Labels are central to the politics of media. And no label has been more powerful than “terrorist.”
A single standard of language should accompany a consistent standard of human rights, which the world desperately needs. “If thought corrupts language,” George Orwell wrote, “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”
No amount of rhetoric from defenders and apologists of Hamas can change the reality that the group committed mass murder in Israel two weeks ago. The horrific and indiscriminate killings of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians of all ages meets the dictionary definition of terrorism.
It is equally true that no amount of rhetoric can change the reality that the Israeli government has engaged in mass murder during the last two weeks. Israel’s horrific military actions in Gaza have already killed several thousand Palestinian civilians of all ages. That too meets the definition of terrorism.
But U.S. media outlets routinely avoid evenhanded use of the “terrorist” label, which is applied to organized Palestinian killers of Israelis but almost never to organized Israeli killers of Palestinians.
This reflexive media bias does not in any way mitigate the horrendous crimes committed by Hamas in Israel. Nor does it in any way mitigate the horrendous crimes that are being committed — on an even larger scale, and increasing daily — by the Israeli government in Gaza.
By any consistent standard, if we refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization, then the same description should fit the Israeli government. But such balance and candor remain intolerable in mainstream media and political discourse. It would be too honest. Too real.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres engaged in some candor on Tuesday, saying that while there was no possible excuse for the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, they had not occurred in a moral or political vacuum, and decades of suffering by the Palestinians had played a role. Such honesty was greeted with outrage by the Israeli government.
Terrorists and their defenders always have excuses when their tactics include the ruthless killing of civilians. But we’re choking on a nonstop supply of smoke-blowing rhetoric — what Orwell called political language “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”….
Joe Biden’s lethal trap: His embrace of Israel has become support for war crimes
For the past three weeks, President Biden has played a key role in backing Israel’s worsening war crimes while touting himself as a compassionate advocate of restraint. That pretense looks like lethal nonsense to most of the world as Israel persists with mass killing of civilians in Gaza. The same standards that led to fully justified condemnation of Hamas’ murders of more than a thousand Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 should apply to the Israeli military’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which has already taken the lives of several times as many Palestinian civilians. And it’s clear that Israel is just getting started.
That unconditional support makes Biden and the vast majority of Congress directly complicit in mass murder and, at least arguably, also in genocide, which is defined as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” That definition would seem to fit the words and deeds of Israel’s leaders to this point.
“Israel has dropped approximately 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza so far and has reportedly killed multiple senior Hamas commanders, but the majority of the casualties have been women and children,” Time magazine reported at the end of last week. Israel’s military has killed civilians in homes, stores, markets, mosques, refugee camps and health care facilities. We can expect information about such realities to become even sparser now that communications between Gaza and the outside world are only intermittently available, at best…
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We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza
Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself
Netanyahu’s deliberate extremism has failed
Haaretz Editorial: Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War
Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Gaza, trades unions, fascism & oppression
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
After the truth-shower 