Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Release the Obama-Khalidi tape!

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

Barry Rubin recently posted an article on the Obama-Israel relationship here. He makes some good points, but what caught my attention was an offhand remark:

By the way, note that the Los Angeles Times has still not released the video of Obama speaking at a Palestinian meeting. Why not? Surely if his speech was so banal there would be no reason to withhold that evidence. We know about Reverend Wright and a lot more as well. But if the policy in the White House had been different, no one would be dwelling on that now.

What video?

The event in question was a 2003 going-away party for Obama’s friend, Rashid Khalidi. In an April 2008 article, the LA Times described it thus:

CHICAGO — It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.” …

And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama’s speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi’s 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”  …

Among other community events, Obama in 1998 attended a speech by Edward Said, the late Columbia University professor and a leading intellectual in the Palestinian movement. According to a news account of the speech, Said called that day for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.”

The use of such language to describe Israel’s policies has drawn vehement objection from Israel’s defenders in the United States. A photo on the pro-Palestinian website the Electronic Intifada [see below — ed] shows Obama and his wife, Michelle, engaged in conversation at the dinner table with Said, and later listening to Said’s keynote address. Obama had taken an English class from Said as an undergraduate at Columbia University…

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times. (my emphasis)

In October 2008, a mini-media furor erupted. The McCain campaign demanded a copy of the video, but the Times refused, with editor Russ Stanton claiming that “it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it…”

The Times claimed that it had done its duty to inform the public by describing the party in the original article. But while the article transcribes some militant anti-Israel statements made by others, Obama’s remarks as quoted are scrubbed clean of any political content. Only his opinion of Mona Khalidi’s cooking remains.

Can we believe that he made no comments whatever about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speech? Even the Times doesn’t assert that. Conservative bloggers (see also here) and commentators demanded that the Times at least release a full transcript of Obama’s words at the event, but the Times refused — even though such a transcript would not violate its promise to its source any more than the original article did.

The election is long over, and Bill O’Reilly et al seem to have forgotten about the tape. But the question of Barack Obama’s intentions in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian issue burns even brighter today than it did in 2008. Obama has been called everything from a staunch friend of Israel to an anti-Zionist who has made a secret agreement with the Saudi king to “deliver Israel”.

Obama’s remarks to pro-Israel audiences have been made public. Now it’s time to find out what he says to his Palestinian friends.

It’s time for the LA Times to release a transcript of Barack Obama’s remarks at the 2003 meeting, or adequately document the agreement which prevents it from doing so — if there is one, which I doubt.

Michelle and Barack Obama with Edward Said and his wife Mariam at a 1998 event in Chicago -- from Electronic Intifada.

Michelle and Barack Obama with Edward Said and his wife Mariam at a 1998 event in Chicago -- from Electronic Intifada.

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NPR ignores its own watchdog

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

You may recall that I ripped NPR a new, er, antenna, a couple of weeks ago because of their over-the-top bias against Israel. I pointed out that their reporter

  • used the Emotive Bias Technique to ensure that the Arab side of the story would stick with the listener while the Israeli side would be forgotten,
  • used the Selective Omission Technique to mislead without explicitly lying, and
  • quoted false statements without comment or challenge.

I sent a link to the local Public Radio station — which, by the way, was in the middle of one of its periodic schnorrs fund drives. I pointed out that NPR gets a great deal of funding from the local stations and that maybe they would clean up their act if the stations complained. I wasn’t surprised when I did not even get a “your opinion is important to us” in return, because I’m sure the local management is quite happy with NPR’s ideological slant.

I also sent it to NPR. They did send a response, and although it was boilerplate that did not relate to my specific concerns, it’s worth a further look. After saying that “there’s no room for bias in our organization” and drawing attention to their code of ethics, they add,

…in an effort to continually monitor the way we cover the Middle East, NPR has hired a freelance researcher to conduct quarterly reviews of our coverage. The reports are prepared by John Felton, a former foreign affairs reporter and NPR foreign editor who covered international affairs and U.S. policy for more than 30 years, and submitted to NPR’s ombudsman.

So I looked at some of Felton’s reports. While he claims that NPR coverage is fair overall, many of his specific reports are damning. For example, here is one about a story aired in March 2009 (emphasis is mine):

In a March 26 piece for Morning Edition [Eric] Westervelt reported on several allegations that the Israeli army used excessive force during the war. Westervelt’s piece centered around two reports in the Israeli news media: A March 21 report by Israel’s Channel 10 quoting an Israeli officer, in briefing his soldiers, as expressing little or no regard for the lives of Palestinian civilians; and reports in [left-wing papers — ed] Haaretz and Maariv on March 19-20 quoting Israeli soldiers as citing accounts of unprovoked killings of civilians.

