Amid growing support for Palestinians lurks a begrudging Western media

Pro-Palestinian support is building in the United States. Some 70 US cities, including Chicago and Seattle, have passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, despite facing immense pressure for adopting such brave and courageous positions against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, a California federal court ruled Israel’s military campaign in Gaza "plausibly" amounts to genocide, but dismissed the case to stop American military support for Israel on grounds of jurisdiction.

This unprecedented opposition to Israel is grudgingly reported by media organisations in the United States. Many outlets have sunk to a new low in their partisanship to Israel’s globally denounced industrial-scale death and destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.

The catastrophe in Gaza is covered by newspapers that need to fill space, but broadcasters have largely abandoned the starving millions of Gazans and embraced the cult figure of Donald Trump and his political peccadillos.

Editorials and opinion columns now blackball and defame pro-Palestinian advocates. Anyone who opposes Israel’s violence is smeared as a Hamas supporter and an advocate of extremism. But there has also been pushback against those who imply pro-Palestinian supporters are anti-American and anti-patriotic.

Lectures and sermons by US Muslims criticising Israel are feverishly denounced as antisemitic. One would not be mistaken in thinking that support for Israel was part of the Pledge of Allegiance, if not for the fact that the pledge advocates "justice for all," which includes Palestinian Americans and others.

Subtle media imagery and keywords suggesting the Middle East is a "troubled" or "difficult" area is another way to denounce Arabs - whether they are Christian or Muslim – as being incapable of governing themselves, while highlighting that Israel is the region's only democracy.

Even pro-Palestinian Jews are not spared. If any of the language and negative descriptions used in today’s media ecosphere were to be used against any other race, ethnic, religious group, or nationality it would spark moral outrage.

But for too long, it has been open season to slander Arabs, Islam and Middle Eastern politics under the fig leaf of free speech in the US and Europe.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who frequently hoodwinks his audience into believing he operates with an air of evenhandedness despite being skillfully partisan, is exhibit number one. Friedman can no longer withhold his bile as Israel loses significant support worldwide as well as inside the United States.

In a recent op-ed, his metaphor of choice was to liken the Middle East region to the animal kingdom. If Israel’s choicest hostility is reserved for Iran for resisting its settler colonial policies, then Friedman joins Tel Aviv’s choir by likening Iran to a wasp that parasitically feasts upon other organisms.

Insect-like organisms, in his view, are those groups in the Middle East known as the Axis of Resistance who rally against Israeli aggression and US neo-imperial designs in the region.

Units of these forces are now in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. The Axis of Resistance are the only forces that have militarily resisted (in mostly symbolic ways) to protest the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza.

Friedman’s sugar-coated but venomous commentary has subconscious undertones of Israeli vengeance in Gaza. Friedman, the amateur entomologist-turned-exterminator, is ready with a remedy for the entire region, when he writes, "we have no counter-strategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle."

A recent study found that words used to describe a conflict do indeed create a "mental state language" of dehumanisation. This experiment was road-tested with Jews in Nazi Germany, when they were described as rats, lice and cockroaches.

Perceptions and propaganda created the conditions for the Nazis to murder six million innocent people, mostly Jews, but also the often-forgotten Roma people. This kind of coded and uncoded language is now widely in use in Europe and North America against immigrants, especially towards Arabs and Muslims.

This type of language has also helped fuel Israel’s military campaign, which enjoys unfettered White House approval. United Nations sources now report that more than 27,000 people have been killed in Gaza, and more than 70,000 are injured and missing.

Iraq failure
This is not the first time Friedman has been unable to contain his pyromaniac thoughts about torching the Middle East. After 9/11, he was an Iraq war booster who talked about the need to puncture the terrorism bubble.

He unabashedly allowed his bigotry to surface when he publicly affirmed that the arbitrary 2003 Iraq war had only one purpose: to teach all Muslims around the world a punitive lesson. Young American soldiers should purposefully go door to door and punish Iraqis by invading their homes and then say to them "suck on this," he said at the time.

Now, Friedman has selected wasps and insects to describe Arab and Muslim groups who resist American imperialism in the Middle East. In his columns that Biden possibly reads, Friedman has for weeks sent signals to the White House to strike at the Axis of Resistance, all allied to Iran. He has simultaneously floated to the Arab regimes a proposal involving the recognition of Israel and a demilitarised Palestinian state.

A demilitarised Palestinian entity is what Biden also has in mind and is nothing short of an apartheid-style "bantustan" that no self-respecting Palestinian can accept. Before Friedman can sell his ideas to his fawning readers, he first must reduce all significant actors in the Middle East theatre to the equivalent of members of the animal kingdom.

