NRK reports on the Naqba without mentioning war which caused it
Journalist Laila Ø. Bakken of the Norwegian State Broadcasting Authority NRK manages to report on how Abbas’ family fled during the “Naqba”, while completely omitting any mention of the 1948 war which caused the “Naqba”.
Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon declared war on Israel the day after it proclamation itself as a state. As for the Palestinians, they had already been waging war against the Jews for some time prior to this. The war of 1948 set two refugee streams into motion: one refugee wave of Jews fleeing Muslim lands, and one refugee wave of Palestinians fleeing Israel.
The question is how and why NRK’s Laila Ø. Bakken choses to mention only one of the effects of the war, and not the cause of it. There are several alternatives: 1) She honestly does not know 2) The 1948 war makes the Palestinians look bad, as it was a war of aggression against Israel. Since Laila Ø. Bakken does not want to make the Palestinians look bad, she omits the entire war 3) It is not necessary to mention the war. Doing so would just obfuscate the point of the article, which is to give readers some background information on Abbas.
If pressed for an answer, Ms.Bakken will deliver something along the lines of alternative #3. Regardless of what she answers, the result is the same: it makes Israel look bad.
This is of course not the first time a Norwegian journalist manages to emphasize the evil of Israel by going into the details of the “naqba” while ignoring the fact that the “naqba” was one of the consequences of the 1948 war of aggression on Israel. This site has observed the same phenomenon repeatedly before. The Norwegian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, for instance, managed to do the very same thing on May 1st 2009. In October the same year, we observed VG make itself guilty of the same error. There are more examples out there.
