Indirectly refuting an attack on Israel by the local French Canadian daily Le Devoir, Abraham Harman, newly-appointed Israeli Consul-General in Canada, at his first meeting with representatives of the press, said that he had been in Jerusalem until the end of the siege and that he could vouch for the fact that Israeli forces took special care to protect the Holy Places from damage.
He revealed that the Israeli Cabinet, in special session, had ordered its troops not to damage Nazareth and Ein Karim, the reputed birthplace of St. John the Baptist. At the moment, he said, only about five percent of the Holy Places were in the Israeli sector of Jerusalem. Israel, he declared, welcomes the principle of freedom of access to the Holy Places for all religions and has proposed the establishment of international machinery to ensure their sanctity.
Le Devoir, which has on occasions found space in its columns for anti-Semitic incitement, recently published an article under the heading “Truths on the Palestine Conflict” which is full of atrocity propaganda against the Jews and Israel. According to the article, the Jews have slaughtered Arab civilians, murdered Arab prisoners of war, violated churches and other Holy Places. The article, according to the newspaper, is based on a memorandum supplied to the U.N. by a so-called Arab investigation committee.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
