On Thursday, January 11 2018, Palestine International Forum for Media and Communication organized a seminar “Confronting Media Normalization” with the Israeli Occupation, which was attended by about 100 media professionals, journalists and representatives of media organizations in Istanbul.

The seminar highlighted three topics; dangers of media normalization with the occupation, forms of media normalization, and the possible ways of confronting it. The speakers were; the Algerian political analyst Dr. Idriss Rabouh, and the famous TV Show presenters Mr. Nazih al-Ahdab and Mr. Moataz Matar, from Lebanon and Egypt respectively.

The seminar aimed at confronting media normalization, whose features began to loom and raise the level of people’s awareness of its dangers and its negative effects on our future generations. Indeed, media normalization is a second and deeper Catastrophe “Nakba” than the occupation of Palestine and the establishment of the Zionist entity. If Palestine was the victim of the first Nakba, Zionist movement throughout the Arab world, circulates the Nakba to the entire nation.

At the end of the seminar, the media covenant “Confronting Media Normalization” was launched by Mr. Hisham Qasem, the Director General of the Forum. He emphasized that it’s important for all media professionals and institutions to boycott Israeli Occupation and called upon avoiding hosting Israeli officials or representatives in Arab media platforms, or even appearing on their platforms. He also urged all media professionals to confront and fight normalization with the occupation in a deliberate and systematic manner on all media platforms, and called media personnel and institutions to sign it.