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The Complicit Lens: How Media Helped Normalize the Destruction of Gaza
On the latest episode of Scheer Intelligence, host Robert Scheer sat down with media scholar Robin Andersen for a blistering examination of how major American media institutions covered — and often concealed — the realities unfolding in Gaza.
At the center of the discussion is Andersen’s new book, The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, which argues that corporate media did far more than simply fail the public. According to Andersen, institutions like The New York Times and CNN helped manufacture a sanitized narrative that erased the historical roots of Palestinian suffering while shielding Israeli state violence from meaningful scrutiny.
Throughout the conversation, Scheer and Andersen return to a central question: What happens when the institutions tasked with informing the public become instruments of political messaging?
Andersen points to leaked newsroom directives reportedly instructing journalists to avoid words such as “occupation,” “ethnic cleansing,” and even “refugee camp.” The effect, she argues, was not merely semantic. It fundamentally stripped audiences of the historical and legal context necessary to understand Gaza itself. If Palestinians are never described as occupied people, then their resistance appears irrational rather than rooted in decades of dispossession and military control.
Scheer repeatedly stresses that this is not simply a failure of journalism, but a crisis of democracy and intellectual freedom. The conversation expands beyond Gaza into the repression seen across American universities, where students and professors protesting the war increasingly found themselves surveilled, punished, or accused of antisemitism. Andersen describes how campus protests were portrayed not as organic moral outrage, but as dangerous extremism requiring police intervention and political suppression.
The interview also confronts the growing contradiction at the heart of American political discourse: criticism of the Israeli government is increasingly treated as hostility toward Jewish identity itself. Scheer, drawing from his own Jewish background, calls this “a blasphemy against the Jewish people,” arguing that the history of Jewish struggle has long been rooted in universal human rights and dissent against oppression — not unconditional allegiance to state power.
One of the most striking parts of the discussion centers on how Palestinian voices — especially journalists documenting the destruction on the ground — were marginalized by establishment media even as they risked and lost their lives reporting from Gaza. Andersen argues that social media and independent outlets became essential because they bypassed traditional gatekeepers that often repeated official Israeli talking points without verification.
Scheer ultimately frames the crisis as one extending far beyond a single conflict. If governments, media institutions, and universities can collectively narrow the boundaries of acceptable speech around Gaza, then the implications for democratic society are profound. The issue is no longer only about what is happening overseas, but whether Americans themselves retain the ability to openly question power without fear of censorship, retaliation, or ideological policing.
By the end of the interview, Andersen delivers a stark warning: journalism that abandons accuracy, historical context, and moral clarity ceases to function as journalism at all. It becomes public relations for power.
And in moments of mass suffering, silence and distortion become forms of complicity.
Scheer Intelligence: Highlights
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add the intelligence comes from my guests. The title Scheer Intelligence was actually given to me years ago by KCRW before they ended the show after a good 20-year run. I never really liked the title, but there’s no question our guest today brings the intelligence.
Professor Robin Andersen is professor emerita at Fordham University, author and co-author of numerous books. Her latest is The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, available now through OR Books.
Robin, thanks for joining us.
Robin Andersen:
Thanks for having me, Bob.
Robert Scheer:
One thing that immediately stands out in the title of your book is your use of the word “genocide.” That alone has become controversial in American public discourse and largely avoided by mainstream media institutions.
At the same time, much of the world is increasingly using the term openly. We’re now seeing governments, legal scholars, human rights organizations, and even world leaders describing what’s happening in Gaza in those terms.
Your book really takes aim at how American media has handled this entire issue. So let’s begin there. Why did you write this book?
Robin Andersen:
What I try to do in the book is give readers a language to understand how the media distorted, denied, justified and ultimately normalized Israel’s actions in Gaza.
This has been described as the most documented genocide in history because Palestinian journalists on the ground risked and lost their lives documenting what was happening in real time. Yet at the same time, it has also become one of the most contested realities in modern media.
If you compare what people saw directly through independent footage and Palestinian reporting versus what was presented through corporate legacy media, it often looked like two completely different worlds.
And that distortion matters because governments can continue committing atrocities so long as media institutions help manufacture consent or obscure reality.
Robert Scheer:
And what’s striking now is how open some Israeli officials have become about brutality itself. The recent flotilla arrests, the treatment of detainees, even the public celebration of harsh tactics by high-ranking officials — it’s extraordinary.
Meanwhile, major media institutions still struggle to even describe what’s happening accurately.
So what exactly do you document in the book?
Robin Andersen:
I focus on the mechanisms of distortion.
