Category: Media

Just Say No – Refusing the Drug of Propaganda at an Early Age

Israeli media is finally starting to feel the pressure. These past two weeks, the news has been full of the issues that activists have been working hard for and paying with their freedom for. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is slowly making headlines, the Goldstone report has been on the Israeli mind all week and the issue I’d like to highlight today, has been gaining momentum: The Shministim.

Meet the Shministim

In Hebrew “Shministim” means “seniors”. Every high school senior, in Israel, gets their drafting order in the mail. On rare occasions, these seniors refuse on ethical grounds, becoming conscientious objectors. In Israel, conscientious objectors are jailed by the army. They serve up to 28 days (those refusing to wear an army uniform, during their jailing, are sent to solitary confinement), are released and jailed again, until the army agrees to discharge them.

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Iran – The War Dance

An important interview with Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq, on Democracy Now!, debunking some of the myths spun around Iran’s nuclear programme.

In a frightening replay of its pathological gullibility for state propaganda, the mainstream press (with honourable exceptions, as ever) has once again adopted the dominant narrative set by Western governmental officials, with journalists and other members of the intelligentsia dutifully performing their role as Gramsci’s “experts in legitimation”.

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Learning about Zionism the Goldstone Way

Richard Goldstone in Gaza
Richard Goldstone in Gaza

I waited a bit to have a complete picture of Ha’aretz (“the elite left”) coverage of the Goldstone lead UN report on Gaza. Israeli citizens could have learned something about the government and themselves through this report. Instead, I learn, yet again, how corrupted the media, the government and the people are, by the Zionist mythos.

Keeping the Myth Alive

The first Ha’aretz article (and all the subsequent articles that weren’t written by Amira Hass or Gideon Levy) about the report plays on the myth that both sides of this “conflict” (a.k.a. “occupation”) are on equal footing:

UN probe: Israel, Palestinians both guilty of Gaza war crimes

This title is, of course, misleading, as anyone who’s taken the time to read just the table of contents of the report, can see a clear ratio that puts Israel to shame. But the sillies don’t stop there; Not only is the title misleading, when reporting about the mission, it’s misleading in characterization of the article it heads! The article mentions the main points (I’ve rephrased, in order to avoid linguistic bias, such as calling a massacre “war”):

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Surfing on Islamophobia

On Sunday, our good friend Phil Weiss posted a sympathetic piece by Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative, on Christopher Caldwell’s new book about Islam in Europe. Here is the response by PULSE editors Muhammad Idrees Ahmad and Robin Yassin-Kassab which was published on MondoWeiss today:

There are two sets of population statistics about Europe, writes Eliot Weinberger in a post on the London Review Blog: ‘those of the Islamophobes and those of everyone else.’ Weinberger is commenting on the recent of flurry of books trading in the ‘Islamic threat’, among them one by neoconservative writer Christopher Caldwell. In his encomium to Caldwell, Scott McConnell couldn’t possibly have been referring to the statistics of ‘everyone else’. It would be hard otherwise to elevate a minority of 3.6 percent into a civilizational threat. So presumably he accepts the numbers of the Islamophobes. But he does more; he also echoes their assumptions. Small wonder then that he should consider ‘nuanced’ a book that describes Muslims as ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’.

But before we get to Caldwell lets address McConnell’s own assumptions.

McConnell splits ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslims’ into opposing camps, and understands their relationship only in terms of harm. ‘Had I to weigh the extent to which the Islamic world is more victim or victimizer of America and the West’, he opines, ‘the scales would tilt decisively towards America as the more guilty party’. American crimes include the Iraq war and support for Israeli conquest of ‘the Arab sections’ of Jerusalem and the West Bank. Support for dictators, the proponderance of military bases, the exploitation of resources, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and support for the Israeli conquest of the ‘Arab sections’ of Tel Abib and Yaffa, clearly do not factor in McConnell’s narrow vision. But it’s fair enough in itself. Where logic fails McConnell entirely, or rather where he fails logic and turns to racism instead, is where he places Muslim immigration into Europe ‘on the other side of the ledger’.

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Enemies of Free Speech

Gaza police check their organs
Gaza police check their organs

Remember the Islamophobic cartoons published by the neo-con Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten? The controversy rumbled on from 2005 into 2006, and involved angry demonstrations, embassy-burnings (in countries where you can’t look at an embassy without a government permit), deaths, boycotts, and campaigns of support to counteract the boycotts. Although I found the cartoons deeply offensive, and not in the least related to free speech or constructive debate, I was more upset by the responses of some Muslims.

