Afrasianet - There is much to be stunning about the way the media and officials in the West deal with what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the nature of the "solutions" that are being proposed to this "conflict," such as the possibility of "transferring" Palestinians to neighboring Arab countries. A solution that seems very easy, but it is based on the premise that the land is worthless, simply because we are all Arabs, and it is all desert, exactly as it appears in the movies, so there is no problem for Palestinians to live in Syria, Egypt, Iraq or in The diaspora, or even in the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of kilometers from Palestine, according to some of the "proposals" now being discussed at the highest level of government in the occupying power, all are backward and overcrowded third world countries accustomed to war, and a few million additional refugees will make little difference (1) (2) (3).
All of this is not surprising, of course, but shocking at the same time. We know that the phrase is confusing, but Owen Jones, an English journalist and writer for the Guardian, could not find a better way to describe the current situation; he knew that there was some degree of racism in his country's media coverage – and the Western media in general – of various events in the Middle East and Africa, but he did not imagine that it would manifest itself so clearly in 2024, after the West made supposedly strides in the path of human rights. and freedoms (4) (5) (6). This contradiction faced by Owen Jones, and others like him, who still retain their humanity in this crazed Western cultural and political climate, is in fact never a contradiction, simply because Western civilization has virtually never voluntarily made "great leaps in the course of human rights and freedoms," but has taken away those rights and freedoms from them after decades and centuries of popular struggle of oppressed minorities.
This is a fact that everyone knows, but Western civilization is ashamed to admit it; it was not "granted" but "forced" and, after being forced, spent the following decades falsifying the reality of this conflict, portraying the change in racial mood as a voluntary decision stemming from human sense. "Broad leaps" suggest that the whole matter was a conscious choice, preceded by an admission of error and serious attempts to purify and atone for centuries of crimes, direct enslavement and so on, when in fact it was like a forced renunciation of what the leaders of that civilization saw as an inherent right by virtue of race, religion or material production.
This foundational confusion is what got Jones and his ilk honest people who believed in this propaganda into the current contradiction, and hit him with the "unsurprising shock" as he put it, and only when this deliberate confusion becomes clear, it becomes clear that the current brutal racist pattern against the Palestinians is only an extension of the original "civilized" line, and the only difference here is that there is no reason – yet – for the leaders of civilization itself to compromise this time.
Unmentioned killing
This introduction is very important to explain the phenomenon under study and understand its background; hundreds of these journalists, reporters and broadcasters in the main Western media networks, who are overflowing with racism, ignorance and laziness towards Palestinians and others, did not suddenly exist out of nowhere, did not create exceptional emergency requirements, but only found an opportunity to reveal what is inside them, and local Western laws do not allow it to be practiced against minorities in their countries, at least with such clarity and crudeness.
From here came the many attempts to document the issue, and to turn the verbal arguments sent that stray in the labyrinths of linguistic Zionists into solid numbers that are difficult to deny or argue with, and the first of these recorded attempts came from "Holly Jackson", a graduate student in computer science at the University of "Berkeley" in "California", who deliberately recorded the times that the Palestinian and Israeli "dead" were mentioned by three major American newspapers, the "New York Times". And the "Washington Post" and "The Wall Street Journal" between October 7-22, 2023, comparing them to the actual number of dead according to United Nations records, and of course what I found was remarkable (7).
Even after the first week, when the Palestinian death toll exceeded that declared by Israel, the number of mentions remained less, which is what Mona Shalabi, an English journalist of Iraqi origin, a writer for the English and other Guardian, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, built the world's highest journalism awards, and applied it to the BBC's coverage. In particular, the British in a larger period, included live television coverage and others until the second of December, to obtain similar results (8) (9).
(Al Jazeera)
This separation from reality, which answered the question of "quantity", prompted "Mona" to search for the question of "quality" as well, so she began to study the language of description used and its words, and discovered that even with the mention of Palestinian deaths times that are not commensurate with their number at all, BBC journalists often use anonymous descriptions while covering their news, such as "people" or "people" or even without mentioning the beginner in the first place, such as "150 died today in Gaza as a result of Israeli military operations", while Israelis were killed with descriptions of their family and social relationships such as "mother", "grandmother", "friend", "brother", "son" and "granddaughter" (8).
The witness here, of course, is the dehumanization of the Palestinians by ignoring them, as if these "people" or "people" were not brothers, grandchildren, mothers, grandparents, grandmothers, husbands and wives, and therefore did not leave behind orphans, bereaved or widows, and their killing did not affect their family and social network, and therefore it is difficult for the viewer/reader/listener to form a human connection with their condition, and to sympathize with their oppressors, as if they came from nowhere and returned to it.