We know media bias exists, but I wanted to examine the actual systems and editorial strategies that allowed journalists to obscure the realities on the ground.
For example, CNN staffers reportedly leaked internal directives showing journalists were discouraged from saying Israel killed Palestinians. Instead they were instructed to use passive language like “an explosion killed people.”
They were told not to use terms like “occupation,” “ethnic cleansing,” or even “refugee camp.”
That matters because once you remove the language of occupation or refugee status, you erase the political and historical reality Palestinians are living under.
Robert Scheer:
Exactly. This isn’t merely semantics. It’s a denial of reality itself.
People forget Gaza and the West Bank have been occupied territories since 1967. Palestinians there were not participants in the war between Israel and neighboring states. They became occupied people afterward.
And once you occupy people for decades while denying them voting rights, self-determination, freedom of movement and political agency, then you are fundamentally shaping every aspect of their existence.
But if media removes the language of occupation, then audiences never understand that context.
Robin Andersen:
That’s right.
The directives Andersen discusses in the book show how deeply embedded this framing became inside legacy media institutions. By removing humanitarian and legal language, journalists were stripped of the tools necessary to explain what was actually happening.
For instance, if reporters cannot discuss disproportionate violence, occupation, collective punishment, or international law, then the public loses the ability to evaluate events ethically or historically.
Instead, coverage begins and ends with October 7th as though history itself started there.
Robert Scheer:
And that framing becomes incredibly powerful because once history starts on October 7th, then Palestinians are presented only as aggressors rather than people living under decades of military domination.
That context disappears entirely.
I want to broaden this beyond Gaza for a moment because your book also touches on academic repression and freedom of speech in America.
What we saw on campuses was extraordinary. Students protesting the war were treated as threats to public order. Universities that once claimed to defend free inquiry suddenly cracked down on debate itself.
Robin Andersen:
Yes, and many of those students were incredibly informed. They understood the history, the occupation, international law, and the humanitarian consequences of what was happening.
But instead of engaging with those arguments, institutions framed them as dangerous, manipulated, or antisemitic.
At places like Columbia University, outside pressure groups and political actors increasingly dictated what could and could not be said.
Faculty members teaching Middle East history or discussing apartheid and occupation suddenly faced enormous pressure.
Some professors openly said they could no longer teach honestly under those conditions.
Robert Scheer:
And what’s especially grotesque is that this suppression is often carried out in the name of protecting Jewish people.
I say this as someone from a Jewish background myself: one of the great traditions within Jewish history is dissent — universal human rights, questioning power, speaking against oppression.
Yet now criticism of the Israeli state is increasingly treated as antisemitism itself.
That’s extraordinarily dangerous.
Robin Andersen:
It’s also deeply misleading.
Equating all Jewish identity with support for Israeli state policy not only distorts Judaism but can actually fuel antisemitism by collapsing an entire people into the actions of a government.
And many Jewish activists were among the most vocal critics of the war. Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, played a huge role in protests and demonstrations.
These weren’t fringe movements. They reflected widespread moral outrage.
Robert Scheer:
Meanwhile, legacy media institutions often seemed more interested in protecting official narratives than investigating reality.
That’s the extraordinary irony here. Independent journalists and decentralized media platforms often ended up doing more honest reporting than the institutions constantly presented as guardians of truth.
Robin Andersen:
Absolutely.
One of the core arguments in my book is that many legacy institutions abandoned fundamental journalistic principles.
Instead of skepticism toward power, they repeated official talking points without adequate verification.
Instead of investigating claims independently, they often amplified state narratives.
And when journalists on the ground contradicted those narratives, especially Palestinian journalists, their reporting was marginalized or ignored.
Robert Scheer:
So what we’re ultimately talking about is a crisis not only in journalism, but in democracy itself.
Because if media institutions narrow what can be said, universities punish dissent, and criticism of state violence becomes taboo, then democratic discourse itself begins collapsing.
Robin Andersen:
Exactly.
And this is why media literacy and historical understanding are so important right now. People need tools to recognize propaganda, euphemism, and the manipulation of language.
Because once language itself becomes controlled, public understanding becomes controlled as well.
Robert Scheer:
Robin Andersen’s new book is The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.
Robin, thank you for joining us.
Robin Andersen:
Thank you, Bob.
Robert Scheer:
And thanks to everyone listening to this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Until next time.
gvie me a highlight trancsacsit for publication the best stuff
Scheer Intelligence Highlights: Robin Andersen on Media, Gaza and the Collapse of Journalism
“The media distorted, denied, justified, and allowed Israel to get away with a genocide.”
