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In his new book,\u00a0How to Sell a Genocide: The Media\u2019s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza<\/a><\/em>, media critic Adam Johnson provides a painstakingly detailed indictment of the Fourth Estate, showing how cable shows, newspapers, and online news sites helped build support for the mass killing of Palestinians.<\/p>\n Mondoweiss<\/em>\u00a0U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Johnson about his study, his conclusions, and the shifting public rhetoric on Israel.<\/p>\n All royalties from Johnson\u2019s book will be donated to the\u00a0Middle East Children\u2019s Alliance<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mondoweiss:<\/strong>\u00a0You talk about the talk about the \u201cISIS-ification\u201d of Hamas after October 7 and how the American public was primed for revenge by the media in many ways. Can you talk about how they were covered? Was it simply a retread of the kind of stuff we saw during the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d or were there new elements?<\/strong><\/p>\n Adam Johnson: There definitely was a real plug and play aspect to it, so it was similar to what we saw after 9\/11, references to Western civilization. We actually counted the amount of times [the media] used the term civilization and in contrast to Hamas. The idea of a barbaric Asiatic horde. We quantified and counted how many times words like \u201csavage\u201d and \u201cbarbaric\u201d were used, which obviously have racial connotations, but for some reason get past the liberal, anti-racism censors.<\/p>\n So, there was a plug and play aspect to it. In the first few weeks, the Israeli government paid for a campaign to say Hamas is ISIS. #HamasisISIS, they paid for it on Twitter and on other social media. This was used by everyone from Emmanuel Macron to Lloyd Austin to Netanyahu to Joe Biden because it called upon a very specific mode of nihilistic jihadist violence.<\/p>\n Now, of course, ISIS was a foreign-funded mercenary group that had no organic support in the countries and territories it conquered and, of course, was it was largely a sectarian death squad. Hamas, of course, is not that, and indeed is supported by Shia governments and itself is Sunni. In fact, it goes to war quite frequently with ISIS, especially these ISIS-linked gangs that are backed and funded by Israel and the United States within Gaza.<\/p>\n So the comparison is obviously absurd, but they\u2019re not really dealing with the most sophisticated analysis here, right? They\u2019re attempting to appeal to the lizard brain American public by calling on racist tropes and cliches and, of course, the beheaded babies being being the first and most, I think, consequential one. This idea that [Hamas] would gratuitously behead 40 babies. Obviously, you only do that if you\u2019re a sadistic, nihilistic, antisemitic, whatever.<\/p>\n Of course, that was bullshit. Everyone who knew anything about Hamas knew it was bullshit. It wasn\u2019t their MO, had never been their MO before, but this was passed along by everyone from CNN to NBC reporters to Media Matters to a lot of liberal center-left media. President Biden himself said he saw pictures of it, which obviously he couldn\u2019t have because it\u2019s not something that ever happened.<\/p>\n It was debunked, but the damage was already done. The public was already primed for revenge. This early attempt at atrocity propaganda, and these lurid tabloid claims of hyper-gratuitous violence, were essential to really removing the idea of a ceasefire, which necessarily requires Hamas to remain, if not in power, an armed force within Gaza, from the realm of of political seriousness, as I detail in the book.<\/p>\n This was affirmed by everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders, who went on CNN and CBS in November and December of 2023, respectively, and said you can\u2019t have a ceasefire with someone like Hamas who wishes to destroy Israel. Never mind that the government in Israel wishes to destroy Palestine and Palestinians quite explicitly in their charter.<\/p>\n So this kind of moral preening became the way in which you delegitimized calls for a ceasefire, again, in this kind of faux universalist, faux liberal language. This weird thing developed, where calls for a ceasefire became per se a moral endorsement of Hamas, but again, Palestinian civil society calling for a ceasefire is not a moral endorsement of Israel.