Media Manufactures Consent for Gaza Genocide

Ever since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was initiated on October 7th, the Western media has been monomaniacally focused on events in Israel and Gaza. Remarkably though, none of this relentless coverage has provided Western audiences with any information relevant to even vaguely understanding what has been happening, and why. Even more egregiously, the deluge distorts, obfuscates, and even justifies Zionist atrocities against innocent civilians. Sometimes, preemptively.

Given the pace at which events are moving, it is all but impossible to keep up with the sheer volume of misleading or outright false propaganda and whitewashing that has spewed from the mouths and social media accounts of Zionist officials, pundits, and think tank “experts”, duly regurgitated unquestioningly and uncritically by major news outlets and the alleged “journalists” they employ.

Nonetheless, at the core of all this misreporting and malfeasance is a total lack of any context whatsoever. Readers, viewers and social media users are provided no understanding of the causes of the current crisis, or the paths to its resolution. Countless reporters, pundits and editorials in prominent agenda-setting newspapers have claimed Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was completely without provocation, some sources even implying it was motivated purely by the virulent anti-Semitic hatred of Hamas.

On October 9th, the New York Times boldly declared Hamas “burst through border fences without warning or any immediate provocation.” In reality, that “border” is the weaponized, lethal fence of an open-air concentration camp, equipped with motion-sensor-activated machine guns, barbed wire, and cameras usually resulting in certain death for any Palestinian who dares tread nearby. This dishonest sleight of hand is nonetheless not quite as shocking as the obfuscatory insertion of “immediate”, before “provocation”.

In August, the UN issued an updated analysis on the plight of Gaza. It ruled that Palestinians “have been living under collective punishment” as a result of Israel’s blockade, which results in 95% of the population lacking access to clean drinking water, among other horrors. UN secretary general António Guterres concludes the measures “contravene international humanitarian law, as they target and impose hardship on the civilian population, effectively penalizing them for acts they have not committed.” 

In late September, Israel bombed Gaza for several days, then on October 4th, Zionist settlers attacked Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. From January 1st this year until that date, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) murdered 234 Palestinians, and made 821 homeless by demolishing their houses. If all this is not provocation, what is?

‘Kill and Kill and Kill’

The closest a mainstream outlet has come to acknowledging a rationale for Hamas’ attack on Israel was the Washington Post in its first editorial on the strike, October 7th. The article parenthetically referenced “legitimate Palestinian grievances,” albeit in the distancing context of Hamas “exploiting” them for its own cynical purposes. Even more egregiously, there was no detail provided on what those “grievances” might possibly be. 

No mention of the Nakba. No mention of Palestinians being illegally prevented from returning to their stolen homes and lands stolen, in contravention of UN resolutions. No mention of the peaceful Great March of Return March 2018 - December 2019, during which over 200 unarmed civilians were killed, and 9,200 injured. Many were shot by IOF snipers in their knees, crippling them for life - horrific, wanton mutilation about which the perpetrators openly boasted to Zionist media.

All of these facts are urgently relevant to consider in the context of any modern day Palestinian violence directed towards their Zionist occupiers. So too that systematic, industrial scale slaughter of Palestinians was hardwired into Israel’s blockade of Gaza and the West Bank from the outside world, from the very beginning. In 2004, Arnon Sofer of Haifa University laid out detailed proposals for how this genocidal strategy would work directly to Ariel Sharon’s government.

Israeli forces would be withdrawn from the area entirely, and a stringent surveillance and security system constructed in their place, to ensure nothing and no one entered or exited these open air concentration camps without Zionist proviso. Anyone attempting to flee would be murdered. Sofer forecast - and eagerly welcomed - absolutely dire results:

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today…The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

‘Evade Detection’

As this journalist revealed on September 21st, declassified files show as far back as the 1960s, British intelligence was well-versed in surreptitiously packaging weaponized information serving specific psychological warfare objectives as innocuous, “unemphasised news items” for broadcast via the BBC, and other “organs of publicity” London’s spies “control or influence.” This way, British spooks recorded, their brazen propaganda campaigns were “far more likely to be believed” by unsuspecting target audiences.

Such revealing excerpts resonate ominously today, given the British state broadcaster has repeatedly laid justificatory foundations for genocidal Zionist attacks before they happen. In the most egregious example to date, on October 16th the BBC investigated whether Hamas constructs tunnels “under hospitals in schools,” reportedly in response to a question from an “anonymous reader.”

The British state broadcaster declared that Hamas did, contending based on uncorroborated “reports” and a graphic map supplied by the IOF, that “some passages have entrances located on the bottom floors of houses, mosques, schools and other public buildings to allow militants to evade detection,” therefore “effectively using them as human shields.” 

As if on cue, the very next day, Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital, brimming with hundreds of injured patients, and thousands of Palestinians seeking refuge from the inexorable onslaught of Zionist airstrikes, was struck from the sky. The damage was absolutely cataclysmic. Fatality estimates range from 300 - 800. 

Even at the lower end of the scale, this represents the largest single loss of life in Gaza since Israel sealed the area off from the outside world almost two decades ago. Before the dust had settled at the hospital, Hananya Naftali, an IOF operative “recently called up from the frontline to another front - the digital war,” took to Twitter to boast about the carnage:

“Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza. A multiple number [sic] of terrorists are dead. It’s heartbreaking that Hamas is launching rockets from hospitals, mosques, schools, and using civilians as human shields.”

‘Nakba 2.0’

The echo in these words of the BBC’s “unemphasised news item” from 24 hours earlier is palpable. Conspicuously though, Naftali deleted this within hours. A post on Netanyahu’s official Twitter account, which perversely branded the IOF assault on Gaza “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle” was almost promptly purged. Hurriedly, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a video purporting to show a Palestinian rocket striking the hospital.

Almost instantly though, online sleuths determined the clip to be fraudulent, and it was retracted. Despite such suspicious retractions and falsification being unambiguous signifiers of guilt, mainstream journalists not only persist in refusing to attribute the hospital strike to either “side”, but urge their audiences to avoid jumping to conclusions, and/or blaming Zionist forces. Veteran Sky News editor Adam Boulton went to the extent of declaring, “Israel had nothing to gain from this.”

Yet, the Zionists absolutely did have much to gain from destroying the hospital, just as they do from it wholesale destruction of the Occupied Territories, and all who live there. The current blitz on Gaza is concerned with completing their founding objective of purging Palestine of its entire indigenous population, and leaving what remains a monoethnic state forever. In the wake of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’s launch, multiple Israeli lawmakers and officials openly called for a “Nakba 2.0”.

Those horrific proposals remain extant today. So too does a heinous statement from Israeli National Security minister Itamar Ben-Givr, issued not long after the destruction of al-Ahli Arab Hospital:

“As long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands, the only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”

Zionists over many, many years have made their genocidal intentions towards the Palestinian people abundantly clear. It is therefore incumbent upon us all to do what Western journalists refuse to do. Namely, take them at their word, and act accordingly.

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