Okay, maybe saying that National Public Radio has an anti-Israeli bias is a bit like saying that fish swim, but I was still a bit surprised by Andrea Levin’s analysis of NPR’s coverage of Palestinian terrorism for the Jersualem Post. According to Levin,
In a period of six days, from March 27 through April 2, when 53 Israelis were slain, not one of the victims was mentioned by name, not one bereaved family was interviewed, not one injured survivor was the focus of a story.
The attacks were reported briefly with some references to the gruesome details, but almost invariably with emphasis on how such events might harm political developments.
March 27, of course, was the date of the Netanya bombing. Now maybe NPR is just too busy to interview the victims of violence in the Middle East. Maybe it has its correspondents deployed in Egypt or Lebanon and could not get them to interview victims in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not quite. After listing a series of terrorist attacks that killed 53 Israelis over the week in question, Levin notes that NPR carried plenty of interviews with civilians — provided they were Palestinian civilians,
Although none of these people or any other of the March terror victims was mentioned on NPR, there were human interest stories about Palestinians. The day after the Haifa slaughter [where 14 Israelis were killed in a suicide bomb attack at a restaurant], the network aired a segment devoted entirely to the discomforts of a woman in Ramallah whose large house was temporarily requisitioned by Israeli soldiers. The woman, who admitted the soldiers did not mistreat her family, declared that “terrorism is every time a human life is being threatened, is being terrorized and humiliated.”
Levin also notes that on April 2, Linda Gradstein (*gag*) did a long piece about Israeli’s stopping ambulances at checkpoints. Only a couple sentences at the end of the long piece hinted that the reason the Israeli’s were stopping ambulances was that Palestinians had been caught using them to smuggle explosives.
Levin concludes,
The depth of NPR’s ideological favoritism for the Palestinians is singularly underscored when, in a week that saw multiple massacres of Israelis, the network could not bring itself to offer even a glimpse at the personal side of the losses suffered.
Maybe they should rename it, National Palestinian Radio.
Source:
NPR Ignores Israeli Terror Victims. Andrea Levin, Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2002.