Bias is not having a strong opinion on a subject, bias is when your let your opinion cloud your ability to judge facts objectively. Case in point. The Culture and Media Institute recently voted the following headline as the most Biased of 2007. It is sad as it is funny and clearly indicates the loss of the ability to view facts objectively. This headline comes from the McClatchy News Service (formerly Knight-Ridder):

Yes, that is a real headline. Clearly, the bias against the war and the administration makes it impossible for McClatchy to acknowledge any good news. They can and will distort any news if the perceived beneficiary is the “enemy.”

What I am about to show you will make that McClatchy headline look like amateur hour at the distortion mill. From Israel comes a story that is absolutely shocking.

Hebrew University doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan has authored a paper that has garnered the coveted Hebrew University Teachers’ Committee Prize. The paper purports to analyze the strikingly low incidents of rape committed by members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against Palestinian women. Nitzan’s conclusion, members of the IDF are all a bunch or racists. Palestinian women are apparently not good enough to rape. If the members of the IDF were better people, they would be raping and pillaging more. From the Israel National News:

(IsraelNN.com) A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers’ committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.

The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.”

The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers’ eyes.

Bias, what bias? Apparently Israel has self haters too!

McClatchy, AP, Reuters, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, et al have a lot of work to do if they want to be in the same league of bias as the professors at Hebrew University.