All Kidding Aside: The Onion Only Empathizes With Plight of Palestinians

The satirical newspaper The Onion is generally non-political and at times it has had some good conservatively-slanted humor pieces, like this gem from April 2009. But when it comes to the ongoing violence in Israel, The Onion has just proved it doesn't have many layers of complexity.

In a briefly worded article published Monday on the ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict, the unidentified author demonized the Israeli military for putting Palestinian children at risk and joked about mortality itself. At no point in the short piece does it reference the terrorist organization Hamas, the death and destruction they cause, or Hamas terrorists' penchant for firing rockets from locations that are full of innocent civilians:

GAZA CITY— As civilian casualties continue to mount amid the escalating conflict along the Gaza Strip, 8-year-old Palestinian boy Walid Suleiman expressed both joy and astonishment Monday that he has yet to be killed in an Israeli military attack. “Boy, I thought I’d be dead by this past Saturday for sure, but amazingly enough, here I am,” said Suleiman, adding that he is “pleased, but pretty shocked” not to be among the estimated 100 Palestinians left dead by widespread Israeli airstrikes in the region over the past six days. “I’d have bet you anything that by today they’d have already dug my corpse out from underneath a giant pile of rubble and buried me alongside the rest of my family. Guess I won the lottery, eh?” At press time, incoming Israeli aircraft could be heard swiftly approaching as Suleiman limped back to his home.

Of course there's nothing funny about the deaths of innocent Palestinians nor of Israeli civilians living in fear of rocket strikes. But it's telling that the morbid sense of humor The Onion applies makes Israel out to be the bad guy when they try as best they can to avoid hitting kids, who are often used by terrorists as human shields.