In the media, in criminal justice and in international affairs, all lives are not equal.
That’s a terrible thing to say on its face, but it’s true, and sometimes, it’s warranted. Media critics will complain when a storm kills hundreds of people in India, and the story gets less space in the newspaper than the deaths of a few dozen people in a city in the U.S. But the difference in coverage is warranted, since there is simply more reader interest in pretty much any domestic event than one overseas. The murder of a prostitute is going to get less attention from both police and the media than, say, a contract killing of a wealthy corporate mogul. That’s not warranted on the criminal justice side – a killing is a killing, and all such crimes need to be fully investigated and prosecuted – but it’s undeniable that the murder of the corporate exec is more unexpected and would get more news coverage.
Sometimes, the media vastly overcompensate: after the wall-to-wall coverage of Princess Diana’s death, U.S. media outlets went a bit overboard in covering the death of Mother Teresa, just to prove that they weren’t judging a former member of the royal family as more important than a woman who dedicated her life to serving the poor. But that wasn’t the point. Princess Diana was not more important than Mother Teresa, but her death was a bigger story. Diana’s death was premature and preventable. Mother Teresa was 87 when she died. Her death was sad and noteworthy, but it wasn’t tragic.
[SEE: Cartoons on the Middle East]
The value of life has come up again in the terrible story of the violence in Gaza. It’s easy to detest Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip and which has been declared a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and other Western nations. And it’s easy, too, to fall back on the concept that Israel has a right to defend itself. It does – but at what cost?
In the three weeks of the (most recent) fighting), well over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 70 percent of them civilians and many of that group children. On the Israeli side, 42 soldiers and two civilians have been killed. Most shocking was the deaths of 16 civilians at a UN-run school being used as a shelter for Palestinians fleeing the violence in the Gaza Strip. Israel has denied having anything to do with the deaths, offering as proof a grainy video showing an "errant" mortar shell in the courtyard (suggesting it had been a Hamas weapon that caused the deaths). That claim has just a bit more credulity that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia didn’t have a thing to do with the downing of the Malaysian plane last week. At any rate, it’s not Israel’s place to conduct the sole investigation of the episode, since it is a suspected party in the attack.
Israelis feel under siege (as do Palestinians), but that doesn’t make it acceptable to take any action at all in the name of self-defense. Americans are coming to realize this, too, after watching U.S. surveillance agencies go hog wild in the name of preventing terrorist attacks after 9-11. Being a victim, or being afraid of becoming a victim again, does not justify uncontrolled violence. Israel says it wants to crush Hamas. But the civilian death toll gives the sense that Israel really wants to crush the Palestinians. This is a numbers disparity that cannot be ignored by the media or the international community.
