Manufacturing Consent 101: The New York Times and “What [NOT] to Know” About the Genocide in Gaza
January 3, 2025
Manufacturing Consent 101: The New York Times and “What [NOT] to Know” About the Genocide in Gaza
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Photograph Source: RubyGoes – CC BY 2.0
Listen for the silences in the imperialist press.
Last Saturday’s New York Times included a story it billed online as “What to Know About Gaza’s Humanitarian Crisis.”
The Times relayed some of the horrific suffering being inflicted on the people of Gaza. It reported that Israel’s bombs have “turned [Gazan] cities into rubble-filled wastelands” and displaced 90% of Gaza’s population.
The Times told its readers about a Gaza widow and her daughter who subsist by splitting an herb sandwich for breakfast and a tomato for lunch each day.
Times readers learned about a Gazan man with kidney disease who can’t access clean water, about four badly sheltered Gazan children who recently died from winter cold, and about Gazan parents who struggle to find medicine and painkillers for children whose bones have been shattered and whose skins have been scorched by Israeli bombs.
The Times reported drastic shortages of food, drinking water, medicine, all courtesy of a 14-month Israeli war that has included the bombing of hospitals.
The Times reported Amnesty International’s description of the war on Gaza as “genocidal,” Doctors Without Borders’ description of the war as “ethnic cleansing,” and the United Nations’ warning that the war now puts 1.95 Gazans at risk of famine. (Here the paper might have added the United Nations General Secretary’s description of the Gazan situation as “apocalyptic” and a UN special committee’s conclusion that Israel’s attack on Gaza is “consistent with genocide.”)
All of this was important to report but the framing of the story deleted key parts of what needs to be known about the horrors in Gaza were deleted in accord with the Big Brother thought control imperatives of US imperialism.
The article’s online billing is telling. “The humanitarian crisis in Gaza”? Seriously?
A “humanitarian crisis” can result from any kind of catastrophe, including a natural disaster like an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami. The Times’ language here deletes the criminal agency of the perpetrators who have pulled the trigger on Gaza. As a revolutionary friend writes from Chicago, “it’s not a f*cking ‘humanitarian crisis.’ Starvation is being deployed as a weapon of war, along with carpet bombing, destruction of every kind is sanitation and health infrastructure, etc. by Israel with 100% US backing.”
Imagine calling the mass exterminations in two of the Nazi Third Reich’s worst death camps “the humanitarian crises in Auschwitz and Treblinka.”
Try “What to Know About the United States and Israel’s War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza”!
Please note: “with 100% US backing.”
A fundamental part of “what to know” about these crimes is egregiously missing from the Times report – the role of the United States:
+ $18 billion in military aid to Israel in the first year of the genocidal war on the people of Gaza, surely the most generous provision of military support ever from one state to another for the purposes of ethnic cleansing.
+ The sending of 100 US military personnel to Israel to operate an advanced missile defense system there.
+ The sending of massive US naval and air forces to the region to protect Israel from regional retaliation for its genocidal war.
+ The Biden administration/US Empire blowing though “red lines” beyond which its spokespersons said it would not continue support for the war: Israel’s assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in May of 2024 (US support continued) and Israel’s blocking of humanitarian assistance to the people of northern Gaza (Biden dropped that “red line” in December of 2024).
+ The US Empire blowing off the “Leahy law” – US legislation that says the US can provide “no aid to foreign forces facing ‘credible’ accusations of human rights violations.” (Israel’s US-backed human rights crimes have been so credible that at least a dozen US government officials and personnel have resigned their positions in protest and Israel’s president and top military commander have received indictments and arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court!)
+ The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) preventing its staff from reporting on maternal and child mortality in Gaza since the war began[1].
Last May the blood-soaked US imperialist president Joe Biden had the Orwellian audacity or idiocy to say this: “I’ve done more for the Palestinian community than anyone.”
You can’t make up shit like that.
What a deranged imperialist butcher.
When does the ICC issue an arrest warrant for Genocide Joe?
How the critical and criminal US role is not part of “What” the Times thinks its readers need “to Know” about the “humanitarian crisis” resulting from US imperialism and Israeli fascism is a good question to ask the paper’s editors and owners. It is unlikely that they will respond with an honest answer: US imperial doctrine mandates the presentation of the blood-drenched United States Empire as a benevolent force for good. Uncle Sam generously supporting and equipping genocide abroad does not fit the doctrinal requirement. It’s not part of what the Times considers “all the news that’s fit to print.”
It’s called Manufacturing Consent 101.
Note
1. As Al Jazeera reports: “While serving as a contractor and senior adviser for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Alex Smith had a broad mandate. He was tasked with offering insight on issues concerning gender, infectious disease, nutrition, and the health of mothers and children. …Smith decided to raise the alarm [about the genocide being inflicted on Gazan women and children] within his agency. He said he wrote emails to his higher-ups, including Samantha Power, the administrator of USAID — all to no avail. The final straw, Smith said, was when senior leadership pulled his presentation on maternal and child mortality among Palestinians, despite initially agreeing to let him speak. In the lead-up to the presentation, he said his slides were scrutinized, and he was given detailed instructions on what language to use. He recalled being told not to refer to Arab Israeli citizens as ‘Palestinians’, even if they identified as such, and to avoid phrases like ‘at the border of Gaza’. Even a map of Gaza was deemed ‘unacceptable’. ‘It was all very Orwellian,’ Smith said, referencing the British dystopian novelist George Orwell. ‘It’s pretty much straight out of the pages of 1984.’ After the presentation’s cancellation, Smith said he was made to choose: either resign or face dismissal. He chose the former…As he reflects upon his time in the Biden government, Smith notes a stark contrast between Biden’s support for war-torn Ukraine and his lack of support for Gaza, where entire neighborhoods have been leveled. ‘When we talk about Ukraine, we can condemn the bombing of hospitals. We can talk about the resilience of the people who are being attacked. We can talk about the perpetrators who are attacking them,’ Smith said. ‘But when it comes to Gaza, we don’t talk about those people. We don’t plan for their health systems to be rebuilt.’”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/03/manufacturing-consent-101-the-new-york-times-and-what-not-to-know-about-the-genocide-in-gaza/
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