There is a disparity, but it certainly doesn't go the way you're suggesting. Because most folk draw their knowledge from news reports, they see coverage of the rocket attacks and the like and assume that most of the deaths are Israelis. Most folk I've talked to on the subject, even those who don't agree with what Israel has done, have assumed most deaths have been Israelis, when the truth is the overwhelming number of casualties have been Palestinian, like 4 Palestinians for every Israeli.
You would assume that, but the truth is that I tend to find in the
UK, it does go the way I just described. There was actually an internal investigation done at the BBC as to whether the BBC are pro-palestinian/anti-Israel, and the result was that after the report was finished, the BBC went to tremendous amounts of effort to deny the public access to it. Despite several FoI requests, and legal attempts launched to force them to publish it, they're still refusing to this day. I believe its been in the legal wrangler for a few years now, and millions of pounds of taxpayers money have been wasted by the BBC in their efforts to not have to show this document. It must be said, the result is that you begin to wonder exactly what they're trying to hide. If the report said, 'The BBC is completely neutral', would they be trying to so hard to suppress it?
That is of course, just one example of the media over here. Nonetheless, I do find the press here takes a rather pro-palestinian view of the whole affair. For example, on the whole thing of ships getting into gaza, the headlines were simply along the lines of 'plucky freedom loving peoples defy cruel inhuman tyrannical oppresion'.
It may be different in the States or Australia, but over here, whenever the human rights organisations get bored of shouting about Guantanamo, they come up with their latest scheme to 'fight the power' by doing things like boycotting Israeli Universities as mentioned before.
sebster wrote:Sure, and you've got a fair point that the debate over Israel seems to occupy a whole lot of media time compared to other situations. I don't believe that's because there's a particularly anti-Israeli agenda (in fact Israel is continuously defended, despite so many of their actions being entirely indefensible). I think that's a large part of it, really, there is still a debate over the morality of Israel's occupation, whereas Zimbabwe is pretty much 'Mugabe is bad, here's more of Mugabe being bad' and then everyone says 'yep'. It's the debate that encourages more coverage.
Dogma wrote:
t is strange, but to some extent I think its simply a natural consequence of popular interest. There are a lot people, educated and otherwise, that are interested in Israel. There are few that are interested in Darfur.
One other thing to note is that Israel is a developed nation. This is important because it has a huge impact on the amount and quality of information available regarding the conflict. If you want to see what's going on with regard to the conflict, you can just pull up the English homepage of an Israeli newspaper. You can't do the same if you want to learn about Darfur.
This is broadly correct I would think. The two quotes here sum it up. Although I would still be interested in learning why the media here in England does seem heavily biased towards the Palestinians.
Oh, sorry, I didn't realise your comment on rabid anti-Israeli folk was in that context. It's a fair point, and I'm sorry I misread you, and sorry I was that aggressive, I should have given you more benefit of the doubt.
No problem.
