[News] How the corporate media helped fuel Israel’s genocide in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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How the corporate media helped fuel Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Michael Arria
April 24, 2026
------------------------------

In his new book, *How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the
Destruction of Gaza
<https://www.plutobooks.com/product/how-to-sell-a-genocide/>*, media critic
Adam Johnson provides a painstakingly detailed indictment of the Fourth
Estate, showing how cable shows, newspapers, and online news sites helped
build support for the mass killing of Palestinians.

*Mondoweiss* U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Johnson about his
study, his conclusions, and the shifting public rhetoric on Israel.

All royalties from Johnson’s book will be donated to the Middle East
Children’s Alliance <https://www.mecaforpeace.org/>.

*Mondoweiss:* *You talk about the talk about the “ISIS-ification” of Hamas
after October 7 and how the American public was primed for revenge by the
media in many ways. Can you talk about how they were covered? Was it simply
a retread of the kind of stuff we saw during the “War on Terror” or were
there new elements?*

Adam Johnson: There definitely was a real plug and play aspect to it, so it
was similar to what we saw after 9/11, references to Western civilization.
We actually counted the amount of times [the media] used the term
civilization and in contrast to Hamas. The idea of a barbaric Asiatic
horde. We quantified and counted how many times words like “savage” and
“barbaric” were used, which obviously have racial connotations, but for
some reason get past the liberal, anti-racism censors.

So, there was a plug and play aspect to it. In the first few weeks, the
Israeli government paid for a campaign to say Hamas is ISIS. #HamasisISIS,
they paid for it on Twitter and on other social media. This was used by
everyone from Emmanuel Macron to Lloyd Austin to Netanyahu to Joe Biden
because it called upon a very specific mode of nihilistic jihadist
violence.

Now, of course, ISIS was a foreign-funded mercenary group that had no
organic support in the countries and territories it conquered and, of
course, was it was largely a sectarian death squad. Hamas, of course, is
not that, and indeed is supported by Shia governments and itself is Sunni.
In fact, it goes to war quite frequently with ISIS, especially these
ISIS-linked gangs that are backed and funded by Israel and the United
States within Gaza.

So the comparison is obviously absurd, but they’re not really dealing with
the most sophisticated analysis here, right? They’re attempting to appeal
to the lizard brain American public by calling on racist tropes and cliches
and, of course, the beheaded babies being being the first and most, I
think, consequential one. This idea that [Hamas] would gratuitously behead
40 babies. Obviously, you only do that if you’re a sadistic, nihilistic,
antisemitic, whatever.
<https://www.plutobooks.com/product/how-to-sell-a-genocide/>

Of course, that was bullshit. Everyone who knew anything about Hamas knew
it was bullshit. It wasn’t their MO, had never been their MO before, but
this was passed along by everyone from CNN to NBC reporters to Media
Matters to a lot of liberal center-left media. President Biden himself said
he saw pictures of it, which obviously he couldn’t have because it’s not
something that ever happened.

It was debunked, but the damage was already done. The public was already
primed for revenge. This early attempt at atrocity propaganda, and these
lurid tabloid claims of hyper-gratuitous violence, were essential to really
removing the idea of a ceasefire, which necessarily requires Hamas to
remain, if not in power, an armed force within Gaza, from the realm of of
political seriousness, as I detail in the book.

This was affirmed by everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Ro Khanna to Bernie
Sanders, who went on CNN and CBS in November and December of 2023,
respectively, and said you can’t have a ceasefire with someone like Hamas
who wishes to destroy Israel. Never mind that the government in Israel
wishes to destroy Palestine and Palestinians quite explicitly in their
charter.

So this kind of moral preening became the way in which you delegitimized
calls for a ceasefire, again, in this kind of faux universalist, faux
liberal language. This weird thing developed, where calls for a ceasefire
became per se a moral endorsement of Hamas, but again, Palestinian civil
society calling for a ceasefire is not a moral endorsement of Israel.

This was a totally new and ad hoc talking point that sort of just came and
went, but it was all about buying time for Israel to change the so-called
facts on the ground and create the conditions and the axioms of genocide
such that by the time we really did begin to normalize the concept of a
ceasefire, especially after the Biden White House redefined it in February
and March of 2024, the basic axioms of genocide were already in place. It
was too late because really the intervention to stop the genocide could
have happened between October to December 2023.

