Wake up, Westerners! There’s another side to the story you are not hearing.
As we hear about suffering in certain parts of the world, in the media we must observe the wording and the content. There will always be political motives and biases within the media, sure, but are we astute enough to see which way they want us to sway, to see one side as the “bad guy” and the other as the “good guy”, or do we blindly swallow what we read/hear as “fact”?
The Palestinian humanitarian crisis is a prime example of suffering the West doesn”t hear. I cannot do the situation justice, because it has a deep complex history which only gets more complicated by the day. What I want to stress is this: Are we hearing the Palestinian perspective at all in the West? Or are we just automatically labeling all Palestinians as terrorists because the media portrays them as so?
Did you know about the constant demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli military tanks or how many innocent people – men, women, children, elderly are massacred nonstop in the name of Israeli national security raids? Just on Tuesday November 7th the Israeli military killed eight Palestinians after pulling out of a battered town where it had mounted its bloodiest operation in the Gaza Strip in a year. In all, Israeli troops killed 52 people, a lot of them innocent civilians, during the raids that centered on Beit Hanoun, Palestinian medical officials said. Beit Hanoun’s mayor said some 40 homes were destroyed and 400 damaged during the assault. This was a continuation from this past weekend’s raid in which Palestinian women protesting in front of a mosque were murdered. Israeli forces killed three Palestinians in Gaza on Saturday, November 04, 2006, including two fighters in air strikes and clashes, rescue workers said. The violence came a day after Israel killed 17 people, about half of them civilians and including two women acting as human shields between troops and pedestrians hiding in a mosque in Beit Hanoun.
So little information, yet powerful media images can be stuck in a reader’s mind, yes?
The silencing of the suffering the Palestinian people endure is quite appalling. Who decides which human life is more valuable than another? The media sways people to see one life as more valuable and people just don’t realize- wait a second, we’re all human beings. We must all feel each others pain somehow. At least give the people the justice of airing their side of the story; we should want to hear both sides. We should ask professors to assign more works by Palestinian writers/activists. We should be more open-minded, to find more news resources, and analyze what we do read. But in general, we need to realize there’s always both sides to every story. Let us do justice as people in academia to hear each out, especially when one is being continuously silenced.