Israel’s attack on Gaza: How is the Western media covering it?

Two weeks ago Israel in Lebanon By turning pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices into homicidal weapons Shocked the world. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured in these attacks, most of them women and children.

This attack is terrorism by any definition, a crime against humanity and a clear violation of international law, but how it was covered by the Western media is eye-opening.

Western The media A section of the media doesn’t seem to care that dozens of innocent people have been killed in an unusual way, but instead is surprisingly linking the incident to an imaginary threat linked to China and Russia. For example, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have written about the threat to our supply chains and how careful we should be about products coming from China.

This issue is not new. For a long time, the Western media has seen the issue of Palestine and Israel through a certain colored lens and shown others.

A clear majority of the Western media is describing the ongoing horrors in Gaza as the ‘Israel-Hamas war’, suggesting that two armies may be fighting head-to-head on the battlefield. Although the situation is that Israel is by far the most advanced war machine in the world. At least 70,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on a densely populated area, to which Hamas’s response is nothing but a few rocket attacks.

Describing it as a face-to-face battle between two armies is meant to sugar coat the bitterness of Israel’s aggression.

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But when the same media reports the war between Ukraine and Russia, where the armies of two countries are actually fighting each other, they call it an attack on Ukraine.

Journalism classes are taught to use the active voice whenever possible because it is more powerful. The 55th edition (published 2022) of the Associated Press Style Book, considered the bible of journalism, instructs journalists:

Favor the active voice: “Firefighters are working the blaze,” not “the blaze is being worked by firefighters.”

But while reporting on the attacks on Gaza, the Western media ignores these principles and uses passive language that does not reveal who is carrying out the attacks.

On 6 September 2024 Israeli army Ayesha Noor, a Turkish-American human rights activist, was shot dead in the head in the West Bank. Now see how this serious crime was covered by American network ABC:

American activist fatally shot in the head in the West Bank: Officials

It did not say who shot the woman in the head. Not just the headline, the Israeli army is mentioned somewhere in the 18th line of this news.

The Washington Post reported the same news as follows:

‘Gentle, brave, silly’: Amerian killed in West Bank remembered by loved ones

See a headline from the British newspaper The Times. Hamas is ‘doing’ the killing while Palestinians are ‘being’ killed. It is not known who is killing the Palestinians.

When Israel cut off the water supply to Gaza, the Guardian newspaper did not write that Israel had committed a serious crime against humanity against civilians. Rather, its headline read:

That is, God knows how the water was stopped, who did it, people are just getting dehydrated.

We gain access to the reality of the world through language. But through the medium of the same language, the truth can be hidden and distorted, but language can also be used as a weapon. And this is what is happening in a section of the Western media right now.