Israel under renewed Hamas attack’, screams a BBC headline.
A military superpower armed with F-15 fighter jets, AH-64 Apache helicopters, Delilah missiles, IAI Heron-1 drones and Jericho II missiles (and nuclear bombs, for that matter), versus a “prison camp” firing almost entirely ineffective rockets. Weapons about as effective as the slingshots with which Palestinian Teenagers “targeted” armored Israeli vehicles during the first intifada (Uprising) of the 80s.
Almost a hundred men, women and children have died in Gaza in the past three days while there have been “Zero” casualties on the Israeli side. Yet its “Isreal” under “renewed” Hamas onslaught. As if Hamas attacks, pillages and lays waste to Israeli cities and towns on a regular basis. And this is BBC, widely considered to be the most unbiased media outlet in the whole world!
Perhaps, this is why BBC being a public broadcaster and answerable to its license holders is merely ‘biased’ as opposed to an ABC that has resorted to blatant lies and outright, willful distortion to obfuscate the truth. Believing firmly in the Nazi dictum, (as espoused by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Geobbels) “a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth”, ABC’s Diane Sawyer positively outdid herself.
She deliberately misidentified scenes of the aftermath of Israeli missile strikes in Gaza as destruction caused by Palestinian rocket fire!!
In a particularly galling news segment she said “We take you overseas now to the rockets raining down on Israel today as Israel tried to shoot them out of the sky.” Next to her is video footage not of Israelis or even Israel, but of Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza strip!!
In a feat of legerdemain that would have done even Goebbels proud. Sawyer then went on to describe a Palestinian family gathering belongings in the smoking debris of a missile-hit home in Gaza as “an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can.”
Taking her journalistic chicanery to its logical conclusion Sawyer then described an image of a Palestinian woman surrounded by destroyed homes as “one woman standing speechless among the ruins,” with the implication that she is Israeli.
However, social media is increasingly becoming the light at the end of the tunnel. With images and their stories going viral in cyber space, the era of monolithic news networks able to define, mold and ultimately control public opinion is being challenged as never before. The sheer wight of public opinion forced the ABC network to retract the story and Sawyer herself, tweeted an apology shortly afterwords.
The age old dictum ‘truth is the first casualty of war’ does not have to be proven right in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (If shooting fish in a barrel can actually be called a conflict).
The ability of the ordinary people to tweet, share updates and pin images has the potential to shake the very foundation of the powerful mass media organisations who have hitherto reigned unchallenged over the last century.
If we, the people succeed in doing that, this would be our greatest legacy.
