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Peled on Talk Show
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February 10, 2017

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Attention CAMERA E-Mail Team:

On February 2, PBSs Tavis Smiley hosted Miko Peled on his talk show. Peled is a
radical anti-Israel activist who has, in the past, falsely described Israel as an
apartheid state, referred to Israeli airport security officers as the Smiling
Gestapo, and defended terrorists.

On Smileys program, Peled:

called Jewish history a myth,

called Israel an illegitimate state, saying Jews have no right to self-determination
there,
called the Haganah a terrorist group, but justified terrorism against Israelis, and
perpetuated falsehoods about Israel, including the ubiquitous water libel.

Yet, his host failed to aggressively challenge his assertions.

 When Smiley asks Peled how he responds to allegations that he is antisemitic,
Peled responds, in essence, that he cant be antisemitic, first, because he is
Jewish, and second, because he is not racist against African Americans or other
racial minorities. Peled then claims that opposing the State of Israel not its
policies, but the State itself is not antisemitic. In fact, the Obama State
Department declared that it is. This, too, is ignored by his host.

Neither Smiley nor a second guest, apparently brought on in an attempt at

balance, unraveled the falsehoods promoted by Peled. Real journalism requires
real facts, not narratives spun by advocates. PBS should do better.

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You have more of an impact when you share your thoughts in your own words.
Please use the information included here as background for your letter instead
of forwarding, or cutting and pasting from, the Alert.

Please write to PBS:

Write to Tavis Smiley on the form here or at tavis@tavistalks.com

Write to your local PBS affiliate. Find the address here.

Write to the PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler. Complete this form on the PBS
website or email him at ombudsman@pbs.org

Firmly but courteously make the following points:

PBS should not permit guests to make false statements unchallenged.

Smiley should announce corrections of Peled's false statements on his show, in

particular, he should correct the assertion that the Haganah was a terrorist organization
and the implication that Israel denies water to Palestinians.

Smiley and PBS should avoid hosting radicals such as Peled in the future,
unless the interviewers are prepared to aggressively challenge their narratives
and false claims.

If you're on social media:

Tweet to Tavis Smiley at @tavissmiley

 Leave a comment on his Facebook page here.

Please send blind copies (bcc) to letters@camera.org

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If Tavis Smiley had researched his subject prior to the interview, he would have
found that Peled has falsely described Israel as an apartheid state, and called
Israeli airport security officers the Smiling Gestapo. In the anti-Israel
website Electronic Intifada, Peled wrote that Israel is an illegitimate creation
brought about by a union between racism and colonialism, and that criticizing
Palestinian resistance [i.e., terrorism] is unconscionable. He
has described terrorists serving time in Israeli prisons some for murder as
political prisoners.

The Obama State Department defined antisemitism to include justifying the

killing or harming of Jews (often in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist
view of religion), as well as drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy
to that of the Nazis, and denying the Jewish people their right to self-
determination, and denying Israel the right to exist. Prior to appearing on
Smileys show, Peled had engaged in all three of these behaviors. Yet, during the
program, Smiley failed to aggressively challenge Peled when he continued his
open delegitimization of the State of Israel, when he dismissed historical fact as
a mythical narrative, or when he promoted a narrative that is not based in fact
at all.

Peled began the discussion by calling the return of the Jewish people, the
building of a Jewish state after 2,000 years a mythical narrative. He continued,

Legitimizing the idea that Jews have a right to come from Europe, take over a land that
is inhabited by other people, kick those people away and establish their own state there,
I dont see how you legitimize that. But these were different times.

These were times where Europeans thought they could come to the countries of people
who are not white and do whatever they wanted, and thats what really Zionism was
about. The idea was for white European Jews to go to go to Palestine that was inhabited
by Arabs, which means theyre probably just Bedouins and poor people and who cares,
and establish a state for the Jewish people. There are numerous problems with this
statement. First, Peled ignores the ample historical evidence that Jews are in
fact indigenous to the land of present-day Israel, and ignores that Jews have maintained
a continuous presence in Jerusalem since1004 BCE. Second, referring to Jews simply as
white Europeans ignores thehistory of Jewish oppression in Europe, as well as the fact
that many Jewish Israelis arrived in the country as refugees from Arab lands. And, as
CAMERA has shownbefore, many of those who today identify as Palestinians descend
from relatively recent migrations from surrounding territories.

Its also inaccurate to generally describe the Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine as
having been kicked away. While there were some instances in which the Arabs of
Palestine were forced from their homes during the 1948 War of Independence, in most
cases, those who became refugees fled from actual or anticipated fighting.

