Running scared of Israel the #BBC makes one Israeli life worth 1000 Palestinian lives
▻http://stopwar.org.uk/news/fear-of-israel-is-why-the-bbc-makes-one-israeli-life-worth-1000-palestin
These all strongly, and rightly, expressed the broadcaster’s empathy with the fact that something terrible had happened. But when has the BBC ever expressed this level of concern for the deaths of Palestinian teenagers? The question matters because consistent empathic bias has the effect of humanising Israelis for the public and dehumanising Palestinians. This is an extremely lethal form of media propaganda with real consequences for human suffering.
A Guardian editorial noted that the killings ’had shocked [Israel] to the core’. Western leaders had also expressed solidarity - an outpouring of concern that contrasted with the reaction to Palestinian deaths, which ’so often pass with barely a murmur’. But that was all the Guardian editors had to say.
The missing, ugly reality is that over the last 13 years, on average, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, 1,523 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel’s occupation forces. Over the same time period, 129 Israeli children have been killed.
