American woman shot dead at anti-settler protest in West Bank
American woman shot dead at anti-settler protest in West Bank
Witnesses say Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was fired at by Israel Defense Forces soldiers positioned in a nearby field
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Normally you’d say she was killed by the IDF, or Israel shot and killed an American.
Instead the media makes strong use of passive voice:
Witnesses say Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was fired at by Israel Defense Forces soldiers positioned in a nearby field
The news loves to focus on individual Israeli hostages and victims by providing backgrounds and what they do for a living, but for the most part just lists Palestinian deaths by numbers and only occasionally includes names or family relationships.
There is one news agency, I think the BBC, which used the phrase "unprecedented attack" to refer to the Oct atrocity that kicked off the current hostilities but doesn't use any similar phrasing for the IDF killing many times more civilians as a response. So apparently genocide doesn't need called out in a similar fashion because it is apparently not unprecedented.
They're not technically wrong at least, the IDF killing civilians has plenty of precedent.
...was fired at...
Gotta love a passive voice so passive that it doesn't even clarify that she was shot and killed and not merely "fired at".
IDF soldiers have been seen pulling small levers on handheld devices.
Eygi fell to the ground with blood coming out of her head around the same time.
Could be rephrased as: US puppet military kills its own citizen
To be fair, they do use the same language often enough when reporting about police shootings. Which does not make it any better though.
I mean. "she was killed by the IDF" is passive voice, no? I think IDF is out of control as much as the next person but passive voice can be communicative and clear as much as active voice. And clearly it's easy to reach for if you gave it as a counter example accidentally.
The problem is not that they use the passive voice, it's that they use the passive voice systematically for one side and the active for the other. It's always "Hamas kills" versus "shot dead by the IDF", and usually the "by the IDF" part is buried in the article instead of the headline.
I've seen reports that just say someone "dies" instead of that the IDF killed them.