A HIERARCHY OF HUMAN WORTH

 

The latest attempt to assassinate Donald Trump was so feeble that it bordered on slapstick. But the American media still went into overdrive, providing saturation coverage. Meanwhile, real mass death — the kind occurring in Gaza and Lebanon —  barely registers.

 

THE LATEST supposed attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump was so feeble it bordered on slapstick. The alleged attacker never got within sight of him. He didn’t even breach the ballroom where the annual White House Correspondents dinner was being held. Trump himself said the would-be assassin was stopped by security some fifty yards away. In truth, it was a security scare, not an assassination attempt — yet it was instantly elevated to the status of a national trauma.

And so the American media did what it does best: inflate spectacle into significance. CNN, Fox News, and the rest rolled out 24-hour coverage, filling airtime with hosts and pundits who had nothing new to say once the initial adrenaline wore off. The story became a self-licking ice cream cone — endlessly consumed, endlessly reproduced, endlessly empty. I suspect it left many Americans vaguely unsatisfied and has probably helped to encourage the speculation that the whole incident was staged to benefit the unpopular Trump administration.

Meanwhile, real mass death — the kind that doesn’t fit neatly into America’s political theatre — barely registers.

According to the Associated Press, more than 2,100 people have been killed in Lebanon in the past six weeks, including 172 children. These children were not caught on front lines. Many were killed inside their own homes, in strikes that hit apartment buildings where families were together at night or during daily routines.

The AP has described children crushed beneath the rubble of their own houses, as in the case of Taline Shehab, who was asleep when missiles collapsed the building above her, killing her and her father instantly. It has recounted the death of 11-year-old Jawad Younes, killed while playing football with his cousins, the missile striking his uncle’s home without warning.  It has documented the killing of 10-year-old Zeinab al-Jabali, whose father had already lost a brother — also aged ten — to an Israeli missile in 1982.

These are not abstractions. These are named children, with families, histories, and futures that no longer exist.

Israel rarely names the target of these strikes, even as it acknowledges that children are being killed. The Israeli military claims it is hitting Hezbollah militants, but has provided little evidence to support its assertions about killing 'hundreds' of operatives. International law experts say it is impossible to assess proportionality — a core requirement of the laws of war — because Israel does not disclose who or what it is targeting.

Yet this sustained killing of civilians — including children asleep in their beds — receives only cursory mention in the Western press.

Gaza, for its part, has vanished almost entirely from mainstream coverage. Israel has barred international journalists from entering since October 2023, leaving Palestinian reporters to document what human rights groups and UN experts have labelled as genocide. Their reporting rarely appears on American television. It circulates instead on social media and on independent outlets, or not at all.

At least 235 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza in the past two years, deliberately targeted by the Israeli military.

The humanitarian collapse continues. UNICEF recently reported the killing of two drivers delivering clean water — attacks that worsen an already severe water shortage and fuel the spread of preventable disease in Gaza. But this, too, barely breaks through into the western mainstream media.

The contrast is obscene. A failed 'assassination attempt' that never came close to succeeding becomes a media obsession, but the killing of children in Lebanon — children crushed in their homes, children playing football — is treated as background noise.

This is not just a failure of western journalism. It is a hierarchy of human worth. The Western media has decided that these deaths do not matter. That Arab children do not matter. That the destruction of homes, families, and entire neighbourhoods is less important than a political spectacle in Washington.

The result is a public consciousness shaped not by reality, but by selective visibility.This is a world in which some lives are grievable and others disposable. A world in which the deaths of children in Lebanon and Gaza are treated as unfortunate but unimportant — tragedies that cannot be allowed to disrupt the narrative flow.

An AP report ends with a mother visiting her son’s grave, listening to warplanes overhead. 'The most precious thing, my heart, is gone' she says. 'What more can they do?'  

The American media has already answered that question: they can pretend he never existed.