“Georgy Keburia says goodbye to his wife Maya and children at a train station in Odesa, Ukraine, as they board a train to Lviv on March 5, 2022. The situation in Eastern Ukraine has become extremely critical as the fighting intensifies. Hundreds of women and children who escaped cities like Mariupol, Kherson, and Mykolaiv, are trying desperately to catch a train and leave for a safe place before the violence of the war reaches the city. Meanwhile, men like Georgy must stay to fight to defend their own country and families.”
Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.
Georges explained that he was with the international media and tried to hold onto his camera. But additional security men surrounded him, taking away the camera and telling him: “Here it’s different. We don’t care.”
The police held on to the camera for over an hour, deleting seven photos and preventing him from doing his job. When the camera was returned, both journalists were ordered to leave and told there would be a “big problem” if photos of one of the officers were published.
The Foreign Press Association condemns this egregious behavior in the strongest terms. We call on the Palestinian Authority to sanction the officers who were involved in this incident and to stand behind its past promises to respect the freedom of the press.
A government attacking media is pretty big news, right?
But this story - which happened on Saturday, and this press release issued Tuesday morning - has not gotten any coverage in the media that I could find.
Not even from the Washington Post!
The Washington Post made a conscious decision not to cover an attack on its own journalists. It chose to publish AP's story on the protest in Ramallah, and not the account of its own people on the scene.
The venerable news organization chose to adhere to the wishes of the Palestinian Authority that they censor their own story about Palestinian police violence.
Compare the lack of response here to the huge headlines when Israel attacked an office tower that housed AP along with Hamas offices and intelligence equipment in May. Article after article hinted that Israel deliberately attacked the media, a most ridiculous accusation. But when Palestinians target media explicitly - silence.
The Tragedy of Charlottesville in Two Powerful Photos
"It’s taking ideas that are hard to communicate and reducing them to simple things that evoke emotions very quickly," says David Uttal, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern University. "And they evoke emotions so quickly that it’s almost too late to start explaining things when people have been pushed in one direction or another".
Great photos this weekend by Detroit Free Press photographer Salwan Georges during Michigan State University’s football game against Furman University.
