Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Amber Alert for "Kidnapped" Gilad Shalit
The Washington Post's Scott Wilson, "Captors of Israeli Soldier Issue Demand; Olmert Warns of Strike," http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/26/AR2006062601236.html, continues one-sided reports about Gaza. He is an exemplar of the biased reporting one expects from the corporate media, what Patrick O'Connell in Electronic Intifada refers to as "the privileging of the Israeli narrative," that "fits into the general pattern of US corporate media coverage of Israel/Palestine."
Wilson writes Cpl. Gilad Shalit was "kidnapped," as if he were a toddler whisked out of a department store by a child molester instead of an Israeli soldier engaged in shelling and traumatizing Palestinian children in Gaza.
Today Wilson's story affirms Ehud Olmert's blunt assertion: "the lives of Israeli citizens threatened by Qassam attacks were 'even more important,'" than Palestinian lives. There is no mention of two Palestinian brothers abducted the day before, nor is there any indication that fifteen Palestinians were diappeared in the Hebron area Monday morning.
Wilson clearly sacrifices objectivity in an egregious attempt to present Israel in a favorable light:
"Israel completed the evacuation of its settlements and military bases here last September after occupying the strip in the 1967 Middle East war. It has not returned with significant ground forces since the withdrawal, despite near-daily rocket fire from the strip into southern Israel. Late Monday, one of the crude rockets landed in the city of Sderot, wounding one person lightly in the leg."
Regarding "the evacuation" Wilson conveniently eliminates important context so that a reader might wonder what's up with these Palestinians? Aren't they ever satisfied? Like most Israelis, Wilson believes, as Ran HaCohen writes,that the occupation has ended, when in actual deed, "Israel has imposed a total siege on the strip."
Wilson has been apprised in thorougly documented and minutely detailed e-mails by O'Connell about the disparity that exists between Palestinian rockets launched toward Sderot and the shelling of Gaza by Israel's occupation forces, yet Wilson includes mention of "near-daily rockets landed in the city of Sderot," minus any note of Israel's barbaric shelling, traumatization, and killing, which includes thirty-seven Palestinians in June.
A perceptive reader might note from Wilson's story, however, that Gilad possesses both French and Israeli citizenship, and that there are a heck of a lot of "kidnapped" Palestinian political prisoners in Israel's jails.
What most readers won't know, however, is that we have our nineteen year old poised to take out an indigenous people, many of them refugees in clear sight of their personal property within a few kilometers of Gaza so that he, and other Jews from all over the world, may live unhindered in a Jews preferred state and that Shalit is part of a military that daily engages in war crimes on behalf of this state that, among other breaches of civil and human rights, refuses to implement the inalienable right of 7.2 million Palestinian refugees to return home.
Wilson's spin and lack of context is little more than an Amber Alert for a vulnerable and slight Jewish boy with big rimmed glasses.
Wilson writes Cpl. Gilad Shalit was "kidnapped," as if he were a toddler whisked out of a department store by a child molester instead of an Israeli soldier engaged in shelling and traumatizing Palestinian children in Gaza.
Today Wilson's story affirms Ehud Olmert's blunt assertion: "the lives of Israeli citizens threatened by Qassam attacks were 'even more important,'" than Palestinian lives. There is no mention of two Palestinian brothers abducted the day before, nor is there any indication that fifteen Palestinians were diappeared in the Hebron area Monday morning.
Wilson clearly sacrifices objectivity in an egregious attempt to present Israel in a favorable light:
"Israel completed the evacuation of its settlements and military bases here last September after occupying the strip in the 1967 Middle East war. It has not returned with significant ground forces since the withdrawal, despite near-daily rocket fire from the strip into southern Israel. Late Monday, one of the crude rockets landed in the city of Sderot, wounding one person lightly in the leg."
Regarding "the evacuation" Wilson conveniently eliminates important context so that a reader might wonder what's up with these Palestinians? Aren't they ever satisfied? Like most Israelis, Wilson believes, as Ran HaCohen writes,that the occupation has ended, when in actual deed, "Israel has imposed a total siege on the strip."
Wilson has been apprised in thorougly documented and minutely detailed e-mails by O'Connell about the disparity that exists between Palestinian rockets launched toward Sderot and the shelling of Gaza by Israel's occupation forces, yet Wilson includes mention of "near-daily rockets landed in the city of Sderot," minus any note of Israel's barbaric shelling, traumatization, and killing, which includes thirty-seven Palestinians in June.
A perceptive reader might note from Wilson's story, however, that Gilad possesses both French and Israeli citizenship, and that there are a heck of a lot of "kidnapped" Palestinian political prisoners in Israel's jails.
What most readers won't know, however, is that we have our nineteen year old poised to take out an indigenous people, many of them refugees in clear sight of their personal property within a few kilometers of Gaza so that he, and other Jews from all over the world, may live unhindered in a Jews preferred state and that Shalit is part of a military that daily engages in war crimes on behalf of this state that, among other breaches of civil and human rights, refuses to implement the inalienable right of 7.2 million Palestinian refugees to return home.
Wilson's spin and lack of context is little more than an Amber Alert for a vulnerable and slight Jewish boy with big rimmed glasses.