Westervelt’s piece also quoted Yehuda Shaul, director of a leftist veterans group, Breaking the Silence, who said he had interviewed soldiers who told similar stories of abuses of civilians during the war. In addition, the piece dealt with allegations that the army’s chief rabbi and his aides had encouraged soldiers to show no quarter when dealing with Palestinians. Finally, the story cited Human Rights Watch allegations that the Israeli army improperly used white phosphorous as an illuminating device, injuring innocent civilians when the phosphorous descended to the ground…

Although I am glad that NPR brought this story to its listeners’ attention, I do have concerns about this particular piece:

– The piece relied heavily on Shaul’s accounts without telling listeners that he is an active, vocal campaigner against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Shaul is far from an unbiased source. While the information Shaul collected might well be true, he had an agenda in making this type of information public. Listeners should have been told more about him and his agenda.

– The central element of the Israeli atrocities allegations came from a February 13 meeting of Israeli veterans of the Gaza war held at the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Haaretz, and later Maariv, published stories on March 19-20 based on that transcript. Israeli soldiers told several stories, including accounts of the unprovoked shootings of an elderly Palestinian woman and of a woman and child. Westervelt cited both incidents but did not make clear (as additional Israeli media reporting had found prior to March 26) that the soldiers recounting these incidents had not witnessed the events and had only heard about them.

– In the days after Haaretz first broke the story (on March 19) about Israeli soldiers accusing colleagues of committing atrocities, subsequent stories in the Israeli news media began to cast doubt on some allegations. The Jerusalem Post, YNet news, and other Israeli news organizations quoted soldiers as disputing both the specific atrocity accounts and the general idea that soldiers had disregarded Palestinian lives. Westervelt’s piece, however, did not mention any of these subsequent reports, which emerged before the piece was aired.

Westervelt’s piece did quote an Israeli army spokesman, Major Avital Leibovich as saying the alleged atrocities were under investigation and suggesting that the soldier’s accounts were “hearsay” [the effect was to make the IDF appear evasive — ed].

Five days after the piece aired, the army’s judge-advocate general closed his investigation into misconduct allegations during the war, saying the newspaper reports were based on “hearsay” and had proven to be false. The soldiers who made the allegations had not actually witnessed or participated in the events they had described, the judge-advocate general said. Several human rights groups protested the ending of the investigation and suggested it was a whitewash.

Westervelt reported the closing of the investigation in a [short –ed] news spot that aired on March 30.

In short, the NPR reporter parroted accusations of murderous atrocities made by highly biased sources — sources which he should have known were biased — and then NPR aired the report after the horrific allegations had been shown to be false!

I well remember my fury when I woke to hear this dishonest story, and posted this: “NPR’s shocking lack of journalistic integrity“.

But apparently the NPR brass doesn’t pay attention to Felton, because they keep doing the same thing, again, and again, and again.

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Why I have a problem with NPR

Monday, June 14th, 2010

By Vic Rosenthal

The following is on its way to the program director of KVPR, my local Public Radio station.

Dear Jim,

As you might remember, I stopped supporting your station in 2006, after becoming outraged at NPR’s biased coverage of the war in Lebanon. But a couple of years ago I “rejoined” because, after all, I listen to it.

So here’s my latest complaint (you can read a few of my previous ones here, here, here, here, and especially here).

NPR provides arguably the best, most complete radio news coverage widely available in the US. But it consistently portrays events in the Mideast with a steep anti-Israel tilt. And since one of the most important sources of funding for NPR is the fees paid by local stations, those of us who have a problem with NPR also have a problem with the local stations.

For example, this morning’s newscasts carried a piece by Peter Kenyon, reporting from the Egyptian side of the border between Egypt and the Gaza strip.  Kenyon slanted his story in several ways:

  1. He used the Emotive Bias Technique to ensure that the Arab side of the story would stick with the listener while the Israeli side would be forgotten
  2. He used the Selective Omission Technique to mislead without explicitly lying
  3. He quoted false statements without comment or challenge

Let’s look at some of it.

DEBORAH AMOS (host): The Gaza Strip doesn’t get many high profile visitors since the Islamism group Hamas took over three years ago and Israel imposed a blockade. But the territory is now back in the spotlight. International pressure has been building on Israel to end, or at least ease, the blockade. The head of the Arab League Amr Moussa was in Gaza yesterday to express solidarity with the people of Gaza. NPR’s Peter Kenyon traveled to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, and sent this report.

