An Army Radio host on Wednesday lauded Arab-Israeli filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, the director of the libelous anti-Israel film “Jenin, Jenin,” who violated every journalistic ethic to produce the film.

“During our broadcast, the beloved, amazing actor Mohammad Bakri passed away, someone who truly is among the greatest of the great,” the broadcaster said. “A huge, big hug to the Bakri family. Truly, among the greatest of the great.”

In his outrageous “Jenin, Jenin” film, “beloved Bakri” falsely depicted the IDF as having carried out a civilian massacre in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Bakri not only included scenes in the film that never happened, such as an IDF tank running over Palestinian prisoners, but he also used false translations of subtitles of interviews in Arabic, inserting terms such as “genocide” and “massacre,” which weren’t actually said.

Screenings of the film were initially banned in Israel, a ban later overturned by the High Court. However, the High Court later reinstituted the ban in response to a libel lawsuit filed by a reserve soldier who appears in the film.

Beyond the film, Bakri repeatedly defamed Israel in interviews with international media.

It should be noted that the Army Radio host’s praise of Bakri is no surprise and is typical of the channel’s liberal dogma, which mainly serves Israel’s enemies rather than IDF soldiers. It should also be noted that Israel is the only democracy that maintains a military-run radio station competing with civilian news outlets, funded at roughly NIS 52 million annually. Despite these issues, liberal Israeli figures, news outlets and Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara have fiercely opposed the government’s decision to shut the station, claiming that the government is “abolishing freedom of expression”—a meaningless statement that is reminiscent of the incessant leftist claims that “Netanyahu is destroying democracy.”

Likud MK Avichai Boaron responded by saying that the incident underscored exactly why Army Radio should be closed. “Bakri, the filmmaker who portrayed IDF soldiers as war criminals, whom a court ordered to pay compensation to IDF soldiers for defamation after ruling that his film contains ‘lies and fabrications and slander against IDF soldiers’—Bakri, who echoed Holocaust deniers by saying ‘no one investigated whether survivors’ testimony was true or examined the German side’—this is the man Army Radio hailed as ‘among the greatest of the great.’ Anyone who needed proof of why this station must be shuttered just got it.”

Minister Shlomo Karhi added, “The so-called ‘home of the soldiers’ is mourning and glorifying one of the most notorious supporters of terror—the man who said that normalization with the ‘Zionist enemy’ is tantamount to treason and who produced one of the most antisemitic and anti-Zionist films ever made here, smearing Israel and the IDF worldwide. May his name and his memory be erased. Soon our heroic soldiers will no longer have to be ashamed of their ‘home.’”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)