Israel and Ukraine: Legacy Media Provide The Same Impunity
On August 4th 2022 Amnesty International published the results of it’s extensive monitoring of Ukrainian armed forces. The report headlined clear and persistent violations including stationing troops in schools and launching attacks from within civilian areas.
We are all familiar with these kinds of violations because the legacy media is always happy to point them out when the accused can be dismissed as terrorists. Every time a US drone operator illegally executes someone in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq and their family are also killed it is excused, justified, legitimised by placing the responsibility for civilian deaths not on the actors causing the explosion that killed them but on the negligence of their victim who chose to sometimes spend time with their family.
Amnesty felt compelled, despite having extensively reported on Russian violations separately, without reference to anyone else, to include, in the headline points, a reminder that Ukrainian violations do not excuse Russian ones.
Despite their stated and long-standing purpose of impartially reporting violations of human rights and despite making it explicitly clear that this report was no different President Zelensky’s response reveals just how biassed the legacy media has been in their reporting of the war in Ukraine.
Zelensky’s comments focussed on how Amnesty should have treated his country’s military: “tries to amnesty the terrorist state”, “shift responsibility from the aggressor to the victim”, “anyone who doubts this is an accomplice of Russia”.
Zelensky made no attempt to deny the accusations. His position was entirely Hey ! We are Ukraine, you aren’t supposed to treat us like that.
After five months of relentless propaganda by legacy media, including, regrettably, Al Jazeera, which overlooked racist abuse of refugees by Ukrainian border guards, extra-judicial executions by Ukrainian security services, Neo-Nazi groups guilty of abuse of Muslims, Jews, Travellers, Feminists and immigrants passed off as “brave nationalists”, playground language from Ukrainian “diplomats”, homophobic agendas from Ukrainian government advisors and, most importantly of all, consistent, continued killing of Donbass civilians, President Zelensky’s government believes that it has the same impunity as Israel’s. It is the same, sickening impunity currently being exercised yet again in Palestine; the impunity to oil Apartheid politics with the blood of Palestinian children.
The legacy media and the western liberal establishment in general, with their inability to approach anything except with a childish, binary simplification are part of the problem, not the answer.