Once that time came and went, thanks largely to to liberal center-left
media, defending and deflecting the left-wing criticism or anti-genocide
criticism for the White House, the genocide was a *fait accompli*. It was
pretty much already decided because the so-called war on Hamas, or the goal
to “eliminate Hamas,” was already tattooed into the liberal psyche as
something that was both possible and morally defensible, despite the fact
that it was obviously neither.

[Former Secretary of State Antony] Blinken himself told Netanyahu behind
closed doors on January 16th, 2024, according to Andrea Mitchell at NBC
News, that defeating Hamas was militarily was impossible, which is
obviously true for anyone who knows anything about anti-colonial resistance.

Whatever one thinks of Hamas is irrelevant. They still have a a meaningful
amount of support within Palestinian society. They are, of course, not
alien to Palestinian society. They are Palestinian themselves. The people
who make up Hamas and Hamas leadership are largely orphans of of previous
Israeli bombings, and they themselves are the descendants of those
ethnically cleansed from parts of Israel.

So, this idea that they were this exogenous kind of ISIS-like entity was
not something that anyone who understood Gaza note knew to be true, but it
became this kind of go-to media cliche, even so-called progressive foreign
policy leaders like Matt Duss and Center for International Policy (CIP)
made the argument that Israel had a right to sort of target Hamas, which
is, of course, absurd and was never something that was ever going to happen
in any meaningful sense, because the fundamental grievances are secular.

They’re fundamentally political. The solution was and remains a
fundamentally secular and political issue. This wasn’t the sectarian
conflict that you that it was often portrayed to be, despite, of course,
the Islamist flavor of Hamas, which of course is is real and it exists, but
it’s not ISIS, right? It’s not this kind of nihilistic death cult backed by
Emirati or Saudi money. It is its own independent and resistance movement
with organic support within the Palestinian society, although, of course,
it’s not uniform.

*I wanted to talk about this trope that anyone who has followed these
issues has seen implemented many times. We saw it repeatedly with Biden and
now we see the media do it with Trump. *

*You write about “Helpless Biden,” “Frustrated Biden.” and “fuming, deeply
concerned” Biden. It’s this idea that the most powerful person in the
world, a guy who is leading a government that’s giving Israel weapons, is
growing upset with Israel. They’re always allegedly nearing a breaking
point with Netanyahu.*

*Can you talk a little bit about that trope, how it gets implemented and
why and what kind of what you make of it?*

The liberal establishment and the White House itself very quickly stopped
defending the “war” on principle. It was indefensible.

So, they quickly realized that they needed to maintain the arms and the
military support and intelligence support, but needed to look like they
were gesturing towards something like a ceasefire or proto-ceasefire to get
human rights groups, you know their left wing flank, anti-genocide
protesters, and of course, foreign leaders who increasingly were disgusted
by what they were seeing, off their back.

So a typical kind of liberal, or liberal imperialist framework, that dates
back to the British Empire is this idea of what I refer to as third
partying, which is to [frame] the U.S., not as an active participant in a
genocide, which they manifestly were, but a humanitarian third party
attempting to intervene and broker some kind of so-called ceasefire.

When the Uncommitted Movement developed in February of 2024, and was
looking to pressure Biden in these kind of pro forma primaries,
specifically in Michigan, they realized they had a major PR problem on
their hand, and they could not defend the “war” as such. So what they did
is that they pivoted to this idea that, oh, they were secretly working to
end it, but it was this process that was going to go on indefinitely.

Of course, it ended up going on for almost a year. The ceasefire theater,
the ceasefire performance was a way to distance Biden from the genocide he
was supporting, while feigning anger and disappointment publicly.

This had antecedents, specifically around Saudi Arabia, when [Trump] was
leveling Yemen in 2020. Biden came into office, he said he was going to
make Saudi Arabia a pariah. Then, of course, he turned around and shipped
them half a billion dollars in weapons. He needed to look like he was very
concerned and hand-wringing over human rights while just keeping it
business as usual.

So you have a system where a bunch of Biden aides anonymously, for the most
part, leak these stories about how angry he is behind closed doors. This
happened pretty much right away. In November of 2023 you had these angry
Biden stories that were leaked to the press. I did an analysis of the
sourcing for these. 92% or 93% were anonymous Biden aides, or they were
Aaron David Miller, whose job was to come along and talk about how helpless
and angry Biden was.