<\/p>\n This was a totally new and ad hoc talking point that sort of just came and went, but it was all about buying time for Israel to change the so-called facts on the ground and create the conditions and the axioms of genocide such that by the time we really did begin to normalize the concept of a ceasefire, especially after the Biden White House redefined it in February and March of 2024, the basic axioms of genocide were already in place. It was too late because really the intervention to stop the genocide could have happened between October to December 2023.<\/p>\n Once that time came and went, thanks largely to to liberal center-left media, defending and deflecting the left-wing criticism or anti-genocide criticism for the White House, the genocide was a\u00a0fait accompli<\/em>. It was pretty much already decided because the so-called war on Hamas, or the goal to \u201celiminate Hamas,\u201d was already tattooed into the liberal psyche as something that was both possible and morally defensible, despite the fact that it was obviously neither.<\/p>\n [Former Secretary of State Antony] Blinken himself told Netanyahu behind closed doors on January 16th, 2024, according to Andrea Mitchell at NBC News, that defeating Hamas was militarily was impossible, which is obviously true for anyone who knows anything about anti-colonial resistance.<\/p>\n Whatever one thinks of Hamas is irrelevant. They still have a a meaningful amount of support within Palestinian society. They are, of course, not alien to Palestinian society. They are Palestinian themselves. The people who make up Hamas and Hamas leadership are largely orphans of of previous Israeli bombings, and they themselves are the descendants of those ethnically cleansed from parts of Israel.<\/p>\n So, this idea that they were this exogenous kind of ISIS-like entity was not something that anyone who understood Gaza note knew to be true, but it became this kind of go-to media cliche, even so-called progressive foreign policy leaders like Matt Duss and Center for International Policy (CIP) made the argument that Israel had a right to sort of target Hamas, which is, of course, absurd and was never something that was ever going to happen in any meaningful sense, because the fundamental grievances are secular.<\/p>\n They\u2019re fundamentally political. The solution was and remains a fundamentally secular and political issue. This wasn\u2019t the sectarian conflict that you that it was often portrayed to be, despite, of course, the Islamist flavor of Hamas, which of course is is real and it exists, but it\u2019s not ISIS, right? It\u2019s not this kind of nihilistic death cult backed by Emirati or Saudi money. It is its own independent and resistance movement with organic support within the Palestinian society, although, of course, it\u2019s not uniform.<\/p>\n I wanted to talk about this trope that anyone who has followed these issues has seen implemented many times. We saw it repeatedly with Biden and now we see the media do it with Trump.<\/strong><\/p>\n You write about \u201cHelpless Biden,\u201d \u201cFrustrated Biden.\u201d and \u201cfuming, deeply concerned\u201d Biden. It\u2019s this idea that the most powerful person in the world, a guy who is leading a government that\u2019s giving Israel weapons, is growing upset with Israel. They\u2019re always allegedly nearing a breaking point with Netanyahu.<\/strong><\/p>\n Can you talk a little bit about that trope, how it gets implemented and why and what kind of what you make of it?<\/strong><\/p>\n The liberal establishment and the White House itself very quickly stopped defending the \u201cwar\u201d on principle. It was indefensible.<\/p>\n So, they quickly realized that they needed to maintain the arms and the military support and intelligence support, but needed to look like they were gesturing towards something like a ceasefire or proto-ceasefire to get human rights groups, you know their left wing flank, anti-genocide protesters, and of course, foreign leaders who increasingly were disgusted by what they were seeing, off their back.<\/p>\n So a typical kind of liberal, or liberal imperialist framework, that dates back to the British Empire is this idea of what I refer to as third partying, which is to [frame] the U.S., not as an active participant in a genocide, which they manifestly were, but a humanitarian third party attempting to intervene and broker some kind of so-called ceasefire.<\/p>\n When the Uncommitted Movement developed in February of 2024, and was looking to pressure Biden in these kind of pro forma primaries, specifically in Michigan, they realized they had a major PR problem on their hand, and they could not defend the \u201cwar\u201d as such. So what they did is that they pivoted to this idea that, oh, they were secretly working to end it, but it was this process that was going to go on indefinitely.<\/p>\n Of course, it ended up going on for almost a year. The ceasefire theater, the ceasefire performance was a way to distance Biden from the genocide he was supporting, while feigning anger and disappointment publicly.