#920 9/9/18 – This Weekend, What’s World News? Starkly Different Treatment of One “Protester’s” Death vs “Humanitarian Catastrophe” with “Plague-like” Conditions Sheds Light

This Weekend, What’s World News?  Starkly Different Treatment of One “Protestor’s” Death vs “Humanitarian Catastrophe” with “Plague-like” Conditions Sheds Light

At breakfast this morning, I read the “Nation & World” Sunday page of a suburban Philly newspaper mostly focused, fair enough, on suburban Philly local news.  Its editor had a whole world of international and national news stories from which to select for this page.  The four international AP squibs that he/she chose for this morning’s “Nation & World” page were on a “global warming” protest in Paris, a trial of 739 dissidents in Egypt, 75 of whom were sentenced to death, Boko Harem overrunning a key crossroads in Nigeria, and a teenage Gaza “protester” who threw a rock at Israeli soldiers as “hundreds took part in protests Friday along the border, burning tires and hurling objects at troops on the Israeli side” having died of his wound.

They’re Gaza riots, not mere “protests,” of course, but what’s significant here is that it hands Hamas a bit of the international publicity it seeks, and Israel a bit of the world’s obsessive negative focus upon it, for the editor of a suburban news-focused local newspaper half-a-world-away to zero in on that one rock-throwing rioter’s death from among all the world’s news happenings for space on its Sunday edition “Nation & World” page.

One enormous “humanitarian catastrophe” receiving “little attention,” not just from one suburban Philly local newspaper editor, was included in Friday’s Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ Daily Alert.  Perhaps, you gentle readers are more familiar with this major humanitarian catastrophe, and its partially-intended infliction, than I was, but had its dire description not been published by the respected Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and excerpted in the Daily Alert, I’d have been skeptical.

The JCPA article is titled “Iran and Turkey Divert Iraq’s River Waters, Leaving Iraq on the Brink of Catastrophe.”  After you read it, the only word in the title in issue is “Brink.”

The lead explains that “Iraq’s existence in both ancient and modern times has always depended” on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and that “little attention” is being given to what is happening to them.  The Tigris crosses the southern city of Basra and “used to be the main source of drinking water and agriculture” but is now “almost dry.”  The alternative nearby Shatt-al-Arab marshes “are now going dry.”  Repeated deadly riots have erupted in Basra since early July.

One paragraph tells all you need to know about Basra:

     “The cause of the discontent is the crumbling and obsolete state of the local infrastructures.  Today, the blame is directed mostly against the failing water infrastructure, which is causing plague-like conditions in the local population: according to the news from Basra between 500 to 600 individuals are admitted to emergency rooms daily because of water poisoning accompanied by skin diseases.  Some 17,000 intestinal infection cases due to water contamination were recorded, according to Basra health authorities [footnote citing internet article, “3.5 Million Basra Residents are Threatened With Lethal Diseases”].  Hospitals are unable to cope with the flow of the sick, nor do the authorities know how to deal with the spreading diseases and the threat of cholera.”

A prolonged drought is part of the cause of this, but “more importantly,” says the JCPA article in a section titled “Beyond Basra’s Nonfeasance – Willful Diversion,” “both Turkey and Iran are diverting water away from Iraq’s rivers.”

What struck me this weekend was not just that a suburban Philly paper I happened to read selected a Gaza “protester’s” death and not Iraq’s humanitarian catastrophe for its Sunday “Nation & World” page, or even that Iraq’s fellow-Muslim neighbors are willfully contributing to Iraq’s water plight, but that Israel’s Arab neighbors once tried to divert fresh water from flowing to Israel.  The world’s “little attention” to Iraq’s intentionally-diverted waters plight is unsettling.