Too Tiny for Washington Post to Mention
When is a country so tiny its size – or lack of it – can’t be mentioned? Apparently when that country is Israel and The Washington Post is the mentioner.
A Post article on plummeting fertility rates in Latin America (“The incredible shrinking family”, December 30) referred in passing to “tiny Ecuador.” With 109,483 square miles and 15 million people, Ecuador is about 13 times less tiny than Israel in area and counts a population twice that of Israel’s 7.6 million.
Reporting on the “Arab Spring” early in 2011, The Post twice described Tunisia as tiny (“Overthrow delivers a jolt to Arab region”, January 16 and “Across Arab world, a sense of possibility”, February 12). Tunisia’s population totals 10.6 million and, at nearly 59,000 square miles, the country encompasses seven times as much territory as the Jewish state’s New Jersey-sized 8,000 square miles.
During the same period the newspaper also labeled Oman as tiny – though with 82,000 square miles for only 3 million people, the emirate is 10 times larger than Israel (“Despite oil wealth, Arab economies lack traction”, February 24).
As CAMERA has noted previously, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Eritrea and Georgia, all at least twice as big as the Jewish state though with smaller populations, also have merited the diminutive in Post foreign news reporting. Though the newspaper refers to much larger countries as tiny, it does not so describe the Jewish state. One reason, perhaps, is because that to do so might conflict with “the Palestinian narrative” by highlighting the existential nature of risks Israel faces from hostile neighbors and might incur through unreciprocated concessions.
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