Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash
Western media’s reporting of the war in Gaza makes little pretence of impartiality. In French newsrooms and radio studios, unconditional support for Israel is the norm and part of a wider lurch to the right.
Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert
Le Monde Diplomatique
February 28, 2024
“A period of media frenzy has revealed, and accelerated, a political shift: in the weeks since the Hamas massacres on 7 October, France’s government and mainstream media have managed a double feat. They have expelled from the ‘republican arc’ (the spectrum of the politically acceptable) the leftwing La France Insoumise (LFI) and simultaneously admitted the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) to the fold. The RN, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen as the Front National, was once deemed unworthy of being in government by the ruling classes, who frequently called for a united front against it; now suddenly rehabilitated because it allied itself with the stance of the Israeli government, it is no longer beyond the pale.
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There’s a second major axis of the journalistic coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: occidentalism. Newsrooms, aligned with an increasingly Atlanticist French and European foreign policy, see Israel as an ally that shares their worldview, with the same enemies, the same conviction that it belongs to a superior civilisation, that of liberal democracies. In the Middle East there rages ‘a battle of Western democracies against the obscurantism of radical Islamism’, as journalist Laurence Ferrari put it (Paris Match, 4 January).
Former prime minister Dominique de Villepin asked BFM TV host Apolline de Malherbe (27 October), ‘Because horror has been committed [on one side], does that mean it has to be committed on the other side too?’ She answered, ‘Which part of humanity’s views are those?’ – implicitly contrasting the enlightened West with the populous South where people harbour terrorists. ‘I love Israel … because it’s a country infused with the European spirit,’ said former director of Charlie Hebdo Philippe Val, now a commentator on Europe 1 (9 October), Vincent Bolloré’s far-right radio station.
As with Kyiv a year and a half earlier, the media endorse, without fact-checking or perspective, most of the narratives from the Israeli government and army, whose spokespeople mostly speak fluent English and know the journalistic codes of the target audience. Any information from Hamas, meanwhile, including the number of victims, is treated with scepticism. The media don’t just pick up the IDF’s numerous fake news stories (the 40 ‘beheaded babies,’ the 20 burned and executed children, the newborn put in an oven, the shot and disembowelled pregnant woman, the Hamas command centre under the Al-Shifa hospital etc) whose subsequent denial receives less attention and has less impact than the sensational stories that preceded it. It’s the official Israeli core narrative that the French media retail: the army of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ has the mission of destroying an inhuman monster which has melted into the Gazan population; so Hamas bears primary responsibility for all victims of the conflict.
As so often, Bernard-Henri Lévy is the pre-eminent mouthpiece for this kind of propaganda…”
Continue reading this brilliant piece of journalistic criticism – of which there are far too few, given the manifest decay of the profession in our so-called liberal so-called democracies.
