How Western Media Laid The Groundwork For A Holocaust

This week Israel murdered five Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza, including Anas al-Sharif, one of the few journalists regularly broadcasting from the strip. He was twenty-eight years old and had a young son and daughter.

The images testify to a scene of utter brutality, bombed in their tent, cameras and laptops lying melted among their torn and charred bodies.

Israel didn’t deny they’d targeted journalists (a war crime). They boasted about the crime, predictably crying 'Hamas' as a justification for their butchery.

They claimed the four men and one woman were Hamas, because they believed this was the best way to sell a war crime to the western public. And why not? After all, cries of Hamas! have become the justification for a holocaust itself. What’s another five murdered journalists between genocidal friends?

Twenty-plus years of propaganda aided by the western media and political class helped create the conditions for all of this. This propaganda, that Hamas is a terror group and anything goes in pursuit of their destruction, was designed to end us up here. It was designed to smooth Israel’s final solution.

Let’s interrogate exactly what it means to be ‘Hamas’ for a minute.

Let’s look at the context and reality behind a word that has so deeply contaminated western brains that it has enabled a genocide in our time.

Hamas are (were) the civic authority in Gaza, responsible for everything from landscaping the parks, to maintaining the sewage system to collecting the garbage. And they were democratically elected. The engineer who fixed the water pipes in Gaza City? Hamas. The gardener who tended the parks and watered the flowers in Rafah? Hamas. The guy who cleaned the Khan Yunis water park and maintained the slides? Hamas. The accountant who collected the taxes to fund the governance and management of Gaza? Hamas.

But it was essential that no one in the west thought of Hamas like this. On the contrary. It was essential that in the western mind Gaza was synonymous with terror, so when the timing and conditions were right for a final solution, Israel could apply that final solution without friction.

And this was achieved via the proscription of Hamas as a terror group in key western countries in the late 90s and early 2000s, starting with the US under Clinton in 1997 and the UK under Blair in 2001. The armed wing of Hamas has never attacked outside Israel and the occupied territories and never wanted to. Why would they? Hamas isn’t ISIS or al-Qaeda. Hamas is a local resistance group struggling against a nuclear-armed oppressor who stole their land, stole their homes and inflicted generations of apartheid on them.

Because Hamas is a local organisation, only ten countries in the world proscribe them as a terror group. Do we believe it’s because these are the best, right and most moral countries in the world? Of course not. These are the countries most vital to the Israeli project, the ones where you can get most bang for your Zionist buck. Proscribing Hamas was an indispensable ploy, because it ensured western media would preface every future mention of Hamas with the words 'terror group.’

Terror group Hamas.

Terror group Hamas.

Terror group Hamas.

A phrase repeated over and over and over for years, in print, on TV, on the radio, brainwashing key western publics. This brainwashing granted Israel the license to murder whoever it wanted in Gaza, whenever it wanted, with minimal fuss and outcry in those countries.

This brainwashing enabled Israel to kill nearly two hundred civilians and maim over one thousand in 2018 when Gaza’s residents organised peaceful marches to the border fence demanding an end to the blockade of the territory. The UN report of the mass murders during a series of marches known as the Great March of Return details only one injury to an Israeli soldier (from a stone being thrown). Not a single Israeli soldier was badly hurt, let alone killed. Palestinians marched to the fence with banners and were simply shot through the head by snipers in watchtowers. The report says the patterns of injuries on children were particularly clear: the knees and legs were targeted in an effort to permanently maim and disable.

This brainwashing enabled Israel to bomb Gaza during the height of covid in 2021, striking six hospitals, nine health centres, and killing Dr Ayman Abu al-Ouf, the specialist responsible for leading the response to the pandemic across Gaza City. They killed Dr Ayman and his entire family, wife, children, a 12-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son, collapsing their home down on top of them with American bombs. The justification for slaughtering a man responsible for leading the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic? You guessed it. Hamas.

The Hamas brainwashing helped lay the groundwork for the final solution we’re now witnessing.

And to this day, after nearly two years of the slaughter, we see and hear this propaganda alive and well in the western media. ‘Hamas-run health ministry’ has been a particular favourite of so-called journalists in the west, a signal that we should doubt the number of dead. The prefacing of everything with 'Hamas-run' is terror-coding, a little nudge to make sure we remember our training, to make sure we know these aren’t white Ukrainians. These aren’t real victims. We’re dealing with brown terrorists here. And some babies may have to be killed. Maybe a lot of babies actually. But remember: Hamas.

