Grotesque social media comments have followed legacy media's belated decision to highlight the forced starvation and genocide of Palestinians, writes Mick Hall.
As Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza enters its 22nd month, with the effects of the blockade of Gaza and the destruction of its means of sustaining life creating increasingly horrific scenes as forced starvation kills off its inhabitants, Western media began highlighting the images.
It led two public figures in the South Pacific to openly mock those scenes in a manner that defies belief, making you question how someone could be so disconnected from their humanity. It also raises questions as to how it was that they felt so comfortable publicly deriding a people facing an agonising extermination.
New Zealand journalist Sean Plunket, founder of digital news talk site The Platform, posted on X (formerly Twitter) at the weekend: “I’m really concerned about the mass outbreak of anorexia in Gaza.”
His Tweet has been lodged with the Accountability Archive, a crowdsourced record of journalists, politicians, and public figures endorsing or encouraging the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and/or defaming pro-Palestinian activists.
The Platform was, until recently, openly funded by the Wright family, who maintain a majority shareholding and whose net worth was put at $400 million by the National Business Review last year. The Platform has about 68,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Plunket has been a public figure in New Zealand for decades, having been a host at public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ), fronting its flagship news programme Morning Report for 13 years, as well as being a political reporter for TV3 and a host at Newstalk ZB.
He has regularly hosted New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Labour opposition leader Chris Hipkins on The Platform.
The ease of his whimsical diabolism this week suggests Plunket did not fear a backlash from his listeners, nor the prospect of politicians like Hipkins and Luxon boycotting his show. Maybe he had reason to trust his assessment.
Both politicians seek to attract the votes of Plunket’s listeners and a bit of genocide mockery probably won’t stop them pragmatically agreeing to future interviews, unless a massive public outcry changes the calculus.
Plunket is known for his Zionism and callous, provocative remarks, and his latest comment is likely to be met with semi-indifferent eye-rolling, more than mass revulsion.
This is in no small part due to popular perceptions of Israel and Gaza having been clouded by newsroom leaders who have declined to adjudicate ‘contentious claims’ around genocide, ignoring the available evidence of UN bodies, preeminent genocide scholars, human rights groups and Israel’s history of colonial dominance, with ethnic cleansing as its raison d'etat.
In doing so, under the guise of maintaining ‘due impartiality’ and editorial standards, media outlets have brought into disrepute the very concept of public interest journalism.
New Zealand’s outlets, including the two state broadcasters, have also platformed Zionists just as extreme as Plunket as sources of expert opinion in their cowardly pursuit of false balance, adding another disturbing layer to their failure to meet the informational needs of democratic citizenship. Public clarity over the issue may have increased pressure on the government to meet its international legal obligations to stop the genocide unfolding further.
The same applies across Tasman, in Australia, where security analyst and former Liberal Democrats federal elections candidate Daniel Lewkovitz compared a starving Gazan child to a photo of sickly ET, a reference to a scene in Steven Spielberg’s ET, the Extraterrestrial movie. The security analyst and media figure quipped:
“This is a 3-year-old Palestinian infant named Iti. Iti is in a Gaza hospital where he has been starved and hasn’t been able to phone home thanks to the IDF.
Please tell the New York Times, NBC, The Age and the BBC. The world needs to know.”
Lewkovitz, himself an alternative media figure, was apparently responding to a harrowing front age photo in The Age newspaper showing a woman holding a skeletal child.
A belated treatment of Gaza as an issue of moral salience by Western media outlets, acting with typical herd-like synchronicity, came after a collective call by Western leaders to end “the war” in Gaza, as the sight of Gazans blatantly gunned down at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) pseudo-aid hubs demanded a diplomatic shift of optics.
The mere recognition of Palestinians as human, after 22 months of wall-to-wall dehumanisation as a means of greasing the machinery of Western support for Israel’s onslaught, it seems, was evidently too much for people like Lewkovitz and Plunket.
For them, scenes of children starving elicit feelings of hatred and twisted contempt, not empathy, remorse or disgust for what has been allowed to take place. They project their own darkness onto their victims, while refusing to acknowledge their pain.
Their obscene comments should be recognised as part of a Western pathology, a growing condition that seems to be bringing us closer to civilisational breakdown or worse.
Although these characters are nowhere near representative of public opinion, their vileness cannot be divorced from Western society.
Dozens of research papers over the past decade have found empathy, to varying degrees, dropping across the West.
Some put it down to a selfish individualism running parallel with neo-liberalism, society’s dominant ideology. Many trace its roots back much deeper, to a Euro-Atlantic civilisation based on colonial extraction and capitalist expansion, one also marked by periodic internal wars over rights of conquest, where human empathy was lost through dehumanisation of subject races and domestic class hatred.
Both seem true.
By the 1990s, the rise of neoliberalism had destroyed communities and even to an extent the memory of what it was like to be part of one, with society reduced to atomised individuals seeking fulfilment through consumerism.
The sale of state homes and the rise of a landlord class — ‘mum-and-dad’ investors, as the ideologues like to describe them — reflected this trend. Many members of this expanding class grew up in poverty, while protected by the relative safety net a state house afforded their struggling parents.
These formative experiences didn’t translate into a type of class consciousness or conviction that change was required to deal with such precariousness and misery in society. They sought personal salvation instead, entering into a financialised housing market that offered, with the connivance of governments and banks, the chance of owning a second home or maybe even a dozen.
These types of new societal relations, coupled with media indoctrination bringing a fragmented sense of the world, partly account for the fact street demonstrations in support of Palestine across Western capitals did not reach the critical mass or intensity necessary to move their governments to act against Israel and defy the US hegemony overseeing its violence.
The public’s ability to see beyond narrow interests and their precarious situations is being contained, along with their capacity to engage in collective action for a wider common good. Student protests that began on US campuses and direct action by other groups like Palestine Action that challenged this trend have been met with increasing state repression.
Layered on top of this is a legacy issue of centuries of imperialism, which has brought a pervasive sense of Western cultural superiority, used by governments to justify neocolonial relations with the rest of the world. The sad truth is that racism remains part of the organisational DNA of mainstream Western political thought and culture.
For many, the Palestinian question is about the ‘other’s’ inability to live by reason and abide by Western values and democratic norms, a wider Arab problem going back centuries. This racist, deluded, Eurocentric position takes Israel as the embodiment of these supposed values. It is a view accepted by much of the Western establishment, as well as by Plunket and his unhinged Zionist friends.
Despite evidence of genocide and ethnic cleansing now busting through establishment narratives, many still cling to the position that Israel has a right to defend following October 7, 2023 and that unintentional ‘collateral damage’ of is a sad reality of war.
This ahistorical position presented by Western governments and their media stenographers helped enabled Israel’s genocide, now in its later stages, as remaining Gazans face expulsion and their land colonised, a constant experience of Palestinians during 77 years of occupation.
The ethnic cleansing of Gaza has also been helped by the fact that a few countries like Australia and New Zealand still refuse to even recognise Palestinian statehood, joining tiny US vassal states in the Pacific region in following the direction of Washington.
So long as imperialism and its ideological justifications find structural expression within our political and media establishments, conditions will remain
This article was first published by Mick Hall in Context.
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