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Islamophobia has spread widely in the western world in recent times and especially after 9/11. During this period, populism and right-wing politics reached their peak and Muslims were portrayed as a terrorist nation.
In this whole process, the media had a big influence. Although we often hold the Western media and their traditions as role models, when it comes to Muslims, we don’t see the objectivity and integrity they claim.
Their perception of Muslims is a stereotype that perhaps every Muslim is an extremist and their women are imprisoned.
Here we cannot fully blame the Western media, which has a huge hand in the policies of the Muslim countries themselves, the faults of the Muslim Ummah, the internal politics of the Western countries, and their continuous relationship with the Muslim world for the last five decades or so, among them is being in a state of war.
It is said that the first casualty in any war is truth and reality. When the clouds of war are over and everything is blurred, it is difficult to distinguish the good from the bad. This is a great opportunity for those whose business is to shine their shop by spreading hatred, who have no regard for human life, morals and values and for whom journalism is the propagation of their ideas instead of a sacred mission. They use this opportunity to spread propaganda.
Propaganda has always been the work of governments and warring forces to mix truth and falsehood for their own interests and propagate it over and over again in such a way that a common mind gets confused that the truth of these claims. What is truth and what is fiction? Now here media is used to achieve the goal.
The work of journalism is not only to inform the public or to tell which event happened when, but also to inform the truth and the real situation.
If the job of the media is simply to give information, then this job is and can be done much better by the public relations department of every government and organisation. But the problem is that they are one party and it is futile to expect them to tell everything based on facts. A common man is not capable enough to verify every news by fact check and other sources.
It is the job of a responsible media to fulfil this duty to its consumers, which the western media has unfortunately failed to do during the recent war between Hamas and Israel. For decades, however, the Western media has presented a particular point of view regarding Palestine and Israel, which is that of their governments.
Under this thinking, the Palestinians are systematically portrayed as inferior human beings, but since October 7, 2023, the issue once again became part of the global headlines but the role of Western media has been criminal.
First, the news spread that Hamas had beheaded 200 children, this news was exaggerated by all the western media, it was published on the cover of various newspapers, it was broadcasted on TV for a long time, the American president tweeted and said that I have seen those pictures myself. But it later turned out to be a lie, denied by the CNN reporter who reported it.
The matter does not stop here. For 70 years, the innocent Palestinian people have been living under Israeli oppression, they are dying day and night, but everything in the Western world starts from October 7, as if before October 7 everything was peaceful and people were living happily.
for the people of Gaza and the West Bank every day is and has been hell. It didn’t start from now. According to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Hamas attacks did not happen in a vacuum.
Israeli casualties are being exaggerated in the Western media, no doubt the killing of civilians is unjustified, but we have the same passion and condemnation for the casualties on the other side and the war crimes committed by Israel are not visible.
If Hamas is a terrorist, as claimed by the media of the United States, Britain and the Western world, then according to the same principle, Israel should also be called a terrorist.
After all, targeting hospitals, firing on journalists, massacring children, cutting off water, food and electricity to 2 million people, besieging them and indiscriminately bombing them and then carrying out ground operations with tanks, millions of people Displacing people and genocidal them for years, isn’t it terrorism?
This is not the first time Israel has done this, it has a long history of such actions. Last year, his forces killed an American reporter for Al Jazeera, and we see no outrage in the Western media, which has yet to go after the Saudi crown prince over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. There is a specific mindset behind all this propaganda and adventure, and that is to show the Palestinians so cruel and humiliate them so much that they don’t seem human and the opinion of their own people becomes that they might be killed. It doesn’t matter that much. Exactly the same mentality that was used to justify the massacre of Jews in Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
This is why we see that when the BBC reports on Israeli casualties, it will say who killed them, but the attitude changes to the other side. So many Palestinians died, now God knows how, who killed them, there was a storm or punishment. In this whole scenario, if any dissenting voice is raised, it is called anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic.
If someone protests, the whole West bans him. What happened to Harvard students is still fresh. There is a need for the Western media to hold themselves accountable, to do their work instead of propaganda, to think of humanity instead of interests, and not to repeat the sin of the Iraq war once again.