Western media discriminating kids' lives

Electronic Intifada reported:

A young Palestinian man named Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi rammed his car into pedestrians exiting the Ammunition Hill light rail station in northern al-Quds ('Jerusalem') on Wednesday, killing three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown and injuring at least seven others.

Israeli officials instantly labeled the crash a terrorist attack, which US media outlets have parroted without question even though the intent of the driver remains unclear.

Given that Israeli police shot and killed al-Shaludi immediately after he exited the vehicle, whether the crash was deliberate may never be certain.

His family insists it was an accident, telling reporters that al-Shaludi, 21 years old, suffered from mental illness as a result of being tortured in Israeli prison.

“We believe that he was shot and killed in cold blood and there was no attempt to question him, and hear his side of the story,” his cousin, Abed al-Shaludi, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Meanwhile, these same outlets have either whitewashed or completely ignored the ongoing abuse and killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli military and settlers.

The same day that al-Shaludi killed an Israeli infant with his car, an unexploded Israeli bomb took the life of four-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad in Beit Hanoun, a city in northern Gaza that was decimated by Israel’s merciless summertime bombing campaign, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 500 children.

Unlike the tragic death of three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown, Muhammad Jrad’s killing elicited only silence from the American press corps, as did that of another Palestinian child run over by an Israeli settler earlier this week.

n Sunday, a man reportedly from the Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar ran over Palestinian schoolchildren as they made their way towards their mothers after exiting a school bus in the West Bank town of Sinjil.

Five-year-old Inas Khalil died of her wounds shortly thereafter and another girl, also hit, was left in critical condition.

Instead of stopping to check on the children or calling for help, the man kept driving until he reached a nearby Jewish settlement, at which point he says he called the police.

Residents accused the settler of ramming the children deliberately, but Israeli police ruled the hit-and-run an accident, siding with the settler, who claims he fled out of fear of being hurt by the Palestinian crowd which gathered around the girls he maimed.

eanwhile, Khalil’s killing received a mention of two sentences in The New York Times, buried near the end of an article about Wednesday incident.

The Associated Press, one of the only US media outlets to cover Khalil’s death, devoted just five sentences to the hit-and-run, framing it as nothing more than an unproven accusation by Palestinians against an unnamed Israeli settler.

The US press showed even less interest in the video that surfaced this week that shows Israeli soldiers blindfolding, handcuffing and abusing an eleven-year-old developmentally disabled Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as a crowd of settlers and their children laughed, cheered and shouted racist slurs.

The abuse and wanton killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli war machine is not an exception, but rather a norm that US media outlets are complicit in enabling through omission or obfuscation, and, like Israel, they are guilty of valuing some children’s lives more than others.