Rampant Media Bias on Israel

September 10, 2014

CNN headquarters, NY In recent days, Jews in America and throughout the world have begun to protest the rampant anti-Israel bias that we have seen in media coverage of the war in Gaza. This lurid, unbalanced coverage shows an unhealthy obsession with Israel and has prompted some European politicians to speak of Israeli “massacres.” Even more ominously, it has prompted a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations and mob violence across Western Europe.

The obsession with Israel and the rhetorical excess and violence it engenders is even more egregious when we consider that real massacres—of religious minorities by ISIS forces in Iraq, and of civilians in the Syrian civil war—have been happening in the Middle East at the very same time but have gotten scant coverage by the Western press.

The bias is glaring: after weeks of the Gaza war leading the news, there was a ceasefire and, as if by magic, Americans were suddenly confronted with the specter of mass slaughter in Iraq. Was all that killing suspended while eyeballs were glued on Gaza? Hardly.

While the UN Human Rights Council fulminated about supposed Israel “war crimes,” real war crimes were going on by the thousands in Iraq and Syria—and in the case of Iraq, with American weapons captured from the Iraqi Army. The carnage in Syria during Israel’s Gaza incursion has dwarfed the death toll in Gaza.

World Jewry has had enough. American Jews demonstrated in front of CNN in Manhattan, protesting the lack of context of media stories about Palestinian casualties and the near absence of footage of Hamas weapons use and rocket launchings. WJC [World Jewish Congress] itself has asked the media to account for the growing reports of instances of Hamas intimidation of journalists.

Truly, the Western media needs to ask itself, as columnist Jeffrey Goldberg did recently, “why the horrific levels of violence across the Arab world don’t seem to prompt such intense feelings, either in the Muslim or non-Muslim worlds.” As Goldberg notes, “the war in Syria (and Iraq, since it is more or less a single war now) is of greater national security importance to the United States than the war in Gaza, and it should be covered in a way that reflects this reality.”

Source: Excerpts of article by Ronald S. Lauder, World Jewish Congress

Photo Credit: Andrevruas/wikipedia.org