Cruelty of Language — the NYT’s Leaked Gaza Memo

Ramzy Baroud responds to revelations about The New York Times “guidance” on language about the Israeli mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7.

The New York Times coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream U.S. media, is a disgrace to journalism.

This assertion should not surprise anyone. U.S. media is driven neither by facts nor morality, but by agendas, calculating and power hunger.

The humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians because of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is simply not part of that agenda.

In a report – based on a leaked memo from The New York Times – The Intercept found out that the so-called U.S. newspaper of record has been feeding its journalists with frequently updated “guidelines” on what words to use, or not use, when describing the horrific Israeli mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip, starting on Oct. 7.

In fact, most of the words used in the paragraph above would not be fit to print in the NYT, according to its “guidelines.”

Shockingly, internationally recognized terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” were on the newspaper’s rejection list.

It gets even more cruel. “Words like ‘slaughter’, ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice,” according to the memo, leaked and verified by The Intercept and other independent media.

Though such language control is, according to the NYT, aimed at fairness for “all sides,” their application was almost entirely one-sided.

For example, a previous Intercept report showed that the American newspaper had, between Oct. 7 and Nov. 14, mentioned the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.

[consortiumnews.com]

After this the numbers game is brought in. Truth be told though, the numbers will never be correct, or mentioned even if they could be. As suggested, Israel will always fudge the numbers to reflect a desired perception for their agenda and benefit. On the other side, there's a probability that thousands of Palestinians are still buried under the large mounds of rubble. Like in Iraq in their largest 3 cities that were turned into rubble, Gaza is now a stink bomb of decaying corpses pushing out diseases to go with the famine and now foul water. The major source of food being provided for Gaza is what the real animals of the Israeli government have provided for the rats, mice, insects, and various other critters now feeding off the dead. Life will be good for them until the bulldozers come in. As their crimes have moved into the West Bank which has been getting no coverage.

I'll be posting another article below this one also. You'll notice the columnist of this article from CN is from an outside source called Z. Also from this source {Z} that is an interview of a regular columnist from The Guardian. This is one of those win lose scenarios I warn about when you follow deceptive sources. So, this is by no means a promotion to follow either source on a regular basis without first learning to recognize when you're being deceived. But these points need to be made.

{According to this double standard, occupied, oppressed and routinely slaughtered Palestinians are depicted with the language fit for Israel; while a racist, apartheid and murderous entity like Israel is treated as a victim and, despite the Gaza genocide, is, somehow, still in a state of “self-defense.”}

Yes, oppressed and routinely slaughtered for nearly a 100 years I'll remind you.

“Behind Every Fascist Movement There Is a Billionaire.

George Monbiot is the most prominent environmental columnist in the English-speaking world. His regular column in The Guardian castigates the destroyers of the planet.

[znetwork.org]

I don't have much experience with Z. I tend not to wonder out to far from my usual sources other than when lead to others through links within my usual sources. But with The Guardian I do. And The Guardian is well known for its contradictory coverage from factual news and collaborate nature with intelligence agencies and government agendas towards delivering perception management on their part. So, being these two articles raise much needed mention. I'm also using this opportunity to remind you how some large online news networks can be deceiving if you don't apply a good sense of intellectual experience of knowing the writers and normal patterns they follow.

In other words. When you have a group of writers in a large conglomerate network where there's obviously two sides of a political spectrum, you're essentially getting the same atmosphere as our two party government and our medias. Where the only possible outcome can become confusing to the readers and or inject division. If you observe the comments in such networks, you'll eventually come to recognize the same divisional combative nature you see on social medias. People are lured into a divisional state. Quite frankly, what you witness right here in this community also.

It's quite bewildering to me really. In this community where you have a variation of topics, you can witness people conversing with each other often quite civilly on some pages within a large array of opinions. But within the political arena, we become a mirroring of what's found on social media and the news networks I'm attempting to expose here. Ridicule, name calling, unwarranted accusations, etc, fly freely, while narratives and context are mangled in the process if not entirely unnoticed with a failure to apply. Where the useless rhetoric taught by negative propaganda overwhelms intellectuality.

Anyways....

{One of the reasons people are pessimistic is that they think you have to convince everyone for change to happen. Many historical examples show that this is not true. We have data [1] that shows how many people need to be persuaded for social change to happen: about 25% of the population. If you look at attitudes to abortion, gay marriage, women’s lib, smoking, and seat belts, you only need to reach that proportion for the tipping point to occur. Once enough people are committed, the rest of the population suddenly starts to follow.

