I heard a man talking the other day at a bar on 8th Street in the East Village. He blurted out quite audibly that You will always know the names of the Israeli Soldiers who are killed while invading Lebanon, but you will never know the names of the Palestinian children murdered by State sponsored terrorism at the hands of the Israeli Military. Why is that? I did not respond. There was a pause before he continued, How is the media in Israel and America (worse here than even there) not a flip of the coin from the worst image of Al Jazeera we hold in our prejudices and endemically drawn bigotry? I did not respond again, but I noted in my head that we do have fears enhanced and raised by our media in response to Muslims in general and Arab Muslims in particular. I know I am supposed to dismiss this man’s rant as horribly anti-Semitic, that we are not permitted the grace of Free Speech where the state of Israel is concerned–and you cant believe that Truth is a yardstick that measures news when it concerns Israel or Israeli military actions in the Middle East, or the United States using Israel as its own pit bull around the world. Wherever the Israeli Military and its actions or objectives are concerned, news resembles press releases from the State Department. I understand–and you should understand–how everyone in America has to walk on egg shells whenever any criticism of Israel is openly raised. There is no debate where these maters are at issue–issue is not permitted. The media is as Orwellian about this as is possible. Any examination of our media–whether it be print, broadcast, film et cetera–will reveal a decidedly pro-Israel bent, which is not a problem. Zionism itself, or being a Zionist, is not what is wrong with the news, or who is control of the media. The problem is that a particularly virulently right wing Zionism is at the core of controlling the media and the messages that get disseminated. This right wing Zionism, if it existed in a political reality that did not see an overwhelming shift to the right, would not be as atrocious as it is becoming today in a world politics that find liberals where once stood moderate conservatives only a couple of decades ago. Obama would certainly have been a conservative in the 70s, that is, with no changes in his rhetoric or choices or decisions.
I wonder where we are headed and just how much of the First Amendment is still alive in America because I see that we are convinced that news as propaganda can only exist in a place like the former Soviet Union or a place like Nazis Germany, or certainly Al Jazeera. You were not likely to see anything in the mainstream media concerning Police Officers bullying protesters during any Occupy Wall Street demonstration. You might never see the atrocities of the Israeli Military against Palestinian or Lebanese women and children, hospitals and schools. Israel’s use of White Phosphorous against the Palestinian People has gone unreported. Our media is complicit in the atrocities of Israel at the behest, or the condoning, of the United States. Nothing in the media about Israeli crimes against humanity will be disseminated, but every Arab Muslim Terrorist Organization’s retaliation or initiating crimes–and they do initiate crimes–will get the fullest treatment in all organs of America’s media. The latter is not the problem; the former is. And in America, the media will jump at the opportunity to critique the United States military use of drones in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq, but it virtually deletes all information concerning any question about Israeli military tactics. The former allows us to maintain the illusion of Truth in our media. If the media outlets criticize the American military, they most certainly would the Israeli military if there was anything to say, right? All of this sounds good to too many people who passively accept news as fact when it comes from one of our media conduits either in print or by broadcast; but Zionism is a Nationalism, and anyone subsumed by it is working with the same psychology of any nationalist. Nationalists in America criticize the media for its negative portrayals of the American military; Zionists would have to do the same, almost by compunction, where matters of Israel are concerned. I’m not with any of these Arab terrorist organizations in my sympathies–I have lambasted President Obama for not responding quickly enough or even now forcefully enough against ISIS. I have no illusions that we are going to have to kill all of them–yes, and I mean that, so I do know the manias that beset Zionists, particularly reactionary ones. ISIS is not like Nazism–there is something even more deeply fanatical about this. The metaphysics that accompanies religious fervor, religious devotion to the point of mania is not the same as political extremism or political fanaticism. The most ardent Naazis had difficulties after the war; but Nazis could and did find political usefulness i both the Soviet Union and the United States; politics has always been a game of hop-scotch; hop-scotch is the favorite game of all politick and politicians. There is no such inclusion from or for ISIS. Both of these facts may be too horrible to comprehend, but I have no illusions, not at least any of the ones our President suffers.
But our media sorts to the simplistic: Arab Muslim, bad; Israelis, good. The Jewish State is lauded as a model of and for the future of middle eastern democracy (a laugh) in contrast with Arab Muslims who are presented as horribly degraded, endemically anti-American, hopelessly brutal and stupid. The horror of the image mongering is that Jews are presented as virtual Übermensch while Arab Muslims are shown skirting the border between human and subhuman. How much has Jewish self-image-making learned from the Nazis that placed Jews in a position similar to the one Arab Muslims are placed in today by the American media–and who runs this media of ours, print and broadcast–where Truth is a laughable concept by those in control.
The only possible conclusion one can draw from the premises as they are arranged in the media is this: Arab Muslims are to Jews what Jews were to Nazis; Palestinians are the people who, in the State sponsored propaganda of Israel and the fostering conduits of the American media, have created a state within the state of Israel. It is in Israeli propaganda that Palestinians are a virus in the body politic of Israel. It’s almost as if the Palestinians are perceived as having always lived as a foreign body inside a Jewish State–this land in the common Zionist rhetoric is something that by inference has always been Jewish and not Palestinian or Arab Muslim and Christian. The Jewish State for Jews as Germany in 1933 was certainly only for Germans seems the unofficial slogan of Israel. Not all Jews are with this, believe this, assert this, promote this, support this–but the latter gets done where no opposition is mounted. By omission, right wing Zionism has achieved may of its goals, has reached hegemony among American Zionists, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim. A Right Wing Zionist Israel is one of the greatest threats to world peace and the spread of humanism in the world today; a reactionary state anywhere–does Russia come to mind–is a threat to peace. A Reactionary form of Zionism has gained greater valency and validity but it is nonetheless fascism. Anyone who thinks Zionism in its right wing, particularly its reactionary form, does not have a lot in common with other forms of totalitarianism is mistaken. Zionism in its most benign form is still Nationalism and prey to all the vices of nationalist politics. The real horror in all of this, though, is that reactionary Zionists today have learned their political, rhetorical and propaganda lessons well enough from the Nazis. It is almost an historical logic that reaches its conclusions from horribly construed premises; this makes it more heinous, but also that much more difficult to admit or combat.
The Falling Leaf Review 