In today’s Toronto Star Simon Black complains that the media gives Palestinian prisoners a raw deal:
Since his capture, I have been unable to avoid the image of Gilad Shalit and the life and history behind this image.
What I do not know is the names and faces of the hundreds of Palestinian children held in Israeli jails….
These people are nameless, faceless, reduced to bare life — human beings not entitled to rights, dignity and respect.
Nor do they merit the attention of the BBC, The Globe and Mail, Ha’aretz, or The New York Times.
Unless of course they engage in an act of violence so horrific, so apparently unexplainable and incomprehensible that they must be subject to biography, psychological profiling, a where-did-it-all-go-wrong-for-the-aspiring-fun-
loving-university-student-type docudrama.Apparently their suffering does not deserve the attention of the media.
Let’s aside the repugnance of Black’s moral equivalence between Gilad Shalit and Palestinian security prisoners—who are imprisoned for a reason.
Given the culture of death and martyrdom that dehumanizes Jews, given the society that considers someone like Mariam Farhat a role model, given the scant value the Palestinians place on human life, is it any wonder that the Western media (at least according to Black) treats Palestinian prisoners in kind?
