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Friday, June 07, 2002

Killion's killer reporting: MSNBC has a lengthy article on Palestinian refugees to commemorate the anniversary of the 1967 Six Day War. It is by Nikole Killion , an international senior assignment editor and field producer for NBC News. As you might guess, given the date and the subject, it is quite pathetic.

Killian introduces Jordanian Queen Rania as one of the 2 million Palestinians who "relocated to Jordan after the wars of 1948 and 1967." Really? Her bio, from Britain's Hello magazine, reads as follows:
Rania Yasin was born on August 31, 1970, in Kuwait to Palestinian parents. A doctor's daughter, she grew up in a comfortable home on the West Bank alongside her two siblings. She received a thoroughly Western education, first at the New English School in Kuwait City and then at the American University in Cairo, where she graduated with a business degree. In 1991 she moved to Amman, where her parents had settled after fleeing Kuwait along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians following the 1991 Gulf War.


HR says, "Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Jordan, Rania's family was driven out of... Kuwait."

Killion continues:
While Jordan has resisted some of the more radical Palestinian groups, such as the notorious expulsion of resistance fighters during Black September in 1970, arms smuggling into the West Bank continues to be a difficult issue.


Would that be the civil war in 1970 when Arafat and the PLO tried to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein? Hussein crushed the PLO and killed thousands of PLO and other Palestinians in Jordan.

Killion blames an "estimated 250,000" Palestinian refugees on Israel's victory in the Six Day war, when they "were forced to flee into Jordan and other Arab nations." He then intersperses tales of refugees from 1948 and those from 1967. "Despite the existence of a U.N. resolution that allows refugees the right to return to their homes, it has become nearly impossible for most Palestinians. Restrictive checkpoints, curfews and security raids have become a way of life in the West Bank and Gaza."

What do checkpoints have to do with Palestinians who want to return to West Bank towns such as Jenin or Tulkarem, or claim to have come from Netanya, Jaffa or Haifa? Nothing.

Back in the real world, tens of thousands of Palestinians have already been permitted to return to the West Bank over the last 30 years as part of Israel's "family reunification" program. Moreover, had Yasser Arafat accepted the Barak peace proposals at Camp David in July 2000, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would have been able to settle in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank. Though Lord only knows why they would want to. The refugee camps (frequently described as "hellish") are in PLO territory and controlled by either the PLO or the UN.

Want to see these mistakes corrected? I don't know that anyone at MSNBC will listen, but you can still try.

By mail:

NBC News, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112

Or by email: letters@MSNBC.com

Or respond on line, using their correspondence box