<\/p>\n This had antecedents, specifically around Saudi Arabia, when [Trump] was leveling Yemen in 2020. Biden came into office, he said he was going to make Saudi Arabia a pariah. Then, of course, he turned around and shipped them half a billion dollars in weapons. He needed to look like he was very concerned and hand-wringing over human rights while just keeping it business as usual.<\/p>\n So you have a system where a bunch of Biden aides anonymously, for the most part, leak these stories about how angry he is behind closed doors. This happened pretty much right away. In November of 2023 you had these angry Biden stories that were leaked to the press. I did an analysis of the sourcing for these. 92% or 93% were anonymous Biden aides, or they were Aaron David Miller, whose job was to come along and talk about how helpless and angry Biden was.<\/p>\n This was something that got repeated again and again.\u00a0NBC News<\/em>\u00a0from November of 2023: \u201cThe gap between Biden administration and Netanyahu government over Gaza future is widening.\u201d So here we have it widening.\u00a0CNN<\/em>\u00a0from December of 2023: there\u2019s \u201cunprecedented tensions between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel.\u201d Barak Ravid of\u00a0Axios<\/em>, January of 2024: \u201cBiden running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza hits war as Gaza war hits 100 days.\u201d\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0February of 2024: \u201cBiden moving closer than ever to breach with Netanyahu over war in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n So this is what I call the asymptotic break with Netanyahu that is always about to happen, but never happens. Probably the funniest one was from\u00a0Politico<\/em>\u00a0in March of 2024: From \u2018I love you\u2019 to \u2018asshole\u2019, How Joe Biden gave up on Bibi after decades of building a close personal friendship with Netanyahu. \u201cJoe Biden has had it with the Israeli prime minister. Now he\u2019s hitting him hard and it may be working.\u201d<\/p>\n New York Times<\/em>, May of 2024: \u201cBiden\u2019s clash with Netanyahu over Gaza. Here\u2019s Barak Ravid again: White House cancels meeting and scolds Netanyahu in protest over video.\u201d That one is referencing one of their myriad war crimes caught on video.<\/p>\n So you would think that after literally the hundredth version of this article is published, where there\u2019s some alleged asymptotic break with Netanyahu, some supposed anger, there\u2019s usually a phone call that they know is recorded. You would think the average skeptical editor, well, Wait a second. We\u2019ve done this article now 100 times. It\u2019s been nine months, eight months, whatever it is. Why are we still doing this asymptotic break that never happens? There\u2019s never any withdrawal of actual weapons. There\u2019s never any policy change. It\u2019s just rhetoric and supposed kind of palace entry and theory of mind reporting without any, again, material shift.<\/p>\n I compare it to the difference between a sketch and a plot. A plot moves forward. A plot has beats, characters develop. The rabbit\u2019s foot goes from you know Istanbul to Prague, right? Something happens. Whereas a sketch is the same three or four gags with slight variations.<\/p>\n This was fundamentally a sketch. It was not a plot. Nothing ever happened. It was the same story written over and over again, often by the same journalists. The most egregious example is [the\u00a0New York Times\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0] Peter Baker, who wrote dozens of these articles. He writes an article basically saying that Biden\u2019s pressure on Netanyahu is working because Israel has delayed its Rafah invasion. Then two days after that article comes out, Israel invades Rafah, kills thousands of people and levels a city of 850,000.<\/p>\n So in retrospect, we look at that article about Biden\u2019s anger and pressure on Netanyahu working. Was that a genuine reflection of a reality or was it a way for the Biden White House to wash its hands of an invasion they knew was about to happen? It\u2019s very clear, I think, what it is. It\u2019s a public relations trope to distance the White House from the carnage that it is manifestly funding, arming and supporting because they knew it was unpopular, they knew it was unpopular with their base, and they knew it\u2019s just indefensible, and they knew that the people who occupy the Biden White House are thinking one thing and one thing only, which is, I cannot be tainted with this genocide. I need to distance myself from it because later on, when I\u2019m looking for work at Center for American Progress or liberal think tanks or other administrations, I can say, we were secretly working on a ceasefire.