This is how racist Zionists, via their client journalists in the media, managed to cultivate in the western mind a caricature of Hamas that facilitated a holocaust. A caricature that made Hamas out as bloodthirsty murderers and rapists who would kill and/or rape you the moment you set foot in Gaza. This caricature has done a lot of the heavy lifting that brought us to this point and to the total destruction of Gaza, the near-extermination of a people.

And this propaganda is almost certainly why you’ve never heard of Vittorio Arrigoni.

Arrigoni was an Italian peace activist who left Italy and arrived in Gaza on a peace flotilla in 2008. Living with local Palestinian families across the strip, he was welcomed openly, and lovingly. He integrated into the society and culture of Gaza and became an iconic figure. He even got a tattoo in Arabic dedicated to Gaza (because no, Hamas didn’t kill people for having tattoos).

Then, in 2011, after leaving the gym, he was kidnapped off the street by an al-Qaeda affiliated group seeking the return of their leader who had been imprisoned by Hamas. Arrigoni was held as a bargaining chip by the al-Qaeda-linked militants who gave Hamas officials thirty hours to release their leader or they'd kill Arrigoni. Hamas were making arrangements for delivering the leader back to the group when Arrigoni was killed by his captors before the expiration of the deadline. Hamas immediately sealed off parts of Gaza City and launched a manhunt. They found the militants, killed two of them in a gunfight, and arrested four.

In the weeks after his death, Ismail Haniyeh, the-then leader of Hamas (who was assassinated by Israel last year) arranged for Arrigoni's parents to fly to Egypt, and from there they were personally escorted by Hamas officials into Gaza. Hamas gave Arrigoni a state funeral, the highest honour in death, and one normally reserved for the elite of society in Gaza. He was designated an official martyr by Haniyeh and a street in Gaza City was named after him. On top of this, Hamas respected the wishes of the parents for the courts not to impose the death penalty on the remaining al-Qaeda-affiliated militants, who were instead sentenced to between one year and life in prison. Every year after his death, hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza would march in remembrance of Arrigoni to the Square of the Unknown Soldier.

You’ve never heard this story. You never heard about Arrigoni, and you never heard the story of the hundreds of western activists who have lived safely in Gaza over the years, welcomed with love by Palestinians.

You never heard about it because it would have disrupted the narrative.

Because it would have humanised Hamas and the Palestinians.

Israel’s murder of Anas and his colleagues was enabled by the dehumanisation so successfully cultivated in the western mind.

Israel knew that if they denied foreign journalists access to Gaza they could call everyone Hamas and do a holocaust because the depth of anti-Muslim racism in the west would mean Palestinian accounts of their own suffering would be disbelieved or ignored.

The propaganda has been sickening. Grotesque. Genocidal.

We must remember this propaganda every time we hear a news anchor or journalist or talking head screeching wildly about Hamas as justification for genocide.

Remember also that IDF doctrine says the families and friends of anyone they consider Hamas are legitimate targets for murder.

This is how we ended up with slaughter on a scale that erodes all of our humanity.

Cracks are appearing now, because after a time, a genocide becomes obvious as the thing that it is.

But it has taken far, far too long.

And this is because the propaganda that aimed to dehumanise the Palestinians worked so well.

This is because people who are paid to be impartial interlocuters of events are nothing of the sort.

This is because racism, anti-Muslim racism, is thriving in the west.

The caricature of Hamas is the same caricature that Zionists and fascists seek to cultivate in the western mind about Muslims everywhere. This caricature is central to the far-right vision and is a key subtext to the illegal immigration narrative. And this is why we can’t divorce Gaza from the domestic politics of the west. Fascists in our countries look to Gaza approvingly. And western fascists poisoning minds with racist lies about what ‘third-world immigration is doing to our countries’ cheer as Gaza lies in complete ruins, a civilisation destroyed by the same supremacist credo that claims itself the saviour of civilisation.

We have to organise to defeat these people.

And we have to organise against genocidal propaganda and against the pushers of this propaganda for a truth that could set us all free.