Fediverse vs Disinformation

They took umbrage at their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the double-tap bombing of Nasser hospital “a tragic mishap”. It was neither tragic nor a mishap, according to them. Channel 14, which supports Netanyahu’s government and the war, reported military sources as saying the attack killed “terrorists disguised as journalists”. The sources said that soldiers targeted a Hamas “terror headquarters” in Nasser hospital.

“According to the current security concept, any place where terrorists operate, whether it used to be a school or a hospital, becomes a legitimate target,” the report noted. Soldiers involved in the attack told Channel 14 that it had been “approved and coordinated with the senior command, and they knew about it before it was carried out”. Similarly, Maariv reported that it was carried out “after receiving approvals from the command level”.

Zvi Yehezkeli, the Arab affairs correspondent for i24 News, praised the killings in Khan Younis: “These are Nukhba men in every way,” he said, referring to the slain journalists as members of an elite Hamas military unit. “If Israel decides to eliminate the journalists, then it’s better late than never.” Yehezkeli, a settler living in the occupied West Bank, is at least being honest. That is more than can be said for two international news agencies, Reuters and the AP, that used the work of these slain journalists for whom, one naively assumes, they should feel a duty of care.

Apparently not. Both swiftly reported without qualification the Israeli military’s ever-changing excuse for targeting the hospital: that the Golani Brigade was targeting a camera used by Hamas. This provides no explanation for the second strike 15 minutes after the first, which wiped out the journalists. In reporting this claim straight, as if Israel had the right to balance the assertion that the journalists were targeted with its own fabrication, Reuters and the AP offered no account of the fact that this “Hamas” camera could have indeed been the camera set up for Reuters to use as a live feed.

Media was also integral to the genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels systematically dehumanised the Jews, justified their persecution, and secured public support for mass murder. The concentration camps compelled prisoners to send postcards home saying they were being treated well. Concerts were filmed in Theresienstadt, after which the entire crew was sent to Auschwitz.

Propaganda that Jews were being “resettled in the east” was critical to the Nazi regime’s attempts to disguise its “final solution” in the gas chambers. Today, Israeli media reports on negotiations with South Sudan as the destination for an “evacuation” of Palestinians in Gaza as if it were the most normal and humanitarian thing in the world.