As public anger grows over Israel’s assault on the
Palestinian people, US government officials and mainstream media are
desperately trying to control the narrative.
Speaking about the student protests in New York,
CNN anchor Kasie Hunt said late last month: “Some pretty stunning images coming
to us overnight … We also are just learning at this hour that banners have been
hung from the hall. They read ‘Hind’s Hall’ and ‘Intifada’. Hind is a reference
to a woman who was killed in Gaza. Intifada, of course, a reference to
uprising, violent struggles the Palestinians has had over the years
against Israel.”
Where does one even begin? Someone purporting to be a
journalist apparently won’t even pretend to make an effort to check on a story
that went around the world, when a five-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind
Rajab, called out from a besieged car where several family members had just
been killed.
As the young girl waited for help to arrive, the two
Palestinian Red Crescent medics coming to her aid were also killed by
Israeli fire. Hind’s last words to emergency service workers
over the phone, before a volley of bullets was heard, were: “The tank is next to
us. We are in the car and next to the tank.”
CNN later tweeted saying that Hunt “misspoke and
corrected herself on the show immediately after”.
As for
intifada, the iconic images of the First Intifada – launched in
December 1987 after an Israeli vehicle hit and killed four Palestinians in
Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp – were those of boys and young men armed with rocks
and slingshots, facing down Israeli tanks, snipers and bulldozers.
The
Second Intifada, which began in September 2000, was accompanied by another
iconic image: that of a father, Jamal al-Durrah, clutching his 12-year-old
son in an attempt to shield him from Israeli gunfire. The boy was hit and died
soon afterwards.
More than 10,000 children were wounded during the
Second Intifada, and nearly 5,000 Palestinians of all ages were killed. Durrah
has lost more family members since Israel declared war on Gaza last
October.
Apparently
“violence” is only something committed against Israel, while Palestinians
mostly “die” rather than being “killed”, according to the vagaries of western
mainstream media syntax.
On that same CNN segment, New Yorker journalist Evan
Osnos told Hunt, “There was an interesting moment last week. You were
beginning to see university administrators come to an idea, a principle. You
saw the president of Princeton say the goal should be the maximum expression
without intimidation or obstruction … This is something else, because students,
Jewish students on campus at Columbia, are going to wake up this morning and
say this does not satisfy that standard.”
Even though many campus protesters are themselves Jewish,
these comments suggest that “Jewish students” are only those to whom harm is
caused by pro-Palestinian demonstrators – not those who are outraged by Zionist
manipulation and the instrumentalization of their very identity and history in
order to carry out a genocide.
This is not even to mention the anger and disappointment
that many people feel at seeing university presidents and government officials
calling on fully armed police to protect the policies of a foreign government,
rather than the rights of US citizens.
Much depends on whether Israel can be stopped. It is the US
that holds almost all the leverage
Such grotesque twisting of reality does not take place in a
vacuum, but rather infects every nook and cranny of US propaganda and
mainstream rhetoric, imagery, culture and institutional norms, as more and more
aspects of “public life” face a relentless assault by corporate and
governmental power.
The irony is that as this has taken place, and as the truly
ignominious Antisemitism Awareness Act has been passed by the US
House of Representatives to put another nail in the coffin of the First
Amendment, more Americans than ever are aware of the atrocities being committed
against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Perhaps more importantly, they understand that these
atrocities are paid for by US tax dollars, and fully supported by a political
class that has given up any pretence of representing its constituents.
The
desperate attempt to expand the definition of “antisemitism” in the US and
Europe, while imposing new legal codes to prevent scrutiny of Israel’s actions,
is a last-ditch effort by western powers and their representatives to maintain
control over the narrative. But as they have abandoned their constituencies,
their constituencies are abandoning them.
As the sitting US president mumbles a warning for Israel not
to invade Haifa (instead of Rafah), or goes on about an uncle who was
allegedly eaten by cannibals during the Second World War, an
increasing portion of the US ruling class – from university presidents to
mainstream journalists – find themselves in the position that Joe Biden was in
as a candidate: hunkered down in their bunkers, as public contempt rises.
This disappearance of almost any stable reference point in
the public sphere is truly a precarious moment in the life of the nation, and
seems like a harbinger of some kind of dystopian totalitarianism – many aspects
of which are already present.
While
all state and corporate power remains focused on further fragmenting and
demonizing the populace, keeping everyone at each other’s throats and inventing
new classes of victims, we can only hope that some glimmer of human commonality
will finally emerge, before this century is plunged into a catastrophic spiral
of killing and destruction like that of the previous century.
Much depends on whether Israel can be stopped. It is the US
that holds almost all the leverage, and this is where more pressure must be
placed.
Courtesy: Information Clearing House
