For over a year, the US and UK media have refused to identify Israel’s war as a genocide. Mainstream outlets are only willing to regurgitate their governments’ soft criticisms of Israel, which serve to mask the West’s complicity in the slaughter.
by Justin Schlosberg
Part 1
According to John Newsinger’s A People’s History of the British Empire, it was the outsourcing of genocide that gave Britain the edge over its European imperial rivals. By ensuring an arm’s length distance from the mass slaughter carried out on its behalf, the British state was able to project the image of a more benevolent empire, even at times publicly criticizing the brutality of its client regimes.
It was an unprecedented feat of propaganda, and it’s not hard to spot its enduring legacy in how atrocities against the Palestinian people have been widely reported over the last year. Much like the crime boss on an image cleanup mission to disassociate from the thugs on his payroll, the US and UK governments have attempted to hide their bankrolling of Israel’s military machine behind soft criticism and empty pleas for restraint. And the mainstream media, on the whole, has bought it.
It’s complicated, of course, and at first glance, the coverage of Gaza over the last year has hardly followed Israel’s official script. When ITV captured shocking footage of the Israeli military shooting and killing a man clearly holding a white flag, it pushed the story against the grain of official Israeli denial and obfuscation. Nor did the BBC wholly accept the Rishi Sunak government’s framing of peaceful demonstrations in support of Gaza as terrorist hate mobs. Indeed, the unprecedented outpouring of public sympathy for Palestinians across the democratic world undoubtedly owed much to the real-time broadcasting of the wholesale destruction of life in Gaza and what legal experts were increasingly calling a genocide in action.
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