Selective nature of our moral outrage
The story of Palestinian suffering in the face of Israeli violence, as it has become routinised over the years, is failing to register in the US media
When is news newsworthy? When do editors of a newspaper decide that one piece of information is news while another is not? The classic, though by now hackneyed aphorism in journalism is that when
“dog bites man”, it isn’t news, whereas when “man bites dog”, it is — the obvious notion being, according to New York Sun editor John B. Bogart, who coined the phrase in the late 19th century, that the former is a pedestrian everyday event that happens so often it doesn’t warrant reporting.
You want proof that violence perpetrated against Palestinians living under Israeli occupation has become a story shelved as dog-bites-man, then ponder how occupation troops last month — just last month — killed 32 Palestinians, six of them children, and injured hundreds, with many of these unfortunate souls destined to live the rest of their lives suffering permanent disabilities. Yet this horrific news merited nary a mention in the American mainstream media.
Perhaps you could charitably argue here — you not wanting to attribute malice to expediency — that American editors have a particular target audience in mind, and that particular audience has, when it comes to Palestinians, suffered enough from “empathy fatigue”. Or perhaps, much in the manner of baseball scouts who tend to ignore statistical indicators of a player’s past performance, relying instead on their subjective impressions of the player’s looks, build and personality, that match their notion of what makes a baseball player great — a phenomenon chronicled in Michael Lewis’s bestseller, Moneyball — editors can tell when a story will be viewed by readers as a snoozer. And, sadly, the story of Palestinian suffering, because it has become routinised over the years, is now one such.
Media reactions
Consider this case: Not quite two weeks ago, a far-right white supremacist, who had posted anti-Semitic statements on social media, armed with a semi-automatic assault-style rifle, stormed into a synagogue in Pittsburgh where he shot and killed 11 worshippers and injured six. The attack was identified as the deadliest on Jews in American history. The city mourned. The nation expressed shock. And commentators had their say about the matter, the perpetration of hate crimes as an angry response to rapid social and demographic change, exacerbated by racist rhetoric in high places. And well they might, for it was truly a despicable act, not just because of its brazenness, but also because it represented the mother of all hate crimes — the killing of worshippers as they prayed in their chosen House of God. Now consider this other case, one that, though identical in kind, did not elicit the same frenetic front-page coverage: On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a far-right Israeli who lived in a colony in the middle of the Palestinian city of Hebron, and who belonged to the rabidly anti-Arab, racist Kach movement, entered the Ebrahimi Mosque there at dawn and perpetrated an unspeakable massacre — he killed 29 worshippers, several as young as 12, as they knelt in prayer, and injured 125 others. (During the mayhem, Goldstein was overpowered, disarmed and beaten to death by the survivors.)
The slaughter set off mass protests throughout the West Bank, triggering clashes with Israeli troops, who went on to kill 26 other Palestinians and injure 120. The American media, of course, reported the story, but absent outrage. The outrage remained absent, or at best muted, even after, in the days, weeks and months following the massacre, hundreds of Israelis travelled to Goldstein’s grave to celebrate his act, and to sing and dance, with various rabbis in attendance, praising the murderous deed as conforming with “the five Halachic principles”, Halacha being the collective body of Jewish religious law derived from the Torah — a claim we like to believe is false. “In a steady stream, they came by the hundreds to recite afternoon prayers at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, many bowing deeply to kiss the tombstone of the Hebron mass killer and to proclaim him a holy man”, reported the New York Times on April 1 that year. “They were a small group from among 10,000 or more Jews who descended on this Israeli [colony] to rally against the government for ... raising the possibility of moving [the Jewish colonists] who live in that tempestuous West Bank town”.
Even that news story, clearly one that, had it been widely reported, would have shocked Americans to the core, did not appear to have had legs in the mainstream media — nor did the news about the wanton killing, last month alone, of 32 Palestinians, six of them children, with hundreds injured. Killing and maiming Palestinians, you see, has become so routinised, so predictable, so mundane that filing a news report about it is much akin to filing a story about a plane that did not crash. Or a dog that bit a man. A strange, cruel world that Palestinians inhabit, wouldn’t you say?
■ Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.