Why The Powerful Always Paint Their Side As The Victims
On Friday Israel began a two-day attack on Gaza which as of this writing has left a total of 27 Palestinians dead, including a pregnant woman and a baby.
Moon of Alabama documents how the mass media have been consistently depicting this attack as a “response” to a Hamas rocket attack, suggesting that Hamas were the initial aggressors and Israel merely responded in self-defense, yet Hamas is very open about the fact that the rocket attack was done in retaliation for two Palestinian civilians who were killed by Israeli snipers. MoA cites an excerpt from a 2011 Louis Allday blog on Israel’s extensive history of painting all of its aggressions as acts of self-defense:
If one consults only mainstream media for information on the conflict in Palestine, what is immediately striking is that Israel appears to be in a permanent state of “retaliation” — a phrase which immediately confers at least a modicum of legitimacy or justification upon the act to which it refers. Israel is never presented as the aggressor and however much its actions are condemned — which they are by some mainstream sources — they are invariably portrayed as a reaction to some form of provocation. Conversely, missiles launched from the Gaza Strip or southern Lebanon are habitually portrayed as “attacks” — never “retaliations,” even if Israel has launched a devastating missile strike immediately prior to the event — as so often is the case.
The public is subliminally conditioned to understand that Israel is a permanent victim that on occasion is forced to lash out in response to the ostensibly irrational and unruly aggression of illegitimate non-state actors that encircle it.
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