How Western media manufactured consent for genocide in Gaza

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce . . . In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. 

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

In his seminal work Covering Islam, one of his books on the subject of “Orientalism”, Palestinian-American academic Edward Said discussed how Western news media constructs, distorts, and weaponizes narratives about Muslims, Arabs, and the Middle East. Said demonstrated that Western media do not simply misrepresent Islam and Arab societies, they also produce an entire worldview in which Muslims, and specifically Middle-Eastern societies, are rendered suspect, irrational, violent, and culturally inferior.

In his book Said showed that news media in the West through the lens of Orientalism depicts “Islam as a monolithic force”, a view shaped by ignorance, racism, bigotry, and geopolitical interests. His analysis exposed the machinery through which Western media manufacture fear, justify domination, oppression, and erase the humanity of those living under Western-backed violence. Nowhere is this structure more visible — or more lethal — than in Western coverage of Palestinian issues over the decades, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Gaza Genocide through a biased Western media lens

Said warned that Western media portray Islam and Muslims through a “hostile and belligerent” lens, reviving “discredited Orientalist views” whenever geopolitical interests demand it. That lens is now the default through which the Gaza genocide is covered. Palestinians are framed not as human beings with rights, histories, agency, and suffering, but as abstractions — “human shields,” “Hamas sympathizers,” “terrorist-adjacent populations.” Meanwhile Israeli lives are individualized, named, and mourned while Palestinian lives are recognized only through death tolls, and their narratives doubted, minimized, or erased.

This is not accidental, and has been happening for decades whenever Palestine and Israel have been discussed in the West, and more so over the past three years.  The news media have fuelled Israel’s genocide by uncritically repeating Israeli claims, suppressing Palestinian testimony, and framing Israel’s brutal violence as “self-defence” even when it has targeted hospitals, schools, journalists, and entire families. This provides credence to Said’s argument that Orientalism functions by privileging Western voices and those of its Israeli ally over those of Middle Eastern Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. For decades since its creation the Israeli narrative has been treated as authoritative and trustworthy, while Palestinian voices are treated as emotional, biased, suspect, and dangerous.

Canadian media’s coverage of Palestinians is no exception. A study by The Review of Journalism found that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) flagship program The National featured more Israeli voices than Palestinian ones in its Gaza coverage, giving disproportionate weight to Israeli perspectives and marginalizing those of Palestinians. This is Orientalism in practice, where the colonizer’s voice is legitimized, and the colonized are not spoken to as people with agency, but spoken about as if they have none.

Said emphasized that Orientalism is not only about what is said, but how it is said. Language constructs reality, and Western media’s linguistic choices when talking about Palestinians or Muslims reveals a hierarchy of human worth, with Palestinians and Muslims sitting near the bottom.

Israeli deaths are described with emotional and graphic specificity — “slaughtered,” “massacred,” “butchered.” Whereas Palestinian deaths — even when numbering in the tens of thousands — are described with passive, distancing language — “died,” “were killed,” “perished,” or the most dehumanizing of all, “casualties.”

As the independent news outlet The Maple reported in 2020, there is a “devastating” pro-Israel bias in Canadian media. Stories on mainstream Canadian news outlets have repeatedly used an active voice to describe Israeli deaths while consistently using a passive voice for Palestinian deaths, subtly implying agency when Israelis are harmed and inevitability when Palestinians are deliberately killed by Israeli forces even when they are peacefully resisting occupation. This linguistic asymmetry is not neutral but rather a moral ranking mechanism. When Israel kills Palestinians, the media ask: What did Hamas do to cause this? When Israelis are killed by Palestinians the media ask: Why did Palestinians murder Israelis for no apparent reason?

This is precisely the Orientalist logic Said identified, one where the West (and its allies) act and those in the Middle East are acted upon. Israeli violence is contextualized while almost eight decades of Palestinian dispossession, oppression, suffering and death are not.