This was something that got repeated again and again. *NBC News* from
November of 2023: “The gap between Biden administration and Netanyahu
government over Gaza future is widening.” So here we have it widening. *CNN*
from December of 2023: there’s “unprecedented tensions between White House
and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel.”
Barak Ravid of *Axios*, January of 2024: “Biden running out of patience
with Bibi as Gaza hits war as Gaza war hits 100 days.” *Washington Post*
February of 2024: “Biden moving closer than ever to breach with Netanyahu
over war in Gaza.”

So this is what I call the asymptotic break with Netanyahu that is always
about to happen, but never happens. Probably the funniest one was from
*Politico* in March of 2024: From ‘I love you’ to ‘asshole’, How Joe Biden
gave up on Bibi after decades of building a close personal friendship with
Netanyahu. “Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli prime minister. Now he’s
hitting him hard and it may be working.”

*New York Times*, May of 2024: “Biden’s clash with Netanyahu over Gaza.
Here’s Barak Ravid again: White House cancels meeting and scolds Netanyahu
in protest over video.” That one is referencing one of their myriad war
crimes caught on video.

So you would think that after literally the hundredth version of this
article is published, where there’s some alleged asymptotic break with
Netanyahu, some supposed anger, there’s usually a phone call that they know
is recorded. You would think the average skeptical editor, well, Wait a
second. We’ve done this article now 100 times. It’s been nine months, eight
months, whatever it is. Why are we still doing this asymptotic break that
never happens? There’s never any withdrawal of actual weapons. There’s
never any policy change. It’s just rhetoric and supposed kind of palace
entry and theory of mind reporting without any, again, material shift.

I compare it to the difference between a sketch and a plot. A plot moves
forward. A plot has beats, characters develop. The rabbit’s foot goes from
you know Istanbul to Prague, right? Something happens. Whereas a sketch is
the same three or four gags with slight variations.

This was fundamentally a sketch. It was not a plot. Nothing ever happened.
It was the same story written over and over again, often by the same
journalists. The most egregious example is [the *New York Times’s* ] Peter
Baker, who wrote dozens of these articles. He writes an article basically
saying that Biden’s pressure on Netanyahu is working because Israel has
delayed its Rafah invasion. Then two days after that article comes out,
Israel invades Rafah, kills thousands of people and levels a city of
850,000.

So in retrospect, we look at that article about Biden’s anger and pressure
on Netanyahu working. Was that a genuine reflection of a reality or was it
a way for the Biden White House to wash its hands of an invasion they knew
was about to happen? It’s very clear, I think, what it is. It’s a public
relations trope to distance the White House from the carnage that it is
manifestly funding, arming and supporting because they knew it was
unpopular, they knew it was unpopular with their base, and they knew it’s
just indefensible, and they knew that the people who occupy the Biden White
House are thinking one thing and one thing only, which is, I cannot be
tainted with this genocide. I need to distance myself from it because later
on, when I’m looking for work at Center for American Progress or liberal
think tanks or other administrations, I can say, we were secretly working
on a ceasefire.

The whole premise is, of course, absurd. Israeli officials have since said
that Biden never asked for a ceasefire. They’ve confirmed that verbatim. So
this was an entirely alternate reality designed for liberal and liberal
consumption so people could point to it say, “Look, he’s working on a
ceasefire” It’s like the peace process. It’s this thing you can point to.

The corollary to this was the “Helpless Biden.” Even if he wanted to, he
couldn’t change it because this or that excuse, which I call, moats of
rationalization. There’s always this thing that’s imposed on him by an
outside mysterious geopolitical dark matter. Oftentimes, it does veer into
antisemitism because it’s this idea that, oh, he can’t take away weapons
because then AIPAC will punish them. Wait, he’s the most powerful person in
the world. Why not? Or you hear that Netanyahu has manipulated him. This
pictures [Biden] as a doddering old fool being manipulated by the oriental
wiles of Netanyahu, whose charm and and manipulation is unmatched. You can
just manipulate every president.

However, the Occam’s razor answer is that they both agree on the genocide,
but politically it’s so toxic they have to create an alternate reality
where there’s this alleged ceasefire negotiations that, again, never go
anywhere because they’re fake and they’re not real. Egyptian mediators
basically said as much in late 2024. They said this is for public
consumption in the United States. These are not real negotiations. To the
extent to which there were some real negotiations, it was over a temporary
pause for a week or two for captive exchanges, but never a lasting
ceasefire. That was never on the table, something since affirmed by Israeli
officials who were in the room, because there was never any credible threat
of withdrawing support.

