Propaganda Blitz: How mainstream media is pushing fake Palestine stories
By Alan MacLeod (Posted Oct 16, 2023)
Originally published: MintPress News on October 13, 2023 (more by MintPress News) |
After Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, IDF forces responded with airstrikes, leveling Gazan buildings. The violence so far has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 people. Western media, however, show far more interest and have much greater sympathy with Israeli dead than Palestinian ones and have played their usual role as unofficial spokespersons for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS, ZERO EVIDENCE
Media across the western world were quick to run headlines stirring outrage over the unsubstantiated claims.
One case in point is the claim that, during their incursion into southern Israel, Hamas fighters stopped to round up, kill and mutilate 40 Israeli babies, beheading them and leaving their bodies behind.
The extraordinary assertion was originally reported by the Israeli channel i24 News, which based it on anonymous Israeli military sources. Despite offering no proof whatsoever, this highly inflammatory claim about an enemy made by an active participant in a conflict was picked up and repeated across the world by a host of media (e.g., in the United States by Fox News, CNN, MSN, Business Insider, and The New York Post).
Meanwhile, the front pages of the United Kingdom’s largest newspapers were festooned with the story, the press outraged at the atrocity and inviting their readers to feel the same way.
Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence, and a story like this should have been met with serious skepticism, given who was making the claim. The first question any reporter should have asked was, “Where is the evidence?” Given multiple opportunities to stand by it, the IDF continually distanced itself from the claims. Nevertheless, the story was simply too useful not to publish.
The decapitated baby narrative was so popular that even President Biden referenced it, claiming to have seen “confirmed” images of Hamas killing children. This claim, however, was hastily retracted by his handlers at the White House, who noted that Biden was simply referencing the i24 News report.
The story looked even more like a piece of cheap propaganda after it was revealed that the key source for the claim was Israeli soldier David Ben Zion, an extremist settler who had incited race riots against Palestinians earlier this year, describing them as “animals” with no heart who needs to be “wiped out.”
Manipulating the U.S. public into supporting the war by feeding them atrocity propaganda about mutilating babies has a long history. In 1990, for instance, a girl purporting to be a local nurse was brought before Congress, where she testified that Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein’s men had ripped hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and left them to die. The story helped whip the American public up into a pro-war fervor. It was later revealed that it was a complete hoax dreamed up by a public relations firm.
THE MURDERED GIRL WHO CAME BACK TO LIFE
David Ben Zion in a video from a settlement construction site (left) and hours after he told i24 the IDF had found babies beheaded by Hamas (right). (Photo: The GrayZone)
Another piece of blatantly fake news is the case of Shani Louk. Louk attended the Supernova Festival, ambushed by Hamas. It was widely reported that Hamas murdered her (e.g., Daily Mail, Marca, Yahoo! News, TMZ, Business Insider), stripped her, and paraded her naked body trophy-like through the streets on the back of a truck. Louk’s case incited global anger and calls for an overwhelming Israeli military response.
There was only one problem: Louk was later confirmed to be alive and in hospital, a fact that suggests the videos of her on the back of a truck were actually images of people saving her life by taking her to seek medical assistance.
Few of the outlets irresponsibly publishing these wildly incendiary stories have printed apologies or even retractions. The Los Angeles Times was one exception: after publishing a report claiming that Palestinians had raped Israeli civilians, it later informed readers that “such reports have not been substantiated.”
LIONIZING ISRAEL, DEHUMANIZING PALESTINIANS
Few readers, however, see these retractions. Instead, they are left with visceral feelings of anger and disgust towards Hamas, priming them to support Western military action against Palestine or the wider region.
In case their audiences did not get the message, op-eds and editorials in major newspapers hammered home this idea. The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed entitled “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas”, which insisted to readers that “Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil, depraved culture that resides next to it.” Thus, the outlet implicitly gave Israel a free pass to carry out whatever war crimes it wished on the civilian population, whether that is using banned chemical weapons, cutting off electricity and water, or targeting ambulances or United Nations officials.
The BBC told its readers that Israelis have been “killed” while people in Gaza merely “died,” removing any agency from its perpetrators and almost suggesting their deaths were natural.
The National Review’s editorial board was of a similar mind, stating that “Israel needs a long leash to destroy Hamas.” This long leash, they explained, meant giving Israel far more time to carry out the destruction of Gaza. Western leaders would have to refrain from criticizing Israel or calling for calm and peace.