In one of his more disturbing comments, Peled refers to the Haganah as a terrorist
group. In fact, the Haganah was formed for the defense of the Jewish communities of
Mandatory Palestine, after British forces failed to protect those communities from attack.
A few minutes later in the interview, however, Peled justifies terrorism when it is
committed against Israelis, saying if theyre Palestinians and they live there and you
come and declare that its a Jewish state, what are they supposed to do, you know?
Theyre going to resist. Theyre going to fight. Youre going to put them in prison, youre
going to call them terrorists. Again, Smiley fails to challenge either the inaccurate
characterization of the Haganah, or the defense of the murder of civilians.

Smiley gives Peled an opening for the delegitimization of Israel when he asks, tell me
why you no longer believe that a two-state solution is even viable. Peled responds at
some length, but never mentions that Palestinians have turned downIsraeli offers to
withdraw, allowing them to create their own state, three times since 2000. Instead, he
absurdly claims that the fact that people refer to the region as Judea and Samaria
somehow prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state. In discussing the close
proximity in which Jews and Palestinians live in the West Bank, he also relies on the
assumption that Jews wont be able to live in a future Palestinian state, without
questioning whether or why, this is so namely, that they would likely be targeted with
violence. Finally, he cites the descendants of Palestinian refugees, without questioning
why they are the only refugee group that passes down refugee status from one
generation to the next, rather than being resettled in their host countries.

During the interview, Peled says explicitly, I dont accept that theres a need for a
Jewish state.... You cannot have a Jewish state in an Arab country unless you are going
to infringe upon the rights of the local people. You have to kick them out because they
wont have rights. Peled and Smiley both ignore the fact that two million Arabs live
in Israel with full and equal rights. Here, however, Peled does get a little bit of push-
back from his host, when Smiley asks, why are Jews not entitled to their own
homeland, to their own state, to their own borders? Why are they not entitled to that?
Peleds response is telling: "Because Jews have their states. They have American Jews in
America. Theyve got French Jews in Germany. Youve got, you know, Australian Jews in
Australia.

Peleds claim that Israel is unnecessary because theyve got French Jews in Germany,
ignores the fact that for most of the history of European Jewry, Jews were persecuted,
culminating in the Holocaust. It ignores that in the Middle East, Jews lived in second-
class, or dhimmi, status. It ignores the current flight of French Jews into Israel, to
escape anti-Jewish violence there.

Smiley misses those points in his response, in which he asserts thats like saying
Americans, we shouldnt have a US of A because there are Americans all around the
globe. His comparison to America is specious. European colonists who came to the US
were not indigenous to this land, as Jews are to Israel, and there was no American
nation living in exile for 2,000 years.

Finally, Peled repeats the thoroughly-debunked water libel, saying, Palestinians get 12
hours of water per week, and implying that this is Israel's fault. As CAMERA
hasnoted before, the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) has dispelled this
canard:Water shortages in the Palestinian Authority are the result of Palestinian policies
that deliberately waste water and destroy the regional water ecology. The Palestinians
refuse to develop their own significant underground water resources, build a seawater
desalination plant, fix massive leakage from their municipal water pipes, build sewage
treatment plants, irrigate land with treated sewage effluents or modern water-saving
devices, or bill their own citizens for consumer water usage, leading to enormous waste.

At the same time, they drill illegally into Israel's water resources, and send their sewage
flowing into the valleys and streams of central Israel. In short, the Palestinian Authority
is using water as a weapon against the State of Israel. It is not interested in practical
solutions to solve the Palestinian people's water shortages, but rather perpetuation of
the shortages and the besmirching of Israel.CAMERAs Tricia Miller has written:Israel
supplies Palestinian communities with water from Israeli wells and has laid hundreds of
kilometers of new water mains and connected hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns
to the newly built water system. Villages and towns not hooked up to the new system
have refused the service for political reasons, believing that acceptance of Israel's offer
of a new water supply would legitimize the occupation. The guest that followed Peled
on the program, Rabbi Steve Leder, was presumably intended to give an appearance of
balance. Rabbi Leder did disagree with Peled about the need for a two-state solution and
for Jewish self-determination, and did note that, according to former US envoy for
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations Martin Indyk, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas has checked out. Rabbi Leder did not, however, debunk any of Peleds
falsehoods and he did not note that the Palestinians have rejected three Israeli peace
offers. Thus, many of Peleds claims went unchallenged.

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With thanks,

Karen Bekker
Assistant Director
International Letter-Writing Group
CAMERA