Silencing pro-Palestinian voices is the new McCarthyism

Said wrote that Western media relies on “experts” to reinforce dominant colonial and imperialist narratives — well-known and credentialed voices who reproduce the Western worldview of power while masquerading as neutral analysts. These experts, he argued, are selected not for their insight but for their ideological reliability. That is, they tell the public the Israeli and pro-Western narrative in favourable terms, reinforcing already established Orientalist narratives. Today, this dynamic has intensified to the point of open intimidation. Journalists who are sympathetic to Palestinian narratives — especially those who report honestly on Israeli atrocities — are not merely marginalized, they are disciplined or fired. Newsrooms that once claimed to value independence and fairness in coverage now enforce ideological conformity in how Israel and the story of Palestinians are portrayed, with the rigidity of a security apparatus.

Reporters who attempt to humanize Palestinians, verify Israeli claims, or document Israeli war crimes, face investigations, suspensions, and removal from their jobs, as editors spike stories that contradict Israeli talking points. Freelance reporters lose contracts for expressing grief or sympathy over the suffering of Palestinian children or posting social media comments, and entire careers are destroyed for refusing to participate in the dehumanization of a people living under a brutal occupation for almost eight decades. This is not a marketplace of free speech as much as it is a system of control, with prejudiced and racist editors and producers controlling how Palestinian humanity is represented in stories. It is the modern incarnation of what Said identified decades ago — a media environment in which dissenting news stories are treated as threats to the dominant narrative, and truth-tellers are disciplined into silence to reinforce Israel’s anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Across Canada, journalists have been suspended, fired, or censured for expressing even mild sympathy for Palestinians or for criticizing Israeli war crimes. The Maple documents how Canadian journalists who attempted to report on the scale of Palestinian suffering were reprimanded or removed from assignments. Breach Media reports that Canadian op-ed pages have overwhelmingly published pro-Israel commentary while rejecting Palestinian perspectives long before the start of the Gaza genocide. Middle East Eye shows how Western media have “manufactured consent” for Israel’s killing of hundreds of Palestinian journalists by downplaying or ignoring these targeted assassinations.

This is not merely media bias, it is repression and censorship. It is the policing of acceptable speech by media gatekeepers, and the enforcement of a narrative that protects Israeli power and erases Palestinian humanity. Said warned that Orientalism is not merely an academic discourse but also a political weapon that promotes oppression. And that is evident today, as this weapon is being used against journalists who refuse to participate in the sanitization of Israel’s horrific crimes and the vilification of Palestinians.

The long history of Anti-Palestinian racism

Anti-Palestinian prejudice did not begin on October 8, 2023. It has been embedded in Western media and society for decades. As Rabble.ca notes, Western media have a long history of ignoring or minimizing atrocities committed by Israel, from the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 to the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 — a weekly peaceful protest in which Palestinians in Gaza demonstrated for their right of return to the homes from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, 1967 and the decades since then. It is clear from the history of Palestinians since before Israel came into being that Western media portrayal of the Middle East is conducted through a lens shaped by “geopolitics and economic interests,” not by truth.

What has changed in how Western media portrays Palestinians over the past few years is not the scope of anti-Palestinian prejudice but its visibility. The Gaza genocide has exposed the depth of Western news media’s structural anti-Palestinian racism, particularly in major broadcasters and newspapers like CNN, BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Mail, and others. It has revealed how deeply Orientalist assumptions are woven into Western newsroom culture, editorial decision-making, and journalistic norms. In Canada, newsrooms cling to “flawed notions of objectivity” that unquestioningly treat Israeli state narratives as authentic and truthful while Palestinian narratives are questioned and seen as biased. This is Orientalism masquerading as professionalism — a veneer of journalistic neutrality that conceals a racialized hierarchy of credibility. The result is a media environment where Palestinian suffering is filtered through skepticism and prejudice, Israeli claims are granted automatic legitimacy, and the very idea of Palestinian humanity becomes negotiable within the offices of Western news editors and producers.

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce it claimed Said. In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. If one looks closely at news stories in Western media about the Gaza genocide, they have played a role that is structurally analogous to the role the tabloid Der Stürmer played in Nazi Germany, not in ideology, but in function.

