How the Media Deftly Distorts the Truth and Harms Israel
How an Avalanche of Images and Disconnected Factoids Provides News Viewers with A Distorted Narrative About the MidEast and Everything Else
By David Gottfried
This essay is not about the recent Iranian missile barrage against Israel, but at the outset I will underscore two critical points about the altercation between Israel and Iran.
Why the Outcome of Iran’s Recent Missile Barrage Against Israel Signals the Most Ominous Tidings
Some people might discount the danger to Israel because Iran has not garnered much visible support, and Jordanian forces might have intercepted some missiles, and the U.S. and the U.K. intercepted many missiles. Also, France and Germany, usually seething with pro-Palestinian and anti-Jewish sentiment, denounced Iran’s aggression. However, I am not the least bit sanguine about Israel’s safety and future.
Israel’s Reliance on the Armed Forces of other Countries is Almost Unprecedented and Very Dangerous.
The military involvement by other countries, on Israel’s side, was, paradoxically, an ominous development for Israel. In all of Israel’s prior wars (with the exception of the Sinai campaign of 1956), she defended herself without the participation of any allied forces. In 1948, Israel received equipment from communist bloc countries; in 1967, the French “Mirage” Jet, as perplexing as a surrealist painting and as powerful as Napolean’s armies, made Israel’s air-force the dazzling empress of the morning sky; and in 1973, United States armaments saved the day, but in none of those altercations did a single state fight alongside Israel. To the extent Israel is compelled to rely on American forces, she will become more vulnerable to American demands to make concessions to Arabs and Islamists.
Also, Israel’s dependence on direct American military participation undermines a salient theme of the Zionist dream:
The Zionists wanted to create a new Jew. To hell with being a cowering merchant, gray-suited and ashen-faced in a cold and damp European ghetto. They wanted to create a Jew who was more physical, stronger, swifter with his fists and ready to defend himself. [Their antipathy toward dreary urban life and longing for a rural revival made them very much the peers of the German Wondervogel movement (“free bird” movement), a German youth movement which decried the soulless mechanization of the industrial revolution]. When Israel depends on Christian friends, this writer worries that Israel may regress to pre-Zionist stereotypes of narrow-shouldered, weak, tubercular tailors.
At the risk of sounding like a war-loving curmudgeon whose sensibilities are firmly rooted in the 19th century, I fear Israel is simply not strong enough. If Israel had not gotten American assistance, she may have gone under as her air defenses, while very advanced, can simply crack when several hundred missiles are thrown at her at once. Iran is massively more powerful than the Arab states that opposed Israel from the 50’s though the 70’s. In those days, Egypt and Syria got military aid from the Soviet Union, and to some extent from Britain. Nowadays, arms travel in reverse and Iran has been giving drones to Russia. That’s how mighty and menacing Iran is.
Support from European States and Jordan Does Not Mean that Israel is Not Hated; it only demonstrates that the Arab world Fears Iran
Support for Iran is limited because Iran Is Persian, not Arab, and subscribes to the Shiite Islamic sect, and for centuries Persians and Shiite Muslims have had periodic bloodbaths with Arab, Sunni Muslims. Indeed, the recent Abraham accords were not reached because Jared Kushner, although Jewish, is very good at bonding with fellow rich-kid swindlers in Saudi Arabia; rather, Israel and its Arab neighbors forged a fleeting sense of unity in the Abraham accords because of their common enmity toward the Mullahs of Tehran. (And this demonstrates, in a Hegelian 1 sort of way how peace breeds war: Iran, utterly incensed at the possibility of peace, encouraged Hamas to attack Israel last October.)
How the Media Makes the World as Savvy as a Kindergarten Kid Wetting His Pants
First, I will demonstrate how the media, in general, clouds and obfuscates our understanding of politics. At the conclusion, I will demonstrate how media distortions prejudice Israel and extoll the Arabs.
