Why News Coverage of Incitement Matters
After the research organization MEMRI shared a video in which Mohammed Morsi, not long before he became president of Egypt, evoked an anti-Semitic slur by calling Zionists “the descedents of apes and pigs,” the amount of attention to the comments themselves was nearly eclipsed by the amount of attention to lack of reporting on the incident.
At Forbes, Richard Behar called out American press for largely (though not entirely) ignoring the revelation, and cited CAMERA’s new monograph documenting the New York Times‘ tendency to overlook anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement. And the Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg referenced the Forbes story when asking why Morsi’s anti-Semitic formulation had not been covered more widely.
The New York Times eventually did report on the video, along with another more explicit video showing Morsi calling on his countrymen to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.”
This is important for several reasons:
• This type of hate speech is bad for Egyptian children and grandchildren, bad for Jews, and bad for Mideast peace prospects.
• The coverage raises hopes that the New York Times might begin covering anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement with the prominence it deserves.
• The ripples spread from the Times, to the White House and State Department, to editorials in major newspapers, all the way to Egypt, where Morsi’s office was forced to contend with the attention. (A spokesperson for Morsi probably didn’t convince many when he insisted the calls for anti-Jewish indoctrination were taken out of context.)
• With criticism coming from all corners, Morsi is unlikely to repeat his anti-Semitic slurs. Imagine, then, how the interests of peace could be advanced if Palestinian hate speech, which is no less vile than Morsi’s rant, was adequately covered in the US. More coverage could lead to more pressure on Palestinian leaders to cease the demonization of Jews and Israelis. Less incitement by the Palestinian governments (in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank) would mean less hate by the population of those territories, greater openness to compromise, and a future generation not nursed on hatred for the other.
Stay tuned for a CAMERA Op-Ed this weekend exploring the topic in greater detail.
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