The cartoons were a media provocation, and should have been combatted through intelligent use of the media. The outpouring of Muslim anger at a West which insulted Muslims after slaughtering them was certainly understandable, but was aimed at the wrong target. I lived in Oman at the time, where the state-appointed Mufti as well as editorials in the state-controlled press encouraged people to boycott Danish goods. The supermarkets put up signs announcing that they no longer stocked Danish goods (although an English friend assured me that Danish bacon was still on sale in the foreigners-only pork room of one supermarket). Meanwhile the shelves groaned under American products, and Oman continued to stock  British and American military bases. American planes were incinerating Iraqi Muslims in their mosques at the time. The cartoon fuss seemed very much to be an organised distraction from more serious issues.

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Empire, Obama, and America’s Last Taboo

Author, journalist, film maker John Pilger speaks at Socialism 2009 http://www.socialistworker.org; http://www.haymarketbooks.org Filmed by Paul Hubbard at the Womens Building in San Francisco 4 July 2009.

Media Mis-focus – Perpetuating the Zionist Narrative, for Better or Worse

Media Mis-focus

Good propaganda isn’t constructed on lies, but rather half truths. Missing context, however, is not the only component the Israeli media employs to distort the Israeli mind. Another subtle trick is what the media focuses on. Three stories were revealed to me this week. They have little in common but a lesson on the effects of media focus.

The Irrelevance of an Israel-Born Fatah Member to the Zionist Narrative

Thank god for alternative media, because I could have completely missed this fantastic fact:

Loud applause broke out Saturday evening as it was announced that “brother” Dr Uri Davis had been elected to the Fatah movement’s largest governing body.

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Advocacy Group Decries PETA’s Inhumane Treatment Of Women

Women Deserve Better says PETA abuses defenseless, simple-minded women by forcing them to remove their clothing and participate in humiliating…

Recapping the Twilight Zone Media

TwilightZoneI have to admit, I’ve lost touch with the Israeli mainstream media. I’ve found so many alternative medias online that there really isn’t any point to turning on the telly, or buying a newspaper. But one must travel into the alternate universe known as Israel every so often. So I put on my goggles and nose plug and sink my hands deep into Ha’aretz’s front page, knowing this is as left as the mainstream media gets down here. What does the Israeli mind preoccupy itself with while the international boycott movement is growing and Israeli citizens are turned refugees right under its upturned nose?

USA Support
The number one obsession in Israel is US support, or rather the eating-our-cake-and-having-it-too notion of what we can get away with and still have US support.

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Freedom of Speech Framed

Darius Guppy, left, with Earl Spencer

The Independent has offered Darius Guppy the opportunity to write back against the dominant ‘Iran narrative’ in the Western media. Guppy argues that there is no hard evidence for rigging in the recent Iranian presidential elections (an argument made here and here too), and criticises the easy assumption that Ahmadinejad’s victory was fraudulent, as well as, more generally, the West’s usual double standards when it comes to the Muslim world. He questions the complacent expectation that most young Iranians wish to emulate our ‘free’ society, and contrasts the UK unfavourably with Iran in terms of authoritarian surveillance, public ethics, and culture. “Visit Iran and you will see a people polite, hospitable, cultured, noble and brave,” he writes. “Look at Britain’s urban hell and you will see young girls and boys armed with knives, swearing, half naked, vomiting the previous night’s attempt to stifle their pain and their emptiness.” Guppy here is employing the rant genre, as I often do myself. Like all op-ed journalism, his piece is necessarily partial and incomplete. He generalises, and fails to mention, for example, Iran’s galloping heroin problem. But he surely makes some very good points, and makes them very eloquently. The Independent is to be congratulated for giving him the space.

Or is it? Two paragraphs into the online piece, the reader is directed to another article which mocks the author. This framing piece doesn’t engage Guppy’s arguments but simply launches ad hominem attacks against him. It turns out that Guppy was imprisoned for insurance fraud in 1993. This is relevant information, but not so relevant that we need to be informed even before we’ve finished Guppy’s piece. Then the Independent’s omniscient voice implies Guppy is not a genuine enough native informant because he’s only half Iranian. (Guppy does use the rhetorical ‘we’ in his piece, but also describes himself as an old Etonian. He isn’t pretending to be anything he isn’t.) The framing article also subtly distorts Guppy’s perspective, for instance by claiming that he mocks the idea that Iranians long for democracy. In Guppy’s article, democracy is written inside inverted commas – ‘democracy’. In other words, Guppy is not writing against democracy, but against the propagandist use of the word in the West.

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