The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.
Reuters (10/18/24) called October 7 “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”; no similar Nazi comparisons were offered for the (probably far more than) 42,000 Palestinians killed by Israel.
Reuters (10/18/24), for example, produced an obituary headlined “Yahya Sinwar: The Hamas Leader Committed to Eradicating Israel Is Dead”—a less than charming use of terminology in light of the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in Gaza.
Since last October, more than 42,000 Palestinians have officially been, um, eradicated—although according to a Lancet study (7/20/24; Al Jazeera, 7/8/24) published in July, the true death toll could well exceed 186,000. Per the view of Reuters, this is really the fault of Sinwar, a “ruthless enforcer” who, we are informed in the opening paragraph,
remained unrepentant about the October 7 attacks [on Israel] despite unleashing an Israeli invasion that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, laid waste to his Gaza homeland and rained destruction on ally Hezbollah.
Never mind that Sinwar’s elimination will have no impact on the genocide, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear: “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow, but our task has still not been completed.”
Delegitimizing resistance
The New York Times headline (10/21/24) seems to express surprise that assassinating a negotiating partner is not a pathway to peace.
Further down in the obituary, Reuters journalist Samia Nakhoul managed to insert some biographical details that hint at reasons besides “evil” that Sinwar chose to pursue armed resistance:
Half a dozen people who know Sinwar told Reuters his resolve was shaped by an impoverished childhood in Gaza’s refugee camps and a brutal 22 years in Israeli custody, including a period in Ashkelon, the town his parents called home before fleeing after the 1948 Arab/Israeli war.
This, too, is a rather diplomatic way of characterizing the ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter that attended the 1948 creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land—an enterprise predicated on perpetual killing, as we are now witnessing most acutely. By portraying Sinwar’s actions as stemming from an intrinsic diabolicalness that made him hellbent on “eradicating” Israel—in contrast to Israel’s actions, which are implicitly restrained until “unleashed” by Sinwar—the corporate media delegitimize resistance while effectively legitimizing genocide.
This longstanding commitment to laying nearly all responsibility for the conflict at Palestinian feet also leads to bizarre headlines like the New York Times‘ “Yahya Sinwar Is Dead, But a Palestinian State Still Seems Distant” (10/21/24). It is the Biden administration’s alleged hope that Sinwar’s killing could “help pave the way for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.” The idea attributes the failure to create a Palestinian state to Sinwar rather than Israel, and ludicrously imagines that genocide, along with the massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure that Israel is committing in Gaza, are logical ways to go about state-building.
That report came on the heels of another Times intervention (10/19/24) that critiqued “Hamas’s single-minded focus on the Palestinian struggle, which had dragged the whole region into the flames”—even while acknowledging that Israel is the party presently responsible for perpetuating the conflict. This particular effort bore the headline: “Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive.” Well, yeah.
‘Terrorist Hamas leader’
Fox News (10/17/24) labeled Sinwar a “terrorist,” but didn’t use the word when noting that he “rose to the top positionthe killing of previous leader Ismail Haniyeh in the explosion of a guesthouse in Tehran”; in fact, it couldn’t even bring itself to mention that Israel had carried out the assassination.
For its part, Fox News (10/17/24) deployed predictable lingo in its memorialization of Sinwar, describing him in the obituary headline as “The Israeli Prisoner Turned Terrorist Hamas Leader.” Indeed, the “terrorist” label never gets old, even after decades of being wielded against enemies of Israel and the United States, the Israeli military’s partner in crime and the primary financial enabler of the current bloodbath. Lost in the linguistic stunt, of course, is the fact that both the US and Israel are responsible for a great deal more acts of terrorism than are their foes.
But pointing out such realities goes against the official line—and so we end up with Sinwar the “Hamas terrorist leader,” as ABC News (10/17/24) has also immortalized him. Time magazine (10/18/24) opted to go with a front cover featuring Sinwar’s face with a red X through it.
CNN (10/17/24), meanwhile, offered space in the second paragraph of its own reflections on Sinwar’s demise to Israeli officials’ spin on the man, noting that they had “branded him with many names, including the ‘face of evil’ and ‘the butcher from Khan Younis,’” the refugee camp in southern Gaza where Sinwar was born.
Given the Israeli butchery to which Khan Younis is continuously subjected these days, it seems CNN might have refrained from taking Israel’s word for it. On just one bloody day this month, October 1, at least 51 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on a tent camp in Khan Younis (BBC, 10/2/24)—a space that had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area.” Israel killed 38 more there yesterday (AP, 10/25/24).
‘The threat remains’
Time (10/18/24): “The corpse of Yahya Sinwar was found in the landscape he envisioned—the dusty rubble of an apocalyptic war ignited by the sneak attack he had planned in secret for years.”
