purge at HaAretz. New owners of the newspaper are slowly but surely ‘weeding out’ the only voices of truth and reason in the Israeli press ...

FREE WORLD OF CENSORSHIP ~~ PURGE AT HaARETZ NEWS « DesertpeaceMay 31, 2008

Many of my readers may have noticed that I have not been posting many articles by Amira Hass lately. I have also not been cross posting a regular column by Gideon Levy called ‘The Twighlight Zone’. To be honest with you, I have combed the pages of HaAretz looking for these tidbits but to no avail.

This morning I found out why… there has been a purge at HaAretz. New owners of the newspaper are slowly but surely ‘weeding out’ the only voices of truth and reason in the Israeli press…. so typical of what has been going on generally in the ‘free world of censorship’.
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... According to inside sources, the new owner has carried out a rough, sittingroom survey that revealed that “the occupation doesn’t sell newspapers” and they are therefore concentrating on the business world (ie. The Marker). Twilight Zone, Gideon Levy’s regular Friday column, has been scrapped, Amira Hass has been degraded to freelance on half salary, Meron Rapaport has been fired and Akiva Eldar has lost at least one half page a week.
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It appears that the Israelis are closing down many if not all of the sources of critical information coming out of Israel. The hypocrisy of it all is that Israel complains that when the British Academic Union proposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as a way to pressure Israel and to protest Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians the Israelis start to scream that the proposed boycott is a violation of freedom of speech and a violation of academic freedom. ...