2021.5.11

     Today, Mr.Paterson once again taught us about what is happening in Israel and Palestine. The tension now was caused by all the way back to 1940s. There racial discrimination in US (it still is), and didn’t want Jews to live in their country. Therefore, they send Jews back to Palestine. There were 50 countries in the UN at that time and many European or American countries are feeling bad for Jews because of terrible act of Nazis. Now Palestine’s land became even shorter and everyone eventually started to leave.

     Firstly, it was shocking to know that 1500 years old mosque was burnt by the Israeli. There were people praying inside, and they suddenly get kicked out, and on next minute, there was a fire. I got really curious about the reason why Israeli burnt by place and researched it on internet. In fact, the place was No.3 most holy place in Palestine, and No.1 in Israel. I believe the biggest problem is that these two are in the same hill. People sometimes do horrible things in name of their religion which I can not understand. It might have been prevented if these two were in a different place.

      Secondly, I was surprised by strong bias of the media and how tilted they are toward Israel. They were using positive vocabularies toward Israel and negative vocabularies for Palestine. Basically “image controlling” by “charged language”. For example, “kidnap” and “take” gives completely different feeling to the readers. US told both people to calm down but actually, Israel is the only one “attacking”. I noticed that I might have been controlled unconsciously through this class, it would be really interesting to learn how to judge the strongness of the bias. I believe when talking about media, SNS is the key point as really changed the era of old mass media that was Elite-controlled(newspaper, radio, and TV). Web 2.0 allowed normal people to pull up things up, and gave access for information anytime, anywhere. However, the technology development allowed them to photoshop.

     Lastly, let me focus on Japanese media. I am not a TV person and use more of social media. There were numerous news reports related to what is going on between two countries. I feel like NHK is a little Israel sided but other media are mostly Palestine sided.

     Conclusively, it was really interesting to learn about the media with example of Palestine and Israel. The thing that’s happening there is absolutely horrible, many of my classmates were sharing what they learned in class by Instagram stories. I want to keep taking actions too.