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| Beaten and tortured by Hamas: Asma Al-Ghoul |
02 April '11
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/04/media-cover-up-gaza-savagery-that-does.html
Remember how days elapsed before the violent sexual assault on Lara Logan, reporting for an American television station from Tahrir Square, was brought (and then only reluctantly) to public attention by Al Beeb and the rest of the we-love-to-pick-on-Israel gang? Well, it seems that despicable acts of savagery by Hamas towards female Palestinian journalists in Gaza have gone largely unreported in the mainstream media.
You'd think that some of those outlets, being so politically correct in general, would be chomping at the bit to report abuses against women. But there are two very good reasons for the veil of silence - an exclusivist fixation with demonising Israel and a paralysing fear of Hamas reprisal.
Professor Phyllis Chesler notes that in recent weeks
"at least eight Muslim Palestinian female journalists were physically beaten with clubs, iron chairs, and fists, stabbed and tortured with electric shocks by male Hamas security forces in the Gaza Strip. Their cell phones, laptops, documents and cameras were confiscated. They were also arrested. Some were forced to sign a document "pledging not to cover such events [the Facebook-arranged pro-unity rallies demanding an end to factional in-fighting between Hamas and Fatah] again"'.
Although this does not bode well for women's rights in what Professor Chesler terms "the increasingly well-organized Islamist Middle East" her main point in drawing attention to this "male-on-female atrocity in Gaza" is that only a few journalists, who happen to include two Israelis, reported it.
'The mainstream media does not really care about what happens to Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians," she continues,
'not even when they are fellow or sister journalists, women, and feminists. The media only cares when and if Israelis are allegedly the perpetrators, the murderers, the checkpoint "humiliators." Even when Israelis kill an armed Iranian-backed Palestinian member of Hamas in self-defense, even when the Israelis accidentally, with no malice aforethought, kill a British journalist or an American "activist," the Israelis are not only blamed - films, plays, and documentaries are made about the "martyred" American Rachel Corrie or the "martyred" British filmmaker James Miller or British "anti-war" activist Tom Hurndall. Countless demonstrations have been held. In Miller's case the British government insisted on an investigation, and his family brought a civil lawsuit against an Israeli soldier.
The media was all over this even though an investigation strongly suggested that James Miller was killed by Palestinians "from the direction of the populated Rafah." Although people know that Palestinians routinely hide behind civilian hostages, deliberately target Israeli civilians, especially children, create their own "martyrs" (the Muhammad al-Dura case as well as the Rachel Corrie case immediately come to mind) - nevertheless, the media refuses to hold Palestinians accountable and refuses to believe that Israelis are innocent. The media knows full well that they will be killed or not allowed to "report" in Palestinian areas if they publish anything negative, anything true. By now, this habit is ingrained.'
To read more:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/04/01/arab-spring-male-on-female-atrocity-in-gaza-disappeared-by-the-western-media/
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