We had seen the journalistic caste and its cohort of editorialists turning up their noses at the massacres of the civilian population of Gaza, falling in line with the talking points of the military leadership of “the most moral army in the world,” systematically underestimating the number of Palestinian victims on the pretext thatthey came from the Gaza Ministry of Health, hysterically censoring any guest on television who dared to mention a possible “genocide” or, at the very least, an ‘intention’ or “genocidal logic” at work, wallowing in indecent pro-Netanyahu propaganda, discrediting the opinions of the International Criminal Court, and labeling anyone who strayed from the mandatory alignment with the Israeli camp of good as an “Islamist.” “Islamist” anyone who strayed from the mandatory alignment with the Israeli camp of good. Mired in its propagandist stupidity, subject to its colossal ignorance, blinded by its civilizational biases, the caste had simply forgotten to open its eyes to the blinding evidence: the crime was there for all to see. This was based on good faith, but above all on the numerous images relayed by the Gazans themselves.
Then the “truce” came on January 19, 2025, in the form of a ceasefire supposed to open the first phase, in three acts, of an agreement between Israel and Hamas. More or less imposed by Trump – but the Biden administration would have done the same – it allowed for the release of 30 Israeli hostages and the transfer of eight bodies in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Unilaterally interrupted on March 17 by Netanyahu, the Israeli offensive resumed on the night of March 17-18, killing 400 people in Gaza, more than a third of whom were women and children [1].
If proof were needed, yet another example, but undoubtedly the most flagrant, of the disrepute into which the journalistic caste has sunk, it is its treatment of the situation in Gaza since, as it calls it, the “breakdown of the truce.” — without specifying who broke it — will be a textbook case [2]: a disgraceful treatment of a dehumanized, even animalized, Gazan population, whose fate seems to matter far less to the columnists of public and private radio and television stations in the PAF than that of the hostages “put in danger” — without specifying Netanyahu’s responsibility in the matter; a hierarchy of ” information” that relegates the fate of the Palestinians to the bottom of the pile on the pretext that it is better to open a radio or television news program with a telephone meeting between Trump and Putin about which we know nothing than with yet another massive destruction about which we know everything because the IDF boasts about it and its exploits are relayed on all social networks; and finally, a framing of viewpoints which always starts with the Israelis—and particularly those who express their concern for the latest hostages on the streets—in order to ultimately feed the endless cycle of lies and fantasies that tend to make every Palestinian an accomplice or sympathizer of Hamas. A true disgrace.
The question, therefore, arises naturally. What more will it take than the 50,000 names and faces of Gazans wiped from the face of the earth—more than half of whom were women and children—and the 100,000 wounded or maimed for life, for Le Monde to finally refer to their fate as “massacres,” a term it had used without fail to describe the war crimes committed by the military wing of Hamas on October 7, 2023, which caused the deaths of 1,000 Palestinians, including 500 women and children, and wounded 10,000 others? massacres,” a term it had used consistently and appropriately to describe the war crime committed by the military wing of Hamas on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children and wounded some 5,000? It is this mechanism of “double standards,” of ‘doublethink’ as Orwell called it, of “double standards” as we now say, that is intolerable, immoral, and insulting to anyone endowed with reason, not partisan, but simply human.
What will it take for the dominant media caste to finally remember and claim as their own the 232 Palestinian journalists targeted by the IDF’s artificial intelligence software and murdered for doing their job as journalists since the beginning of the Israeli offensive? Five times more than in Vietnam or Afghanistan during the entire duration of those dirty imperialist wars!
What will it take, finally, for a shred of indignation to appear in media reports or under journalists’ keyboards in response to the machine-gunned ambulances, the bombed “community kitchens,” and the clearly exterminatory intent of the fascist-captured Israeli state to starve an entire civilian population by blocking all food aid? People will say that this is too much to ask or too much to expect. Possibly, but I refuse to accept that ordinary decency has declined to such an extent in the submissive consciences of a profession which, before becoming a caste, had been able to take a stand, in the name of simple factual truth and on certain occasions, in the only camp that could be its own: that of criticism of murderous powers and of a claimed independence of mind. The collapse on this point is total, or almost total, because it is always appropriate, especially when teetering on the brink, to salute the courage of independent journalists who, individually or collectively, save honor by continuing to resist the distortion of “objective truth,” which attests that a crime is a crime, a massacre is a massacre, and genocidal logic is the foundation ofan ongoing genocide.
