- There is another question about media coverage that has been bothering me, however, one of proportionality. I was struck, over the weekend, by the lack of coverage of the Syrian civil war, in which the death count recently passed 170,000. By Sunday night, it had become clear that the weekend in toll in Syria would stand at roughly 700 dead—a larger number, obviously, than the weekend toll in Gaza (and more than the total number of deaths in this latest iteration of the Gaza war to date.) I tweeted the following in response to this news out of Syria: “I sincerely hope the @nytimes covers the slaughter in Syria – 700 dead in 48 hours – in tomorrow’s paper. Very important story as well.”
I wonder why "helplessness" is never seen as a reason for disproportionate media coverage. Israel is a democratic power that has many extremely close ties to the United States. We can sanction, we can report, we can protest, we can implore, we can impune. Hollywood comes down on both sides of the issue; commentators come down on both sides of the issue. A public debate about Gaza comes with the feeling that all the talking might actually do something. After all, we've been deeply entrenched in the Israeli peace process since Israel was a suburb of Jaffa. Syria is a non-aligned Islamic dictatorship. Most years we don't even have an ambassador there. Assad isn't going to listen to us and the guys who oppose him are ethnic cleansers. I'm reasonably well-read on Islam (for a Western white dude) and I'd have a hard time explaining Alawite vs. Sunni. More than that, I know that nothing the United States says or does is going to change things one iota in Syria until there are boots on the ground, drones in the skies and craters in the cities. We saw this movie. It was called Black Hawk Down. You send US troops to keep the peace and unless you're willing to invade, Midwestern kids are gonna get dragged through the streets on CNN. And if you are willing to invade, pallets of Benjamins are going to disappear off C-130s and Halliburton is going to get rich. Meanwhile we saw the Arab Spring and near as anybody can tell, it replaced unstable agnostic autocracies with unstable Islamic theocracies. Coverage of Syria necessarily takes the form of Factions you don't understand killing each other over places you can't find on a map for reasons we don't have time to explain and before too long, Kim Kardashian's wedding ends up taking all the column inches. Gaza? Those are English speakers who worship at the same church as your neighbor who will take John Kerry's call. There's a level of accessibility that Syria will never have. Lather, Rinse, Repeat for Chechnya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Liberia, Libya, Kurdistan, Belarus, Myanmar, Ceylon, Peru, Columbia, Nicaragua, etc.
Your bolded text may as well be the Balkans in 1935. Substitute religious sects for communists and nationalists (and different religious sects), and we're seeing and age old pattern. Given the multiple civil wars in various regions of the world that are drawing the eye of old powers combined with the generally cynical economic outlook for so many people, I am fearful of war, although I think the prospects are unlikely. But, as we've seen in history, the unthinkable remains so until it happens, and all of a sudden it becomes reality.
Yes, certainly strife in the Balkans predates modern Europe by a long shot. I chose 1935, because some historians have said that Germany and the USSR at that time used local civil wars as a pretext for invasion, and that especially the Germans co-opted dissidents to fight on their behalf against hostile regimes. One can envision the same happening in the Mid East today (cough, arm and train the rebels, cough)