{"id":286688,"date":"2024-05-01T07:28:37","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T07:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=286688"},"modified":"2024-05-03T07:04:53","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T07:04:53","slug":"university-protests-dominate-media-coverage-obscuring-the-true-horror-of-gaza-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=286688","title":{"rendered":"University protests dominate media coverage, obscuring the true horror of Gaza war"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lorraine Ali \u2013 Los Angeles Times Apr 29, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The mention of mass graves is so deeply disturbing that it\u2019s preferable to think of such wartime horrors as dark remnants of another era, chapters of history we\u2019ll never repeat. The Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik revolution, Nazi Germany, El Salvador, Bosnia-Herzegovina.<\/p>\n

The fairy tale that the human race has evolved beyond such barbarism was shattered (again) last week when reports surfaced that three mass burial sites had been unearthed in Gaza. The shocking development should have made headlines, but it barely made it onto most people\u2019s radars.<\/p>\n

The media are instead hyper-focused on how we protest atrocities rather than the atrocities themselves.<\/p>\n

Anti-war demonstrations on college campuses dominate conversations and coverage about the Israel-Hamas war. Every imaginable news source \u2014 legacy print outlets, user-generated posts, broadcast and cable news \u2014 has its sight set on the encampments and rallies breaking out on campuses across the nation.<\/p>\n

The protests are worthy in their own right for drawing attention to critical issues. They\u2019ve raised awareness (and hackles) around the staggering Palestinian death toll, antisemitism, occupation, the oft-forgotten hostages and free speech. The largely peaceful demonstrations, dealt with ineptly at best by university heads and law enforcement, are rightfully the leading national story, and its stars are a generation that many older folks had written off as apathetic.<\/p>\n

In SEO terms, the protests present the perfect setting for a media blitz. They\u2019re taking place at colleges and they come with powerful images and ample social media content. As an example, protests at USC unfolded live on television across various local stations, with choppers capturing the action from every imaginable angle. They\u2019re also an easier way into the war, bringing the Mideast conflict home to America without the horror of witnessing a real battle.<\/p>\n

But blanket coverage of the uprising by students is so omnipresent, it\u2019s overshadowed news from the very war they\u2019re protesting.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a stunning lack of coverage and outrage following an announcement Friday by Palestinian authorities that they\u2019d uncovered 390 bodies from mass grave sites <\/a>around Gaza\u2019s Nassar and Shifa hospitals, facilities that were raided<\/a> and destroyed in Israeli strikes. The bodies were reportedly found in the pits, buried by bulldozed debris, after the Israeli Defense Forces ended operations in the region<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Women and children are among the deceased; the majority are still unidentified. Some of the dead were allegedly found stripped naked with their hands bound behind their backs. \u201cIt indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations,\u201d said Ravina Shamdasani, a chief spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker T\u00fcrk.<\/p>\n

The sheer barbarity of these scenes may explain why they haven\u2019t garnered more attention. It\u2019s simply too awful to process, so we turn away.<\/p>\n

And if the discovery of mass graves is a hard story to watch, it\u2019s an even harder one to cover. Israel continues to restrict international journalists\u2019 access to Gaza, so there are fewer reporters there to bear witness. For those who are there, it\u2019s one of the deadliest wars on record for media workers, and civilian casualties are more than 34,000. If reporters do survive, they\u2019re faced with intense investigative digging to get to the truth. And when their stories are finally reported, they\u2019ll be lambasted, trolled and harassed by one side \u2014 or both \u2014 for their perceived bias.<\/p>\n

But we need answers, and short of an independent investigation (the Biden administration has left it up to Israel to investigate itself), we\u2019re left to guess whether war crimes have or have not been committed.<\/p>\n

The dearth of information is partly due to the contraction of American newsrooms. Journalism outlets big and small have lost the resources, access and the expertise to cover wars like they once did. It\u2019s also up to elected officials to draw attention to potential war crimes, especially when the U.S. plays such a central role in the conflict.<\/p>\n

Politicians like Mike Johnson have instead been busy raising their profiles by inserting themselves into the Palestinian-Israeli mire. Painting himself as a defender of student safety, the Republican House speaker instead put hundreds if not thousands of anti-war protesters in danger \u2014 Jewish students included \u2014 by conflating their pro-Palestinian stances with sympathy for Hamas. \u201cThe things that have happened at the hands of Hamas are horrific, and yet these protesters are out there waving flags for the very people who committed those crimes. This is not who we are in America,\u201d Johnson posted Thursday on X, formerly Twitter.<\/p>\n

It was refreshing to see that ABC News didn\u2019t just quote him<\/a> and move on, as many other news outlets did. The network reported that there had been no documented cases of demonstrators waving Hamas flags. Such details matter when the safety of students is at stake.<\/p>\n

But critical questions remain around Gaza\u2019s mass graves, and there\u2019s the matter of accountability.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe grave in question was dug \u2014 by Gazans \u2014 a few months ago,\u201d tweeted Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force. \u201cThis fact is corroborated by social media documentation uploaded by Gazans at the time of the burial. Any attempt to blame Israel for burying civilians in mass graves is categorically false and a mere example of a disinformation campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israeli officials said the corpses buried near Nasser Hospital had been exhumed to check whether they were those of Israeli hostages. An Israeli military official said<\/a> that all remains were then \u201crespectfully returned to their place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gaza authorities affirm that graves were dug before the Israeli military\u2019s arrival, but allege that the IDF added bodies to the site. Gaza Civil Defense said that only about 100 people were buried in graves before the IDF raid, and that 390 to 392 bodies (accounts vary) had since been recovered.<\/p>\n

The widely reported slaughter of innocent Israelis and Palestinians, and the taking of hostages, prompted the protests in the first place. Now, the cries of demonstrators are the story. But we can certainly pay attention on both fronts, even if one of them requires a lot more work and emotional girding. It\u2019s our moral imperative to pay attention or risk becoming bystanders as another dark chapter on wartime atrocities writes itself.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As reports emerged of mass graves being unearthed in Gaza, many containing the bodies of women and children, the Western mainstream media remined firmly focused on protests about alleged Israeli crimes, not the crimes themselves <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":286687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-7-10-gaza-war"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=286688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286689,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286688\/revisions\/286689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/286687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=286688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=286688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=286688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}