The Economist ran the following political cartoon to illustrate an article about how Palestinians feel about losing the world’s attention.
Tom Gross caught it, Nidra Poller confirmed it emphatically: the two foreground figures are Muhammad al Durah and his father, Jamal. The wall behind them is the famous wall behind the two, “riddled” with bullets, allegedly shot “like rain” and “in cold blood” by the IDF.
The piece is supposed to accompany the article, which combines a sympathetic story of Palestinian distress at Realpolitik alliances such as Sissi and Bibi,
The shift has left the Palestinians, whose fate once topped the Arab agenda, feeling abandoned.
with an implied threat that, if we don’t pay attention to the plight of the Palestinians, they just might get violent.
What really stirs Arab emotions are scenes of Israelis killing Palestinians. Violence over the past year has left dozens of Israelis and more than 200 Palestinians dead. Most Palestinians, according to polls, back a return to an armed intifada (uprising). With the Arab world focused elsewhere, America in the throes of a presidential race and progress towards a two-state solution halted, they may see no other way to capture the world’s attention.
The article has no author, but appears not to be an editorial (although it would certainly fit nicely in the opinion section, written jointly by the Jerusalem and Cairo correspondents). Presumably, this kind of writing seems both professional and informative to the editorial team who published it. But when we read the cartoon against the grain, we get a remarkable comment on the inveterate lethal journalism that dominates European reporting on the Middle East.
Rather than spend time on the incoherencies that pepper the written piece itself – Après Morsi, Le Déluge ? – let’s just focus on this concluding paragraph and relate it to the illustration.
What really stirs Arab emotions are scenes of Israelis killing Palestinians.
Precisely. And this lies at the core of the current global humanitarian catastrophe. For 16 years now, the MSNM, Brits in the lead, have obsessed over images of Palestinian children suffering at the hands of cruel Israelis. In so doing, they have fed the Jihadi beast, greatly contributing to global Jihadi warming.
Violence over the past year has left dozens of Israelis and more than 200 Palestinians dead.
Note the careful phrasing. The reification of violence (as in “the cycle of violence”) permits the author to avoid any agency here.
Most Palestinians, according to polls, back a return to an armed intifada (uprising).
It may not seem relevant to mention that this is especially true of those who get their news from social media. Once again we deal with the problem of incitement through media. And with Palestinian propagandists, including BBC correspondents, recycling pictures of dead from around the world and reporting them as Palestinians killed by Israelis…
Add this to your #Pallywood collection: Palestinian “activist” pretends photo from Equador earthquake is from #Gaza pic.twitter.com/ksXAUaSQFl
— ((Anarcho-Zionist)) (@AnarchoZionist) July 23, 2016
…why wouldn’t Palestinian youth, exposed to such doubly approved propaganda, support violence? That’s the purpose of war propaganda: make your side want to be violent. And when outsiders confirm the narrative, why not believe it?
With the Arab world focused elsewhere, America in the throes of a presidential race and progress towards a two-state solution halted, they may see no other way to capture the world’s attention.
The founding example that launched the now-long list of “Astoundingly Stupid Statements of the 21st,” was a colleague’s response to the suicide terror campaign of the early 21st century: “What choice do they have?” It is the paragon of “humanitarian racism,” or the attitude that “lesser peoples” are not capable of moral agency, who have “no choice” but to behave violently, and we (in this case Israel) are responsible for their violence. If only we paid attention to the poor Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression, then they might not be violent.
Note how the two-dimensional image of the Palestinians this humanitarian Economist piece takes for granted, is one whose strategy is to get the world’s attention in order to tell their victim narrative, and turn that opinion against Israel, forcing her to make concessions. In other words, it’s a “Palestinian people” who, like some force of nature, are about to get violent. Bibi and Sissi buddy buddy is just more misery for poor them.
Not a whiff here of alternatives, of other paths the Palestinians might take, now that the rapprochement of Israel with the Arab world presents a real possibility of compromise. Now, Palestinians could make concessions to Israel with Arab support. Now, Palestinians could start taking care of their people, get the refugees out of camps, use the cement to rebuild people’s houses not war tunnels, drop the hate-mongering drumbeat of war, an insane, suicidal war at that…
Of course the key player in this constructed Palestinian whose only agency is to fight Israel by manipulating world opinion, and whose only recourse when ignored, is violence… is the mainstream news media, like the good folks who bring us the Economist. They know quite well that
What really stirs Arab emotions are scenes of Israelis killing Palestinians.
And that, alas, is what the MSNM have been doing, more or less non-stop, every time they cover the Middle East Conflict. Indeed, Hamas has made a military cogwar strategy based on the sacrificing their own civilians, and critically reliant on the crucial role of the Western MSNM showing it as Israelis killing Palestinians: Lethal War Journalism, or running one side’s war propaganda as news.
That’s what Al Durah is about. He’s – in the words of the most penetrating of the students of the affair, Nidra Poller – a “long-range ballistic myth.”
Al Durah is the Ur-accusation: IDF targets innocent Palestinian kids. Before the “proof” of having it on tape, few believed Palestinian claims that Israel targets children. After few doubted.
And once you believe that, you’ll believe anything – Israelis kill family on Gaza beach, Israelis mass execute Palestinians by the hundreds in Jenin, Israelis break Eid al-Fitr Truce to bomb children playing in refugee camp.
