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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How the corporate media helped fuel Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Michael Arria</div>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">April 24, 2026</div>
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<p>In his new book, <em><a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/product/how-to-sell-a-genocide/">How to Sell a Genocide: The Media\u2019s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza</a></em>,
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.</p>
<p><em>Mondoweiss</em> U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Johnson about his study, his conclusions, and the shifting public rhetoric on Israel.</p>
<p>All royalties from Johnson\u2019s book will be donated to the <a href="https://www.mecaforpeace.org/">Middle East Children\u2019s Alliance</a>.</p>
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<p><strong>Mondoweiss:</strong> <strong>You talk about the talk about
the \u201cISIS-ification\u201d 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 \u201cWar on Terror\u201d or were there new elements?</strong></p>
<p>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
\u201csavage\u201d and \u201cbarbaric\u201d were used, which obviously have racial
connotations, but for some reason get past the liberal, anti-racism
censors.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>So the comparison is obviously absurd, but they\u2019re not really dealing
with the most sophisticated analysis here, right? They\u2019re 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\u2019re a
sadistic, nihilistic, antisemitic, whatever.</p>
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<p>Of course, that was bullshit. Everyone who knew anything about Hamas
knew it was bullshit. It wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t have
because it\u2019s not something that ever happened.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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\u2019t 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>fait accompli</em>.
It was pretty much already decided because the so-called war on Hamas,
or the goal to \u201celiminate Hamas,\u201d was already tattooed into the liberal
psyche as something that was both possible and morally defensible,
despite the fact that it was obviously neither.</p>
<p>[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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>They\u2019re fundamentally political. The solution was and remains a
fundamentally secular and political issue. This wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s not ISIS, right? It\u2019s 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\u2019s not uniform.</p>
<p><strong>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. </strong></p>
<p><strong>You write about \u201cHelpless Biden,\u201d \u201cFrustrated Biden.\u201d and
\u201cfuming, deeply concerned\u201d Biden. It\u2019s this idea that the most powerful
person in the world, a guy who is leading a government that\u2019s giving
Israel weapons, is growing upset with Israel. They\u2019re always allegedly
nearing a breaking point with Netanyahu.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Can you talk a little bit about that trope, how it gets implemented and why and what kind of what you make of it?</strong></p>
<p>The liberal establishment and the White House itself very quickly stopped defending the \u201cwar\u201d on principle. It was indefensible.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 \u201cwar\u201d 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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This was something that got repeated again and again. <em>NBC News</em>
from November of 2023: \u201cThe gap between Biden administration and
Netanyahu government over Gaza future is widening.\u201d So here we have it
widening. <em>CNN</em> from December of 2023: there\u2019s \u201cunprecedented
tensions between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political
price for standing with Israel.\u201d Barak Ravid of <em>Axios</em>, January of 2024: \u201cBiden running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza hits war as Gaza war hits 100 days.\u201d <em>Washington Post</em> February of 2024: \u201cBiden moving closer than ever to breach with Netanyahu over war in Gaza.\u201d</p>
<p>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 <em>Politico</em> in March of 2024: From \u2018I love you\u2019 to
\u2018asshole\u2019, How Joe Biden gave up on Bibi after decades of building a
close personal friendship with Netanyahu. \u201cJoe Biden has had it with the
Israeli prime minister. Now he\u2019s hitting him hard and it may be
working.\u201d</p>
<p><em>New York Times</em>, May of 2024: \u201cBiden\u2019s clash with Netanyahu
over Gaza. Here\u2019s Barak Ravid again: White House cancels meeting and
scolds Netanyahu in protest over video.\u201d That one is referencing one of
their myriad war crimes caught on video.</p>
<p>So you would think that after literally the hundredth version of this
article is published, where there\u2019s some alleged asymptotic break with
Netanyahu, some supposed anger, there\u2019s usually a phone call that they
know is recorded. You would think the average skeptical editor, well,
Wait a second. We\u2019ve done this article now 100 times. It\u2019s been nine
months, eight months, whatever it is. Why are we still doing this
asymptotic break that never happens? There\u2019s never any withdrawal of
actual weapons. There\u2019s never any policy change. It\u2019s just rhetoric and
supposed kind of palace entry and theory of mind reporting without any,
again, material shift.</p>
<p>I compare it to the difference between a sketch and a plot. A plot
moves forward. A plot has beats, characters develop. The rabbit\u2019s foot
goes from you know Istanbul to Prague, right? Something happens. Whereas
a sketch is the same three or four gags with slight variations.</p>
<p>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 <em>New York Times\u2019s</em>
