Why the western media doesn't seem to care

These past two weeks have been somewhat difficult for me as I have been watching the political situation escalate between the IDF and Hamas.

Recently there was a terrorist bombing near the central bus station in Jerusalem, at a specific bus stop that I am at more than anyone else I know. Thank G!d I wasn't there but I heard the explosion from my house because it is only a 20 minute walk from my front door.

Then on Thursday a Hamas splinter group fired an anti-tank missile at a school bus, seriously injuring a 16 year old boy. That one bothered me all weekend long as it was hard for me to process such intentional evil. Shooting a katyusha, as terrible as it is, can't be aimed directly at anyone in particular. It shoots in a general direction and they hope it lands somewhere where it causes damage. But firing a short range missile directly at a school bus is a level of immorality that I can't possibly comprehend. Similar to the Fogel murders - I can't imagine someone making the moral calculation to take out a weapon and kill a child.

As I was trying to wrap my head around that kind of evil, I spent Shabbos with my girlfriend's brother in Beer Sheva and I had my first experience with a Red Alert. At around 11:00 a siren went off and we had to run into the bomb shelter because a rocket was being fired towards Beer Sheva. Thank G!d the Iron Dome is online - it shot the rocket down while it was en route, but we heard the explosion. What an awful and unique sound it is to hear an explosion from a weapon that was violently directed towards you. I heard two this month.

In order to help me absorb these questions I have been having as of late, I spent some time perusing different news websites to see who posted about the rocket fired at the school bus last week and to see how it was interpreted by the western media. I found that some had no mention of it whatsoever (the Guardian) and others mentioned it only in the context of Hamas responding to it by calling a ceasefire (the BBC, the New York Times), where the actual event of shooting the school bus was a minor part of the article. This made me pretty upset because in contrast, whenever the IDF strikes a target in Gaza or when the Israeli government permits more housing units to be built in the West Bank, it is heard all over the world. (Disclosure: I am also against building in the West Bank, but I think it should be clear to anyone with rational facilities that firing an anti-tank missile at a school bus is far more morally reprehensible than unilaterally building on contested land).

My difficulty with the one-sidedness of western media led me to a conclusion about why they choose to report only one side of the conflict: it is a way of trying to reconcile their own regrettable history by projecting their guilt into blame on another western nation.

All of the news stations that the western world relies on comes from countries with colonial pasts - USA, England, France, etc. Now that we live in the seemingly post-colonial age, the progressives of those countries do their best to fight what they see as colonial paradigms around the world (a powerful western nation beating on a developing non-western nation) - the best example of which is Israel and Palestine. In their eyes, Western nations are held responsible for their actions because they are enlightened nations that represent democracy, human rights, free speech, etc. but an Arab nation cannot really be held accountable as they are not western and don't hold by the same values as us. Thus when a Palestinian does an act of terror that is deemed immoral by western values, it can be brushed off as not news since we cannot assume that Arabs hold humanistic ethics similar to us and therefore it is not important to cry out to the world about that act. But if a democratic, educated, western nation does an act that even slightly goes against the morals of western society, they can be blamed for it as we hold them to the same standard as every other western nation. So when the IDF kills Palestinian civilians as collateral damage who are being used as human shields to defend terrorist targets, the western world can supposedly rightfully blame Israel for not holding the highest standards of human rights and doing everything they possibly could to avoid those casualties as a technologically advanced western nation who is morally accountable for their actions.

But in fact what is actually going on in the minds of these western nations is aderaba. The reality as I see it is that this mentality of western nations claiming to be post-colonial are in fact guilty of the exact colonialist mindset that they are claiming to be fighting.

A true postmodern political scientist would claim that value for human life can be found in all nations and does not necessarily come from western intellectualism. In fact it can even be argued that there are some situations where the west was ethically less concerned with human rights than other non-western nations. By claiming that one nation is a beacon of intellectual ethics and the other is uncivilized is a textbook definition of colonialism.