PETER KENYON: Gazans were heartened by Amr Moussa’s visit and were glad to hear him repeat the Arab Leagues call for lifting the blockade.

Mr. AMR MOUSSA (Leader of Arab League): (Through translator) The position of the Arab League is clear: the siege must be ended. The Palestinian people deserve to be supported, not only by the Arab states, but by the whole world now.

KENYON: But on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border yesterday, international support wasn’t translating into much more than a trickle of Gazans making their way into Egypt. Those who did make it through, like Mohammed Awul Anane(ph), said the rest of the one-and-a-half-million Palestinians in Gaza were watching their economy and their society suffocate under the Israeli sanctions.

Kenyon and Amos have suggested that the “trickle” of traffic is due to the Israeli blockade. But this is the border with Egypt. What is omitted here is that Egypt has also closed its border with Gaza, because Hamas is aligned with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which is trying to subvert the Mubarak regime and install a radical Islamist one. These are the same folks that murdered Anwar Sadat for trying to make peace. This counts as selective omission.

The listener is also left with the assumption that Gazan society is ‘suffocating’, because  a Palestinian says so. But actually there is a huge amount of international aid reaching Gaza, plus a vibrant smuggling economy. Nobody is suffocating, but Kenyon doesn’t comment on this false implication.

Mr. MOHAMMED AWUL ANANE: (Through translator) How can I describe it? There’s no other word for it but tragedy, a tragedy. People are living as if they’re already in their graves.

KENYON: Israel defends the blockade, saying it has no intention of letting Gaza’s Hamas rulers acquire new weapons and military-style fortifications so they can resume firing rockets at southern Israeli towns. Israeli officials have also defended their decision to send an elite naval commando unit to raid a Turkish-registered aid ship two weeks ago. The raid left eight Turks and a Turkish-American dead and sparked an outcry that has evolved into mounting international pressure to at least ease the blockade and perhaps allow in items such as cement and steel to help rebuild Gaza’s shattered infrastructure.

This is wonderful! First, notice how the Palestinian complaint is put in the mouth of a real person, who speaks with emotional intensity, while the Israeli position is presented in one dry sentence. It’s a paradigm case of the Emotive Bias Technique.

Now look at the statement about the interception of a Turkish ship attempting to break the legal blockade of Gaza. Kenyon omits the most important facts about the incident, which are that the Israeli boarding party was viciously attacked by a group of thugs who boarded the ship separately from the other passengers, who did not undergo security checks, who were well-organized and armed with pipes, knives, axes, slingshots and other weapons, wore gas masks and ceramic vests,  who took over the upper deck of the ship and attempted to tear the Israelis to pieces as they landed (you can read more about it here and here or watch the video here).

Saying that the raid “left eight … dead” obscures the fact that the Israelis acted in self-defense — the dead were killed while trying to commit murder. That’s one hell of a selective omission!

The piece continues:

KENYON: Twenty-five-year-old Mohammed Howaja(ph) has a slightly dazed look as he steps onto the Egyptian side of Rafah. It’s the first time in his life that he’s set foot out of Gaza, he says, and he’s off to Alexandria to study law. When asked how he got approval to leave, he said as with many of his fellow travelers, he paid someone off.

Mr. MOHAMMED HOWAJA: (Through translator) Five times this month I tried to get a permit, and each time I was turned down. Finally, I brought money. I paid in order to come out.

KENYON: When asked how many Gazans would leave if they had the chance, he immediately said all of them. And it was hard to tell if he was joking.

Keep in mind that this is the Egyptian border. He paid Egyptians, Hamas people, or both; not Israelis. And we are not sure that he wants to leave because of the blockade: maybe he’s secular, Christian, a Fatah supporter, gay, or any number of things that would make life under Hamas quite literally impossible.

It concludes:

At the moment, support for the Palestinians of Gaza seems to be on a rare upward trend, while analysts say Israel is looking increasingly isolated. Israel’s defense minister canceled a trip to Paris – in part, officials said, because of difficult questions he might face. But as far as 35-year-old Palestinian Essam Ellion(ph) is concerned, Gazans have a long and forlorn history of trying to live on kind words of solidarity, and it’s not working.

Mr. ESSAM ELLION: (Through translator) As far as I can tell, it’s just empty talk, just words piled on words. I’m without hope right now. There’s nothing real, nothing we can touch or see on the ground when it comes to ending the siege.

