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<h1 class="title" id="page-title">International media ignore Israel’s
abduction of Palestinian teens</h1>
<div class="submitted">
<span property="dc:date dc:created" content="2014-06-17T19:24:41+00:00"
datatype="xsd:dateTime" rel="sioc:has_creator">Submitted by <span
class="username" xml:lang="" about="/users/amena-saleem"
typeof="sioc:UserAccount" property="foaf:name" datatype="">Amena Saleem</span>
on Tue, 06/17/2014<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/amena-saleem/international-media-ignore-israels-abduction-palestinian-teens">http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/amena-saleem/international-media-ignore-israels-abduction-palestinian-teens</a></small></small></small></b><br>
</span> </div>
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class="file file-image file-image-jpeg media-element file-full"
style="width: 618px;"><br>
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<p align="left">In the first ten days of June, seventeen teenage boys
were abducted in the occupied West Bank. The youngest was thirteen, the
oldest seventeen.</p>
<p align="left">Some were dragged at gunpoint from their homes and
family in the middle of the night; others were seized from the streets
in broad daylight.</p>
<p align="left">All of the abductions were documented by the <a
href="http://www.nad-plo.org/dailyreports.php">Palestinian Monitoring
Group</a>. None were reported by the international media. No Western
politicians called for the release of the boys.</p>
<p align="left">On 12 June, three more <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/patrick-strickland/kill-palestinian-every-hour-says-new-israeli-facebook-page">teenage
boys went missing</a> in the West Bank. Their disappearance sparked
worldwide media coverage, cries of terrorism and demands for their
release by the US Secretary of State and the UK Foreign Secretary.</p>
<p align="left">Those three are Israeli. The seventeen others are
Palestinian.</p>
<p align="left">And, if the case of Israeli soldier <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Shalit">Gilad Shalit</a>,
taken by Palestinian forces in Gaza in 2006 and released in 2011, is
any indication, Western interest in the case of these three Israelis
will not wane until they are found.</p>
<h2 align="left">Black hole</h2>
<p align="left">Conversely, the seventeen Palestinian boys seized by
heavily armed Israeli soldiers will disappear into the same silent
black hole as all the other <a
href="http://www.dci-palestine.org/theme/child-protection">Palestinian
children</a> taken on an almost daily basis by the occupation forces.</p>
<p align="left">Some will be detained for days, weeks, or months,
beaten, interrogated and then released. Others, however young, will
find themselves put through Israel’s military courts and jailed, often
on the basis of <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/justice-upside-down-new-study-israels-military-courts">coerced
confessions</a>.</p>
<p align="left">According to the rights group Addameer, there are
currently approximately <a href="http://addameer.org/">two hundred
Palestinian children being held in Israeli jails</a>. Some of those
children will suffer periods in solitary confinement; all are at risk
of <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/children-describe-torture-israeli-solitary-confinement">physical
abuse amounting to torture</a>.</p>
<p align="left">If their plight is anything to go by, the seventeen
Palestinian youngsters taken by the Israeli army at the beginning of
June will merit not a word spoken or written about them by the same
journalists now eager to tell the world about the disappearance of
three Israeli teenagers.</p>
<p align="left">If children and teenagers disappear in the West Bank as
a result of the occupation, it should be reported, whether those
youngsters are Palestinian or Israeli. But, in the highly selective
Western media reporting on Israel’s occupation, Israeli suffering
always trumps that of Palestinians.</p>
<p align="left">Since the disappearance of the three Israelis last
week, the Palestinian town of Hebron has been <a
href="http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=705027&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed">held
under siege</a> by the Israeli army, up to <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.599264">1,000
soldiers</a> have been going door to door in towns and refugee camps
across the West Bank searching and ransacking civilian homes, <a
href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/mass-arrests-in-west-bank-as-search-for-kidnapped-teens-continues/">two
hundred Palestinians</a> have been taken into detention, a <a
href="http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=705075">twenty-year-old
Palestinian has been shot dead</a>, and the Israeli government has been
threatening the forcible transfer of some West Bank Palestinians to
Gaza for supporting Hamas.</p>
<p align="left">This is the degree of control that Israel exerts over
Palestinian lives. But that control seems to be so accepted, or
ignored, by Western media that there has been next to no comment on
Israel’s actions, and the illegality of them, over the last five days.