<\/p>\n The whole premise is, of course, absurd. Israeli officials have since said that Biden never asked for a ceasefire. They\u2019ve confirmed that verbatim. So this was an entirely alternate reality designed for liberal and liberal consumption so people could point to it say, \u201cLook, he\u2019s working on a ceasefire\u201d It\u2019s like the peace process. It\u2019s this thing you can point to.<\/p>\n The corollary to this was the \u201cHelpless Biden.\u201d Even if he wanted to, he couldn\u2019t change it because this or that excuse, which I call, moats of rationalization. There\u2019s always this thing that\u2019s imposed on him by an outside mysterious geopolitical dark matter. Oftentimes, it does veer into antisemitism because it\u2019s this idea that, oh, he can\u2019t take away weapons because then AIPAC will punish them. Wait, he\u2019s the most powerful person in the world. Why not? Or you hear that Netanyahu has manipulated him. This pictures [Biden] as a doddering old fool being manipulated by the oriental wiles of Netanyahu, whose charm and and manipulation is unmatched. You can just manipulate every president.<\/p>\n However, the Occam\u2019s razor answer is that they both agree on the genocide, but politically it\u2019s so toxic they have to create an alternate reality where there\u2019s this alleged ceasefire negotiations that, again, never go anywhere because they\u2019re fake and they\u2019re not real. Egyptian mediators basically said as much in late 2024. They said this is for public consumption in the United States. These are not real negotiations. To the extent to which there were some real negotiations, it was over a temporary pause for a week or two for captive exchanges, but never a lasting ceasefire. That was never on the table, something since affirmed by Israeli officials who were in the room, because there was never any credible threat of withdrawing support.<\/p>\n Without that credible threat..then how sincere are you? The analogy I use is what if [Los Angeles Dodgers Manager] Dave Roberts before Game 7 of the World Series. If he says, I\u2019m going bench Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and the entire starting lineup, and out our AAA team, but don\u2019t worry, I really want to win the World Series. If he had said that people would commit him to an insane asylum. You would think he had lost it. Meanwhile, Biden can say, I\u2019m forfeiting my entire leverage, which is military support and weapons, but don\u2019t worry, I secretly want a ceasefire.<\/p>\n Well, clearly you don\u2019t. Otherwise, you wouldn\u2019t have you wouldn\u2019t have benched Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Shohei Ohtani. There was this bizarre alternate universe where there was a fake ceasefire. I\u2019m just some guy on Twitter and in 2024, I wrote a piece in\u00a0The Nation<\/a><\/em>\u00a0saying, the supposed ceasefire negotiations are fake. They\u2019re never going to go anywhere. Then cut to almost a year later and it takes Trump coming into office to impose a temporary pause, which, of course, was later later dissolved.<\/p>\n What prophetic skills did I have? I had none, zero. I just could read the actual things they were saying, which were nonsensical. This ceasefire theater that we dragged on and on and on for months, these palace intrigue stories about how they were working really hard on it. If Dave Roberts brought in the AAA team, I\u2019m sure they would genuinely be working really hard to to win the World Series. However, the whole premise where you take out your leverage means any discussion or any argument after that is utterly meaningless.<\/p>\n This was something that liberal and center-left media indulged constantly. CNN, MSNBC, just thousands of articles about these ceasefire talks that were all Potemkin ceasefire. They were all theater because their fundamental premise made no sense.<\/p>\n Then from that premise, you had basically what was just kayfabe. It was theater. It wasn\u2019t real.<\/p>\n In addition to print media and online media, you also cover some of the cable news shows and morning talk shows. This is a place where people a lot of people get information, actually. You center in on\u00a0Morning Joe<\/em>, which is a popular show. We were talking about the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d earlier and during that time, cable shows almost never had antiwar voices on, or actual Iraqis. By the same token, I imagine very few Palestinians have actually been invited on these shows. What did you see when you took a deeper look at these programs?