MEDIA IGNORE THE FACT THAT AN ARAB JUDGE SENTENCED EX-ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER OLMERT
When international media reported at some length last week on the sentencing of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to 18 months in prison by Israel’s Supreme Court, almost no foreign journalist mentioned that the judge who announced the verdict, Justice Salim Joubran, from Haifa, is an Israeli-Arab member of Israel’s Supreme Court.
To mention this would, of course, draw attention to the fact that the “Israeli Apartheid” myth that many of their colleagues in the media promote, is just that – a myth.
Olmert is the first Israeli prime minister to be convicted of a crime. A lower Israeli court had sentenced him to six years in jail for two counts of bribery, but the Supreme Court overturned one of the convictions on appeal last week. (Olmert was found guilty of accepting a relatively small sum in bribes – certainly small compared to the bribery and corruption rife throughout much of the world, and even in some EU countries.)
A correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz wrote “Israel is the only country in the world where a president and a prime minister have both been sent to prison by a court, without a coup or revolution.”