W.J. Astore
Genocide through Famine
If you’re like me, you subscribe to news services like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters, which send daily news reports and quick highlights. Given the busy pace of life, most people probably read those headlines and short summaries and little else. The mainstream media is counting on that.
Consider this quick summary I received today from Reuters’ “Daily Briefing”:
ISRAEL AND HAMAS AT WAR
- More than five months into Israel’s ground and air campaign, launched in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, there are widespread shortages of food, medicines and clean water in Gaza, doctors and aid agencies say. Starving children fill hospital wards as famine looms.
Note the framing here. It’s a war between Israel and Hamas, with history beginning on October 7, 2023. Most of all, note how widening famine is described: it’s just happening, apparently due to a war that Hamas started.
You’re not told that the famine is man-made. That the Israeli government is blocking thousands of trucks loaded with food, medicine, and clean water for Gaza. Instead, you’re encouraged to think it’s much like a natural disaster, if not entirely the fault of Hamas, which allegedly started all the trouble on October 7th.
If challenged to write my own summary for Reuters, I’d pen something like this:
Israeli government policies are producing mass famine in Gaza. Israel has already killed or wounded more than 100,000 Palestinians since the October 7th Hamas attacks. An Israeli blockade on most aid to Gaza promises death tolls in the hundreds of thousands over the next few months. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send weapons to Israel while providing diplomatic cover in the UN, making it complicit in genocide.
We see similar narrative elision with the Russia-Ukraine War, which in the mainstream media is all the fault of Vladimir Putin, who woke up in February 2022 and decided to invade Ukraine because he’s a power-hungry maniac, a new Hitler—or worse. Meanwhile, Putin blew up his own highly profitable Nordstream pipelines, or maybe a rogue element from Ukraine did it. Who can tell, right?
Dishonest and disingenuous reporting is facilitating genocide in Gaza and a horrendous war in Ukraine that is hollowing out that country. In each case, what we’re supposed to focus on is something else: the crimes of Hamas and the alleged megalomania of Putin.
Gaza is especially egregious since a genocide is in progress there, enabled and empowered by massive weapons shipments from the United States to Israel. But I guess there’s nothing we can do to help those starving Palestinian children “as famine looms.” I guess we can construct a temporary pier that will take two or three months to build; I hope the starving children can hold on that long. Whether that pier will facilitate relief efforts or serve mainly as a Trojan horse to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza (ethnic cleansing by the boat load) remains to be seen.
Bracing Views 
Oh, come on, we (US) are always the “good” guys. Therefore, our government only acts in the best interests of others, irrespective of the outcome in the end. So, hundreds of thousands die or are harmed from munitions we facilitate–or leave behind after we depart, or from starvation from lack of food by the invading party(ies) or illness from an absence of medicine and first aid supplies stopped at their borders. How is the United States culpable in that? It’s never our fault. We are loved around the world, and for those who don’t feel that way, they are all terrorists and potential enemies, right? Especially all those illegals at the southern border who come from South America, China, and all those other countries who are sending their criminals here to take over.
I am being unnecessarily sarcastic, I admit, but I also know that there are far too many who really do believe all this. I am surrounded by them here, and they are very vocal. Case in point, the hatred and vitriol spewed at a recent county meeting, as reported in our local newspaper:
“…The woman related a story about speaking with someone working in a local grocery store [deletion of location] who said that she had seen people who she claimed were from other countries, coming in the store.
“At different times she has seen a main majority of Hispanic-speaking people one day and a lot of Chinese, whether they’re Communists or not coming in on other days,” the woman said.
“And she says they have smartphones. They have debit cards and we know what the administration has done with this,” she claimed. She also shared an incident where she described a woman who looked like she was from India panhandling in a parking lot [location deleted].
“Can I ask you a question? Have you ever seen a white person panhandle,” Commissioner [name redacted] asked her.
The woman countered that she had, but only in Las Vegas. When asked by [redacted] if she’d ever seen a white person with a smartphone or a debit card she accused him of trying to be smart.
“When you said the Chinese person had a smartphone and a debit card…I don’t understand what makes that a problem,” [Commissioner] said.
The woman then backpedaled, saying that she hadn’t actually seen those people herself, but that she was sharing what had been told to her by the grocery clerk.
“She was talking about it. She said something was going on in [deleted] Township,” she said.
[Commissioner] persisted in trying to clarify why she had an issue with someone who wasn’t white or spoke a different language and had a smartphone and used a credit card.
“What’s the issue with that,” he asked.
“This is not a racial thing. We’re here because we’re getting the illegals and we’re worried about that,” a man in the audience interjected.
“You know why I’m saying that? Because every person that she mentioned was Hispanic, Chinese or Indian. The reason it sounds racial is because every person she brought up was of a different race,” [Commissioner] countered.
“Just because you’re around Hispanic people who look Hispanic or Chinese people who look Chinese who speak a different language, it doesn’t make them criminals and it doesn’t make them illegal,…”
[There is much more back and forth, too much to share. Web address available if requested.]
And this is only the public commentary that does not include the local extreme right wing “patriots” group that has a public website but a very private Facebook group. I get many of the same news feeds that you do and can readily see how we (the United States in total) are complicit in the atrocities in many areas, including in our own country. It’s an ongoing battle to fight fear and ignorance here, traits that are often called out by citizens of other civilized countries. It’s disheartening at the least, and frightening as we face another presidential election.
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