http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2011/10/journalism-no-cruelty-and-propaganda.html
It appears that before Egypt passed Gilad Shalit over to the Israelis today, it subjected him to ten minutes of cruel and inhuman treatment of its own. Further details have emerged of the interview with Shalit carried out by Egyptian TV interviewer Shahira Amin. Many have commented on how ill at ease Shalit appeared during that interview. Now it turns out that standing behind Shalit’s chair as he answered the questions was a man in fatigues and wearing a black face mask and the green headband of the Qassam brigades – Hamas’s military wing – and with a video camera in his hand.
As for the interview itself, it was clearly designed as a propaganda exercise for the Arab masses. To ask such exploitative questions of someone who had just been released from five years’ captivity, who was clearly in a fragile state (he said so, and he subsequently fainted in the helicopter on the way to the Israeli air force base) and thus to delay his transfer to the Israelis and the reunion with his family, was itself a kind of torture. But as this report in the Jerusalem Post reveals, some of Amin’s questions amounted in addition to bullying which in the circumstances was as cruel and inhuman as it was, quite simply, totally detached from the reality of Shalit’s hermetically sealed captivity:
‘“During all that time of captivity, you did just one video to tell the world and your family that you’re alive,” she tells the soldier. “Why just once? Why didn’t it happen again?” Rather than letting him answer, however, Schalit’s Hamas minder-cum-interpreter scolds Amin for asking the same question twice (a peculiar accusation, given the footage shows the question hadn’t been asked before).