<\/strong><\/p>\n That was kind of agenda setting, because Biden\u2019s favorite show was apparently\u00a0Morning Joe<\/em>, which he watched obsessively. Of course, he didn\u2019t need\u00a0Morning Joe<\/em>\u00a0to be a glib Zionist and a racist, but it certainly didn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n Morning Joe<\/em>, in the year of study we did, had not a single Palestinian guest. Meanwhile, it had a revolving door of Israeli officials, generals, and Zionist cry bullies like [Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was apparently, from what I can perceive, sleeping in the green room at MSNBC. He was there all the time. [Senator] Adam Schiff and him, I guess, just have a bunker there like in the Navy.<\/p>\n These shows, in the two years that I studied from October of 2023 to October of 2025, and it\u2019s probably still the case, but I haven\u2019t done a recent study in the last six months, did not feature a single Palestinian guest with one exception. That was CBS Face the Nation on November 7th, 2023. They had Palestinian ambassador from the UK on for six minutes or maybe seven minutes, and that was it.<\/p>\n So,\u00a0Meet the Press<\/em>,\u00a0This Week<\/em>\u00a0with George Stephanopoulos and CNN\u2019s\u00a0State of the Union\u00a0<\/em>with Dana Bash and Jake Tapper did not feature a single Palestinian guest in the first two years of the genocide, and I don\u2019t think have yet today.<\/p>\n That\u2019s pretty extraordinary, especially when you count the dozens of Israeli officials and, of course, dozens more U.S. officials. You know, Tony Blinken, I suspect the reason why is less so because there wasn\u2019t some enterprising producer who didn\u2019t think about it. I think that they had a very hard time finding a native informant with any credibility within the world of of Palestine, like Palestinian civic society or diaspora. It\u2019s not like other countries the U.S. tries to destroy where you have like 10% of the elite you can kind of peel off to go in there and spout off the liberal Zionist lines.<\/p>\n For a while, they tried to bring in [Palestinian activist and attorney] Noura Erakat, who did the forward for my book and is a very well-respected legal scholar. She wouldn\u2019t play ball. She went on CBS and ABC and they would try to ask her, \u201cdo you condemn Hamas?\u201d questions. She would reject the premise and go on about war crimes. They deleted it from the internet and never called her back. It\u2019s detailed in my book and detailed in her forward actually.<\/p>\n So, they had a hard time finding native informant Palestinians to come on and spew the kind of liberal Zionist clap trap that\u2019s the acceptable discourse. [Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0editor] Jeffrey Goldberg did manage to pull a few out of obscurity from NATO funded think tanks, but, really, it\u2019s basically three guys. They have no connection to Palestinian civil society and they have no respect within that world because, again, the fundamental premises of liberal Zionism is inherently dehumanizing. You\u2019re effectively asking Palestinians to co-sign their own their own erasure from society. There\u2019s no market for it, so you just ignore Palestinians. And to the extent to which you have the other side, you bring on [former Executive Director of the UN World Food Program] Cindy McCain to appeal to their humanity and that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n [The double standard] is also reflected in the output of how Palestinians are spoken about versus how Israelis are spoken about, which I detail with a lot of data. With Israeli deaths, their use of emotive terms versus Palestinian deaths, which are in a passive voice and don\u2019t have emotive terms and are spoken very clinically and in very anodyne terms. This is reflected both on cable news and print.<\/p>\n We saw these anti-genocide protests across college campuses during the genocide and you write about how these were covered by the media. We saw these show trials with these university presidents, who were basically pushed to resign over this alleged boom in antisemitism on their campuses. A lot of your chapter on this is about how anti-Zionism and antisemitism are openly conflated by the media. Talk about the overall coverage of those protests and the way in which mainstream media framed the debate and the battle on campuses.<\/strong><\/p>\n Every single media outlet had to have their very serious antisemitism on campus trend piece. If you actually go through the [antisemitic] examples they cite, as we did in excruciating detail, we went through five of the major stories, NBC News, CNN, etc. The vast majority of cases are just people doing open pro-Israel advocacy being counter-protested or, in some cases, attacked. Now, that isn\u2019t to say attacking people is justified, but they were not attacked or accosted or confronted because they were \u201cJewish students.