Mahmoud Abbas

Friday at the UN (text here), Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of engaging in "ethnic cleansing."

Earlier, in a speech to 200 supposed "senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the U.S." (would that include Gaza flotilla organizers and Barack Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn? Just askin'), Abbas declared, as relayed by Ynetnews.com, that "They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state."

Given that there would hardly be a point to covering Abbas's speech if readers knew of the just-cited statements, it's hardly surprising that the press is also in a non-recognition mode:

As attention has turned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the Palestinian Authority planning to seek recognition for a Palestinian state by the United Natinos on Friday, the media have almost universally ignored last week's prediction by Maen Areikat, the Palestine Liberation Organization envoy to the United States, that Israelis - presumably referring to Israeli Jews rather than Israeli Arabs - would be removed from such a Palestinian state.

And, although the allegedly moderate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has a history of being even more direct in declaring that not a single Jew would be allowed to live in a Palestinian state - not even Jews from other countries serving as part of a hypothetical NATO peacekeeping force - a small number of the media outlets that bothered to pay attention to the issue at all have naively allowed Areikat to dubiously backtrack and claim that Jews would indeed be welcome in such a Palestinian state. But Areikat himself last year in an interview with Tablet magazine had more explicitly than last week argued that Jews should be removed.

As the morning and evening newscasts on CBS have reported on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's upcoming plan to seek statehood recognition from the United Nations on Friday, correspondent Mark Phillips has appeared three times filing reports which have portrayed Palestinians as victims of Israeli extremism and "militant" Jewish settlers, while ignoring Palestinian extremism and refusal to meet for talks in recent years despite overtures from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Tuesday's CBS Evening News, Phillips recounted clashes between Palestinians and Jewish settlers, and seemed to suggest that the Israeli military had fired tear gas at the wrong group as he noted that Arabs were subjected to the anti-riot measure. Phillips: