When in college, I was dutifully schooled about ‘fairness, balance,’ etc. Since then I have learned the media are not fair or balanced in many ways. One is the extreme preference given to covering Jewish affairs.
Israel must get more coverage than any foreign country and more than many of the fifty states. Its elections get far more coverage than those of other countries. We are taken step by step through each Israeli conflict, but given far less on the other conflicts around the world.
We are imprinted with details of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the Mitla Pass, Masada, the Wailing Wall, the Knesset, Hebrew, Yiddish, unleavened bread, the Sephardim group, the Hasidic group, Israeli unions, strikes, inflation, kibbutz’s, farming, resorts, exchange students, tourist industry …. Their housing shortage was on page three of the L.A. Times. Their daylight savings was on page one. A boy getting stabbed there got two articles. A sixteen page supplement on the U.S. military had one page on Israel’s military. Their prime minister broke his leg – page one. How often have we heard about similar events in Burma, Ecuador, Kenya, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Tunisia …?
Outside So. Vietnam, Israel has gotten more U.S. aid since WWII than any county. During the Eisenhower era, Secretary of State Dulles complained, ‘We cannot have all our policies made in Jerusalem,’ and, ‘I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews.’
Former congressman Pete McCloskey felt the ‘Jewish lobby … completely unbalanced U.S. foreign policy.’ He felt their power should be ‘recognized and countered in open and fair debate … without raising the red flag of anti‑Semitism.’
Most Americans have a European heritage. We hear very little about that compared to what we hear about the Jewish part of our heritage.
The media never lets us forget that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Six million others also died in it, from 14 other ethnic groups ‑ Gypsies, Slavs, Serbs …. Are their deaths less important? What about the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians, the Cambodian killing fields, or Stalin’s starving 10 million Ukranians in the early 30s?
We read about tracking down German war criminals from WWII, not Italian war criminals, nor Japanese ‑ and little about the war criminals of other wars.
The Jews claim uniqueness. What about Gypsies, Basques, Sikhs, Kurds, others?
If we’re not supposed to discriminate on one hand, we shouldn’t favor on the other.
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