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Friday, November 07, 2014

How the media portrays "Jewish extremists" and "Muslim extremists"

AFP captioned this as "Jewish extremists"
I just did a Google News search on the terms "Jewish extremists" and "Muslim extremists," looking for actual actions that reports say these two groups are doing (as opposed to just saying that there is a growing danger of Muslim extremism, for example.)

The only story in the past month that highlighted an action by "Muslim extremists" was from two Christian news outlets, saying that they killed 31 people in Nigeria. I did not see any stories about ISIS atrocities being ascribed to "Muslim extremists."

But the term "Jewish extremists" is all over the place. What horrendous crimes are they doing? Well, they are protesting - not burning a single tire or throwing a single rock.

They are visiting Judaism's holiest place - without raising their voices or going near any Muslim worshipers.

(Reuters' Noah Browning claims that "Jewish extremists" killed an Arab teenager in July. The murderers were not religious at all. So that's just libel.)

That's it.

Jewish extremists walk around. Muslim extremists almost don't do anything, although they are a concern, perhaps because people know that they behead people and rape women - but those specific acts are ascribed to named groups, almost never to "Muslim extremists."

The only reason that Jewish "extremists: are called that are because Muslims are so extreme as to not want to allow Jews to have any civil or political rights. Because Muslims are so angry at Jewish people asserting their own human rights, they call those Jews "extremists" and the epithet spreads to the mainstream.

Language matters, and the media bias against Jews - not just Israel, but Jews - is the reason why Jews are so easily called extreme while Muslims or Christians or Hindus rarely are, even when they do the most heinous crimes.