[News] Fake Neutrality: How Western Media Language Misrepresents Palestinians, Shields Israel

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/fake-neutrality-how-western-media-language-misrepresents-palestinians-shields-israel/>
Fake Neutrality: How Western Media Language Misrepresents Palestinians,
Shields IsraelAugust 24, 2022
------------------------------
A vigil near the graves of Palestinian children who were killed in the
latest Israeli war on Gaza. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine
Chronicle)

*By Ramzy Baroud <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ramzy-baroud>*

While US and western mainstream and corporate media remain biased in favor
of Israel, they often behave as if they are a third, neutral party. This is
simply not the case.

Take the New York Times coverage of the latest Israeli war on Gaza as an
example. Its article
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/06/world/middleeast/fighting-israel-gaza.html>
on August 6, “Israel-Gaza Fighting Flares for a Second Day” is the typical
mainstream western reporting on Israel and Palestine, but with a distinct
NYT flavor.

For the uninformed reader, the article succeeds in finding a balanced
language between two equal sides. This misleading moral equivalence is one
of the biggest intellectual blind spots for western journalists. If they do
not outwardly champion Israel’s discourse on ‘security’ and ‘right to
defend itself’, they create false parallels between Palestinians and
Israelis, as if a military occupier and an occupied nation have comparable
rights and responsibilities.

Obviously, this logic does not apply to the Russia-Ukraine war. For NYT and
all mainstream western media, there is no question regarding who the good
guys and the bad guys are in that bloody fight.

‘Palestinian militants’ and ‘terrorists’ have always been the West’s bad
guys.  Per the logic of their media coverage, Israel does not launch
unprovoked wars on Palestinians, and is not an unrepentant military
occupier, or a racist apartheid regime. This language can only be used by
marginal ‘radical’ and ‘leftist’ media, never the mainstream.

The brief introduction of the NYT article
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/06/world/middleeast/fighting-israel-gaza.html>
spoke about the rising death toll, but did not initially mention that the
20 killed Palestinians include children, emphasizing, instead, that Israeli
attacks have killed a ‘militant leader’.

When the six children killed by Israel are revealed in the second
paragraph, the article immediately, and without starting a new sentence,
clarifies that “Israel said some civilian deaths were the result of
militants stashing weapons in residential areas”, and that others were
killed by “misfired’ Palestinian rockets.

On August 16, the Israeli military finally admitted
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-08-16/ty-article/.highlight/after-initial-denial-israeli-officials-admit-5-palestinian-minors-killed-in-gaza-strike/00000182-a2b6-d825-a5a7-aaf6d3320000>
that it was behind the strikes that killed the 5 young Palestinian boys of
Jabaliya. Whether the NYT reported on that or not matters little. The
damage has been done, and that was Israel’s plan from the start.

The title of the BBC story
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62553628> of August 16, ‘Gaza’s
children are used to the death and bombing’, does not immediately name
those responsible for the ‘death and bombing’. Even Israeli military
spokesmen, as we will discover later, would agree to such a statement,
though they will always lay the blame squarely on the ‘Palestinian
terrorists’.

When the story finally reveals that a little girl, Layan, was killed in an
Israeli strike, the language was carefully crafted to lessen the blame on
her Israeli murderers. The girl, we are told, was on her way to the beach
with her family, when their tuk-tuk “passed by a military camp run by the
militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad”, which, “at the exact moment, (…)
was targeted by Israeli fire”. The author says nothing of how she reached
the conclusion that the family was not the target.

One can easily glean from the story that Israel’s intention was not to kill
Layan – and logically, none of the 17 other children murdered during the
three-day war on Gaza. Besides, Israel has, according to the BBC, tried to
save the little girl; alas, “a week of treatment in an Israeli hospital
couldn’t save her life”.

Though Israeli politicians have spoken blatantly about killing Palestinians
children – and, in the case
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes>
of former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, “the Palestinian mothers
who give birth to ‘little snakes’” – the BBC report, and other reports on
the latest war, have failed to mention this. Instead, it quoted Israeli
Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who reportedly said
<https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/event_statement080822> that “the
death of innocent civilians, especially childr is heartbreaking.”
Incidentally, Lapid ordered the latest war on Gaza, which killed
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/12/gaza-death-toll-rises-to-49-including-17-children>
a total of 49 Palestinians.

Even a human-interest story about a murdered Palestinian child somehow
avoided the language that could fault Israel for the gruesome killing of a
little girl. Furthermore, the BBC also labored to present Israel in a
positive light, resorting to quote the occupation army’s statement that it
was “devastated by (Layan’s) death and that of any civilians.”

The NYT and BBC have been selected here not because they are the worst
examples of western media bias, but because they are often cited as
‘liberal’, if not ‘progressive’, media. Their reporting, however,
represents an ongoing crisis in western journalism, especially relating to
Palestine.

Books have been written
<https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745329789/more-bad-news-from-israel/> about
this subject, civil society organizations
<https://www.palestinedeepdive.com/> were formed to hold western media
accountable and numerous editorial board meetings were organized to put
some pressure on western editors, to no avail.

Desperate by the unchanging pro-Israel narratives in western media, some
pro-Palestine human rights advocates often argue that there are greater
margins within Israel’s own mainstream media than in the US, for example.
This, too, is inaccurate
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/on-haaretz-can-settler-colonialism-be-liberal-and-apartheid-be-progressive/>
.

The misnomer
<https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2022-08-17/ty-article/.premium/not-even-the-shoah-can-guarantee-germanys-duty-to-israel-today/00000182-ad44-d1f9-a59e-fd6ce9580000>
of the supposedly more balanced Israeli media is a direct outcome of the
failure to influence western media coverage on Palestine and Israel. The
erroneous notion is often buoyed by the fact that an Israeli newspaper,
like Haaretz, gives marginal spaces to critical voices, like those of
Israeli journalists Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

Israeli propaganda, one of the most powerful and sophisticated in the
world, however, can hardly be balanced by occasional columns written by a
few dissenting journalists.

Additionally, Haaretz is often cited as an example of relatively fair
journalism, simply because the alternatives – Times of Israel, the
Jerusalem Post and other right-wing Israeli media – are exemplary in their
callousness
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/armed-drones-gave-idf-surgical-precision-during-recent-gaza-fighting-officers-say/>,
biased language and misconstruing
<https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-714967> of facts.

The pro-Israel prejudices in western media often spill over to Palestine’s
sympathetic media throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world,
especially those reporting on the news in English and French.

Since many newspapers and online platforms utilize western news agencies,
they, often inadvertently, adopt the same language used in western news
sources, thus depicting
<https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/ceasefire-between-israel-palestinian-militants-fragile-middle-east-coordinator-tells-security-council-urging-all-parties-uphold-truce-safeguard-past-gains>
Palestinian resisters or fighters, as ‘militants’, the Israeli occupation
army as “Israeli Defense Forces” and the Israeli war on Gaza as ‘flare ups’
of violence.

In its totality, this language misinterprets the Palestinian struggle for
freedom as random acts of violence within a protracted ‘conflict’ where
innocent civilians, like Layan, are ‘caught in the crossfire.’

The deadly Israeli wars on Gaza are made possible, not only by western
weapons and political support, but through an endless stream of media
misinformation and misrepresentation. Though Israel has killed thousands of
Palestinian civilians in recent years, western media remains as committed
to defending Israel as if nothing has changed.


*- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé,
is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and
Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research
Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is*
*www.ramzybaroud.net* <http://www.ramzybaroud.net/>
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