We know the truth. “Israel,” for a year, has been committing an accelerated genocide of the Palestinian people. Israel now is expanding its genocidal war to Lebanon. “Israel” is a death cult. But death is profitable. The so-called United States of America — a nation fatally empowered by accumulation, exploitation, and conquest — has backed this cadaverous entity to the fullest extent. It is the U.S. government that supplies the missiles raining down on Rafah and Deir al-Balah, incinerating whole families in their tents, turning safe zones into mass graves. It is the U.S. president who signs off on the use of 2,000-pound bombs in the suburbs of Beirut. And it is the U.S. media that endorses and seeks to normalize these unearthly horrors.

In the pages of The New York Times, Zionist massacres are presented as “targeted assassinations,” cold-blooded slaughter is presented as “counter-terrorism,” and ethnic cleansing is presented as “self-defense.” (Massacre, slaughter, and ethnic cleansing are just three of the terms that The Times’s style guide prevents reporters from using to describe the genocidal conditions in which over two million Palestinians exist. Apparently, it is only when Palestinians dare to resist their annihilation that words like slaughter are appropriate.) The so-called ‘paper of record’ is a mouthpiece for empire, amplifying lies and distorting reality in order to shore up America’s psychic and material investments in colonialism and occupation.

Divestment begins with an accounting of what we owe. “I claim responsibility for the Israeli crimes against humanity,” June Jordan wrote in 1982, “because I am an American and American monies made these atrocities possible.”

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“All the Consent That’s Fit to Manufacture”

New York War Crimes

New York War Crimes

The Genocidal Unconscious

Recognizing the Pattern in NYT’s Lies
https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/media/pages/the-genocidal-unconscious/8b000c9773-1728262450/concordance.png
October 7, 2024

“Palestinian militants.” “Israeli hostages.” The insidiousness of The New York Times doesn’t just persist in what they write but in how they write it. Consent for this genocide is made not just in the presentation of state propaganda as news but in the slow accumulation of associations in readers’ minds, built through the repetition of ideas over time. In linguistics, they call this concordance: how a term is used in relation to others. “Palestinian” and “Israeli,” two terms that should simply mark group identity and belonging, become much more than that in the corpus of The New York Times. An imbalance is struck; a narrative is seeded; a pattern emerges.

The above concordance compares usages of “Palestinian” and “Israeli” within just the October 8, 2023, issue of The New York Times, establishing a baseline for how the NYT would interpret and present Al-Aqsa Flood — and a year of “Israel’s” vengeance — to its readers. What we find should come as no surprise. Palestinians here are mostly “militants,” but also “gunmen,” “prisoners,” and “detainees.” They “take hostage” and “hold captive.” “Israelis,” on the other hand, are those “taken hostage” or “abducted.” They’re not militants but “civilians,” “soldiers,” and “children.” They have “objectives” which they “achieve” with “tanks” and “warplanes.” These associations frame Israelis as both victims and heroes, unjustified targets rising to defend themselves from Palestinian aggressors.

The NYT’s desperation to vilify resistance and lionize “Israel” doesn’t only take the form of the explicit: the contorted headlines, the hearsay reporting, the silence on narrative-undermining facts. Bias and denial run deep. The echolalic drum beat of images and associations seep into America’s genocidal unconscious as consent for slaughter is made and remade.