Without that credible threat..then how sincere are you? The analogy I use
is what if [Los Angeles Dodgers Manager] Dave Roberts before Game 7 of the
World Series. If he says, I’m going bench Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts,
Freddie Freeman and the entire starting lineup, and out our AAA team, but
don’t worry, I really want to win the World Series. If he had said that
people would commit him to an insane asylum. You would think he had lost
it. Meanwhile, Biden can say, I’m forfeiting my entire leverage, which is
military support and weapons, but don’t worry, I secretly want a ceasefire.

Well, clearly you don’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have you wouldn’t have
benched Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Shohei Ohtani. There was this
bizarre alternate universe where there was a fake ceasefire. I’m just some
guy on Twitter and in 2024, I wrote a piece in *The Nation
<https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-redefines-cease-fire-gaza/>*
saying, the supposed ceasefire negotiations are fake. They’re never going
to go anywhere. Then cut to almost a year later and it takes Trump coming
into office to impose a temporary pause, which, of course, was later later
dissolved.

What prophetic skills did I have? I had none, zero. I just could read the
actual things they were saying, which were nonsensical. This ceasefire
theater that we dragged on and on and on for months, these palace intrigue
stories about how they were working really hard on it. If Dave Roberts
brought in the AAA team, I’m sure they would genuinely be working really
hard to to win the World Series. However, the whole premise where you take
out your leverage means any discussion or any argument after that is
utterly meaningless.

This was something that liberal and center-left media indulged constantly.
CNN, MSNBC, just thousands of articles about these ceasefire talks that
were all Potemkin ceasefire. They were all theater because their
fundamental premise made no sense.

Then from that premise, you had basically what was just kayfabe. It was
theater. It wasn’t real.

*In addition to print media and online media, you also cover some of the
cable news shows and morning talk shows. This is a place where people a lot
of people get information, actually. You center in on Morning Joe, which is
a popular show. We were talking about the “War on Terror” earlier and
during that time, cable shows almost never had antiwar voices on, or actual
Iraqis. By the same token, I imagine very few Palestinians have actually
been invited on these shows. What did you see when you took a deeper look
at these programs?*

That was kind of agenda setting, because Biden’s favorite show was
apparently *Morning Joe*, which he watched obsessively. Of course, he
didn’t need *Morning Joe* to be a glib Zionist and a racist, but it
certainly didn’t help.

*Morning Joe*, in the year of study we did, had not a single Palestinian
guest. Meanwhile, it had a revolving door of Israeli officials, generals,
and Zionist cry bullies like [Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan
Greenblatt, who was apparently, from what I can perceive, sleeping in the
green room at MSNBC. He was there all the time. [Senator] Adam Schiff and
him, I guess, just have a bunker there like in the Navy.

These shows, in the two years that I studied from October of 2023 to
October of 2025, and it’s probably still the case, but I haven’t done a
recent study in the last six months, did not feature a single Palestinian
guest with one exception. That was CBS Face the Nation on November 7th,
2023. They had Palestinian ambassador from the UK on for six minutes or
maybe seven minutes, and that was it.

So, *Meet the Press*, *This Week* with George Stephanopoulos and CNN’s *State
of the Union *with Dana Bash and Jake Tapper did not feature a single
Palestinian guest in the first two years of the genocide, and I don’t think
have yet today.

That’s pretty extraordinary, especially when you count the dozens of
Israeli officials and, of course, dozens more U.S. officials. You know,
Tony Blinken,
[Former Biden Principal Deputy National Security Adviser] Jon Finer,
[former Spokesperson for the United States Department of State] John Kirby
basically also lived in those respective green rooms and nothing from any
Palestinians.

I suspect the reason why is less so because there wasn’t some enterprising
producer who didn’t think about it. I think that they had a very hard time
finding a native informant with any credibility within the world of of
Palestine, like Palestinian civic society or diaspora. It’s not like other
countries the U.S. tries to destroy where you have like 10% of the elite
you can kind of peel off to go in there and spout off the liberal Zionist
lines.

For a while, they tried to bring in [Palestinian activist and attorney]
Noura Erakat, who did the forward for my book and is a very well-respected
legal scholar. She wouldn’t play ball. She went on CBS and ABC and they
would try to ask her, “do you condemn Hamas?” questions. She would reject
the premise and go on about war crimes. They deleted it from the internet
and never called her back. It’s detailed in my book and detailed in her
forward actually.