Sinwar is not the only Middle Eastern resistance leader to have been recently eliminated by the Israelis. On July 31, Israel assassinated Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Haniyeh with a bombing in Tehran, and on September 27, it killed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, in an operation that entailed leveling an entire residential block. (What was that about terrorism?)
On the latter occasion, the Jerusalem Post (10/6/24) got its panties in a bunch over the allegedly “unnerving eulogy of the terror chief” that appeared in the New York Times (9/28/24), whose authors had not only had the audacity to call Nasrallah a “powerful orator…beloved among many Shiite Muslims,” but had also mentioned that the man had helped provide social services in Lebanon.
(That Times article also reported that some Lebanese “felt he used Hezbollah’s power to take the entire country hostage to his own interests,” and it linked to another Times piece—9/28/24—about those who “welcomed Mr. Nasrallah’s death.”)
The Washington Post (9/28/24) went with the noncommittal headline “Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah Leader and Force in Middle East, dies at 64,” while simultaneously running an op-ed by Max Boot (9/28/24): “Nasrallah Is Gone. But the Threat of Hezbollah Remains.”
Now that Sinwar is gone, too, rest assured that Israel will continue to exploit all manner of threats to justify unceasing slaughter—and that the media will be standing by with disingenuous and reductionist narratives all the way.
As it happens, the Washington Post today (26 Oct) published a piece titled, “Israel limited its attack on Iran, hoping to ease tensions for now”. How noble. Bravo, Israel! The piece has drawn well over 1,800 comments, and counting. I added this one:
Please consider context: rather than lashing out, Iran’s leaders waited weeks before responding to Israel’s late-July assassination of a senior Palestinian political leader visiting Tehran, reportedly to negotiate a ceasefire.
Further, Iran gave Israel advance notice of its early-October retaliatory strike. I am certainly no fan of Iran and its vicious theocracy. But in this instance it sounds like Iran was acting like the adult in the room. (Israel, of course, boasted about how many missiles it shot down, without mentioning that thanks to Tehran, it knew when they were coming.)
The Post is never strong on context — a polite way of saying it wallows in journalistic malpractice — especially with regard to Israel vs the regional enemies this racist apartheid state has made through lethal violence and land theft. Reading WaPo, you’d think Mideast history began on 7 Oct 2023, and not with 1940s zionist gangs terrorizing and dispossessing indigenous Arab families in Palestine.
The current report is just another example.
(END OF MY WAPO COMMENT)
Someone who believes history began in 1940 LOL
“Those who live by the sword, die by the sword” is an old proverb that means those who use violence will suffer violence, which certainly apples here. Good riddance.
Given that the US and Israeli states use massive and overwhelming violence against the poor who defy their hegemony, why don’t you point your finger at those fanatical regimes?
“On April 9, 1948, just weeks before the creation of the State of Israel, members of the Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist militias attacked the village of Deir Yassin, killing at least 107 Palestinians. According to testimonies from the perpetrators and surviving victims, many of the people slaughtered – from those who were tied to trees and burned to death to those lined up against a wall and shot by submachine guns – were women, children and the elderly.
As news of the atrocities spread, thousands fled their villages in fear. Eventually, some 700,000 Palestinians would flee or be forcibly displaced at the outset of Israel’s creation, making the massacre a decisive moment in Palestinian history.” (al-Jazeera)
Israel was reconizied not created in 1940’s, just look what the mosque was built on :)
Ignore her, as she is another hate spewing antisemitism Jew hater. She apparently drank the kool aid some time ago.
While she may be preaching to the ‘Fair’ choir, this author wastes no time by showing her baggage and obvious biases in her very first paragraph. Does the author really think all of us here drink from the same spiked punch bowl ?
Well, that’s a convincingly argued riposte, I don’t think. Were you just too lazy to bother with reason or evidence to refute this well-written piece? I suspect it’s more that defending a genocidal regime requires you to obscure reality, and that’s not always easy.
What genocidal regime? The population of the Gaza Strip increased this year. I think you’re the one that’s obscuring reality.
Genocide is determined by intent not number of killed.
What a twisted puff piece. Hasan Nasrallah was a worldwide recognized and renowned terrorist – period. What I was thrilled to see today is seeing Israel finally strike back against Iran. While fairly limited in terms of the actual damage it caused, the message to Supreme Leader Khamenei and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is what really matters; Israel can reach strategic sites in Iran and can hit what it wants, while Tehran lacks the ability to get in the way. These Iranian thugs have to be asking themselves how much more it would take for Israel to focus on targets with higher strategic value, like the oil facilities and of course, the nuclear program. Bottom line, after Saturday’s strike, it now more likely that Israel will feel it has the capacity — and the imperative — to cause meaningful damage to that program with a new series of attacks.