\u201d<\/p>\n They were accosted or approached or yelled at or counter protested because they were engaging in open Zionist political activity, oftentimes recruiting for the IDF. Again, all while human rights groups already had consensus that this was a genocide.<\/p>\n So this constant smol bean \u201cJewish students\u201d framing for people engaged in open Zionist activity, oftentimes on the payroll of pro-Israel organizations and lobbying groups, was really how you\u2019ve pumped up these numbers and inflated this so-called threat. Now, there was there was a handful of genuine antisemitic incidents where people on college campuses were attacked because they were visibly Jewish, but they were not attacked by pro-Palestine students. These were unrelated or kind of vigilante. They had no connection to any of these pro-Palestine organizations, no connection to any of the pro-Palestine groups or Jewish Voice for Peace or any of these groups.<\/p>\n There was this constant conflation, innuendo, and smearing of campus protests as a hotbed of [antisemitism] that had zero empirical basis and, of course, many of these groups were paid to go try to incite responses and to try to play up this victim narrative. These pro-Israel vigilantes on campuses, like for example, at UCLA and Columbia, sprayed chemical agents or attacked people with batons, but these attacks were, of course, never framed as anti-Palestinian racism or anti-Muslim bias or Islamophobia. They were framed in entirely secular terms. Meanwhile, almost all pro-Palestine activity was framed in the sectarian discourse as attacks on Jewish students.<\/p>\n Of course they also erased and removed from the conversation the meaningful Jewish leadership in these campus campus protests. They erased and removed the participation of Jewish groups and religious and cultural celebrations at these at these campus protests. They framed it purely as Jewish students versus proto-Hamas, proto-pogroms. Then the ADL would step in and present themselves as the arbiter of of the platonic Jewish voice, [even though] if you look at the opinions of Jewish Americans under the age of 25 on college campuses, the majority of them believe that Israel is committing genocide.<\/p>\n So even the ADL\u2019s own self-professed, self-appointed representation of this platonic Jewish student is not reflected in polling. This constant sectarian framing, this mopey framing, this disingenuous conflation of Zionism with Jewish culture and ethnic and religious life was baked into the cake of how these fake antisemitism panics manifested.<\/p>\n Throw that on top of the fact that you had these show trials where where high profile university presidents were were dragged in front of Congress by Republicans and asked these dopey, racist leading questions. \u201cDo you condemn, globalize the intifada?\u201d They would say, well, no, because that\u2019s just an Arabic term that means uprising. And then the headline became \u201cPresident refuses to to condemn calls for genocide on Jewish students.\u201d The implication being that there was a call for a genocide on Jewish students. Of course there wasn\u2019t. There was\u00a0zero\u00a0<\/em>calls for genocide of Jewish students. It was a pure hypothetical about an Arabic term that they misrepresented and demagogued based on reptile-brain ignorance about what the word intifada means.<\/p>\n This led to a full-blown moral panic and this really culminated in panic around [former Harvard University president] Claudine Gay in December 2023 and January 2024. You had this meta-scandal with her plagiarism. We compare the coverage to the coverage of the killing of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old in Gaza who was mowed down along with her family by Israeli troops. It was an act of of just abject horror that went viral around the globe, and could have been a culminating moment of galvanizing against the genocide.<\/p>\n This is completely completely ignored in the U.S. media. It doesn\u2019t make the front page of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0once. It isn\u2019t mentioned on MSNBC in the one month after her murder once. It\u2019s mentioned on CNN twice in two segments and they\u2019re throwaway segments in the middle of the day that no one really notices or pays much attention to.