by MUNA KHAN
The double standards exhibited in the Western media when it comes to reporting on Gaza have only widened the mistrust between it and the audience.
“You cannot continue to victimise someone else just because you yourself were a victim once — there has to be a limit.”
Edward Said wrote this nearly 50 years ago, but the limits he wrote about have long been crossed by Israel’s powerful propaganda machine, which has found plenty of allies in the Western media.
How else do you explain the continued circulation of the false story about the 40 beheaded babies — which emerged in Israel’s Kfar Aza Kibbutz following Hamas’ attack on Israel — one year ago? The story quickly made global headlines and received condemnation, including from US President Joe Biden, whose staff, it later emerged, had cautioned him from mentioning it.
Yet, those cautions fell on deaf ears when Biden said he had seen those images and then had to retract. When history reviews that moment, it will likely put Biden’s lies down to his old age and confused state of mind. However, to those of us long familiar with how “we” are reported on, we know “they” only see the worst of us.
As Said wrote in his book Orientalism in 1975: “In newsreels or news-photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world.”
The Palestinian Arab, thus, must be put in its place.
While US presidents, sitting and hopeful, are quick to believe Israel’s version, it is nonetheless shocking to see them defend the damage caused by Israel’s airstrike on Rafah in May which, to be precise, charred to death scores of children. This was days after the International Court of Justice had ordered Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel would describe it as a “tragic mistake.” Unlike the imaginary 40 beheaded Israeli babies, here we saw a father hold up a decapitated baby in Rafah, but it did not make the headlines. Only prominent diaspora writers, with links to the Arab or Muslim-majority countries, wrote about it on their Substacks or social media; perhaps there was an op-ed or two in left leaning papers like The Guardian.
Were it for not social media, and phones recording the horrors of the genocide in Gaza, we would be dependent on Israel’s manipulation of these falsehoods. They do this to garner support, to shape policy, to ensure that any sympathy toward Palestine is quickly turned into a “do you support Hamas?”. And they have mammoth support from Western media and scholars and influencers.
As law professor, Khaled Beydoun, wrote following the Rafah massacre: “On a landscape ravaged by unhinged Israeli militarism and unchecked American might, the lie of headless Israeli children means everything; while the truth of beheaded Palestinian children means nothing.”
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