Janelle’s Reviews > How to Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza > Status Update

As per usual with the genre, it’s simply taken for granted that Israel’s “security” is paramount over all other considerations and that it cannot be achieved through a political process, but only bombs and starvation.

In 2002, Applebaum advocated for the killing of Palestinian journalists for the crime of making Israel and the U.S. look bad, ….

…as “Hamas strongholds” without defining what this concept means……..
“Hamas strongholds” were, in effect, whatever area or building Israel was attacking at the time.

In the mid-1980s, the ADL launched a propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and slammed the African National Congress as “totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American.”

When a war crime happens to Israelis or Ukrainians, there’s almost always an explicit guilty party with sinister motives centred in the framing of the article. When a war crime happens to Palestinians, it is written as if Palestinians have been struck by an earthquake.

…largely reported on war crimes without centring a clear perpetrator, trafficking in a variation of what social critic and documentarian Adam Curtis refers to as “Oh Dearism”, a mode of liberal mournful witness where the observer is outraged and sickened but is rarely provided a clear responsible party, much less any political call to action.

The Biden administration was not a powerless NGO standing on the sidelines with a clipboard. They were an active participant in the conflict-providing arms, military support, troops and diplomatic support for the starvation campaign in question.

The New York Times can’t even avoid double standards when disputing claims that they use double standards.

Another glaring double standard is the frequency with which Israeli captives under the age of 18 were referred to as “children”, but Palestinian … were referred to as “minors”.
…..media outlets applying this double standard in the exact same paragraph - and often in the same sentence.

The constant invocation of the mantra that Israel has a “right to defend itself,” typically followed by the rationalisation of mass civilian killing, was a right only said to exist for Israelis.