Mondoweiss –February 10, 2024
Dehumanization and misinformation in service of genocide
The dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs combined with outright misinformation about October 7 is the engine powering the genocide in Gaza.
BY MITCHELL PLITNICK
Cutting off the funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) just at the moment when its services are more desperately needed than at any point in its history is cruel beyond measure, and is, itself, an act of genocide. It cannot be anything else, as the known consequence of that cutoff under current circumstances will lead to massive numbers of deaths and an unimaginable increase in illness, injury, and profound trauma among the 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, not to mention the damage it will also do to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria who also rely on UNRWA’s services for daily needs.
This level of monstrous inhumanity would seem to be as horrific as it could get. But now consider that the United States — which has now led nearly twenty countries to suspend funding for UNRWA — has explicitly admitted that it took this murderous course based on nothing more than Israel’s word.
As I reported recently, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said they had not verified Israel’s claims. On Wednesday, the government of Canada, which has also suspended UNRWA’s funding, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that they still had not seen any evidence beyond Israel’s claims against UNRWA.
The only evidence that has been shared publicly — and, based on those public statements by U.S. and other officials, quite possibly all that has been presented even privately — has been a six-page dossier simply repeating the allegations, but offering no supporting evidence whatsoever.
Sky News reported on the dossier which has been leaked to news outlets. Their report stated that, “The Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.”
You’d think that would be the lead, but that one paragraph, damning though it is, is all the article had to say on the veracity of Israel’s claims, and you needed to get close to the end of the piece to find it.
This is typical of how the entire war on Gaza has been covered by most of the press in Europe and, especially in the United States. As James North reported recently on this site, this has gone way beyond the usual pro-Israel bias that we see in American and European media. One staff member at CNN told Chris McGreal of The Guardian, “Every action by Israel — dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families — the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon either. On November 9, 2023, just a month into Israel’s campaign of slaughter of Gaza’s civilian population, some 750 journalists signed on to an open letter decrying American media coverage of the war.
“Newsrooms have…undermined Palestinian, Arab and Muslim perspectives, dismissing them as unreliable and have invoked inflammatory language that reinforces Islamophobic and racist tropes,” the letter read. “They have printed misinformation spread by Israeli officials and failed to scrutinize indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza — committed with the support of the U.S. government.”
The letter ended up gathering over 1,470 signatures, many of whom are reporters for leading news outlets like Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Yet the problem only grew worse.
From the beginning, stories that relayed the constant torment of life in Gaza under relentless Israeli attack were rare, and drowned out by the constant drumbeat of in-depth stories of suffering on October 7, and quotes from President Biden, Secretary of States Antony Blinken, and other American officials blaming Palestinians for their own suffering and at most politely stating that Israel must comply with international law that they clearly were ignoring without consequence.
Deceiving the public into supporting a genocide
The campaign to convince people in the West to support a genocide needed to go much farther than biased and decontextualized presentations of events. It needed to go full bore into misinformation.
The United States is certainly no stranger to blatant lies used to create public support for some of the most horrible atrocities in recent memory. The Gulf of Tonkin scam and, of course, the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, led to unimaginable atrocities in Vietnam and Iraq from which those countries still bear deep scars.
World history has demonstrated the key role media plays in genocide. From Der Sturmer in Nazi Germany to Pravda in the Soviet Union, powerfully authoritarian governments used major media to communicate to the masses and also to manipulate what they saw in the world around them, covering up or creating justifications for their worst abuses.
In modern, liberal republics such as those in the U.S., Europe, and, to a lesser extent due to its active military censorship, Israel, misinformation in mainstream media remains a key tool but needs to be modified to suit a somewhat less authoritarian kind of government. It’s even trickier in the age of social media, where people can get both reality as well as some truly fantastical narratives through their phones.
This means the propaganda effort is less effective, as we can see by the overwhelming number of Democrats in the United States who disapprove of Bidenﾒs policy. Yet, in so many ways, it still gets the job done.
Consider some of the things that have been repeated over and over, without substantiation, until they are accepted as truth, by at least some significant part of the populace. It becomes even more powerful when it’s more than the media, but the leadership.
