Al Hamatzav

For our non-Swedish readers, I’d like to introduce to you Aftonbladet, a leftist tabloid and one of the largest newspapers in Sweden (circulation of ~450,000 issues and 1,4 million readers). Both its editorial staff and columnists are infamous for anti-Israeli (which only in the slightest sense translates into pro-Palestinian) bias, regularly publishing columns by Orientophiles such as Jan Guillou (a known Swedish author, lesser known for publishing a book praising the Baath-regime of Iraq in the late seventies as democratic and progressive) and Helle Klein.
Aftonbladet has managed to hit several lows in the last few years, from the above mentioned Guillou using the Al-Aqsa intifada to predict Israel’s forthcoming destruction to using the Gaza campaign from this summer to propagate (either through ignorance or stupidity, though I’ll forgive a daily newspaper neither) the myth of Israel dropping “sonic bombs” over the Gaza strip (due to a dyslexic copywriter somewhere who couldn’t spell sonic boom). In any case, my nitpick of the day has to do with the choice of published articles on their news site, www.aftonbladet.se (consistently rated as one of the top five most visited sites in Sweden).

For those of you not following events, and for future reference, the situation today is the following:
The Lebanon front is quiet, Hezbollah are suspected of amassing forces for a future campaign, but nothing more. The West Bank has been relatively quiet, a few chance arrests here and there, and the civil war which raked Gaza the last few weeks barely spilled over. In Gaza, Fatah and Hamas militias have been engaged in internal strife for a couple of weeks, but are currently holding an uneasy ceasefire.

So what could be newsworthy today, if anything?

Well, the Israeli negotiations with Fatah are quite interesting. Though not fresh news, one might care to keep an article alive about Israel releasing the $100 million frozen since last spring, removing several important roadblocks in the West Bank and negotiating for the release of a single soldier in exchange for 1,400 Palestinians.
A more interesting article might be about the over sixty Quassam rockets which have struck Sderot and Ashkelon (that’s several a day, folks) in the last few weeks of “ceasefire” between the PA and Israel, and the IDF not following it’s usual policy of instant retaliation, marking an unusual (and almost groundbreaking) level of restraint.

So what, if anything, does Aftonbladet choose to publish on its news page on this fine December day? This month old article about a grandmother who blew herself up in sorrow of the artillery strike in Beit Hannun.

Actually, I don’t know what scares me more. Aftonbladet’s reporting or how many people who actually read it. Any questions?

Edit: Just to clarify, Fatima Omar Mahmud al-Najar, mother of nine and grandmother of 41, blew herself up on the 23rd of november 2006, over a month before the article was published on Aftonbladet and about three weeks after the story stopped having any newsworthiness.