Seek the Truth
“If you want peace, work for justice.” But justice starts with the truth, and as Adam Johnson’s new book shows, major U.S. outlets spent the destruction of Gaza selling the public a story built on lies.
Rev. J. Mark Davidson
8/27/20263 min read
I have a framed painting in my study. It’s a print of the brightly-colored calligraphy of Sister Corita Kent, a beloved nun, artist and educator, whose themes were peace, social justice, and Christian faith. It reads, “If you want peace, work for justice,” a famous saying of Pope Paul VI. I’ve always loved that simple insight, and I have lived my life in its spirit. It lays bare the truth that the world’s injustices cause terrible suffering, and they must be rectified if we are serious about peace, healing, and reconciliation. “No justice, no peace.” In our quest for a just and lasting peace in Palestine-Israel, ending the long history of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people is the heart of our work. Much as I identify with the truth of Sister Corita’s painting, I’ve come to believe that there is an additional truth that must accompany it: “If you want justice, seek the truth.” We cannot hope to be effective allies with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom, dignity, and equal rights if we don’t understand their oppression and its root causes. This means rejecting the myths and misinformation that Zionists and Israeli propagandists have promulgated for years. Before you and I can do effective justice work alongside Palestinians, we have to do “truth work” first. Until we break free from the lies, we will spread them, not being aware of how we have been manipulated, not being aware we are putting new obstacles in the path of Palestinian freedom. This means media literacy when it comes to the news we are consuming about Palestine and Israel.
I am reading a new book, How To Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, by media critic Adam Johnson. He unpacks how major news outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitized Israel’s war crimes, disguised the United States’ central role, and dehumanized the Palestinian people. The sheer brutality of the first live-streamed genocide in history, the one-sidedness of it, made it impossible for anyone with a shred of morality to ignore. And yet, the truth was rarely told. In its place instead was “an elaborate framework of excuse-making, deflection, faux-savvy realpolitik, orientalist tropes, and glaring double standards.” Johnson cites, in particular, the since-debunked sensationalist story of “40 beheaded babies.” An outraged public, ready to believe just about anything about “the terrorists,” heard raw, unverified reports from an Israeli television channel that Israeli soldiers confirmed that 40 babies were beheaded. That same day the spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces repeated this claim to Business Insider. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN that babies and toddlers were found with their “heads decapitated” in Kfar Aza kibbutz. This report was repeated dozens of times by United States and western media outlets, and repeated by President Joe Biden, who claimed to have seen “confirmed pictures” of the grisly atrocity. As we know, several independent investigative journalists such as Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, Ali Abunimah, as well as Mondoweiss and Aljazeera did the serious journalism and exposed the truth – none of it was true. At its source in Israel, the story was deliberate misinformation and atrocity progaganda designed to justify Israel’s savage retaliation. In the complicit Center-Left American media, it was repeated without verifying the story, historical context was omitted, and state-sanctioned falsehoods were amplified. Johnson also makes the important point that these gruesome stories primed the American public for what was to come. It provided them with a kind of “pre-explanation” for Israel’s genocidal violence against the Palestinian population in Gaza. It did its job all too well with millions of Americans. Almost 3 years after the fact, I still hear people repeating the story as if it were true, and saying it “helps them understand why Israel did what it did.”
As the above journalistic vignette demonstrates, if we fail to practice alert media literacy, we will be hoodwinked and openly deceived. If we fail to consciously avail ourselves of credible, intrepid, independent media covering Palestine-Israel, we will never know what we don’t know. If we aren’t listening to Palestinians telling the truth about their lived experience on the ground in Palestine, we are missing critically important perspectives that will help us discern the difference between the truth and the lies we have been, and continue to be, told.