Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Not all Jews happy with the Road Map to Peace

JERUSALEM (AP)-[off the wire, no link, similar story here]-Extremist opponents of Israel's planned pullout from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank blocked the main entrance to Jerusalem on Wednesday, sitting in the road during evening rush hour. Police reacted by spraying them with a water cannon.

Several dozen protesters, all of them children and teenagers, dashed into the road and stopped traffic in both directions. Police dragged about 10 protesters into a van. The protesters resisted and several escaped.

A few minutes earlier, children under the age of 10 sat on the road, chanting "Jews do not evict Jews," the slogan of the pullout opponents, slowing traffic.

[...]Settlers and their backers oppose the removal of all 21 Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and four from the West Bank, claiming that Israel cannot give up parts of the biblically promised land of the Jews. However, the mainstream settlers' council and other bodies have come out strongly against violent tactics, including blocking roads.

Now if these protesters had been been Palestinians protesting the Gaza occupation, instead of "right wing extremists" the article would have read more along the lines of "Palestinians by the hundreds took to the streets yesterday to protest the Israeli occupation of the Gaza strip. Members of the group Hamas led the demonstration as the crowd chanted 'End the occupation.'" Think that's very far off?

Notice how the article infantilizes the protesters, dismissing them and their cause and labels a sit in even if it does block a roads as a "violent tactic." The Fox link above mentions the protesters scattered nails across the highway as further evidence of the violence to come. While a crap tactic that I don't condone, it's hardly violent. All of this is a result of the media dumbing down true violence like they did with torture at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo which should be more correctly referred to as embarrassment and humiliation.