Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com.au / September 2, 2024
The message is clear: Israelis dying is a terrible tragedy, while Palestinians dying is just the normal way for things to be.
You never see the dehumanization of Palestinians in western society exhibited so clearly as when something bad happens to Israelis during the genocidal assault on Gaza.
Today western officials are publicly weeping about six dead Israeli hostages, including one Israeli-American, who the IDF says were recently killed by Hamas.
Whoever’s been writing Joe Biden’s press releases for him published a statement about how “devastated and outraged” the president is about the death of the American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
The statement says the president knows Goldberg-Polin’s parents, saying “I admire them and grieve with them more deeply than words can express” and that “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
“I have worked tirelessly to bring their beloved Hersh safely to them and am heartbroken by the news of his death,” the statement reads, which for the record is a lie — the Biden administration has been collaborating with Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage a hostage deal at every turn.
Similar sentiments are being expressed in statements by western officials like Vice President Kamala Harris, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
All of these statements frame the deaths of these six Israeli hostages as an earth-shakingly horrific tragedy, and all frame Hamas as a band of evil villains who must be brought to justice for their crimes.
No similar statements have ever been made by any of these officials about the far, far greater number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza by the state of Israel with their assistance. No similar expressions of condolence have ever been uttered by these leaders for the millions of Palestinians who’ve had their lives completely ruined by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank over the last eleven months, or for the untold thousands of parents who’ve had to bury children who were exterminated in Israel’s genocidal onslaught.
Western government officials are making it clear that they do not see Palestinians as human in the same way they see Israelis as human, as are the mass media propaganda institutions who’ve been covering the deaths of these hostages with an intensity never seen regarding the IDF’s daily massacres of civilians in Gaza. Israeli strikes killed 47 Palestinians in Gaza in one 24-hour period between Saturday and Sunday, receiving not the tiniest fraction of the attention as those six Israeli hostages.
The message is clear: Israelis dying is a terrible tragedy, while Palestinians dying is just the normal way for things to be. An Israeli dying should matter as much to you as your own family or friends dying, while a Palestinian dying should be regarded as a routine and natural event like a drop of rain falling from the sky.
And that’s an important message for westerners to be indoctrinated with. Can you imagine if we all started caring about western bombs being dropped in the middle east as much as we would care if they were being dropped on our own country, or on a country we’ve been conditioned to sympathize with? All their carefully manufactured consent would crumble, and people would cease allowing the western empire to do what it needs to do to dominate the planet.
These people are actively working to subvert our basic sense of human empathy. To twist our psyches into being unable to recognize the same level of humanity among empire-targeted populations as empire-supported ones. To see authorized populations as worthy of care and sympathy, and to see unauthorized populations as vermin in need of extermination.
Yes, our rulers really are that evil, and so are the propagandists who run the mass media.
So today I would like to extend my deepest condolences to the millions of Palestinians who’ve lost loved ones and had their lives thrown to the winds of chaos by Israel’s western-backed campaign of extermination, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism.
And I would like to remind my readers that Israel has exponentially more hostages than Hamas has, and murders them routinely, and rapes and tortures them constantly.
And it is right that we should care deeply about that. Even if the people who rule over us do not.
