Khaled Abu Toameh notices an epidemic of not noticing [extended excerpt follows]:
"The arrest last week of seven Palestinian university lecturers at the hands of Palestinian Authority security services in the West Bank is yet another example of how the international media functions in this part of the world.
"Some Palestinian stringers and reporters offered the story about the arrest of the academics to at least a dozen foreign correspondents and newspaper editors in North America and Europe.
"Only one foreign journalist agreed to write about the story. His colleagues gave different excuses for turning their backs on the story.
"Some said they were concerned about their personal safety should they report a news item that was likely to anger the Western-funded PA security forces in the West Bank.
"Others simply blamed their editors in New York, Paris, London and Toronto for turning down the story as 'insignificant.'
"Earlier this week, a disenchanted Ramallah-based Palestinian journalist decided to put her Western colleagues to the test. She contacted the same group of newsmen and editors who had been offered the story on the academics' arrest with a 'new idea' for a news item.
"The Palestinian journalist proposed that the foreign press write about a Palestinian university professor who complained that Israeli authorities had turned down his request to visit Israel together with his wife and three children.
"The response from the international journalists came almost instantly. All but two said it was a 'great story' and expressed readiness to start working on it immediately."
[End extended excerpt].
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Comments
I'm not 100% sure the Israelis would even want to cover this at the moment. They have a different problem:
Mostly as a result of the work of Salam Fayyad, a lot has changed on the West Bank. There's less anti-Israel crap and more economic development. At this point, Israel needs to support Fatah (who's running the West Bank) in order to undermine Hamas, which is more virulently anti-Israel and more virulently nuts in general. I think the reason Hamas was elected in Gaza is primarily because Fatah was so corrupt when Arafat was still alive. If the West Bank Palestinians suddenly do way better than the Gazans, the Gazans will wonder why they've kept a leadership that isn't helping them as much as Fatah is helping the West Bank Palestinians.
I'm not anti-Palestinian per se - in fact, in many respects, I think they've gotten a raw deal, though at a lot more hands than Israel's - and I'm not Fatah's biggest fan, but I actively hate Hamas. The best thing that can be said about Hamas is that they're less corrupt than Fatah used to be. I'm not sure I even want to get into the worst thing that can be said about them - it would be quite a race to the bottom. Everything from taking the human shield concept to places it had never been before - like after being leafleted by Israeli jets that a building was about to be bombed, herding civilians at gunpoint INTO the building - to shooting the legs off at the knees of Fatah members (who ended up getting advanced prosthetics in Israel) to setting fire to a UN-sponsored summer camp for children because it allowed girls (your report) to targeting and murdering Israeli children on multiple occasions indicates that this is a morally bereft organization. Maybe "morally bereft" is a little mild; I'd say "evil" is considerably more accurate.
To get back to your point: the incidents you report apparently took place under Fatah on the West Bank, so the Israelis are probably keeping their mouths shut because the last thing they need is to give Hamas more traction of any kind.
Isn't Middle Eastern politics fun?
In fact, who knows, maybe Hamas likes those kind of games, because a certain type of revolutionary's theory is,"the worse it gets, the better it gets."
Now, having said that, you are of course completely correct that Israel does get judged by a different standard, because it is a democracy, partly.
That is why ruling over Palestinians is a bad idea, not because the Arabs have been the good guy, because their unwillingness to accept Israel is the main problem, like 70 per cent, but because they make the Israelis play their game to much by provoking them to do things that look bad on television, like that whole setup over the Turkish ship episode.