Media Bias on Gaza Crisis Favors Israel
The Islamic University in Gaza is destroyed. Few media question this.
The Israeli PR offensive leading up to its calculated assault on the Gaza Strip is paying dividends. The Israeli publicity machine has effectively framed this murderous spree against Palestinians and Hamas in Gaza as a reasoned, defensive measure. Even though it has killed 350 Palestinians, most of whom are civilians, and injured one thousand more, Israel is being presented in media as a normal, morally-acting state.
The “shock and awe” tactics that many Americans supposedly grew to regret in Iraq — and then opposed in Israel’s 2006 bombardment of Lebanon — is being deployed again. And all we hear about in the media are about rockets.
Such atrocities in the name of self-defense inspired “humanitarian” intervention against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic by the West. Yet in Israel’s case, it receives diplomatic support and accolades even as it destroys the Strip’s infrastructure, universities, and families’ abilities to provide for themselves (following a crushing embargo during the so-called truce). Western leaders and media turn a blind eye to Israel’s historic crimes, the decades of occupation and the Palestinian refugee population — all in the name of rockets.
The reason given for this blood-letting in Gaza is singular: the rockets Palestinians fire at towns surrounding Gaza. As if such desperate and primitive weaponry comes even close to inflicting one-half of one percent the devastation Palestinians suffered during Israel’s foundation — the total annihilation of 500 Palestinian villages and forced dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians.
This history we hear nothing of.
A Google News search indicates that more than 26,000 articles mentioned “Hamas rockets.” These rockets, the obsession of Israeli talking points — have killed at most 22 people EVER. The far more deadly Israeli missiles and bombs and F16’s elicited 10,000, 11,000, 2000 mentions respectively. They have caused hundreds of Palestinian deaths in the past few days but receive far less attention.
It is too bad that the refugees of Gaza, those who suffer disproportionately, do not have their own PR personnel and echo chambers in the public spheres of western states. All they do is die and live in squalor while the elite of the West wax endlessly about rockets and Hamas, phenomenon tangential to the historic reality of Israel’s theft of Palestine and ongoing oppression of those its founders displaced.
Still, Israel is not committing genocide. They do not seek to eradicate a people as some on the left claim. Israel is more sophisticated, it seeks to eliminate an idea — the notion that a Palestinian people can be anything other than the former residents of the land Israel now possesses. Palestinians can only have no rights and live only as the marginal people Zionism conceives — a people made into a diaspora so that a Jewish state can exist with the proper ethno-religious demographics.
Gaza and the blood flowing in the streets is a reminder of the essential supremacy of the Zionist political vision in the holy land. The only Palestinians — and indeed Arabs — fit to rule are those who can guarantee the security of this vision, regardless of the rights and aspirations of the people they are to represent.
As their superficial and highly framed coverage has shown, mainstream media are part and parcel of this ideological project. The issues central to this conflict are really simple to understand once you get past the smoke and mirrors of PR, talking points, and propaganda. Hamas may be a despicable organization and the rockets it sense desperate and inhumane political ploys, but they pale in comparison to the real issues. And media are missing the story.
[Tarboush tip: QQ]
