{"id":71103,"date":"2016-03-28T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=71103"},"modified":"2016-03-28T01:54:52","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T00:54:52","slug":"highlighting-western-victims-while-ignoring-victims-of-western-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/03\/highlighting-western-victims-while-ignoring-victims-of-western-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"glenn<\/a>25 Mar 2016 – <\/em>For days now, American cable news has broadcast non-stop coverage of the horrific attack in Brussels. Viewers repeatedly heard from witnesses<\/a> and from the wounded. Video was shown in a loop of the terror and panic when the bombs exploded. Networks\u00a0dispatched their TV stars<\/a> to Brussels, where they remain. NPR profiled<\/a> the lives of several of the airport victims. CNN showed<\/a>\u00a0a moving interview with a wounded, bandage-wrapped Mormon American teenager\u00a0speaking from his Belgium hospital bed.<\/p>\n

All of that is how it should be: That\u2019s news. And it\u2019s important to understand\u00a0on a visceral level the human cost from this type of violence. But that\u2019s also the same reason it\u2019s so unjustifiable, and so propagandistic, that this type of coverage is accorded only\u00a0to Western victims of violence, but almost never to the non-Western victims of the West\u2019s own violence.<\/p>\n

A little more than a week ago, as\u00a0Mohammed Ali Kalfood reported<\/a> in\u00a0The Intercept<\/em>, \u201cFighter jets from a Saudi-led [U.S.<\/a>\u00a0and U.K.-supported<\/a>] coalition bombed a market in Mastaba, in Yemen\u2019s northern province of Hajjah. The latest count<\/a> indicates that about 120 people were killed, including more than 20 children<\/a>, and 80 were wounded in the strikes.\u201d Kalfood interviewed 21-year-old Yemeni Khaled Hassan Mohammadi, who said, \u201cWe saw\u00a0airstrikes on a market last Ramadan, not far from here, but this attack was the deadliest.\u201d Over the past several\u00a0years, the U.S. has launched hideous civilian-slaughtering strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq. Last July,\u00a0The Intercept<\/em> published a photo essay<\/a>\u00a0by Alex Potter\u00a0of Yemeni victims of one of 2015\u2019s deadliest Saudi-led, U.S.- and U.K.-armed strikes.<\/p>\n

\"cnn-540x414<\/a><\/p>\n

You\u2019ll almost never hear any of those victims\u2019 names on CNN, NPR, or most other large U.S. media outlets. No famous American TV correspondents will be sent to the places where those people have their lives ended by the bombs of the U.S. and its allies. At most, you\u2019ll hear small, clinical news stories briefly and coldly describing what happened \u2014 usually accompanied by a justifying claim from U.S. officials, uncritically conveyed, about why the bombing was noble \u2014 but, even in those rare cases where such attacks are covered at all, everything will be avoided that would cause you to have any visceral or emotional connection to the victims. You\u2019ll never know anything about them\u00a0\u2014 not even their names, let alone hear about their extinguished life aspirations or hear from their grieving survivors \u2014 and will therefore have no ability to feel anything for them. As a result,\u00a0their existence will barely register.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s by design.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0because U.S. media outlets love to dramatize and endlessly highlight Western victims of violence, while rendering almost completely invisible the victims of their own side\u2019s violence.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you think there are good \u2014 or at least understandable \u2014 reasons\u00a0to explain this discrepancy in coverage. Maybe you believe humans naturally pay more attention to, and empathize more with, the suffering of those they regard as more similar to\u00a0them. Or you may want to argue that victims in cities commonly visited by American elites (Paris, Brussels, London, Madrid) are somehow more newsworthy than those in places rarely visited (Mastaba, in Yemen\u2019s northern province of Hajjah). Or perhaps you\u2019re sympathetic to the claim that it\u2019s easier for CNN or NBC News to send on-air correspondents\u00a0to glittery Western European capitals\u00a0than to Waziristan or Kunduz. Undoubtedly, many believe that the West\u2019s violence is morally superior because it only kills civilians by accident and not on purpose.<\/p>\n

\"Yemeni<\/a>

Yemeni rescuers carry the body of a baby girl who was retrieved from the rubble after a building was struck overnight by Saudi-led coalition airstrikes on Feb. 10, 2016, in the capital, Sanaa.<\/p><\/div>\n

But regardless of the rationale for this media discrepancy, the distortive impact is the same: By endlessly focusing on and dramatizing Western\u00a0victims of violence while ignoring the victims of the West\u2019s own violence, the impression is continually bolstered that only They, but not We, engage in violence that kills innocent people. We are always the victims and never the perpetrators (and thus Good and Blameless); They are only the perpetrators and never the victims (and thus Villainous\u00a0and Culpable). In April 2003, Ashleigh Banfield, then a rising war-correspondent star at MSNBC, returned from Iraq, gave a speech<\/a> critiquing the one-sided, embedded U.S. media coverage of the war, and was shortly thereafter demoted and then fired. This is part of what she said:<\/p>\n

