Israel Matzav

Where are the Turkish pictures?

When the Sabbath ended, I had a couple of emails from fellow bloggers asking if I knew where to get pictures of the chemical weapons massacre of Kurds in Turkey. If this is any indication, they will not be easy to come by.

The Jerusalem Post notes that photos of eight Kurds (six men and two women) killed by Turkish chemical weapons were provided to the German media in March. Why have we not heard or seen much (any?) about this in the U.S. media? Well, you see, the 31 photos showed that the Kurds bodies were “severely deformed and torn to pieces.” It seems that the photos are so horrific “news organizations have been reluctant to publish them.”

So this is the new journalist guideline — if human-rights abominations are too awful, then they can’t be revealed? Or perhaps the rule is something different, namely that the coverage of atrocities by Muslim nations get precious little coverage by the media. Israel and the U.S. are inspected with a microscope, and when the facts aren’t there, the media and the left-wing propaganda industry (yes, the two often overlap) are happy to concoct some human-rights misdeeds or treat individual acts of misconduct as official policy.

When confronted with this imbalance and blatant double standard, liberal media mavens will tell you that we simply have to expect more of western democracies. Huh? Yes, the condescension toward nonwestern states (i.e., we can’t expect anything more, so therefore human-rights abuses aren’t “news”) is an insidious form of bias. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The other excuse commonly given for the non-coverage of Muslim human-rights abuses is that we can’t get access to “closed” societies, so not much can be reported. There are two problems with this excuse: even when information is available, why isn’t it widely reported, and why don’t we read more about suppression of the media in the “Muslim World”?

Indeed.

I'm trying to get the pictures.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:23 PM