CAMERA Snapshots..
23 January '13..
Maybe they were too busy bemoaning the state of Israel’s democracy to do any actual reporting, but the mainstream news media completely ignored a report by Freedom House, an independent watchdog group dedicated to the expansion of freedom around the world, that rated Israel as the only free country in the Middle East.
In the 2013 edition of its annual report, “Freedom in the World,” the organization wrote:
Israel remains the region’s only Free country. In recent years, controversies have surrounded proposed laws that threatened freedom of expression and the rights of civil society organizations. In most cases, however, these measures have either been quashed by the government or parliament, or struck down by the Supreme Court.
In other words, Israel’s democracy works. By contrast, both Gaza, under Hamas, and the West Bank, under the Palestinian Authority were rated “Not Free,” as was Jordan. Lebanon and Egypt ranked as merely “Partly Free.”
In a section called “Worst of the Worst,” Freedom House cited three of Israel’s neighbors: Sudan, “ruled by a leadership that has elements of both radical Islamism and a traditional military junta,” Saudi Arabia, “an absolute monarchy with severe social controls,” and Syria, “a dictatorship in the midst of a bloody civil war.”
To look at a map of world freedom, click on this link. You’ll have to enlarge it quite a bit to see the sliver of green freedom that is Israel in the sea of yellow (“partly free”) and purple (“not free”) that is the Middle East and North Africa.
Given the hyper-focus on Israel by the press, one might expect news outlets to at least mention this positive evaluation of the Jewish State. However, although Israeli and Jewish outlets reported the Freedom House study, CAMERA could not locate any mainstream news media that covered it. More embarrassing still, even Egypt’s Daily News wrote:
Egypt is now one of six countries in the Middle East that is classified by Freedom House as “partly free”. Eleven are classed as “not free”, while Israel is the region’s only “free” country.
A newspaper in a country that has only recently been upgraded to “partly free” covered Israel's "free" ranking but news outlets in “free” countries did not. One has to ask, why the hesitancy to report something positive about Israel's democracy? And, as usual… Where’s the coverage?
Link: http://blog.camera.org/archives/2013/01/wheres_the_coverage_israel_the.html
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
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