Friday, February 13, 2015

Bob Simon

Rami Kamal Adwan (the son of Palestinian Fath commander, Kamal `Udwan, who was murdered by Israeli terrorists in 1973 in Verdun, Beirut) wrote this on Bob Simon on Facebook. I am reproducing with Rami's permission: "Bob Simon from CBS died in a car crash. My personal experience with him was when he visited our house in 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11. He was preparing a 60 minutes episode to "shed light on extra judicial murders and how indiscriminate they can be covering cases including among others Israel's assassination of my father Kamal Adwan". After airing it, the theme turned out to be whether the U.S. Should learn from "Israel success in eliminating terrorists" to target president Saddam Hussein.  To prepare a story, he misrepresented himself, lied, and manipulated inhumanly our family's story. When I asked him then about where he thought the Arab Israeli conflict was headed, he said the absence of peace was destined to culminate in an apocalyptic end , 9/11 being it."   I will say this about Bob Simon: while he was more willing than most mainstream journalists in the US to air some mildly critical segments about Israel, he was still part of the mainstream media who could not deviate from the Zionist narrative on Palestine. But while he was a correspondent in occupied Palestine for CBS, his reports were rather more critical of Israel than other correspondents, I have to say. But he would always feel the pressure and then prepare a pro-Israel report--they call propaganda for Israel "balance" in the US.