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Israelis protest visit of controversial Swedish journalist - AFP and EJP
by: AFP and EJP Updated: 02/Nov/2009 10:19
TEL AVIV (AFP-EJP)—-Several dozen Israelis waving banners protested on Sunday against the arrival in the country of a controversial Swedish journalist who accused Israel of stealing organs from dead Palestinians.
The protesters were waiting at the Ben Gurion airport for the arrival of Donald Bostrom, who is in Israel to attend a media conference in the southern city of Dimona on Monday.
Israel’s Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, who is also minister for development of the Negev and the Galilee, said he would boycott the conference and pull funding from it to protest Bostrom’s presence .
“I do not want to associate myself to the fact that a platform is offered to an enemy who publishes defamatory articles on Israel,” Shalom told army radio.
“I won’t fight for freedom of expression if it gives voice to Hamas, [to those who say] that Israel has no right to exist, that the Jews are pigs… a line must be drawn, and I believe I have drawn the line in the right place,” he added.
Shalom said the conference organizers had essentially “chosen Bostrom over the Israeli government,” all in an attempt to gain the conference more media attention.
Bostrom sparked outrage in Israel and a diplomatic spat with Sweden after he published an article in August in the popular Aftonbladet tabloid that alleged Israeli soldiers stole and sold body parts of dead Palestinians.
The newspaper later said the story lacked proof.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who is currently also president of the Council of the European Union, said he supported the findings of the Goldstone Committee report into alleged war crimes committed by both sides during the Israel-Hamas conflict in January 2009.
Bildt said last month that Israel had made ‘a mistake’ by not cooperating with the UN-mandated inquiry, and he called South African judge Richard Goldstone’s report ‘independent’ and ‘serious’.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman has ed Bildt’s remarks ‘isappointing,’ and said they demonstrated his ‘lack of reading comprehension skills,’ since anyone who read the report would know that it was biased.
Israel has demanded that the Swedish government condemn the article that it has labelled an anti-Semitic “blood libel.” Stockholm has refused, saying that to do so would violate the country’s tradition of freedom of speech.
Gidon Adin, one of the conference organisers, defended the decision to invite Bostrom.
“He will for the first time have to explain in front of a hostile audience why he publishes defamatory articles on the basis of rumours,” Adin told army radio.
Dimona Mayor Meir Cohen said that he was surprised by the minister’s decision to boycott the conference, but that he respects it. He defended the decision by conference organizers to invite the controversial journalist, saying that, despite his personal misgivings, bringing Bostrom to Israel is a way to tackle problems in the European media head-on.
“We need to deal with the trend in the European media, whether it be Swedish or Italian, to take Palestinian propaganda and turn it into news,” he told the Jerusalem Post, saying that “there is no clearer way” to show the trend than to speak to Bostrom.
He said that it is important to address the issue of European journalism that is “completely built on lies”.
AFP/European Jewish Press 2 November 2009
