"If It Bleeds, It Leads"
Not in Gaza and Somalia
By
Abukar Arman
Freelance Writer — USA
In news media coverage, there is a tacit cliché rule known as "if it bleeds, it leads." It is the pervasive mentality that puts violence captured on film as the most attractive of all news reporting.
Ironically, in the case of the Gaza Strip and Mogadishu, they bleed but lead not.
Whenever the media fail to report on matters of war, the foreseeable consequence is prolonged destruction and bloodshed.
Aside from Baghdad, Iraq, nowhere is such consequence more evident than in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Territories, and in Mogadishu, Somalia.
While in all three cases predatory foreign intervention is exacerbating the situation,
this article focuses on the latter two because of the magnitude of their manmade humanitarian crises. In each case, the crisis has rapidly evolved into a full-fledged catastrophe.
"Holocaust" in Gaza
In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has waged what its defense minister Ehud Barak had promised would be a "major military offensive."
Deadly strikes on Gaza followed a severe blockade that had cut off fuel, electricity, food, and services essential to the survival of more than 1.4 million people in the world's largest prison camp, as described by Paul McCann, former spokesman for the UN's Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza Strip, in an opinion published by The Independent Aug. 16, 2005.
But the worst might be yet to happen. Reuters Web site reported February 29, that Israeli deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai said, "they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."
For Vilnai, self-defense meant anything from mass destruction to denying emergency healthcare for a dying senior women.
In this regard, B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, documented a case of a heart patient, Fawziyeh a-Dark, 66, who died of heart attack after the Red Crescent ambulance coming to transport her to the hospital was denied permission to go through the checkpoint. According to the report, the driver called the patient's husband and urged him to bring the wife to the checkpoint so he could receive her there.
Later when the patient was brought to the checkpoint, she was denied crossing over to the other side. In a helpless frenzy, the husband kept begging the Israeli soldiers to let his wife get the medical attention that she desperately needed, but to no avail.
"Let her die, let her die, it doesn't interest me, it is forbidden to cross," heartlessly said one of the soldiers manning the checkpoint, and she died.
"Catastrophe" in Somalia
Similarly, in Somalia the Ethiopian forces continue their routine indiscriminate shelling of densely populated Mogadishu neighborhoods. In 2007, the first year of occupation, 7,000 civilians — mostly women and children — were killed, according to Elman Human Rights group.
Since the occupation, life in Mogadishu has become so unbearable that approximately 1 million civilians — again mostly women and children — have fled for safety and became Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). They now inhabit makeshift refugee camps and are deprived of goods and services to survive. According to the UN, the total number of people in Somalia at risk of starvation is now 1.5 million, thus moving the situation toward a "humanitarian catastrophe," described Davide Bernocchi, executive director of Caritas Somalia, according to the Web site of ReliefWeb.
In another Gaza-like example, Somali civilians are routinely denied their most basic right of medical attention, as frequently documented by many local and international human rights groups. Both the occupation and the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces are reported to practice random killings and psychological intimidation of civilians.
The recent assassination of the brother of the TFG's Minister of Information, while speaking on his cell phone outside his home only highlights the horrors reported by helpless civilians whose loved ones have fallen victim before their eyes.
According to Human Rights Watch, both Israel and Ethiopia are in direct violation of articles 33 and 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention as they have been punishing the entire populations for the acts of a few. Both have been violating their respective obligations, as the occupying forces, to ensure the flow and distribution of food, medicines, and all other humanitarian relief goods and services to civilians.
So why is it that we do not see these kinds of reports in our nightly news or the front pages of our newspapers?
Media Blackout
After the US corporate media indirectly contributed to the happening of Rwandan genocide by failing to report on it, history seems to be repeating itself in both Somalia and Gaza Strip.
Today very little international media attention has been given to the atrocities and dire humanitarian situation in Somalia, as compared to the attention crisis in Darfur, Sudan, has so far received.
As for the recent Israeli military operations in Gaza or the preview of the "holocaust" to come, the US and European mainstream media failed to provide coverage commensurate with the depth of civilian kids and women killings.
Often under pretense of seeking objectivity, these media tend to draw parallel comparisons between trivial rocket launches from the Gaza Strip with the Israeli F16 and missile attacks on populous Palestinian neighborhoods. Besides, the gut-wrenching images of civilians' body parts being collected after each Israeli raid, very rarely make it through editorial desks of US and European mainstream newspaper or television media.
Veteran journalist
Robert Fisk who covers the Middle East for
The Independent newspaper criticizes the Western media, particularly the American, for biased reporting, according to and article in
Stanford Daily Web site published Nov. 22, 2002.
He contends that the Palestinian violence is routinely reported as terrorism whereas the Israeli violence — which is much bloodier and indeed more destructive — as a necessary military action.,
While the US enjoys a comparatively high level of freedom of expression, some voices, especially those critical of Israel, are routinely muffled and labeled as anti-Semitic.
In 2004, US president George W. Bush signed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 into law. The bill obliges the US State Department to monitor and combat "global anti-Semitism practices." On the surface, there seems nothing wrong with monitoring hatred not only against jews but against all peoples and their faiths. However, there is slanted aspect of this bill that could make criticism of Israel and its leaders potentially a reprehensible act. Hence,
any voices critical of the Zionist transgressions and human rights abuses are likely to be censored before they are reported by mainstream US news media.
Media as Spin Tools
Evidently, much time has passed and much media changes have happened since the press admired by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic book Democracy in
America almost two centuries ago.
The very media elements once used to keep an eye on decision makers in matters of high public importance have become tools to fend off public attention from things that matter to them.
Corporate media have become so profoundly mesmerized by the ways and the means of the powerful. As a result, they routinely offer free pass for those who craft policies to disseminate them.
Fisk warns against the dangers posed to "journalism itself." He described these dangers as "the silent and unquestioning acceptance of authority, and the trite, bland and deeply deceiving government statements which are inherited by the neglect of hundreds of headlines," according
The Stanford Daily article.
The corporate media have willingly forfeited their role as credible watchdogs that guarded democracy and the rule of law and exposed the abuses of the power-lords against the weak. And the consequence of this squandered role — at a time when the world is incrementally becoming more like a global village — cannot be overstated.
In recent years, corporate media have grown more comfortable in redefining the nature of their business as being "entertainment," and their objective as being "bottom line" or profits.
However, that same profit-oriented media have brought international attention on the crisis in Darfur in focus, when they have hitherto overlooked manmade catastrophes in Gaza Strip and Somalia.
Whatever the reasons, the heavily profit-oriented media have hypnotized the world so effectively that they made the sirens being sounded by human rights and humanitarian advocacy groups so inaudible.
Abukar Arman is a freelance writer who lives in Ohio, USA.