Afrasianet - Fatima Musa Karneib - The Western media, through all that it has presented and presents, kills the truth by turning it into a "point of contention" and a "dispute between two parties", although it is good at refining or mitigating what its regimes are committing against vulnerable peoples. How does his partnership with Israel manifest in the genocide?

On October 25, 2023, Joe Biden came out to express his "lack of confidence in the figures (of the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza) announced by the Palestinians." The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip spared no time or effort to remove the alleged US president's doubt, issuing a detailed list containing the names and numbers of the victims.

Despite this, Washington insisted on going ahead with Biden's claims, as the White House communications coordinator, John Kirby, said that the "health" of Gaza is "a Hamas front, and we cannot accept anything issued by the movement, and that includes the so-called Ministry of Health."

The Western media did not delay in adopting the US discourse on the number of martyrs and wounded in the Strip, who were recorded, and targeted by the Israeli-American war of genocide, adhering to Biden's "doubts."

As soon as Kirby's statement was issued, Gaza Health shifted from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, in the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CBS, The Guardian, and other agencies, newspapers, and media networks in the pro-Israel West.

The Washington Post did not adopt the same formula: Gaza's "health" is, for it, "the Ministry of Health in Gaza, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but says that the majority (of victims) are women and children."

In Yedioth Ahronoth, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, Israel Hayom, Haaretz, and all Israeli newspapers and media, the Ministry of Health in Gaza is also the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.

All this came a few days after  the Israeli army complained about "a number of media organizations reporting Hamas' allegations," according to its spokesman, Daniel Hagari, who tried to spread lies about the targeting of the Baptist Hospital with a Palestinian rocket, in order to evade responsibility for the massacre in which about 500 Palestinians were killed and wounded.

This is but an example of the similarity, amounting to identical, narratives that the Western and Israeli media seek to promote and entrench. This congruence, if anything, is indicative of the full partnership between the media in both the West and Israel, which is unequivocally evident during wars in which the aggressed party is anti-Western and seeks liberation from its hegemony.

How does the media reflect the organic interests between Western countries and Israel?

The reason for the partnership between the Western media and the Israeli media is the partnership between the Western countries and the occupying entity. Just as organic and vital interests govern the relationship between Western regimes and its advanced base in the Middle East, structural interests arise between the media in each.

Beyond political and intellectual differences, the major Western media outlets are linked to their state systems, institutions, capital, and multinational corporations, all of which have shaped the current international order and designed it to be hegemony.

In Israel, the birth of this regime and one of its pillars, the media is also linked to the government, especially the military and security establishments, so we find a commitment to "official" narratives and acquiescence to the censorship laws imposed by the "army", for example, so that military analysts are almost unofficial spokespersons for it, and the media becomes a propaganda tool that supports military efforts.

Western and Israeli media also share the intellectual background that defines their agendas. The editorial policies that each pursues branch from one root: colonial needs to political regimes, whose continuation is based on crushing the peoples of other countries opposed to them, or vulnerable peoples, although the media are good at refining or mitigating what the West is committing against the latter.

Selective empathy: those who should cry for

From here, selective sympathy and the categorization of human beings between deserving and undeserving victims can be understood in Western and Israeli media coverage. Coming to our region, this illustrates the treatment of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Arabs in general, as inferior people, who do not deserve sympathy or are treated as owners of a life of value and worth continuing.

Within the framework of this strategy of action, the Western media deliberately muzzles the victims of the current war, which is what it does in wars in general, and strips them of their human characteristics and stories, hand in hand with the Israeli media. This is done based on a criterion that can be summarized as follows: whether or not to belong to a group that supports the West, the United States, and Israel.

On the evening of October 13, Hezbollah launched an attack through pounced marches, targeting a training camp belonging to the Golani Brigade in Binyamina, south of occupied Haifa. The attack killed four Israeli soldiers and wounded about 61, according to the army.

After the occupation army allowed the names of those killed to be published, the British "Sky News" published a story entitled: "Israel announces the names of teenage soldiers who were killed in a Hezbollah march attack, while 23 people died in the bombing of a school in Gaza."

The network published the same news on the X platform with a slight change, saying that "Israel is announcing the names of the four teenagers, victims in a Hezbollah rally attack, while (it was said that) at least 23 people were killed in an attack on a school in central Gaza."

In both cases, the network worked to appeal to the public towards the dead soldiers, because they were teenagers, in exchange for referring only to the number of Palestinians who were martyred in the Israeli massacre, which targeted the "Mufti" school, which shelters displaced people in the Nuseirat camp, and reached 22, including 15 children and a woman, as announced by the government media office in Gaza at the time.

Later, after a wave of criticism and ridicule against Sky News for publishing the news in this way, the network changed the headline, and deleted what it published in "X". Finally, she pointed out that the four dead were soldiers, soldiers only, killed by Hezbollah, but insisted that the killer of Palestinians displaced by the genocidal war remain unknown, so the headline read: "Israel announces the names of the soldiers killed in a Hezbollah march attack, while 23 Palestinians were killed in the bombing of a school in Gaza."

If we take a look at the text, we find that the network maintained its attempt to appeal to the public towards the soldiers, noting that "the army announced that the 4 are 19 years old," remembering their names, while making their image the main image of the news.

