The Western hostility against the Palestinians has been never restricted to the political, economic and military domains. Media has always been a key field resorted to in order to reinforce this hostility.
Thus, the UK and US media outlets have always engaged in the scheme of dehumanizing the Palestinians.
Declassified Website published a study that explains this process of dehumanization, concentrating on how five key outlets – Washington Post, New York Times, The Times, The Guardian, and BBC covered the Zionist aggression on Gaza between October 7 and 26.
UK-US media are clinical and routine in prioritizing coverage of Israeli suffering while Palestinians are routinely depicted as faceless victims of a natural disaster, deserving of Western magnanimity and Israeli acts of aid, not political or military intervention in their defense, the study added.
The analysis also indicated that the have been suspensions and sackings of journalists speaking out against Israeli policies, while dehumanizing speech about Palestinians has been aired without challenge.
According to the study the US and UK media deal with the Palestinians as colonized people, recalling the political philosopher Frantz Fanon who wrote during France’s colonial war in Algeria of “hordes of vital statistics”, “hysterical masses”, “faces bereft of all humanity”, and “children who seem to belong to nobody”.
A number of examples were provided by the study about dehumanization of Palestinians in reports posted by the above mentioned outlets:
1. Israelis are killed by the Palestinians and deserve support, while the Palestinians die facelessly.
2. Palestinians die because of the clean water shortage
3. Palestinian children are called people aged 18 and younger
4. Reporting Israeli airstrikes on Gaza without mentioning “Gaza” in the headline.
Source: Al-Manar English Website
