HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
ADAM H. JOHNSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework.
How to Sell a Genocide is a thorough indictment of US corporate media's role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitised Israel's war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanised the Palestinian people.
Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonisation of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the US media.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: When I read "deep, original data-driven analysis" in the book's synopsis, I realized the read was going to be tendentious, probably ill-sourced, and reflective of the need to marshal supporters of anti-war, pro-Palestine leanings into willingness to take action. That's exactly what I got.
Since I am all those things I find it hard to fault this read for being what it's supposed to be. If you are not all those things, or are anti-all those things, you'll be very unpset by this read. I myownself think you might should read it anyway.
War crimes are committed when there are wars. Both sides commit them. But do not lose sight of the fact that one side started this war. They're looking for you to believe they didn't start it, the other side did by doing something terrible. That terrible something did not suddenly occur in an otherwise peaceful and ordinary world, though. And that terrible something did not involve bombing runs by sophisticated jet aircraft, advanced anti-personnel drone attacks, destruction of thousands of homes, missile attacks on hospitals...in other words, we're being fed false equivalences to disguise a long-term and intentional act of ethnic cleansing, perhaps rising to the standard of genocide set after the Holocaust. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak authoritatively on that. I'll say that my reading of the bloviations from each side of the conflict leads me to think there is a case to answer and a darn compelling body of evidence to compel the case to be brought in the court of public opinion.
That's why this book exists. It's a highly emotional read. It's a highly emotional subject. It's part of an effort to break through the saturation-bombing of the pro-Israel lobby's PR firms.
Are there angels in this conflict, the pure and unsullied victims of hateful demonic criminals?
No.
There are only ordinary human beings who need, but don't have, the basics you and I walk outside our intact homes to access: streets we can use easily, food stores with the planet's abundance piled up for us to choose from, water pipes to quench our thirst, sewer pipes to take our waste away to keep us healthy, hospitals to care for frail bodies' failure points, living parents and children and loved ones who, when they leave our sight, are statistically likely return to us alive and as well as they left.
War is wrong. Always and eternally wrong. It is war that created this oongoing crisis. War is a decision, a set of decisions, made by people who want *something* so much they're willing to trade your life for it. Never theirs, or the wars would be short.
I don't think for a single second that Humankind will ever be free of war. If reading words could stop war there wouldn't still be any of them.
Reading words is a slow process, thinking about them slower still. Changing minds, firing up action in people who don't like doing hard things, that kind of thing that words *can* do, all has to start somewhere.
I ask you, please, for the sake of people you have never met and will never meet: Start the process in yourself now. Pay it forward, to the best of your ability, and know from the beginning that you won't "win" or "succeed" or "finish the job" because the work is never, can never be, complete as long as there are human beings.
But let's make sure the greatest possible number of people live out their "one wild and precious life" as poet Mary Oliver taught us to think of it.
