SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 7 (IPS) – When news broke over the weekend that President Biden had approved an $8 billion deal to ship weapons to Israel, an unnamed official said: “We are committed to the defense of Israel. “We will continue to provide the necessary capabilities,” he pledged. ” Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency, following reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that concluded Israel’s actions in Gaza were genocide.
It is logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choice to continue sending massive amounts of weapons to Israel was pivotal and disastrous. But the presidential massacre and the active acquiescence of the majority in Congress are consistent with the dominant media and overall politics in the United States.
Forty days after the war in Gaza began, Anne Boyer announced that she had resigned as city editor. New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement highlights why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the aftermath of the destruction in Gaza.
Boyer has emphatically chosen to dissociate himself from the country’s leading liberal media organizations, denouncing “the State of Israel’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza.” To adapt us to this irrational suffering. No more terrible euphemisms. There are no more words-sanitized hellscapes. “No more lies that lead to war.”
The adaptation process soon became routine. President Biden and his loyalists, in particular, are motivated to pretend that they are not actually doing what they are actually doing.
For mainstream journalists, the process required a willingness to suspend belief in consistent standards of language and humanity. Boyer stepped down from the “newspaper of record” with a keen awareness of the serious importance of reporting from Gaza.
According to a content analysis of the first six weeks of the war: New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times He had an extremely inhumane attitude toward the Palestinian people. The three papers “disproportionally emphasized the deaths of Israelis during the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” the study found. intercept showed it
“The term ‘genocide’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians as 60 to 1, while ‘genocide’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians as 125 to 2. “It was 36 to 4 Israelis to Palestinians.”
A year after the Gaza War, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: new york times They see everything absolutely from Israel’s point of view. ‘How does it affect Israel and how do Israelis view it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and this is generally true of elites across the West as well. “The Israelis have very cleverly prevented direct reporting from Gaza, further reinvigorating the Israel-centric view.”
Khalidi summarized: “Mainstream media is more blind than ever. “They are willing to accept any of Israel’s terrible lies, acting as stenographers for power and repeating what they say in Washington.”
The compliant media environment has smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to shape their narratives out of trouble, disguising their complicity with impartial policies. Meanwhile, Israel’s weapons and ammunition have grown enormously in the United States. Almost half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with righteous doublethink. For example, while the horrors in Gaza continued, no journalist attempted to confront Biden over what he said when the president quickly appeared on live television during the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
“There are parents who will never see their children again,” he said, adding, “Losing a child is like having a part of your soul ripped away.” . . . This is a feeling shared by brothers and sisters, grandparents, families and the communities left behind.” And he asked plaintively: “Why do we want to live with this massacre? Why do we allow this to continue to happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde left 19 children dead. The daily massacres in the Gaza Strip claimed the lives of countless Palestinian children in a matter of hours.
Biden has refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and genocide he has enabled over and over again, but the Democrats around him have collaborated in silence or other forms of avoidance. The long-standing strategy is to confirm the necessary banality by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
The unspoken lesson dominating the Capitol was that Palestinians can be consumed by substantive political issues. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries have said virtually nothing else.
Nor did they make any effort to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who lost summer primaries with unprecedented multi-million dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was more diverse but less lethal for Palestinian civilians. In the first few months, the war in Gaza received a tremendous amount of mainstream media coverage, but this decreased over time. The effect was primarily to normalize continued slaughter. Although there have been some exceptional reports of suffering, journalism has increasingly taken on a media tone that resembles background noise, while overhyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts into believing they are a determined quest.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under increasing criticism. But widespread U.S. media coverage and the political rhetoric’s reluctance to expose Israel’s mission to destroy Palestine en masse have gone further than portraying Israeli leaders as not caring enough about protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of being honest about the terrible truth, the common narrative in American media and politics has offered euphemisms and evasions.
Anne Boyer, who resigned as city editor of The New York Times Magazine in mid-November 2023, denounced what she called “an ongoing war against the Palestinian people, who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced displacement, dispossession, surveillance and siege.” , imprisonment and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call knowing what’s happening but not recognizing it cruel, and perhaps the root of all cruelty.
Norman Solomon He is the National Director of RootsAction.org and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, The Invisible War: How America Hides the Casualties Caused by Its Military EquipmentIt was published in paperback this fall with a new review of the war in Gaza.
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