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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

so many dead children, unnoticed

An indication of the slanted nature of reporting in the United States about Israel is the huge disparity in news about Israeli deaths vs Palestinian deaths.

A recent example is the murder of the settler family in the Itamar settlement. This awful crime took five people and was very widely reported on in the U.S., but over the years there have been several times more Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths (more than 10 to 1) and most go unnoticed in the U.S. for four reasons.

1) There is nowhere near the number of people in the U.S. that identify with Palestinians as there are people who identify with Israelis

2) There are essentially no Palestinians in the U.S. media whereas there are very many Zionists who are concerned with protecting the image of Israel more than with letting readers/viewers know about killings by Israel's army, police and settlers.

3) Palestinian deaths are routine, even the deaths of their children. News that is routine is not considered worthy of much attention.

4) It is a theme of Israeli propaganda that the country is in constant danger and the victim of unrelenting and eternal hatred. Israeli deaths can be used to dramatically reinforce this propaganda in order to support continuing American funding of Israel as a garrison state. Israel wants no sympathy for the real underdogs, preferring to place itself in that position for U.S. consumption.

With these points in mind, I recommend a visit to Remember These Children because it offers a stark way to see the large number of Palestinian children killed by year and month between 2000 and 2011. Simply pick a year at the very top of the page, then scroll down to see Palestinian children killed (a common occurrance) compared with Israeli children killed (a rarity) listed by month within that year.

Totals for 2000 to date

124 Israeli children killed
1457 Palestinian children killed

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