MJ Rosenberg, at Huffington Post, picks up on the racism in the prisoners’ story. Note the contrast between his piece and the New Yorker piece on Gaza, which harped on Shalit’s incarceration and never stated how many Palestinian prisoners are held by Israel. Rosenberg:
But most maddening is, in my opinion, the racial implications of the Shalit saga. It does not matter that Israelis and Palestinians are racially indistinguishable. The fact is that the Israelis are "white" in terms of their status in Israel-Palestine and the Palestinians are not.
The Shalit story is reminiscent of the way Americans become obsessed with crimes committed against whites while generally indifferent to identical crimes committed against people of color. The media will devote endless hours and days of coverage to the tragedy of a white woman gone missing while ignoring similar disappearances of black women. The same applies to stories of child kidnappings and other crimes of violence.
We tend only to care if the victim is white.
And Israel is no different (it is, in fact, worse). It cares about "Jewish suffering" but is indifferent, at best, to the suffering it inflicts on the non-Jews with whom it shares the land.
The country is obsessed with Shalit’s imprisonment. It is beside itself with rage, sorrow, and fury. It is so upset that the government is on the verge of approving a massive prisoner trade with the hated Hamas to get Shalit released.
At the same time, Israel is perfectly content with holding thousands of Palestinians in their prisons [more than 10,000, Rosenberg cites]…
These prisoners will sit and rot in jail until released as part of a deal to free some Israeli who shouldn’t have been kidnapped either.
One can take this argument even further. The entire Gaza Strip is an Israeli prison if one uses the most common definition of a prison. It is sealed and its people are locked in. Its million residents cannot leave. Even youngsters accepted at American or European universities are refused exit permits.
I give Rosenberg a lot of credit, he’s one of those few who is willing to put it all out there in its entirety and to evaluate the situation from a fair vantage point.
The entire Gaza Strip is an Israeli prison if one uses the most common definition of a prison. And most of the prisoners are kids.
Excellent point, Tuyzentfloot, as we are poked and prodded to show endless sympathy for Gilad Shalit.
Imagine if they loved everyone like they do Shalit (in Israel), they would not subject them to maintaining this atrocity of occupation.
American Jews think of themselves as a subset of the white race. This is especially troubling that this is even more the case among the media bigwigs who are Jewish. Cartoonists, Jewish or not, recycle WWI era anti-Semitic cartoons of Eastern European Jews but dressed as Middle Eastern Mullahs for today’s audience. It is less appalling that the cartoonists’ caricatures promote anti-Semitic racism than it is that their media bosses proudly broadcast their racism. How can anyone expect journalists at the lower ends of the media food chain to be anti-racist when their bosses are so openly racist? Who has done more to make racist anti-Semitism the norm in the US media for the description, in word or image, of native non-Jewish Middle Easterners?
“[...] the New Yorker piece on Gaza, which harped on Shalit’s incarceration and never stated how many Palestinian prisoners are held by Israel.”
The New Yorker piece did actually talk about Palestinians in Israeli prisons: they give “over 7,000″ as the number. It did indeed harp on Shalit however. Does this mean you got around to reading the piece, Phil? I don’t remember ever reading your response to it on the blog.
Missing white woman syndrome:
link to en.wikipedia.org