The mainstream media are dying, and good riddance. Where Wilbur F. Storey once thundered that it was a newspaper’s duty to “print the news and raise hell”, today’s lickspittle hacks see their only duty as printing lies and kissing boots. For all their blatherskite to the contrary, they are engaged in the business of telling lies for power — especially when, as in New Zealand, the mainstream media are dependent on the government for a large swathe of their income.
But the most egregious self-inflicted blow to mainstream journalism is modern journalists’ propensity to pontificate with absolute certainty on subjects of which they are almost entirely ignorant.
This is especially apparent when it comes to science, environmental and climate journalism (or, usually, all three rolled into one) — and, now, Israel and the Arab Middle East.
A dumbed down media and international humanitarian law infected by the politics of identity are inverting history to support puerile allegations of genocide against the only nation on Earth that truly understands genocide. This against a democracy where Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze can all vote.
I recently had a “pro-Palestine” type scoff at the very idea that Israel is a democracy. When asked why, he spluttered about Netanyahu, as if the mere fact that someone he didn’t like won an election disproves that it was a democratic election (no doubt, the same person would deride anyone who claimed that the 2020 US election was “stolen”). How, in any case, such a claim somehow validated Hamas’ atrocities was not even addressed.
This fellow, though, is a model of informed rationality, compared to much of the mainstream media and the entirety of the activist class.
As The Australian’s columnist “Jack the Insider” wrote on Thursday, the Western left sides with this cousin of ISIS [Hamas] that executes gays, bans abortion and accepts child marriage for Palestinian women. Too many journalists in Australia ignore the protection that women and gays enjoy in Israel, which decided in 2022 to give refuge to persecuted Palestinian gays from the West Bank and Gaza.
Then there is the left’s other blanket nostrum: “colonialism”.
Too much media coverage is informed by the idea Israel is a colonial European power even though more than half its Jews are descended from people who never left the Middle East when the Romans expelled them in 19AD.
Much of the astonishing ignorance of the media can be sheeted home to its incestuous insularity. From school, to university, to the workplace, any journalist under forty has been coddled in a Long March echo chamber for all of their lives. And that’s just how they like it.
Young journalists interested in the truth should read a January 28 Newsweek piece by West Bank-based Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid.
“This truth must be told: it is Israel – and the Zionist Jewish community preceding independence – that consistently offered compromise, dialogue and a two-state solution. And it is Palestinian demagogues valuing personal power over the good of their people who have rejected these open-handed offers,” he wrote.
Palestinians have violently rejected a two-state solution from decades before the creation of the modern state of Israel by a UN mandate. When the League of Nations voted in 1922 to establish a Jewish state and a separate Palestinian state comprising all the West Bank, Gaza and all of what is now Jordan, Palestinian Arabs went on the rampage, massacring Jews. When the British offered an even more generous deal to the Palestinians in 1937, they chose to side with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Reich instead. Palestinian leader Haj Amin el-Husseini collaborated with the Nazis through WWII.
Also collaborating with the Nazis at the time were Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which gave birth to Hamas. This is the background of groups the left media is now supporting.
Yet the left, who see imaginary Nazis everywhere, now proudly side with the very organisations that were violently allied to the very real Nazis. Mostly, it seems, because they have one big thing in common: anti-Semitism.
Of course, the left denies being anti-Semites, but when they obsessively attack the only Jewish state in the world, while ignoring the enormities of its Arab neighbours, the jig is well and truly up. When green-left politicians march proudly alongside Muslim mobs, shouting genocidal anti-Jewish slogans, the lie is laid bare for all to see.
Tablet magazine on December 6 published an analysis by historian and columnist Gadi Taub, under the headline: “Why Israel is the #1 target of the global left”.
“Anti-Semitism has evolved through a breathtaking dialectical leap: it is now conveyed through the (language) of human rights. This is how a host of liberals and progressives – many of them Jews – have been seduced into supporting NGOs that claim to promote human rights, but are in fact promoting a racist view of Jewish people,” he wrote.
How can the idea of universal human rights be so distorted as “to yield an argument for the targeting and exclusion of Jews” from the right to self-determination?
NGOs portray Israel as a violator of human rights but say little about China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and most of Israel’s neighbours.
Taub discusses the preference of the UN and other NGOs for channelling a rights agenda through global institutions that undermine national democracies.
And, as we now know, the UN, through its UNRWA agency (long overseen by ex-NZ PM Helen Clark), has become an active participant in anti-Jewish genocide. Not only did dozens of its own staff participate in the vile atrocities of October 7, the entire organisation seems to exist for little else but furthering the genocidal fanaticism of Hamas.
Revelations last week by Canadian lawyer and human rights advocate Hillel Neuer on CNN and on Sky News Australia’s Sharri Markson program of an UNRWA Telegram social media group of 3000 that celebrated the October 7 massacre are consistent with UNRWA’s track record.
One freed Israeli hostage has revealed she was kept in the home of a UNRWA health worker inside Gaza.
As far back as 2014, UNRWA was forced to apologise for the placement of Hamas rockets inside UN schools.
Israeli intelligence last week passed details to the US showing 23 per cent of all male UNRWA staff are Hamas members compared with 15 per cent of all male Gazans.
Like the Hamas leadership, the UNRWA has a vested interest in keeping Palestinians poor, ignorant, and violent. After all, it’s one of the biggest employers in Gaza, and has a budget of more than $1bn a year. That’s a lot of “martyrs” and rockets.
No wonder the UN and Aunty Helen are so desperate to keep the river of “aid” money pouring in.
Just don’t expect to read any of this in the NZ mainstream media.
