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July4 - US Media and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
When you travel to Israel/Palestine, as I did in March of this year, not to enjoy the fruits of the Zionist enterprise and have a pleasant vacation, but to actually see the facts on the ground and the absolute unfeeling cruelty and carelessness with which the current owners of the land treat the dispossessed former owners, you will never again be the same. The despair of the formerly peaceful farmers in the land of Palestine is overwhelming. The very people who have built the Jewish experience of the Holocaust into their worldview and are using it as their justification, are now treating the Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories with such a degree of human disregard and cruelty that it shakes your composure.
Even as I write this and while the newspapers are full of soccer in Brazil, F-14 bombers attack Gaza, 40,000 reservists are called up for a ground war, private houses are demolished and families made homeless as collective punishment, soldiers are exhibiting cruelty to civilians and beat up youngsters. Hundreds of men, including children as young as 5 are arrested for stone- throwing and resisting the government. Do you remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? The celebrated hero fighters of the ghetto, fighting the Nazis, did it because hopelessness breeds desperation, lack of prospects kills the soul, life is not worth living if it doesn’t offer a modicum of personal and collective self-determination. Israel frames its military actions as defense and justified retaliation, when the reason for resistance and stone-throwing is THE OCCUPATION ITSELF.
The US Government and its media, so devoted to its “unbreakable friendship” with Israel, controls what we, the people, are being told about the Palestinian events, and mostly it is heavily influenced by the official Israeli viewpoint. If you want to know more about the US media, you may watch the movie "Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land" below. It compares U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East and shows how structural distortions in U.S. coverage are reinforcing false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The US Government and its media, so devoted to its “unbreakable friendship” with Israel, controls what we, the people, are being told about the Palestinian events, and mostly it is heavily influenced by the official Israeli viewpoint. If you want to know more about the US media, you may watch the movie "Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land" below. It compares U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East and shows how structural distortions in U.S. coverage are reinforcing false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.