Now today I see some (some, but not a lot of) media coverage of the 1.3 million Pakistani refugees fleeing their homes in the Swat and other regions of Pakistan. Yes, over one million people being displaced -- the largest number of displaced citizens since that nation's creation -- and yet they do not merit anything near the attention the far smaller number of suffering Palestinians received. Talk about disproportionate.
Source: Nightingale, Tzvi. "Where is the media attention on the issues that really need international attention and fixing?" Jewish World, AISH.com, May 17, 2009: http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/mediaobjectivity/Out_of_the_Spotlight.asp
We know the easy answer: horror and tragedy in Islam never garner the condemnation deserved while its leaders get away with deflecting responsibility for their sorry records by attacking Israel, the United States, and Danish cartoonists.
That's a pat and political response to Rabbi Tzvi's inverted observation of anti-Semitism or Judeophobia.
Doubtless, the are other and more sophisticated causes for underplaying conflict and its attendant and dismal consequences in war zones as different as Swat Valley and the Shabelle River region of Somalia.
For one thing, even with media temporarily barred from the "hot"--live fire--zone of Gaza, events involving Israel are easily accessed through a government that has been both forthcoming with facts as well as tolerant of accusations against its military and able to positively engage with investigations launched by the various humanitarian NGO's involved with conflict.
Most importantly, no one covering Israel's defense is likely to be shot for it.
By comparison, obtaining accurate, complete, and reliable government-side information out of the involved Islamic theaters may prove not only difficult but whether involving the unreconstructed ISI in Pakistan or the still fighting Islamic Courts-Shabaab nexus in Somalia, dangerous as well.
Along the Islamist Front, journalists "in-country" who report too closely or independently, much less against the immediate interests of various powerful sources, risk intimidation and death.
To even this up a little bit, the treatment of journalists in other conflicts, not only those involving Muslims but also those powered by corrupt governments and their criminal elements produce similar licenses to kill and the same corresponding self-censorship or aversion to typing ambitiously and idealistically into respective danger zones.
As a dimension, one might call the above "Intimidation of Journalism in Conflict Zones" and scale it.
In Israel, I would think the marks low--in rhetoric, at least, when Jews fire back, they do so with bullet points in publications; in Pakistan and Somalia, where a few journalists get "wacked" annually with bullets of another sort (by parties never known), it should be quite a bit higher.
Here's another dimension, less kind: "Tolerance of Violence".
Probably in-country and certainly from the standpoint of objective or, more accurately, third-party observation, the daily (not incidental) misery attending life along the Islamist Front may be such as to innure local and international observers to assassinations, kidnappings, human-borne and roadside bombings, and other greater and lesser forms of violence plus the always accompanying howls of the suffering of the innocent.
From the start of my following conflict, there has not been a week in more than 100 that I haven't glanced at one- and two-paragraph fodder involving firefights and murders, all of it Muslim-on-Muslim, much of it (with beheadings and the headless bodies thrown into trees for display, etc.) beyond the pale.
For scale: the warfare that has plagued Mogadishu has displaced one million Somalis internally and driven another 250,000 into Kenya.
Since the ejection of the Taliban from Afghanistan's government, the indigenous Pashtun tribes of the borderlands, with substantial constituencies, have fought with and hosted, joined, jostled, and otherwise adjusted--not necessarily happily--to the presence of Al Qaeda and its foreign elements and the more localized but culture-altering Taliban presence.
Against that backdrop, the lone bombing of a school or intimidation of a businessman and shuttering of a music shop in Mingora doth not a front-page piece make for, say, The Washington Post.
The destruction of 105 schools altogether by the "fairies who come in the night"--that's another matter. It seems to have required that much damage this past year to produce a few small blips on the international news radar.
Also, in a woefully inverted manner, one might suggest the western press expects no end to culturally-inflicted and conflict-related misery in "third-world" Islam, and so consequently underreports its agonies. That's not at all right,but the "Tolerance of Violence" and expectations about it in cultures in conflict may also dampen enthusiasm for making big news of so much incremental news.
Finally, it is a characteristic of the Islamic Small Wars processes that those not yet directly in the path of armed men may regard the suffering encountered elsewhere as someone else's pain, problem, and tragedy.
Again, this becomes news close to the so-what news category.
In Pakistan as late as this month (May 2009), it's possible that the sense of confining an Islamist government to territory an hour off the backbone of the country may have been comforting. Whatever it is, it's "up there in the mountains"--well, the whole world has seen how well that works.
As regards Israel's role in Islam, the Jews, as a people apart and as a minority, have long encountered the role of "enemy of the state" in both Christian and Islamic cultures when it has suited the ambitions of political entrepreneurs or incumbent but insecure or venal powers. In the United States, the "Indian", the "Negro" and a colorful merry-go-round of immigrants from distinct cultures (defined by cuisine, language, and manners) have served similar purpose.
This same form of discriminaton that finds its shine in rhetoric about the nobility of lineage and the purity of race finds its reversal in the success of open, tolerant, and plural societies, for where Jews have been welcomed as a minority, others have been welcomed as well, and that tells across the indices measuring the success of political forms around the world.
In Israel, where Jews have built a minority state, the inclusion of a substantial Arab minority treated as equal under the law has similarly produced a peaceful, vibrant, and working society within the state's more firmly defined boundaries.
I'm going to relax a little bit here (45 minutes before 60 Minutes): the Palestinians and surrounding and still sword-waving Arab states, Egypt and Jordan excluded, plainly restrict themselves to medieval straits. Unable to transform themselves, so far, they're unable to reconcile the presence of a Jewish state with Muhammad's 7th Century dictates and the legacy of a clerical literature that panders to aspiration and assuages despair by promoting the destruction of the Jews. In the promotion of that confusion and negativity lies their relevance as well their eventual irrelevance.
The run of the English and other western press, I think, see an "underdog" story: they're immune to the scale and scope of the cultural underpinnings of Arab Judeophobia and not really in position to delve into it.
The scribes see Israeli jets and dead Arab children well enough, but they're not as likely to grasp the psychology that first put those children in the way of jets and then baited the Jews to put them in the air.
In addition to that hidden literary experience, which involves more than the language of the Qur'an, Hadith, Sunnah, and Tasfir, may be the dawning notion that a relatively militant few can lead a political corpus of comparatively less enthused millions into wars that inevitably foster their own destruction.
That, I think, could stand a little more reporting.
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