Our Interpretation of Pictures Tells a Thousand Lies.
Developmental psychologists explain that as people and civilizations mature, they move from pictures to words, from the concrete to the abstract, and from animistic beliefs that entail the worship of idols, to the conception of G-d. With the advent of television, and of computer use revolving around the sharing of images, we are all regressing: It started with pet rock faddists in the 1970’s and it’s blooming today in the profusion of paranoid bullshit spewed by political extremists.
How Pictorial News Made Us Stupid about Iraq:
When we read things, our mind is not silenced. If we read a sentence which says, “100 Iraqis demonstrated against Sadaam Hussein,” we have the sense to realize that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Iraqi people hate Sadaam Hussein. We reason: There are millions of people in Iraq; therefore, the 100 Iraqis who demonstrated against Sadaam do not necessarily represent the people of Iraq. However, most people don’t read. Most people eat their junk food and watch junk Television and Images on Computer Screens.
When people see a picture, they are riveted by the picture, what they see in the picture displaces all other thoughts in their itty-bitty brains, and they forget that 100 people in a demonstration in Baghdad, in 2003, are not necessarily representative of the Iraqi people. When they watch pictures, they are silly putty for the image masters in government and their hand maidens in the media. In any event, because of happy news in the American media in 2003, such as film footage of 100 Iraqis taking down a statue of Sadaam after American forces took Baghdad, we thought everything was hunky dory in Iraq.
In 2004 and onwards, Americans soldiers were getting killed by IEDs, improvised explosive devices. Then the media, ala Walter Cronkite reporting in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive, delighted in telling us that we must realize the limits of American power and that the US military was a bumbling, blundering helpless giant. The disillusion after 2004 was a natural reaction against the excessively sanguine portrait propagated by the happy news of 2003. The United States is not a helpless giant, and its Iraqi foes were not gallant, third world rebels bravely defying imperialistic tyranny, but the news media, through its ineptitude (or Machiavellian Design) gave Mid East despotism a gift when it covered the American-Iraq War.
How the Pictorial News Makes Us Stupid about a Child in Gaza
We see a child in Gaza who has allegedly been wounded by Israeli bombs, and we automatically assume that Israel is an ogre. Of course, it is terrible to see little children die, but do you realize how many little children die who you don’t see on the “nebbish” news. Free societies let the news media roam though the cities and the countryside digging up dirt. Closed societies, which are very often Arab societies, don’t let you see their clobbered, crying children – unless they have allegedly been clobbered by someone else.
A) In Egypt, Christian Copts are routinely attacked and assaulted. If you filmed them getting spat on, the Muslim hordes might lynch you. They are so degraded by their Muslim neighbors that many of them have been consigned to lifetimes of collecting garbage,. i.e., since they are viewed as human garbage, most of them work as garbage collectors. When was the last time the fancy pants pansies of Harvard or Berkeley protested the annihilation of the Christian Copts. Those elite students may pose and strut and imagine that their IQs float above the mainstream like charmed celestial ether, but they don’t talk about the Christian Copts because they haven’t seen them on television.
B) ISIS was convinced that the Yazidis were in league with the Devil. Although the Muslim world is not known for being particularly innovative, ISIS was unceasingly creative in developing more intricate and crueler means to kill the Yazidis. This wasn’t on television, so for most people it never happened.
C) There aren’t many pictures portraying the deaths and expulsions of Maronite Christians from Lebanon. And the castratos of Cambridge and Columbia are like one of the proverbial three monkeys: They see no evil. Ergo, there is no evil.
D) In 1982 or 1983, the relatively secular Syrian regime was worried about messianic rumblings in the City of Hana. What did they do about it ? They destroyed the city and most of the people who lived there. Of course, since it did not come with film footage, it did not happen as far as television was concerned. The New York Times covered the story, but most Americans never, ever read the New York Times.