For example, Joe Biden has repeatedly talked about the “beheaded babies” in the October 7 attack, despite the fact that his own staff has had to walk back the assertion that he kept making, claiming to have actually seen pictures of an atrocity that clearly never happened, as there was only one baby killed (and that is enough of a tragedy) on October 7. That’s not coming from human rights groups, that’s Israel’s official data.
Yet it was repeated often enough in media before it was disproven (which is mentioned far less often) that many still believe it to be true. And if one wants to argue that, at least as far as the U.S. government goes, we might write this off as Biden being “confused” as he so often is (just look at him being unable to remember who Hamas is in this video), how do we explain the fact Antony Blinken told equally unsubstantiated, lurid, and false tales in a Senate hearing?
No, this is a campaign of misinformation to justify the unjustifiable, and it’s worked.
American media amplified the horrifying stories of October 7 and decried anyone asking for evidence as a “denier.” This becomes easier because there can be no doubt that civilians were killed and wounded by Hamas on October 7. So, a reasonable person would ask, why would Israel bother exaggerating it?
The reason, of course, is that Hamas’s act would have been enough to justify an Israeli response in people’s minds. But Netanyahu never intended for this to be a proportional response, or even as disproportionate as Israeli attacks on Gaza have been in the past. This operation was always meant to drive Palestinians from Gaza by making it unlivable, causing as much death and destruction as possible. To that end, the goal of totally eradicating Hamas was set, which anyone with any knowledge of such matters knew was always going to be unattainable. Because even Israel isn’t quite brazen enough to explicitly state, “We intend to commit genocide.”
By establishing the complete elimination of Hamas as its goal, massive attacks on civilians were justified. And, indeed, for many weeks, there was absolute support from the U.S. and Europe, despite the legions of documented cases of Israel deliberately targeting civilians, shelters, schools, hospitals, journalists, rescue workers, mosques, and every other protected person or site. It took months before European leaders expressed any discomfort at all, and even longer for the United States to grudgingly admit that maybe Israel was going just a little too far.
That level of acquiescence requires more than the usual attack on civilians. The attack needs to be so inhuman and monstrous that it stirs up a lust for vengeance that mixes with real horror. In this case, it feeds off of Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes as well, particularly of a special kind of Muslim/Arab misogyny and sexual violence.
The story of systematic mass rapes, which remains unsubstantiated, though there is enough evidence that some sexual assault did occur to warrant an investigation that Israel will not, of course, allow (that is a very low bar. Any credible allegation of even a single incident should be investigated). Few have asked what should be the obvious question of why suddenly, after all these years, we see such a dramatic level of sexual violence when that had not been a typical characteristic of Palestinian attacks on Israelis for all these long decades of conflict.
Outright racism
Even Joe Biden was forced to condemn the Wall Street Journal for its despicable article on February 2 headlined, “Welcome to Dearborn, Americaﾒs Jihad Capital,” which characterized the Michigan city, with one of the country’s largest Arab-American populations, as a hotbed of support for bloodshed and antisemitism. One racist trope after another is trotted out, to such a distressing and disgusting degree that the city was forced into a massive increase in its security for fear of racist attacks.
Not to be outdone, on the very same day as the WSJ article came out, the New York Times published a piece by Thomas Friedman, “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” where the notorious pro-Israel writer directly translated Middle Eastern countries into animals. Iran is a parasitic wasp, Hamas is a spider, and the U.S. is a lion. Israel is not so transformed — only Netanyahu, who is a lemur. It isn’t hard to see the racism at work here.
That sort of dehumanization, as I and Prof. Sahar Aziz demonstrated in our recent report, Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the PalestineﾖIsrael Discourse, permeates U.S. policy in “normal” times, and helps reinforce the intense bias toward Israel.
But now, it’s a much more dangerous phenomenon. This dehumanization, combined with outright misinformation, is the engine powering a genocide machine. It makes some support it. It makes other people unsure of how fervently they can oppose it.
Dehumanization and misinformation have combined to justify Israel’s genocide and now it’s being used to cut off what little help from the international community the people of Gaza have been getting. More than anything else, it is what the movements around the world to save Gaza have been fighting against.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/dehumanization-and-misinformation-in-service-of-genocide/
The Gaza genocide is just an instrument in Israel’s larger colonial project
Genocide is Israel's latest policy, alongside ethnic cleansing and apartheid, in its settler colonial project of eliminating the Palestinians.
