'Relative' Death

The reports on Aug. 12 all told the same story - the peace between Israel and Palestine had been shattered by two Palestinian suicide bombers, each of whom had killed one Israeli with their bombs.

"The attacks broke more than a month of relative silence," NBC broadcasted that day. Other news outlets used similar phrases, such as "relative quiet" (The Los Angeles Times) and "relative calm" (The New York Times).

The unfortunate reality, unreported by virtually every American media outlet, was that the bombings hardly shattered anything close to relative calm, unless one considers 17 Palestinian deaths in that period "calm."

A media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, sent out an alert shortly thereafter, noting that aside from the 17 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops during that period, including one four-year-old boy, 59 others had been wounded by Israeli forces.

The alert went unnoticed, and the American media continued to frame the suicide attacks against a background of "relative calm." In underplaying the Palestinian deaths, the media left out half of the story and disguised the cyclical violence that was really taking place.

Marginalizing or ignoring certain deaths is disturbingly common in the American media and is not limited to Israel - few published reports include civilian death tolls in Iraq or Afghanistan, and by conservative estimates, over 9,000 innocent civilians have been killed by American bombs during the "War on Terror."

In Afghanistan, for example, the civilian death toll is between 3,000 and 3,400, according to an exhaustive accounting conducted at the University of New Hampshire.

So even by the lower estimate, 3,000 innocent people were killed in Afghanistan by indiscriminate air raids - those were not Taliban fighters, but rather ordinary people living in the country.

The deaths in Afghanistan were summarily ignored, however, and "journalists" openly defended such a decision. "Civilian casualties are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is that they accompany wars," said one Fox News pundit on Nov. 5.

Fox News personality Brit Hume made an even more offensive statement to the New York Times two days later, tossing the concept of "fair and balanced" right out the window.

"Look, neutrality as a general principle is an appropriate concept for journalists who are covering institutions of some comparable quality.... This is a conflict between the United States and murdering barbarians," Hume said.

"Journalists" such as Hume should actually follow their own mantra "We Report, You Decide." Journalists are obligated to report both sides of the story, and let the public decide which deaths are tragic and which are justified.

When the media fails to report civilian deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq, or any deaths in Palestine, they become propagandists.

By casting American deaths as tragic and casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq or anywhere else as insignificant, the damaging cycle of violence taking place between our country and those we deem as enemies is obscured.

The reality is that a civilian in Iraq or Afghanistan is just as innocent as a civilian in America, and dead is dead.