Der Stürmer dehumanized Jews, justified state violence, and normalized atrocity. Western media today dehumanizes Palestinians, legitimizes Israeli violence, and normalizes genocide. Western media have become a weapon in the Gaza genocide, shaping public opinion to enable mass killing, and have systematically suppressed images, testimonies, and evidence of Israeli atrocities.

When media systems consistently dehumanize a people, erase their suffering, and amplify the narratives of their oppressors, they are not neutral observers. They are participants and criminally complicit.

There needs to be accountability

If international law is to have any meaning, then institutions that materially contribute to atrocity crimes must face scrutiny and be held legally accountable. This includes media institutions whose coverage enables, rationalizes, or sanitizes genocide. While media systems — as institutions — can be complicit in mass violence, such complicity does not arise spontaneously. It is shaped and enforced by people — executives, editors, and senior decision‑makers — who determine which narratives are amplified and which are suppressed. The precedent is clear. At the Nuremberg Tribunals, Nazi propagandists were tried and convicted because their media apparatus played a structural role in enabling the Holocaust. Similarly Western media executives have played a significant role in the atrocities carried out by Israel in Gaza. The principle established at Nuremberg — that propaganda and disinformation can constitute participation in atrocity — remains relevant today. Western media have spent three years repeating Israeli talking points, reiterating its claims without verification ignoring Palestinian testimony, and denying that genocide is taking place. In effect, Western outlets have adopted Israeli military language, framing mass killing as “precision strikes” and ethnic cleansing as “evacuations,” thereby laundering and legitimizing Israeli state violence through their framing of genocidal acts.

Said taught that knowledge is never neutral and that media power always constitutes political power. When that power is mobilized to facilitate or obscure genocide, the question becomes unavoidable: what forms of accountability are necessary for institutions that help enable mass atrocity? His critique of Western media bias, once dismissed by some as academic overreach, now reads as prophetic. The analytical framework he developed is not merely relevant to the present moment, it is indispensable in understanding how the Gaza genocide has been narrated, justified, and normalized in the West.

The atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza have revealed the true nature of Western media, not as watchdogs of power, but as instruments of it, not as defenders of truth, but as manufacturers of consent, not as neutral observers, but as structural participants in atrocity. The patterns Said identified decades ago — the privileging of colonial narratives, the erasure of Indigenous voices, the racialized hierarchy of credibility — have all re-emerged with devastating clarity. They shape which deaths are to be mourned, which claims are to be believed, and which atrocities are to be rendered invisible.

Said warned that Orientalism was not a relic of the past but an active system of thought that would continue to shape Western perceptions of the Middle East unless confronted directly. The world did not listen and for the past three years, a genocide has unfolded in real time, with Western media helping to make it possible — through distortion, through silence, through selective empathy, and through the steady reproduction of the narratives that justify the dehumanization of Palestinians.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

An appointment with the courts awaits Western media executives complicit in the Gaza genocide

A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering . . . 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

When the unspeakable horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza finally grinds to a halt—after the rubble settles on shattered Gaza neighbourhoods, as the echoes of potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths fade, lost to bombings, snipers, starvation, and disease—there will be a reckoning not just for the perpetrators, but also for the enablers. There will be little mercy for the Western governments that funnelled billions in bullets and bombs to Israel, neither for the United States which vetoed UN ceasefires on their behalf, nor for the universities that silenced pro-Palestinian voices while doing the bidding of Zionist donors.

However, one of the sharpest blade of justice will need to carve deepest into the heart of Western news media—the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, CBC, CTV, The Daily Mail, and their ilk. These so-called pillars of “free press” have devolved into shameless Israeli propagandists, laundering their lies, dehumanizing Palestinians, and fuelling the very mass murder on which they pretend to report. For decades, they have peddled Israeli anti-Palestinian propaganda and racism as objective journalism, but since October 7, 2023, their complicity has escalated into active participation in an ongoing genocide. Yes, a reckoning is coming—one that will drag media executives, producers, and editors into courtrooms, force their corporations to pay Holocaust-level reparations to survivors, and shatter the myth of Western media’s moral authority forever.

