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US media: selective news coverage |
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By SALAAM ABDUL KHALIQ, Columnist
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Recently a peculiar incident in Iraq drew the attention of national media and spread like forest fire on the Internet. Major networks carried the news, pundits commented on it and the public became so enraged by the cruelty and barbarity of this incident that many asked for the head of the perpetrator.
What could that incident be, one might wonder? The killing of an Iraqi child? The rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager? Guess again.
The tragic incident in question involved the tossing over a cliff of a helpless puppy dog by an American Marine. Someone was dumb enough to record this cruelty and post it on YouTube. Within hours, the name and address of the Marine were posted on the Internet and death threats followed. Media outlets pounced on the story prompting the Marine Corps to condemn the video and launch an investigation.
At about the same time, a few hundred miles west of Baghdad, Gaza was being pounded by Israel’s American-made F16s and Apache helicopters. The toll: more than 120 dead and hundreds injured. Most of the casualties were civilians, mainly women and children. One casualty was only 9-months old and not bigger in size than the puppy dog that was tossed over the cliff.
Was there an outrage in America? Did anyone at least feel sorry for that 9-month-old baby as they did for the puppy dog? Almost no one did because most did not get to see the video. And the video was not seen because the US news media was too busy reporting Islamophobic innuendos about Senator Obama’s alleged Islamic background.
The usual rehashed crock is that “Israel has the right to defend itself from rocket attacks launched by terrorists.” What the news media almost never tells the public is that in most cases it is Israel that instigates the “terrorism” while Palestinians only react by lobbing crudely made rockets (which have caused mostly property damage and injuries and just one reported death on record).
A week later, a Palestinian gunman killed eight Yeshiva students in Jerusalem. But this time the tragic revenge attack made headlines everywhere in America. Extensive live coverage of Israeli reaction to the incident was aired, pundits called for the heads of Hamas leaders to roll, President Bush and presidential hopefuls called Prime Minister Olmert with condolences. No one even condemned the murders of Palestinian civilians killed by American weapons, let alone call the families of the dead Palestinian 9-month old baby to offer condolences.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who recently visited Israel, declared Germany’s “undying commitment” to the Jewish state, condemned Hamas, and promised to hold a summit to tackle Iran’s nuclear threat. Merkel was even criticized in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for being mum on Israel’s heavy-handed killings of Palestinian civilians.
In spite of Israel’s many transgressions and its overt genocide against a defenseless population, the West constantly gives it a blank check. The Christian West, and Germany in particular, obviously feels guilty because of the Holocaust. Chancellor Merkel should never forget that it was her parents and grandparents who murdered Jews and not the Palestinians. Her lack of sympathy towards an occupied and oppressed people is nothing more than shameful hypocrisy. Merkel should be made abundantly aware that if her fathers gassed Jews, innocent Palestinians should never be made to pay the price with their blood and property and that it is they who should be compensated.
Western media’s selective coverage of the conflict often portrays the fourth most powerful military in the world as the victim, while a predominantly civilian population living within the biggest prison camp on Earth as the aggressor. Gaza is strangled from the sea, land and air, with 90 percent of its population living on UN food handouts, and still they are blamed for the violence. Apparently, it is their fault that they are being starved to death, their electricity cut off, and it is their fault that they are being treated like caged animals behind barbed wire.
It is a shame that American politicians, who eat off of the mighty hand of the pro-Israel lobby, have no moral backbone and no integrity to stand up against this blatant injustice, but time and again they find it expedient to lay the blame on the Palestinians in order to score political points with the right wing Rapture-freaks and Jewish neo-fascist groups.
If no one feels outraged when 120 Palestinians are murdered, but hell breaks loose when eight Israelis are killed or a puppy dog is tossed over a cliff, then we know that our collective conscience as a civilized society that tries to live by the principles of the Constitution and the ideals of the Founding Fathers has reached the lowest depth of moral decay.
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