By Randy Alonso Falcón on October 16, 2023, from Havana
Gráfica: Edilberto Carmona Tamayo
“Life is a succession of lessons that one must live to understand.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
We live in a world of hypocrisy, beautifully adorned and dosed by the mass media, in which the powerful seek at all costs to impose a unique look and interpretation of events.
There is blatant or covert manipulation, a proliferation of double discourse and double standards, and all kinds of devices are used to induce a biased and exclusive version of reality. It is all about conditioning values, beliefs, emotions, motivations, reasons and behaviors. Everything becomes valid in the masked party of the imperialist dynasty.
The tragic events of these days, once again terrible, in Palestine and Israel have brought out the best “collection” of the manipulative repertoire of the media and politicians.
Because in our world some are worth more than others. At least for the BBC, where in a report we read the dismaying number of Palestinians killed and Israelis murdered. Different human beings, right?
The same bias as that of Univision and other U.S. TV stations, which devote fleeting news reports to the destruction and deaths in Gaza, while their correspondents tell us the story of the dead or kidnapped Israelis, the pain of their families and the impact on society as a whole.
Children are used to hate the enemy. Anything goes in this perverse game of death. Emotions are used to cloud our thinking. This is how the war against Iraq was sold to us in 1991, when the emotional speech before the US Congress of a moved volunteer nurse -about “evil Iraqi soldiers” disconnecting the incubators of Kuwaiti newborns- was the perfect motive to unleash the so-called First Gulf War.
It was later revealed that the “witness” was Nayirah al Sabah, daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, who had been trained by a public relations firm for her speech. The lie, supported by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and much of the US media, cost the lives of more than 200,000 people, including thousands of children. Hundreds of thousands of other infants died of malnutrition and disease after that war as a result of the sanctions imposed against Iraq.
Now they tried to sell hatred against the Palestinians by launching the hoax that Hamas had beheaded 40 Israeli children. The private Israeli TV network i24News and CNN did the job by airing the “atrocity”. Other media and social networks served as amplifiers of the alleged news. Even President Biden later echoed the “event” and claimed to have seen pictures of terrorists beheading children.
The White House had to mea culpa for the President and the CNN journalist gave a mild apology on her social networks, throwing mud at the Israeli government. But the lie, although it has short legs, has terrible consequences in this case. The tragic reality is that more than 700 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 2,000 injured by Israeli bombs dropped day and night on the Gaza Strip for more than a week.
a wounded child after Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, Oct. 2023. Photo: The Observer Post
The victims of these days are added to the thousands of children detained, tortured or killed throughout decades of Israeli domination and vassalage over the Palestinian people.
The demonization of the opponent ends in putting him mercilessly under bombs and white phosphorus.
Democracy is as far as the powers that be want it to be. Israel, imperial spearhead in the region and perpetrator of crimes against the Arab peoples, is called “the largest democracy in the Middle East” by the mainstream media. That the corrupt Netanyahu has returned to power in his fifth attempt in three years, thanks to the alliance with a conglomerate of radical parties of the racist, anti-Arab and homophobic ultra-right, and that he reforms the judiciary at will and orders the killing of Palestinians at will is worthy of all praise. If he was voted in to kill, it is democratic, some will say.
No wonder, if in France (that of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité) it is punishable to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The Minister of the Interior banned any demonstration in support of Palestine because they are “likely to generate disturbances of public order”. But this Saturday, people returned to the Parisian streets to cry out against the siege of Gaza. Several of them were arrested. Spreading fear is a good tool for democratic censorship.
The minister did not clarify whether demonstrating in favor of Israel was also punishable.
The best investment. For many Jews, Israel is their homeland and the place of their traditions. For imperial politics, it is the best investment ever made. In 1986, Senator Joe Biden put it bluntly: “Let’s stop apologizing for supporting Israel. There is nothing to apologize for! Nothing! It’s the 3 billion best invested! If Israel did not exist, the US would have to invent Israel to protect its interests in the region” (sic).
Taking care of his expensive investment, President Biden sent planes with ammunition for the Israeli army and two aircraft carriers to the region.
Numbers to remember. The Palestinians are terrorists, the Russians are atrocious, the hegemonic media repeat over and over again. None, not a single civilian death is justifiable; but Noam Chomsky reminds us of details in a recent interview: “…in February 2023, the UN estimated that some 7,000 civilians had died in Ukraine. That’s certainly a very low estimate. If we triple it, we will reach the likely death toll of the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. If we multiply it by 30, we reach the number of victims of the massacre perpetrated by Ronald Reagan in Central America; one of Washington’s little runs.”
The world continues to teach us lessons every day. Too bad for those who do not see them or do not know how to interpret them. Capital continues to drip blood and mud everywhere. Already more than a century ago, Mark Twain, in his article The Mysterious Stranger wrote: “…and then the statesmen (and the media we might say) will invent cheap lies, laying the blame on the nation under attack, and every man will be content with these conscience-soothing lies, and will study them conscientiously, and refuse to examine the possible refutations, and will end by convincing himself that the war is just, and thank God for the pleasant sleep which this grotesque process of self-deception gives him.”
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English