BY TAMAM MOHSEN
On October 31, the red “Breaking News” banner announced that Israeli warplanes had bombed a residential block in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. Telegram channels then delivered more devastating news, revealing that the airstrike had targeted the al-Sanida neighborhood in Jabalia, where I grew up my entire life.
As I watched Al Jazeera, staring at the screen aghast, I recognized some faces covered with blood and dust, neighbors and relatives rising from under the rubble, some standing over piles of limbs and dead bodies. In that incident, Israel had carried out at least six airstrikes on the refugee camp, flattening an entire housing block within a few minutes and killing at least 400 people.
The Jabalia massacre made headlines for the devastation it caused and the cold calculus underlying the strike, most prominently shown when an Israeli military spokesperson effectively told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that killing 400 Palestinian civilians in order to kill one Hamas commander was acceptable. In less than 24 hours, Israel carried out another airstrike in the overcrowded camp; by the end of the next day, the number of killed rose to 1000 Palestinians.
But the Jabalia massacre was one of at least 2000 massacres that Israel has perpetrated so far since October 7. As of the time of writing, the war has claimed the lives of at least 28,000 people, the majority of them women and children, while thousands still lie under the rubble, and tens of thousands have been maimed and injured.
Legal scholars, including Israelis and independent UN experts, warned that the Israeli assault on Gaza was a textbook case of genocide. And indeed, anyone with a modicum of reasonability should be able to detect the genocidal patterns in Israel’s war of extermination, especially when taken together with the statements of Israeli officials and the actions of Israeli soldiers, which were prominently brought to light during South Africa’s presentation of its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The ICJ ruled that South Africa made a convincing case that the risk of genocide in Gaza was “plausible,” hence allowing the case to advance forward at the Court.
Yet the ICJ may still conclude that some of Israel’s atrocities do not qualify as genocidal acts. That is why it is important to stress that genocide is not, in all cases, the defining feature of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. Rather, the basic feature of Israel’s settler colonial project is the logic of elimination.
This is not quibbling with words. The Zionist movement’s ultimate goal of exterminating and replacing the indigenous Palestinian population has historically been achieved through a variety of tools, which included mass ethnic cleansing on a large scale (1948, 1967, and the current genocidal war), or small-scale and incremental ethnic cleansing (such as in Area C of the West Bank or in different neighborhoods in East Jerusalem).
During historical periods when Israel was unable to eliminate the Palestinians from their lands on a grand scale, its gradualist approach required a political and administrative framework to manage the day-to-day process of incremental colonization. That framework was apartheid. Activists and human rights groups have caught on to this feature of Israeli domination in Palestine, documenting how Israel confined different groups of Palestinians into separate Bantustans and enclaves and treated them as second or third-class citizens.
But apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are mere tools in service of Israel’s larger goal — to create an exclusive Jewish state between the river and the sea.
Settler colonialism is not simply a form of genocide
Many have already examined Israel’s nature as a colonial state with a settler society, concluding that the logic of elimination is a part of the state’s ongoing structure. This means that the Gaza genocide is not the spontaneous outcome of forced circumstances triggered by the October 7 attacks but a natural outcome of Israel’s colonial structure.
As if to underscore this point, Israeli officials have repetitively invoked several 19th-century colonial tropes to justify their barbaric attack against Gaza, most notably in Netanyahu’s post on X (later removed) about the war being a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”
Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe first introduced the framework of the “logic of elimination” in an influential 2006 essay, arguing that settler colonial projects primarily seek to secure control over indigenous land and eliminate the indigenous population in service of that territorial goal. That is why Wolfe alerts us to the fact that the question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. But this is not to say that settler colonialism is invariably genocidal.
Settler colonialism may exist without genocidal behaviors, even as the settler colony actively works toward the elimination of the natives. In this sense, Wolfe argued that settler colonialism is a “structure” that stretches through time and adopts a range of practices in service of elimination, including forced expulsion, mass killings, confining the natives to certain enclaves, delegitimizing and wiping out their heritage and language, and cultural erasure through forcible assimilation.