So why do so many people in Britain, France, Poland, and Germany… oppose the Green movement and vote for very conservative parties? Unfortunately, the far right is trying to reach its tipping point, and everywhere it has proved extremely effective in seeking systemic change.

The problem is not just the far right, but the fact that there is an alliance between the super-rich and the far right… It’s true. Behind every fascist movement, there is a billionaire who discreetly supports it. The far-right scapegoats minorities: public anger is not directed where it should be, at the very rich who are destroying our means of survival.}

And the medias, the medias of the billionaires, are right there attempting to manage our perceptions for them. It's a pattern that has been used for decades. A combination of a major lack of information mixed with the perception desired by the ruling classes agenda. Just going back the previous 5 decades you'll find the same pattern as perpetual warring became Reagan's project in Latin America. Later to have Bush Sr make the statement, "By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,”

[consortiumnews.com]

The only thing that has changed since then is the amount of purpose the CIA played then and how billionaires have taken more of a role in developing the beginning of chaotic atmospheres within targeted countries. The 6 billionaire news medias we have today would soon after this with the help of Bill Clinton begin to monopolize all news medias and newspapers to become our worst enemy they are today to use against us. This is the most important understanding that every American needs to come to terms with. Our medias are not there to inform us. They're there to betray us. To take your intellectuality from you and plant a false imagine in our brains that reflects a delusional reality their owners want you to believe in. And a vast majority of us are distracted by the purposeful political division it has created to benefit that agenda. We must all recognize the patterns above!

The latest victims of this type of travesty on mankind are the Ukrainian people. Her people have been through the washer time and time again since the beginning of the 2000s. 2014 playing the ultimate role of an essential destruction of a country by outside western governments and the fascist they put in place after illegally overthrowing their democratically elected government. Millions of people have left the country, and nearly a million have been sent to a Russian meat grinder only to benefit a war machine with hopes to make Russia the next victim. Now the Ukraine government is so hopeless it seeks those who fled asking western governments to cancel their passports and force them back to be sent to the meat grinder. They kidnap people off the streets, raid homes, barely trained, off to the front they're sent.

All opposing parties, some 11 or 12 of them, have been banned and election cycle canceled. Opposing politicians in some cases have been arrested via trumped up charges, many fled in fear of their lives, jailed, assassinated other wise. One car bombing attempt just happened last week against an X intelligence military man in Russia who was essential in helping Donbass defend itself in 2014. A gentleman I've seen in a couple of RTs documentaries over the years. They want him dead because he knows what crimes they've committed. Who in the west they collaborated with in 2014. Money, fraud, mass murders. Exposing the deep fascist nature our medias won't cover.

{In his recent encyclical on ecology, Pope Francis talks about the need to change the ‘irresponsible lifestyle of the Western model’. Why don’t politicians dare to say the same?

No politician outside the Green parties seems prepared to say it, even though it’s a reality we need to confront people with. It is presented as frightening because we have normalized extreme forms of consumption, even though we know they don’t make us any happier. This has to change or it will lead to the greatest unhappiness in human history. But this is considered unthinkable, not because the vast majority of the population couldn’t possibly think it, but because in Britain most of our newspapers are owned by psychopathic billionaires who don’t live in Britain. Yet they tell us how to think and how to live, and they have more influence over political parties than they do over voters. They are the ones who make it unthinkable to tell people to consume less.}

Jill Stein speaks it. No one covers her! Will you listen!?!

How do you see the world in 2030?

{When politicians talk about 2050, they mean never. 2050 has become synonymous with never. It’s better to talk about 2030. By then we may have passed environmental tipping points and be facing a collapse of the Earth’s systems. The kind of change that is possible is unimaginable. The political changes we could see are also unimaginable. One real possibility is that the far right will take power in the UK in 2029 under the banner of the Conservative Party. But if these bad things are imaginable, so are the good things: we could see unstoppable mass movements whose pressure forces political change. Forcing the Labour Party, for example, to respond and become a party that does what it says.}

The Guardian is a British news source, much of this is correlated as such. If you haven't been recognizing the fascist movement going on in the US and Canada, I highly suggest you pull your head out of your ass and get with the current times! It's highly embedded in our political arena and judicial system right now. We're currently supporting and funding it on two fronts right now which is devastatingly reaching across Europe. Unstopped it won't be long it further effects us here in the US. Don't doubt it isn't already.