Tuesday, December 29, 2009

An Opportunity to Bash Israel! Wow!

The Guardian is engaged in a series of daily reports from Gaza, commemorating the Israeli operation of last year. Here's one of the series, predictably telling how awful Israel was and is.

Commemorating the anniversary of a news event is standard, especially if there isn't much else going on and you've got to fill your pages or time-slots. Revisiting an event day after day after day for the duration of the original event is, however, a bit odd.

2009 was a bloody year, as these things go. There was lots of violence in Sri Lanka, in various corners of Africa, not to mention big chunks of southern Asia. Pakistan ousted millions of its own citizens from their homes; no-one knows how many innocents they killed because no-one thought to ask. And the list goes on.

Don't expect daily re-screening of any of these events. Most of them didn't attract much of the Guardian's attention the first time around; re-visiting them a year later would be inconceivable.

Sorry for boring you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are not boring

news that sell as compared to news which are news are endlessly interesting and frightening

rgds,
Silke

Jinpa77 said...

I used to think people were just over-zealously defending Israel when they complained about the excessive coverage its alleged "human rights violations" get. But as time goes on, I notice more and more horrific things happening everywhere else in the world. Strangely, these occurrences (Guinea, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, etc., etc., ad nauseum) don't seem to get much more than a byline in the mainstream media.

For instance, no one seems to have ever heard of how Muslims in the Kashmir Valley killed around 5-10,000 Kashmiri Hindus and expelled 500,000 others back in the late 1990s, yet everyone and their dog knows about Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report. One is a much grosser violation than the other. Gaza: 1,200 dead, the majority of which were members of terrorist organizations. Kashmir: 5-10,000 dead and 500,000 ethnically cleansed from their ancient homeland, and nobody notices.

In short, nit-picking Israel and ignoring much worse human-rights violations = the New Anti-Semitism.

AKUS said...

The Guardian seems determined to post one or two articles a day about Gaza - clearly this is editorial policy.

Meanwhile, events such as Thailand begins to return 4,000 Hmong asylum-seekers to Laos where they face murder is unreported.

Someone once said that there are only two kinds of atrocity in the world, as far as the Guardian is concerned:

1) Gaza
2) A lot of less serious things.