While the Tundra Tabloids will admit to not supporting all of Amos Gitai’s views and understandings concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, it does however support his views on how the media over amplifies the significance of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
It is without question one of the most over reported conflicts in the history of the world, though the statistics consistently prove it to be one of the least lethal when viewed in comparison to other conflicts. The Finnish media for an example, has a peculiar fixation with it, with the Helsingin Sanomat (the NYT of Finland) reporting on the conflict -or on either party involved- on an average of every 1.3 days.
ANSA: “The image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is turned exclusively into a spectacle by the European media,” Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, who is in Milan to participate in the cultural fair “Milanesiana”, said. “If we make a comparison, the war in former Yugoslavia lasted pretty much as long as the second Intifada and it caused 250,000 deaths, rapes, ethnic cleansing,” Gitai said during a meeting with the audience.
“Nothing similar has taken place between Israelis and Palestinians and the deaths in our case were much less, some 3,000. There are limits that both societies have chosen not to cross”. And yet, the filmmaker claims that “the European public opinion sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the worse of the two”. In any case, “although from abroad the situation seems desperate, we who look at it from the inside cannot be pessimistic on the possibility for dialogue”, Gitai said”
I do however take exception to Gitai’s claim that “There are limits that both societies have chosen not to cross”. That is most definitely not the case. If the Arab terrorists had there way, meaning being successful in most of their attempts at murdering Israeli civilians in cold blood, the death toll would in fact be much higher than that of the Palestinians. It is only due to Israeli security methods that keeps the Israeli death toll much smaller than that of the Palestinians, who cynically use their own civilians as human shields, and their living areas as staging grounds for attacks against Israel.
The international media has been working in tandem with the Palestinian cause for decades, regardless of whether their taking sides has resulted in prolonging the conflict that they’re covering. Amos Gitai has put his thumb on a very important issue which the media will most certainly have a difficult time in explaining away. They the media have helped to create the momentum that keeps themselves permanently stationed in the region, by either knowingly or not, allowing their reporting to become an extended wing of the Palestinians’ propaganda war vis-a-vis the Israelis.
At least Amos Gitai has come out in support of Israel, in the sense that the media itself has helped to shape the misunderstanding of the conflict, which is more than can be said about his shmendrick brother Gideon, (who resides in Finland and who the TT has met on one occasion) who actively works against the state of Israel, choosing to add to the grossly distorted image of Israel that the media has painted, rather than trying to clear it up. *L* KGS
