Singling out, part II

In response to my previous post on "singling out China", I just had the following sarcastic comment suggesting that "Palestine" gets more coverage than China/Tibet in the news. Here's the comment from someone calling themselves KLM:

Yeah Mark,you're so right.There's hardly any coverage of Palestine in the press but everyone knows about the Han Chinese right to Return to Tibet.

To which I tried to reply:

People might not know that much about the Han Chinese in Tibet but they do know of China's human rights abuses and that China occupies Tibet.

China has no apologists in the western media. In the UK there is at least one resident zionist in every major newspaper. It is true that there is a lot of coverage of Palestine but it tends to toe the zionist line and even the word "Palestine" is a taboo in the western media.

I've just run a little test. Google Israel and it yields 210 million sites and in fourth position is a little cluster of sites for news results for Israel. Click on it and you'll find over 59,000 sites of news on Israel. Now try the same with Palestine: It yields 36.4 million (obviously it changes all the time but its a rough guide to mentions on sites). Look for "news results for Palestine". Nothing doin'. Ok so try Palestine on google news. Result! 6,919 news sites, against Israel's 59,723.

Ok, so that's the discrimination in favour of Israel vis á vis Palestine. I should point out that keying in the word "Palestinian" yields much higher results and they do get a "news results for...." on the first page of the search. But you said Palestine. Nice of google (and you) to point out, inadvertently, that the Palestinians are a "people without a land" for the time being.

But you were saying, or implying by sarcasm, that China doesn't get the coverage that "Palestine" does. So let's look at "China". See that? 679,000,000 sites. Over three times the number for Israel. And "news results for China"? Well well well. What did you see? Right now I can see 219,121. Is that nearly four times the amount of coverage that Israel got? I think it is.

But hold on, I didn't look up Tibet. Ok, let's google "Tibet". 31.6 million sites. Well done KLM! Less than Palestine, but at the time of writing, Tibet had "news results from" right at the top of the list whereas Palestine didn't have a "news results from" on the main google page and Israel's was four sites from the top. Now let's look at those "news results for Tibet". Right now it stands at 64,438. Almost ten times as many as Palestine and about ten per cent more than Israel.

What's your point exactly KLM? Avnery's point was that China meets with criticism from the west that Israel seems to avoid. Are you suggesting otherwise? Surely not.

I say I tried to respond because I was so scrupulous in my linking to the evidence of what I was saying, Haloscan (the comment facilitator) simply couldn't handle it. Too many links, it said.

But back to the point. China is a serial human rights abuser. Israel is a serial human rights abuser. China's existence is not predicated on its human rights abuses. Israel's is. China is denounced by all the western media. Israel is not. Why not? Come back and answer that one, KLM.