(Flash 90)

Terror victims’ advocacy group Almagor called upon Israeli media not to air an animated video produced by Hamas and intended as psychological warfare against Israelis, regarding abducted soldier Gilad Shalit. They also enjoined the media to think again about airing series like ‘Hatufim’ about Israeli MIAs.

Government-run Channel 1 and the privately owned Channel 10 chose not to air the video. Channel 2 aired it.

“We call on you to consider ceasing the broadcasts of all materials dealing with Shalit after it turned out that Hamas gets its ideas for propaganda from Israel, and uses your motifs while amplifying them,” Almagor stated in a letter to news editors, television producers and the ‘Lobby for Freeing Gilad Shalit.’

Almagor said that analysis of the Hamas video shows four motifs, all of which are taken from Israeli productions and activism:

• The Israeli protesters for Gilad Shalit put up a sign counting Shalit’s days in captivity; the Hamas version counts the years.
• The Shalit protesters used animation that changes Shalit’s face to that of Ron Arad, an airman captured by Lebanese terrorists in 1986 and now believed to be dead; Hamas changes his face to that of an old man walking the streets of Gaza as the years pass.
• The Shalit activists blame Israel’s prime ministers for not taking action to free him, while the Hamas version has Shalit walking past billboards with quoes of prime ministers’ promises.
• In ‘Hatufim’ the POW comes home after changing mentally. In Hamas’s version the vehicle that takes him to freedom comes after many years, in which he has grown much older.

Almagor also protested against the government’s decision to transfer the daughter of a Hamas minister to Jordan for medical attention, with IDF helicopters in escort. “The gesture was not worthy,” the NGO explained, “when the girl’s father and his accomplices will not allow Gilad Shalit to be visited, much less freed.”

“This kind of thoughtlessness leads the public to think that the only way to free Shalit is through freeing terrorists, as opposed to applying pressure, as was done in such cases in the past,” Almagor added.