So much media attention is spent on Israel.  Is it deserved?

Military conflicts around the world are surely newsworthy.  By taking media coverage as an indicator, it would seem that most of the world’s military conflict occur in and around Israel…but how large is the conflict in Israel, compared to others?

Stealth Conflicts (via Augean Stables) demonstrates the issue with a clever chart

Comparison of Death Tolls in Congo and Israel

Pyjamas Media (also via Augean Stables) present a further analysis of the problem in an article describing the media footprint of conflicts.  They compare the media coverage of an incident from last year’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza to one in the Congo.  In Gaza, an errant shell accidentally killed 40 Gazan civilians when it was aimed at an artillery position a scant 30 meters away.  In the Congo, more than 100 civilians who took refuge in a catholic church were hacked to pieces by the LRA militia.  Pyjamas Media’s analysis (using Google News) found that the Gaza story was reported 242 times more than the Congo one.

Critics of Israel often cite the supposed disproportionality of response by the IDF.  Perhaps it’s time to look at the disproportionality of coverage by the media.

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Using the Google Trends service, it’s easy to compare the popularity of different search terms over time. For example, you can compare the relative popularity of Coke vs Pepsi or Mac vs. Windows. What do you think would happen if we compared “israel” to “darfur”, “iran”, “iraq” and “aids”?

Screenshot taken December 9th, 2009

This graph shows the relative popularity of the search terms over the last twelve months of world-wide googling. Iran received 60% of the attention that Israel did, Iraq 40%, and AIDS little more than half.

Over the last few years 300,000 people have been killed in Sudan, yet over the last 12 months Darfur was googled a mere 4% as much as Israel!

Scientists have proven that OCD is caused by one part of the brain being unable to receive information from the other.

In the past 20 years the 24/7 cable news, internet and social networking sites have revolutionized the way we receive information.  In the shadow of this information revolution lays a disease that has surprisingly not yet received an official diagnosis.  The cause is also a restriction of information.  The disease is called Obsessive Compulsive Israel Disorder or OCID.

For a country that is thousands of miles away, has a population of just 7 million and speaks a completely different language, the world is obsessively and compulsively focused on Israel.

In January 2009, when Israel launched operation Cast Lead, to root out rocket fire from the Gaza strip, the media covered every minute.  There was no shortage of information that often presented Israel as the aggressor and perpetrator of all the violence in the region.  Just like OCD stops the flow of information from one part of the brain to the other, OCID, stopped the flow of the rest of the important events going in the world.

While a tiny country was trying to secure its borders from rocket attack the world was going through major challenges.

• The Ethiopian military withdrew its troops from the Somalia civil war.  This ongoing conflict has killed 300-400 thousand people since 1991.
• Indian Army continued to battle Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed militants in the disputed Kashmir region.  This ongoing conflict has seen countless civilian massacres and terror attacks.
• The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Sri Lanka terrorist group, launched major offensives around the northern part of the country including the bombing the state department of defense. 80 thousand people have been killed in the country’s civil war, including 8000 this year alone.

In order to try to understand this disease we have isolated 3 factors that could influence the amount of coverage a country could receive:

1. Its population,
2. Its geography; and
3. Its state of conflict.

As stated earlier Israel’s population is about 7 million.  It is roughly the same size as Tajikistan, Papa New Guinea and Honduras, none of which have been able to grab the attention of the world, let alone can most people locate these countries on a map.

What about geography?  It is true that Israel’s is in the Middle East but so are countries like Bahrain, Qatar and Oman yet these countries also seldom crack the newsreel, let alone can be located on a map.

That leaves the last category, maybe it’s because of the “disputed” territory in the land.   If this is the case, ask yourselves how many stories have there been about Tibet, Cyprus, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the Western Sahara, all U.N recognized cases of disputed territory.  There is no logic in understanding this disease

While the media was predominantly reporting only on the conflict in the Gaza Strip as a prime example, the world was going through universal struggle.  Their continual criticism and singling out of Israel is baseless in its logic vis a vis its abnormal media coverage.  The larger worldly causes of global warming, hunger, aids and genocide have to take a back seat to feed a news aristocracy that clearly suffers from the sociological disease, Obsessive-Compulsive Israel Disorder.