KENYON: These Palestinians who have just walked out of a tiny, overcrowded coastal strip where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, say that kind of pessimism may be one of the few things growing in Gaza these days.

Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, canceled his trip to Paris not because of  the possibility of “difficult questions,” but rather because anti-Israel activists were planning to embarrass him by filing trumped-up “war crimes” charges against him in French courts.

Regarding the long-suffering Gazans, keep in mind that all Hamas would have to do to end the blockade (it is not a ‘siege’, there is plenty of food, medicine, etc. getting in) is to stop the continuous attempts to infiltrate and tunnel into Israel in order to kill Israelis and take hostages, to stop firing rockets into Israel — yes, they are still doing that — and last but not least, release Gilad Shalit, who has been held incommunicado in an underground bunker by Hamas for four long years.

Jim, I think this makes it clear why I have a problem with NPR. I am suggesting that you and the station take it up with the network, because they certainly don’t care what I think.

But I hope that you do.

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Israel’s traitorous intellectuals

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

The phenomenon of Israel-hatred among Jewish Israeli academics and journalists has gone far beyond what can be explained by the distribution of Jewish Israelis across the political spectrum. Here in the US, it seems to me that Jewish attitudes toward Israel are more or less the same as those of the general population, with a few exceptions in either direction like the anti-Zionist Hasidic sects and the pro-Zionists of the Young Israel movement. For most other American Jews, their position depends on their overall political orientation, with the Left tending to be anti-Zionist and the right pro-Zionist. Only a small number hold extreme positions, and even fewer seem to be activists.

This makes me unhappy — I think there should be a natural tendency for Jews to be Zionists — but it is far from the pathological death wish found among Israeli academics and media elite:

Dr. Anat Matar of [the Tel Aviv University] Philosophy Department will be speaking on February 17 at London University’s School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) – a campus renowned for anti-Israel activity. [link added by editor]

Matar’s talk is to be titled “Supporting the Boycott on Israel: A View from Within.”

She is taking part in a series of events over the coming weeks organized by the Palestinian societies at five University of London campuses – University College London, SOAS, Imperial College, Kings College and Goldsmiths – as well as at the University of Westminster.

In an article in Haaretz in August, Matar accused her own university of being complicit with the “occupation” and questioned Israel’s stance on Palestinian academic freedom and basic education…

The series of events is titled, “Gaza: Our Guernica,” in reference to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. The 1937 attack caused widespread destruction and civilian deaths, with 1,650 reportedly killed…

The series of events opened last Thursday with a candlelight vigil at University College London, recently in the headlines after it was discovered that failed Detroit airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a former president of the Islamic Society there.

Two other Israelis are taking part in the series. On Monday, journalist Daphna Baram spoke at SOAS in a talk titled, “Besieged in Self-Righteousness: Israeli public discourse after the last invasion of Gaza.”

Next Wednesday, Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, professor of International Relations at Oxford University, will speak about “Gaza: Past and Present” at Goldsmiths. — Jerusalem Post

This is in addition to Prof. Neve Gordon of Ben Gurion University who recently called for an international boycott of Israel like that of apartheid South Africa, to “save Israel from herself.” In addition, we can’t ignore Ha’aretz pundits Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, etc. And then there are the Jewish workers in Israeli NGOs such as the European-funded B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel whose activities directly support the campaign to delegitimize the state.

Everyone agrees that free speech has limits. During time of war — and Israel has been at war since its founding — the limits are even narrower. And these Jewish Israelis, especially since they speak to foreign audiences, clearly cross the line. Dr. David Hirsh, who is British and no right-winger, said this:

Israeli anti-Zionists boast that their country carries out the most important and horrific genocides in the world… The delusions of grandeur of Israeli anti-Zionists are as puerile as those of the most naive and proud nationalists. But it is dangerous to tell Europeans that the Israelis are a unique evil on the planet, because this lie finds a resonance in the collective memory and it feels plausible to some contemporary Europeans.

Regarding the obscene comparison of Israel’s action to the Nazi bombing of Guernica, Hirsh added some historical dimension:

In April 1937, on a market day, the Nazis attacked Guernica from the air, first with bombs and then with incendiaries. Fighter planes followed the bombers to machine-gun survivors. It was the first time anybody had launched an attack from the air to kill a civilian population. A third of the population was killed or seriously injured in an afternoon.

This, of course, is how the Gaza operation is portrayed by Hamas and its sympathizers, but the reality — an operation in which unprecedented care was taken to reduce civilian casualties and damage — was exactly the opposite. This reality has by now been almost entirely obliterated in  the public mind by a massive disinformation campaign, of which the notorious Goldstone report is emblematic.

