Just the other day Indian Hindus killed about 800 Moslems in a disgusting riot.
Yet where is the anti-Hindu outrage? Or even reporting on this?
Meanwhile the world press is focused in a negative way on Israel’s attempts to ward off terrorism.
Balance? Fairness? I think not.
Let’s start in good old SDMB fashion…cite?
If the total deaths has recently reached 800, I have not yet seen it.
The OP is probably referring to events surrounding the events related in this MSNBC story from the Google cache.
There are a few differences between the Indian situation and the Israeli/Occupied Territories situation:
For one thing, it is internal to a single country (i.e., there is no military component and there is no demand for independence or recognition as a state involved).
For another thing, the 544 deaths (800 if the OP is correct that the numbers have risen that high) involve people from both sides and the violence is scattered around. The largest single incident was the trigger riot in which 58 Hindus were killed in a train. The remaining deaths have been retaliatory attacks between the two sides or deaths from police suppressing the riots. There has been no evidence that either group is plotting to initiate or continue attacks with a purpose. It appears that all the attacks are spontaneous.
I am making no judgments, whatever, regarding the rightness of the actions in either the Mideast or India. It is, however, much easier to develop “moral outrage” against the actions of a coherent group of “freedom fighters”/“terrorists” or “national defenders”/“imperialist oppressors” than it is to work up the same moral outrage against scattered factional fighting.
(Some may actually see some latent racism, (or, at least, parochialism), in the idea that riot news is “just” more news from India.)
(There were similar riots nine years ago that did lead to around 800 deaths. I do not know whether they were divided proportionally between the Hindus and Muslims at that time or if they were primarily one group or the other.)
It was a riot internal to a country much like the Cincinnati or LA riots, though on a much larger scale, and with religion as the basis, as opposed to race. It did get (fleeting) coverage in all the main forms of media in the US, and it got some attention only because of September 11. I am guessing it would have been ignored otherwise. What exactly is “anti-Hindu” outrage? If the OP is referring to outrage, shame, and introspection, it is happening in India, the country where the incident took place.
FYI - there has been extensive coverage of the Gujarat situation in the papers here. Probably because there is a very large Indian community here, so people have a greater interest in these things. Also because of the proximity of India to the UAE, compared with Europe, or the US for example.
berdollos: Balance? Fairness? I think not.
While I agree that foreign news in general is under-reported in the US, I don’t think you can make a convincing case out of this for anti-Israel bias in the US media. After all, the Middle East conflict is very familiar to most Americans, has been going on for a long time with a lot of American involvement, and involves one of our closest allies and largest aid recipients; it is also pretty close geographically and politically to Europe. Naturally, we are likely to see more coverage of it in European and American media than we are of communal violence in India, or human rights violations in Chechnya, or war in Angola, all of which are appalling but none of which get much western press.
Other posters have pointed out that the Gujarat killings are also different in being riots rather than official government actions (although considering the allegations being made about the Gujarati government and the BJP/RSS in general conniving at them, this diagnosis may change).