How the US Media Did not Inform the Story of the Occupation of Palestine

The Media Training Basis’s 2016 movie The Occupation of the American Thoughts is being hounded off of campuses and communities on costs of antisemitism. The documentary seems on the methods propaganda from Israel and the USA governments in regards to the occupation of the Palestinian Territories shapes US media protection. 

Since October 7, 2023, now we have seen how the US media has a separate algorithm when discussing the whole struggle being waged on the civilians of Gaza. With greater than 35,000 lifeless, an unprecedented variety of youngster amputees, and over 1,000,000 in danger for hunger, the urgency to decode media obfuscation of a genocide has by no means been higher. A lot has been written about this, particularly after had been revealed The New York Occasions’ language constrictions that restrict how writers ought to talk about the present assaults on Gaza. 

That makes The Occupation of the American Thoughts and its trenchant media evaluation an important device for understanding the present scenario. That’s additionally why it’s been attacked by politicians and policed by school directors and in comparison with Beginning of a Nation and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Such responses are just like Netanyahu’s comparability of the sit-ins at Columbia to the Nazi rallies within the Thirties. I reached out to the movie’s govt producer, Sut Jhally, and administrators Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp to debate the movie and the general public response.

Dave Zirin: A slew of politicians and faculty officers in Maryland denounced your movie as antisemitic. What’s your response to that cost?

Sut Jhally: My first response is that they clearly haven’t seen the movie and are simply studying from some script that’s been handed to them. In the event that they’d bothered to observe it, they may have thought twice about modeling such an ideal instance of what the movie is definitely about. The movie can be a historical past of how US information media have failed to inform the story of Israel’s brutal, decades-long navy occupation of Palestinian land. It additionally particulars how pro-Palestinian voices have been marginalized and routinely vilified as antisemites and terrorist sympathizers, which is precisely what these Maryland state legislators and school directors are doing. It’s only one small instance of the mounting backlash that’s now spreading throughout the nation as pro-Palestinian protests erupt on increasingly school campuses. The clear aim is to forestall any form of problem to the dominant narrative that’s been circulating within the media in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian battle for many years. Greater than anything, it reveals how petrified US and Israeli officers are that their management of the narrative is falling aside underneath the burden of actuality.

Loretta Alper: These Maryland state representatives and faculty directors appear to suppose our movie reinforces the antisemitic trope that Jews management the media as a result of we doc how pro-Israel views far outnumber pro-Palestinian views in mainstream shops. The issue with this declare is that we explicitly say the imbalance has nothing to do with some form of Jewish conspiracy and the whole lot to do with company media’s extra basic tendency to amplify, reasonably than query, the official claims of US and Israeli officers. Likewise, after we study how the pro-Israel foyer helps construct public assist for US backing of Israel, we explicitly say that there are key components of the foyer that aren’t even Jewish, together with right-wing evangelical teams like Christians United for Israel, and we level to different highly effective pursuits that form media protection, just like the military-industrial complicated. So, if something, the movie is a rebuttal to the antisemitic concept of Jewish management of the media.

Jeremy Earp: It’s value including that when politicians and school directors weaponize the cost of antisemitism to silence pro-Palestine voices, it’s additionally supposed to silence the tens of 1000’s of anti-Zionist American Jews who’ve been courageously talking out in opposition to the occupation and defending Palestinian human rights for years. In actual fact, 9 of the 16 critics of Israeli coverage we function in our movie are Israeli and American Jews, a few of them kids of Holocaust survivors who explicitly condemn how antisemitism and the Holocaust have been weaponized to justify Israel’s brutal remedy of Palestinians. Moderately than acknowledging any of this and interesting with the precise substance of our movie, these state politicians and school directors would reasonably throw round incendiary smears to scare folks away from watching it and deciding for themselves what to consider it.

DZ: What sort of chilling impact can this response have? Is it too far to name it neo-McCarthyism?

