Row over Jordan media visit to Jerusalem
AMMAN. September 10. KAZINFORM. The Jordanian government on Wednesday hit back at a coalition of opposition parties and trade unions, which strongly criticized a current visit to East Jerusalem by a team representing Jordanian media; Kazinform refers to Arab News.
"The trip is organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to allow journalists to have a first-hand look at Jordan's efforts to preserve the Islamic and Christian holy sites. I don't see any normalization when the sites are under Jordan's supervision," Minister of State for Media Affairs and Communication Nabil Sharif said.
Sharif was responding to the National Committee for Anti-Normalization with Israel, which condemned the trip as "gross disregard for the feelings of millions of Arabs and Muslims" and called for disbarring the journalists from the Jordan Press Association (JPA). "We feel betrayed by the journalists who headed to the Israeli Embassy in Amman and applied for a visa," the committee's president Badi Rafayaa said.
The media men, who represent key daily newspapers and the official Petra news agency, arrived in Jerusalem on Tuesday and were scheduled to travel to the Palestinian Authority areas to meet officials there.
The authorities said the team would appraise steps taken by the Jordanian government to preserve holy places in East Jerusalem, which was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war, against a flurry of Israeli measures designed to judaize the holy city; Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version.