What makes news?

Goodness knows how many people died in the conflict in and around Darfur today. There are very few journalists around to count the bodies but it's a fair bet that it leaves the 300 or so casualties in Gaza well behind in the body count. Yet throughout the world the military action by Israel in Palestine is headlines in the papers and dominating the television and radio news bulletins while Darfur gets nary a mention.
I really don't understand why it is so. In the Darfur conflict this century alone the estimate is of 400,000 deaths. And that pales in to insignificance compared with perhaps 1.8 million killed in the Congo. Yet there is no sense of outrage at these slaughters while Israel gets condemned as if it is some kind of mass murdering regime.
Why, too, is there no general outrage at the barbaric deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians by Muslim suicide bombers comparable to that which is accompanying the peripheral killing of innocent civilians as the Israelis attempt to persuade Hamas to stop lobbing rockets on to the homes of ordinary Israelis?
I find it hard to believe other than that anti Semitism is alive and well.

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