For the past week, Bir Zeit University has been closed by the school administration twice because of student demonstrations against a new rule against using the campus for “manifestations of militarization.”
The rule prohibits “any national celebrations by any of the student blocs of a military character, such as models of missiles and other weapons, and the presence of masked students in them.”
Bir Zeit, and other Palestinian universities, routinely host pro-terrorist demonstrations:
The university closed its campus last Wednesday in response to students rioting and destroying its western entrance in response to this new rule. After more unrest on Thursday the university again decided to close the campus today for the safety of the students.
Ghassan Al-Khatib, Vice President of Birzeit University for Development and Communication, has been calling for dialogue with the pro-terror groups in order to find a compromise. They have not been interested.
The head of the student movement, Abd al-Rahman Alawi, says “Bir Zeit University, “which graduated the martyr engineer Yahya Ayyash and the prisoner Marwan Barghouti and dozens of martyrs and prisoners who had a clear imprint in the history of the Palestinian resistance, should be a source of uprisings and a political platform as it is now.”
University officials say there are two reasons for the new rule, which had been discussed internally for years. One is the obvious – that pro-terror activity on campus is disruptive and against the values of the university. The other is that those activities give Israel an excuse to say that the university tolerates pro-terror activity.
Indeed, last week Israel arrested the president of the Student Council Conference at Birzeit University in Ramallah, Shatha Majid Hassan, at her home on December 5, along with a number of Hamas students that the IDF accused of gathering intelligence and preparing bombs for sabotage last Friday.
University officials insist that this anti-militarization rule has nothing to do with the arrests. In fact, the university forced all student blocs to sign a pledge not to engage in military-type demonstrations before the last student elections.
The other aspect of this story is that up until now, it has not been reported in any English-language media.
Yes, a major university closes its doors right before final exams, students are rioting, and there is complete silence on the story.
Bir Zeit University has some 14,000 students shut out from campus twice in a week and there is a near-total news blackout!
Most major Palestinian Arabic media has been ignoring the story or only publishing bits and pieces about the university closing without discussing why. It has been covered more by the pan-Arab press than Palestinian media.
This shows yet again:
– Palestinian media is not free to report on things that make Palestinian institutions look bad.
– NGOs and international media are not interested in doing any work to expose internal Palestinian rifts and conflict.
– Narratives of Israeli evil and Palestinian innocence are more important than reporting the news honestly.
– The world gets a highly skewed idea of how things are in the most-reported part of the worldd.
– Most reporters on the ground in the Middle East are lazy and have no interest in reporting actual news on their own, or their editors kill any stories that don’t fit the “narrative.”
Professional news organizations in Israel and the territories should be ashamed at their lack of commitment to their jobs. An unpaid blogger from thousands of miles away should not be getting so many scoops while people paid full salaries to report the news spend their time in Tel Aviv coffee shops, reading Ha’aretz to decide what story they want to cover.
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