David Swanson at War is A Crime on how the media is covering Israel’s war on Gaza:
In this latest assault on Gaza, Israel had by Thursday already killed 69 Palestinians including 22 children and 13 women, plus 469 wounded including 166 children and 85 women, and 70 houses destroyed. These numbers have since increased significantly.
In this video from Thursday on CNN, Jake Tapper interviews Diana Buttu, a former advisor to the PLO. After failing to persuade her of Israel’s complete innocence, he tells her that Hamas is instructing women and children to remain in their homes to die as Israel bombs them. She responds by expressing doubt that people want to die. Oh no, says Tapper, Palestinians live in a culture of martyrdom; they want to die.
William Westmoreland once remarked on Vietnam, where the United States killed 4 million men, women, children, and infants: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
Banastre Tarleton stood up in Parliament and defended the slave trade on the grounds that Africans did not object to being slaves.
President William McKinley said little brown Filipinos appreciated being conquered and dominated.
The view that the people you are abusing don’t mind it has a long history of being employed to distract from the evil being done.
Just as powerful, if not more so, is the view that no evil is being done at all.
ABC News’ Diane Sawyer told her viewers that scenes of destruction in Gaza were actually in Israel, and was later forced to apologize, but did not note that scenes like those she’d shown do not exist in Israel, rather leaving the impression that a simple mistake had swapped out similar scenes from one country for the other.
I had thought that Jake Tapper was one of the good guys.
Is he OK on non-Israel issues, or is he not to be believed in general?
Diane Sawyer, OTOH, has been across-the-board treacherous for the last 35 years or more.
I read one headline that the Hamas rockets were a continuation of what started with the kidnapping of the 3 teenage jewish settlers. No mention of the kidnapped palestinian kid who was burned alive in retaliation. It’s not like there isn’t enough blame to go around, but always Israel is blameless and all the Palestinians are guilty, or should at least accept their collective punishment more stoically.
Tapper is better than a lot of them, but that’s not saying much.