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I came across two interesting cases in a matter or hours yesterday as I checked my RSS feed from Ha’aretz. Both cases deal with censorship in some way, first of media and then of expressing Pro-Palestinian sentiments.

Apparently, Israel plans to impose an official embargo on the Qatar-based news network Al-Jazeera in retaliation for perceived “unfair” portrayal of the IDF.

“The Foreign Ministry has held discussions on the matter, and decided to embargo the station,” Deputy Foreign Minister Majali Wahabe told Army Radio, adding: “These reports are untrustworthy and they hurt us, and they arouse people to terrorist activities.”

Israel would do well to consider that killing over 125 people over a matter of days in Gaza (half of whom were children) is difficult to spin in a “fair” way—when fair means favorable to Israel. Perhaps they should even (gasp) consider that their brutal actions in the occupied territories fuel so-called “terrorist activities”.

The boycott will include a general refusal by Israeli officials to be interviewed by the station, and a ban on Al-Jazeera correspondents from entering government offices in Jerusalem.

So much for media freedom. The implications of an Israel without access to alternative sources of news and information are rather disturbing. Already, Israel has replaced CNN with FOX News as their primary international news service (one of the bastions of unfailing support for Israeli aggression), but this latest move nails the coffin shut.

And just when I thought Israel’s obsession with silencing legitimate alternative points of view couldn’t get any worse, I saw the following headline:

Pro-Palestinian graffiti found inside El Al plane in Italy

Ok ok. Sounds innocent enough… I see this kind of graffiti in Europe all the time. So I clicked on the link.

Pro-Palestinian graffiti written in Arabic was found scrawled inside the cargo hold of an El Al plane during unloading at Milan’s Malpensa airport Monday, raising Israeli concerns about Italian airport security.

Hmmm, concerns about airport security? Ok, so maybe something pretty intimidating had been scrawled on the well (you know how sensitive airport security can be sometimes).

“It was something like ‘Long Live Palestine’,” written with a marker pen, Raffaele Veri of the Malpensa airport police told reporters on Tuesday..

What??!! So, let me get this straight: someone writes some patriotic Palestinian slogan and El Al “demand[s] that an investigation be launched into the circumstances”. Something tells me the reaction would have been less dramatic had the graffitum read “Death to Arabs” as many Israelis were chanting in the aftermath of the shooting in Jerusalem last week.