And every face of every child incites hatred of Israel.
Even of those killed by Hamas…
Sadallah child, 2012, killed by Hamas, displayed for the camera by Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya and Egyptian (Muslim Brotherhood) Foreign Minister, Hesham Qandil at Shiffa hospital.
The Masharawi baby. Jihad, the father, works for BBC at the time. The bomb was an errant Hamas rocket, identifiable right away by the minimal damage.
FOR USE AS DESIRED, YEAR END PHOTOS – FILE – In this Nov. 14, 2012 file photo, Jihad Masharawi weeps while he holds the body of his 11-month old son Ahmad, at Shifa hospital following an Israeli air strike on their family house, in Gaza City. The Israeli military said its assassination of the Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari, marks the beginning of an operation against Gaza militants. (AP Photo/Majed Hamdan, File)
The parents of one of the 11 children of Shati Refugee Camp killed by Hamas rocket that broke a cease fire for Eid al Fitr.
Al Durah and Lethal Journalism
Since the Al Durah blood libel of 2000 two things have consistently happened in the MSNM.
- Every time Israel moves to defend itself, they report extensively on the damage Israel does, and give great credibility to Palestinian accounts, provoking violent demonstrations the world over.
- Every time that the Al Durah narrative gets identified as a fake, calling into question both the “IDF targets Palestinian children” narrative and the competence of the MSNM’s reporting from the Middle East, the MSNM circle the wagons and defend their “honor.”
Now here we have a new contribution to the discussion, this fascinating cartoon done by a talented artist, Peter Schrank. If I am wrong in my analysis (below), I welcome his correction and comment.
My guess is that, in invoking the Al Durahs, Schrank was referring to something he thought was a true story, that is that they are the victims of Israeli aggression. Muhammad al Durah alive, living in dread, was not supposed to support the ludicrous conspiracy theory that he’s still alive, but rather to symbolize all Palestinian kids who live in the shadow of Israel’s crushing presence (now supported by Egypt).
But there’s something dark about the father’s eyes that suggests – to me at least – sinister thoughts. This is not the face of a righteous man, suddenly abandoned in his suffering, but of a schemer foiled, planning retaliation, or in this sense, planning to regain center stage.
Along that line of thought, were the father to follow the thinking of these journalists – violence is the way to get the world’s attention back – then that boy becomes a primary candidate for the “victims of Israeli violence” that strategy entails. Muhammad’s worried look may be less about the two leaders in the distance, than about his father, in this reading, symbolic of the patriarchal, domineering, honor-driven, shame-murdering, culture of violent revenge. Here, he stands for these testosteronic elites willing to brainwash and sacrifice their children on the altar of their undying triumphalist hatred.
To reinterpret the drawing:
The part on the left, the somber, bullet-ridden wall with the two unhappy figures, represents Pallywood, the stage on which Palestinians have for decades, produced images of Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression, which it counted on the Western MSNM to use in reporting the news. Muhammad al Durah, the most explosive accusation of deliberate child-murder, alive represents, in this reading, an acknowledgment of the malevolent and foolish journalism that made his staged death into the young century’s icon of hatred.
Since this incitement and the hatred it aroused was a major cause of the conflict, this reporting supported not so much the Palestinian people, as their exploitative elites who willingly sacrifice the people to their ends (e.g., Palestinian refugee prison-camps). In that sense, Muhammad (alive) represents the generation of Palestinian youth sacrificed to hatred, and Jamal (scheming) represents the Jihadi triumphalists who sacrifice their youth to their dreams of honor revenged.
The dejection of the al Durahs is a sign of the failure of both Palestinian (Arab) culture to develop and adjust to a larger world, and the failure of the MSNM to call off their lethal war journalists. The article this image accompanies, represents a solid if mild example of this unthinking “lethal journalism” that runs Palestinian war propaganda as news… a kind of joint lament that we lethal journalists and our Palestinian sources don’t get the kind of respect we used to.
The right-hand side, represents possibilities. Muslims and Jews in the Middle East talking to each other. Sissi trying to get the two sides to work it out. Schrank could have drawn it as the two men, looking over to the legendary father and son, symbols of Palestinian suffering, and offering a way out of that icon of hatred under which their people have been suffering for so long (in no small part, thanks to the MSNM).
But to do that, would mean not seeing Bibi and Sissi as pure power players, hegemonic, imperialistic, wrong side of the intersectionality, victimizer/victim sweepstakes. It would also mean having a level of self-awareness that is still only barely dawning on journos today.
My guess is that, despite his (unintentionally?) honest pen, Peter Schrank sympathizes with the “anti-imperialism of fools.” Indeed, belief in the blood libel of Al Durah (IDF targets children), is part and parcel of the world view of foolish anti-imperialists who think the Jihadis are on their side. Thanks to Schrank, we have the correlation made explicit.
Both the article and the cartoon (at least, I think, in its intent), offer us a good example of how lethal journalism has become so normalized, that neither the writers, nor the cartoonist, nor the editors, have the faintest idea that they are global Jihad’s main delivery system for a war propaganda that targets them and all they claim to hold dear.
It’s not just lethal journalism that targets Israel (and wreaks havoc among Palestinians) that these news providers, these information professionals, engage in; it’s own-goal war journalism, that targets both the West and its free journalism, whose privileges these folks are so fortunate to enjoy and, alas, so ready to abuse.
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