Media Manipulation
In my last post I went through some examples of the hysterical, bigoted coverage mainstream media have provided on the anti-genocide pro-Palestine protests that have occurred in huge numbers around the world, while platforming Israeli war criminals and officials who are making openly genocidal inflammatory comments.
I barely scratched the surface—there’s hundreds of examples. I have a full-time job, I’m a dad, a husband, and a freelance writer on the side so I have almost no spare hours or energy to give. This haunts me, particularly because a significant number of people have told me the writing I’ve managed to do here and on social media has made a difference to them. I want to do a better job of explaining what’s going on, to give this the fullness of my time and energy. But I can’t right now and I’m sorry for that. These hurried notes are the sum of my capabilities at the moment. What I hope to do is point you in the right direction.
Something that has bothered me for a while is a shift in language I watched happen in real-time. Near as I can tell, the shift occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli attack on Al-Ahli hospital, on October 17th, which slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians who were sheltering in the courtyard. At this point in time, Israel had already massacred 3,000 Palestinians and was doing so comfortably with the strongest statements of support and sympathy from around the world.
The strike on Al-Ahli hospital, which Israel had repeatedly warned in the days prior that it would strike, changed everything for a span of hours. The tone of coverage shifted dramatically. World leaders everywhere condemned it, and Israel saw its support vanishing. What followed was a large-scale effort to deny they’d done it, to claim Hamas or Islamic Jihad was responsible, and to this end, several hilariously bad videos were generated to try to support this idea, and all of them have been roundly debunked. You can look all that up yourself, that’s not what I’m here to go over. Less discussed but far more insidious has been the change in language around the Gaza Health Ministry. One of Israel’s misinformation efforts in the wake of that massacre—one of several dozens it has committed, out of dozens of hospitals it has hit—and by far its most successful was to say, “whoever did it, you can’t trust the numbers coming out of Gaza” anyway. And lo, the phrase “the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry” was born.
Let’s look at some examples from The Guardian and The New York Times.
The Guardian: Before the Al-Ahli Attack
The Guardian After the Al-Ahli Attack
October 18th: Now we have “run by Hamas” followed by or preceding “Gaza Health Ministry”. This is true for most if not all of the coverage since.
NY Times: Before the Al-Ahli Attack
NY Times After the Al-Ahli Attack
October 20th: Now we have “the Hamas-operated Gaza health ministry”. NYT for those who want to do a search of their own prefers Hamas-operated or “controlled”.
Before I go any further, I invite you to look at and screenshot examples from media outlets everywhere in the Anglosphere. I’ve seen examples from the ABC and Haaretz. I’ve seen it on the news, and heard it on the radio—it’s everywhere now. I would be interested to know as well if this shift occurred in other languages. This propaganda-line rippled throughout the coverage of the ongoing massacre and mass starvation of Palestinians currently being committed by Israel. It originated from Israel, and was given the stamp of approval by President Joe “Genocide” Biden who openly declared that he didn’t trust the numbers of casualties being reported. This was widely condemned because the Gaza Health Ministry has reported accurately for decades and there is no suggestion or proof anywhere, ever, of it having lied or unreasonably distorted statistics. As Adam Taylor notes in The Washington Post, the US State Department cited the Gaza Health Ministry as recently as a few months ago.
Yes, the political party Hamas is nominally the administrative authority in the Gaza Strip, and so this line is not untrue, but that doesn’t change the fact that nobody had any qualms about the reliability of the Health Ministry or the many doctors that work in Gaza prior to this horrendous attack. An extraordinary propaganda campaign is underway to try to brand “Hamas” as the ultimate evil; Israeli officials and the Israeli state’s social media accounts have been calling them Nazis, “worse than ISIS”, etc. in an effort to justify their own atrocities. The message is clear: any cost at all is worth eliminating them, which includes cutting off the food and water and electricity to 2.2 million civilians while bombing them indiscriminately, this includes the slaughter of 4,000 children, 10,000 people, over 20,000 severely wounded, and 1.4 million displaced.
I wrote about this particular branding effort earlier:
In light of this “ultimate evil”/“a million 9/11s” narrative, they are attempting to make Hamas synonymous with evil, to make their reprisal-atrocities seem lesser, to malign it so completely that just saying “Hamas-run” ministry is enough to sow a seed of doubt in the mind of the reader. Never mind that we can see endless videos of the carnage—despite consistent efforts to suppress this, to keep international press out, to cut off the internet—never mind that Israel is broadcasting their relentless bombardment, never mind that the dehumanising language around Hamas has been effortlessly and enthusiastically extended to all Palestinians, never mind that there is no legal, ethical or moral grounds for genocide and there never will be. Never mind that even Israeli channels are citing similar figures and referring to everyone killed, the many thousands of children, the hundreds of babies, as “terrorists”:
I’m going to end on this note, something I came across while searching through the articles published in the past few weeks. “Even before the siege, most of Gaza’s water supply was not fit for drinking: the taps regularly spewed salty water.”
It’s been a month since they cut off the water. I don’t have sufficient language for this evil, or the evil of the leaders around the world who refuse to condemn it. One thing is abundantly clear. We do not live in a free, democratic, or decent society. That lie is dead now and forever.
Yours in disgust,
Omar