Last year, Dennis Prager spoke at Oxford University on the seemingly obvious question of whether Hamas or Israel was a “greater threat to peace.” It was a part of a debate related to last summer’s Gaza War.
One of the worst aspects of media coverage of that conflict was when the media added up casualties on both sides and without proper context presented them as mere statistics, like a basketball scoreboard.
Today, we have seen this type of warped, misleading coverage return as many in the media present the current wave of Palestinian terrorism as a numbers game, showing how many more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. When they do not report on the intent of the terrorists, murdering as many Israelis as possible, they are misreporting what is really happening.
With that in mind, it is worthwhile to hear what Prager said at Oxford.
The media gives you a jaundiced view of the world. Gaza starts a war to kill as many Israelis as possible. And all you see on the BBC and Sky News, as we see in America on our TV, is dead Gazans. That’s all you see. I shudder to think if in World War II, the same media covered World War II, you would have seen far more dead German civilians than dead British civilians.
But it takes a very, very frail moral mind to believe that you determine right and wrong by the number of dead…
We must insist that the media report on the disproportionate intent of the two sides. Without that information, the number casualties on each side lacks meaning.