This isn’t hyperbole, it’s historical inevitability. As Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the United Nations, and over 800 genocide scholars have documented, Israel’s campaign in Gaza meets every criterion of genocide: intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group through killings, causing serious harm, and imposing conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction. Yet Western media didn’t just fail to report this truth—they buried it under an avalanche of Israeli hasbara (propaganda). From the genocide’s outset, news outlets like CNN and the BBC instructed their staff to avoid using terms like “genocide,” “occupation,” or “war crimes” in their reporting, opting instead for mealy-mouthed euphemisms that absolve Israel while vilifying Palestinians as “terrorists” or “Hamas sympathizers.” This isn’t sloppy journalism. It’s a deliberate editorial choice, rooted in decades of anti-Palestinian prejudice and racism that predates October 2023.

Consider the pattern, etched in stone long before the current slaughter. For over 75 years, Western media has framed Palestinians through a lens of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian villainy. During the 1948 Nakba—when Zionist militias forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and committed massacres butchering thousands, Western news outlets downplayed ethnic cleansing, portraying it as a “civil war” sparked by Arab aggression. Fast-forward to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Israeli forces enabled Christian militias to slaughter 3,500 Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, a tragedy where media coverage focused on Israeli “retaliation” against attacks by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with scant mention of the victims’ humanity.

This historical amnesia isn’t accidental, it’s systemic. A 2023 analysis of news media coverage by the Arab Center Washington DC revealed that US media consistently omits the context of Israel’s brutal occupation, Jewish settlement expansion, dispossession of Palestinian lands, and Israeli apartheid, presenting their actions as defensive acts rather than colonial aggression. By 2023, this bias had metastasized to a point where there was a little sympathy shown for the victims of Israel’s genocide, with the vast majority of Western legacy news outlets favouring the Israeli narrative—the myth of “40 beheaded babies” or “Hamas rape epidemics” presented without evidence—even while social media was flooded with Palestinian testimonies of daily atrocities committed by Israel.

Now, amplify this to the Gaza genocide’s scale. Over 25 months, Israel has flattened 90% of Gaza’s buildings, poisoned its water, destroyed its hospitals, bulldozed agricultural lands, and engineered a famine that kills children by the hundreds weekly. What is the reaction of Western media? They platform Israeli officials to spew unchallenged falsehoods. Take CNN’s Jake Tapper, who in November 2023 reported on US intelligence claims that Al-Shifa Hospital was a “Hamas command center,” amplifying unverified Israeli assertions without immediate scrutiny or counter-evidence from Palestinian sources. In December 2023, BBC reporting allowed Israeli officials to suggest the Gaza death toll was inflated, with claims that one Hamas fighter was killed for every two civilians—figures later contradicted by UN data showing over 18,000 dead, including thousands of children. These aren’t isolated slips. They’re policy. Leaked internal memos from CNN reveal executives quashing stories on Palestinian suffering to avoid “inflaming” pro-Israel advertisers, while BBC guidelines mandate “balance” that equates one of the most powerful militaries in the world with a people who have neither an army, navy, nor air force.

Contrast this fawning deference to pro-Israel guests with the inquisition faced by pro-Palestinian voices. Palestinian analysts like Omar Baddar have appeared on CNN only to have their critiques framed amid accusations of one-sidedness, with segments often edited to emphasize Israeli perspectives over Palestinian context. Meanwhile, anti-genocide protesters—students, doctors, even Holocaust survivors—are branded as “terrorist sympathizers” in headlines from the US magazine The Atlantic to Canada’s National Post, their chants for ceasefires twisted into calls for Jewish extermination. This double standard isn’t bias. It’s a machine of suppression, mirroring the very propaganda tactics that enabled the Holocaust.

