The Self-Censorship Has Begun

Across America's media landscape, there's only one acceptable opinion in the wake of Hamas's massacre.

I’ve spent all week watching coverage of the war in Gaza between Hamas fighters and Israel’s military, and because the Internet has its positives, I’ve been able to check multiple news sources around the world. It will probably shock few people that the “land of the free” with its “free press” has aired the most sanitized, censored, and slanted coverage of the war and its victims. From Fox to CNN to MSNBC, the only thing you’ll see on American cable news is Israeli officials, the Israeli views, and the stories of Israeli victims.

It’s not that I do not sympathize with them, or feel revulsion at the slaughter of innocents. It’s not that I don’t care about Jewish lives. It’s not that I don’t understand the brutal gut punch to a nation of nine million people that this has inflicted. I sympathize, I feel their pain, and I’ve repeatedly and loudly denounced anti-Semitism whenever it rears its head. I can do all that, and I can also demand better of a polyglot nation. I can demand better from a media that has freedom that few others have, and has collectively decided that Palestinian deaths are not worth any close attention, that entire families killed by Israeli missiles fired into apartment buildings are not important, and that denounces anyone trying to point this out as being “disgusting and despicable.”¹

I’ve found myself turning to YouTube airings of England’s public broadcast network Channel 4, or Al-Jazeera English on Sling, just to hear a balanced take on the war. To hear voices of Palestinians alongside those of Israelis, and coverage of Palestinian children on par with that of Israeli children. I am glad that it exists, and saddened that American media has become nothing more than a propaganda arm for Israel’s government, sanitizing the words of the radicals, covering up the retaliatory war crimes.

I think many people, seeing truly balanced coverage, would be horrified. It’s one thing to see buildings turned to rubble. It’s another when you see close-up coverage of dozens of people smashed under buildings because they had the misfortune of living in the same location as a Hamas leader. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened. Families decimated. What’s happening now is the rage of wounded people, lashing out in their grief, and when the president of Israel himself was asked about this by a British reporter today, the response was understandable and terrifying at the same time. “If you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, do I not have the right to defend myself,” President Isaac Herzog replied. Herzog grew more agitated and shouted the reporter down by the end of it. After that taped exchange was shown, the reporter noted that the IDF has dropped over 6,000 bombs and missiles from drones upon Gaza, because the IDF claims Hamas is so woven into civilian populations that they have no choice.

There is a choice. American media is ignoring that a choice exists. They are picking up the 9/11 playbook and running it again. There is a choice for Israel to not use drones indiscriminately across an area the size of Detroit. The Gaza Strip and the city of Detroit are within one square mile of each other in size. Imagine drones flying over Detroit, dropping bombs and missiles upon its 1950 population of just under two million people. Imagine if that had been the response to the 1967 riots. We wouldn’t tolerate that. It’s indiscriminate. It’s barbaric. It won’t bring back a single dead Israeli. It won’t bring back a single one of the hostages taken by Hamas—hostages that American and French Jews living in Israel have so little faith in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to rescue, they’ve asked the US and France to run the missions themselves.

By using the 9/11 playbook, stifling criticism, and refusing to show the suffering of Palestinians trapped in Gaza (along with Arab-Americans that the State Department isn’t doing a damn thing to get out), American news media is becoming an accessory to whatever actions the Israeli government takes in Gaza. An initial bombardment followed by ground invasion makes sense, and would be logical under the circumstances. This isn’t initial now. This is unremitting, unrelenting terror being unleashed upon a captive population in the hopes that some Hamas terrorists will be caught in the explosions—which doesn’t make much sense given the IDF’s own public assessment that Gaza is riddled with tunnels that Hamas has built to hide in and move around away from the eyes of surveillance tools. If that’s true, then what’s the point of blowing up buildings? The only logical conclusion is a desire to bring as much pain to Palestinians as possible for somehow not dislodging Hamas from Gaza—as if an unemployed, unarmed, chronically underfed, poorly cared for population could somehow force out an armed militia of thousands.

I said yesterday it didn’t have to come to this. Today, I’m more frightened than ever that in its anger, too many Israelis will gladly join in the campaign of their nation’s far right politicians to wipe Gaza, and everyone inside of it, off the map of the Earth. Our support for Israel cannot, must not, extend to acquiescing in a genocide.

1. Willie Geist of NBC’s Weekend Today & MSNBC’s Morning Joe