Al Jazeera investigative journalist Vidya Krishnan believes that Israel's war on Gaza has exposed the true nature and purpose of the West.
If you've been following the West**, trying to make sense of the heartbreaking images and stories that took place in Gaza during the Israeli invasion, you're bound to be disappointed.
This has proven to be one of the fastest ethnic cleansing operations in history since Israel launched its latest assault on besieged Palestinian enclaves. Western news outlets have repeatedly published unsubstantiated claims, told only one side of the story, and selectively covered up the violence to justify and shield Israel from censorship for violations of international law.
Western journalists have abandoned basic standards when reporting on Israel's treatment of Palestinians. None of this is new. The failure of Western journalism has helped Israel justify its 75-year occupation and violence against Palestinians.
On August 6, 2022, more than a year before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the New York Times, in its coverage of Israel's "flare" incident, covered up the deaths of six Palestinian children, a particularly shocking sabotage of good journalism.
In the report, the reporter waited until the second paragraph to mention that the Israeli attack on the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza killed six children, and without even breaking the sentence, added: "Israel claims that the deaths of some civilians were caused by items hidden by militants." "Residential areas" and "In at least one incident, a Palestinian rocket on fire killed civilians, including children, in northern Gaza".
In journalism school, this is considered "suffocating" reporting. It turned out to be a false report as well. Ten days later, the Israeli military finally admitted that they were behind the attack that killed Jabaliya's children.
The New York Times did not report this.
I can call it unprofessional, and that's true, because the West**'s coverage of this conflict is clearly influenced by ideology rather than rigorous fact-checking. However, such an assessment would obscure a deeper, more profound problem in Western journalism: coloniality.
Conflict reporting is one of the most over-colonized corners of the world's largest newsroom. Even in racially diverse newsrooms, reporting on conflict can be tricky. But serious errors in newsrooms that pride themselves on the accuracy of conflict reporting that seem to have passed through editorial filters need to be addressed. It also needs to be documented that, as a result of these consistent mistakes, Western journalists are "mediating" the Palestinian conflict, not just reporting on it.
It would be too much of a beat if I didn't call it a textbook case of colonizer journalism. It's journalism done by practitioners from colonists who are proud of their imperial conquests and highly self-aware, each fiber nurtured by centuries of predatory accumulation of wealth, knowledge, and privilege. These journalists seem to be convinced that their country has historically fought and defeated a particularly immoral and powerful enemy, stopped the spread of **, protected civilization, and saved the world. This is the main story of the West and, by extension, the story of Western journalism.
However, the dominant story is often not the true story, it is simply the story of the winners.
Today, the West is once again telling the story of Gaza's victors, just as they have reported countless times before on the conflicts, crises and human suffering of the post-colonizers.
I see this in journalists' coverage of tropical diseases that know that malaria, dengue or Ebola will never pass through their veins or affect their communities. I saw this after the Rohingya genocide, when genocide survivors were asked if they were "held down by five men or seven men" when they were raped.
Western journalism is essentially victor's journalism, and it never tries to construct stories, put them in the right order, or add context to tell the truth to power and expose the continued excesses, aggression, and violence of the "victors." History.
When it comes to Palestine, it's news about occupation, and these people will never know what it's like to live under occupation. This is a kind of reporting that has no moral code or a sense of basic decency.
In the news of the colonizers, language is used to erase the humanity of the colonized. The philosopher Frantz Fanon, who analyzes the dehumanizing effects of colonization in his book The Unfortunate on Earth, writes that reports describe the suffering of Algeria (during the French Imperial Conquest) as "a vast number of vital statistics" involving "hysterical masses" and "children who do not seem to belong to anyone". The book was written in 1961, but the inferences from it are perfectly applicable to the West** reporting on the Palestinian suffering today.
This inhuman use of language is most evident in the death toll statistics. In early November, the London Times noted that "Israelis commemorate a month in which Hamas killed 1,400 people, kidnapped 240 people, waged war, and allegedly killed 10,300 Palestinians". In the Western news, the Israelis die actively, Hamas "kills" or "** them, and the Palestinians die passively. As The Guardian once put it, they "died of dehydration as clean water ran out", as if this was not a deliberate crime against humanity, but a random act of God.
According to the Western propaganda machine, Israel has the right to destroy Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, and any other country in the region in order to guarantee the safety of Israelis. It can kill almost all Muslims, Jews, Médecins Sans Frontières (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) UN staff and doctors, journalists, ambulance drivers, and even babies in attacks on Hamas that are demanding a ceasefire. However, few news outlets discuss what this means for Israel and the world, and the only way if Israel feels safe is for millions of people to die and suffer. None of them, because there are now "us" and "them", the ** world of the colonized and the colonized, have ever meaningfully questioned whether a victory at the cost of the lives of thousands of innocent children can be considered a victory.
In this flashy war propaganda, Western journalists obscure the real story we face here, that Israel, backed by the world's most powerful military, is waging war against stateless people living under its occupation and ** innocent men and women. and thousands of children. The West, while conniving at this great event, preaches to the world their superior values, decency, and love for democracy. Anyone living in the post-colonial world knows that they talk about decency and a love of democracy and outstanding journalism and decent politicians, which is almost a **.
At a time when wars are intensifying, children are starving, and Israel is being tried for "specious genocide," the blood in the hands of Western journalists is crucial. They work perfectly with the powerful ** to slander and disempower multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, clothe Israel's "self-defense" narrative with a veneer of respectability, and render Palestinian stories and perspectives irrelevant.
The few Palestinians who have been given a platform in the name of "balance" and good journalism are prevented from discussing the decades of oppression, occupation and abuse they have endured at the hands of Israel. They are only allowed to cry for their dead loved ones and beg for more aid to feed hungry children, after denouncing Hamas, of course.
Perhaps with this war, the game of Western journalism is finally over. As they socially **on* Israel's war on Gaza and witness first-hand what is happening through Palestinians' own reports and testimonies, more and more people around the world are recognizing the role that the West has played in perpetuating colonial power, its language and its perspectives.
Nowadays, there is more and more criticism of the failures of Western leaders, but not enough is said about the failures of Western intellectuals, especially those who lead the most influential newsrooms in the West. As a result of Israel's war on Gaza, not only was Western liberalism and the rules-based order razed to the ground, but the legitimacy of Western journalism was destroyed.
Western news outlets, in their coverage of the war in Gaza, have made it clear that they believe mass death, starvation, and untold human suffering are acceptable, even inevitable, and that these are caused by their allies. They show that the journalism of conflict, practiced by Western newsrooms, is nothing more than another form of colonial violence, not through bombs and drones, but through words.
In this moment of overwhelming brutality, journalists of color like me are whipped for immorality. All Western journalists with great power can do at this moment is to demand a permanent ceasefire that will insulate us from the news coverage of the colonizers.