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The violence of the alphabet – how media aids the genocide in Palestine

By Mariam Jooma Carikci

On the first anniversary of the Israeli genocide of Gaza, it is no surprise that Palestinians have lost their faith in the media to activate any change to stop the carnage. While thousands upon thousands of children are literally being blown apart in real-time, we amputate our humanity and scroll past to view the latest trends on TikTok.   It took the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) more than six weeks to issue a statement on the 43 journalists and 13,000 civilians killed in the opening weeks of the war. Now, one year and officially 41,000 dead Palestinians later not to mention the estimated 300 journalists killed, the mass media and its apparatus are not neutral bystanders to the war.

Indeed, the media are deeply complicit in the war crimes and outrageous abuses of the US-backed Israeli state as they continue to present a façade of ‘balanced’ journalism. How many know that in 1975 the United Nations adopted a resolution stating that Zionism is a form of racism? The resolution held at least until 1991 when Israel insisted it be revoked as a basis for participating in the failed Oslo peace process. Today any critique of Zionism is considered anti-semitic even as orthodox Jews in Israel itself reject the conflation of Judaism with Zionism.

Where information is sourced from is as important as the story itself and first-hand accounts are first prize for any journalist worth their street cred. Yet mass media plays semantic games as it expects Palestinian victims to justify why the Israeli bombing of every hospital, university, and school in the Gaza strip and the murder of 17000 children is evidence of genocide, even as live Instagram reels show the insides of dead children murdered by bombs in their thousands.  In contrast, when IDF spokesperson, Daniel Hagari points to a handwritten calendar of the days of the week in Arabic which he says is a list of Hamas fighters, western journalists are supposedly given ‘proof’ of Hamas activity at Al-Shifa hospital.

One year later, the thoroughly discredited claim of 40 beheaded babies and mass rape by Hamas fighters still serves to justify acts of violence across Israel’s borders into Lebanon. In stark contrast, the documented murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was struck by 335 sniper bullets while waiting for help for three hours, fails to trigger calls for a ceasefire. Are Palestinian lives considered so inconsequential that the term ‘ceasefire’—merely a pause in the violent assault on a vulnerable and confined civilian population—has become a point of contention, a complex linguistic tool in our detached discussions?

A quantitative analysis done by The Intercept of major US newspapers over the first six weeks of the war shows the term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” described the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4. Palestinians ‘die’ in the passive tense they are not ‘slaughtered’. Gazans are displaced due to the conflict; they are not forcibly moved under threat of air bombing.  Palestinians are never allowed to take control of the narrative because to do so would be to expose the colonial project that is Israel itself.

In an interview with Al-Jazeera’s Listening Post program on media coverage of Palestine since Oct 7, former Jerusalem Post Bureau chief, Judi Ruderen, unwittingly exposes the ideological underpinning of Western mass media. Without irony, Ruderen explains concerning the Hamas attacks on Israel and the response to it, “Barbaric, massacre, atrocities those are appropriate words to use…the response was intense with death, destruction and displacement… but we are talking about two very different things and they deserve different adjectives.”

For Ruderen the fact health workers have a new acronym for an estimated 17000 child victims -WCNSF (wounded child no surviving family) is no evidence of barbarity, atrocity, or massacre. Israel’s response is simply “intense”’. One can almost hear the undertone – Palestinian civilians are legitimate collateral damage.

The prolific Palestinian-American Professor Edward Said eloquently summed up this double standard in his essay on the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, The Permission to Narrate: “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them.” Importantly, the authority behind those narratives imbues them with meaningful power.

For those unwilling to acknowledge history, the Hamas attack on Oct 7, 2023, was an aberration of an otherwise perfectly, peaceful neighborhood. The fact that Gazans have been under collective Israeli punishment through a land, air, and sea siege since the early 1990s followed by a 17-year chokehold after electing Hamas to political power in 2007 is an inconvenient truth for Western audiences.

We continue to hear from sycophants who are invested in shielding Israel from accountability, that the conflict is ‘complicated’. After 365 days of genocide, the truth won’t be suppressed. No generation is more awakened to the Palestinian cause for liberation than Gen Z. They have demonstrated the power of alternative and social media to build solidarity based on human rights for all. As the sun sets on the US empire and its Israeli outpost unmasked for all to see, mainstream media must be tried for their complicity. Just as media personalities were held accountable for abetting the Jewish holocaust and the Rwandan genocide so media workers must be made accountable.  As Rapper Macklemore says in his tribute to Hind Rajab, ‘You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm, but it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness’.

Mariam Jooma
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