By WILLIAM MAYER
July 28, 2014 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – As if its biased reporting on the Gaza campaign weren't enough, the New York Times has now started running a daily body count as the Israelis continue to hammer HAMAS. [see, Karen Yourish and Josh Keller, The Toll in Gaza and Israel, Day by Day]
This journo-stunt is of course intended to present the Israelis as uncaring butchers of innocents; that narrative being consistent with the Times' editorial stance.
Though the current phase of the Israeli-HAMAS war is of recent origin, the body count tactic is a well used tool of the left as it seeks to manipulate public opinion.
During the majority of the GW Bush administration, the Times and other legacy media outlets published an above the fold, front page body count - showing the number of dead and injured - as the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq played out.
This was a small part in the non-stop effort by the left to provide aid and comfort to the enemy in hopes of the U.S. losing both of these wars, an outcome to which Team Obama is fully committed.
The media strategy here is pretty basic, create a constant drum-roll of bad news so that the American people lose faith and become convinced that conflicts are unwinnable and ultimately not worthy of their support.
The body count game was perfected during the Vietnam war and in that context did exactly what its authors intended, persuading the public that the U.S. had been militarily defeated when in actuality it was winning on the battlefield. That the situation on the ground in Vietnam bore little resemblance to the negative reportage coming from the Western press was of no consequence. Thus the overwhelming majority of the American public came to believe the "war is lost" narrative, promulgated in large part by CBS' chief anchor Walter Cronkite. It was Cronkite, after all, who was responsible for the fable that the 1968 Tet Offensive was the United States' Dien Bien Phu when in reality it was so disastrous for the North Vietnamese and the VC that subsequent diplomatic communications indicated that they felt they had lost the war.
The template has been the same ever since; as soon as the U.S. becomes militarily involved or moves in that direction, out comes the disinformation machine.mAs a consequence of the 24x7 info-news cycle, a large chunk of the daily routine of running a huge military campaign has to be devoted to public relations messaging.
The primary driver of this "dirty" reporting was, then as it is now, blind, unchecked hatred.
In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan this coordinated media rage found its roots in a seething contempt for the American way of life, its traditions, mores and values as well as its embrace of capitalism. That these attributes also served to make the U.S. the most powerful nation on earth further stoked the already significant press bias.
What better way to tarnish the image of a country than to unfairly depict it as an out of control war-mongering colonial hegemon?
The sad truth is that the tactic works, especially in a dumbed-down, apathetic country which is obsessed with pop-culture trivialities.
In the Gaza operation, hatred of America is undoubtedly, one of the motivating factors in the media's pro-"Palestinian" tilt because until very recently, it was one of America's few bedrock allies and is thus a natural target for the left.
But there is a darker component at work here, Jew hatred.
But how can this be when the New York Times, America's "paper of record," has been run by the descendants of Adolph Ochs' [son of immigrant German Jews] extended family [it was Ochs' daughter who married Arthur Hays Sulzberger] since he bought the paper in 1896?
Our working theory?
Easy…the people who now run the New York Times are post-Zionists. Can you expect these highly educated, sophisticated people to actually believe the fable that God gave Israel to the Jews? Of course not, it clashes with nearly every fiber of their being. To them the very concept of a "chosen people" screams racism.
The response is predictable…a patina of shame and self-loathing.
A number of psychiatrists have established a very plausible grounding for this hypothesis.
For example, Dr. Kenneth Levin [a psychiatrist and historian who teaches at the Harvard Medical School] explored the subject in, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege .
His hypothesis is that the Jewish psyche has been so traumatized by centuries of what are really unspeakable horrors that it displays symptoms of Oslo Syndrome.
In the sense used here, Oslo, or Stockholm Syndrome is a condition where the persecuted come to identify with their persecutors; to some degree they blame themselves for their plight rather than their actual oppressors. The most famous example of this was seen in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Maoist Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) during which she was brainwashed into joining the group, to the point where she participated in one of their bank robberies armed with a machine gun.
"To understand the why of this situation we must look at the psychology of chronically besieged populations…and Jews have been besieged for 2,000 years. As Max Nordau wrote over a hundred years ago, the greatest success of the anti-Semites was that they had gotten the Jews to see themselves through anti-Semitic eyes. Nordau saw the idea of a Jewish state as a refuge for all Jews, regardless of their politics, language, or nationality.
In the 1920's and 1930's within the Zionist movement the "new Jew" was cast as a secular socialist, without the accoutrements that enraged the wider gentile world. German Jewish intellectuals like Martin Buber cast their disapproval of a Jewish state in moral terms, and argued that Jews had moved beyond the need for a state…
From the creation of the Jewish state until 1977, Israel was run by socialist-Zionists. However, things changed in 1977, when for the first time, a non-socialist-Zionist government was elected. Between 1977 and 1992 the Labor constituency began to accept the idea that if Israel retreated to the 1967 lines the Arabs would allow them to peacefully coexist. The New History movement also supported the idea that in order to achieve peace Israel must acknowledge its guilt and accede to a retreat. Moreover, it proffered the notion that Israel bore primary responsibility for the hatred with which it was viewed by its neighbors. The post-Zionist movement argued that Israel was too Jewish and that it must abolish the law of return and change the flag and national anthem as they were unfair to Arabs." [source, Dr. Kenneth Levin, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege, Middle East Forum]
We believe there is much merit in this theory, in that to a certain degree it explains the inexplicable; Jews turning against their besieged brothers and sisters.
©2014 PipeLineNews.org LLC, William Mayer. All rights reserved.