Yes, let’s confront the ugly parallel between what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing. Western media’s role in Gaza echoes the Nazi press’s complicity in the destruction of Jews and other minorities. In 1930s Germany, outlets like Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter didn’t just report; they incited. This fascist rags spewed caricatures of Jews as vermin, rapists, and economic saboteurs, dehumanizing them to justify Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass when the windows of Jewish businesses were destroyed—as well as the concentration camps. Editors faced no push back—indeed, they were rewarded—while Jewish voices were silenced, their pleas dismissed as “Bolshevik lies.” Sound familiar?

Fast-forward to 2023 and 2024 where The New York Times has run op-eds from current and former Israeli officials and their supporters in the US justifying the Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians, and labelling Palestinian resistance and anti-genocide protests as “terrorism”. These commentaries go largely unchallenged by editors who challenge critiques of Zionism and Israel by labelling them as “hate speech.” A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering through euphemisms like “collateral damage”, using terms like “died” rather than “killed”, and barring their journalists from using descriptors like “brutal” or “horrific”, that downplay or delegitimize Palestinian deaths.

The resemblance between the media during the Nazi era and today when we look at the promotion of racism. Nazi media normalized antisemitism by portraying Jews as an existential threat, their suffering as self-inflicted. Western coverage does the same for Palestinians. A report from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative found that 2023-2024 coverage embedded anti-Palestinian racism through disproportionate focus on Israeli victims and minimization of Palestinian grief, implying inherent criminality in their deaths. Phrases like “human animals” (echoing Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s October 2023 statement) seep into TV news scripts without quotation marks, embedding anti-Palestinian hate as fact. An analysis by Vox has labelled this “anti-Palestinian racism” as a structural prejudice that erases Palestinian agency, history, and grief, rendering their genocide palatable to Western audiences steeped in colonial myths. Protests against this slaughter? They are labelled “riots”, “anti-Jewish hate demonstrations”, or “antisemitic mobs,” fuelling arrests from US campuses to Canadian streets, amid broader crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism.

This racism isn’t abstract, it’s lethal. By dehumanizing Palestinians—calling Rafah and other parts of Gaza “evacuated” rather than “ethnically cleansed”—Western news media executives justify Israeli violence against a defenceless people. They bear as much responsibility for mass murder in Gaza as did Nazi newspaper and radio owners did for dehumanizing the millions killed in concentration camps. And like the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials which saw dozens of Nazi officials sitting in the docks, accountability for those media executives who enabled the Gaza atrocities through their media coverage must follow by charges being laid. This can be done at the International Criminal Court or in nations with uncompromised legal systems under the legal concept of “universal jurisdiction,” where international law allows national courts to prosecute individuals for the most serious international crimes—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes—regardless of where the crimes were committed.

Media Watch International and Al-Shabaka Policy Center argue that under the Genocide Convention and Rome Statute, complicit propagandists can face war crimes charges. Will we see major media personalities from CNN or BBC or the CBC charged and tried? This remains to be seen. But if they chose political expediency and lies over truth, if they withheld footage sympathetic to Palestinians, or platformed pro-Israel voices while suppressing Palestinian narratives, to appease Zionist and Israeli interests, while Gaza’s journalists were murdered by the scores, then they need to stand trial.

The net must widen to catch all who were complicit. Producers who scripted so-called “balanced” segments equating occupier and occupied. Editors who buried or ignored UN reports on famine. Companies that supported Israel and ignored their crimes must pay a price, legally and financially. Once the trials are over the companies that employed them must be fined, and they must be forced to pay into a Palestinian Victims Fund, modelled on the Holocaust Claims Conference. In Canada, where CBC and CTV’s coverage rivals CNN’s or MSNBC’s in its unbalanced coverage of the Palestinian genocide, CRTC licenses should be reviews and executives hauled before the courts. This isn’t vengeance, it’s justice delayed by decades of Israeli impunity.

