Propaganda 101: How To Defend A Massacre

If you are a human being, as you
probably are, you might think it would be difficult to explain away the
massacre of several dozen people. And you might think that it would be
difficult to get justifications for mass murder printed in one of the
world’s leading newspapers. You would, however, be mistaken. Propaganda
defending murder is both simple to produce and alarmingly common in
major media outlets.

In order to understand how people can
defend acts that should shock the conscience, today we’re going to
examine and dissect a particularly galling example. Last week, 60 Palestinians were killed, and 1700 wounded (including being permanently disabled) by the Israeli military during the Nakba protest, when Palestinians attempted to breach the fortified wall surrounding Gaza.

Much of the news coverage in the New York Times was already disturbingly one-sided, and the paper ran a front-page story on how Palestinians’ deaths made Israelis feel (they “hoped every bullet was justified”) while suggesting that Gazans exploit their own suffering for “political” ends (it’s a place “where private pain is often paraded for political causes”). But yesterday, the paper topped itself, running an op-ed from Jewish Journal editor Shmuel Rosner entitled “Israel Needs to Protect Its Borders. By Whatever Means Necessary.”

Rosner fully justifies the massacre,
with no apologies, regret, or second thoughts. He believes the killing
of these Palestinians was correct, and that they deserved to die. Now
you might, as I do, think this attitude is so self-evidently barbaric
that even to debate it is to surrender a little bit of one’s humanity.
But Rosner’s position is not a fringe one, and the good liberals at the New York Times consider
it within the boundaries of reasonable discourse, so unfortunately we
have not yet achieved the kind of world in which such thinking is
“self-evidently” immoral. (This reflects very badly on all of us.) I’d
like, then, to go through Rosner’s argument paragraph by paragraph, to
show how he constructs his defense of murder, why it might be persuasive
to people, and why it fails and should horrify everyone. 

Read more: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/propaganda-101-how-to-defend-a-massacre

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