The message was clear: international unity was paramount at this time. Mere trifles such as war crimes must be overlooked. And while Israel and its people were treated with special sympathy (e.g., Washington Post), the other side was written off as bloodthirsty radicals. While the phrase “Palestinian terrorists” could be found across the media spectrum (e.g., Fox News, New York Post, New York Times), its opposite, “Israeli terrorists” was completely absent from corporate media. This, despite casualties on the Palestinian side outnumbering Israelis.
Underlining the fact that Israeli lives are deemed more important is the way in which deaths from each side are reported. The BBC, for example, told its readers that Israelis have been “killed” while people in Gaza merely “died,” removing any agency from its perpetrators and almost suggesting their deaths were natural.
CONTEXT-FREE VIOLENCE
Missing from most of the reporting was the basic factual background of the attack. Few articles mentioned that Israel was built upon an existing Palestinian state, and that most of the inhabitants of Gaza are descended from refugees ethnically cleansed from southern Israel in order to make way for a Jewish state. Also left unmentioned was that Israel controls almost every aspect of Gazan’s life. This includes deciding who can enter or leave the densely populated strip and limiting the import of food, medicine and other crucial goods. Aid groups have called Gaza “the world’s largest open-air prison.” The United Nations has declared the conditions in Gaza to be so bad as to be unlivable.
One of the principal reasons that this crucial context is not given is that it could influence Western audiences into sympathizing with Palestinians or supporting Palestinian liberation. Giant media corporations are largely owned by wealthy oligarchs or by transnational corporations, both of whom have a stake in preserving the status quo and neither of whom wish to see national liberation movements succeed.
Some media outlets make this explicit. Axel Springer—the enormous German broadcaster that owns Politico—requires its employees to sign its mission statement endorsing “the trans-Atlantic alliance and Israel” and has told any staff members that support Palestine to leave their jobs.
Other outlets are slightly less overt but nonetheless have Israel red lines that employees cannot cross. CNN fired anchor Marc Lamont Hill for calling for a free Palestine. Katie Halper was fired from The Hill for (accurately) calling Israel an Apartheid state. The Associated Press dismissed Emily Wilder after it became known that she had been a pro-Palestine activist during her college years. And The Guardian sacked Nathan J. Robinson after he made a joke mocking U.S. military aid to Israel. These cases serve as examples to the rest of the journalistic world. The message is that one cannot criticize the Israeli government’s violent apartheid system or show solidarity for Palestine without risking losing their livelihoods.
Ultimately, then, corporate media play a key role in maintaining the occupation by manipulating public opinion. If the American people were aware of the history and the reality of Israel/Palestine, the situation would be untenable. For those wishing to maintain the unequal state of affairs whereby an apartheid government expels or imprisons its indigenous population, the pen is as important as the sword.
https://mronline.org/2023/10/16/propaga ... e-stories/
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Cancel Culture Turned On One Of Its Own After MSNBC Reportedly Suspended Mehdi Hasan’s Show
ANDREW KORYBKO
OCT 15, 2023
He naively thought that his “woke” cult’s elite members sincerely shared their foot soldiers’ views about Palestine and never could have countenanced that they were just exploiting that cause’s “decolonization” rhetoric to facilitate their goal of reshaping Western civilization. That’s why he continued criticizing Israel’s killing of civilians without worrying about his job, only to suddenly find out that his show has reportedly been de facto suspended as a result.
Semafor’s report about the internal disputes that have erupted within MSNBC over the latest Israeli-Hamas war revealed that Mehdi Hasan and two other Muslim anchors were quietly taken out of the anchor’s chair and had their programs de facto suspended. The company denied these claims and said that they’re simply prioritizing coverage of the conflict above all else, but the conspicuous absence of those three’s shows nevertheless extended credence to their report and sparked an outcry among some.
For however strongly readers might feel about freedom of speech in America, and particularly the right for workers to publicly share views on sensitive matters that contradict their employer’s without fear of punishment, it’s ironic that Hasan of all people just had his show suspended. He’s a hardcore liberal-globalist who hitherto marched in lockstep with this radical movement’s Democrat proxies on Russia, Trump, COVID lockdowns, and all other related matters, only to now have his allies turn against him.
Many people are therefore experiencing intense schadenfreude at seeing him get canceled after he so aggressively demanded the canceling of his political opponents over the years, especially after the January 6th incident. Hasan apparently thought that the same tactics that he supported against others would never be used against him since he calculated that his role as this cult’s token Muslim meant that his employers would never dare cancel him lest they discredit their cause in fellow believers’ eyes.
To add another layer of irony to it all, many of the “woke” happen to be anti-Zionists just like he appears to be too, so he probably thought he could get away with criticizing Israel’s killing of civilians on social media. His mistakes were that he overvalued his importance to his “woke” employers, which he thought made him untouchable, and actually believed that they sincerely supported Palestine. The first is attributable to arrogance while the second is the result of naivete.