But the rot runs deeper, demanding a cultural purge. Western media’s failure isn’t mere negligence, it’s a betrayal of the ideals which they claim to uphold—truth, accountability, humanity. For years, they’ve normalized Israel’s apartheid regime, from the blockade of Gaza starting in 2007 to the 2014 onslaught that killed more than 2,200 Palestinian civilians. The coverage back then included sympathetic profiles of Israeli “fear,” while there were perfunctory tallies of Palestinian “casualties.” The same pattern persists today. A 2025 study in Third World Quarterly details how outlets like The Daily Mail, The New York Times and The Washington Post employ “ethical collapse” in silencing Gaza’s voices, prioritizing Israeli-friendly narratives over journalistic integrity. This isn’t journalism. It’s complicity in genocidal violence, a modern echo of the British Palestine Mandate press that greased the wheels for Zionist settlement.

Imagine the trials with media executives and editors in the docks, their memos banning the use of the words “genocide”, “occupation” or “Palestine” projected onto screens for the court to see, proving they chose complicity or silence over humanity. Paying reparations cannot be optional. There must be a global fund established, seeded by fines for those who were complicit and seized assets, to rebuild Gaza’s soul. This would be in addition to reparations paid to Palestinians by nations like the US, Canada, Germany and the UK.

One of the lessons from this is that media can’t be left free to push ugly and dehumanizing narratives. There must be a legal mechanism to ensure that the ideals of truth in news media are upheld, along with mandatory fact-checking, diverse sourcing, and penalties for stories that attack the very humanity of an oppressed and subjugated people. Until then, every broadcast, every news story is a potential bullet for vulnerable peoples like the Palestinians.

Western media’s facade of neutrality and balanced news coverage of this Palestinian Holocaust has crumbled in Gaza’s rubble. They didn’t report a genocide, they enabled one, their screens stained with Palestinian blood. When trials loom and reparations flow, let the producers, editors and executives tremble. The world watched as Western news media gave Israel a pass as it destroyed a society, deliberately killed tens of thousands, and demonstrated a level of evil not seen since World War Two. They streamed Gaza’s slaughter live, yet tuned out the screams. No more. The reckoning is coming, and it will be as merciless as the crimes it avenges.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

The Palestinian Exception: Western media’s anti-Palestinian racism and complicity in genocide

Just as Nazi propaganda desensitized the German public to Jewish suffering, Western media’s refusal to speak the truth about Israel’s violence against Palestinians normalizes their mass murder. 

  

By Fareed Khan 

  

On July 17, 2025, an Israeli airstrike severely damaged Gaza’s last remaining Catholic church, a sanctuary sheltering the elderly and children amidst a relentless 21 month military assault. The attack, which killed dozens and severely damaged a rare Christian landmark in the besieged enclave, garnered fleeting attention in Western media outlets like The New York Times and BBC. However, this coverage stands in stark contrast to the near silence surrounding the systematic destruction of more than a thousand mosques and the desecration of Muslim cemeteries in Gaza by Israeli forces since October 2023. This selective outrage is not an anomaly but a manifestation of a deeply embedded anti-Palestinian racism in Western news media, often termed the "Palestinian exception."

This phenomenon—characterized by biased, negative coverage of Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation while amplifying positive narratives about Israel—echoes the dehumanizing propaganda of Nazi Germany’s news media towards Jews in the 1930s. The Western media’s role in dehumanizing Palestinians, as explored in scholarly analyses of how narratives about marginalized groups are shaped, enables Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. This systemic bias, which portrays Palestinians as less deserving of empathy and humanity, demands that news corporations and their executives one day face legal accountability for their criminal decisions, and provide restitution to Palestinians for their complicity in the Gaza genocide, the way Jews were given restitution for the Holocaust.

