The fog of the blog
While memories of it are in sepia, there was a time, not so long ago, when news lobbed into your driveway as opposed to your inbox. It was a time when anti-Israel sentiment was the domain of a left-leaning intellectual few and confined to university corridors.
EDITORIAL
While memories of it are in sepia, there was a time, not so long ago, when news lobbed into your driveway as opposed to your inbox. It was a time when anti-Israel sentiment was the domain of a left-leaning intellectual few and confined to university corridors.
It was a time when even keen observers were less likely to presume to understand the nuances of the regions’ geo-political contrivances, simply because they did not have easy access to reams of material on the subject. They were less likely to expound on intricate issues of foreign policy and diplomacy, let alone ascribe blame with certitude.
It was a time when to comment on an article you had to write a letter to the editor and send it by post. To share a news item, you had to cut it out. The landscape has changed.
The internet and the 24-hour news cycle has reduced discussion about the recent war in Israel to a shouting match of heart-string tugging, outrage-inducing, emotional platitudes with little regard for facts and even less for context.
Both sides of the argument are guilty of pruning the truth until all that remains are memes, hashtags, graphic images and emotive plight pieces. But there can be no doubt as to who is shouting loudest.
We all curate the internet to suit our slant. We cheer pundits who speak to our side of politics and decry those opposed, but while Israel does what it must to ensure the safety of its citizens, in the realm of public opinion it is taking a blood bath. The nature of the campaign against it is nothing new, but the scale and range have reached frightening proportions.
Avoiding noise on the conflict is approaching impossible. Stories about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees rebuking Hamas for storing rockets in Gazan schools go largely unnoticed. Footage of Israelis cheering air strikes goes viral.
No matter what you choose to read, Gazans are suffering terribly, and their affliction has captured the imagination of the mainstream and rightly so. The anti-Israel – and in some cases anti-Semitic – vitriol that follows is harder to understand. The implication that the death and suffering on the Israeli side is somehow comeuppance is repellant.
Why is people’s indignation less satisfied by laying the blame at the true source of this atrocity – Hamas?
The narrative of a brutal overseer, with its standard issue boot firmly pressed on the throat of a hopeless underdog; committing “war crimes”, “genocide” and perpetrating an “apartheid state” to crush the will of its peace-loving neighbour, has a better emotional hook. It also gets more clicks.
AJN STAFF
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