It’s no secret that the media has an unhealthy obsession with Israel. The Free Middle East website has a video about this obsession:
Their Obsessive and Compulsive article explains the mental disorder / global disease:
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder that causes repeated unwanted and intrusive thoughts. An OCD sufferer will engage in repetitive behaviors (compulsions) aimed at reducing anxiety caused by these thoughts (obsessions). OCD is a chronic or long-term illness that can take over a person’s life, hurt relationships, and limit the ability to work or go to school.
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.
From the same article, Obsessive and Compulsive:
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 another article on Free Middle East, they pose this question: Which is Googled More: Israel or Darfur? Take a look at the graph in this article. The answer isn’t surprising:
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!
Going back to Obsessive and Compulsive, this is the media’s problem:
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.