It is to the spirit of Orwell, that of 1984, that we must always return to track down “alternative truths,” reveal their foundations, and expose the objectives of the newspeak that supports them, which posits that “war is peace,” that “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.” It is also from Orwell that we must grasp the semantic shifts of the last half-century and its new neoliberal variations— “equality is inequality,” “the market is monopoly,” “reform is counter-reform” – to name but a few of his maxims validated by a zeitgeist entirely devoted to a relativism based on the idea that “objective truth” never existed.
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four,” Orwell pointed out. “If that is granted, everything else follows.” Yet it is precisely this obviousness, this truism, this axiom that neoliberal discourse—its “newspeak”—and postmodern deconstruction have largely contributed to corroding. There was a time, in fact, from which we have not yet emerged, when, emancipated from mathematical evidence, new clerics attested from their pulpits that two plus two could equal five, or six, or seven, or more. Because freedom, as theorized by Richard Rorty (1931-2007), philosopher, historian of ideas, left-wing progressive and herald of this relativism in progress, would be nothing more, seen from this perspective, than “believing what one [wants] to believe without any absolute criteria being able to regulate the desire to believe,” as Renaud Garcia noted in his Désert de la critique [3]. From there, anything is possible, but first and foremost the worst: “lies are the truth,” “immigrants are profiteers,” and “climate change is a hoax.”
The Gaza moment, this moment that lasts and leads inexorably to the planned crushing of an abandoned and exhausted people, is revealing of the deliquescent state of a shipwrecked world where barbarism is advancing and where, like international law, all common sense seems to be disappearing. The cognitive earthquake that characterizes it is a clear sign of the collapse of common sense, which, based on an analysis of reality, convinces us that we are facing—in Gaza as in the West Bank—an enterprise of mass destruction founded on a deadly conviction: them or us. Rarely, if ever, has this logic been expressed so clearly in history. And yet, with rare exceptions, the media caste has decided to turn a blind eye to the implications of this methodical massacre of Palestinians for the whole of humanity at a moment in history when the most odious supremacism and the most savage law of the strongest are advancing everywhere.
Don’t look up seems to have become the credo of those who are paid to see and reveal. Daniel Schneidermann referred to the media coverage of the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 as a “professional catastrophe” in which avoidance was a way of not seeing. There is obviously something of this in today’s prevailing information shipwreck, but there is worse: a combination of ignorance with a capital I, boundless mediocrity, and blatant bad faith—the same bad faith attested to on the talk shows by the repeated (and paralyzing) accusation of anti-Semitism hurled ad nauseam whenever someone dares to challenge the dominant discourse, by editorialists who, until recently, were not known for their scrupulousness on the issue. This is particularly true of Bolloré’s stable.
But what does anti-Semitism have to do with denouncing a genocidal logic aimed at eradicating the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank? By what confusing process can one arrive at such an absurd conclusion? By what reductionist logic can Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben Gvir be portrayed as merely extremist representatives of a legitimate Jewish cause, while the many Jews around the world, on campuses and in demonstrations, who refuse to be associated in any way with these war criminals are suspected of anti-Semitism? The only hope that remains for the decline of anti-Semitism, which is spread more than anything else by the colonial philosemitism of the supporters of Greater Israel, is that this trio ends up before an international tribunal and the falsifiers who supported them in the dustbin of history.
Freddy GOMEZ
Notes
[1] This “truce” was broken on several occasions by Israel, with the bombings—which killed more than 200 people—never completely stopping. In addition, on March 2, a blockade was imposed on all food and humanitarian aid.
[2] On this subject, see the article in Lundi Matin “Massacres in Gaza: the indecency of the French media.”
[3] To make matters worse for Rorty, we might add that in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), theauthor seems to retain from the scene in 1984 where O’Brien tortures Winston to make him admit that two fingers plus two fingers could make five fingers, only “O’Brien’s skill in tearing human minds to pieces and rebuilding them anew in his own image” (p. 244 of the 1993 Armand Colin edition). Commenting on Rorty’s judgment, Renaud Garcia rightly notes in his Désert de la critique : déconstruction et politique (L’échappée, 2021, p. 122) that it provides “a definition that corresponds quite well to the act of deconstruction.”
Source: https://acontretemps.org/spip.php?article1107
Translated by TerKo using a free translation tool
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