Lost in Nablus

Black Iris has a chilling piece on his blog today. The Language of Losing a Palestinian Baby shows how subtly language can assign or avoid blame. When Maha El Katoumi's unborn child was shot by Israeli soldiers during a gunfight with Palestinians in a Nablus refugee camp. The stories range from the graphic depiction of the Tehran Times ("A bullet hit the head of Maha Katoumi’s eight-month-old fetus when Israeli troops opened fire at Palestinian fighters in the Ein Beit Ilma refugee camp. ... One doctor showed the dead fetus to a Reuters television crew") to the rather sanitized Ha'aretz version ("A Palestinian in her seventh month of pregnancy miscarried Thursday due to wounds she sustained from crossfire during a clash between Israel Defense Forces and armed Palestinians in a West Bank refugee camp.") Interestingly, in all cases Maha "lost" the baby. A common euphemism for miscarriage, I realize, but it does seem to put a subtle blame on a pregnant mother for getting in the way of some innocent IDF bullets.

In European and Middle Eastern media, a pregnant woman being shot by IDF soldiers was the headline. In the U.S. it was at best a side note to stories about Ehud Olmert apologizing for mistakes made during last summer's war of aggression against Lebanon.