The accusation was made by Ahmed Al-Assaf, head of the official media in the State of Palestine and president of the Palestinian News and Information Agency, while speaking at an international forum on the propaganda of hatred and violence in the media.
He said the meeting comes at a difficult time for Palestine, “particularly in Gaza, where a massacre is occurring.”
The struggle of this people sums up the struggle between truth and falsehood, truth and lies, deception and slander, he said.
Al-Assaf also criticized the press for turning a blind eye to the crimes, persecution, killings and destruction on Palestinian lands.
He recalled that “the primary goal of the media is to spread a culture of tolerance, justice and love among people, to defuse crises and to avoid the emergence of conflicts, hatred and the fragmentation of societies.”
He noted that the Palestinian people and other nations cannot accept the lies, lack of truth and denial of the tragic reality and massacres in Gaza and Jerusalem when the biased press ignores these facts.
“This bias will produce more positions that are hostile to all these measures,” he concluded.
For his part, the Secretary General of the Muslim World League, Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, called what is happening in Gaza today a disgrace to all of humanity, “the criminal attack on children, women and other innocent people.”
This is a humanitarian catastrophe that has been imprinted on the heart of every living conscience, he stressed, recalling that international resolutions “have been violated, resulting in bloodshed and painful repercussions.”
In this sense, he warned at the forum sponsored by the Union of News Agencies of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that there is a dangerous global shift in which material scientific progress does not correlate with moral ethics.
The media has an important role to play in steering the world onto a ship of salvation and preventing it from sinking into the dangers of a worrying escalation of hate speech and incitement to dangerous acts.
The tendency to hate has taken hold in many minds and in politics, with double standards that go beyond interpretation and maneuver and lead to defiance and arrogance, he concluded.
Gas/Vc