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| Image by Sohaib Al Kharsa |
Throughout history, military empires have reduced
their victims, their subjugated, and their abducted to a state of “The Others.”
The political and mass media institutions usually follow suit by supporting
their empire’s predatory policies with slanted coverage.
Such is the case with the U.S. global and the
Israeli regional empires. The U.S. federal government and the mainstream media
often move in lockstep.
For example, take the word “terrorism.” The New York Times regularly refers the Hamas regime
as “terrorists,” while describing the far more extensive Israeli acts of state
terrorism as “military operations.” Since October 7th, the Israeli military
superpower has killed over 500 times more children than Hamas killed in their
raid through a still uninvestigated collapse of Israel’s vaunted multi-tiered
border security.
Apart from a massively greater overall civilian toll
inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza – the vast undercount stands at 34,000
Palestinian deaths compared to the deaths of 1,139 Israeli civilians, soldiers,
and foreign workers.
This staggering ratio – over 14,000 Palestinian
children (with many thousands under the rubble) compared to 30 Israeli children
– escapes proper reporting. “The Others” don’t get accurate coverage as was
also the case with huge Iraqi losses during the Bush/Cheney criminal war. (See,
the March 5, 2024, column: Stop
the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza).
Take the use of the term “hostage.” Hamas seized
over 240 Israelis hostages on October 7th. Since then, the
Israeli army has seized about 9000 Palestinians, including women and children,
and taken them without charges, along with many more thousands languishing in
these prison camps also without charges for years (it’s called Israel’s “administrative
detention”). Many of the imprisoned Palestinians are being tortured. Who has
gotten the far greater attention? Aren’t these Palestinian hostages also? Again “The Others.”
How about the application of the right to
self-defense? Every state has the right to self-defense. Count the many times
you have heard, “Israel has a right to defend itself” compared to “Palestine
has a right to defend itself.” Members of Congress who bellow the former
declaration daily cannot get themselves to say the latter.
It is a forbidden phrase. Yet, who is the violently
occupying, colonizing, land, and water-stealing party? Israel. For over fifty
years, more than 400 times more innocent Palestinians have been killed and
injured compared to innocent Israeli civilians. Where is the detailed coverage
of the loss of life from enforced destitution and denial of life-saving
medicines, equipment, and emergency transport to health facilities? Again, it
is “The Others.”
“The Others” are always described with less
charitable words. In a meticulous content analysis by The
Intercept of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post between October 7 and November
24, the use of the words “slaughtered,” “horrific” and “massacre” in relation
to Israeli and Palestinians killed was 218 to 9!
The Intercept said Israel’s
war on Gaza is “perhaps the deadliest war for children – almost entirely
Palestinian – in modern history.” There is scant mention of the word “children”
and related terms in the headlines of articles in that span of time.
(Note, reporters from these papers are like the rest
of the mainstream Western media reports, including Israeli journalists, who
have been long banned by the Israeli government from freely reporting from
inside Gaza, but have managed to write some exceptionally graphic stories from
a distance.)
Palestinian Arabs are denied the description of
armed-force anti-semitism by the Israeli war machine. Arabs are Semites and
have long been the victims of violent racist, hate-filled anti-semitism by
brutal Israeli leaders. (See the “Anti-Semitism
Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).
The Intercept reported that
the three newspapers mentioned anti-semitism against Jews in the U.S. 549 times
compared to 79 mentions of Islamophobia, notwithstanding, far more frequent,
and violent assaults on Muslims and Arabs.
Western medical doctors spending a few weeks in
bombed Gaza hospitals are personal witnesses of scenes beyond any level of
deliberate slaughter they have ever experienced in their courageous service in
troubled areas around the world.
Ambulances, hospitals, and thousands of families –
adults, children, women, and babies alike – huddling in areas outside these
facilities are routinely bombed, and shelled by Israeli planes and tanks, and
targeted by Israeli snipers. Courageous Israeli human rights groups and
refuseniks will detail more of the mayhem over time.
Biden’s chosen humanitarian aid emissary David
Satterfield did not mince words in his remarks during a virtual event hosted by
the American Jewish Committee, “there is an imminent risk of famine for the
majority, if not all, the 2.2. million population of Gaza.” According to
Satterfield, “This is not a point in debate. It is an established fact, which
the United States, its experts, the international community, its experts assess
and believe is real…”
Still, the duplicitous Netanyahu twirling the
hapless Joe Biden around his bloody fingers continues to obstruct the entry of
hundreds of trucks with critical food, water, and medicine, sometimes paid for
by U.S. taxpayers that are lined up daily at the borders of Gaza. Netanyahu
continues to enforce, whenever he can, the genocidal orders by his barbaric
ministers on October 8 – “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. …We are
fighting animals and will act accordingly.”
To the White House and the Netanyahu-dominated U.S.
Congress, violating numerous federal laws, (See the April 19, 2024, Letter
to President Joe Biden), the response is to make the American
taxpayers continue to pay billions of dollars to unconditionally weaponize
further the Israeli death machine in Gaza, right down to 2000-pound bombs that
destroy entire civilian neighborhoods. After all, Gazans are “The Others.”
The streets of America have come alive with valiant
Jewish, Muslim, and Christian protestors joining together and showing up
wherever Biden and other callous politicians speak such as Senator Tom Cotton
(R-AR) who said, “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in
Gaza.”
After 76 years of Congress blocking testimony by
leading Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates, more lawmakers are starting to
listen. But many more in Congress –– are still mired in their clenched-jaw
obeisance to the AIPAC lobby. It is time to stop the rubble ‘bouncing’ over
decomposing bodies in the besieged tiny Gaza Strip.
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