The existence of oppressed Jewish (and other) minorities in Arab lands has long been an embarassment to certain Western journalists and policy-makers, as well as to Communist ideologues. The mainstream of American journalism in the 1940s and 1950s typically portrayed the Arab world as a region where people were kind, where toleration of Jews and other minorities was the rule, and where only Israel's presence spoiled the longing of the naturally anti-Communist Arab Muslims to join the Baghdad Pact. Soviet propaganda likewise advocated Arab unity, although in behalf of "anti-imperialist" and "progressive" goals and under Soviet rather than Western sponsorship.

In this atmosphere, Western and Communist politicians, communications media and educational institutions overlooked or minimized the wrongs committed by Muslim-Arabs against dhimmi (non-Muslim) peoples, or even against fellow Muslims who resisted Arab nationalism. Consider how the mass murder of Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein (by poison gas among other means) and the genocide of southern Sudanese Blacks are usually overlooked by the media, by self-styled "human rights" bodies, by UN agencies, and by politicians generally. Ethnic cleansing of Kurds in Iraq intensified in 2000 and 2001, yet the veil of silence and distortion stayed in place as the media has focussed on alleged wrongs committed by Israel against Arabs in the course of Arab-initiated warfare.

http://www.netanyahu.org/whattheydont.html