] Peter Baker, who wrote dozens of these articles. He writes an article
basically saying that Biden\u2019s 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. </p>
<p>So in retrospect, we look at that article about Biden\u2019s 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\u2019s very clear, I think,
what it is. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019m 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.</p>
<p>The whole premise is, of course, absurd. Israeli officials have since
said that Biden never asked for a ceasefire. They\u2019ve confirmed that
verbatim. So this was an entirely alternate reality designed for liberal
and liberal consumption so people could point to it say, \u201cLook, he\u2019s
working on a ceasefire\u201d It\u2019s like the peace process. It\u2019s this thing you
can point to.</p>
<p>The corollary to this was the \u201cHelpless Biden.\u201d Even if he wanted to,
he couldn\u2019t change it because this or that excuse, which I call, moats
of rationalization. There\u2019s always this thing that\u2019s imposed on him by
an outside mysterious geopolitical dark matter. Oftentimes, it does veer
into antisemitism because it\u2019s this idea that, oh, he can\u2019t take away
weapons because then AIPAC will punish them. Wait, he\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>However, the Occam\u2019s razor answer is that they both agree on the
genocide, but politically it\u2019s so toxic they have to create an alternate
reality where there\u2019s this alleged ceasefire negotiations that, again,
never go anywhere because they\u2019re fake and they\u2019re 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.</p>
<p>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\u2019m going bench Shohei Ohtani, Mookie
Betts, Freddie Freeman and the entire starting lineup, and out our AAA
team, but don\u2019t 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\u2019m forfeiting my entire
leverage, which is military support and weapons, but don\u2019t worry, I
secretly want a ceasefire. </p>
<p>Well, clearly you don\u2019t. Otherwise, you wouldn\u2019t have you wouldn\u2019t
have benched Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Shohei Ohtani. There was
this bizarre alternate universe where there was a fake ceasefire. I\u2019m
just some guy on Twitter and in 2024, I wrote a piece in <em><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-redefines-cease-fire-gaza/">The Nation</a></em>
saying, the supposed ceasefire negotiations are fake. They\u2019re 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.</p>
<p>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\u2019m 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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Then from that premise, you had basically what was just kayfabe. It was theater. It wasn\u2019t real.</p>
<p><strong>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
<em>Morning Joe</em>, which is a popular show. We were talking about
the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d 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?</strong></p>
<p>That was kind of agenda setting, because Biden\u2019s favorite show was apparently <em>Morning Joe</em>, which he watched obsessively. Of course, he didn\u2019t need <em>Morning Joe</em> to be a glib Zionist and a racist, but it certainly didn\u2019t help.</p>
<p><em>Morning Joe</em>, 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.</p>
<p>These shows, in the two years that I studied from October of 2023 to
October of 2025, and it\u2019s probably still the case, but I haven\u2019t 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. </p>
<p>So, <em>Meet the Press</em>, <em>This Week</em> with George Stephanopoulos and CNN\u2019s <em>State of the Union </em>with
Dana Bash and Jake Tapper did not feature a single Palestinian guest in
the first two years of the genocide, and I don\u2019t think have yet today.</p>
<p>That\u2019s pretty extraordinary, especially when you count the dozens of
Israeli officials and, of course, dozens more U.S. officials. You know,
Tony Blinken, <strong><br></strong>[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. </p>
<p>I suspect the reason why is less so because there wasn\u2019t some
enterprising producer who didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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\u2019t play ball. She went on CBS
and ABC and they would try to ask her, \u201cdo you condemn Hamas?\u201d
questions. She would reject the premise and go on about war crimes. They
deleted it from the internet and never called her back. It\u2019s detailed
in my book and detailed in her forward actually.</p>
<p>So, they had a hard time finding native informant Palestinians to
come on and spew the kind of liberal Zionist clap trap that\u2019s the
acceptable discourse. [<em>Atlantic</em> editor] Jeffrey Goldberg did
manage to pull a few out of obscurity from NATO funded think tanks, but,
really, it\u2019s 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\u2019re effectively asking Palestinians to
co-sign their own their own erasure from society. There\u2019s 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\u2019s it.</p>
<p>[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\u2019t have emotive terms and are spoken very clinically and in very
anodyne terms. This is reflected both on cable news and print.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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\u2019t to say
attacking people is justified, but they were not attacked or accosted or
confronted because they were \u201cJewish students.\u201d</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>So this constant smol bean \u201cJewish students\u201d framing for people
engaged in open Zionist activity, oftentimes on the payroll of
pro-Israel organizations and lobbying groups, was really how you\u2019ve
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>So even the ADL\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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.