So when the western media does not report on a moral attrocity caused by an Arab, they are basically saying: "These animals can't be expected to understand our moral and intellectual tradition, they are just barbarians who can't be blamed for their amoral tribalist ways." If we were living in a different era, the next step would be to baptize them or to occupy them in order to force democracy on them. I guess nowadays we support them by assuming their "barbaric nature" and by condemning militaristic responses to it.

Therefore, when the western media covers immoral actions by Israel and ignores even worse actions by the other side, they are projecting their own guilt at failing to be post-colonialist onto another western nation. Why deal with your own problems when you can place them on someone else? They claim to be post-colonialist because they are supporting the underdog, but the rationale for their support is grounded in colonialist rhetoric. If they held both sides equally accountable for human rights abuses and breaking international laws of war, then they would be acting philosophically consistent with the political ideology that they claim to uphold. But unfortunately, it seems that colonialism has shifted from trying to save the barbaric nations to assuming their barbarism and only holding other western nations accountable.

One Quick Blog About Israel

I know this is supposed to be a travel blog now, but I can't resist talking about Israeli politics a little bit.

Here are two really interesting articles about Arab Israelis protesting against anti-Arab politics in the Knesset (specifically Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beitenu). The first is here on Ynet and the other is a video from the Guardian.

It is disturbing for me when I see people who hold racist policies in high regard in Israeli politics (or any politics for that matter). Lieberman has shamelessly said on many occasions that he wants to forcefully transfer all Arabs outside of Israel. He is also trying to get all Arab political parties banned from running in the upcoming elections on accounts that they are racist. This is pure Kahanism at its best, and that scares me. It's that type of anger that fuels violence and close-mindedness.

If Baruch Goldstein were still alive, he would vote for Yisrael Beitenu, and wherever Baruch Goldstein's politics lie, I stay far far away. How about instead of ousting an entire ethnicity from your country, warmongering in the process, why don't you actually address the issues and figure out how to improve your current situation? How about working with Israeli Arabs instead of ostracizing them? Seeing how much media attention Lieberman's been getting, I'm a bit nervous about the upcoming Israeli elections.

But I am excited to see how the Holocaust Survivors & Grown Up Green Leaf Party does. Yeah, that's right, its the name of a coalition formed by two parties that could not be any more different from each other. If they get even one seat, I will be the happiest man alive. Their platform is so random that I first thought it was a joke. Why don't all parties start combining in order to get more seats? How about the Communist party and the National Religious party? Or Shas and the environmentalist Party?


UPDATE: I spoke too soon... click here.

Ahmadinejad on the Jews

Don't get me wrong, this guy is a very dangerous man and I worry for the lives of Israelis with him in power. But it seems like he isn't the lunatic everyone thinks he is. He's making some good points and while some of them I strongly disagree with, others make sense.

As Rabbi Lerner puts it beautifully in Healing Israel/Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel in response to the Holocaust was like Jews jumping out of a burning building and landing in another building that already had occupants. Of course the first reaction of both parties would be to play the "I'm the victim!" game (and we all know how good Jews are at that).

Ahmadinejad has the standard Arab view of Zionism: that it is incompatible with Arab countries, but that doesn't mean that he hates Jews. Unfortunately the two often go hand in hand, but it seems that Ahmadinejad can make that distinction and I respect him at least for that.

