Seeking ideological uniformity on the issue, western officials and their media accomplices have long recognised the centrality of language to their political indoctrination project
Children ride in the back of a tuktuk as Palestinians flee the al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on 28 July 2024 as they flee the latest assault by Israeli forces on Gaza (AFP)
Joseph Massad writes in Middle East Eye 29 July 2024
In the official West and its mainstream regime media, there exists a specialised dictionary and thesaurus to translate to the western public all matters Israeli and Palestinian.
Officials and journalists must also adhere to a special grammatical syntax, particularly when using verbs in the active or passive voice.
This definitional and translational practice is central to the politics of western representation. It guarantees ideological uniformity on the issue of Israel and Palestine within the whole range of the respectable political spectrum, which, at least in the US, is so narrow between the Democratic and Republican parties that it could be measured in millimetres.
After 7 October, the enforcement of this dictionary and lexicon was intensified to give cover to Israel’s savagery in Gaza.
This included the demand that government and media officials could not cite the Palestinian health ministry’s statistics on the casualties of Israel’s genocide without prefacing it with “Hamas-run” to cast doubt on the numbers.
Such directives went against the positions of the World Health Organisation and other international humanitarian agencies, which expressed full confidence in the accuracy of the casualty figures.
The refusal to accept these figures is the official stance of the US government and the anti-Palestinian Anti-Defamation League, which led the charge in that regard.
The US government was not satisfied with imposing its dictionary within the US alone, however, and sought to impose it on Arab media as well.
In late October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken requested that the Qatari government impose the US dictionary on the Al Jazeera network in its coverage of the genocide, he assured American Jewish leaders.
Indeed, western governments and financial elites have long recognised the centrality of language to their project of political indoctrination. To this end, their ongoing efforts to police journalists, academics, and the public at large – and enforce compliance with the government-sanctioned ideological dictionary – are imperative.
A review of some examples of these translational efforts by western governments and their subservient media is instructive.
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