Saturday, December 4, 2010

Orwellian terms of war

Language is everything to the propagandist.  Symbols are carefully selected and manipulated to deceive and lead the audience to swallow the propagandist's message.  No contrary message is offered or tolerated.

Take for example, Reuters lexicon of war.  Whereas Reuters has a policy strictly proscribing use of the word terrorism except when quoting directly from a source (unless the source is Israeli, in which case Reuters takes the liberty of censoring the quote), the agency has no compunction adopting Arab rhetoric intended to conceal and sanitize their genocidal mission and methods:
Armed struggle has a powerful appeal among the inhabitants of the occupied territory, where the rival Fatah faction has been extending influence since a civil war with Hamas in 2007, [Hamas leader Khaled] Meshaal told a conference in the Syrian capital...
"The resistance is facing huge challenges, especially in the West Bank," Meshaal told a meeting of leading pro-Hamas politicians, writers and thinkers opposed to the U.S.-supervised peace process between the Palestinians and Israel.
"Our inalienable rights are threatened with extinction if the scene in the West Bank does not change by launching the resistance against the Israeli occupation and the settlements," he added...
Meshaal, who lives in exile in Syria, said only armed resistance would keep the Palestinian cause alive, despite Western aid to Abbas and his forces.
Note how Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis serves as a mouthpiece for Meshaal, citing full, detailed quotes including the use of incongruous language drawn from WWII (resistance) absent quotation marks around that term.  Oweis himself, parrots the term resistance sans inverted commas.

The story contains no explanation of, or reference to the Hamas Charter with its explicit call for the liquidation of Israel and the genocide of all its Jewish inhabitants.  For Oweis, this would undermine his effort to portray the Palestinians as a people simply seeking their national rights and Hamas, their champion.

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