Receive our latest updates by email or RSS- SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FEED(An audio interview with Huwaida Arraf of the Free Gaza Movement, one of two activists released, and with Mairead Corrigan Maguire, who is still in jail, follows the opening paragraphs of the story.)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkPvzSZRuDo[/youtube]
On Tuesday, the news broke on Twitter: a freighter, Spirit of Humanity, carrying three tons of medical supplies, cement, olive trees, and children's toys for Gaza, had been intercepted and boarded by Israeli naval personnel. Twenty-one passengers, including former US Congressman Cynthia McKinney, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, and activists from Britain, Ireland, Bahrain, and Jamaica were detained. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said, "They will be released as soon as they are checked." However, McKinney, Maguire, and 17 others remain in custory because they refuse to sign a deportation order that says they were "trespassing" in Israeli territorial waters.
As of Friday morning, here is how many column inches
The Washington Post has given to the story: 0
(The
Post website has
a short account on Tuesday from the Associated Press but that never made it into print.)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj5YLhMz_pI[/youtube]
And here is the attention span of
The New York Times:
3 sentences, tucked away at the bottom of a story today on the Amnesty International report on "war crimes" in the Gaza War of December-January.
(The three sentences are from
a longer story on the
Times website, but that is not in "Today's Paper". It can only be found through a search of the "World" section on the site.)
I appreciate that the story broke at a busy time --- on Tuesday, we had one eye on Iran, another on Iraq, and if we could have borrowed someone else's eye, we would have turned that on Afghanistan-Pakistan. Others were riveted by the
coup drama in Honduras. Still, you would have thought that 72 hours later, the leading US newspapers would have caught up with the drama of a freighter seized at sea and 21 international activists tossed into Israeli holding cells.
In part, the explanation may be that McKinney, stigmatised as an "extremist", a "radical", and a dangerous-to-know person during and after her time in Congress, is poison for some newspaper editors (conversely, it's probably far from incidental that Fox News, which has long targeted McKinney as a figure of derision, has been in the media lead on the story). Part of the reason might be that the drama was muted by the lack of photos and footage.
I suspect, however, there is a wider, more significant reason. Paying attention to the story also means paying attention to the cause: the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And acknowledging the scale of the continuing economic deprivation and social destruction in that besieged territory, led by a Hamas Government that a lot of people do not want to recognise, is a step too far.
To be fair, from time to time, a
Times or
Post reporter will drop by the territory to file a story. It's far different, however, to link that coverage to the immediacy of political protest. So, as McKinney and others continue to refuse deportation, no doubt hoping that their jail stay will eventually be noticed, and as Israeli authorities just hope the incident will disappear, expect the
Times and
Post to ignore a story that is not fit to print.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 14:14