Debunking Israel’s top 10 propaganda points
Palestinian women react at the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church, Gaza City, which was damaged by an Israeli strike, 20 October 2023
Hamid Dabashi writes in Middle East Eye:
As soon as Israeli forces began the round-the-clock carpet bombing of Gaza on 8 October, prominent media outlets like the New York Times and the BBC went full throttle in waging a massive disinformation campaign to justify the horrors that would soon unfold.
Western media carpet-bombed the news cycle with pro-Israel propaganda and a narrative that would distract from the fact that Israel was engaged in a barbaric genocide of an entire people and that the whole edifice of the presumptuous “western civilisation” and “democracy” was a big fat lie.
Here are the top 10 propaganda points western media were pushing on behalf of their favourite settler-colony:
1) The conflict began on 7 October, following Palestinian fighters’ attack on Israel
President Joe Biden declared the 7 October attack as equivalent to “15 9/11s” for Israel, which western outlets similarly argued. It is not, however. Before 7 October, there was 6 October, and before that was a succession of dates and facts in a murderous colonial project of domination and dispossession going back to the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.
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While the Israeli government and its Zionist propagandists wish to fetishise 7 October, we are here to de-fetishise and historicise it.
2) Palestine is Hamas
Palestine is not. Israel and its US and European accomplices have equated Hamas with the entirety of Palestine to discredit their entire resistance and liberation struggles.
3) Hamas is ISIS
It is not. ISIS, or the Islamic State group, was a rootless, violent gang created and conditioned by the US invasion of Iraq. Fortunately for Palestine, Palestinian fighters represent a deeply cultivated and historically conscious Palestinian population collectively resisting the Zionist thievery of their homeland. Palestine is not Hamas. Palestine is its heroic people, its generations of scholars, historians, artists, novelists, playwrights, poets, filmmakers, scientists, physicians, engineers, revolutionary thinkers and activists. Israel and its American and European enablers are no match for Palestinians.