Suffer the children ...

Editorial

Even those of us too young to remember the Vietnam War have seen, at one time or another, the now-famous photograph of a young Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc Phan, running screaming and naked down the street in her village of Trang Bang as napalm from an American bomb burned her skin away in strips.

It was that image that further galvanized the American public against the war – just as the front-page images of 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, shown in a hospital room with his arms blown off, sparked outrage about the civilian toll of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It is virtually impossible to view such images of children and not react viscerally. Nor should we ignore the tragic impact of global conflict on the most innocent of victims. But there's a fine line between highlighting sorrow and using it to sell newspapers.

We in the media like to consider ourselves free of bias, at least when it comes to pure reportage (as opposed to columns and opinion pieces). The truth is that reporters are all too human, and are sometimes capable, despite professional guidelines, of leading their audience in a particular direction. This seems to have been the case with reporter Mark MacKinnon's front-page story in the Globe and Mail Monday.

Twelve-year-old Palestinian Huda Ghalia watched seven members of her family perish in a violent explosion on a beach at Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip last Friday. The immediate assumption was that Israeli gunboats had fired shells directly onto the beach and that the Israel Defence Forces were responsible for the deaths. Shots of Ghalia wailing in agony besides her family's remains were beamed around the world in both print and broadcast format.

Pictures are one thing – they tell a story in themselves – but "interviewing" a traumatized child – and expecting anything other than pure, confused grief – is another. "Her voice was low," MacKinnon wrote of Ghalia, "and her dark brown eyes were expressionless." Is her eye color really relevant here? Is this a news story or a Van Morrison song?

MacKinnon went on to describe what the dead family ate for lunch and to underline that "Israel ... had been pounding the northern Gaza Strip with missiles and artillery shells for weeks in an effort to prevent other Palestinian groups from firing home-made Qassam rockets. Dozens of the rockets have landed in or near Israeli towns or near the border, most of them falling harmlessly into empty space."

That "empty space" includes the Israeli town of Sederot, whose mayor only this week went to Jerusalem to beg for more protection for his city, which was hit by 26 rockets, some causing serious injury, last Sunday alone. Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last August, more than 3,000 rocket attacks have been launched against southern Israel – all during a so-called "ceasefire" in the intifada.

The Globe reporter was far from the only one to imply that Israel should be hung out to dry for the Palestinian deaths.

Over the weekend, as Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas called for "an international intervention" against "this Israeli killing policy," the British newspaper the Guardian led its story with the line, "A barrage of Israeli artillery shells rained down on a busy Gaza beach." Another U.K. paper, the Independent, ran its story on the incident under the headline, "Palestinians killed on Gaza beach by Israel gunboats." Meanwhile, the BBC, which was only recently censured for its perceived anti-Israel bias, reported that Ghalia had been "symbolically adopted" by Abbas and PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniya. "Errant shell turns girl into Palestinian icon," read the Monday edition of the New York Times.

All of this is a lot of weight to put on the head of a little girl who has just lost most of her family. None of it will further understanding among the Palestinian and Israeli people. Nor will it contribute to the peace process. What it will do is engender more anger; and perhaps imbue an already sorrowfully orphaned girl with even greater bitterness.

The attempts to make Ghalia into a poster child belie the fact that Israel, unlike the United States during the Iraq invasion or the bombing of Trang Bang, is extraordinarily careful to not target civilians. At a press conference Tuesday evening, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz announced that an investigation showed unequivocally that stray IDF shells were not responsible for the Bei Haliya deaths, yet also noted that, "Israel regrets every Palestinian death."

It's important to remember what Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reaffirmed on Monday. "The IDF," he said, "is the most moral military in the world." More moral, perhaps, than much of the world's press.

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