So, they had a hard time finding native informant Palestinians to come on
and spew the kind of liberal Zionist clap trap that’s the acceptable
discourse. [*Atlantic* editor] Jeffrey Goldberg did manage to pull a few
out of obscurity from NATO funded think tanks, but, really, it’s basically
three guys. They have no connection to Palestinian civil society and they
have no respect within that world because, again, the fundamental premises
of liberal Zionism is inherently dehumanizing. You’re effectively asking
Palestinians to co-sign their own their own erasure from society. There’s
no market for it, so you just ignore Palestinians. And to the extent to
which you have the other side, you bring on [former Executive Director of
the UN World Food Program] Cindy McCain to appeal to their humanity and
that’s it.

[The double standard] is also reflected in the output of how Palestinians
are spoken about versus how Israelis are spoken about, which I detail with
a lot of data. With Israeli deaths, their use of emotive terms versus
Palestinian deaths, which are in a passive voice and don’t have emotive
terms and are spoken very clinically and in very anodyne terms. This is
reflected both on cable news and print.

*We saw these anti-genocide protests across college campuses during the
genocide and you write about how these were covered by the media. We saw
these show trials with these university presidents, who were basically
pushed to resign over this alleged boom in antisemitism on their campuses.
A lot of your chapter on this is about how anti-Zionism and antisemitism
are openly conflated by the media. Talk about the overall coverage of those
protests and the way in which mainstream media framed the debate and the
battle on campuses.*

Every single media outlet had to have their very serious antisemitism on
campus trend piece. If you actually go through the [antisemitic] examples
they cite, as we did in excruciating detail, we went through five of the
major stories, NBC News, CNN, etc. The vast majority of cases are just
people doing open pro-Israel advocacy being counter-protested or, in some
cases, attacked. Now, that isn’t to say attacking people is justified, but
they were not attacked or accosted or confronted because they were “Jewish
students.”

They were accosted or approached or yelled at or counter protested because
they were engaging in open Zionist political activity, oftentimes
recruiting for the IDF. Again, all while human rights groups already had
consensus that this was a genocide.

So this constant smol bean “Jewish students” framing for people engaged in
open Zionist activity, oftentimes on the payroll of pro-Israel
organizations and lobbying groups, was really how you’ve pumped up these
numbers and inflated this so-called threat. Now, there was there was a
handful of genuine antisemitic incidents where people on college campuses
were attacked because they were visibly Jewish, but they were not attacked
by pro-Palestine students. These were unrelated or kind of vigilante. They
had no connection to any of these pro-Palestine organizations, no
connection to any of the pro-Palestine groups or Jewish Voice for Peace or
any of these groups.

There was this constant conflation, innuendo, and smearing of campus
protests as a hotbed of [antisemitism] that had zero empirical basis and,
of course, many of these groups were paid to go try to incite responses and
to try to play up this victim narrative. These pro-Israel vigilantes on
campuses, like for example, at UCLA and Columbia, sprayed chemical agents
or attacked people with batons, but these attacks were, of course, never
framed as anti-Palestinian racism or anti-Muslim bias or Islamophobia. They
were framed in entirely secular terms. Meanwhile, almost all pro-Palestine
activity was framed in the sectarian discourse as attacks on Jewish
students.

Of course they also erased and removed from the conversation the meaningful
Jewish leadership in these campus campus protests. They erased and removed
the participation of Jewish groups and religious and cultural celebrations
at these at these campus protests. They framed it purely as Jewish students
versus proto-Hamas, proto-pogroms. Then the ADL would step in and present
themselves as the arbiter of of the platonic Jewish voice, [even though] if
you look at the opinions of Jewish Americans under the age of 25 on college
campuses, the majority of them believe that Israel is committing genocide.

So even the ADL’s own self-professed, self-appointed representation of this
platonic Jewish student is not reflected in polling. This constant
sectarian framing, this mopey framing, this disingenuous conflation of
Zionism with Jewish culture and ethnic and religious life was baked into
the cake of how these fake antisemitism panics manifested.

Throw that on top of the fact that you had these show trials where where
high profile university presidents were were dragged in front of Congress
by Republicans and asked these dopey, racist leading questions. “Do you
condemn, globalize the intifada?” They would say, well, no, because that’s
just an Arabic term that means uprising. And then the headline became
“President refuses to to condemn calls for genocide on Jewish students.”
The implication being that there was a call for a genocide on Jewish
students. Of course there wasn’t. There was *zero *calls for genocide of
Jewish students. It was a pure hypothetical about an Arabic term that they
misrepresented and demagogued based on reptile-brain ignorance about what
the word intifada means.

