Holding the Press and White House Accountable: Solomon’s Afterword on the Gaza War
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In Norman Solomon’s new Afterword in the paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, the author excoriates the White House for arming a genocide with assistance from a negligent press. Solomon tracks events following Hamas’ killings and kidnappings of Israelis on October 7th, a few months after publication of the book in hardcover. The 31-page Afterword indicts the Biden administration for complicity in Israel’s genocide, a horror facilitated by Pentagon media stenographers who covered up, ignored or under-reported U.S-Israel war crimes
As executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Solomon values truth in reporting, a rarity in a country where the press fails to report near trillion-dollar military budgets that defund urgent needs at home despite Americans living one paycheck away from desperation, even homelessness.
Solomon’s lucid Afterword: The Gaza War exposes the lies, half-truths, omissions and pivots of President Biden, Secretary of State “rules-based order” Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan as they bemoan the “unintentional” killing and wounding of tens of thousands of Gazans, most of them women and children who had nothing to do with October 7th.
“After ten weeks of the carnage, it was big news on December 12 when Biden got around to voicing some unhappiness with Israel’s ‘indiscriminate bombing,’” writes Solomon, explaining that during this time a duplicitous Biden was green lighting and fast-tracking “enormous U.S. shipments of weapons and ammunition to Israel – including one-ton bombs – so that indiscriminate bombing could continue.”
Solomon’s addition to his War Made Invisible tells the truth in harrowing detail, reflecting the author’s commitment to accuracy in journalism and political discourse. A collection of Solomon’s “Media Beat” columns, published from 1992-2009, won the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Solomon’s incisive analysis and scathing foreign policy critiques are also hallmarks of his other books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) published in January 2003, two months before then-President George W. Bush ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In Afterword: The Gaza War, Solomon demonstrates a knack for narration, offering a cringe-worthy snapshot of Biden’s callous detachment from the suffering in Gaza. Solomon describes the President in late February hosting a photo op at an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, where Biden ruminated on the prospects for a ceasefire. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden tells the press before strolling off holding his ice cream cone.
Meanwhile, the author points out, it was five months into Israel’s killing spree before a compliant Washington Post finally reported the US was able to secretly deliver to Israel more than 100 separate weapons transfers without public debate since the transfers fell below the dollar threshold that required congressional notice and approval.
Apparently the Biden administration could read the tea leaves – the majority of Americans wanted an end to the killing – and so the weapons were transferred quietly lest the public throw stones at the White House or a shoe at President Biden. After all, according to Solomon, the US was supplying Israel with 80% of its imported weapons to bomb Gaza’s hospitals, schools, UN refugee centers and so-called “safe” zones to which the Israeli military directed tens of thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge.
Readers remembering New York Times stories about individual Palestinian suffering may judge Solomon as too harsh on corporate media and its guest pundits, but these stories, Solomon notes, rarely blamed the White House because “… the narratives of catastrophe were short on zeal for exploring causality – especially when the trail would lead to the US ‘national security’ establishment.”
Either the corporate media knew of the Biden administration’s culpability or chose not to know – both worthy of derision.
In examining mass media complicity, Solomon reminds us of The Intercept’s findings: the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times coverage of the war’s first six weeks minimized Palestinian suffering with editors and reporters employing 60-1 the term “slaughter” to characterize the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians and using “massacre” 125-2 to describe the murder of Israelis versus Palestinians.
Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, a grassroots anti-war organization, chastises the press for ignoring Israel firing artillery shells loaded with white phosphorus at civilians in Gaza. White phosphorus can burn its victims down to the bone, cause them to blink spasmodically until blind or struggle to breathe before dying from asphyxiation.
To the skeptic, Solomon offers abundant examples of media bias, including press failure to cover the declaration of UN experts who in March, 2024, issued a statement: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.”
The most inspiring passages – the pages that restore our faith in reporters on big media’s payroll – describe how courageous journalists, including those at CNN, risked their lives and careers to cover Israel’s bombardment and starvation of over two million people in Gaza, nine out of ten internally displaced where “trauma in Palestine is collective and continuous,” according to the Chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Solomon tells us that reporters at some of the largest news outlets – the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune – signed a letter in November, 2023, denouncing their employers for “dehumanizing rhetoric that served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” A month later the Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern over the Israeli military’s pattern of targeting journalists and their families, citing a journalist killed wearing press insignia and other journalists whose families were threatened by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Referencing a report in The Guardian, Solomon writes of internal dissension at CNN, where reporters, including star veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour, decried editorial policies demanding disgraceful regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and censorship of Palestinian voices in what amounted to “journalistic malpractice.”
Broken up into sections, peppered with news quotes and congressional grilling of the Secretary of Defense, Solomon’s Afterword presents a rare and valuable synthesis of post October 7th events and bedfellows.
Presidents can get away with genocide as long as the press gives them a free pass.
Building on themes in his War Made Invisible, Solomon reveals the human toll of an imperial U.S. foreign policy. The new edition with Afterword: The Gaza War is a must-read for policy makers, academics, activists and anyone wondering how war criminals in the White House can cry crocodile tears that pass for real anguish.
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