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<h1 class="page__title title balance-text" id="page-title">Why are
journalists surprised that Israel kills children? </h1>
<header class="node__header">
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/amena-saleem"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel"
datatype="">Amena Saleem</a></span>
<span class="field field-blog"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blog/media-watch"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel"
datatype="">Media Watch</a></span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2015-06-15T09:01:01+00:00">15
June 2015<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/amena-saleem/why-are-journalists-surprised-israel-kills-children">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/amena-saleem/why-are-journalists-surprised-israel-kills-children</a></small></small></b><br>
</span></span> </p>
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<p>There was nothing surprising about <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/patrick-strickland/israeli-military-exonerates-itself-slaughter-children-gaza-beach">Israel
finding itself not culpable</a> for the killing of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/children-die-playing-football-taxi-grandma-israel-bombs-gaza-tenth-day">four
boys on a Gaza beach</a> in July last year, as it did in a
military judgment released a few days ago.</p>
<p>Israel’s investigations into its own crimes aren’t known for
delivering guilty verdicts.</p>
<p>What was interesting, however, was the reaction of some
mainstream journalists — journalists who felt they had a vested
interest in this case because they had witnessed the strikes which
killed the four boys from the Baker family as they played football
one afternoon during Israel’s 51-day assault on Gaza.</p>
<p>Articles by Peter Beaumont in <em><a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/11/israel-clears-military-gaza-beach-children">The
Guardian</a></em> and Robert Tait in <em><a
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11670640/Israeli-exonerates-itself-over-killing-of-Gaza-boys-on-beach.html">The
Daily Telegraph</a></em> give off a sense of disbelief and
indignation that the investigation by the Israeli army into the
attack cleared all personnel involved and declared the incident “a
tragic accident.”</p>
<p>Both these journalists, and Paul Mason in his <a
href="http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/israeli-beach/3832">blog</a>
for Channel 4 News, describe how their own observations, both
during and after the attack, refute Israel’s allegations that it
was targeting Palestinian fighters.</p>
<p>But the sense that there has been a miscarriage of justice by a
reputable organization, rather than an outright cover-up by a
rogue army, remains.</p>
<h2>Struck in error? </h2>
<p>This journalistic respect for Israel’s army is highlighted in
Tait’s article, as he writes that the slaughter of the boys was
“surely an indication that something had gone badly wrong in
Israel’s military procedures for such a deadly strike to have been
aimed at what were clearly children.”</p>
<p>By which he indicates his belief, shared by many mainstream
journalists, that, unlike the killing of the Baker boys, the rest
of Israel’s military procedures in Gaza last summer were not acts
of indiscriminate slaughter.</p>
<p>Bombardments which leveled homes, mosques and entire
neighborhoods, massacring whoever was in the vicinity, babies and
children included, weren’t, according to Tait’s reasoning,
deliberate acts of terror, but acceptable military activity.</p>
<p>The BBC, true to form, goes one step further in the esteem in
which it holds the Israeli army. Its <a
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-33106578">online
article into Thursday’s findings</a> does nothing but quote
chunks from the Israeli army report and is headlined “Gaza beach
attack: Israel ‘struck boys in error.’”</p>
<p>There is no attempt to critically analyze the report’s
conclusions, as Tait, Beaumont and Mason all did for their
respective news organizations, and no Palestinian comment.</p>
<p>Instead, the BBC simply provides a platform for Israel’s
self-exonerating report to be aired, free from the inconvenience
of journalistic scrutiny.</p>
<p>And it ends, of course, in typical BBC fashion, by giving
Israel’s excuse for attacking Gaza last July and August — “to put
an end to rocket-fire and remove the threat of attacks by
militants tunneling under the border” — with no mention of the
Palestinian reality of occupation, siege and resistance.</p>
<h2>Damage limitation</h2>
<p>It is this high regard in which many mainstream journalists hold
the Israeli army which explains, perhaps, their shock that its
soldiers could deliberately target children and then their
disbelief that its commanders could dub that deliberate targeting
an accident.</p>
<p>The question then is, why are mainstream journalists so easily
taken in by Israeli propaganda, appearing to believe Israel’s
refrain that it has “the most moral army in the world?”</p>
<p>The truth they ignore, and consequently fail to convey to their
audiences, is that Israel kills Palestinians at will and <a
href="http://chat2gaza.com/2014/04/04/how-trigger-happy-israel-is-targeting-children-and-youth-in-palestine/">with
impunity</a>.</p>
<p>Its army only announces investigations into a killing or killings
on the rare occasion that Western journalists or politicians
become agitated about Palestinian life being taken — usually
because the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/will-israelis-filmed-killing-palestinian-teens-nakba-day-get-away-murder/14520">killing
has been caught on camera</a> and can’t be hidden.</p>
<p>Those same journalists seem unware of the reality that an Israeli
announcement of an “independent investigation” is nothing more
than a damage limitation exercise, an exercise in “public
relations” to quieten the critics, and that the word “independent”
is meaningless in these cases.</p>
<p>It is meaningless because the outcome of an Israeli investigation
into Israeli crimes will almost exclusively be a finding of
Israeli innocence. There is nothing independent about the process,
and it shouldn’t be reported as such.</p>
<h2>Wake up to reality</h2>
<p>The military’s absolution of blame for the slaughter of the Baker
boys wasn’t a one-off, as the resultant mainstream reporting
seemed to suggest. It was part of a pattern which will be repeated
over and over until the occupation ends.</p>
<p>Israel is a colonial power. It will kill whoever it has to
(Palestinians, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/photostory-israeli-bulldozer-driver-murders-american-peace-activist/4449">US
activists</a>, <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Miller_%28filmmaker%29">British
media workers</a>, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/crimes-i-saw-mavi-marmara/8868">Turkish
humanitarians</a>, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-killing-british-citizen-iain-hook-unrwas-project-manager-jenin/4234">UN
staff</a>) to make its <a href="http://jfjfp.com/?p=72476">colonial
goals</a> a reality. And it will lie, cover up and propagandize
in exactly the same way that all colonial powers did in centuries
past to get away with its crimes.</p>
<p>Mainstream media journalists need to wake up to these facts. They
need to be sharper, more intelligent and more astute in the way
they cover Israel and the occupation. They need to read and
understand history, especially European colonial history, and they
need to embrace, rather than dismiss, context in their reporting.</p>
<p>Israel didn’t just kill those four young boys last summer. Its
warplanes, warships and tanks wiped out <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.612255">89 entire
Palestinian families</a>, wiped out <a
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/gaza/11056976/The-children-killed-in-Gaza-during-50-days-of-conflict.html">504
Palestinian children </a>at an average rate of 10 a day, wiped
out a total of more than 2,200 Palestinians.</p>
<p>Its politicians and military should be tried for all these
crimes. And they should be tried in a properly independent manner
— or as independently as the world allows — at the <a
href="http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/Pages/default.aspx">International
Criminal Court</a>. This is what the mainstream media should be
clamoring for. Not expressing polite surprise that an
“independent” Israeli inquiry acquitted Israel of deliberately
slaying four little Palestinian boys who dared to play football in
Gaza.</p>
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