Nothing is more effective in this campaign than its support by Israeli Jews. And since the object of it is to pave  the way to the destruction of the state, these Israelis are in effect guilty of treason.

Of course I don’t expect them to get their just deserts, but it is unacceptable that there are no negative consequences for them at all.

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A world of propaganda

Monday, January 18th, 2010

This past Saturday night (January 16), our local public radio station, KVPR, aired the most anti-Israel 55 minutes that I’ve heard anywhere. And that is saying something, because KVPR’s competition in the listener-supported radio world carries the Pacifica network, home of Amy Goodman.

The weekly program is called “A World of Possibilities”, and is produced by an outfit called Connexus Communications”, which is supported by grants from ‘progressive’ foundations, especially the Ford Foundation. It’s provided free for download and broadcast by anyone who wants it.

Saturday’s episode was called “Victims No More: Seeking the Middle Way in the Middle East,”  but there was no “middle way” or balance about it. The host, the snotty Mark Sommer — who often peppers his remarks on unrelated programs with anti-Israel comments (in a program about Darfur, he said conditions were “as bad as the Palestinian territories”) — interviewed five guests. Let’s look at what each one contributed to the program:

Amal Jadou, deputy chief of the PLO mission in Washington spoke for about fifteen minutes, delivering an unrelieved rant about the horrors of occupation, all the humiliations suffered by the Palestinians, whom she calls “the Jews of the Jews” in support of her offensive position that Jews have persecuted Palestinians just as they themselves were persecuted in Europe. Need I remind you that Jadou’s PLO practically invented terrorism as a political tool and has murdered thousands of Israelis, more than any other terrorist group?

Rami Khouri, a Palestinian/Jordanian journalist living in Beirut, also got about 15 minutes. Khouri, educated in the US, speaks excellent English and specializes in sounding moderate while delivering his zingers, such as talking about Israel’s “colonization program,” saying that “the Israelis have shifted very sharply to the right,”  that “both sides fight in vicious and barbaric ways,” that the “core of the [Mideast] conflict” is the Palestinian question, that the US has not historically been a “fair mediator” but has leaned toward Israel, that the US has “echo[ed] the views of the right wing in Israel,” and that Israel “overreacts[!]” to Iranian threats.

Haleh Esfandiari, a Iranian/American scholar who was imprisoned in Iran got about 7 minutes. She didn’t talk about Israel or the Palestinians at all, and — because of her opposition to the Iranian regime — seems to have been included as a form of balance.

Motti Cristal, an Israeli who served as a negotiator when Palestinian terrorists invaded and occupied (and damaged and desecrated) the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem for 40 days in 2002, had his seven minutes of fame. He explained his theory of “interest-based” negotiation and the power relationships between Israel and the Palestinians. Nothing earthshaking, and I wasn’t sure why he was included until he dropped his payload, in response to a question from host Sommer: “in order to reach a comprehensive settlement … you have to include representatives of Hamas in any negotiation table set between Israel and the Palestinians.” You could almost see Sommer licking his lips with glee.

Josh Weiss, an academic and ‘negotiation consultant’, had the final 5  minutes. Weiss’ contribution was the idea that the issues on both sides were primarily ‘symbolic’. Palestinians didn’t want to actually exercise a right of return, he said, they just wanted to overcome their sense of “being wronged.” You could have fooled me. But Weiss really shone when host Sommer, apropos of nothing, asked him about ‘occupation’. “When I go [to Israel], you know, I feel it, I feel the connection to that, to being part of the occupier. In some way it’s like what white South Africans might have felt,” Weiss said.  Why thank you, Josh.You can go back to your Harvard office now.

“Most people on both sides are victims of an argument they had no part in creating,” says Sommer in conclusion, ignoring the fact that the Palestinian leadership, by refusing to accept any solution that implies the end of the conflict and the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, has played a very big part in keeping the argument alive. Indeed the whole thrust of the program is to repeat the mantra “both sides, both sides, both sides,” ignoring  small asymmetries like the fact that Israel’s goal is to live peacefully in the Middle East and the Palestinian goal is to prevent this!

KVPR, as I mentioned before is a listener-supported station. I do not believe for a moment that most of its listeners share the vicious point of view of Mark Sommer, or think that a program composed of blatant anti-Israel propaganda belongs on the schedule. If your local public radio station carries “A World of Possibilities,” please write to it (in Fresno, you can contact KVPR Program Director Jim Meyers — I intend to) and tell them that this is not the way you want your donations used.

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