“seeing Israel finally strike back against Iran” – you mean you think this is the first time that the fanatically Zionist Israeli regime has aggressively attacked Iran? It has been committing similar crimes for decades. With the connivance of the equally fanatical and imperialist US government, apartheid Israel has murdered many prominent Iranians and attacked the country with missiles on numerous occasions. You have a very short memory and a willingness to believe the nonsensical notion that Zionists – openly, unashamedly on a mission to create a Greater Israel as a Jewish-supremacist state – are somehow ‘defending themselves’.
Its the first time Hamas used violence? All that aid and did they support they’re people? All that land in the middle east and Africa. Decades of chanting death to a people? Funny sounds like defense to me
Let me know over the decade who has more human right violations :P
As Noam Chomsky and others have long noted, based on body-counts, since the 1950’s the US has been the uncontested leader in terrorism, by any neutral definition of the term. Just in Iraq alone, in 2003 the US killed at least 100,000 people on what was diplomatically deemed a ‘mistake’ – and that was in a country on the other side of the world. Add in the South/Central America deaths from the US sponsored ‘freedom fighters’, Indonesia/East Timor/etc,etc, and the rationalizations soon evaporate into thin air.
Well, if Noam Chomsky stated it, I guess its gotta be a fact huh? LOL
The NY Times headline was predictable. One of its past/present chairman of the board was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. His parents were Jewish. So maybe a leaning towards Israel in their jaded reports on the war.
More objectively, in 1930, there were about 200,000 Jews in Palestine, and 850,000 Arabs, from the book, ‘A State at any Cost The life of David Ben-Gurion’, by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman, publisher Farrar, Strauss, andGiroux, 2019, p. 223. On May 15, 1948, at the end of the British control over Palestine, the ratio should have been about 20% Jews, and 80% Arabs. Especially with known British restrictions on Jews immigration to Palestine.
Before the end of the British Mandate May 15, 1948, Zionists were preparing for war, but not so much the Arabs in Palestine. But the Arab Liberation Army from countries surrounding Palestine were preparing for war with Palestinian Jews. Probably based on information regarding Jewish military build-up supplied by the British. In the years immediately after WW II,
“They (Jews) kept coming to Palestine and many thousands manage to defy the British Navy and sneak into Palestine, to join the armed forces of the Hagana, Irgun (Etzel), Lehi (Stern Gang). As the build-up to war gained momentum ……..the number of mobilized (Jewish) troops rose by a factor of twenty”, in the book, ’An Army like No Other’, by Haim Breesheth-Zabner, Verso, 2020, page 88
And,
‘In 1947/1948 Irgun (Jewish militia) bombed the Haifa oil refinery…which incited a revenge attack by the local Arab forces against Jewish refinery workers…..escalating the violence….By (the Jews) opposing a truce, they were able to drive out 70,000 Arabs from Haifa controlling it without hindrance. By May 1, 1947, well before the end of the Mandate …most of the Palestinians were already refugees….the larger cities Haifa, Jaffa, Beersheba, Tiberias, Lydda, Ramla…..fell before May 15, 1948 (the end of the British Mandate control of Palestine)’, in the book, ‘An Army Like No Other’, pages 91, 92
Before the Arab Liberation Army from nearby countries went to war against the Jews in Palestine after May 15, 1948, most Palestinian Arabs were already refugees, according to Zabner. In December 1947, the U.N. offered the Jews who were a decided minority in Palestine, a ‘state’ of their own. Which the Arabs who were the pronounced majority quickly said ‘no’ to. Which only makes sense. Because no one can get something for nothing. They have to work for it. Or, kill for it. The way David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin people did in the 1940s, with their Deir Yassin massacre of over 200 Arabs (Kimche, p. 123) .
The British gave some of their military compounds to the Jews, some compounds were given to Arabs as they exited Palestine May 15, 1948. See the book, ‘A Clash of Destinies-The Arab Jewish War and the Founding of the State of Israel’, by Jon and David Kimche, 1960, pages 114, 117, 118
The local Palestinian Arabs were already several steps behind the Jews military-wise, as the British gave up control over Palestine. So those Arabs grandchildren, who the Western press calls terrorists, are fighting to get their lands back from the Jews who stole it from their Arab forefathers through acts of terror and thuggetry in the 1940s. Both the Israel 1956 war against Egypt (Zabner, p. 134), and the 1967 Six Day War, and Operation Black Arrow into Gaza in 1955 (‘Fortress Israel’, by Patrick Tyler, page 28) were preemptive/unprovoked strikes by Israel against Arabs, according to most historians.
