We watch the battles of opinion and perspective being waged across the TV screens and computer monitors between U.S. networks on cable and between national networks such as BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, news reports via the Internet from France or Germany. We are witness to escalating levels of blood-shedding fighting (self-defense or slaughter, pick your poison) and political rhetoric between adversaries in middle east as they invite sympathy or outrage through the media. We watch a battle for hearts, minds and imaginations raging in, through and sometimes in spite of the media coverage.
The 24-hour news stations like CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News (where oh where are ABC and CBS news represented on cable?) give dramatically divergent takes on blame- or fault-finding and provide double- or single-sided platforms of air time and face time for representatives of opposing sides, proffering disparate analyses and perspectives with seeming casts of hundreds to answer the media's call.
We watch the many faces of on-the-ground "facts. " CNN, with accompanying footage, reports the demonstrations Israeli incursion into Gaza throughout major cities like London, New York, Paris, Istanbul street scenes presumably taking the moral temperature of young activists with moral outrage on their minds but with virtually no pro-Israeli signs or demonstrators in sight. Yet no anchor or street journalist takes notice of this most curious, pro-Israel void.
But just switch the channel and another reality steps to attention. Fox News shows the same demonstrations but comments on the absence of Israeli sympathizers. Later, on the Fox News Geraldo Rivera Show, Geraldo interviews experts and officials commenting on the remarkable mobilization of demonstrators with pro-Palestinian sympathies occurring more quickly and in greater numbers than ever seen before in these same cities implying that the PR machines fanning anti-Israel sentiments are far more effective than in years past. Still later on Fox News, some experts even comment on how the organization of these demonstrations are facilitated by mobile communications media like cell phones and across platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Politics and protest in the 21st century media age" Same pictures, two different takes. Where is the truth?
The voice of Israeli diplomats and representatives in studios and via satellite is consistently on message but they are having to walk a tight rope because, in the eyes of the world, Israel is playing the Goliath to Gaza's David. But what is spin, what is truth, and what is strategy? Is Israel playing the aggressor because of its outrage over an incessant and reported 8000 rocket and other munition attacks by Hama over the past years, or does Israel really want to push Hamas from office with the hope of replacing it with a more conciliatory or moderate, Fatah-like government in Gaza? Is this a replay of the Bush administration's phony rationales for the regime-changing war on Iraq only today masquerading as Israeli rather than American self-defense adventurism?
Voices heard on all major news networks as well as from C-SPAN argue that Goliath's answer to gutty little Hamas is disproportionate to the effects of the rocket attacks on Israel in terms of killed and wounded -- triple and quadruple death digits to single death digits on Israel's side. Oddly, though, when Israeli supporters ask would it be proportionate, then, if Israel sent rockets and missiles into Gaza, sriking civilians at random?, the world's answer comes back "no!" Israel has more accurate and devastating missiles than does Hamas. It's not fair. Hmmm, what's a nation to do?
But what's the truth?
Octavia Nasr, a Arab journalist and commentator (or "perspectivist") for CNN notes that Arab media is offering more radical and emotionally inciting commentary, news reports, propagandistic footage and analysis than they offer for Western consumption in part because very little of Arab media is shown in U.S. while all major news media of U.S. are shown in Arab countries via satellite. The asymmetry offers inevitably distorted views of what Arabs are saying to other non-Middle East nations and what it offers to its own people.
The same may well be true when Israeli diplomats appear on Western media, the same in that what's happening on the ground in Gaza may be seen by Middle East countries who have reporters and citizen journalists in Gaza. But scenes of death and destruction are not seen by most Western countries unless they are simply replaying feeds from Arab news sources, feeds that generally have a case to make supporting the Hamas position and are decidedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas. This is simply more asymmetry because Western reporters and cameras are not allowed into these urban war zones, sometimes for their own protection, sometimes not. This was America's strategy during the first Gulf War. More fog perhaps.
Why do the Israelis seem immune to their killing of Palestnian civilians in Gaza? According to Israeli spokespersons civilian casualties are inevitable and regrettable, the result of hard Hamas targets cynically and stratetically being placed in civilian housing schools, universities mosques which then invite attack and loss of civilian life and allow for use of terms like slaughter and holocaust, always a sensitive term for Israel's Jewish state.
Is Hamas is effectively using civilians as human shields thereby making Israel look insensitive to Arab life, even as it proclaims it tries to avoid or minimize civilian casualities? According to Israel, Hamas intentionally targets civilians in Israel when it sends in rockets and missiles and suicide bombers? When is a civilian death a casualty and when is the casualty a voluntary martyr?
What's true? Who lifts the fog?
The old saying goes, you have the right to your own opinions but you do not have the right to your own facts. The truth and the facts of what is happening in Israel and Gaza at this time are virtually impossible to discern because there are so many truths to be reckoned with: truths about intentions of each side (e.g., for Israel: to replace Hamas, do what it has to do before Obama takes office on the one side vs. for Hamas: sabotage the peace process in any way possible and never give in to the notion of a continued existence of Israel), about casualties (thousands vs hundreds and who is providing the "accurate" count?), about definitions of occupations, about historical events (who attacked whom first, who drove whom out of their homeland, fellow Arabs promising quick victory in 1948 over the nascent nation of Israel and a return to homes, or ethnic cleansing Jews seeking a total Jewish state as quickly as possible?), about the value of life and which side values life more, about who can be trusted and who tends to betray trusts and treaties and understandings (which side says what things to one group and other things to another and who really rejected the Camp David accords and why?), about definitions of terrorism and who are the real terrorists.
The list is endless and truth lives cheek to jowl with propaganda and ideology-creating truths and biblical promises and histories.
It is clear that where consensual reality is elusive, so is negotiation in good faith. Too many sides have too many dogs in this never-ending fight and our news media run around like crazed chickens trying to cover all the basis, offering their good offices of TV studios to bring warring sides together to "talk" either at or to each other and make PR and political hay. All the while, callow anchor persons entreat partisans and diplomats "Can't we all just get along" while thoughtful Americans redden with embarrassment in their living rooms.
We watch and find that the more we watch the less we seem to know because politicians and militants are still in the throes of swagger and threat, hyperbole or calculated, western-oriented, understatement, not ready to plow swords into concessions and cessation of hostilities.
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