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, you have the Claudine Gay \u201cscandal\u201d which completely consumes media. What\u2019s important to understand is that it\u2019s a completely meaningless story. It has no inherent news value whatsoever at all. It\u2019s just a manufactured scandal about someone who may, or may not, have committed plagiarism 20 years prior, but they needed a scalp. They needed someone to be disciplined and punished to send a message, not only for university administrators to crack down on protesters, but for protesters, saying, we\u2019re gonna ruin your life and we\u2019re gonna call you an antisemite and that\u2019s gonna stick with you for the rest of your life.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll give you an example. This is a one month study for after the respective Claudine Gay and Hind Rajab stories broke. Claudine Gay was mentioned in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a079 times versus two mentions of Hind Rajab.\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0had Claudine Gay mentioned 23 time versus two for Hind Rajab. AP was was eight versus one.\u00a0Politico<\/em>\u00a0is 57 mentions of Gay versus zero mentions of Hind Rajab. CNN had 409 mentions on air of Claudine Gay and 29 mentions of Hind Rajab. MSNBC had 210 mentions of Gay versus zero Hind Rajab.<\/p>\n What I assert in the book is, objectively the Hind Rajab story is more important than whether or not Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, may or may not have committed plagiarism\/not condemned this expression that nobody said. This is totally all smoke, no fire. It\u2019s a Jeremy Corbyn-esque antisemitism scandal where, if you look at the details, you can\u2019t even remember where it started. It\u2019s just this thing that metastasizes and has no basis in reality.<\/p>\n I think that\u2019s a huge indictment. By the way, that same month where [Gay\u2019s scandal was covered so much] we also compared it to child deaths because that month was the highest month of child deaths. It was roughly 3,000. At the same time, there 95 articles in the survey of mainstream media articles we covered,\u00a0Washington Post, New York Times, Axios<\/em>, etc. There were 95 articles about Claudine Gay and only six focusing on child deaths, which again, there were 3,000 child deaths during that survey period..<\/p>\n It\u2019s simply not relevant. It gets a passing mention. You get maybe one article here and there. But meanwhile, we have this constant hysteric nonstop centering of this made-up Claudine Gay scandal, which was predicated on, of course, just disciplining university administrators to crack down on on students. It\u2019s a very it\u2019s a very efficient way of doing it because by bringing them up in front of the cameras in Congress and calling them all antisemites, they effectively have to adopt these rules to \u201cprevent antisemitism.\u201d You look at the rules and it\u2019s just cracking down on campus protests, free speech, and pro-Palestine activity and smearing them all as antisemites.<\/p>\n I wanted to bring this to current day. We talked about the Iraq War, where there was this infamously terrible reporting from the mainstream media. Having said that, the war was a lot more popular among the US population than Trump\u2019s bombing of Iran has been. By the same token, as you know, we\u2019ve seen dozens and dozens of polls showing that the U.S. population has soured on Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship. This was true of Democrats for a while, but the genocide has just pushed it to an unprecedented level. I think the last poll I cited in a story was an NBC News one showing that only 13% of Democrats view Israel positively. Israel could obviously count on Republican voters for a long time, but even that seems to be shifting, at least among young Republicans and we see some dissent in Trump\u2019s base even.<\/strong><\/p>\n In terms of media coverage, do you think this will change anything? It\u2019s been interesting to see you know people like Rahm Emanuel fluctuate their public position\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, the J Street cutoff military aid thing is a Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham talking point.<\/p>\n Yes, exactly. That\u2019s the new thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s quite clever.<\/p>\n This idea that Israel should pay for its own genocide is the big stance now. But it still represents a rhetorical shift, so these people certainly see the writing on the wall.<\/strong><\/p>\n It certainly signals something, right?<\/p>\n Yes, it signals something.