Why the West created a new dictionary for Israel and Palestine
JVL Introduction
Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York, looks at the conscious effort that goes into framing the way in which the struggle for (and aginst!) Palestinian self-determination is understood.
There is in effect a specialised “dictionary” of words that are deemed appropriate and a special grammatical syntax, particularly when using verbs in the active or passive voice.
Use of the “Hamas-run” health ministry is well-known as a strategy to discredit any casualty figures coming out of Gaza – despite the WHO and others being confident about their figures.
Immediately after October 7th the New York Times editors “instructed journalists to restrict the use of terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”, not to use the word Palestine “except in rare cases”, and to avoid terms like “refugee camps” and “occupied territory” to describe actual Palestinian refugee camps and Israeli-occupied territories…[and] to be careful in their use of “incendiary” terms like “slaughter”, “massacre”, and “carnage” to describe killings “on all sides”.”
Massad goes on to detail other strategies deployed in this war of words and the complicity with Israel that it embodies.
RK
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Mon 29 Jul 2024. Read the original here.
Why the West created a new dictionary for Israel and Palestine
Seeking ideological uniformity on the issue, western officials and their media accomplices have long recognised the centrality of language to their political indoctrination project
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Sadly all the “Liberal” “Moderate” and “Centrist” journalists who idolize George Orwell, haven’t got to terms with living on Airstrip One.
For students of media history there are measurable criteria and examples against which the bias and racism of the reporting of recent historical events can be quantified. Compare the BBC’s critical reporting of the Vietnam War with its supportive coverage of Western aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, & elsewhere etc.
Only 3 countries – Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, and Israel – bucked the post war decolonisation consensus. Compare current coverage of Israel, with that from decades ago critical of its two racist sister colonial projects – Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa. Also worth noting that previously the BBC and other news providers warned LGBTQ groups about the dangers they might face in North Carolina. Neither it or any other news outlets now warn Black Britons about the dangers they’d face – even if Jewish – as people of colour in Apartheid Israel. In fact, the term Apartheid is mostly censored.
Many commentators have suggested comparing coverage of a single life lost in Ukraine with that of tens-of-thousands in Palestine. Actually, we do know the death toll from 9/11 was 3,000 with many more injured. We also know that the death toll in Gaza is 13 times the size of 9/11. But news editors refuse to treat it as remotely equivalently.
At the end of WW2 the allies executed Julius Streicher, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) and others, for creating the ideological climate and facilitating Nazi crimes. It is hard to argue that our generation of western news industry professionals are any less guilty?
Gavin Lewis has it spot on. The US and UK Media are controlled by the Rightwing. The BBC has been so Bias when it comes to Politics, whether it was its part in bringing down Corbyn, supporting the Tories when it comes to the Privatisation of the NHS, the truth behind the war in Ukraine and worst of all it’s reporting on Gaza and it’s silence over what is happening in the West Bank. We would be better off if it didn’t exist.