Israeli colonization of mainstream Western media

From the invasion of Iraq to Israel's war on Gaza, Western media has pushed distorted narratives with impunity, but global solidarity with Palestine still grows, writes Salim Nuqul. (By Getty Images)

Western media outlets, having been colonized by Israel, misrepresent the truth about the struggle for the Liberation of Palestine, with an intrinsic bias toward Israel.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution summed up the media's role as a Zionist bulwark in a letter to US students protesting against the complicity in genocide of their respective universities.

• How the Media are colonised by Zionism 
  How the Media are colonised by Zionism

  The Israeli regime has colonized the mainstream media.

On May 30, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution published a letter he had written to protesting students on US campuses.

The letter began: 'as the page of history is turning, you're standing on the right side of it'. Amongst his words of advice was a statement about the role of the media, ‘the global Zionist elite, who own most US and European media corporations, or influence them through funding and bribery, has labeled this courageous, humane resistance movement, as terrorism’.

To Western ears, this may sound like an exaggeration or a simplistic account of how the media works, but let us examine the various elements of the media system and how it is influenced.

• Iran's open letter to US university students 
  

The first, and perhaps the most important element to note, is that setting the tone of coverage in Western media is the role of official sources, defining what is deemed legitimate violence and what is not.

Thus, in the case of Palestine, Zionist regime sources have a built-in advantage over those of the resistance.

This is why we see the overwhelming blanket coverage of Zionist inventions like the 40 beheaded babies claim or the mass rape thesis, or even the claim that Hamas killed 1,200.

These claims have been debunked time and again since October 7, but they still retain a meaningful grip on the Western imagination.

Even more fundamental than that is the definition of terrorism, which is embedded in the counterterrorism apparatus of most of the countries in the West

For example, between 2003 and 2015, neoconservative counter-terror policies were adopted by the UK, EU, Netherlands, France, and Spain.

These policies moved away from a law enforcement approach and adopted a policy based on radicalization in which non-violent ideas, values, and, practices come to be seen as suspect and are subject to state sanctions.

A fundamental and primary threat is seen to come from Islam, but concepts such as ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamic Terrorism’ derive in origin substantially from the efforts of Zionist intellectuals, with a specific impetus from Benjamin Netanyahu himself, via a conference organized in 1984 in Washington D.C.

As a result, because official sources inside a particular country are more dominant than those of a foreign power, such as the Zionist entity, any news about political violence or Islam, the security and intelligence sources of France, Spain, or the UK predominate, but Zionist assumptions have already been baked into these policies.

The mainstream media is locked into a structure of misinformation about political violence, which itself is influenced by the Zionist entity and by the structural preference for the views of genocidal Zionists over those of their victims.

• Coverage of  war on Gaza biased in favor of Israel