Temple Mount. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The fact that Israeli officials appear on Arab media has raised the ire of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS).

The PJS just issued a call for Arab media to stop interviewing Israelis like Avichay Adraee, IDF Arabic spokesman, and Mordechai Kedar, professor at Bar-Ilan University.

The PJS is saying that their demands should be met because the BDS movement doesn’t allow contacts with Israeli Jews, but it seems clear that they are more worried that Arabs are listening to the Israeli viewpoint.

Adraee has more than 100,000 Twitter followers and more than half a million Facebook “Likes” on his Arabic-only pages.

Hilariously, the PJS couches their demands to destroy free speech with an appeal to liberal values:

The principles of journalistic ethics and professional commitment to provide all opinions excludes views that promote hatred, racism and racial discrimination, being the antithesis of pluralism, democracy and human rights….representatives of the occupation who appear on some Arab satellite channels exploit it as a platform for the defense of war crimes and crimes against humanity and for the promotion of racism, hatred, murder, and even raping mothers and sisters of Palestinian militants, such as Professor Mordechai Kedar, who was a frequent guest in the past on some satellite channels.

Kedar has been widely misquoted as promoting the rape of Arabs, which is absurd.

Of course, when the PJS says it wants Arab stations not to interview Israelis, they mean “Israeli Jews.” They would have no problem with an interview with Haneen Zoabi or any of the other anti-Israel Arab Knesset members.

This shows that anyone who considers Palestinian Arab journalists to adhere to any kind of journalistic standard of objectivity and fairness is hopelessly naive.

The real question is whether reporters like Fares Akram, who writes for the New York Times as well as Al Jazeera, are members of the PJS and support their position.