In his March 30/31 castigation of Israel, Geraldo revisited a familiar role. Among previous such Geraldo propaganda bursts are these: In 2012,
he fawned over West Bank Palestinian Hanan Ashrawi in a "Geraldo at Large" Fox News Channel special, "Israel Caught in the Crossfire," filmed in Israel and the Palestinian territories, that aired July 8, 2012 (10 PM Eastern). The hour-long documentary – with Geraldo reporting mainly from Israel and his brother Craig reporting from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – dealt with several issues including the chances for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs leading to a "two-state solution." Describing Ashrawi as “a friend I have known for decades,” Geraldo indulged her anti-Israel disinformation. This long-time Geraldo friend has been a
long-time anti-Israel propagandist and
continues as such.
Ashrawi has discredited herself a number of times – for example, as the only known professing Christian in the otherwise Muslim leadership of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Ashrawi gave a press conference in 1991 in which she replied to a question in self-righteous indignation, “I find your reference to 'Judea and Samaria' a statement of extreme bias, and rather offensive. I am a Palestinian Christian, and I know what Christianity is. I am a descendant of the first Christians in the world, and Jesus Christ was born in my country, in my land. Bethlehem is a Palestinian town. So I will not accept this one-upmanship on Christianity. Nobody has the monopoly." (
Washington Post, “The Practiced Palestinian,” Caryle Murphy, Nov. 4, 1991)
But if Ashrawi is in fact a "descendant of the first Christians in the world," as she describes herself, she would be a descendant of ancient Israeli Jews not the descendant of Arabs as she is presumably. Furthermore, although Ashrawi denies the existence of Judea and Samaria, Israel's names for the West Bank, the names are mentioned in the Christian New Testament in well known passages Matt. 2:1 and Acts 1:8 in the context of land resided in by Israeli Jews (this was perhaps a thousand years before the establishment of the first Arab communities in the Holy Land which happened well after conquering Muslim Arab armies had swept across the continent from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E.). Evidently, Ashrawi is either ignorant or deceitful about all this. This is Geraldo's long-time friend whose influence is likely to have led to his misperception of the conflict with the Palestinians.
Interestingly, Geraldo is not the only highly visible American newsman who was likely to have been influenced by Ashrawi to mislead viewers about Israel. Former ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, when he was head of the ABC bureau in Beirut, Lebanon in the 1970s, had a serious relationship with Ashrawi in Beirut where she was a graduate student in literature at the American University. This relationship was reported by
U.S. News & World Report in 1991,
Washington Post of Sept. 17, 2001 and
Daily Mail (London) of Sept. 20, 2001. Jennings frequently
misreported and
fabricated information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beginning in the 1970s and continuing through his career as an anchor for ABC's
World News Tonight.
In March 26, 2010, Geraldo
launched verbal assaults on Israel in an appearance on
Fox and Friends in which he accused an allegedly anti-peace, obstructionist Israel of focusing on the Iranian threat in order to divert attention from its own supposed intransigence. His tirade also included the baseless allegation that Israel is responsible for American difficulties vis-a-vis the entire Middle East and the Muslim world.
(full article online)
CAMERA: Fox News Channel Airs Geraldo Riveras Anti-Israel Disinformation