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PA Media Glorify Tel Aviv Bomber as Martyr
(Jerusalem Post) Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook - * The PA-controlled media glorified the bomber in Friday night's terror attack on a beachfront Tel Aviv night club as a shahid (martyr who died for Allah) - the highest level of human achievement for a Muslim. By granting shahid status to the murderer, the PA media are portraying bombing as a positive religious act. * Sunday's front-page coverage of the story in the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda featured a giant color photo of the terrorist at the top of the page, with the caption: "The executor of the Tel Aviv operation, the shahid Abdullah Badran." Another photograph shows his mother holding a picture of her son, captioned: "The mother of the Shahid." The newspapers Al-Ayyam and Al-Quds also referred to "the family of the Shahid." * Given this ultimate veneration of the act of murder, condemnations of the suicide attack within the Palestinian-controlled media have focused on the "poor timing" and the fact that the attack was a violation of the agreement between Abbas and Hamas. The killings were detrimental to PA policy - nothing more. As in the Arafat years, the act itself was not portrayed as immoral or wrong. * Under the new leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, the message to Palestinian society remains essentially unchanged. PA leaders condemn the potentially negative ramifications of a terror attack, but not the act itself. Marcus is founder and director, and Crook is associate director of Palestinian Media Watch.