The Palestinian Exception: A Legacy of Bias

 

The bombing of the Gaza Catholic church briefly pierced Western media’s consciousness, likely because it resonated with Christian audiences in the West, and because Pope Leo felt compelled to respond. However, the deliberate destruction of over 1,200 mosques and desecration of Muslim cemeteries in Gaza by Israeli forces since October 2023 has received scant attention. This disparity exemplifies the Palestinian exception, where Palestinian suffering is systematically marginalized or ignored while Israeli narratives are elevated. Studies, such as one by The Intercept analyzing over 1,000 articles from major US outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times from October to November 2023, reveal a clear pattern: Israeli casualties were covered with emotive language like “massacre” or “slaughter,” while Palestinian deaths were reported in clinical, passive terms, often as mere statistics. Furthermore, during this period, mentions of antisemitism in these outlets outnumbered those of Islamophobia by a ratio of 7:1, despite a significant surge in anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab hate crimes in the US, surpassing that of the period after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This bias is not new but has been documented for decades, with analysis showing that a majority of news stories on Israeli violence against Palestinians failed to mention that incidents occurred in occupied Palestinian territory, erasing the context of Israel’s illegal occupation. Similarly, a Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) study of NPR’s coverage during the Second Intifada (2000–2005) showed that while Israeli and Palestinian deaths occurred in similar numbers, NPR reported eight out of ten Israeli deaths but only three out of ten Palestinian deaths, creating a skewed perception of the conflict’s death toll. Palestinian voices continue to be given a fraction of the airtime or column space afforded to pro-Israel perspectives today. A 2023 report by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring noted that British media frequently framed stories from an Israeli viewpoint, often without verifying Israeli claims, and without giving Palestinian voices equal coverage.

The Language of Dehumanization

Western media’s language in reporting on Palestinians often perpetuates anti-Palestinian tropes. The phrase “Israel’s right to defend itself” is commonly used, framing Israeli military actions—frequently disproportionate and targeting Palestinian civilians—as justified. Conversely, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is routinely labelled “terrorism,” with groups like Hamas demonized without historical context. For instance, following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, outlets like CNN, BBC, and Canadian news media widely broadcast Israel’s lie about babies being beheaded and burned in ovens—claims later debunked by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. These reports fuelled outrage and justified Israel’s response, which, by July 2025, has killed nearly 69,000 Palestinians, 30% of them children. Moreover, Western reporters often subject Palestinian interviewees to aggressive questioning, such as “Do you condemn Hamas?” while Israeli interviewees face no similar scrutiny about their government’s criminal actions, and their statements are frequently accepted without verification, the way the “beheaded babies” lie was.

This double standard reflects what Palestinian-American academic Edward Said described in his 1997 book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World as the media’s role in constructing a dehumanized image of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. Said argued that Western news media portrays people from these communities as inherently violent and irrational, reinforcing stereotypes that justify their marginalization. He talked about how the media shapes public perceptions and selectively filters information to control what people know or don’t know about Islam and Muslims.

This framing is evident in the coverage of the Gaza genocide, where Palestinian deaths are reported as numbers, often prefaced with qualifiers like “as reported by the Hamas-run health ministry,” casting doubt on their credibility, while Israeli casualty figures are presented as authoritative. Such journalistic choices desensitize audiences to Palestinian suffering, dehumanizing them to most Western audiences.

Historical Context and Media Silence

Western media’s omission of critical historical context further entrenches this anti-Palestinian bias. Few outlets acknowledge that Hamas, portrayed as the epitome of Palestinian terrorism, came to be a viable political force in Gaza through Israeli support and funding beginning in the 1980s into the 2000s. The goal being to undermine the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and derail the Oslo Peace Accords. This strategic backing was intended to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state, yet it is rarely mentioned, allowing media to frame Hamas as an existential threat without acknowledging Israeli complicity. This erasure distorts the narrative and obscures the root causes of Palestinian resistance.

The destruction of Gaza’s cultural and religious sites further illustrates this bias. The systematic targeting of mosques, Muslim cemeteries, schools and universities by Israeli forces echoes the Nazi destruction of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in 1930s Germany and during the Holocaust. Yet, while the bombing of Gaza’s Catholic church garnered some coverage in Western media, the obliteration of Islamic sites has been largely ignored. This selective focus reflects a racist and bigoted cultural hierarchy at the executive level where Muslim and Palestinian suffering is deemed less newsworthy. 

