Thursday, September 12, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The media war against Israel
Melanie Phillips: The media war against Israel
The media’s effect on public attitudes towards Israel, however, is very different indeed. That’s because the Western public, by and large, knows virtually nothing about Israel, the Middle East or Jewish history. On Israel, the public mind is therefore a blank page on which can be imprinted whatever picture the media wishes to paint.Jonathan Tobin: Democracy suffers when the media can’t be trusted
And the picture of Israel that’s been painted over the last few decades—and even more intensely since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led pogrom against southern Israel communities—is a vicious and wildly distorted caricature.
Last week, a high-ranking delegation of former NATO military officers was in Israel on a fact-finding mission to assess the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces in the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Members of the group subsequently expressed admiration for the way the IDF has been conducting the war in an unprecedentedly challenging combat environment.
Gen. Sir John McColl, the British former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said: “I came away from the trip satisfied that the IDF’s operations and rules of engagement were rigorous compared to the British Army and our Western allies … Israeli soldiers are fighting in conditions of extraordinary complexity and risk.”
This was a sharp if tacit rebuke to Britain’s Starmer administration, which has announced a partial arms embargo against Israel on the grounds that such weapons “might” be used in a “serious violation” of humanitarian law and that there had been “credible” claims about the mistreatment of detainees.
But what was particularly striking about McColl’s remarks was that he had apparently arrived in Israel predisposed to believe the allegations made against it. He said: “Basing my views about the Israel-Hamas war on U.K. media coverage, I arrived in Israel critical and skeptical of their military operations. … There is balance missing in the reporting of events in Gaza.”
The impression given by the British media for the past 11 months of this war has been that Israel is willfully killing huge numbers of Gaza’s women and children, recklessly bombing hospitals and schools full of displaced people, and preventing humanitarian aid from getting to civilians.
Those claims are the reverse of the truth. Yet a very senior military figure seems to have believed them because this media narrative is omnipresent. Even in newspapers whose editorial line is broadly sympathetic to Israel, the reporting is massively distorted by the promulgation of Hamas propaganda as news reports.
The most egregious serial offender is the BBC, whose global reach and reputation for integrity and trustworthiness make it the most influential media outlet in the world. For decades, it has sanitized Palestinian Arab terrorism and painted Israel falsely as the aggressor in the region. And during the current war in Gaza, its coverage has been overwhelmingly malevolent.
A major study published this week by Trevor Asserson, a British lawyer based in Tel Aviv, laid bare the staggering scale of this betrayal of BBC and journalistic standards.
A dedicated team he set up used AI to crunch four months of war coverage. It identified 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. It also revealed moderate or strong pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli sentiment in more than 90% of broadcasts on the network’s flagship shows.
Israel was associated with war crimes in BBC reporting 592 times but Hamas (whose entire campaign from Oct. 7 onwards has consisted of war crimes against both Israeli and Gaza civilians) only 98 times.
Worse still—because far more explosive—was the distorted coverage on the BBC Arabic service whose output displayed 90% bias. Most shocking of all, across all its output the network repeatedly used journalists who had shown hostility to Israel, sympathy for Hamas or outright Jew-hatred.
Journalists fueling antisemitismAndreas Malm and the green antisemitism
The ability of the left to dominate the national conversation undermines the long-held belief that journalists play a key role in the democratic process, by which the policies of any government can be held up to scrutiny and candidates can similarly expect to be held accountable. If mainstream journalists are only doing this to one side of the political divide while giving a pass to the other, especially when already in power, the public is given the impression that what we have is not a free press but a state media that can be expected to toe the party line in the same manner as authoritarian or totalitarian regimes.
The same process applies to the coverage of Israel and antisemitism. It is almost universally expected now that the Jewish state’s efforts to defend itself—even against the barbaric tactics of a genocidal Islamist terrorist group like Hamas and its tyrannical Iranian backers—will always be covered unfairly. In the past, most media bias against Israel was rooted in ignorance, sloppiness and the natural inclination of journalists to always tell a story from the side of the perceived underdog, which, despite the size and power of the forces arrayed against the one small Jewish nation on the planet, is the way the world views the Palestinian Arabs who seek to destroy it.
In recent years, it’s become clear that the problem with the coverage of Israel is more a matter of ideology than a lack of knowledge about the history of the conflict in the Middle East. Just as the left’s stranglehold on college faculties and administrations has created an atmosphere in which most professors and students believe the intersectional lie that Israel is an illegitimate “settler/colonial” state of “white” oppressors, the same is now true of the liberal media, most of whose personnel have already received the same indoctrination.
“The first thing we said in these early hours consisted not so much of words as of cries of jubilation. Those of us who have lived our lives with and through the question of Palestine could not react in any other way to the scenes of the resistance storming the Erez checkpoint: this maze of concrete towers and pens and surveillance systems, this consummate installation of guns and scans and cameras – certainly the most monstruous monument to the domination of another people I have ever been inside – all of a sudden in the hands of Palestinian fighters who had overpowered the occupation soldiers and torn down their flag. How could we not scream with astonishment and joy? Same with the scenes of Palestinians breaking through the fence and the wall and streaming into the lands from which they had been expelled[1]”.
These words, celebrating the destructive act of Hamas on October 7, 2023, are those of Andreas Malm, a researcher in human ecology at Lund University (Sweden). Andreas Malm, a Swedish citizen, is a favorite author of eco-Marxism and one of the most influential thinkers in political ecology. Let’s be clear: for anyone interested in environmental issues, Malm has become a must-read over the past decade. Malm is a rigorous researcher, one of the most visionary on climate change, one of the most creative, one of those who inspire the younger generation of activists, but also the not-so-young, often Marxist or revolutionary. In particular, he has helped to transform ecological thinking considerably because of his metahistorical and foundational approach to the global fossil economy; this sheds light on the economic responsibility of industries and empires in the destruction of environments[2]. Only, Malm, and a new generation of eco-activists with him, place “Israel”, in a dubious critical gesture, at the heart of climate science and environmentalist critique. In his books, and especially in his public statements after the October 7 massacre, Malm repeatedly describes Palestinians as double victims of the Hebrew state: on the one hand because of the occupation, on the other because of Israel’s role in the climate crisis. Why such sweeping generalizations from an otherwise fastidious researcher?
That the author, a Marxian, belongs to the camp of anti-Zionism whose affects are well identified[3], seems obvious, since the critique of Israel is part of the critique of the hegemony of the global North. But by linking “Zionism” and “the environment” and making Palestine the laboratory of climate resistance, a new field emerges: that of what we might call green anti-Zionism. What was the discursive modality behind this evolution? Here, we look at the argumentation behind it, while wondering whether a certain activist-oriented movement in political ecology isn’t in the process of acclimatizing to the prevailing anti-Israelism. Indeed, we need to grasp the content of Israel’s inclusion within the environmental question, for far from being an isolated event, it is indicative of the powerful extension movements of “anti-Zionism” and its updated form based on renewed paths.
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