In 2000, a French correspondent who was not at the scene narrated fifty-five seconds of footage from Gaza as the killing of a boy by Israeli fire. The raw footage, when a court finally forced it out, showed no blood and a boy lifting his arm after his “death.” France 2 never retracted.
That is the model for every Gaza war since: a local cameraman supplies the picture and the story, a Western outlet supplies the authority, and the picture becomes the verdict.
Chapter 6 of the series “Everything You Know About Gaza Is Wrong” is about how the media learned not to look. The dead child in Shuja’iya whom no reporter could say was killed by Israel rather than by Hamas’s own RPGs or booby traps. The BBC reporter’s infant son, mourned worldwide as a victim of an Israeli strike, until the UN quietly recorded that a Hamas rocket had killed him. The clean doll in fresh rubble that appears in the first week of every war, a gag British television was using to mock dishonest reporters in 1990. The Norwegian doctor whose “banned weapons” claims were never checked because he was a doctor. The wars that always begin, in the retelling, with Israel’s first airstrike and never with the scores of rockets that came before it.
By 2014 the news organizations had seen all of it in 2009 and 2012, and reported as if they had not. By October 2023 they had been trained for twenty-three years, and they covered the war exactly as they had been taught: assume Israel is wrong in every case, and don't bother checking.
Link to the chapter follows.
הבריטים הנאלחים
המציאו את הקולוניאליזם,
ובכל זאת הם מטיפים לנו, היהודים – ששבנו לארץ אבותינו לאחר 2,000 שנות גלות.
The wretched British
invented colonialism,
yet they preach to us Jews—who returned to the land of our forefathers after 2,000 years of exile.
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Sheikh Hamdan has visited Captain Smit Machchhar in hospital to express his “full appreciation and praise” after the pilot saved the lives of 172 people.
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