When talking about the Israeli massacre, Sky News did not name it either, of course, but only said that "at least 23 people were killed (...)Women and children were reportedly among those who died."

Referring to the occupation, she said only that "Israel has not yet commented, but it repeatedly accuses Hamas leaders of hiding in school buildings, which the group (Hamas) denies." Thus, Sky News echoed Israeli allegations that the resistance in the Gaza Strip used civilians as "human shields" and removed responsibility from Israel for targeting them.

There is no talk above the words of "Israel". and the United States

The promotion of Israeli claims is not limited to repeating them, but appears in part through the deliberate absence of what the resistance declares, in an effort to limit its achievements, conceal the size of the losses it causes, and distort its image. Thus, the Israeli narrative becomes the only available and recognized reference for verifying the results of resistance operations, whose narrative, despite careful documentation, is always in doubt.

In the same Sky News story, the news of "teenage Israeli victims", the network overlooks Hezbollah's strike on a military target, which includes dozens of occupation soldiers and officers, including senior officers, who were preparing to participate in the attack on Lebanon, as  confirmed by the Islamic Resistance Operations Room in Lebanon, an attack based on targeting civilians, journalists, paramedics and vital civilian facilities.

The network did not mention what was revealed by Hezbollah's operations room (published its statement before the news of "Sky News"), regarding the fact that the targeted base is "unknown to many settlers", knowing that the targeting occurred shortly after the resistance warned the settlers of the existence of "army" bases, managing the aggression against Lebanon, inside settlement neighborhoods, in major occupied cities, such as Haifa, Tiberias, Acre and others, which was documented  by the "hoopoe" returning from "Haifa - Carmel".

This is one of many other examples that demonstrate the full adoption of the Israeli narrative in the Western media. Who can forget how the Western media was quick to adopt Israel's lie about its claim that "Hamas raped Israeli women", as the New York Times did, and insist on repeating it, despite all the assurances that refute this claim, some of which were also issued by Israeli media?

Here, it should be noted that the Western media is good at manipulating news materials, working to "maintain a supposed balance and professionalism" by deluding itself into its material the views or statements of various quarters. This can be seen, especially when it comes to the attacks launched by the occupation targeting civilians and displaced persons, for example, claiming to target military leaders in the resistance.

In a lengthy article titled "Hamas built a secret war machine to ensure its survival," published by the Washington Post on October 5, 2024, the newspaper talked about Hamas's survival and continued fighting a year after the Israeli-American war on Gaza. In the article, the newspaper focused on the tunnels, which "surprised Israeli and American intelligence."

The newspaper relied on interviews it conducted "with more than 20 Israeli, American and Arab military and intelligence analysts, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity." It also conducted "interviews with current and former Hamas and PA officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity" as well, fearing what the newspaper said was "reprisals."

Of these "more than 20 protesters," only two are from Hamas: Ghazi Hamad, a member of the political bureau, and Abu Hamza, a commander in Jenin in the West Bank. Although the Washington Post material theoretically included the resistance's point of view, represented by enthusiasm, the main image it used is enough to show its true alignment.

In the caption, the photo, taken from Reuters, The Washington Post said it showed "an Israeli soldier securing a tunnel under Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, in November 2023." Back then, on the 14th of that month, the Israeli army stormed the hospital, under its usual pretext: using it for military reasons by the resistance. Washington has also embraced this claim, with John Kirby claiming that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have "a command and control center, starting from Shifa Hospital."

Hamas, in turn, refuted the Israeli and American lies through a press conference held by its leader, Osama Hamdan, who refuted the Israeli army's claims that weapons had been found in the hospital. Two days after the raid, Hamdan presented evidence of the "fragility and stagnation of the Israeli narrative", proving, through photographs, that the boxes that the occupation army claimed to have found in the hospital were full of weapons, which were in the hands of the soldiers during the raid.

Hamdan also pointed out that the army naively displayed the weapons, as they appeared in the photos wrapped in its own blankets, and then re-transferred them to another cabinet, to display them again in order and order. The other scandal emerged through the display of a computer, supposedly belonging to the Qassam Brigades, with a picture of a female soldier on its screen. After the occupation discovered this, he deleted it from its pages on social media platforms, only to re-display it after covering the screen!

Accordingly, the Washington Post's adoption of such an image can be seen as ignoring the overwhelming evidence provided by Hamas and clinging to the Israeli-American narrative that justified the storming of the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, which at the time housed some 50,000 displaced people.  

Between those who say that Israel controls the Western media in a certain way, and those who assert that the Western media is part of the Western hegemonic system that shares with the occupation, there is one fact, which is that the media track in the West, no matter how its vocabulary changes, is subject to the control of the long-term goals of this system.

When the Israeli occupation targeted the Baptist Hospital and accused the Palestinian resistance of doing so, most Western media outlets came out to publish what Israel had to say, along with what the "other side" had to say, but at the same time it opened the air for hours to the spokesmen of the occupation army.

If the Israeli occupation systematically kills journalists in order to prevent the truth from appearing, the Western media, through all that it has presented and presents, kills the truth itself by turning it into a "point of contention" and a "dispute between two parties."