( Counterpunch ) – Since October 7, 2023, white settler propaganda has ramped up through two insidious tactics targeting western audiences. The first rationalizes Israel’s brutality under the pretext of “self-defense” of a supposed “civilized” western democracy in a barbaric region, exploiting the conflation of Zionism with Judaism and dehumanizing all Palestinian people as “terrorists” to legitimize the ongoing genocide in Palestine and suppress dissent in the United States. The second aims to normalize genocide and Zionism, making mass violence more acceptable by breaking societal taboos, delegitimizing and attempting to destroy international law and weaving them seamlessly into the fabric of Western capitalist, liberal and consumerist culture.
Driving this normalization campaign is the mainstream media, with platforms like the talk show Piers Morgan’s Uncensored and the liberal Zionist outlet Haaretz playing pivotal roles.
The role of dehumanization in genocide
Recent research has advanced understanding of why people participate in genocide. Influences like peer pressure, group norms and obedience to authority often outweigh deeply held beliefs or ideologies. Class, economic inequality and lack of resources also make some individuals more vulnerable to coercion.
Several studies highlight the role of dehumanizing propaganda in promoting and shaping genocidal violence. While such rhetoric may not convince everyone, it shifts social dynamics by promoting the repression of dissent, normalizing violent ideas and emboldening those with pre-existing biases to act on them. This propaganda does not always create hatred though it can legitimize and create consent to deadly aggressive solutions, making them seem acceptable although they are illegal, morally abhorrent actions.
Dehumanization also plays a role after participation in violence. While many genocidaires initially experience intense emotional and physical distress, repeated acts of violence dull these reactions. Dehumanizing narratives then play a critical role in reframing and normalizing such actions, helping participants justify continued violence and view it as morally acceptable.
Spreading lies and debating mass murder
White settler societies, including Zionist society in Palestine, construct their identity through misinformation, dehumanization of “the other” and a commitment to expansion and dispossession, with media shaping public opinion and influencing policy to sustain these narratives. Since October 7, 2023, the mainstream media has perpetuated what may be one of the most elaborate and insidious misinformation campaigns in modern history. This includes the widespread dissemination of fictitious atrocity propaganda dehumanizing Palestinian people, such as claims of mass rape, beheaded babies, infants hanging on a clothesline, a baby baked in an oven and other fabricated horrors.
British media personality Piers Morgan has used his extremely popular News Corp platform to amplify debunked atrocity propaganda, facing no accountability. Through his debate show, he has provided a stage for Islamophobes, official Israeli state and military spokespersons and unapologetic antisemites to air their abhorrent, fascistic and bogus viewpoints. These reactionaries have been featured alongside anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-genocide, pro-humanity, progressive, liberal and leftist activists, politicians and media personalities as a supposed counterbalance, muddying the waters of acceptable debate.
“Piers Morgan all over the Place,” Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v3, 2024
Morgan’s show trivializes atrocities by framing genocide as a topic for “debate” rather than the moral and legal outrage it is. This process of normalization, as defined by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, makes the inherently abnormal, illegal and repugnant apartheid, genocide and settler colonialism – seem ordinary and acceptable, while diverting focus from the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The BDS movement opposes normalization, viewing it as a tool used by oppressors to legitimize oppression and suppress resistance. Normalisation enables Israel to whitewash its apartheid, genocidal regime and weaken global solidarity with Palestinian liberation through manipulative rhetoric.
Programs like Morgan’s claim to be neutral platforms, yet his overt pro-Trump stance and role as a henchman for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Fox News expose the façade, steering the narrative behind his so-called “uncensored” approach. Similarly, another Trump aficionado, now appointee Elon Musk claims to champion “free speech” while actively suppressing dissenting voices on his increasingly reactionary X platform.
Morgan’s show exemplifies Orwell’s concept of “newspeak,” as described in 1984. This distortion of language, repackaged as seemingly innocent discourse, aligns with what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco termed “Ur-fascism,” warning in his 14th point that such manipulations can even manifest in the guise of popular talk shows. Morgan positions himself much like Israeli war-criminal Netanyahu and US President elect Trump, who embrace a cult of tradition, whether rooted in the myth of a once “great” America or an expansive Greater Israel, syncretizing diverse and often contradictory beliefs into an immutable “truth,” while rejecting modernism and intellectual, academic critique.
Haaretz and justice
The foremost liberal Zionist media outlet – Haaretz (“the land” in Hebrew) – serves a particularly noxious normalization function; to present Zionism as aligned with human rights, claiming to encompass a political spectrum from right to left, with democratic, progressive values and a commitment to peace and justice. This façade legitimizes a hollow “peace process” of fruitless negotiations, all while Israeli bulldozers and developers persist in stealing Palestinian land, with some of it even marketed in the U.S. at Zionist land sales cynically hosted in synagogues.
Much like its portrayal of the anti-Netanyahu protests in the spring of 2023 as indicative of Israeli so-called “democracy,” Haaretz obscures the genocidal foundation of Zionism by framing the intensified violence against Palestinians since October 7, 2023, as a symptom of the Netanyahu government’s extremism – a bug rather than a feature of Zionism. Additionally, similar to Piers Morgan’s program which fosters open collaboration with genocidal entities, Haaretz has featured reports from regime-aligned journalists embedded within the Israeli military. It played a key role in amplifying the fabricated Hamas mass rape narrative, among other regime agitprop.
Piers Morgan Uncensored and Haaretz are not merely examples of media manipulation; they are instruments of societal conditioning designed to sustain global systems of oppression. Resisting this insidious normalization demands critical engagement with media narratives and a steadfast refusal to accept these atrocities as unavoidable.
Reclaiming the language of justice is essential, standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a critical front in the global fight against white supremacist imperialism.
Reprinted from Counterpunch with the author’s permission.
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