Get this straight, Western media: Palestinians aren’t sub-human -
Levin - 11-10-2023
Andrew Mitrovica
Published On 10 Oct 2023
10 Oct 2023
Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades.
That fact may come, I suspect, as a surprise to many people whose grasp of the world is shaped by their exclusive consumption of Western media.
The deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians – prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias – have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations.
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much of the Western media won’t acknowledge these facts and outrages. That’s because many of the reporters and columnists now gripped by the latest eruption of murderous madness in Palestine and Israel have always interpreted events through a prism chiefly dictated by Israel
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In this myopic calculus,
Israel is always the victim, never the perpetrator. Israel’s understanding of history matters; Palestinians’ reading not only of the past but of the present and the future too, does not count. And, perhaps most indecent of all, Israeli lives and deaths matter; Palestinian lives and deaths don’t.
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Human rights groups based in Jerusalem, London and New York have published report after report that establishes, as a matter of international law, that Israel has, for a long time, been guilty of apartheid – a state-sanctioned, systemic policy to impose ethnic supremacy over besieged Palestinians with brutal, grinding efficiency.
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Instead, many Western news outlets either dismissed outright or used the familiar vocabulary of denial to obscure the blatant truth.
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At the core of this blindness is a shared doctrine that holds that a Palestinian is a disposable non-entity, an expendable by-product of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.
In this perverse construct, Palestinian civilians are not considered innocent casualties of war but remain largely responsible for their own deaths and desperate fates.
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Western columnists will defend Israel – without so much as a hint of doubt or equivocation – despite its demonstrable record of erasing Palestinians whenever it wants, wherever it wants, for whatever reason it wants.
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Netanyahu’s chilling vow to, in effect, obliterate Gaza and his warning to the 2 million Palestinians who live in that thin strip of land to “get out” is the inevitable expression of apartheid, which is predicated on the dehumanisation of an entire people.
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the dehumanisation of Palestinians is based on two tenets widely held among Western media: “Palestinians are violent because of who they are – because of something intrinsic in their very nature and culture,” Dajani wrote, rather than “because of the oppression and violence of the Israeli occupation”. As a corollary to this, “since Palestinians lack basic standards of morality… the only way to interact with them is through the use of force, whether state-sponsored force by the Israeli security forces or non-state actors such as Israeli settlers. Force is the only language they understand.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/10/get-this-straight-western-media-palestinians-arent-sub-human?sf182541291=1