I like As'ad AbuKhalil better:http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/angr ... war-crimesWestern Media Complicity With Israeli War CrimesBy As'ad AbuKhalil - Wed, 2013-12-11 When the history books are written years from now – hopefully after the demise of the Zionist apartheid regime – it will be noted that Western media (the liberal and he conservative branches) have been complicit with Israel in its propaganda. Western media have consistently, in a variety of ways, advanced the propaganda talking points of Israel, even at the expense of the truth. There are many examples of such complicity, these are only a few examples:
1) Western media publish long articles about nuclear weapons in the Middle East and about potential weapon programs. Fancy charts and graphs are published alongside the articles but the possession by Israel of a massive arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is consistently ignored by Western media. Furthermore, Western reporters, when interviewing Western officials, are willing to spend an hour or more on discussions of potential Iranian nuclear weapon program without bothering to ask or wonder about actual Israeli nuclear warheads. That can’t be due to lack of information: That is due to pure propaganda.
2) Western media publish long tributes to Nelson Mandela and about the vicious apartheid systems of South Africa while 1) refusing to discuss the similarities between the apartheid system of Israel and the apartheid system of South Africa; 2) purposefully glossing over the long history of close cooperation (at all levels) between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
3) Western media always find a way to make the ruling government of Israel moderate, even through an invocation of bizarre political ideological typologies. Thus, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin are introduced as moderate because they are not Likud (although most of the Israeli war crimes have been committed by the Labor Party and its ideological forerunners). Similarly, Tzipi Livni is labeled as a moderate because she is not Benjamin Netanyahu, while Netanyahu is introduced as moderate, because he is not Avigdor Lieberman, and Lieberman is labeled as a moderate (as in a recent article in The New York Times, which declared him a “changed man” after only a few days in office) because he is not Hitler, presumably.
4) Liberal Western media found a way to justify the Zionist system of repression and occupation in 1948 Palestine by creating a false dichotomy between the West Bank and the rest of occupied Palestine. This artificial formula only served to license crimes by Israel all over the region.
5) Western media never deviated from the foreign policy goals of the Israeli propaganda apparatus. When Israel wished to discredit the Palestinian National Movement during the Cold War, it insisted that the Palestinian resistance movement was a mere branch of Soviet communism. Accordingly, Western media devoted much of their attention in their coverage of Palestine to finding evidence of communist connections (and there is a number of books on that very subject). And when Israel resorted to a new technique after the demise of the Soviet Union, by conflating the Palestinian resistance movement with Islamic “terrorism,” Western media obediently followed suit.
6) Western media have now incorporated or internalized the cruel behavior and methods of Western human rights organizations, whereby any investigation or criticisms of Israeli war crimes have to be “balanced” with a contrived criticism of war crimes by the victims themselves. Human Rights Watch, among other Western organizations, now habitually fault the Palestinians for being victims of Israeli war crimes, as if victimhood in itself – if damaging to Israel – is morally unacceptable.
7) Western media have consistently covered up the rising evidence of racism in Israel, not only against Arabs but also against Africans and Jews from non-European backgrounds. Such coverage may prove too damaging to the image of Israel, which Western media themselves have helped cultivate over the decades.
It is indubitable that the very creation of the state of Israel atop the state of Palestine was itself a massive war crime. And it is certain that the pattern of Israeli war crimes would not have been widely accepted in many parts of the Western world if not for the efforts of Western media on behalf of Israel – not to deny that many in the West do naturally sympathize with the colonial-settler state of Israel. It echoes too much of Western history.