 

This selective focus reflects a racist and bigoted cultural hierarchy at the executive level in news rooms, where Muslim and Palestinian suffering is deemed less newsworthy. As Said noted, Western media operates within a framework that views Arab civilian deaths as an acceptable price for Israeli security.

Parallels with Nazi Propaganda

The parallels between Western media’s anti-Palestinian bias and Nazi Germany’s propaganda against Jews are chilling. In the 1930s, Nazi media portrayed Jews as threats to German society, using the most egregious stereotypes and selective reporting to justify discrimination, dehumanization and violence. Similarly, Western media’s framing of Palestinians as inherently violent, as "terrorists", or complicit in their own suffering—through antagonistic questions or by downplaying Israeli crimes—rationalizes their subjugation. Just as Nazi propaganda desensitized the German public to Jewish suffering, Western media’s refusal to label Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, despite affirmations from top genocide and Holocaust scholars, normalizes the mass killing of Palestinians.

Amnesty International’s 2024 report concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, citing deliberate conditions aimed at the physical destruction of Palestinians, including mass displacement and infrastructure devastation. Yet, major outlets like The New York Times and BBC avoid using the term “genocide” in their reporting, with Times internal memos instructing journalists to refrain from using terms like “ethnic cleansing” or “occupied territory”. This linguistic sanitization mirrors Nazi media’s use of language to obscure Nazi crimes, ensuring public detachment from the human toll.

The Global Recognition Gap

The media’s refusal to recognize Palestine as a state further exemplifies this bias. While 149 countries, including most of the Global South, recognize Palestinian statehood, Western media often avoids the term “Palestine,” aligning with the US-led Western alliance. This linguistic erasure delegitimizes Palestinian identity and aspirations, reinforcing their dehumanization. Furthermore, Western media’s biased framing of Palestinian stories reduces them to mere victims or terrorists, never as people with agency a right to self-determination, or struggling against the longest and most brutal military occupation in modern history.

Accountability and Justice

Western media’s complicity in anti-Palestinian racism and the Gaza genocide demands accountability. News corporations and their executives have not only failed to uphold journalistic ethics and integrity, but have actively contributed to the dehumanization of Palestinians, thereby supporting Israel's racist anti-Palestinian narratives, and enabled its violations of international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures in 2024 ordering Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, yet these rulings are often misrepresented in Western coverage. For example, a Wall Street Journal headline falsely claimed the ICJ rejected a ceasefire demand, when the real story was that it had found a “plausible” basis for genocide allegations.

Just as Nazi propagandists faced justice at Nuremberg for inciting hatred against Jews, Western news executives who played a role in perpetuating anti-Palestinian narratives leading to genocide must one day stand in a courtroom and face justice. Their role in amplifying Israeli propaganda, suppressing Palestinian voices, and sanitizing genocide parallels the media’s complicity in historical atrocities. News corporations like The New York Times, BBC, CNN, and CTV Globe Media, Global News, the CBC, and the Post Media group in Canada, should be held liable for compensation and restitution to Palestinians for their part in enabling the Palestinian genocide. Legal precedents, such as reparations paid by German companies and Swiss banks complicit in the Holocaust, suggest a framework for holding Western media accountable for their role in dehumanization and violence.

The bombing of Gaza’s last Catholic church is a stark reminder of the Palestinian exception, where Western media selectively highlights certain tragedies while ignoring others based on cultural, racial and religious prejudice. This anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, rooted in decades of skewed coverage, dehumanizes Palestinians and has enabled Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

 

Edward Said’s Covering Islam remains a prescient warning of how media shapes narratives to marginalize entire populations. By prioritizing Israeli narratives, amplifying unverified claims, and erasing Palestinian context, Western media mirrors the propaganda tactics of media in Nazi Germany, desensitizing audiences to Palestinian suffering.

The time for accountability is approaching when Western news corporations and their executives must face justice for their complicity, and ultimately provide restitution to Palestinians for their role supporting and enabling Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. Only through such reckoning can the cycle of dehumanization of Palestinians be broken, a more truthful narrative about the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinian people emerge, and decades of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda be rewritten. 
  
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