Robin Andersen:
“What I try to do in my book, Bob, is give us a language to understand how the media really distorted, denied, justified, and allowed Israel to get away with a genocide.
They say that this genocide is the most well-documented one in history because Palestinian journalists on the ground gave their lives documenting it. But at the same time, it’s become one of the most contested realities because establishment media created an entirely different narrative.”
“If you remove the word occupation, you remove the core of the conflict.”
Robin Andersen:
“The New York Times instructed journalists not to use words like ‘occupation’ or ‘refugee camp.’ But when you remove those words, you erase the historical and political reality Palestinians live under.
If you can’t say occupation, then you can’t explain why Palestinians are resisting. If you can’t say refugee camp, then you erase the Nakba and the displacement that created Gaza in the first place.”
“This isn’t semantics. It’s the denial of reality itself.”
Robert Scheer:
“You’re not just removing context — you’re denying reality in the most extreme way.
The Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank have lived under occupation for decades. They didn’t have voting rights, self-determination, or sovereignty. Yet media institutions stripped away the very language necessary to explain that reality.”
“Legacy media repeated Israeli talking points instead of doing journalism.”
Robin Andersen:
“CNN staffers leaked internal directives showing journalists were told not to say Israel killed Palestinians. They were instructed to use passive language like ‘an explosion killed people.’
That’s not journalism. That’s narrative management.”
“The issue is no longer just Gaza. It’s whether Americans can still dissent.”
Robert Scheer:
“What we’re really talking about now is whether Americans still have the right to criticize state violence without being punished.
Students protesting the war were treated like extremists. Professors were intimidated. Funding was threatened. Universities shut down debate instead of defending it.”
“Criticizing Israel is being falsely equated with antisemitism.”
Robin Andersen:
“What’s happening under the guise of fighting antisemitism is actually creating enormous repression.
If criticism of a government is automatically labeled antisemitic, then free speech itself collapses.”
“This is a blasphemy against the Jewish people.”
Robert Scheer:
“The history of Jewish people has largely been one of fighting for universal human rights and liberation.
To now use Jewish identity as a shield against criticism of state violence is grotesque. It prevents thought. It prevents examination. It prevents moral accountability.”
“Independent media exposed realities legacy media tried to obscure.”
Robin Andersen:
“Palestinian journalists, independent reporters, and social media exposed realities corporate media often minimized or ignored.
That’s why establishment institutions became so threatened by decentralized information. People were seeing the destruction directly.”
“You cannot have democracy without truthful language.”
Robert Scheer:
“If you remove the language of occupation, apartheid, collective punishment, or genocide, then people lose the ability to even understand what they are witnessing.
Once language itself is controlled, democratic thought becomes impossible.”
“Journalism became public relations for power.”
Robin Andersen:
“The complete abandonment of journalistic standards by legacy media has been astonishing.
Accuracy, fairness, skepticism toward official claims — those principles were discarded in favor of repeating government narratives. At that point journalism stops functioning as journalism and becomes propaganda for power.”
Rushed Transcript
Please note: This transcript was generated quickly and may contain errors, misspellings, or inaccuracies. We appreciate your understanding.
Robert Scheer 0:00
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add, the intelligence comes from my guest. The Scheer Intelligence was given to me by NPR station KCRW before they ended the show, but for 20 years it was a good run. I never really liked the title, but there’s no question that our guest, Professor Robin Anderson, emerita professor at Fordham University, which I just discovered is gender-based. You’re emeritus if you’re a male, emerita if you’re female, but it shows certainly shows a distinguished academic career. She’s been an author, a co-author of a dozen books, and the new book that’s coming out, it’s already available from the publisher, or but is called The Complicit Lens: US media coverage of Israel’s genocide. Do I have that right? US media,
Robin Andersen 0:54
yes. Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Yes.
Robert Scheer 0:57
Oh no, that’s right. US media’s coverage of Gaza of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. All right, we got that established now. The interesting point, when I read that, I thought, you know, I still teach at the university, USC, and so forth, and we even have some kind of law in California that, you know, progressive Governor Gavin Newsom signed somewhat conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and you can’t do that, particularly if you teach at a public university like UCLA, and you unabashedly used the word genocide here, which, of course, one of the biases demonstrated by the media is their refusal to use that word, and yet much of the world is now using it, and again, just bringing it to current events. Something that happened that I mean, a lot has bothered me about what has happened in regard to Gaza, to Israel, to the whole coverage, but the latest flotilla arrest is evidenced not just brutality, but the unapologetically, not apart, the celebration of the brutality by Israel’s highest ranking Israeli official dealing with it was appalling, and even the seven nations, including South Korea, the leader of South Korea condemned Netanyahu in no uncertain terms as a war criminal, you know, he had done that once before. So we’re talking about a developing world consensus that the very thing the American media did not want to deal with, you know, that this is something very different and very ugly, is really what your book is about. So why don’t you take it from there, and why this book? Why should people get it? Fortunately, it’s printed at a fairly reasonable price, and it’s coming out, as I say, at the beginning of June. So, take it away.
