Crisis in Gaza? What crisis?

It’s easy for Arafat to deny any crisis when journalists receive death threats for reporting it:

Palestinian journalists covering the ongoing crisis in the Palestinian Authority complained over the weekend that they had received death threats from the various feuding parties.

As a result, many of them said they have stopped covering the internecine fighting. Others said they were continuing to report on the power struggle, but without having their names mentioned for fear of reprisal.

“Many Palestinians working with the foreign media in the Gaza Strip are being threatened,” a journalist in Gaza City told The Jerusalem Post. He said the threats were coming from all the parties involved in the internal strife

[ . . . ]

The Gaza City rally was either downplayed or completely ignored by the Palestinian media. Al-Quds, the largest daily newspaper, instead carried a story in which it said Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip continued to express their support for Yasser Arafat by staging marches and issuing statements.

So much of the world continues to stubbornly insist that the Palestinian government is democratic. Freedom of the press would seem to be a basic requirement for that to hold true, and yet, here’s just further evidence that journalists are only allowed to report one thing: anti-Israel news stories. Anything else could get them shot.