Why can't the Israeli policies of occupation and depopulation be stopped? Why doesn't the international community use its power to persuade Israel to adopt a humane and just policy? The answer has several dimensions, one of which is the bias in some parts of the Western media against the Palestinian cause. As Edward Said explained well in Covering Islam, most of the Western journalists and commentators see the Middle East through streotypes in which "terrorism" is always associated with the Arab Muslim world and never linked with Israel.

This misconception is so obvious that some news agencies reporting on events in Palestine have adopted a style and vocabulary favorable to Israel. For example, when following news reports about Palestine, you seldom encounter the phrases "the territories occupied by Israel" or "the Occupied Territories." Likewise, in news reports that mention Israeli attacks, the words "Israel's retaliation" are used as a matter of course. This gives readers the following message: "First the Palestinians attacked; Israel counterattacked only to defend itself."

One of the most frequently encountered sentences in the Western media describes instances of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian children: "A Palestinian child died during an exchange of gunfire." This carries the message: "If Palestinians had not engaged in aggressive conduct, these children would not have died." In fact, The Independent newspaper's Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk emphasizes what is meant by "crossfire" where Israel is concerned: "When I read the word 'crossfire', I reach for my pen. In the Middle East, it almost always means that the Israelis have killed an innocent person."89 As far as the Western media is concerned, Palestinians always die in "crossfire." The intention here is to hide the fact that Israeli sharpshooters take aim at Palestinians and shoot with the intention to kill.
This influence is described today by many political scientists and Middle East experts. This attitude, which ignores Palestinian suffering and Israeli brutality and tries to make Israel look innocent, prevails in almost every country, particularly in America. Fisk discusses this in his article "I Am Being Vilified for Telling the Truth About Palestinians":
But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at any one academic, analyst, reporter who dares to criticise Israel (or dares to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian academic who is a professor at Columbia University.
He has been facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist Organisation of America, which last year demanded that he be fired from the Modern Language Association and which now demands on an almost daily basis his dismissal from his professorship at Columbia solely because he points out, with clinical ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical tragedy of Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of Israel's continued occupation and the bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement… Too true. Noam Chomsky, himself Jewish, is one of the most profound philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli occupation and America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel now earn him ever more ruthless abuse... Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the US that only a few tiny newspapers report anything other than Israel's point of view. You won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put very well by Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel, note the boondocks location, when he wrote that "Palestinians won't get their independence until Americans get theirs". But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now international. We must say that Israel is under siege by Palestinians (rather than occupying Palestinian land), that Palestinians are responsible for the violence (even though Palestinians are the principal victims), that Arafat turned down a good deal at Camp David (though he was offered just over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and that Palestinians indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the Israeli troops have shot so many Palestinian children).90

As Fisk describes, most Western media outlets do not hesitate to report false news when the subject is Israel. The facts are carefully hidden. Israel's operations, murders, slaughters, bombings, occupations, exilings, and hundreds of other types of cruelty either are ignored in Western media outlets or reported in such a way as to make Israel appear blameless. Israel is still an aggressor state occupying lands that do not belong to it, in direct contravention of UN mandates. Yet it is presented to the world as the "representative of peace and stability in the Middle East."
When faced with the false news reports and misinformation of the al-Aqsa Intifada's early days, Fisk could not help asking: "Why do we always get taken in by the same lies? Don't reporters carry history books, even a cuttings file, to remind them of what they wrote in the last Arab-Israeli war? Even the quotes – the meretricious, cliché-soaked statements – are the same."91
Even when Israel intensifies its use of violence and terror, the Western press takes a clear pro-Israel stance, failing to find the inhumane slaughters of civilians newsworthy. In fact, some newspapers even act as spokesman for Israel, offering those who personally perpetrated the massacres to write columns, hence publishing a purely slanted version of events. Noam Chomsky describes how, in 1986, The New York Times presented Ariel Sharon, a future Prime Minister of Israel and known as "The Butcher of Lebanon," as its "terror expert":
The New York Times called upon an expert on terrorism to offer his thoughts on how to counter the plague… The Times editors gave his [the expert's] article the title: "It's Past Time to Crush The Terrorist Monster," and they highlighted the words: "Stop the slaughter of innocents [Israelis]." They identify the author solely as "Israel's Minister of Trade and Industry." His name is Ariel Sharon. His terrorist career, dating back to the early 1950s, includes the slaughter of 69 villagers in Qibya and 20 at the al-Bureig refugee camp in 1953; terrorist operations in the Gaza region and northeastern Sinai in the early 1970s including the expulsion of some ten thousand farmers into the desert, their homes bulldozed and farmlands destroyed in preparation for Jewish settlement; the invasion of Lebanon undertaken in an effort – as now widely conceded – to overcome the threat of PLO diplomacy; the subsequent massacre at Sabra and Shatilla; and others… In a moral and intellectual climate such as this, it may well be appropriate for the world's greatest newspaper to select Ariel Sharon as our tutor on the evils of terrorism and how to combat it.92
 Most Western media outlets apply a very simple technique when reporting on Palestine: They take Israel's official statement, make room for the Prime Minister's comments, and dress up the piece with footage from Israeli news sources. Grace Halsell, President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary for almost 3 years, was an internationally recognized columnist and Middle East expert. In one article, she describes how the Western media report on events in Israel:
Police, said the Israelis, used live ammunition on the Palestinians only after the Palestinians began an assault on Jewish worshippers. Without exception, the Western media initially reported this "official" Israeli explanation.
Now, however, eyewitness accounts, reports from four Palestinian and Jewish human rights groups, as well as three videotapes, reveal the Israeli version is false. All available evidence supports Arab charges that Israeli police initiated the conflict and then shot Palestinians in cold blood.
On Nov. 9, after UN Security Council representatives viewed one of the videotapes, the Soviet ambassador, Yuli M. Vorontsov, said the filmed document undermines Israel's claim that Palestinians incited the violence…
A three-man Israeli commission then issued a report upholding the "official" Israeli line that Palestinians had started the conflict…
Among others, the commission criticized Aryeh Bibi, in charge at the scene of the killings… Shortly thereafter, Israeli officials called in Bibi and said he was being promoted to full commander of the Israeli Police Manpower Division. Whatever the motivation, his promotion, carrying not only an increase in rank but also in pay, will signal other police that, officially, it "pays" to shoot Palestinians…
Moreover, the US media, which has several dozen writers stationed in Israel, makes little or no attempt to understand and report on the meaning of these assaults. They do little or no investigative reporting, but rather too readily accept "official" explanations of events provided them by the Israelis.93
But we must remember that the responsibility for the cruelty occuring in Palestine is not reserved only for those who actually inflict it, but also for those who endorse it with their silence and support it indirectly. As we read, "... (Those who) cause corruption in the Earth, the curse will be upon them. They will have the Evil Abode." (Qur'an, 13:25), God warns us that those who sow discord will be condemned on Judgment Day.