Robin Andersen 2:56
Yeah, what I try to do in my book, Bob, is give us a language to understand how the media really distorted, denied, justified, and allowed Israel to get away with a genocide. They say that this war, that this genocide is the most well-documented one ever in the history of genocide, but it’s also the most contested, and most of that contestedness has been within the media. If we look at social media, because we had Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza who gave their lives to document this, the horrors that they were going through, and the people in the Gaza Strip endured, and are still enduring. It’s not over. If we contrast that reality to the way we read and understand it through the mediated lens of constructed corporate and establishment media, they look like two different worlds, and Israel has gotten away with this kind of impunity, because as long as those directing the military government elites, people calling for these wars and carrying them out can see that their propaganda is successfully being distributed over over the establishment media, they can continue to do it, and, and what we see now is, you were talking about Israel, has really, it’s especially the leaders in Ben Gvir, these people have gone off the rails, they’re they are expressing the most brutal, inhumane kinds of evil that human beings can do to one another. They’ve done it with impunity. They’ve gotten away with it now, not just since october 7, but for years against the Palestinians, whose territory and lands they are occupying as a settler colony. So we see two very different worlds, and with the flotilla we have international backing behind a lot of these people on the flotilla, and boats coming from all around the world, and we have cameras, and we can see it, look at the brouhaha that just happened with Chris with Nicholas Kristof publishing what we’ve known is happening in Israeli prisons and dungeons with the sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners, that’s now been documented by human rights organizations for many years, and the minute Christoph publishes an op-ed in the New York Times, and confirms it, and, and, and shows the reader of the New York Times what Israel has really gotten away with. It’s a huge controversy. It makes headlines, it goes around the world. So, so these papers do have an outsourced influence, but for particular government elites, I think that’s the connection now between our media, our mainstream and legacy media, and the media that we get from the from people on the ground.
Unknown Speaker 6:14
Yeah, and let’s talk about this legacy media, because a lot of people go around thinking, gosh, we lost or losing this wonderful legacy media, of course. The New York Times would be the best example, but I do want to always remind people it was not always so wonderful. It was always obviously biased towards the people who could own, forget who said it, but AJ Liebling, I think the media critic of New Yorker said freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one, and so there was always a style, and New York Times that you’re referring to smashed editorial smashed Martin Luther King for daring to criticize the Vietnam War, you know, and so that you know they also justify every other war that the government was in, but certainly now one kind of hopes that the legacy media can come through, because you have this blatant ownership by the billionaire class of the media of the Washington Post of CBS and CBS News, and so forth, so now, and in the case of CBS, CBS News, deliberately bought by someone with very strong, you know, views and pro-Israel, and so forth, but let’s take the case, and well, let’s talk about your book, because your book basically analyzes the media, and so take us through the story. I mean, what is it you document here?
Robin Andersen 7:47
Well, I try to give a language and to help us understand. I mean, we know we’re seeing bias journalism, right? But, but I’m trying to get, I’m really trying to focus on what what these strategies are whereby they they can distort and deny a genocide. If we think about how legacy media, if we look at CNN and the New York Times, which are very influential legacy media in our country, their editorial boards were telling them exactly what they could and could not say, and you mentioned this, that they’ve been, they’ve been instructed not to use the word genocide, and so staffers at CNN, first by January 2024 had leaked these documents, and the fact that all of CNN copy was was sent off to their is Jerusalem bureau and it was and and the IDF had eyes on it, so it was it was being vetted by the IDF in Jerusalem CNN’s CNN coverage, so they were told say explosion, do not say that the bomb immediately. Don’t, don’t say it. Israel killed somebody. Israel killed the Palestinians when they bombed a refugee camp. Say an explosion killed Palestinians in Gaza, right? They couldn’t even use the word refugee camp. Now, this refugee camp was a particular one that the New York Times editorial directives told their journalists not to use, and that story came out in The Intercept on April 1 at 2024
Robert Scheer 9:38
Testify not calling a refugee camp, which is after all composed of people who are refugees. How did they justify to their staff not calling it a refugee camp?
