Clashes, violence and escalation: a media agenda
Yesterday two members of the Israeli occupation force in Bethlehem walked down a road and set up a battlefield sniper rifle in full view of the world. Repressive regimes do this all the time when they feel threatened by a civilian population but usually they do it from hidden positions because they also feel threatened by the world’s media.
Their manifest feeling of impunity has been created by decades of biassed reporting. The media of the liberal democracies has habitually used non-committal words to describe what happens in Palestine. Clashes have occurred. Violence on the streets of Ramallah. Tensions have escalated in the West Bank. All phrases designed to disguise the specific reality of what has happened.
When reporting on Euromaidan or anti-coup protesters in Myanmar or US-backed insurgents in Venezuela there is no hesitancy in emphasising the unequal nature of the competing sides: the greater numbers, the civilian status, the “ordinaryness” on one side; the vested interest, the military strength, the illegitimacy on the other.
In most of the world the liberal media take the view that, whatever the politics, there is never any excuse to use battlefield weapons against civilians. In Palestine they habitually start from the opposite premise; Israel always has a right to use battlefield weapons against civilians.
The racism behind this distinction is obvious but let’s subject to logical scrutiny one specific example, the equivalence of Israeli air strikes and rocket fire from Palestinian fighters.
Rockets fired into Israel are indiscriminate, do injure and kill innocent civilians and in absolute terms are undeniably a bad thing. Were the Palestinian fighters to be supplied with the latest killing technology from the US it is speculation as to whether they would continue to target civilians. I would say no, they would have far more interest in pin-pointing military targets and doing real damage to the enemy. Speculation.
The Israeli bombardment is discriminate. With their cutting edge killing technology supplied by the US they are able to choose exactly what they destroy, exactly who they kill. So far in the current onslaught this decision making has resulted in the death of at least 65 children.
We can speculate about the intentions of Palestinian fighters; I defend them. The terrorism of Apartheid Israel, that is their deliberate use of lethal force on innocent civilians is not speculation, it is a fact. There is no equivalence.
For the media, who implore people to respect truth and be wary of alternative sources of information, to conflate speculation with established fact makes them not observers but participants in the defence of Apartheid.
