Friday, July 10, 2009

Hypocrisy

When Jews are brutally murdered in places like France and Yemen for no reason other than they are Jews, the (non-Jewish) media totally ignores it. Yet yesterday the media (including CNN, BBC, Fox news) was saturated with news of the story of a Muslim woman who was murdered in a German courtroom. "The Headscarf Martyr" had sued her neighbour for calling her a 'terrorist' and it was the accused who knifed her to death in court. News bulletins last night showed, for example, mass demonstrations in Egypt calling for revenge against the German government for allowing such an anti-Muslim crime to happen.

Now, notwithstanding the curious issue of why the act of insulting a Muslim in Germany should have resulted in a major court action (you can imagine that the neighbour might have been pretty riled by that) this was clearly a terrible crime. But was it less horrific and racist a crime than one that was announced on the same day and which received precisely zero coverage in the non-Israeli media. I refer to the story of a cab driver (Grigory Rabinovich) in Israel brutally murdered by two Palestinians who claimed "We killed cabbie because he was a Jew" They reportedly got into Rabinovich's cab in Ashdod and asked to be taken to a desolate spot.
The Palestinians told investigators that they punched Rabinovich in the face and head at which point they put him in the trunk of his taxi. They said that when he regained consciousness they decided to kill him, and strangled and beat him to death. The police described the injuries as truly horrific.

Of course what might have made it onto the BBC news would have been if the cab driver had refused to give a lift to two Arabs to a desolate spot for fear of what they might do to him. That, of course, would have been a real case of racism and anti-Muslim stereotyping. Al-Jezeera would have dedicarted a 2-hour documentary to that.

Similarly, can you imagine how the world's media would react if Israel refused entry to a Muslim on the basis that they are wearing a veil? Well don't hold your breath expecting to hear in the UK about the story of Jordan denying entry to Israeli with Jewish prayer items. This is the same Jordan which supposedly has a peace treaty with Israel, yet is responible as much as any country for promulgating the myth of Israel as an apartheid state, while it actually has enshrined in its constitution a law that no Jew can be a citizen of the state.

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