“If you are insistent on having a strong opinion on the matter, I must…urge you to take the time to listen to [the Martyr Made] podcast.”
— Ben Petersen, former host of Latter-day Peace Studies presents: Come, Follow Me podcast
If you listen to this podcast, this is your trigger warning for violence and rape.
“The huge public relations deficit the Arabs have in the West is something that largely defines how people today, especially in the United States, perceive [the Israeli-Palestinian] conflict. Unless you’re an activist for one side or the other, and you’re just a person who’s got a job or goes to college or goes to school, and that’s what you do, unless you’re a committed activist to one of these two sides, you probably never give a second thought to Palestine unless it’s in the news. You notice when it’s in the news, but that’s it. Like, when else would you think of it? And the only time it seems to make the news is when the Arab population gets frustrated and violence starts popping off. If the only time you hear about a situation is when one side starts becoming violent, it can be very easy to think that everything is just daisies and roses in between the outbursts and then every once in a while a terrorist decides to get all explodey and then something happens.
When the first you hear about it every time is when Palestinians start shooting and your television anchor is framing violence from the other side as the quote “Israeli response”. It’s always an “Israeli response” in the US media. It’s never a Palestinian response to what’s happening to them. It’s an Israeli response to the initiation of violence by the Arabs. That’s how it’s always presented. And our media usually treat the Arabs like a mindless volcano that just sort of sits dormant for a while and you can kind of build your life around it and hope that it doesn’t blow up. But then every so often, for no discernible reason at all, it starts rumbling and decides to explode.
And now the Israeli military has to respond to this initiation of violence by the Arabs. Then what usually happens? What usually happens, you turn on your TV, it’s CNN, one of those talking head shows, and there’s a pro-Palestinian person coming on TV and trying to talk about the conditions that the Arabs are being forced to live under, and the crimes being committed by the other side that never make it onto Western news channels, and then the other talking head just accuses them of making excuses for the violence, and then the 20 seconds is up, and they’re on to the next story. You hear the same line every time. The pro-Palestinian person says, “Look, I don’t condone terrorism, but it’s nevertheless important to…”
What? Stop. When the other side has already gotten you to preface your argument with, “I don’t condone terrorism”, they’ve won the argument. They’ve taken the center of the ring on that one. Well, this is something the Zionists had mastered in Britain 90 years ago, by the 1920s. The Arabs started out way behind the curve, and not only have they not been able to catch up, the nature of how this dynamic builds on itself and the accumulated frustration and reactions after having no voice at all for so many decades has only dug them deeper and deeper into the hole.
This is more a commentary on the way the narrative is shaped in contemporary media rather than a comment on either of the two parties in this conflict, but I hope I’ve made it pretty clear by this point that in my mind, the roots and causes of everything that happens in this part of the world are incredibly complicated. It’s not a story of one side being good or evil.”–Darryl Cooper
Check out the Fear and Loathing episodes of the Martyr Made podcast on Spotify or wherever podcasts are found.