If several of these practices sound similar to what is happening in Gaza, that should not be surprising. But it is also important to note that not all of these practices are captured in Israel’s current barbaric conduct.
What’s more, many colonial practices of elimination that contributed to the erasure of indigenous populations never made it into the Genocide Convention. These include forms of cultural genocide, such as the destruction of the moral and historical existence of a specific group, often achieved through the prohibition of using their language, the destruction of historical monuments, books, and documents, among other practices.
Colonial dehumanization
We could see the logic of elimination at play during the early days of the war on Gaza. Here, the Israeli army did not exclusively focus on genocide as a necessary endpoint but was one of several options it entertained throughout the course of the war. One of those options was the forcible ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population to the Sinai. Israeli leaders of all political complexions did not bother to hide their wishes to “thin out” the population of Gaza and depopulate vast swathes of it, best exemplified by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s eliminatory plan suggesting the removal of around 90 percent of Gaza’s population.
Once this option was, for the moment, foiled by Egypt’s refusal to open Rafah, genocide became a more active part of the Israeli military and political agenda.
On the ground, Israeli soldiers acted upon this policy, internalizing the injunction of Defense Minister Gallant in fighting “human animals,” publicly articulating President Herzog’s statement that there are “no uninvolved civilians” in Gaza, and enabled by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s urging of the soldiers to “wipe off the seed of Amalek.”
Following the mass destruction Israel has systematically wrought in Gaza (particularly in the north, where almost 85 percent of buildings have been flattened), it is now creating large depopulated “buffer zones” along the Palestinian side of Gaza’s fence. According to media outlets, the suggested buffer zone “could be 1 km or 2 km or hundreds of meters (inside Gaza),” which would cram the 2.3 million people into an even smaller area, if not contributing to pushing them to leave altogether.
Four months of indiscriminate and barbaric bombing has also obliterated dozens of heritage sites and millennium-long archaeological structures. The Heritage for Peace reported in November that at least 104 out of 195 architectural heritage sites in Gaza were destroyed or damaged. These barbaric attacks against Gaza’s culture and heritage denote malicious colonial intentions to erase the very essence of indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and silence their history.
The current war against Gaza has further exposed a colonial nostalgia that permeates the Israeli government and is held by its cabinet ministers. In the past weeks, there were increasing voices on the other side of the fence calling for the resettlement of the Gaza Strip. What the “resettlement” of Gaza necessarily means is the removal of Gaza’s population (or at least some) to erect new colonial settlements in their place, as in any classic settler colonization process.
The traces of elimination can be spotted in the ongoing Israeli war against Gaza. While the ICJ is yet to render a final decision on the genocide case brought to the court by South Africa, which presumably will take years, the gruesome atrocities of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine will carry on as long as the Zionist colonial project is not dismantled.
Daily Sabah – February 10, 2024
Alarming rise in anti-Muslim sentiments
Addressing the 5th General Assembly of the Islamic Cooperation Youth Forum (ICYF) in Istanbul, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan Fidan spoke about rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the world and warned that conducting politics based on hostilities toward Muslims and discrimination against Muslims was a growing trend.
“Muslims face this threat increasingly every day. Muslims of the world should fight it and do what they can for the best representation of Islam,” he said.
Fidan noted that Western-centric adversity toward Islam and its holy book, the Quran, evolved into a physical intervention rather than a simple expression and it had “nothing to do with being civilized and having an open mind.”
“Constant provocation of Muslims at a time where Quran burnings and insults increased and pursuit of election victories based on hostility to Muslims should have been an outdated policy but unfortunately, growing anti-Islam sentiment, xenophobia in the West force us to be more cautious,” he said.
Fidan also noted that the majority of conflicts, civil wars and invasions in the world took place in the Muslim world and they should reconsider its causes. He called upon members of the Youth Forum, “who might hold senior positions in the Muslim world in the future” should invest in resolving problems on the agenda of the Muslim world. “If the Muslim world can analyze its own political issues better and show a spirit of cooperation and solidarity instead of seeking assistance from others, most of those issues will be resolved. Most of the time, we expect solutions from the very actors that caused it,” Fidan said.
https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/erdogan-renews-pledge-to-fight-for-independent-palestine/news
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