This led to a full-blown moral panic and this really culminated in panic
around [former Harvard University president] Claudine Gay in December 2023
and January 2024. You had this meta-scandal with her plagiarism. We compare
the coverage to the coverage of the killing of Hind Rajab, the
five-year-old in Gaza who was mowed down along with her family by Israeli
troops. It was an act of of just abject horror that went viral around the
globe, and could have been a culminating moment of galvanizing against the
genocide.

This is completely completely ignored in the U.S. media. It doesn’t make
the front page of the *New York Times* once. It isn’t mentioned on MSNBC in
the one month after her murder once. It’s mentioned on CNN twice in two
segments and they’re throwaway segments in the middle of the day that no
one really notices or pays much attention to.

Meanwhile, you have the Claudine Gay “scandal” which completely consumes
media. What’s important to understand is that it’s a completely meaningless
story. It has no inherent news value whatsoever at all. It’s just a
manufactured scandal about someone who may, or may not, have committed
plagiarism 20 years prior, but they needed a scalp. They needed someone to
be disciplined and punished to send a message, not only for university
administrators to crack down on protesters, but for protesters, saying,
we’re gonna ruin your life and we’re gonna call you an antisemite and
that’s gonna stick with you for the rest of your life.

I’ll give you an example. This is a one month study for after the
respective Claudine Gay and Hind Rajab stories broke. Claudine Gay was
mentioned in the *New York Times* 79 times versus two mentions of Hind
Rajab. *Washington Post* had Claudine Gay mentioned 23 time versus two for
Hind Rajab. AP was was eight versus one. *Politico* is 57 mentions of Gay
versus zero mentions of Hind Rajab. CNN had 409 mentions on air of Claudine
Gay and 29 mentions of Hind Rajab. MSNBC had 210 mentions of Gay versus
zero Hind Rajab.

What I assert in the book is, objectively the Hind Rajab story is more
important than whether or not Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, may or
may not have committed plagiarism/not condemned this expression that nobody
said. This is totally all smoke, no fire. It’s a Jeremy Corbyn-esque
antisemitism scandal where, if you look at the details, you can’t even
remember where it started. It’s just this thing that metastasizes and has
no basis in reality.

I think that’s a huge indictment. By the way, that same month where [Gay’s
scandal was covered so much] we also compared it to child deaths because
that month was the highest month of child deaths. It was roughly 3,000. At
the same time, there 95 articles in the survey of mainstream media articles
we covered, *Washington Post, New York Times, Axios*, etc. There were 95
articles about Claudine Gay and only six focusing on child deaths, which
again, there were 3,000 child deaths during that survey period..

It’s simply not relevant. It gets a passing mention. You get maybe one
article here and there. But meanwhile, we have this constant hysteric
nonstop centering of this made-up Claudine Gay scandal, which was
predicated on, of course, just disciplining university administrators to
crack down on on students. It’s a very it’s a very efficient way of doing
it because by bringing them up in front of the cameras in Congress and
calling them all antisemites, they effectively have to adopt these rules to
“prevent antisemitism.” You look at the rules and it’s just cracking down
on campus protests, free speech, and pro-Palestine activity and smearing
them all as antisemites.

*I wanted to bring this to current day. We talked about the Iraq War, where
there was this infamously terrible reporting from the mainstream media.
Having said that, the war was a lot more popular among the US population
than Trump’s bombing of Iran has been. By the same token, as you know,
we’ve seen dozens and dozens of polls showing that the U.S. population has
soured on Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship. This was true of
Democrats for a while, but the genocide has just pushed it to an
unprecedented level. I think the last poll I cited in a story was an NBC
News one showing that only 13% of Democrats view Israel positively. Israel
could obviously count on Republican voters for a long time, but even that
seems to be shifting, at least among young Republicans and we see some
dissent in Trump’s base even.*

*In terms of media coverage, do you think this will change anything? It’s
been interesting to see you know people like Rahm Emanuel fluctuate their
public position…*

Well, the J Street cutoff military aid thing is a Netanyahu and Lindsey
Graham talking point.

*Yes, exactly. That’s the new thing.*

It’s quite clever.

*This idea that Israel should pay for its own genocide is the big stance
now. But it still represents a rhetorical shift, so these people certainly
see the writing on the wall.*

It certainly signals something, right?

*Yes, it signals something.*

It signals a lack of popularity. I mean, the point of the liberal media
propagandizing against Palestinians and the genocide was to buy time, you
can’t control people seeing videos and the and the realities of a genocide.
You can’t kill 80,000 people and hide it. And you can’t really justify it
or explain it because we’re so numb to the “War on Terror” claptrap. It
doesn’t really have the same impact anymore. But the goal is to buy time
and that’s why so much of the propaganda detail is actually not really on
substance. It’s on sophistry and non sequitur and helplessness. It’s this
feigned helplessness.

Liberals would always prefer to be incompetent rather than evil. You see
this when people would say, “I don’t understand why Biden is not reining in
Netanyahu. Doesn’t he know he looks weak?” They don’t care. They want to
look weak because they avoid ideology like it’s the plague. You can’t
engage in ideological battles, so liberals frame this as something that
they were that they sort of lived outside of or had no hand in. No one
really made the substantive ideological defense of Zionism or Israel or
their “War on Terror.” Maybe people like Joe Scarborough would, but it
didn’t really have any juice. It was so obviously bullshit.

Trump comes in and you have this emerging post-liberal order where it
doesn’t actually really matter what most people think of Israel because
what matters to them isn’t whether Israel is popular, it’s more about
[quashing] protest and campus disruption. Are you putting sand in the gears
of capital. No? Well, then we don’t really give a shit what the polling
says. It doesn’t really matter.

The people who lead the Democratic Party are Hakeem Jeffries, who’s the
largest recipient of AIPAC money in Congress, what a coincidence, and Chuck
Schumer, who professed to Bret Stephens last year that his number one goal
is to keep the left pro-Israel. They’re not going to leave lose they lose
their jobs anytime soon. No one’s calling for that. [Even] AOC supports
Hakeem Jeffries.

As long as they’re in charge of the party and you have enough time and we
have another specter of JD Vance in 2028. You fund enough money and use
enough slick pro-Israel propaganda into the empty shirt that the
[Democrats] run in 2028, then it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like
they’re going to nominate Rashida Tlaib. They’re going to say whatever they
say. Again, when Biden ran in 2020, he said he wanted to make Saudi Arabia
a pariah state. And guess what? He got an office and he shipped them half a
billion dollars and it didn’t matter.

So I’m sure whoever runs in the Democratic primary in 2028 will have highly
calibrated, J Street-curated lines about Israel, but as long as Hakeem
Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are in power, and as long as the Republicans
remain a staunchly Zionist party, which they will for the foreseeable
future, it’s not going matter. It functionally is not going to matter.
That’s why this “cutoff U.S. military aid to Israel” line, with a very
technical definition of aid being literal funding versus just arming, is so
brilliant because it moves it into a non sequitur. It sounds anti-Israel,
but it’s a policy initiated by the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, and Lindsey Graham.

There’s a reason for that because they understand they can read a poll,
just like you and I can, and they know how terminal their support is,
especially among Democrats. [Their goal] is to take away this line of, “Do
you want your taxpayers killing toddlers?” Well, your tax dollars [won’t]
killing toddlers, but..American bombs and weapons are so who cares who pays
for it?

The Ellison family could pay for what we give to Israel with the money in
their couch cushions. The money doesn’t really matter. What matters is
keeping the military support and the arms and the technological advantage
and the PR support among major media. That’s what matters. This is now a
85-15 issue with with Democrats, but I think one thing one can’t
underestimate how sophisticated the liberal Zionist and liberal imperialist
framework is at nullifying, numbing, co-opting, and obscuring opposition to
this system of violence.

You already see it with J Street doing this U.S. military aid. People
talking about how the oppose AIPAC, but then they’re taking money from
AIPAC with a Bobby Valentine
<https://www.mlb.com/news/bobby-valentine-mustache-disguise-mets> mustache.
They’re just going to spin and twist and distort it and they’re going to
shove some liberal Zionist down our throat, whether it’s Ro Khanna or
whoever, that if you actually look at their policies they’re effectively no
different than J street.

Then once they get an office it’s just going to be business as usual with
some more sophisticated frowning and being sad. That’s how the liberal
hatred of Israel and the genocide we discussed will actually politically
manifest. It’s so easily..managed. I could pretty much predict exactly how
they’re going do it, just as I predicted what they would they would do with
the ceasefire routine. Again, I have no unique insight. This is just how it
works. It’s public relations management and throwing slop to the piggies.

They go, oh, well, we’re not giving aid to Israel anymore. Well, then I
guess let’s all go home. No, they’re tirelessly working on a ceasefire.
Well, never mind then. I guess I don’t know what I was so upset about. I
mean, this is so f—ing easy to do.

*It’s funny. Before we started talking, I was looking at a J Street email
they sent out to supporters and it says one of the big issues with the
reoccurring violence in the region is that it leads to growing opposition
of Israel. That’s identified as one of the big problems.*

Yes, funny how that works.

*Where I was going with that question was, as a media critic, do you think
this shift among the U.S. population will change the media landscape in any
capacity? Do you think there’s more room within the liberal establishment
for criticism of Israel…or is the coverage going to remain largely the
same, regardless of what the people think?*

No, the only thing that’s going to change is more sophisticated public
relations. I’m sorry to be cynical, and this is the conclusion of my book
and I would bet my life on it. The only thing that’s going to change,
especially in the next two or three years, is better public relations.

John Oliver does this whole segment on how bad the genocide is and the
starvation and at the end, his prescription is that they need to get
Netanyahu out of office. Anyone who’s read a poll in Israel knows that
Netanyahu is to the left of public opinion there. His policies are very,
very popular. The genocide is popular. Over 50% of Israelis want to commit
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Over 68% are not worried about
starvation. Some polls show 70% support expelling Palestinians from Gaza
proper. Upwards of 94% supported the bombing in Iran. The issue is not
Netanyahu.

They’re already shape-making this to be a ‘one bad man’ theory scapegoat.
Again, it’s about preserving the fundamental premises of of ethnic
supremacy in the Levant and if you’re not going to challenge that premise
in any meaningful way, then we’re just engaging in elaborate theater. You
look at Ro Khanna, who is supposed to be on progressive vanguard. He says
some good things. He calls it a genocide. He uses the right language. Of
course, he won’t hold anyone in Biden administration accountable for
genocide. He won’t commit to that of course, because he doesn’t really
believe it’s a genocide. It’s kind of ah a buzzword now for a lot of these
guys.

What’s your plan to meaningfully alter the dynamic for Palestinians? Oh,
we’re going to have the Arab states occupy Palestine. That’s just another
Zionist occupier. Who do you think pays the the f—ing military bills for
these for the “Arab League states” you’re referencing? They have to go back
to this Pope of the Arabs claptrap with MBS and all this liberal Zionist,
racist head padding shit. A “de-radicalized Gaza” and it’s just like, oh,
this is just more of the same shit.

This is just different variations of genocide. People who are principled,
like say Rashida Tlaib, who did say she’s going to hold Biden officials
accountable and report him to the ICC and purge them from the party,
obviously, they’re not going to get within 500 million yards of the White
House.

I think what they properly and accurately assess is that the liberal hatred
of the genocide can very easily be folded into a sort of fantasy, liberal
Zionist narrative. You already see this with like the Pod Save America guys
trying to bully Hassan Piker into saying Hamas exists outside of history.
They need to salvage this thing they just simply can’t let go because this
particular imperialist colony is so essential to X, Y, and Z.

I get it, it’s messy, it’s complicated. I’m not saying it’s something as
simple as, let’s assert a one state solution, but the fundamental premises
of liberal Zionists and racial and ethnic supremacy in the Levant are just
not gonna be challenged in any way and until you do that, you’re just
rearranging the deck chairs in the Titanic.

In other words, what would be the big thing that anyone who’s running the
2028 platform could support and actually implement? Even just the basic
arms embargo of Israel, where the U.S. no longer provides weapons so
[Israel] has this tremendous military technical advantage to basically bomb
and kill and maim whomever they want. Even something as simple as that,
like a do no harm policy…like I’m not saying you need to start throwing
Molotov cocktails at IDF troops, but just stop arming Israel would be a
thing.

That is completely not on the table. That’s not something they support. The
“Block the Bombs” bill is partial embargo, but it’s mostly obviously a DOA
bill. Does anyone really think that a president Ro Khanna or President
Ocasio-Cortez or a Presiden Gavin Newsom is going to get into office and
actually have an arms embargo in Israel. What would be the mechanism of
accountability to assure that happens?

It’s nothing. It’s going to be a bunch of rhetoric and a bunch of claptrap
around this line about cutting off aid, and it’s going to go back to
business as usual. I don’t see any other any other way around that unless
somebody with some credibility on this issue decides to run for president.
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