E) Ditto: Darfur, Serbs killed by Albanian Muslims, Hindus massacred by Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, African Christians and animists mauled by marauding Muslims.
How Our Pictorial News Makes our Foreign Policy Resemble that of a Spastic, Spectacularly Ambivalent 4-year-old:
Consider Somalia at the of 1992:
In November and December 1992, the infantile American public learn, from pictures on television, that there are starving children in Somalia. We are treated to wonderful, womanly outbursts of glorious torrents of tears on CNN etc. We send soldiers, bearing gifts of food, to Somalia.
Within a month of our arrival, American troops are attacked by a warlord. On the boob tube, the ladies (of both sexes) do their Bette Davis best to tell us that all the Somalis are all a bunch of thugs.
America runs away from Somalia.
Consider Lebanon, 1983:
We see pictures of a terrible civil war in Lebanon
Ronald Reagan sends in the marines
Our marine barracks are attacked.
America runs away from Lebanon.
We react on the basis of pictures. Thought and planning are absent. Policy is positively girlish, flippant, hysterical, like Lucille Ball vamping it up at Desi’s night club and then, feeling guilty, acting like a nun. It is like some women dieters who are hysterically certain that the devil is carbohydrates, and the next minute are certain that the only thing that can make you fat is fat.
I would wager that many pro-Palestinian kiddies in college profess to love Nietzsche, but I would also bet that most of them don’t know that Nietzsche said that a wise man is one who does not react too much.
Nietzsche advised that a wise man does not let himself be buffeted by the latest hysterical gossip fomented by yentas at the water cooler. He should be centered, clear in his ideas and not apt to bend and break like a winsome willow in the wind. However, the picture news tells you to get up and dance, or get up and have a rally, at every visage of melodrama.
A lie told often enough will soon be believed
How Lies About Crime Warped American Politics
Starting in the late 1960’s, politicians, the evening news and comedians told us that America’s Northeast was a citadel of crime and vice. They also reminded us that the South was serene and peaceful as duly portrayed by situation comedies such as “Gomer Pyle” and “Andy of Mayberry.”
This sentiment made itself felt at the highest levels of government as Richard Nixon was elected President, in part, on a law and order platform in 1968, contending that New York and other Northern cites were awash in murder, robbery and rape because of wimpy, soft, liberal policies.
In fact, the murder rate has always been at its highest in Dixie, the most conservative part of the nation. But reality counts for nothing to people who are seduced by the propaganda of the nightly news.
How the media lied about Al Gore, their favorite punching bag.
The media said that Al Gore invented the internet.
Al Gore never said that; he said that he supported legislation which funded research that led to the internet. But what he had said did not matter.
Soon, the media treated us to comedic skits which reminded us that Al Gore invented the internet.
And skits on TV are more important than objective reality.
Consider Gore and his first debate against Bush in 2000:
(This is Amazing and Sickening)
Polls conducted within 30 minutes after the first debate, between Bush and Gore, was over, showed that well over 50 percent of the populace thought Gore had won the debate; only 30 something percent of the populace thought Bush had won.
And then the spin doctors lied like the proverbial rug.
Most of the dimwitted talking heads said the same thing, as if their talking points had been produced by the same PR firm. I suffered to hear at least 3 talking heads say that Gore, most unfortunately, yawned too much, that his yawing made him most immature and that this led to the obvious conclusion that Bush won the debate.
Polls conducted 1 week after the debate showed that most people thought Bush won the debate.
How a Snazzy TV Special is Sure to make People think the way you want
In the Summer of 1989, polls revealed that 5 to10 percent of the populace thought that drug use was the biggest problem or a major problem in the United States.
In the Summer of 1990, polls showed the same thing: 5 to 10 percent of the populace thought that drug use was the biggest problem or a major problem in the United States.
However, at the end of 1989, polls showed that about 40 percent of the populace thought that drugs were hijacking their Holiday
Season like Hades.