That said, what didn\u2019t you see? You didn\u2019t see where those bullets landed. You didn\u2019t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. \u2026 It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn\u2019t journalism, because I\u2019m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor, and we got rid of horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn\u2019t see what it took to do that. \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I\u2019m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people\u2019s opinions. It was very sanitized. \u2026 War is ugly and it\u2019s dangerous, and in this world, the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans.<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, the death, carnage, and destruction the U.S. invasion was causing was generating huge amounts of anti-American hatred and a desire to bring violence to Americans, even if meant sacrificing lives to accomplish that. But the U.S. media never showed any of that, so Americans had no idea it existed, and were thus incapable of understanding why people were eager to do violence to Americans. They therefore assumed that it must be because they are primitive or inherently hateful or driven by some inscrutable religious fervor.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the U.S. media, by showing only one side of the conflict, by presenting only the nationalistic viewpoint, propagandized \u2014 deceived \u2014 American viewers by making them more ignorant rather than more enlightened. As a result, when the trains of London and Madrid were attacked in 2004 and 2005 as retaliation for those countries\u2019 participation in the invasion of Iraq, that causal connection<\/a> (which even British intelligence acknowledged<\/a>) was virtually never discussed because Western media outlets ensured it was unknown. The same was true of attempted attacks on the U.S.: in Times Square, the New York City subway system, an airliner over Detroit, all motivated by rage over Western violence<\/a>. In the absence of any media discussion\u00a0of those victims and motives, these attacks were\u00a0was simply denounced as senseless, indiscriminate slaughter without any cause, and people were thus deprived of the ability to understand why they\u00a0happened.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly what\u2019s happening still. Because I was traveling in the U.S. this week, I was subjected to literally\u00a0dozens of hours of cable and network news coverage of the Brussels attacks. The most minute angles of the attack were dissected. But there was not one moment devoted to the question of why Belgium\u00a0\u2014 and the U.S., France, and Russia before it \u2014 were targeted by ISIS (as opposed to a whole slew of non-Muslim, democratic countries around the world that\u00a0ISIS doesn\u2019t target), even though ISIS explicitly stated<\/a> the reason and it is, in any event, self-evident: because those countries have been bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq and these bombings were intended as retaliation and vengeance. Nor was there any discussion of why ISIS seems to have little trouble attracting support among some in Western countries: As even a Rumsfeld-commissioned study<\/a> found in 2004, it is in large part because of widespread anger among Muslims over ongoing Western violence and interference in that part of the world.<\/p>\n

The point, as always, isn\u2019t justification: It is always morally unjustified to deliberately target civilians with violence (see the update here<\/a> on that point). Nor does it prove\u00a0that the bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria is unjustified or should cease.\u00a0The point, instead, is\u00a0that the war framework<\/em> in which much of this violence takes place \u2014 one side that declares itself at war and uses violence as part of that war is inevitably\u00a0<\/em>attacked by the other side that\u00a0it targets \u2014 is completely suppressed by one-sided media coverage that prefers a self-flattering, tribalistic\u00a0cartoon narrative.<\/p>\n

The ultimate media taboo is self-examination: the question of whether there are actions we take that exacerbate the problem we say we are trying to resolve. Such a process would not dilute the evil of ISIS\u2019s civilian-targeting violence, but it would enable a more honest and complete understanding of the role Western governments\u2019 policies play and the inevitable costs they entail. Perhaps those costs are worth enduring, but that question can only be rationally answered if the costs are openly discussed.<\/p>\n

But whatever else is true, if we are constantly bombarded with images and stories and dramatic narratives highlighting our own side\u2019s victims, while the victims of our side\u2019s violence are rendered invisible, it\u2019s only natural that large numbers of us will conclude that only They, but not We, are committing civilian-killing violence. That\u2019s a really pleasing thing to believe, no matter how false it is. Having media outlets perpetrate self-pleasing\u00a0and\u00a0tribal-affirming \u2014 but utterly false \u2014 narratives is the very definition of propaganda. And that\u2019s\u00a0what largely drives Western media coverage of these terrorist attacks every time they occur in the West.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Glenn Greenwald<\/a> – \u2709glenn.greenwald@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. media outlets bombard us with images and dramatic narratives highlighting our own side\u2019s victims, while the victims of our side\u2019s violence are rendered invisible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}