(Telegraph-UK) Brendan O'Neill - When it was reported earlier this week that Israeli officials had been giving birth control to arriving Ethiopian Jews "without their consent," the international media had a field day. Ha'aretz says these African Jews were indeed given Depo-Provera, a birth-control injection that lasts for three months, but it has not been proven that they were given these injections deceitfully, without their consent. Ha'aretz says "the vast majority of the Ethiopian women who received Depo-Provera were aware it was birth control and received it willingly." Some Ethiopian women continued voluntarily to receive Depo-Provera even once they were settled in Israel, because they "preferred being injected at a clinic rather than having to take pills daily in the presence of other family members who might disapprove of that decision." That is, the injections became culturally convenient for some Ethiopian women in Israel. Yet the story was treated as "some kind of villainous genocidal plot of sterilization aimed at ethnic and racial cleansing," says Ha'aretz. The mistreatment of this story, the exaggeration of it, the warped repeating of it by observers and tweeters around the world, reveals a thirst for treating Israel as a uniquely racist, wicked, barbaric outpost. When it comes to pointing a big, white Western finger at Israel and accusing it of carrying out the kind of crimes of racism and colonialism that the rest of us grew out of years ago, it seems facts count for little.
2013-02-01 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive