As sad as the situation in the Middle East is, one byproduct is that America is getting a much-needed and long-overdue lesson in biased media reporting, thanks to the work of such groups as MER <http://www.MiddleEast.Org> and even the somewhat less frank - but -right-on-the-money this time! - Anti-Arab Discrimination Committee.
Until the conflict in the Middle East became visible to the world, I never even knew that there existed an ADC. Good for them that finally they found their voice - and kudos to the Oregonian who has the courage to print their release. I run it here in full.
ADC Update: ADC Critique of Media Published in Today's Oregonian
A version of ADC's critique of media coverage of the ongoing Palestinian uprising was Published in today's issue of The Oregonian, the largest newspapers in the northwest. It can be read online in the Oregonian website at <http://www.oregonlive.com/oped/index.ssf?/oped/00/10/co_11arabs22.frame>.
A longer version is available on ADC's website at <http://www.adc.org/press/2000/15october2000.htm>. ADC thanks the Oregonian for being receptive to an Arab-American critique of the media's generally outrageous attitude towards recent tragic events in the Middle East.
Hostility against Palestinians taints the news In the wake of chaos in the Middle East comes a call to U.S. publications for fair and balanced coverage Sunday, October 22, 2000 By HUSSEIN IBISH News coverage in the U.S. media of the past two weeks of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories has revealed shocking levels of hostility to Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims from many U.S. journalists.
As the conflict grew in intensity, ever more extreme hostility and racism against Palestinians proliferated in the media. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the nation's largest Arab-American membership organization, notes that the bias against Arabs in the U.S. media has, in some cases, reached scandalous proportions. ADC calls upon the editors of major U.S. publications to maintain consistent standards and ensure that their publications are not a platform for hostile anti-Arab prejudice.
Perhaps the most egregious expression of anti-Arab hatred in the mainstream press in recent days came from the online publication Slate, which is owned by Microsoft and edited by the widely known pundit Michael Kinsley. On Oct. 13, Slate columnist Scott Shuger called one of the Palestinians who had participated in the killing of two Israeli soldiers "a piece of (expletive) posing as a human being." In the past two weeks, more than 100 Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians, have been killed by Israeli occupation troops. More than 20 of the Palestinian dead were children. Rampaging Israeli settlers have murdered several Palestinians, including one who was tortured with hot irons and then burned to death. No U.S. journalist has called the Israelis who committed these atrocities "pieces of (expletive) posing as human beings," and we are certain that editors would have prevented their journals from being used as forums for such sentiment.
When it comes to Palestinians and other Arabs, unique style guides seem to be employed on editorial desks. The killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinians prompted justifiable moral outrage in the press, but this same sense of outrage was absolutely lacking during previous days when 100 Palestinians were gunned down. When the two Israeli soldiers were killed, terms such as "brutal," "savage," "barbaric," "murder," "lynching," "terrorism" and others suddenly appeared for the first time in the coverage-- loaded words never used in the coverage of the killing of Palestinian children. Moreover, many attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians-- including several extremely gruesome murders, some involving extensive torture went largely unreported and completely unremarked on by the major media.
It seems that the identity of the victims determines the level of interest and choice of language, not the nature of the act. The intense coverage of the soldiers' deaths included detailed family and personal histories, many stories about the reaction of their relatives, and a broad effort to humanize and personalize them. The names of Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli military were rarely reported.
The Israeli press has commented on this double standard, with the newspaper Ha'aretz noting in a headline that "Our Victims are Stories, Their Victims are Statistics." That the U.S. media can do no better in evenhandedly covering Israeli and Palestinian victims is indeed a sorry state of affairs. The effect of this bias is to encourage identification with Israelis and dehumanize Palestinians. Perhaps the one exception to this disregard for the stories behind Palestinian victims was the case of Mohammed Al-Durah, the 12-year-old boy whose shooting by Israeli snipers horrified television viewers around the world. Even then, most U.S. media reported that he had been "caught in the cross-fire." It was obvious to press the world over that the boy, his father and the ambulance driver who tried to rescue them were all deliberately shot by Israeli snipers.
This obvious fact was not clearly reported in most U.S. media, who were only too quick to accept official and clearly false Israeli rationalizations about a "cross-fire." The London Independent's Robert Fisk, probably the most respected Western correspondent in the Middle East, wrote about coverage of the incident: "When I read the word 'cross-fire,' I always reach for my pen. In the Middle East it almost always means that the Israelis have killed an innocent person."
For many years the Arab-American community has been doing its best to raise the awareness of editors and journalists about the problems of pervasive anti-Arab bias and double-standards in the U.S. media. Coverage of the tragic events of recent days clearly demonstrates that this bias and hostility is as strong as ever and that journalists are permitted to express anti-Arab sentiments that would never be allowed with regard to most other groups. Patterns such as blaming the victim, ignoring history and international law, humanizing one set of victims while dehumanizing others, uncritically repeating official Israeli claims, and reporting on events in the occupied territories as if there were no occupation in place have been on full, dismal display.
If there are limits to levels of intolerance in commentaries that are acceptable for other groups, these must also apply to Arabs, including Palestinians. We must move beyond the stage where U.S. journalists find it acceptable to describe Arabs, no matter the context, as "pieces of (expletive) posing as human beings."
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Hussein Ibish, communications director of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, can be reached through the ADC's offices in Washington, D.C., at 202-438-7297 or through the Web site www.adc.org.
ADC is the largest Arab-American grassroots organization in the United States. It was founded in 1980 by former Senator James Abourezk. To receive membership information, please send us your name and mailing address or visit our website. To receive or stop receiving ADC's email updates, send a message to <majordomo@adc.org> with the following in the body: to subscribe type "subscribe updates" to unscubscribe type "unsubscribe updates"
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Thought for the Day:
http://unity.ancient-news.com/index0.html ((Click on "Israeli Massacre" on the upper left - not for the squeamish!)
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