Antisemitism in the Arab World

I found this picture in an article on the ADL website about antisemitism in the Arab World in regards to the presidential elections. This one on top was from Al Bayan, a newspaper from the United Arab Emirates.
I understand the criticism over Obama and McCain's relationship to the Jewish lobby: they both made trips to Israel and they are both targeting Jews for their campaigns. Considering the small size of the Jewish population in America, it is a bit striking how much attention we get (and how much pull we have). But to characterize the stereotypical Jew as a haredi shtetl Jew is not only extremely offensive and demeaning, it's also completely untrue, historically inaccurate, and shows the ignorance, hatred, and antisemitism behind the cartoons. The vast majority of Jews are not ultra-orthodox, or even outwardly religious at all, and only a couple of the cartoons in the article depicted Jews as normal looking Americans (possibly because the ones that did were not deemed antisemitic, if they even exist).
I don't understand the reasoning for using such an outdated and ignorant stereotype except for baseless hatred. When American political cartoonists represent the Chinese, for example, they definitely don't show them with buck teeth, wearing a coolie hat, doing dry cleaning, and building a railroad.
Here's another one from Bahrain:
They remind me of when I went to Egypt last summer and had a long conversation with my tour guide about world politics. He explained to me that he liked Americans but he didn't like American foreign policy because it was controlled by the Jews. I couldn't believe that those words actually came out of his mouth and for a second I tried to convince myself that I heard him wrong. I knew that ideas like that existed but I didn't realize they were so widespread that I would encounter them from the only Egyptian I would meet in my week in an Arab country. I told him that I couldn't believe that he believed that and he replied that he couldn't believe that I didn't believe it. I've tried to contact him a couple times through email to hear more about his perspective but he never responds. I think once he realized that I was going back to Tabah to cross the Israeli border he put two and two together and didn't feel like communicating with the enemy.
It's also interesting how this cartoon is of the exact same caliber but comes from a totally different source: American white supremacy.

Bishara Act: Racist or Precautious?

Ynet reports on the controversial bill that the Knesset passed yesterday:

The Knesset passed a bill on Monday determining that any Israeli citizen who visits enemy territory without a proper permit will not be able to serve in the Knesset for seven years.
The bill was initiated by MKs Zevulun Orlev (National Union-NRP) and Esterina Tartman (Yisrael Beiteinu), following the affair of MK Azmi Bishara (National Democratic Assembly). The bill was approved by a majority of 52 to 24 MKs. Among those opposed were Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz and Education Minister Yuli Tamir.

This was put into action after the situation with Azmi Bishara who was a Knesset member who frequently visited Syria and openly supported Hizbollah. After a police investigation, he was charged with high treason and forced to resign from the government. This gave the Arab Israeli party he represented, Balad, a bad name, and many people on the right started blacklisting them and saying that they couldn't be trusted.
I don't think that just because one man was trying to play both hands it means that the whole party is corrupt. The right is being reactionary, as they always are, and when it comes to making life harder for Israeli Arabs they jump on the ball.
So now we come to this very fishy bill. Why is it that the two MKs that initiated this bill about Israeli Arabs both come from the far right of Israeli politics? The NRP openly supports forced transfer of Palestinians into Jordan and Avigdor Lieberman, head of Yisrael Beitenu, was quoted advocating for the execution of any Arab MKs who meet with Hamas leaders. I have my doubts trusting the legitimacy of a bill affecting Israeli Arabs by right wingers who have extremely negative attitudes towards them. Yet I'm sure they used their scare tactics to convince the rest of the Knesset (who isn't that far from the views of the right) that without this bill the evil enemy will take over the Israeli government and push all the Jews to the sea. As Tartman exemplifies in the standard right wing language of us versus them:

The Bishara affair and the defiance carried out by many of the Arab MKs, such as their visits to Syria and their meetings with Hamas leaders, are not within the scope of freedom of speech, but rather a blatant encouragement of the armed struggle in Israel and the encouragement of terror against its civilians.
From now on the citizens of Israel can relax – enemies will no longer sit in the house of legislation.

If she considers "enemies" as "Arabs and peacemakers" then I'm sure she's right. I believe this bill is going to make it much harder for there to be negotiations with Hamas and other terrorist organizations (note that these right wingers consider any form of negotiations an act of treason) and if they get their way by making a couple more similar bills, it will rid the Knesset of anyone who shows dissent from their worldview. Luckily, the Arab Knesset members are protesting this bill and urging for reconsideration because of its infringement on minority rights and it's disregard for normal people who have family in the "enemy" countries. Let's hope that the right wing's scare tactics don't overrule the Arab parties' appeals as well.