Left I on the News

Two articles, courtesy of the invaluable Cursor, on the "situation" in Gaza. The first, from the Arab-American Institute's James Zogby, is an excellent summary of the entire history of the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza, but is most distinguished by this image:

Today I thought of Kitty Genovese.

Some of you won’t remember her, but many in my generation will recall the horror and shame they felt after hearing the story of how she was raped and stabbed to death on a New York City street in 1964. What shocked the nation was the fact that 37 witnesses heard Kitty’s cries but did nothing to help. Years later, social scientists, studying this disturbing passivity, termed it the “Genovese Syndrome”.

That’s how I feel about what is happening in Gaza today. Israel is getting away with murder and the world is letting it happen.

The second, from ZNet, covers the same sort of ground I focus on here, press coverage of what is happening. Here's a particularly interesting item from an excellent article:

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted that he intended to commit war crimes in Gaza, telling his cabinet that he wanted “no one to be able to sleep tonight in Gaza”. Olmert thus officially acknowledged Israel’s policy of collectively punishing 1.4 million Palestinians, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. But none of the US’ three leading newspapers - The New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times - reported Olmert’s statement, even though it was widely quoted around the world.

There was no hint of Olmert’s words in LA Times or Washington Post. The New York Times’ coverage is more interesting. New York Times’ correspondents Steven Erlanger and Ian Fisher reported the quote in an on-line article that was also published in the International Herald Tribune. However, the quote never appeared in the Times’ print edition. The Times’ editors seem to have decided that Olmert’s words were not “fit to print,” and deleted them from their journalists’ report. The conspicuous absence of such a widely reported and telling quote raises the possibility that the leading US papers actively avoid printing information that makes Israel look too obviously bad.