Why did the polls resemble a rollercoaster, shooting up high at the end of 89 as people shivered with terror about drugs, and then promptly come down, making small town America seem as boring and as wretched as it always was. Did millions of Americans finally fall in Love with Timothy Leary and the Marqui De Sade and then, after a couple of weeks, switch their allegiance back to Billy Graham.
Of course not. Instead, the networks gave us dramatic specials about drugs, and women on talk shows got voluble and teary eyed as they howled about how their daughter started to look slutty and their son started to look queer. And then … they forgot about it.
The Media Decides What One Will Focus On
Sometimes, the media alters our politics and replaces old prejudices with new prejudices by altering the nation’s focus.
How our Conception of Male and Female Power Dynamics Radically Changed Because of a Change in the Nation’s Focus
From World War Two Until the End of the 1960’s, the media suggested that the United States was dominated by bitchy, castrating women. You can see it in popular culture, in films such as “Peyton Place” and Novels such as “Portnoy’s Complaint.” You can read it in psychiatry, as psychoanalysts held that bossy American women were turning the nation queer. You can read it in the output of our most provocative intellectuals, as Norman Mailer wrote, in “Advertisements for Himself,” that President Eisenhower was a bit of a fag.
Of course, if you focus on Bette Davis movies and the sound of mink stole-clad women in the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach you may get that impression.
Starting in the 70’s, the media fostered the notion that male chauvinist pigs were abusing women. All they had to do was change the focus and concentrate on the rape of women, spousal abuse, anorexia nervosa, etc.
The same set of facts can make one pro-Israeli or pro arab. The conclusion one arrives at depends on the facts one recognizes and the facts one chooses to ignore.
How the Media’s Distorted Focus and Selective Discussion of Certain Facts, and Omission of other Facts, Tarnishes Zionism and Facilitates Arab Extremism
1) The Media Consistently Screams about the Alleged Eviction of Arabs from Israel, but the Media never mentions that one and a half million Jews were thrown out of Arab lands when Israel was created.
2) The Media Screams that Israel does not want to bend or compromise, but why doesn’t the media ask why Arafat broke off negotiations with Israel after Israel offered to cede 96 percent of the West Bank to the Arabs.
3) The Media contends that Israel’s domination of the West Bank, and its former domination of Gaza, infringed on the Palestinian right to self-determination. Then why didn’t anyone ever contend that Jordan and Egypt infringed on Palestinian autonomy when Jordan controlled the West Bank, and Egypt controlled Gaza, between 1948 and 1967.
4) The Media claims that Israel has been oppressing the people of Gaza by occupying it without mentioning that Israel left Gaza in 2004 and built factories in Gaza, before Israel left, so the Arab people in Gaza could earn money.
5) The Media never asks why Gaza responded to Israel’s deed of peace, recounted in the immediately preceding paragraph, by periodically sending missiles, from Gaza to Israel, since 2004.
6) The Media discusses the Mid East as if there were no such thing as geography and as if we were all incorporeal creatures not taking up any space at all. In World War Two, Roosevelt asked the American people to look at maps so they could better understand the War.
It is high time that Americans graduate from kindergarten and look at a map of the concerned nations.
Very simply, the Arab lands have about 500 times the square milage of Israel.
7) Nations need Strategic Depth to Survive: Russia survived World War Two even though it suffered enormous losses at the War’s outset because it had to lose a lot of land before the Germans were near Moscow or had occupied a huge fraction of Russia’s industrial or agricultural assets. Israel, by contrast, is so small that one can drive from the Northern border of Gaza to Tel Aviv in 90 minutes.
These are just a few of the issues that our brain-dead media never discuss and that the brazen, bitchy bastards of academia bury under a cesspool of anti-Semitic slogans.
Hegel said that every idea or sentiment breeds its antithesis, e.g., love can breed hate. One can love someone so much and eventually feel drained of having given so much love and eventually despise the object of one’s love.