Ray Rice: I Expected Y’all To Blame Israel, Not Me

By Ray Rice, Baltimore Ravens Running Back

I’m as shocked as the next guy over the video of me beating up my wife: since when do the media blame anyone but Israel when dark-skinned people suffer?

We just went through a month-and-a-half war between Israel and Hamas, and one of the recurring themes was that no matter how depraved and callous Hamas was with Palestinian lives, the media rushed to accuse Israel of a “disproportionate” response, of “collective punishment,” or of “targeting civilians.” To read and see the coverage on the major networks and print media, Hamas’s use of human shields, of its placing military positions in and around civilian facilities, was basically an irrelevant detail. Its use of rockets aimed at targets within the Gaza Strip was basically a non-event. As far as the media were concerned, if brown people are getting hurt or killed, there’s only one party at fault. Now y’all turn around and force me to face consequences for my brown-skinned wife getting punched out? I call BS.

It’s not as if the phenomenon was restricted to July and August of this year. When East African migrants brave Egyptian and Sudanese smugglers and trigger-happy gunmen who rape, torture, and kill them arbitrarily, just to get to Israel, everyone blames Israel for paying them to leave, and not a peep about the barbaric treatment by Egypt and Sudan. When Egyptian smugglers treat Palestinian migrants to Europe with the same exploitation, violence, and greed, Israel gets jumped on for keeping its border with Gaza closed, and not a peep about the mistreatment they face if they do make it to Europe. No matter that Egypt’s border with Gaza is even more tightly restricted than Israel’s: blame Israel! So you tell me, you journalists and pundits – why is my case any different? It shouldn’t take any more mental gymnastics than usual for you to blame my domestic violence on Israel too.

Let me show you how easy it is: the Jewish slave traders brought my ancestors over from Africa and locked them and their descendants into poverty and violence. Boom! Got it in one. Or another: the Jewish-controlled entertainment industry creates incentive for NFL franchises to hire the toughest, most violent athletes to give them an on-field edge. So of course it spills over into domestic incidents in elevators. It’s so easy I find it suspicious that none of the usual suspects have gone down that route. It’s doubly suspicious that news outlets happy to parrot the latest wacky accusation against the IDF have gone silent on that angle of my story.

Look, you can’t expect me to accept blame here. That’s just not what I’ve been led to expect would happen. Your coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict consistently demonstrates that the only entity with the capacity to be at fault is Israel. No one else, least of all the people who instigate violent conflict, can be made to suffer the consequences of that conflict. If you treated the Palestinians as you’re treating me, we’d see actual coverage of Hamas using children to dig their attack tunnels, and some mention of the 160 who died in the process. You’d see a real exploration of the difference between specifically aiming at civilian communities with rockets and trying harder than any army in history to avoid hitting civilians.

But you’re not interested in that, so why should you care when I hit my wife?