Labels are central to the politics of media. And no label has been more powerful than “terrorist.”
A single standard of language should accompany a consistent standard of human rights, which the world desperately needs. “If thought corrupts language,” George Orwell wrote, “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”
No amount of rhetoric from defenders and apologists of Hamas can change the reality that the group committed mass murder in Israel two weeks ago. The horrific and indiscriminate killings of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians of all ages meets the dictionary definition of terrorism.
It is equally true that no amount of rhetoric can change the reality that the Israeli government has engaged in mass murder during the last two weeks. Israel’s horrific military actions in Gaza have already killed several thousand Palestinian civilians of all ages. That too meets the definition of terrorism.
But U.S. media outlets routinely avoid evenhanded use of the “terrorist” label, which is applied to organized Palestinian killers of Israelis but almost never to organized Israeli killers of Palestinians.
This reflexive media bias does not in any way mitigate the horrendous crimes committed by Hamas in Israel. Nor does it in any way mitigate the horrendous crimes that are being committed — on an even larger scale, and increasing daily — by the Israeli government in Gaza.
By any consistent standard, if we refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization, then the same description should fit the Israeli government. But such balance and candor remain intolerable in mainstream media and political discourse. It would be too honest. Too real.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres engaged in some candor on Tuesday, saying that while there was no possible excuse for the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, they had not occurred in a moral or political vacuum, and decades of suffering by the Palestinians had played a role. Such honesty was greeted with outrage by the Israeli government.
Terrorists and their defenders always have excuses when their tactics include the ruthless killing of civilians. But we’re choking on a nonstop supply of smoke-blowing rhetoric — what Orwell called political language “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Some have contended that the word “terrorist” should be excluded from news accounts because it is an inherently subjective judgment. After the 9/11 attacks, the Reuters news service explained its policy this way, in the face of considerable criticism and derision: “Throughout this difficult time we have strictly adhered to our 150-year-old tradition of factual, unbiased reporting and upheld our long-standing policy against the use of emotive terms, including the words ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter.’ We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions, identity or background.”
That position seems highly reasonable, but remains an outlier among major media outlets. We seem to be stuck with the “terrorist” word. Ending the routinely slanted, selective use of the "T-word" would certainly be an improvement; more realistically, we should at least recognize and reject its flagrantly skewed usage. It functions in sync with an array of tilted reporting patterns.
Since the latest Israeli assault on Gaza began, U.S. news outlets have repeatedly used euphemistic words like “strike,” “hammer,” “pressure” and “retaliate” to blur the meaning of what it means to human beings when a densely populated area is attacked with thousands of powerful bombs. There has been some vivid reporting from within Gaza, but the overwhelming bulk of coverage of the Israeli government’s wide-ranging terrorism has been abstract, even impersonal, in ways that coverage of Hamas terrorism has not been.
One factor that makes this blurring easier is that Hamas' atrocities mostly occurred up close, with the murderers and murdered often facing each other, whereas the Israeli atrocities have been committed from high above or at a great distance, with bombs and missiles. While international media outlets like Al Jazeera English and the U.S.-based news program "Democracy Now!" have consistently provided high-quality and frequently heart-rending reportage about the carnage and terror in Gaza as well as in Israel, such humane and equitable reporting has been scarce among mainstream U.S. media outlets.
Americans have been acculturated to assume, consciously or otherwise, that killing people with high-tech weaponry from the air is a civilized and even "normal" way to go about the business of war — if the U.S. or its allies are doing it, that is — in sharp contrast to the low-tech efforts of adversaries. This outlook assumes a privileged vantage point, far from those on the receiving end of “sophisticated” firepower coming from the U.S. government and its clients and allies.
Apologists for Israel point out that Hamas intentionally targets civilians and the Israeli military does not. That is a distinction without a difference for the people killed, maimed and terrorized by the Israeli military — commanded by leaders who know perfectly well that the likely civilian death toll will be high. The cover story about not “targeting” civilians is a comfortable rationalization for the slaughter of civilians that self-righteously denies the obvious reality.
Given the extreme pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian spin of U.S. mass media — a more evenhanded use of the “terrorist” label is highly unlikely. But we should strive to challenge the biases at work, and to understand the deadly consequences.
