© AP/John MinchilloU.S. investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald said that the American coverage of the conflict is based on the principle that Israeli lives are "just inherently more valuable that the Palestinians".
"It takes probably 50 Palestinians being killed to get anywhere near the attention of, say, an elderly Israeli woman being frightened in her home and having some kind of a medical problem because of the trauma," he said.
Greenwald also said that the number of Palestinians killed during the recent military operation, almost 2,000, is approaching the number that America had lost on 9/11, but the media was "essentially calm about it."
The total number of those killed in the course of the four-week long operation in Gaza has reached 1,800 Palestinians, mostly civilians. A total of 66 Israelis and a Thai worker have died.
"In a way that if it were happening in Israel, or in the US or in other countries that we regard as having population whose lives are more worthwhile, we would be obsessed within and scandalize by," said Greenwald.
"I think there's a racist element to it. I think there's an ethnocentric element to [the media coverage]," he added. "There's definitely an anti-Muslim strain that runs throughout how this coverage is conducted."
Glenn Greenwald is an American investigative journalist who writes mostly on political and legal topics. He is a contributor to political news magazines and newspapers and an author of four New York Times best-sellers on politics and law.
Greenwald became widely known after The Guardian published the first of a series of reports on the US and UK global surveillance programs based on classified documents released by Edward Snowden.
A winner of numerous awards for investigative journalism, from February 2014 he is also one of the founding editors of The Intercept online news media source.
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