What Mona also discovered is what we think you noticed on your own in the last phrase, which is that a Palestinian usually "dies," "perishes," or "dies" in BBC coverage, unlike an Israeli who often "kills," "slaughters" or "mutilates his corpse," as if natural disasters include American-made bombs as well, in which Palestinians "die" as people die in earthquakes, hurricanes and floods.
(Al Jazeera)
All these methods work to address the unconscious by invoking mental images associated with certain words, and they do not work with any Arab who watches the genocide every day and realizes its vocabulary and limbs, but it is very useful with non-Arabs who recognize these vocabulary and limbs for the first time, and of course this deliberate ignorance does not reflect then on the victim only, but on the killer as well, because it simply exonerates him; "Murder" requires the presence of a perpetrator and a victim, while "death" is the fate of everyone, even if the world is empty. of the killers.
"Not Israelis"
Adam Johnson and Osman Ali, journalists for The Intercept, picked up the thread of blatant racism in Western media coverage, and published an extensive report on January 9 that relies on the same statistical analysis methods of the speech of three major American newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times between October 7 and November 25, 2023, and the results were more racist than all of the above, and by a noticeable margin (10).
The themes are the same: Palestinian fatalities are not mentioned in any logical proportion, and only Israelis are subjected to "slaughter" or "slaughter", but the differences in numbers become clearer as the time range of coverage expands.
(Al Jazeera)
The most painful and racist point in the Johnson & Ali report was that this brutal media treatment, so to speak, extended to children, women and journalists, the most sympathetic groups usually among viewers, listeners and readers.
Israeli children are children, of course, while Palestinian children are "people under the age of 18" or "minors" (Minors); in a diabolical attempt to circumvent the fact that they – believe it or not – are indeed children, and the first term – "people under the age of eighteen" – is an extension of the same racist language used by Arthur Balfour in his hateful declaration almost a hundred years ago, when he described the Palestinian Arab majority in historic Palestine as "non-Jewish minorities" (10) (11).(12)
Unfortunately, the editors of the three American newspapers were unable to repeat the matter with women as "not men", but it is worth noting that the second term "minors" is mainly a legal English term, usually used with perpetrators and accused of crimes in the American judicial system, and the hint here is self-explanatory.
(Al Jazeera)
In an interview with Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, a former PA activist and spokesperson for the Madrid peace talks, Owen Jones drew attention to this well-established methodology in Western media and political discourse, which summarizes the historical treatment of Palestinians with painful genius, as they are simply "not Israelis" (13).
This is all that the majority of the Western media need to unleash its racism, which is proven by experience in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Libya, or any country whose people's problem is that they are not Westerners or Israelis, and this seems to be enough to turn them into "people" and "people", and to consider their children as "minors" and reduce them to soulless numbers and tables that do not arouse any sympathy or build human connections, in preparation for denying their truth and withholding it from the world.
These are the solid solid abstract truths, and the problem with solid solid abstract truths is that we spend our lives trying to grasp them, and then we get paralyzed once we succeed. We are busy planning the journey to the truth, imagining that the easiest thing is the moment of arrival, and this is what makes it, paradoxically, the most difficult of all.
We are facing nations that have bombs weighing a ton each, and whose media, politicians and armies despise us because we are not Israelis. This is the solid, solid, abstract truth, which exchanges silent and rigid glances with a face of rock, which does not care about our feelings, perceptions and prejudices, does not shake our horror at the horror of reality, is not deceived by our attempts to embellish or deny it, and perhaps it is the right time to start thinking about our next step.
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Sources:
1- Talk TV anchor Julia Hartley-Brewer questions whether ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is the solution – Novara Media
2- Israel in talks with the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries over plans for Palestinian "migration" in the aftermath of the war – Times of Israel
3- Congo denies engaging in talks with Israel on its willingness to take in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees – Times of Israel
4- BBC racism against Gaza exposed in shocking study – Owen Jones
5- Media racism exposed in new studies – Owen Jones
6- Joe Biden shows nauseating contempt for Palestinian souls – Owen Jones
7- Study | Media bias for Israel in major American newspapers | Holly Jackson – Github
8- Study | BBC bias in favor of Israel in its coverage of the war on Gaza | Mona Shalaby – Github
9- Mona Shalaby – The Guardian
10- Coverage of the Gaza war in The New York Times and other major American newspapers that clearly sided with Israel, as analysis shows – The Intercept
11- Documenting Western Media Bias against Palestinians between October 7 and November 7 – The Column
12- A century later, Balfour Media Explanation – Al Jazeera
13- Palestinian icon exposes Western complicity in Palestinians – Owen Jones
Source : Al Jazeera