You forgot to mention that the United Nations recognized Israel as a nation in 1948. So please don’t make it sound as though Israel’s existence was entirely illegitimate, achieved solely through acts of “terror and thuggery” in the 1940s.
It seems highly unlikely that Jews were so capable of the acts you describe, given that World War 2 (with Nazi German objectives) were in full progress from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s. Israeli Jews and Jewish refugees straight out of concentration camps weren’t exactly empowered at the time!
I notice that you said there were 200,000 Jews and 800,000 Arabs in the area known as Palestiine and TransJordan in 1930. Clearly, there were more Jews who arrived in the next 18 years, as well as those who were there already, increasing in numbers.
The U.N. (not the British Mandate) partitioned the land such that some of it would be designated for the state of Israel. Your description, of a so-called Arab Liberation Army, was in fact an act of aggression by at least 6 Arab countries against a U.N. declared state. The creation of the state of Israel received affirmative votes from Truman for the US, Stalin for the USSR, whomever was running the UK at that point, and many others at the U.N. Your account, which we didn’t ask for, is largely incorrect.
In October 2024 we still have 60 hostages in Gaza. Sure, the Palestinians have caused 1200 Israeli casualties, the Israelis have caused 40,000 Palestinian casualties. It’s lopsided and Sinwar and Hamas knew it was going to be. But they attacked anyways. Palestinian civilians continue to allow weapons in their living rooms, and to help Hamas in hiding the remaining hostages. Yes, the Palestinians are getting a collective punishment for the actions of their leadership and their comrades, but we can skip the eulogies and accusations of genocide. Hamas has genocidal intent to extinguish the Jews and also the minorities within Palestine that don’t go along with their agenda. The Israelis want to rescue the hostages. Is it that hard to release them?
Why aren’t the media framing religious fundamentalist nationalism in a more positive light? I demand answers as a working American!
FAIR is a “national progressive media watchdog group” (national as in U.S.) according to the site footer. FAIR’s offices are in New York City. The author, Belen Fernandez, should be aware that Hamas and its members are officially designated as terrorists by the United States government and the United Nations, among others.
Given that, I am surprised how Belen criticizes American news media for describing Yahya Sinwar (and his predecessor, the billionaire Ismail Haniyeh) as terrorists. It is entirely appropriate for ABC News and Fox News to refer to Sinwar’s and Haniyeh’s demises as those of TERRORIST leaders. ABC and Fox are U.S. domiciled, with U.S. audiences. To represent Sinwar and Haniyeh other than as terrorists would be contrary to FAIR’s own stated mission against spreading misinformation to the U.S. public.
As for Nasrallah, he helped plan the 1983 bombing of American servicemen barracks in Beirut, resulting in 243 US Army soldier deaths. The soldiers were in Lebanon at the explicit request of the country’s president, for humanitarian reasons only. Earlier the same year, Nasrallah assisted in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering about 25 people; half were American and the others were Lebanese citizens. In all the intervening years, none of the perpetrators were ever found or brought to justice.
The New York Times and Washington Post should have been MORE explicit in describing Nasrallah as a terrorist, rather than eulogizing him as “a beloved S’hia orator”. Nasrallah was a much disliked and feared war lord, by the majority Sunni and minority Maronite Christian populace of Lebanon. They celebrated upon hearing of his demise. Some Syrians also celebrated with relief and happiness to be freed from Nasrallah’s repression. The New York Times obituary of Nasrallah reminds me of WaPo’s coverage of the ISIS leader’s death, as an “austure scholar”.
Good for you, for telling it like it is or minimally an honest, balanced take of the actual reality on the ground there. Frankly though, it probably will not fly all that well in this venue. Nevertheless, thanks for laying out facts as opposed to total fiction and I had totally forgot about the 1983 bombing.
I really appreciate your acknowledgement. (I’m pleasantly surprised that my comment wasn’t removed given um this venue!)
Belen is listed as an AL Jazeera writer and clearly an outright pro-arab terrorist anti-semitic jew hater with a totally distorted view of history. she admittedly hates the west and america, having self-imposed “exiled” herself. please stay in exile or go live in gaza or iran and keep your lying propaganda there also
“For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases.”
The Hebrew word is “ragan” (nirgān) and it means to murmur or to whisper. The whisperer’s words are of grumbling, criticizing, complaining, and slandering – hate. These are the ones who incite rebellion in the hearts of the people. Their murmuring helped to destroy an entire generation who became infected with it. How will it cease? The only hope for the people is that the fire goes out. Let it die where you are now!
The phrase “tone-deaf” comes to mind. Was that not Sinwar’s goal? Do you deny that the destruction of Israel is Hamas’ reason d’etre? Those outlets are simply stating a fact.