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 The US Media Bias toward Israel

By Laila Yaghi

6/24/02

If anybody watches the American news, they should immediately realize how biased it is.  The focus on the Israelis who died is extreme and repetitive, while the focus on Palestinians killed is rarely mentioned if at all!

What reminds me of this saga, the Palestinians and the Israelis, is almost how the African Americans were treated in the USA a few decades ago.  The blacks had barely any rights and even though they were born in the US, they still were treated as outsiders!

While watching ABC news on June 19th, one of the newscasters was stating that Israelis invaded Jenin again in retaliation to the suicide bombers and that there was fierce fighting between the Israelis and the Palestinian militants.  How could there be fierce fighting between the Israelis and the Palestinians?  If any one who watches the news had the least intelligence, he or she should realize by now that the news is definitely lying. Most of the Palestinians don’t have weapons! And what about the 500 children, women and men that were killed during the Jenin invasion, between March 29th and April 13th of this year, were these also Palestinian militants?1 Moreover, five Palestinian children were killed on June 21st, are they also Palestinian militants?2  Let us assume that most Palestinians owned guns.  How is a person with a gun supposed to fairly fight against an army with apache helicopters and tanks?

Every time I watch the news, I’m not even sure how to describe my feelings.  Sometimes I am so saddened and sometimes I am so disappointed and other times I am just so appalled and disgusted at how the media could be so insensible to human beings who are suffering!  How could the news media be so insensible to all the lives that are shattered and to the innocent people that are killed for land, not for anything else?  How can we all just watch the suffering of mothers loosing their children and not do anything about it?  How can we sit down and watch people lose their loved ones for a mere peace of land and not care?  Is our conscious dead?  Sometimes I wonder how can we go and watch a movie or play outside in the park and not lift a finger for these people.  It is our duty to do something for these innocent people since it is our tax money that is providing for the killing of these people, and it is our government that supports Israel’s despicable actions and we do not do any thing about it!

I started to feel that the politicians in my country, the USA, are more faithful to Israel than they are to their own country!  Take for example what Senator John Kerry was saying on Meet the press; on NBC news on June 23rd he stated that, “the Palestinians don’t want peace”!  But the host of the show stated that Sharon is allowing for one million immigrants to migrate to Israel in the next 10 years.”  In other words, how can there be peace when 1 million Jews will migrate in the next 10 years to Palestine and confiscate more Palestinian homes and lands?  How can the Palestinians be asking for peace when their homes are demolished in front of their eyes and their family members are killed?  What the US congress is asking of the Palestinians is to be super humans, to actually not show any sign of human attributes and that is of sadness, anger or bitterness.  Jews are allowed and actually urged to come from different counties of the world and obtain immediate Israeli citizenship while they also confiscate Palestinian property!  Meanwhile the Palestinians are supposed to tell them welcome to my home, you can take every thing as you please and I will go with my children and live in a refugee camp for the rest of my life!

Unless we do something about the killing of the innocent people, our conscience will haunt us for the rest of our lives. Because it is our government that is giving the green light to the Israelis to do as they please while the Palestinian people suffer.  It is our government that decides to put sanctions on some countries like Iraq while the civilians suffer from diseases and deaths.  It is time for us to wake up and realize the extreme of what our tax money is doing to innocent people in this world! 


Notes:

1. aljazeerah.info, March 29-April 13, 2002.

2. aljazeerah.info, June 22, 2002.