Listen to a reading of this article:
The National Director Emeritus for the Anti-Defamation League has announced on Twitter that he is cancelling his subscription to The New York Times, claiming that a front-page story featuring the photos of children killed in Israel's assault on Gaza this month constitutes "blood libel" against Jews.
"I am cancelling my subscription to NYTimes," tweeted Abraham Foxman. "I grew up in America on the NYT- I delivered the NYT to my classmates- I learned civics- democracy and all the news 'fit to print' for 65 years but no more. Today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough."
Foxman's statement drew criticism from all corners, including from loyal establishment pundits like Jonathan Chait, for his ridiculous assertion that merely humanizing Palestinian children killed by Israel is the same as promoting the ancient antisemitic canard known as blood libel.
Supporters of Israeli apartheid and mass murder are losing control of the narrative, which has led to redoubled perception management efforts ranging from the cringey to the iron-fisted. In the former category we're seeing them pen entire articles attacking Seth Rogen for tweeting a fart emoji at virulent Israel apologist Eve Barlow and claiming that putting "fart" in Barlow's name is the same as a literal pogrom. In the latter category they're blowing up entire press offices and arresting Palestinian journalists. This is narrative management at its least subtle.
From a new statement titled “Israel now holding 13 Palestinian journalists” by Reporters Without Borders:
"Two Palestinian journalists were arrested by Israeli security forces in Jerusalem yesterday and were placed in administrative detention today, bringing the total now held administratively by the Israelis to 13. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns Israel’s misuse of administrative detention to hound Palestinian reporters."
"Administrative detention" is one of the many apartheid abuses which Israel has come under criticism for employing, as Israel-based +972 Magazine explained last year:
According to human rights group B’Tselem, as of September 2020, Israel is holding 376 Palestinians, including two minors, in administrative detention. Israel uses administrative detention to indefinitely detain Palestinians (and on extremely rare occasions Jewish extremists) without charge or trial. Administrative detention orders, handed down by the IDF commander in charge of the occupied West Bank, are reviewed every six months, but the detainees are not told what crimes they are being accused of, nor shown the evidence against them.
According to lawyers who defend Palestinian detainees, administrative detentions are almost always based on “confidential material” handed over ex parte to the courts by the Shin Bet, to which the detainees themselves and their lawyers have no access. As a result, it is virtually impossible to defend oneself against an administrative detention order.
Before the Gaza ceasefire last week Israel managed to deliberately blow up over 20 offices for Palestinian media outlets, as well as the tower hosting the international outlets AP and Al Jazeera.
"The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today," AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement after the building was destroyed.
Which, of course, is the whole idea: for the world to know less about what happens in Gaza. The Israeli government has a decades-long history of threatening and targeting journalists in order to exert control over the public narrative about what happens under its rule, and as that narrative slips from its grip we are seeing this pattern ramp up with greater and greater aggression.
"Rather than reduce the cruelty, the Israeli government keeps trying to reduce accurate news coverage," author and activist Norman Solomon writes. "The approach is a mix of deception and brutality. Blow up the cameras so the world won’t see as many pictures of the atrocities."
As Alan MacLeod wrote in Mintpress News, the Overton window has shifted on Palestine. During 2014's far more deadly Israeli attack on Gaza we saw a low-level local Democratic official sparking outrage and scandal by merely posting “Palestine <3” on Facebook, now you have words like "apartheid" being routinely used by mainstream media outlets and national US political figures to describe Israeli abuses of the Palestinian people.
People are just becoming too conscious of the Palestine issue to tolerate its existence as a taboo subject anymore, even in the most mainstream circles of discussion. The old tactics of silencing and marginalizing Palestinian rights advocates simply do not work anymore, and politicians and pundits can no longer get away with painting themselves as progressive-minded humanists without acknowledging the brutal and unjust nature of Israeli occupation.
Palestine is simply not a third rail anymore, and it's been this way for a while now. By the time I started doing commentary in late 2016 people were still saying you'll be smeared as an antisemite and dragged through the mud if you criticize Israel, but my experience this entire time has been that I get a lot more vitriol and attacks coming my way by criticizing US imperialist agendas toward nations like Russia, China, Syria and Venezuela than by criticizing the Israeli government. There's pushback to be sure, but it's not nearly as vituperative as what I'm used to.
This last attack on Gaza was just the ignition of a powder keg in shifting public sentiment that had been building for several years, and it hasn't been due to any top-down effort at perception steering by the establishment narrative managers, but by ordinary people sharing ideas and information and moving the Overton window of acceptable debate through sheer force of will.
The fact that this can be done makes one wonder in what other ways we can collectively move the narrative in a way that benefits ordinary people instead of the oligarchic empire of the US and its allies. This is an exciting time to be alive.
_____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Israel represents such glaring injustice in so many areas while enjoying such glaring immunity from any of its atrocities that only a well-funded propaganda machine has kept things going for as long as it has.
Israel deserves to go the way of South Africa, and for the very same reason. There is no Jewish exception to racism and ethnic cleansing, as defender's of Israel would have us believe.
I am so happy to see you speaking up for the Palestinians, who have no lobby here in the states, nor control billions of dollars. It's a horrible reality that these two factors alone are enough for my government to render a people invisible.
You're doing great work Caitlin. Keep it up. I'd like to see what you come up with when you research the war toys industry's leading role in accelerating climate change. Without a global cease fire and greening of the military, most of the industrialized world is going to be either underwater or scorched by 2050.
If you're not already aware of her, Alison Weir's www.ifamericansknew.org has the most comprehensive library anywhere that I know of on the history of the genesis of the Zionist Project in Occupied Palestine or as I call it , "The Great Schnorr", . Ilan Pappe is another excellent source and the archaeological findings of Israel Finklestein are very important for debunking Zionist mythology. Miko Peled, is without doubt your most credible native Palestinian Jewish voice of the non-violent resistance to the Zionist Project in Occupied Palestine (As a Jew faithful to Torah law, I refuse to dishonor my ancestor's name and will never call that state by the name they claim).
The "Overton Window" on Palestine shifted for American Jews when we saw white phosphorous raining on civilians in the world's largest open air prison during Operation Cast Lead in 2009. My rabbi, Louis Binstock, was one of Elmer Berger's associates in the chartering of the American Council for Judaism, formed in protest to the CCAR endorsement of the Brit's Jewish army in Palestine, standing today at www.acjna.org as the anti-Zionist voice of the reform union rabbi.
Dr. Binstock clearly taught the distinction between the Hebrew faith and the so-called Judaism of the Zionists. Zionism a national socialist political ideology that exploits the vision of the children of Israel's return to Zion led by the Messiah, using a lot of highly questionable Talmudic passages as their justification for creating this industrial fascist state that is nothing more than a settler colonial project of the Rothschild-Morgan cartel as a special place to dump their excess Jewish underclasses on the indigenous nomadic and agrarian population. He took a wait and see attitude to give them a chance to create a state that actually conformed to Torah law. The WP bombardment in 2009 made it clear to many of us that the Zionists would never be able to peacefully coexist with their neighbors or treat native Palestinians as anything but dirt.