PBS’s Amanpour & Co. show hosted journalist and anti-Israel activist Nathan Thrall, author of the non-fiction book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. But first, Monday’s show host, Bianna Golodryga recounted the joyful reunions of “detainees” released by Israel in return for hostages taken by Hamas -- detainees that included a prisoner whose car blew up at an Israeli checkpoint in 2015, leaving her disfigured, and was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to prison, “the charge she has continuously denied.”
That was the awkward segue into Thrall’s segment. His ostensible subject was a Palestinian father whose son died in a bus accident, and emergency response was delayed by Israeli security bureaucracy, but of course, the story was twisted to symbolize the plight of the Palestinians under the thumb of Israel and excuse violence.
Golodryga heavy-handedly noted the book “comes as Palestinians are subject to ongoing restrictions, particularly freedom of movement":
THRALL: There’s tremendous trauma right now for millions of people, millions of Israeli Jews, millions of Palestinians, and the subject of my book is that theme, is the deep, deep trauma that millions of Palestinians face, living in a system of gross inequality….And when we’re looking now at the tremendous suffering of more than 14,000 dead in Gaza, and hundreds of hostages, and more than 1,200 dead in Israel, it’s easy for us to focus narrowly on this immediate suffering and it’s right that we focus on it, but we should also look at the decades-long system that keeps producing these traumas, that keeps producing this bloodshed. And that’s really what my book aims to highlight, is the structural forces that are in place, that are producing daily violence, in order to keep the system in place, because no people will willingly accept oppression, and the violence that it produces in return.
Abed’s green West Bank ID didn’t get him to places like a blue Jerusalem ID would have (he couldn’t go to a nearby Israeli military base), which made finding news of his son's condition more difficult. But Thrall didn’t touch on how Israel perceives such measures are necessary after decades of Palestinian terror attacks within Israel.
Thrall has worked for the International Crisis Group, funded by both left-wing billionaire George Soros and the country of Qatar, which quarters the Hamas leadership and funds the terrorist organization. Needless to say, that question didn’t come up on PBS.
The New York Times recently made a martyr of Thrall for his refusal to sign a pledge not to participate in anti-Israel boycotts. He’s written several pieces for the paper suggesting Palestinian terrorism was a rational response and was a strong supporter of the anti-Semitic B.D.S. movement (“B.D.S.” stands for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” against Israel).
In a 2014 Times op-ed, he blamed Israel, not Hamas, for starting the 2014 Gaza War, even though Hamas actually launched it by kidnapping and killing three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Try not to cry too loudly when you read Thrall talking of “…Hamas’s desperation and isolation” at the time.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo wrote in March 2019 that Thrall “serves as director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, or ICG, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has received around $4 million from the Qatari government in the just the last year."
Neither the Times then nor Amanpour & Co. now noted that affiliation.
A transcript will be posted when it becomes available.