SJ: Assaults like these are designed to ensure folks know there’s a worth to be paid for criticizing Israeli human rights violations and struggle crimes. The aim is to relax the discourse and to ensure individuals are scared. None of that is by chance. We now know that the Israeli authorities shaped a process drive to focus on American campuses and intimidate college students and school and directors into silence. And Congress has additionally joined in, holding hearings and interrogating college directors about scholar protests at high-profile campuses like Harvard and Columbia, understanding full effectively it would trickle down and unfold worry by way of different establishments. In that sense, I feel you actually can describe it as neo-McCarthyism. It’s designed to create a local weather of worry and stamp out the expression of concepts. And there’s a logic behind it. Universities are one of many final locations left on this nation the place there’s any form of debate and variety of opinion on the Israel-Palestine situation. In order that must be shut down. It’s deeply anti-intellectual along with being profoundly antidemocratic.

JE: While you watch these congressional hearings, it’s exhausting to not hear echoes of the McCarthy hearings. A lot of the questioning of those college presidents and directors comes all the way down to, “Are you now or have you ever ever been a Hamas-sympathizer?” As Sut stated, it’s all about instilling worry in anybody who even thinks about talking out for Palestinian rights. What’s wonderful is the rising motion of younger people who find themselves resisting these intimidation campaigns and refusing to again down. The mounting protests we’ve been seeing over the previous few days at Columbia, the College of Southern California, and different universities are a transparent signal younger individuals are getting their information from very completely different sources than older People. They’re on social media they usually’re seeing these horrors unfold in Gaza in actual time, in order that they have a way more correct and visceral sense of the genocidal violence the US authorities is actively supporting. This makes it way more tough for them to easily shut up and go away.

DZ: You might be consultants on how the media shapes the Israel-Palestine narrative. What have you ever seen the media do since October 7?

SJ: As we present in our movie, which got here out in 2016, US and Israeli officers have been in a position to routinely transmit pro-Israel propaganda by way of the mainstream media with none form of actual pushback or debate for many years. Properly, since October 7, pro-Israel propaganda has been on steroids. Over the previous few months, numerous research have proven constant pro-Israel bias in main newspapers and information broadcasts, permitting atrocity propaganda just like the now-debunked beheaded infants tales to flow into with out problem. We’ve additionally seen journalists at CNN and The New York Occasions leak memos and launch nameless statements blasting editorial restrictions on their reporting, criticizing tight controls on the sorts of language they’re allowed to make use of, and speaking about how these restrictions and controls have labored to dehumanize Palestinians and create an awesome pro-Israel slant.

LA: These are the identical propaganda patterns we’ve been analyzing in our movies for years on the subject of wars waged by the US or with US backing, from Vietnam to Iraq. At the start, there’s been no sustained protection of the US’s position in Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians. As a substitute, it seems the US is doing the whole lot in its energy to assist shield Palestinian civilians and restrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The extent of US complicity in Israeli atrocities in Gaza, particularly the actual fact we’re supplying many of the weapons to hold them out, is usually hidden from view. Likewise, in line with media protection of different US and US-backed wars previously, the killing of tens of 1000’s of Palestinian civilians has been repeatedly described as “unintended” and “unlucky” reasonably than the completely predictable results of Israel dropping tens of 1000’s of US-made bombs on civilian facilities in Gaza. As well as, we now know that reporters have been inspired by their bosses to make use of sanitizing language to explain the horrors unfolding in Gaza, to keep away from utilizing phrases and phrases like “ethnic cleaning,” “genocide,” and “occupied territories.” As media critic Norman Solomon has argued, the result’s a dominant media narrative that tells People that Israeli lives matter much more than Palestinian lives.

DZ: What do you say to college students who need to display screen the movie and worry condemnation?

SJ: I’d say I don’t suppose it’s the accountability of scholars—these with the least energy on school campuses—to withstand authorities efforts to silence the form of free expression, debate, and protest which can be the lifeblood of American universities. I feel it’s the accountability of these in positions of management and energy on these campuses to try this. Directors and school members, no matter their politics, ought to be doing the whole lot of their energy to create an academic setting the place college students be at liberty to debate these points and ask powerful questions on US overseas coverage, with out worry of being criminalized or vilified as extremists or terrorist-sympathizers.

JE: In the long run, that’s all our movie is actually about. It’s about clearing away all of the distortions and myths and ideological filters which have warped folks’s understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian battle. And it’s about leveling the taking part in discipline for Palestinian voices so now we have the context and knowledge we have to make up our personal minds about US assist for Israel.