Gazans reeling under battle of narratives
World
Media failed to appropriately highlight the atrocities committed by Israel
By Ali Haider
Israel’s unabated war crimes in Gaza have led to the demeaning of humanity as innocent civilians have become the victims of the bloodthirsty Zionist regime.
Since the outbreak of the genocidal war, Palestinians’ deaths have crossed 11,000 - almost 40pc of them children.
Not only the Western leaders have tried to justify the brutal onslaught against the Gazans as Israel’s ‘right to self defence’, the media, too, failed to appropriately highlight the atrocities committed by Israel.
The duty of the press becomes even more responsible in case of war and more so when one side is hell-bent on erasing the other – as in Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians.
However, since Israel has launched an aggressive war against Gazans in the guise of eliminating Hamas, the biased and one-sided journalism in the West is promoting the sinister designs of the occupier due to its inaccurate reporting.
The shameful double standards shown and the airing of the unauthenticated news that ignited the support towards Israel has encouraged the Israeli army to carry on its genocidal war on the hapless Palestinians as its actions have gone unreported and unaccountable.
For example, Western news organisations quickly gave coverage to the unconfirmed news that Hamas had beheaded babies - a claim that became so widely accepted that it was mentioned by President Biden before the White House and the Israeli government backtracked.
This is not a novelty. The reporting of the Western media has always been pro-Israel. For instance, a report by the ‘Glasgow Media Group’ in 2012 pointed out that Britain’s most popular news channel uses terms such as ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal cold-blooded murder’, ‘lynching’ and ‘massacre’ to describe the deaths of Israelis and the word ‘terrorist’ was often associated with Palestinians.
For entities that see themselves as the champions and promoters of human rights, the focus on giving space to a ‘particular and biased opinion’ is not doing any service for humankind.
Consider how a global media outlet changed its headline after the blast at the Ahli hospital in Gaza claimed 500 lives: it started with ‘Israeli attack’ then to ‘attack on the hospital in Gaza’, and finally to ‘explosion at the hospital in Gaza’.
In other words, it has failed to call a spade a spade and relied on mild alternatives or euphemisms to reduce the severity of the violent act.
Instead of condemning the ongoing erasure of the Gazans, many Western newspapers have painted Israel’s illegitimate and unimaginably cruel actions as much needed for upholding human rights, of course bizarrely and awkwardly.
Consider also one of the editorials in the Western press, “What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law.” This seems weird as nothing could be more unpleasant than the indefensible defence of the Zionist colonisers.
Apart from providing an unreasonable justification for the never-ending Israeli onslaught on the Gazans, the majority of the global press has also used duplicitous language when it comes to covering the situation.
After the attack, another famous media house used the headline ‘the murderous rampage carried out by Hamas’ and the Economist said ‘the bloodthirsty attack by Hamas’. However, despite killing more than 11,000 civilians, Israel’s genocidal actions have not been described as murderous Israeli rampage – newspapers have resorted to euphemisms in case of attacks by Zionist occupiers.
Moreover, the word ‘terrorist’ is always associated with Hamas due to the targeting of civilians by the group. However, Israel is again an exception when applying this term despite children becoming the victims of the ongoing massacre due to the deliberate attacks of its army.
This phenomenon is also visible while interviewing Palestine and Israeli representatives. The former is pressurised to condemn the Hamas’ attacks on Israel, however, the latter is neither questioned nor pressed to take a dig at Israel’s military attacks aimed at the dehumanisation of Palestinians.
Now coming to the question of how misinformation has been used as a tool in the ongoing massacre of the Gazans and how it has blurred the difference between fact and fiction.
Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war and the ongoing assault being launched in Gaza by Israel is no exception. Means and methods of war have changed over the years but this military truism has stood the test of time.
Since the outbreak of war, propaganda machines have put in a lot of effort to fabricate their ‘reality’. On Oct 17, a large explosion took place at the Al Ahli hospital which claimed nearly 500 lives. Soon after, propaganda tools linked with Israel started to blame Hamas, despite the clear evidence otherwise.
Consider, an X account under the name Farida Khan claiming to be an Al Jazeera journalist in Gaza posted a message saying they had a video of a “Hamas missile landing in the hospital.”
Al Jazeera subsequently alerted social media users that the account had no ties to the news service. The news channel said it does not employ a person with the name Farida Khan. The account was later removed.
In the age of social media, misleading and fake content spreads faster. X, formerly Twitter, has been a hotspot for an environment of misinterpretation and deception to promote a particular point of view.
Recently, ‘University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public’ identified seven X accounts that have dominated the discourse by posting huge amounts of content, all revolved around sensitisation, misinformation and getting more likes.
In the first three days of the outbreak of the massacre, the major news accounts (Reuters, AP) published 298 posts which got 112 million views. By contrast, the `new elites` published 1,834 posts, getting a staggering 1.6 billion views.
Important to note is that the major goal of these accounts is to portray a false picture that the Palestinians’ death has been over-reported in the media. Israeli government officials have relied on misinformation to cast doubt on the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza.
Biased reporting and massive disinformation campaigns not only exacerbate the human rights violations but also embolden the occupier to continue its genocidal operation.
Partial coverage of the war and misinterpretation have downplayed the plights of the Palestinians who have been dying for freedom.
The way the global media has reacted to Israel’s unstoppable killings of the Palestinians has exposed the so-called objective and balanced reporting. Now is the need to publish the truth about the war so that facts are distinguished from fiction.
