Movie: Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land

This class is an important class to take not only as a history major, but as a person living in the United States in 2010. The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been going on for a number of years and is still a huge problem in the Middle East today. The conflict is constantly being written about in newspapers and spoken about during the news on T.V. However, after watching the film Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, I learned that a huge amount of this information is poorly represented in media not only in the United States but in other parts of the world was well. A strange coincidence is that after finishing this movie on Thursday, I went to my communications class where my professor told us about how untrue most of the things we see and hear in the news are. This film was a good place to begin this class because it helped me realize how important the conflict in the Middle East is.

The film reflected how biased American reporters are in relaying news to the public. We mainly hear about Israel's side of the story; the media rarely mentions anything regarding Palestine's side of the story. This fact alone made it had to watch the film knowing that Americans are only being fed information that the media wants to give us. While watching the film, I realized how ignorant I am about what is occuring in the Middle East as we speak. What made the film even harder to watch was seeing the amount of violence going on to people my age, older, and younger.

One of the points of the documentary that particularly stood out in my mind was when I learned that in an attempt to bring about peace, a group of Israeli AND Palestinian women marched together, and it didn't even make the media. This probably didn't make the media because the United States wants to consistently make it seem as though there are no attemots being done to bring about peace in the Middle East. It was moments like this in the documentary that I realized that you can't believe everything you read or see in the media. Once you hear something in the media regarding topics related to the Mid East especially, you should check a form of media in another country to see if the facts match up.