Robin Andersen 9:51
You know, the staff, there’s indication that the staff understood the consequences of this, because, for example, in the New York Times, they also. Don’t say occupation, but if you take occupation and refugee camp out of the coverage, what you’re doing is taking out the core reasons for the conflict, right? It’s the occupation, and it’s the fact that Israel sent Palestinians out during the Nakba in 1948 They made them flee. They got 750,000 people, think 15,000 were killed. And in the Jabalia refugee camp, which is the first massacre that I write about in the book, that is a refugee camp. Most of the members and the people who lived in Jabalia refugee camp were descendants from the original Nakba, they, you know, they’re their grandchildren and their grandchildren who had lived through the Nakba, and they were living in, you know, northern Gaza, and so what the New York Times said, because they can’t say refugee camp, they say neighborhood, neighborhood is very, very different than a refugee camp. Also, in real, I mean, if you think about the, you know, it, the UN has been providing refugees because Israel, you know, also controlled every aspect of Gaza’s food and their, and their economy, they had to provide, you know, food and water and everything, because these people are living in these conditions of refugees. It’s hugely important, and a staffer at the New York Times understood that when you take, for example, occupation out, you’re taking out the core of the conflict.
Robert Scheer 11:39
Well, you go doing something, even yes, you’re taking out the core, but you’re also denying the reality in the most extreme way, and this, you don’t have to go back to the Nakba, and the original founding of the state, Gaza was actually occupied by Egypt at the time of the six day war, right, 1967 Jordan was occupying the West Bank, Syria was occupying the Golden Heights there, and so the Palestinian people that lived there were actually under the control of others, Israel went to war in a preemptive war. Everybody forgets this. Israel was not attacked. Israel had a war of choice, was a preemptive war. I covered that war. I went to Gaza, to West Bengal, right after the war, and so forth. And so there was no question, the Palestinian people had not attacked Israel. The people living in Gaza and Jordan, they had no agency, they had no army, they had no equipment or anything else. Yet Israel made peace with the Egyptian government, the Jordanian government, and ultimately the Syrian government to this day. So what happened was the Palestinian people that live in Gaza and West Bank are obviously an occupied people. I actually had this discussion with Gavin Newsom, our governor, the other day because I was questioning, you know, he didn’t want to criticize Zionism, but he had some criticism of Israel, and I said, but wait a second. The issue here is, if Zionism becomes defined as the right to occupy another people, who clearly, which is, you have to use the word, they were occupied, they were a casualty of war, they were not participants. You occupy them, then the question is, and you continue for half a century, then the question is, do they have the fundamental human right, among others, to vote, to speak freely, to organize? They don’t have it. There’s no question about it. So, how could the New York Times, or any governor, or anybody argue, argue this, that you’re not an occupied people, they clearly are okay, and yes, you could say they have the choice, you can, they can leave, you can do ethnic cleansing, you can force them out, but this is the land that they have tilled for 1000s of years, this is where they’ve lived, and so for those who are not actually refugees from Israel itself, so I, we’re not talking about just semantics here, we’re talking about the, if you wanted to use the word fake news, we’re talking about the absolute denial of obvious reality, and the reason they’re doing that is whenever you talk about what did what did the people of Gaza do to us, or what did Hamas do to Israel, or what? Did you forget you took away from these people any right to redress grievance, including to vote? All right, that doesn’t come up somehow. So, how can I’m asking you, you’re there in New.. you’re in New York City, Florida. I actually grew up nearby in a solidly Jewish neighborhood. It, I know, in my part of the Bronx, which included was pretty close to Fordham University, people were not idiots, they all knew this reality, right? And the question was, How can you do something about it? Can you have a two nation state? Can you have, how do you do it? How can you integrate this population, or can you give up this occupied area that is really the key to this argument, that if you can’t use the language about occupation and ultimately of genocide, it’s really trying to destroy a whole culture, that’s what you do by leveling Gaza, you can’t, this gets you a role as an academic and as a professor of media, you cannot actually discuss this thing, you apply the basic language necessary to understand what is going on.