Recall that the Iraq war that Friedman so zealously touted turned into a monumental failure, with between 280,771-315,190 Iraqis dead as a direct result of the US invasion.

And over a half million people were killed if you add to it the US war in Syria. All this came at a cost of $2.9 trillion, a debt that generations of Americans will have to "suck on," to use Friedman’s infelicitous phrase, leave alone the US dead and wounded.

With a track record of superficial, bigoted, and lethal prediction - all of which culminated in the US's defeat, it remains a head scratcher why Friedman is deemed a vaunted pundit.

More puzzling is his role as "whisperer" for US President Joe Biden's Middle East doctrine and for having the ear of the ruling Saudi and Gulf monarchies. Friedman becomes delirious with messianic fervour when he contemplates Saudi Arabia's potential recognition of Israel.

Oscar Wilde might not have had the slightest scruple in mind when he remarked: "there is no sin except stupidity."

Unlike others who realised their folly, Friedman has yet to recant his role as cheerleader for America’s disastrous military expeditions in the Middle East since 2001 in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and Syria, while now continuing to antagonise key players in the region who do not deem the US as a force for the good in the region.

Propaganda campaign US television media outlets ran scores of pro-Israeli pieces in the aftermath of the events of October 7. Many turned out to be Israeli military propaganda to inflate as well as inflame public sentiment against Hamas.

Reports of dozens of babies being beheaded, a libel that Biden repeated and never retracted, and other kinds of war propaganda to justify a scorched earth policy in Gaza were widely circulated by a range of US media.

Little of the Palestinian suffering in Gaza was shown proportionately speaking, since American reporters are not inside Gaza, except as embedded journalists with the Israeli occupation army.

Media coverage aside, unprecedented support for the Palestinian cause has significantly impacted domestic politics in the US. Joe Biden’s double-speak has now embarrassingly become public.

This week, he accused his rivals in Congress and his Republican challenger Donald Trump of thwarting his border policy, saying, "I serve the American people."

Not all Americans are fooled by his pretentious claim, as Biden is neither hearing nor serving many of them. He has strenuously ignored the call of 68 percent of Americans who believe "Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate."

In turning a deaf ear to repeated petitions, it is fair to ask whose bidding Biden is undertaking at the expense of US interests and taxpayer money in funding Israel’s murderous military campaign.

There is no US interest served by supporting a regime in Tel Aviv which an international panel of judges deemed to be accountable for a plausible case of genocide in Gaza and a federal court in California echoed.

Biden could be implicated in aiding and abetting a plausible case of genocide and further arming and funding settler colonialism. His support for a short-term ceasefire saves no Palestinian lives and the US has been ineffective in providing humanitarian aid. Rather, it has stopped funds for UNRWA on Israel’s say so.

Many predict Biden might have difficulty in being re-elected since critical Arab-American, Muslim, youth and left-leaning constituencies are unlikely to vote for him in the state of Michigan come next November. Biden faces similar electoral peril in other key battleground states where protesters have heckled him at public meetings without fail.

Protesters have camped outside the home of Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken for days, accusing him of genocide as an indication of their extreme displeasure at the Middle East policies of the administration he serves.

But there remains a looming danger for pro-Palestinian rights activists, and a few congressional political representatives. They have been cast as supporters of terrorism as the Biden campaign reaches a desperation point.

Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich), Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Andre Carson (D-IN), all three of them Muslim members of Congress, have been targeted with death threats and hate campaigns, some even by their congressional colleagues.

And several members of The Squad of eight Democratic congressional members have repeatedly faced threats for their solidarity with progressive causes and Palestinian rights. Many have to take extra security precautions given hostile right-wing media that send mobs into a frenzy.

Most egregious and outrageous was once Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who called for congresswoman Omar to be stripped of her citizenship and to be deported.

Very few congressional colleagues, media editorials, let alone the leadership of the Democratic Party, have shown any tangible support for members of The Squad, especially in the light of the immense dangers that Omar and Tlaib face.

The year 2024 is a decisive moment for a range of forces, including pro-Palestinian, pro-global justice, the left, Arabs and Muslims in America. Media forces, especially television and the chattering classes as well as the political leadership of both major parties, are significantly aligned against these groups.

Islamophobia is subtle yet rife, but the votes of pro-Palestinian Americans count. Many in this constellation are thinking of either sitting out the November elections or voting for third-party candidates in protest. In other words, this group of pro-Palestinian forces could be the "chaos factor" in the next elections.

The election outcome could signal to both major parties to take their voices seriously in future on policy matters if their electoral absence or votes make an impact on the political landscape of America.