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Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Outrageous Equivalence
In Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson notes:
Those wacky Palestinian Arabs are trying to turn the tables on Israel; since many sources have pointed out the bloodthirsty incitement to murder that pours out of official Palestinian media 24 hours a day, the PA has issued their own report on Israeli “incitement” ... It's bad enough that the PA is making this effort, but in the LA Times its reporter treats the "incitement" on both sides equally:
The U.S.-backed peace plan requires both Israelis and Palestinians to immediately stop inciting violence, and Israel has been particularly adamant that Palestinians must get rid of the fiery rhetoric that has characterized the 33-month-old intifada, or uprising.
"Something has to be done," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled. "This is not a way to raise a generation to peace."
The government of Israel blames TV, radio, newspapers and textbooks for teaching Palestinian youths to hate the Jewish state.
For their part, Palestinians believe Israeli children are raised to stereotype Arabs, that Israelis learn young to write off all Palestinians as "terrorists" and deny their historical land claims.
To equate the two sides is reprehensible. I've been aware the nature of the PA's propaganda from some time. But when I saw a presentation by Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch last year, I understood that nature of the PA's program was really something unique.
I don't think that there's been such a sustained effort to demonize Jews in sixty years. The pervasiveness of the images of evil Israelis, of public calls to kill Jews and denying Israel's "historical land claims" is beyond belief. It's on radio, television, in the newspapers and the textbooks. If one Israel cabinet minister says something over the top, it in no way compares to the wall to wall incitement generated by the PA's propaganda machine.
The article gets worse:
But incitement is tricky to define, and the project of bleaching it out is somewhat ambiguous. Israel accuses the Palestinian media of worsening a seething political climate; Palestinians reply that their media reflect the world around them.
"If you call these facts, these pictures, incitement, then how should we show fact?" asked Samir Sharif, interim director of the state-run Palestinian Satellite Television. "Official television in any country is a mirror of general politics. If things are on fire, I cannot be calm."
"[T]ricky to define" what weasel words!!! If you show a fictional account of Israeli soldiers massacring a family and raping its daughter at a checkpoint or Mohammed Al-Dura inviting children to join him in paradise, that's not fact!
Charles Johnson has it right:
I don’t know; these examples don’t really seem comparable to “A million martyrs, marching to Jerusalem!” or “Death to the sons of monkeys and pigs!”
But maybe it’s just me.
Indeed.
Soccer Dad 2:28 AM
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