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Ever since I was a kid growing up in Australia I can remember seeing "Middle East stuff" on tele. Every night I see it on the news. There'll be some guy throwing rocks at armed men or some homes have been bombed, or whatever. It's on the radio too. Every morning I wake up to the news that "There has been escalated tensions in the Gaza strip...", and it's like "Duh... no shit!".
Gaza, Palestinian, Hamas, Israeli... these are all words that, based on the what the television and radio tell me, I should know well and perhaps even have feelings about. But the fact is that I have no idea what these things mean, and nor do I understand why they are on my television every day. What do they want me to do by showing me this stuff? What do they expect me to feel? Should I feel sympathy? Anger? Apathy? Empathy? Hatred? Sorrow? What? Tell me.
I'm sure that it all actually just comes down to irresponsible journalism. While chatting to my brother about this tonight, he had the following interesting things to say about the whole Arab-Israeli thing:
"these images have been chosen deliberately from thousands of images for the main purpose ove providing a smoke screen to the truth"
"lets face can u show me the common person who has a objective grasp of the arab israeili conflict... and even when we do care, most of our perceptions are based on what the media has chosen to show us"
Maybe that's the case. Maybe this really is just our ignorant, irresponsible media at play. Sigh.