Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Perche' non e' una notizia?

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/25/739/
If you listened to Democracy Now on Monday, you already know the
following:
    Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire was among a number of
people shot Friday by Israeli troops at a nonviolent protest of the
"apartheid wall" in the Palestinian village of Bil'in, near Ramallah.
But if you didn't listen to Democracy Now Monday, you probably didn't
know that.
Maguire was shot with what the Israeli military - and some press
reports - misleading refer to as a "rubber bullet" - that is, a rubber-
coated steel bullet.
Why isn't this "news" in the United States? There's nothing on the web
sites of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles
Times, not even a wire story.
Those who blame the Palestinian people for their fate, attributing it
to Palestinian violence, and faulting the Palestinians for not
emulating Gandhi, King, or Mandela (whose role in the "armed struggle"
against apartheid in South Africa is always conveniently elided for
the purpose of this comparison) should periodically ask themselves,
when Palestinians do engage in nonviolent protest, and are subjected
to brutal repression as a result, how come the mainstream U.S. media
don't pay any attention?
Wouldn't this be a precondition for a successful nonviolent protest
strategy? That people find out about it? Imagine if U.S. news
organizations had not reported on lunch counter sit-ins in the South,
Freedom Rides, or the Montgomery bus boycott - and the repression that
resulted. What if no-one reported on the deaths of Evers, Goodman,
Schwerner, Chaney. Would these protests have been as effective?
That U.S. political, diplomatic, and financial support for the Israeli
government's policies in the West Bank provide crucial support for
these policies should be beyond debate. Don't the American people have
a right to know what's going on?
And if a Nobel peace laureate is shot at a non-violent protest using
weapons paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, isn't that news?
A great deal of ink has been spilled about how the United States is
perceived in the Middle East. Too little of that ink has addressed
whether the perception of the United States might be the predictable
result of unjust U.S. policies, and whether changing some of those
policies might be part of a strategy for changing the perceptions.
A new poll from World Public Opinion.org finds that nine in ten
Egyptians thinks that the U.S. is at war with Islam, and wants the
U.S. to "remove its bases and military forces from all Islamic
countries." Eight in ten Egyptians support attacks on U.S. troops in
the region to bring this about.
U.S. policy towards the Palestinians is surely not the whole story,
but it is surely an important part of the story. If the U.S. cannot,
in the short term, compel Israel to accept a political settlement with
the Palestinians along the lines of the international consensus -
withdrawal to the 1967 borders - can't we at least get them to stop
shooting unarmed demonstrators? Or, if even that is too much to ask,
how about no shooting Nobel peace laureates?
Wednesday night Bill Moyers will examine on PBS how the U.S media
failed us in the run-up to the Iraq war. Perhaps Mr. Moyers could look
into how the U.S. media is failing us on our policy towards the
Palestinians.
Robert Naiman is Senior Policy Analyst and National Coordinator at
Just Foreign Policy.

 A new poll from World Public Opinion.org
*ROTFL*
-Stefano