\u201cDo you condemn, globalize the intifada?\u201d They would say, well, no,
because that\u2019s just an Arabic term that means uprising. And then the
headline became \u201cPresident refuses to to condemn calls for genocide on
Jewish students.\u201d The implication being that there was a call for a
genocide on Jewish students. Of course there wasn\u2019t. There was <em>zero </em>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>This is completely completely ignored in the U.S. media. It doesn\u2019t make the front page of the <em>New York Times</em>
once. It isn\u2019t mentioned on MSNBC in the one month after her murder
once. It\u2019s mentioned on CNN twice in two segments and they\u2019re throwaway
segments in the middle of the day that no one really notices or pays
much attention to.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, you have the Claudine Gay \u201cscandal\u201d which completely
consumes media. What\u2019s important to understand is that it\u2019s a completely
meaningless story. It has no inherent news value whatsoever at all.
It\u2019s 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\u2019re gonna ruin your life and we\u2019re gonna call you
an antisemite and that\u2019s gonna stick with you for the rest of your life.</p>
<p>I\u2019ll 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 <em>New York Times</em> 79 times versus two mentions of Hind Rajab. <em>Washington Post</em> had Claudine Gay mentioned 23 time versus two for Hind Rajab. AP was was eight versus one. <em>Politico</em>
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.</p>
<p>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\u2019s a Jeremy
Corbyn-esque antisemitism scandal where, if you look at the details, you
can\u2019t even remember where it started. It\u2019s just this thing that
metastasizes and has no basis in reality.</p>
<p>I think that\u2019s a huge indictment. By the way, that same month where
[Gay\u2019s 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, <em>Washington Post, New York Times, Axios</em>,
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..</p>
<p>It\u2019s 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\u2019s a very it\u2019s 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 \u201cprevent antisemitism.\u201d You look at the
rules and it\u2019s just cracking down on campus protests, free speech, and
pro-Palestine activity and smearing them all as antisemites.</p>
<p><strong>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\u2019s bombing of Iran has been. By the same
token, as you know, we\u2019ve 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\u2019s base even.</strong></p>
<p><strong>In terms of media coverage, do you think this will change
anything? It\u2019s been interesting to see you know people like Rahm Emanuel
fluctuate their public position\u2026</strong></p>
<p>Well, the J Street cutoff military aid thing is a Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham talking point.</p>
<p><strong>Yes, exactly. That\u2019s the new thing.</strong></p>
<p>It\u2019s quite clever.</p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>It certainly signals something, right?</p>
<p><strong>Yes, it signals something.</strong></p>
<p>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\u2019t control people seeing videos and the and the realities
of a genocide. You can\u2019t kill 80,000 people and hide it. And you can\u2019t
really justify it or explain it because we\u2019re so numb to the \u201cWar on
Terror\u201d claptrap. It doesn\u2019t really have the same impact anymore. But
the goal is to buy time and that\u2019s why so much of the propaganda detail
is actually not really on substance. It\u2019s on sophistry and non sequitur
and helplessness. It\u2019s this feigned helplessness.</p>
<p>Liberals would always prefer to be incompetent rather than evil. You
see this when people would say, \u201cI don\u2019t understand why Biden is not
reining in Netanyahu. Doesn\u2019t he know he looks weak?\u201d They don\u2019t care.
They want to look weak because they avoid ideology like it\u2019s the plague.
You can\u2019t 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 \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d Maybe people like Joe
Scarborough would, but it didn\u2019t really have any juice. It was so
obviously bullshit.</p>
<p>Trump comes in and you have this emerging post-liberal order where it
doesn\u2019t actually really matter what most people think of Israel because
what matters to them isn\u2019t whether Israel is popular, it\u2019s more about
[quashing] protest and campus disruption. Are you putting sand in the
gears of capital. No? Well, then we don\u2019t really give a shit what the
polling says. It doesn\u2019t really matter.</p>
<p>The people who lead the Democratic Party are Hakeem Jeffries, who\u2019s
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\u2019re not going to
leave lose they lose their jobs anytime soon. No one\u2019s calling for that.