The sole focus is on the Israeli teenagers, with scarce journalistic
attention left over for the collective punishment being meted out to
thousands of Palestinians by a country which calls itself democratic.</p>
<h2 align="left">No Palestinian mothers</h2>
<p align="left">The case illustrates starkly the difference in the
attitude of Western media towards Israelis and Palestinians, an
attitude exemplified by the BBC.</p>
<p align="left">BBC news bulletins have carried regular updates on the
missing Israelis, and backed them up with online stories. In one online
article, headlined “<a
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27855994">Israel
accuses Hamas of abducting missing teenagers</a><em><a
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27855994">,</a>”</em>
an embedded video features the mother of one of the Israelis talking
about her wish for his safe return.</p>
<p align="left">While BBC audiences have been made well aware of his
situation and that of his two friends, they remain in the dark about
the Palestinian children and teenagers regularly abducted by Israeli
soldiers.</p>
<p align="left">BBC reporting also shields them from the frequency with
which Palestinian children and youth are killed by Israeli forces.</p>
<p align="left">There were <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/amena-saleem/bbc-service-israeli-propaganda">no
BBC reports</a> on the killing of 14-year-old Yussef Shawamreh, shot in
the back and hip while gathering thistles in March, or of 18-year-old
Saji Darwish, shot in the head as he tended his goats that same month.
The killing of <a
href="http://news.yahoo.com/gaza-boy-7-dies-air-strike-wounds-medic-191834447.html">seven-year-old
Ali al-Awwar</a> in an Israeli missile strike on Gaza last week also
fails to warrant a report. There are no embedded video interviews with
the mothers of Yussef, Saji or Ali, mourning the permanent loss of
their sons.</p>
<p align="left">In response to questioning by <a
href="http://www.palestinecampaign.org/">Palestine Solidarity Campaign</a>
about the failure to report on the killing of Palestinian children by
Israeli forces, the BBC responded: “<a
href="http://pscdc01/users$/amena.saleem/Desktop/Copy%20of%20ICO%20notice.docx">There
is no mandate to report every killing</a>.” Would BBC editors have felt
the same way if seven-year-old and fourteen-year-old Israeli children
had been killed by Palestinians?</p>
<h2 align="left">Media’s cloak of silence</h2>
<p align="left">The last few days have highlighted the extremely narrow
framework, not just of the BBC’s reporting on the occupation, but of
the Western mainstream media as a whole.</p>
<p align="left">More than 5,000 Palestinians are currently held in
Israeli jails, where torture has been documented by organizations <a
href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/026/2012/en">including
Amnesty International</a>. Approximately two hundred are incarcerated
without ever having been charged or tried for a crime, for indefinite
periods of time, under a system known as administrative detention, <a
href="http://addameer.org/">according to Addameer</a>. And more than
two hundred have been on hunger strike since April in protest of
Israel’s use of administrative detention. The BBC’s response to the
mass hunger strike, now in its second month, and <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/06/israel-rush-through-force-feeding-law-2014617125252762942.html">Israel’s
attempts to rush through legislation</a> allowing force-feeding, has
been silence.</p>
<p align="left">The same silence cloaks house demolitions (<a
href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Palestinian-Israeli-Peace-Talks-Settlements-Oslo">15,000
Palestinian homes demolished by Israel</a> since 1993), the destruction
of entire communities, with <a
href="http://972mag.com/nstt_feeditem/photos-israeli-authorities-destroy-bedouin-village-of-al-arakib/">Palestinian
villages being bulldozed</a> both in the West Bank and within
present-day Israel, the killing of Palestinian children (<a
href="http://www.dci-palestine.org/content/child-fatalities">1,405
killed by Israel since 2000</a>), the denial of sufficient water for
drinking, washing, cooking to Palestinians in both Gaza and the West
Bank, and the true effects of the siege on Gaza which denies
Palestinians everything from <a
href="http://www.map-uk.org/news/notes-from-the-field/medicines-in-gaza-are-running-out.aspx">essential
medicines to electricity</a>.</p>
<p align="left">The list goes on and on. How many consumers of
mainstream news reports in the West know any of this? How many know
that Israel’s apartheid wall in the West Bank is more than <a
href="https://www.facebook.com/palestinesolidarityuk/photos/pb.127824130594191.-2207520000.1403019719./700758916634040/?type=3&theater">twice
as high and four times as long</a> as the Berlin Wall that we all in
the West were taught to loathe? How many know that the Palestinians had
their country seized from them in 1948, that Israel was created on that
stolen land, and the total lack of justice or reparations since then,
coupled with ongoing brutal military occupation, has led to this
present situation?</p>
<p align="left">The number will be as limited as the mainstream news
reporting that keeps them in the dark. Their lack of knowledge will
display in a total lack of understanding of Israel’s occupation and its
devastating impact on every aspect of Palestinian life.</p>
<p align="left">These are the audiences created by Western mainstream
journalists, with the kind of selective reporting we’ve witnessed this
week, audiences whose ignorance can only be to the detriment of
Palestinians and to the benefit of Israel.</p>
</div>
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