Robin Andersen 15:51
Well, that’s what restricting those kinds of words, Bob, ethnic cleansing, anything like that. What the New York Times specifically did is take out any of the language of humanitarianism, the principles by which we understand that that people’s actually are are entitled to human rights under international law. When you, when you tell journalists they can’t write about that, they don’t have the tools they need to explain what’s actually going on there, so if you can’t say disproportionate violence, so Moz comes in, you tell us, Israel, that they killed 1200 Israelis, mostly civilians. Well, right off the bat, that’s not true. A, they weren’t mostly civilians, and B, the Israelis called in the Hannibal Directive, and they killed their own civilians. We will never know how many people were actually killed by Hamas or by Israel on October 7, because the Israelis have basically covered it up once you do that, and you start this whole thing at october 7, because that’s how media frames work when you’re talking about war, war coverage, it always, it always, there’s some initial violence that comes from the quote unquote enemy, and then that’s where it starts, so you take this october 7 incident out of its historical flow of 2018 the Great March of Return, where they killed, where they wounded 33,000 children had to have their legs amputated because they were peacefully protesting at the wall, and Israeli snipers shot them, and that was a peaceful protest that lasted for many months. And human rights organizations appealed to the ICC, and they said these are war crimes. They had no cause to fire on these people. They were not presenting the Israelis with an imminent threat, so you take it, you take it, you know, if you look at the quote unquote Israeli-Palestine conflict, let’s say from about 2001 10,000 people up to about 2022 were killed, nine out of 10 of those people were Palestinians, so right away you have this incredible number that indicates that there’s something terribly wrong here in terms of the disproportionate violence being used by one side and the other. That’s a humanitarian rule that that allows that was developed in all of these international rules of war were developed in the post World War Two period after we had two huge world wars that killed a lot of civilians and soldiers, and we decided that we needed some rules to protect civilians during wartime and to make war less horrifying than those world wars. What Israel has done, I don’t think there is actually one international rule of war that Israel has not violated. What they have shown to be is very good at manipulating, at manipulating the language and denying the language of international law, which, if you don’t train your journalists, listen, international rules of war are not difficult. You can find them online. There’s all kinds of educational stuff that lays them out very clearly. The Rome Statutes, you know, the creation of the International Criminal Court, and then you’ve got the International Court of Justice and the Geneva Convention, that was in 1948 I mean, we have these rules in place, and if you take, and you, you, if you tell your journalists, which, of course, you, that’s exactly what they did in the New York Times and CNN legacy media, these are agenda-setting news organizations, once you, they’ve. Get the agenda than the other media follow, so when they go into Al Shiva Hospital, the Israelis lie. They say there’s Hamas in the hospital, so and then news reports. Okay, well, hospitals are safe. You’re not supposed to, to, to kill the people in hospitals, or harm the doctors, or kill the patients in war, but that’s unless the enemy is in, is in the hospital directing and benefiting from that, as, as a, as, as a safe house. Actually, that’s not true, even if Hamas had been in the hospital, which they never were. There’s no evidence that says any of the hospitals were ever occupied by Hamas, that the belligerent party is still liable and still obligated to protect the doctors and patients within that hospital, so so if you don’t say that in the media, then when you report on the worst violation of international law, killing doctors, killing patients, destroying hospitals and civilian infrastructures. If you don’t say that because you say Hamas was in there, so Israel had to go in, and now Gaza doesn’t have any more health care budgeting health care system because we didn’t raise the alarm, we didn’t tell the world that this was actually against international law, and Israel is actually committing war crimes on a daily basis, serious violent war crimes that is killing hundreds of 10s of 1000s of Palestinians in Gaza, and they did not say that it was always this is in defense of october 7, when Hamas killed maybe, maybe 304 100 civilians, so that’s the kind of distortions that we’re talking about, Bob,
Robert Scheer 21:57
right, but I want to focus on this legacy media, because you are a professor of media studies, and there’s a lot of feeling now, because we blame everything on Trump, and certainly Trump deserves a lot of blame, but the fact of the matter is this is a bipartisan looking the other way regarding Israel, and it goes back a long, well, it goes back since the creation of the state in many ways, but I keep wanting to get back to that six day war. How Gaza and West Bank happened to be occupied, and aside from humanitarian law, and we should talk a little bit about that. Your book does the deliberate killing of journalists and killing of doctors, and so forth. Still, I want to get back to basics here, and one basic is, if again, I’m not going to spend all our time in this, but it does get overlooked that if you are occupying a people and have consistently taken the position that you have to have a majority of Jewish people in your state, a comfortable majority. Therefore, you can’t extend the vote to them, and on the other hand, you’re not going to let them have their own self-government, the two-state solution, which Rabin accepted and was killed for accepting. Okay, what are