<\/strong><\/p>\n It signals a lack of popularity. I mean, the point of the liberal media propagandizing against Palestinians and the genocide was to buy time, you can\u2019t control people seeing videos and the and the realities of a genocide. You can\u2019t kill 80,000 people and hide it. And you can\u2019t really justify it or explain it because we\u2019re so numb to the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d claptrap. It doesn\u2019t really have the same impact anymore. But the goal is to buy time and that\u2019s why so much of the propaganda detail is actually not really on substance. It\u2019s on sophistry and non sequitur and helplessness. It\u2019s this feigned helplessness.<\/p>\n Liberals would always prefer to be incompetent rather than evil. You see this when people would say, \u201cI don\u2019t understand why Biden is not reining in Netanyahu. Doesn\u2019t he know he looks weak?\u201d They don\u2019t care. They want to look weak because they avoid ideology like it\u2019s the plague. You can\u2019t engage in ideological battles, so liberals frame this as something that they were that they sort of lived outside of or had no hand in. No one really made the substantive ideological defense of Zionism or Israel or their \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d Maybe people like Joe Scarborough would, but it didn\u2019t really have any juice. It was so obviously bullshit.<\/p>\n Trump comes in and you have this emerging post-liberal order where it doesn\u2019t actually really matter what most people think of Israel because what matters to them isn\u2019t whether Israel is popular, it\u2019s more about [quashing] protest and campus disruption. Are you putting sand in the gears of capital. No? Well, then we don\u2019t really give a shit what the polling says. It doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/p>\n The people who lead the Democratic Party are Hakeem Jeffries, who\u2019s the largest recipient of AIPAC money in Congress, what a coincidence, and Chuck Schumer, who professed to Bret Stephens last year that his number one goal is to keep the left pro-Israel. They\u2019re not going to leave lose they lose their jobs anytime soon. No one\u2019s calling for that. [Even] AOC supports Hakeem Jeffries.<\/p>\n As long as they\u2019re in charge of the party and you have enough time and we have another specter of JD Vance in 2028. You fund enough money and use enough slick pro-Israel propaganda into the empty shirt that the [Democrats] run in 2028, then it doesn\u2019t really matter. It\u2019s not like they\u2019re going to nominate Rashida Tlaib. They\u2019re going to say whatever they say. Again, when Biden ran in 2020, he said he wanted to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. And guess what? He got an office and he shipped them half a billion dollars and it didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n So I\u2019m sure whoever runs in the Democratic primary in 2028 will have highly calibrated, J Street-curated lines about Israel, but as long as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are in power, and as long as the Republicans remain a staunchly Zionist party, which they will for the foreseeable future, it\u2019s not going matter. It functionally is not going to matter. That\u2019s why this \u201ccutoff U.S. military aid to Israel\u201d line, with a very technical definition of aid being literal funding versus just arming, is so brilliant because it moves it into a non sequitur. It sounds anti-Israel, but it\u2019s a policy initiated by the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Lindsey Graham.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a reason for that because they understand they can read a poll, just like you and I can, and they know how terminal their support is, especially among Democrats. [Their goal] is to take away this line of, \u201cDo you want your taxpayers killing toddlers?\u201d Well, your tax dollars [won\u2019t] killing toddlers, but..American bombs and weapons are so who cares who pays for it?<\/p>\n The Ellison family could pay for what we give to Israel with the money in their couch cushions. The money doesn\u2019t really matter. What matters is keeping the military support and the arms and the technological advantage and the PR support among major media. That\u2019s what matters. This is now a 85-15 issue with with Democrats, but I think one thing one can\u2019t underestimate how sophisticated the liberal Zionist and liberal imperialist framework is at nullifying, numbing, co-opting, and obscuring opposition to this system of violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mondoweiss.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/9780745351650-664x1024.jpg\")
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\n<\/strong>[Former Biden Principal Deputy National Security Adviser] Jon Finer, [former Spokesperson for the United States Department of State] John Kirby basically also lived in those respective green rooms and nothing from any Palestinians.<\/p>\n