The UK public is being subjected to an unprecedented campaign of media propaganda to conceal Israel’s true goals as it expands the slaughter
Haidar Hijazi, five, is hospitalised after he was injured by an Israeli air strike that targeted his village in South Lebanon
Jonathan Cook writes in Middle East eye 27 September 2024
The more Israel expands its war across the Middle East, the more the western media intensifies its war on our minds.
Establishment media outlets like the BBC are weaponising the language of their reporting against audiences no less effectively than Israel weaponised primitive pieces of technology against the people of Lebanon.
Thousands of Lebanese were maimed by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies last week. Likewise, the media coverage is mangling the ability of western publics to understand how and why Israel is dangerously stoking fires across the region.
Words like “audacious”, “escalation” and “targets” have become tools to conceal meaning, not to illuminate – and for good reason. Because Israel’s actions are so obviously criminal, so obviously horrifying, so obviously genocidal. Language becomes a weapon to hide the truth.
The media chorus goes like this: Israel is attacking Lebanon to stop Hezbollah rocket fire and allow the residents of Israel’s most northerly communities to return home. Or in the blunter, Orwellian language of Israeli officials framing this horror show: Israel must “escalate to de-escalate”.
Lebanese civilians are paying the heaviest price – some 550 of them were killed in the first day of Israel’s bombing campaign alone. Many tens of thousands have been driven – ethnically cleansed – from the territory of south Lebanon.
Why? Because, says Israel, Hezbollah has hidden its cache of rockets in their homes. Those homes must therefore be destroyed. Strangely, Hezbollah seems to have forgotten that it has extensive rocky terrain across south Lebanon where it could more safely and wisely hide its arsenal.
The media are uncritically broadcasting no less ridiculous Israeli propaganda videos of Hezbollah rockets stashed in Lebanese living rooms
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It is the same script used to justify the slaughter in Gaza. Then, the media mindlessly reheated Israeli talking points about Israel destroying Gaza to “eliminate Hamas”.
Some 2.3 million Palestinians needed to be forced out of their homes for their own safety, even as Israel killed them in those very “safe zones”.
Then, as now, the media subjected us to Israeli CGI-generated propaganda videos of underground “control and command centres” supposedly under hospitals and other vital infrastructure Israel wanted destroyed.
This time the media are uncritically broadcasting no less ridiculous Israeli propaganda videos of Hezbollah rockets stashed in Lebanese living rooms.
Whose right to defend?
In fact, graphs showing “cross-border attacks” since 7 October last year – when Hamas broke out for one day from the concentration camp Israel had made of Gaza over decades – suggest how entirely bogus Israel’s narrative of its bombing Lebanon to “stop the Hezbollah rocket fire” really is.
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war
Of the 9,600 cross-border attacks, Israel committed 7,845 of them – or four-fifths – and began doing so on 7 October itself. Israel actually stepped up its attacks on Lebanon in early September, just as Hezbollah was dramatically reducing its rocket fire.
What the graphs cannot convey is the asymmetrical nature of those exchanges.
Hezbollah rockets caused far less damage to Israel than Israel’s far larger number of, and far more powerful, bombs and missiles.
Israel’s war on Lebanon: The trauma of watching the ‘Hollywood movie’ from afar
By the third week of September, Israel had killed more than 750 Lebanese, compared to 33 Israelis. The differential is even starker now.
And yet the western media has not framed Hezbollah’s attacks as its “right to defend itself” – a right we are continuously reminded Israel has.
Why has the priority been Israel’s need to “stop” Hezbollah’s fewer and mostly non-lethal rockets, rather than Lebanon’s need to stop Israel’s more plentiful and far more lethal Israeli bombs?
But more importantly, Israel does not want western publics to be exposed to other, more plausible reasons why Hezbollah has been firing rockets for the past year – or what it would take to make it stop. And the western media are ably assisting Israel in keeping those reasons shielded from view.
Hezbollah has repeatedly noted that its rocket fire would stop if Israel withdraws from Gaza and ends the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians there, as it is required to do under international law.
In two separate decisions, the International Court of Justice (ICC) has ruled that Israel’s decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and an act of aggression against the Palestinian people that must end, and that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Though no one at the BBC or elsewhere would ever admit it, Hezbollah is actually much closer to upholding international law than western states like the United States, Germany and Britain, all of whom are helping to arm and sustain Israel’s “plausible” genocide.
More …
