More respected organisations say it is genocide; the media still mainly does not
JVL Introduction
We wonder how many organisations need to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide before this is taken seriously by western politicians and western mainstream or legacy outlets. December saw more respected NGOs reporting “that Israel is striving for extermination”; yet the legacy media seems determined not to agree or even properly report these findings. Is it no longer news but “normal” for Palestinians to be murdered, to live under bombardment for 15 months to be soaked and freezing and starving in tents?
In this wide ranging article Cook highlights some of the issues regarding the media – how and why they do what they do. References include the recent findings by Owen Jones about how the BBC is so often (mis)handling the issues. Two videos; one with Norman Finkelstein and one with Owen Jones, were within the original article and are included here.
This article published with the kind permission of Middle East Eye.
LL
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Tue 24 Dec 2024. Read the original here.
Another expert report finds Israel is committing genocide. The West yawns
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Medecins Sans Frontieres are all agreed. But the Gaza genocide is now just another routine news item, buried on the inside pages
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Who owns and controls mainstream media? It is still where most people get their information. Eg BBC: PALESTINIANS “want” PALESTINE for a state. Zionists also want it.
(Implied). (The Jewish) religion confers superior rights to Palestine, over those whose families have long inhabited it.
Came across this article on Counterpunch a bit earlier from a few days ago:
Auschwitz to Gaza: The War Against International Law
By Lawrence Davidson
So how does today’s behavior of Israel, backed by its patron the United States, remind us of the Nazi disruption of international order? (1) Israel has evolved—driven by the very logic of Zionist ideology—to proclaim itself a state of Jewish supremacy. As described by B’Tselem, Israel’s own human rights organization, Israel seeks “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Today, we call this apartheid which international law and convention has designated a “crime against humanity.” (2) Since its inception, Israel has coveted “all the land of Biblical Israel, i.e. Gaza, the West Bank and other parcels of territory, as divinely designated “lebensraum” for the Jewish people. Presently, the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip is being done in preparation for Israeli colonization. (3) That ethnic cleansing is perpetuated primarily by massive bombardment from the air and artillery barrages that reenact both the Nazi tactic of blitzkrieg and the U.S. tactic of “shock and awe.”….
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/31/auschwitz-to-gaza-the-war-against-international-law/
A very accurate summary of the effect of the skewed news on me and so many others. Not helped by having Starmer as my MP, who stopped replying to my letters as soon as I mentioned Israel several years ago. Local protests here in Camden seem to have stopped (please tell me they haven’t — but they are invisible). The last national march felt smaller, with a feeling of bearing witness rather than forcing a change. Al Jazeera has now moved to different channel, harder to find and needing to load. Despair seems to clog our footsteps, and I so admire JVL and JVP , inspiring us to keep going on & going on.
A recent Guardian article suggested that a consensus is building that the state of Israel is committing acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, extermination, crimes against humanity and war crimes, by virtue of the manner in which it is prosecuting its war on the people of Gaza. The author based this conclusion upon recent reports from Amnesty International, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Human Rights Watch (HWR), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the International Commission of Jurists and the UN, described as “the world’s legal and moral authorities”.
Absent from this list of authorities was reference to any public condemnation of Israel’s actions, whatever label one chooses to give them, from the Catholic, Anglican and Methodist Churches which, can speak only with moral authority and so act as the conscience of the nation.
Today Gaza looks like the city of Dresden did after it was bombed by the RAF in February 1945. What we have witnessed over the past fifteen months is a descent into the kind of barbarism that prevailed in Europe eighty years ago, paralleled by a decline in the validity of the arguments made by the state of Israel in defence of its actions.
After the bombing eighty years ago Bishop Bell for a moment turned the Anglican Church into the conscience of the nation. He refused to allow the Christian message to be lost out of fear of upsetting his political masters. The Catholic weekly The Tablet, urged Christians not to silently accept the increasing ruthlessness of the war. Continuation of war in this way, it argued, would not only prolong the conflict, but would constitute surrender to the Nazi spirit.
To use the the words of Bishop Bell, have the churches now become the State’s ‘spiritual auxiliary’?
To Les:-
I’d hoped for more of a lead from the faith groups too. Perhaps it’s happening but we just don’t know about it? I’d have expected to hear from the Methodists and Baptists, for example, but don’t know what they’re doing.
Pope Francis speaks out regularly on Gaza, to the extent Israeli officials / opinion formers/ politicians have tried hard to quieten him.
I think the Catholics and Catholic press may be more active diplomatically and practically than many of us “outsiders” realise. Their resources are huge if they wish to use them.
I feel my own faith group (Quakers) hasn’t reached unity on its response – which surprises and saddens me. Instead, we’re doing individually and as local Meetings anything that we think might help. There is at least one Quaker group involving Friends from many Meetings – JUST. It has links with CAMPAIN) and JVL and other groups may wish to work in loose association with it.
Individual Friends have suffered legal consequences for their (always non-violent) direct action at Elbit and elsewhere to stop the genocide. More typically Friends organise vigils across the faith communities to stop hatred growing here in the UK, write letters, lobby Parliament and MPs, etc …
The Anglicans are enduring sudden forced changes in their leadership and uncertainties about their management of safeguarding within the church – perhaps they’re too distracted to work on other crises right now?