Alison Weir has an extremely interesting article about NYT biased reporting on Palestine/Israel, focusing on a careful, rigorous and long term study by her group, If Americans Knew, on NYT reporting of Israeli versus Palestinian deaths, and her recent meeting with the NYT ombudsman (giving him a slide show of her study). Result: the ombudsman wrote a column essentially ignoring the bias documentation and saying essentially, "Hey, we're not perfect, but we try to be fair and objective".
Pro-Zionist forces have been adept at influencing, if not controlling corporate media coverage of Israel and Palestine. A related example of Zionist influence in the media can be seen in the pressure on the Comcast Corporation by Zionist groups to remove ads that describe the humanity of Palestinians and their suffering under the oppression of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
The Palestine/Israel Conflict as a Means of Control
The NYT is not only biased in a "Jews are good and their lives are important, Palestinians are bad and their lives are unimportant" kind of way.
It is also biased because of its very wrong subtext, which is: "The Palestine/Israel conflict is an ethnic war, not a war fomented by elites to control ordinary people, both Jews and Arabs." The way elites foment ethnic war is by portraying one ethnic group as the innocent victim of the other ethnic group's evil. The NYT and the pro-Zionist forces are engaged in fomenting ethnic war between "Jews and we Americans who should of course identify with them" against "Palestinians and Arabs in general who are, well, Arabs."
It is becoming increasingly evident that the elites running the U.S. and Israel and the Middle East dictatorships intentionally foment ethnic/national war as a means of social control. Sharon and Hamas use each other. The pattern is very similar to the way elites fomented ethnic war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s to control a working class population there who were not pre-occupied with who was a Croat and who was a Serb (intermarriage rates were very high) and whose strikes and massive military draft refusals were threatening elite power. The strategy consists of elites of a particular ethnic group (and often of the "opposing" group as well, in a symmetrical fashion) carrying out vicious violent attacks on the other ethnic group in the name of one's own, followed by attacks, verbal and sometimes violent, on members of "one's own" ethnic group who don't go along with the ethnic war attacks. In Yugoslavia the Serb and Croat elites worked together to pit their respective populations against each other.
The Same Strategy used in WWII
This same pattern was carried out by the rulers of the U.S., Germany and Japan to control working people in each of those nations who, in the 1930's and early 40's, were mounting sharp struggles that the rulers feared were about to turn into revolutions. The rulers instigated World War II to regain control over their own populations. (See my book, The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II, for a full treatment of this story.) We've seen the same use of deliberately fomented ethnic war used as a social control strategy in Ireland. And the current war in Iraq and the larger War on Terror are similarly about social control, practically lifted from the pages of Orwell's 1984.
The Importance of Fighting Zionism
The significance and the importance of our effort to expose Zionism and build opposition to it, is not only the immediate but modest changes that we might win and might lose again, as so often is the case. It is also significant and important in that it enables us to discuss with our friends and neighbors and colleagues the most important facts about the world in which we live - Facts which, when fully appreciated by millions of people, make it possible to really change the world in fundamental ways:
- 1. Elites foment ethnic/national wars and attack ordinary people's best values of equality and solidarity and democracy precisely for the purpose of controlling us;
- 2. The vast majority of people in the world share these very positive values and aspirations and they try to shape the little corner of the world over which they have any control with these values, in the face of elite attacks on their efforts;
- 3. Elites fear ordinary people coming to power so much that they resort to mass murder to foment ethnic/national wars to undercut the unity of the masses.
- 4. Our opposition to Zionism is part of something much bigger: the opposition of billions of people in the world to elite rule;
- 5. Numbers 1 through 4 mean that a revolution to make a truly democratic and equal and solidaristic society is both necessary and possible.
These are the reasons why we are compelled to fight Zionism if we want real peace - not only in the Middle East but wherever a relatively few powerful men foment war and divide the people as a means of control and oppression.
© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com
John Spritzler is the author of The People As Enemy: the Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II, a Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a co-editor of New Democracy World. John can be reached at: spritzler@comcast.net
Additional Articles by John Spritzler on Axis of Logic.
Featured Activist
John Spritzler: Will the Harvard Center for Health and Human Rights take a stand for Articles 13 and 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
January 31, 2005
Critical Analysis
Should People Opposed to Bigotry and Anti-Semitism Support Israel?
Jan 26, 2005
Media Critiques
What The Boston Globe Won't Print About Israel
Oct 28, 2004
Palestine
Should There Be A Jewish State?
Sep 21, 2004
Critical Analysis
"Falsifying History and Ourselves":
Anti-Democratic Propaganda in the Classroom
Aug 28, 2004
The 2004 Elections
America Is Not a Democracy:
What Are We Going To Do About It?
Aug 5, 2004
Critical Analysis
The "Good War" Myth of World War II
Jul 14, 2004
Health/Medicine
An Open Letter to Advocates for Universal
Health Care: We Need a Whole New Approach
Jul 10, 2004
Health/Medicine
Market-Driven Health Care and Social Control
Jun 4, 2004
The 2004 Elections
REFUSE TO VOTE FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004
Mar 26, 2004
The 2004 Elections
NO, VOTING WON'T WORK
Mar 26, 2004
You can find more articles by John Spritzler at New Democracy World, where he serves as Co-Editor.