you talking about? You’re talking about you can occupy a people and deny them every single human right, every single human right, but the most important in terms of this whole discussion of the free world, democracy, and everything, which has been our actually main agit prop slogan all these years of the Cold War, and now you’re what I’m trying to say, is it’s a closed system, you know. And then, if you close the system, and there, whether people are throwing rocks at you, or whether they’re doing more terrible things, you have left no other option. You have said you must accept our will in every aspect of your life, you know, and you have no agency to challenge that, and yet Israel preserved its reputation as some kind of democratic society. The other question, from a media point of view, and that I want to discuss is a sort of acceptance that this all is done in the name of Jewish religion, or Jewish people, or Jewish history. When actually, what Israel is doing is certainly does violence to really the whole history of Jewish people as the struggle for liberation. This is what you celebrate on Passover and other holidays. This is what you’re taught? I know I grew up in this environment, and the amazing thing is now this brutality, and if anybody objects to it, and I want to get to the academic world, because many of these demonstrators at places like Columbia and elsewhere at UCLA, and so forth, were Jewish, you know. And so, and there’s a provision in our own constitution, because right now we have a military alliance with Israel in regards to Iran and this war and everything, but our constitution says that the First Amendment, that the Congress should not establish a religion, and it’s interesting because people don’t realize what that means, but it was really aimed at Protestants of one faction telling other Protestants, along with Catholics and anyone else, how to practice their religion, right? And here, if Jewish people, like Jewish Boys for Peace, or any of the other groups, speak up, J Street now is under attack, you know, by the Israeli government, so forth. If they speak up, the gut, our government, the US government says, “Oh, you can’t do that. You, we won’t give money to Colombia. We, you know, we’ll punish people. But it’s interesting, because I rarely hear anybody raise the question, “Isn’t this the US government is establishing what it means to be Jewish, quite apart from all of the other distortions, they’re actually doing the very thing that Congress, the Constitution banned the government from doing, because they did not want people who believed in the Church of England and some notion of the Episcopal Church to tell Congregationalists or anyone else, how to practice their religion. It was the most fundamental point. And yet, let’s take it to Columbia, you know, or to protest that you talk about there any Jewish students, professor, or so forth, like you have at Columbia, Sachs, he’s very well known, you know, international expert in everything has criticized Israel in no uncertain terms, and yet can be intimidated, had funding taken away, be fired over daring to criticize a state which claims to be the sole definition of what it means to be Jewish, is support of what the government of Israel is doing is exactly what the First Amendment prohibited.
Robin Andersen 27:06
Well, it’s all being done under the guise, of course, of protecting Jews from anti-Semitism, and what it’s doing at the moment, and we know it has been since the genocide started, is creating anti-Semitism, because if you, as if you, if you assert that all Jews are supporting Israel, right, then then Israel is a state that’s engaged in genocide, you know, the rest of the human beings on the globe have disguised cited that they don’t like genocide once they see it in action, because again of the Palestinian journalists doing the documentation, but to go back to your idea about they have no rights under occupation, and this has been going on since 67 Let’s, that’s a kind of intellectual and academic kind of curriculum that is needed to explain that to students and to people. There’s now a movement in media literacy that is proposing that we start teaching international law in the Geneva Convention within grade school and in curriculum, these things are very, very important. I think also that we need to teach the media international law, but if we talk about the greater freedom of speech, our freedom of speech in this country has been rolling back in so many ways, and not just since October 7, that groundwork was late. Primarily, I, what I know most about is the Israeli lobby, and things like honest reporting, which, which influences and pressures our media in this country. There’s also a group called Camera, which is a Jewish-based, which is, which is an excuse me, Israeli-based monitor that every time you don’t, you don’t say the Israeli talking point, they’re going to pound you with that, right? So, there, so, so really, our civil society and public sphere has been being closed down now for decades by lobbying groups that have been very militant in stifling any criticism of the state of Israel and calling it anti-Semitic if you criticize the state of Israel. Now this happened at Columbia, and after the encampments were brutally attacked by the NYPD, and we can get back to some of those details, Bob, if you want, but after that, when the students came back in the fall of 2024 they had a whole, a whole agenda where they had just closed down their freedom of speech, their right to congregate, their, their right. Rights, and what they also did under Trump is the Columbia officials allowed things like outside monitoring groups to come in and look at faculty syllabi, and determine, and of course, these were not experts, these were not even academics half the time, and tell people what they could and could not teach in their classes, so the my book is they is actually co-published with or books in the Institute for Palestine Studies, and Rashid Halidi, who taught for years at Columbia with the Edward Side