While Palestinian Authority (PA) TV has often been caught inciting violence and hatred of Jews, a recent broadcast by a European Union (EU) funded NGO has brought the defamation of Jews to new lows.
In an episode of the program Sights of Jerusalem broadcast October 18 on official PA TV, Jews are dehumanized as "crows" and "rats," and further called "foreigners" in Jerusalem, the 3,000 year old Jewish capital.
Selections from the program subtitled into English by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) can be seen here:
In the video, the narrator calls the Israeli flag a "rag dipped in our blood," claiming that Arabs cannot raise their heads in Jerusalem.
This claim belies rampant Arab violence in the capital city, in which a baby was recently injured by a stone thrown at her by Jerusalem Arabs, and Hebrew University's Mount Scopus campus has come to be termed a "war zone" by students due to violence from neighboring Arab residents.
The video further shows hareidi-religious Jews dressed in their traditional black garb, as the narrator says "the crows pass by and caw." The dehumanization continues as a visual of Israeli soldiers is accompanied by the words "the rats are armed."
The propaganda of delegitimization reaches a peak with the line "Jerusalem will never accept any language other than Arabic and any nationality other than Palestinian, no matter how much the flags of the foreigners fly in its sky."
Particularly of note is the source of funding behind the video, as revealed by PMW.
The program was co-produced by PA TV and PYALARA, a PA NGO for youth. PYALARA is funded by NDC (NGO Development Center).
Donors to NDC include the EU, the World Bank, the French government's Agence Francaise de Developpement, and a donor consortium of Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden.