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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Fake Neutrality: How Western Media Language Misrepresents Palestinians, Shields Israel</h1>August 24, 2022</div>
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A vigil near the graves of
Palestinian children who were killed in the latest Israeli war on Gaza.
(Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)
<p><strong>By <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ramzy-baroud" title="Display all articles for Ramzy Baroud">Ramzy Baroud</a></strong></p><p>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.</p>
<p>Take the New York Times coverage of the latest Israeli war on Gaza as an example. Its<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/06/world/middleeast/fighting-israel-gaza.html"> article</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>The brief introduction of the<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/06/world/middleeast/fighting-israel-gaza.html"> NYT article</a>
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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>On August 16, the Israeli military finally<a href="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"> admitted</a>
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.</p>
<p>The title of the<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62553628"> BBC story</a>
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’.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>Though Israeli politicians have spoken blatantly about killing Palestinians children – and, in the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes">case</a>
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 <a href="https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/event_statement080822">said</a>
that “the death of innocent civilians, especially childr is
heartbreaking.” Incidentally, Lapid ordered the latest war on Gaza,
which <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/12/gaza-death-toll-rises-to-49-including-17-children">killed</a> a total of 49 Palestinians.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Books have been <a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745329789/more-bad-news-from-israel/">written</a> about this subject, civil society <a href="https://www.palestinedeepdive.com/">organizations</a>
were formed to hold western media accountable and numerous editorial
board meetings were organized to put some pressure on western editors,
to no avail.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/on-haaretz-can-settler-colonialism-be-liberal-and-apartheid-be-progressive/">inaccurate</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="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">misnomer</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/armed-drones-gave-idf-surgical-precision-during-recent-gaza-fighting-officers-say/"> callousness</a>, biased language and <a href="https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-714967">misconstruing</a> of facts.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Since many newspapers and online platforms utilize western news
agencies, they, often inadvertently, adopt the same language used in
western news sources, thus <a href="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">depicting</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div><p><br></p><p><span><i><span>-
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</span></i><a href="http://www.ramzybaroud.net/"> <i><span>www.ramzybaroud.net</span></i></a></span></p></div>
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