Journalists are cheering on the arming of militias and civilians making improvised explosives, acts they usually treat as terrorism.
It is simply astonishing how many western journalists, including normally cautious BBC reporters, are shamelessly fawning over young women building Molotov cocktails on the streets of Ukrainian cities like Kyiv.
It's suddenly sexy to make improvised explosives - at least, if the media consider you white, European and "civilised".
That might surprise other, more established resistance movements, especially in the Middle East. They have invariably found themselves tarred as terrorists for doing much the same.
Western journalists' difficulty containing their identification with, and support for, Ukraine's civilian "resistance" must be maddening to Palestinians in tiny Gaza, for example, who have been locked into a metal cage by an Israeli military occupier for decades.
Palestinians in Gaza make their own Molotov cocktails. But because they can't get close to the Israeli army, they have to pack them into balloons that drift over the steel barrier surrounding Gaza and into Israel, sometimes setting fire to fields.
No one from the BBC has celebrated these "incendiary balloons" as a small act of resistance. They are reflexively blamed on Gaza's governing group Hamas, the political wing of which was recently designated a terror organisation by the British government.
Double StandardsPalestinians in Gaza have also suffered a trade blockade by Israel for the past 15 years, one designed to put them on a "starvation diet". Protesters, including women, children and people in wheelchairs, have regularly turned out to throw a stone in the direction of distant Israeli snipers, hidden behind fortifications, as a symbolic way to demand their freedom. These protesters have often been shot by the Israeli army in response.
The western media offer occasional anguish at the lives lost or the legs amputated of those targeted by the snipers. But none of them cheerlead this Palestinian "resistance" as they do the Ukrainian one. More usually, the protesters are treated as dupes or provocateurs of Hamas.
Gaza, unlike Ukraine, does not have an army, and its fighters, unlike Ukraine' s, are not being armed by the West.
The Guardian newspaper even censored its cartoonist Steve Bell when he sought to depict one of the victims of Israel's snipers, a nurse, Razan al-Najjar, who had been trying to help the wounded. The paper implied that the cartoon - of Britain's then prime minister, Theresa May, welcoming her Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, to London, with al-Najjar a sacrificial victim behind them in the fireplace - was anti-semitic.
Assuming the media has in the past been reluctant to encourage ordinary people to confront well-armed soldiers - so as to avoid civilian casualties - then why has that policy suddenly been ditched in Ukraine?
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