billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official
vowed
that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s
defense.” Following the reports last month from
Amnesty International
and
Human Rights Watch
concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was
a
new low
for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep
sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and
calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of
the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall
politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation
as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year
later, her
statement
illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has
collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the
people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the
nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry
amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this
unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally
sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially
abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated
to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of
belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer
acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew
from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the
New York Times, Washington Post and
Los Angeles Times
had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers
“disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used
emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not
Palestinians,” a
study
by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors
and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to
1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus
Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of
Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi
said
: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is
that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does
it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of
their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the
West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from
Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as
willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for
power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent
rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising
complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s
weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States.
Nearly half
of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good
doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist
would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried
school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on
live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,”
he
said
, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away.
. . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and
their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked
plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep
letting this happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has
taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the
ethnic cleansing
and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit
cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver
amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support
for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian
people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like
Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually
nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend
incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer
primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns
funded by
AIPAC and Republican donors
.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for
Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war
received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over
time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some
exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism
gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while
credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of
criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric —
unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse —
rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned
with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and
politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in
mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war
against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades
of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege,
imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford,
wrote
decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
____________________________
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book,
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military
Machine
, was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza
war.
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