A cursory glance at his shows and social media postings confirms the first-mentioned aspect of his personality so there’s nothing more to add to that part of his mistake, but some further insight can be shared about the second since it’s relevant to every member of that radical movement. “Woke” cultists struggle with cognitive dissonance due to their ideology’s inherent double standards, but they work past it since they’re convinced that there’s some order to this chaos and that it’s all for the “greater good”.
Although they all know that tactics like cancel culture are ultimately about power and not accountability and so-called safety like they claim, each of them still sincerely believes in the cause that they’re canceling their opponents for and assumes that their comrades do too. If this false perception wasn’t shared by the majority of their radical movement, then it wouldn’t have ever become as powerful as it has since there’d be a dearth of foot soldiers to fight in its name on social media and in the streets.
The ”woke” elite are a notable exception to the aforesaid observation as proven by their hatred of the Second Amendment and border security despite hiring private security to protect themselves and living in gated communities respectively among other examples. For whatever reason, Hasan never wised up to this “politically incorrect” fact despite being one of the world’s most famous Muslim members of that selfsame elite, hence why he kept criticizing Israel’s killing of civilians without worrying about his job.
What he never realized was that the diverse “woke” elite are actually Zionists who only allow their cultists to virtue signal support for the Palestinian cause since they weaponize related “decolonization” rhetoric in the West as part of their “revolutionary” goal to reshape that civilization. Such concepts are exploited to justify acts of racially motivated violence by their BLM foot soldiers and the large-scale import of civilizationally dissimilar immigrants in order to maximally divide-and-rule the masses.
To be absolutely clear, the “woke” elite’s Zionist sympathies have nothing to do with their goal of reshaping Western civilization, and this class as a whole is very diverse despite certain identity groups being overrepresented relative to their size in the general population. This is crucial to remember since some claim that Judaism is responsible for all the troubles associated with that radical movement, which is nothing but an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that discredits legitimate criticism of this cult’s policies.
In fact, it was none other than Biden himself who said that he’s “a Zionist in my heart” and “you need not be a Jew to be Zionist”. Anyone who speculates that “the Jews” were behind MSNBC’s de facto suspension of Hasan’s program is therefore a bigot who’s taking advantage of this scandal to push their dirty agenda. The “woke” elite’s Zionist sympathies are probably attributable to them associating this cause with the power that they themselves lust after, but it has nothing to do with their other policies.
After all, the self-professed Zionists in Israel favor civilians carrying firearms for self-defense, fully support their country’s border walls around Palestine, and are fervently against BLM-like policies that pit ethnic minorities against the minority, thus making them the exact opposite of the “woke” elite. These Zionists also believe that George Soros, who’s the patron saint of liberal-globalism and practically worshipped by the “woke” masses, is an infamous anti-Semite despite he himself being Jewish.
In sum, Judaism isn’t responsible for all the troubles associated with “wokeism”, and actual self-professed Zionists in Israel ironically stand for the exact opposite of what that radical movement’s Zionist-sympathizing elite do with regards to the right to bear arms and the need for border walls. This selfsame elite’s support for Zionism is therefore hypocritical, just like their private positions towards those two previously mentioned subjects, which makes this counterintuitively logical in its own way.
All of this is relevant with respect to Hasan since he naively thought that his cult’s elite members sincerely shared their foot soldiers’ views about Palestine and never could have countenanced that they were just exploiting that cause’s “decolonization” rhetoric to facilitate their goal of reshaping Western civilization. That’s why he continued criticizing Israel’s killing of civilians without worrying about his job, only to suddenly find out that his show has reportedly been de facto suspended as a result.
It’s incredibly ironic that one of the world’s most well-known and arguably insufferable proponents of cancel culture was just canceled, but it’s unlikely that he’ll defect from “wokeism” since few ever do, especially those of his professional caliber. He just has to be told by trusted figures above him in the movement that this was required in pursuit of the “greater good” and that he’d be impeding that same goal if he dares to protest what just happened. In other words, “trust the plan”, as QAnon cultists say.
Likewise, none of his fellow cultists below him will defect after his show’s de facto suspension either since they trust the wisdom of their elite and have thus already convinced themselves that this advances the “greater good” (whatever they imagine it as being) even if they don’t understand how. All that’s important to them is that powerful people are dealing with problems as they emerge, even if they come from one of their cult’s top propagandists, which gives them a sense of comfort in this chaotic world.
https://korybko.substack.com/p/cancel-c ... one-of-its
, the press is operated by employees of the oligarchs who operate the government.
