The President of the Holocaust, The Politics of the Holocaust – Global Issues
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 07 (IPS) – As news broke over the weekend that President Biden had just approved an $8 billion arms deal to Israel, an unnamed official vowed to “continue to provide the capabilities needed to defend Israel.” ” After last month’s reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide, Biden’s decision was the latest in his disgraced presidency.
It makes sense to focus on Biden as an individual. His choice to continue sending large amounts of weapons to Israel has been significant and disastrous. But the president’s impeachment and the effective acquiescence of the majority of Congress coincide with the mainstream media and general politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, his statement clarifies why the credibility of so many liberal values has crumbled after the destruction of Gaza.
When Boyer criticized “the US-backed war of Israel against the people of Gaza,” he chose to dissociate himself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write poetry among the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim for us to get used to this senseless suffering. No more nonsense. No more verbalized hellscapes. No more encouraging lies.”
The process of getting used to it soon became a habit. It was highly encouraged by President Biden and his loyalists, who were highly motivated to pretend he wasn’t really doing what he was doing.
For mainstream journalists, the process needs to be grounded in a firm belief in a consistent level of language and personality. When Boyer fully understood the importance of its coverage in Gaza, he withdrew from the “newspaper of record.”
A content analysis of the first six weeks of the war found that the spread of New York Times, Washington Post again Los Angeles Times they had demeaning views of the Palestinian people. The three papers “unduly emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killing of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” the study said. The Intercept he showed.
“The word ‘carnage’ was used by editors and journalists to describe the killing of Israelis against Palestinians by a ratio of 60 to 1, and ‘genocide’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis against Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrifying’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis against Palestinians 36 to 4. “
A year after the war in Gaza, the Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My opposition to ideological organs like New York Times that they see everything from Israel’s point of view. ‘How does it affect Israel, and how do Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of the worldview, and that is true of some of us in general, throughout the West. The Israelis are very smart, by preventing direct reporting from Gaza, they also allow an Israelocentric view. “
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is blind as before, willing to cover up any bad lies of Israel, to act as photographers to gain power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The favorable media climate paved the way for Biden and his elite intellectuals to slip into the limelight and shape the narrative, disguising conformity as a viable policy. At the time, a major increase in arms and ammunition for Israel was coming from the United States. Almost half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good thinking twice. So, for example, while the horrors of Gaza continued, no reporter would confront Biden about what he said during the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, which the president had just gone on live television.
“There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “Losing a child is like having a piece of your soul taken away.” . . . It is a feeling shared by siblings, grandparents, and their family members, and the community left behind.” And he asked sadly, “Why are we willing to live with this massacre? Why do we keep allowing this to happen?”
The Uvalde massacre killed 19 children. The daily carnage in Gaza took the lives of so many Palestinian children in less than an hour.
While Biden has refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass killings he has been perpetrating, Democrats on his trail are cooperating with peace or other forms of evasion. Long-term guidance is like checking a box to find the platitude required by affirming support for the “two-state solution.”
Ruling on Capitol Hill, the unspoken rule holds that the Palestinian people are active as a viable political issue. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries have done nothing to show otherwise.
And they didn’t bother to protect House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who were defeated in the summer primaries by an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The entire media landscape has been very different but very deadly to Palestinian civilians. During its first few months, the war in Gaza received a lot of media coverage, which declined over time; the results were to normalize continuous slaughter. Some alternative reports existed about the suffering, but journalism gradually replaced the media as background noise, while misrepresenting Biden’s feeble cease-fire efforts as determined pleas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under increasing criticism. But US media coverage and political discourse — unwilling to expose Israel’s policy of mass destruction of Palestinians — has rarely been more revealing than Israeli leaders are concerned enough to protect Palestinian civilians.
Instead of speaking frankly about the horrifying facts, the mainstream fiction of US media and politics has offered rhetoric and escapism.
When she resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer denounced what she called “the ongoing war with the Palestinian people, people who have endured decades of occupation, forced displacement, deprivation, surveillance, siege. , imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruelty and maybe the root of all cruelty is knowing what is happening but not seeing the truth.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Civil Toll of Its Military Machinewas published in the paper this fall with a new afterword about the war in Gaza.
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© Inter Press Service (2025) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