[Even] AOC supports Hakeem Jeffries.</p>
<p>As long as they\u2019re 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\u2019t really matter. It\u2019s not like
they\u2019re going to nominate Rashida Tlaib. They\u2019re 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\u2019t matter.</p>
<p>So I\u2019m 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\u2019s not going matter. It functionally is not going
to matter. That\u2019s why this \u201ccutoff U.S. military aid to Israel\u201d 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\u2019s a policy initiated by the Heritage
Foundation, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Lindsey
Graham.</p>
<p>There\u2019s 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, \u201cDo you want your taxpayers killing toddlers?\u201d Well, your tax
dollars [won\u2019t] killing toddlers, but..American bombs and weapons are
so who cares who pays for it?</p>
<p>The Ellison family could pay for what we give to Israel with the
money in their couch cushions. The money doesn\u2019t really matter. What
matters is keeping the military support and the arms and the
technological advantage and the PR support among major media. That\u2019s
what matters. This is now a 85-15 issue with with Democrats, but I think
one thing one can\u2019t underestimate how sophisticated the liberal Zionist
and liberal imperialist framework is at nullifying, numbing, co-opting,
and obscuring opposition to this system of violence.</p>
<p>You already see it with J Street doing this U.S. military aid. People
talking about how the oppose AIPAC, but then they\u2019re taking money from
AIPAC with a <a href="https://www.mlb.com/news/bobby-valentine-mustache-disguise-mets">Bobby Valentine</a>
mustache. They\u2019re just going to spin and twist and distort it and
they\u2019re going to shove some liberal Zionist down our throat, whether
it\u2019s Ro Khanna or whoever, that if you actually look at their policies
they\u2019re effectively no different than J street.</p>
<p>Then once they get an office it\u2019s just going to be business as usual
with some more sophisticated frowning and being sad. That\u2019s how the
liberal hatred of Israel and the genocide we discussed will actually
politically manifest. It\u2019s so easily..managed. I could pretty much
predict exactly how they\u2019re 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\u2019s public relations management and
throwing slop to the piggies. </p>
<p>They go, oh, well, we\u2019re not giving aid to Israel anymore. Well, then
I guess let\u2019s all go home. No, they\u2019re tirelessly working on a
ceasefire. Well, never mind then. I guess I don\u2019t know what I was so
upset about. I mean, this is so f\u2014ing easy to do.</p>
<p><strong>It\u2019s 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\u2019s identified as one of the big
problems.</strong></p>
<p>Yes, funny how that works.</p>
<p><strong>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\u2019s more room within the
liberal establishment for criticism of Israel\u2026or is the coverage going
to remain largely the same, regardless of what the people think?</strong></p>
<p>No, the only thing that\u2019s going to change is more sophisticated
public relations. I\u2019m sorry to be cynical, and this is the conclusion of
my book and I would bet my life on it. The only thing that\u2019s going to
change, especially in the next two or three years, is better public
relations.</p>
<p>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\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>They\u2019re already shape-making this to be a \u2018one bad man\u2019 theory
scapegoat. Again, it\u2019s about preserving the fundamental premises of of
ethnic supremacy in the Levant and if you\u2019re not going to challenge that
premise in any meaningful way, then we\u2019re 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\u2019t hold anyone in Biden administration
accountable for genocide. He won\u2019t commit to that of course, because he
doesn\u2019t really believe it\u2019s a genocide. It\u2019s kind of ah a buzzword now
for a lot of these guys.</p>
<p>What\u2019s your plan to meaningfully alter the dynamic for Palestinians?
Oh, we\u2019re going to have the Arab states occupy Palestine. That\u2019s just
another Zionist occupier. Who do you think pays the the f\u2014ing military
bills for these for the \u201cArab League states\u201d you\u2019re 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 \u201cde-radicalized Gaza\u201d and
it\u2019s just like, oh, this is just more of the same shit.</p>
<p>This is just different variations of genocide. People who are
principled, like say Rashida Tlaib, who did say she\u2019s going to hold
Biden officials accountable and report him to the ICC and purge them
from the party, obviously, they\u2019re not going to get within 500 million
yards of the White House.</p>
<p>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\u2019t let go because this particular imperialist colony is so essential
to X, Y, and Z.</p>
<p>I get it, it\u2019s messy, it\u2019s complicated. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s something
as simple as, let\u2019s 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\u2019re just rearranging the deck chairs in the Titanic. </p>
<p>In other words, what would be the big thing that anyone who\u2019s 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\u2026like I\u2019m not saying you need to
start throwing Molotov cocktails at IDF troops, but just stop arming
Israel would be a thing.</p>
<p>That is completely not on the table. That\u2019s not something they
support. The \u201cBlock the Bombs\u201d bill is partial embargo, but it\u2019s 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?</p>
<p>It\u2019s nothing. It\u2019s going to be a bunch of rhetoric and a bunch of
claptrap around this line about cutting off aid, and it\u2019s going to go
back to business as usual. I don\u2019t see any other any other way around
that unless somebody with some credibility on this issue decides to run
for president.</p>
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