Photos of injured or dead children in times of conflict, accompanied by the unbearable cries of their bereaved parents. Such images elicit powerful emotions of pity, anger and hatred toward the perpetrators. Charitable agencies broadcast these images to raise money for humanitarian causes in the aftermath of war, famine, earthquakes and floods. News media blanket all mediums with these heart-rending photojournalistic reflections of the atrocities of war resulting in the viewers’ conclusions of who is at fault in the conflict.
So it has been with the Hamas-Israeli conflicts in Gaza. A very short clip of a suffering or dead child, disseminated repeatedly through media outlets, becomes engrained in the viewer’s psyche as the cause celebre of the conflict. With that reality, irrespective of the casus belli – the firing of rockets into Israel with the expressed intention of annihilation – Israel can never be seen as the victim. It has been transformed, due in part to traditional and social media, into the natural villain, fuelling the current and burgeoning worldwide anti-Zionist anti-Semitism, a sentiment expressed in the venomous actions of individuals, and mobs in the Middle East, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Despite its own history, we see Turkey’s president telling the media of the Israeli genocide while refusing to acknowledge its Armenian genocide. We watch Spanish film stars, calling for a boycott of Israel for “genocide,” ignoring the ignoble true genocidal history of Spain with its Inquisition. Chilling are the French, who violently surrounded a synagogue full of terrified Jewish citizens of France with menacing cries for a repeat of the Holocaust and “death to the Jews” and “Jews to the gas chambers,” conveniently forgetting France’s ignominious collaboration with the Nazis in the rounding-up of Jews in the Velodrome d’Hiver in Paris in1942, followed by the deportation and eventual slaughter of thousands of French Jews.
I observe the current situation and conclude that Israel can never win the media war, and hence, the facts of this conflict will be obfuscated and distorted in the hearts and minds of viewers who are understandably distressed at the sight of suffering children. As images of dead and maimed Gazan children are juxtaposed against those of Israeli children playing safely in their bomb shelters while their parents lament the cancellation of school and summer camps, the world sees a delineation of “good Palestinian” and “evil Israeli,” ignoring the stark political realities that comprise this conflict.
Numbers alone do not tell the story. Depictions of dead children do not tell the story. Numbers of casualties do not tell the story. Yet, the media’s constant reminders of Palestinian casualties and children’s deaths overwhelm the consciousness of those that Hamas wishes to woo, convincing the world that Israel is committing a combination of atrocities, ethnic cleansing or genocide – despite the fact the data does not bear this out. The true intent of Hamas in planting munitions, rockets, attack tunnels, and command posts in civilian neighbourhoods, schools and mosques is to get the video clips and sound bites that will turn the world against Israel.
War is horrific and tragic. A war where the enemy, with the media’s perhaps unintended complicity, savours its citizens being massacred so that it can garner world sympathy is patently cruel and inhuman. Hamas’ philosophy embodies pure evil: its sacrifice of parents and children, for malicious ends is unforgiveable. The only truly guilty parties are the perpetrators of the war, namely, Hamas, which launched it through massive rocket barrages against the civilians of Israel.
Israel may be the proverbial canary of the Middle East, with Hamas the first wave of deadly coal gas and ISIS and other jihadists the next malignant waves that, if not stopped, will cause the final devastating explosion. Let us hope that the media will somehow transmit the message that the mere fact of the death of children and civilians does not tell the whole and very complex story.