under the Edward Said Chair at Columbia, a Palestinian American guy who wrote 100 Years War on Palestine, he wrote the introduction to my book, and he’s also with IPS, which is the co-publisher. So, what Rashid said in a couple of Guardian op-eds was that was that he could no longer teach his Middle Eastern history class because he would have to teach just what you were talking about, Bob, about how the Palestinians had no rights, no civil liberties, no voting rights, no freedom of expression under the state of Israel, even if they were considered Israelis, right? So that is an apartheid system. He couldn’t teach that. He couldn’t teach the laws of 2018 in every ways in which the in which the state of Israel has become more and more anti-democratic and more and more oppressive and right wing, so he had to quit. He actually went so far as to call Columbia Vichy on the Hudson, which I thought was terrific, but the in the conclusion of my book I lay out the the this this consequence of of the attacks on the students and the way that Eric Adams, as the mayor of New York City, empowered the NYPD, and then I’ll just say one more detail, which was absolutely appalling. There was a faculty adjunct on staff at Columbia who was also working in counterintelligence and had an office in Tel Aviv, and she was a special consultant to the NYPD on counter terrorism. So she and Eric Adams came up with this idea to justify the brutality of the NYPD and the in the encampments with the idea that the students were being influenced about outside agitators, and they used really stupid things, like youngsters. They don’t know what they’re doing, they’re being propagandized. When over and over again, the students demonstrated to everybody that their knowledge of the Middle East, their problems with Israel committing genocide was actually on the mind of most Americans. These were not outside agitated, these were homegrown political movements within the United States at the time, and these were exactly the things that the students were identifying. They called the, if you recall, the banner that they released in the early mornings of april 1, said Hind. They were talking about the young, the five year old who was killed in the car in Israel with 30 335 bullets into the car, it with her family waiting to be rescued. Hindra Job, of course, what the movie The Voice of Hindra Job details, they knew about her, that happened in the end of January 2024 By the beginning of April, the first day of April of 2024 they called it Hind Hall. CNN didn’t even know who Hind Raja was. They called her a woman because they weren’t entered into really reporting on what was happening in the Middle East, they were repeating the talking points from the Israeli military, from the security forces, and in New York from Eric Adams and the police, justified by a counterterrorism individual who loves to, you know, we know that intelligence reports are not reliable, but they’re mostly shaping public opinion these days, more than anything, particularly in a case like that.
Robert Scheer 34:27
So, what we’re really talking about, first of all, is a blasphemy against the Jewish people to hold Jewish people accountable for the atrocities of Israel, because right through all the history of Jewish people has been one of fighting for cosmopolitan universal rights that are available to everybody, that’s why Scheer and Goodman in this Mississippi, you know why in the civil right. Rights movement in America, there was so much Jewish participation, and by the way, you have a very good example now. A lot of Jewish people voted for Madame Danny to be New York, to instead of Eric Adams Titan, and they are being blasted. So, what you’re really talking about, first of all, is taking away the right of Jewish people. I proudly put myself in that category of a Jewish person. My mother came from Russia, fleeing, among other things, not only the antisemitism of the Czar, but the antisemitism of the Bolsheviks at a critical moment. You know, so you take away the right of individual Jews to define their religion, what it means to them, which, after all, is the basis of the whole enterprise. Other people are not supposed to get between you and a higher power. You’re supposed to be able to figure this stuff out and be held accountable, but the irony here is that it now prevents Americans from criticizing their own government, because right now in the war with Iran, for instance, where there’s an alliance between the US government and the Israeli government, we can’t do what we were able to do against our own government when it was in Vietnam, and after all, in that war, there were Americans at risk, right? They were the troops that were there, and yet people in the peace movement, including Martin Luther King, felt they had to speak out to help those troops not get killed, right, and that, and it was recognized in this society, you know, generally by the courts and everything else by the universities that we had a right to protest a war being conducted by our own government, right, and in which American troops were at risk. Now, in this war that was basically concocted by Netanyahu’s influence, really over Trump, he seems to be conceding now, we may have picked up some wrong signals about how easy it was going to be, and so forth. The fact is, these two governments now have a common military trajectory. They’re bombing at random people, and so forth. And yet, if we criticize, I guess what we can sue is, in order to avoid being called anti-Semitic, I’ll say, oh, I’ll only criticize when American planes drop bombs on civilians, but I can’t criticize when Israeli planes do it. That is the contradiction here, that is so appalling. And I think you know, we get lost in the weeds a little bit, really. The issue here, and I wanted to bring it back to the mayor of New York, do we have the right, whether we’re Jewish or not, to vote for someone who differs, has criticisms of the government of Israel and our own government? Do we have that right, or if we do that, and if we’re Jewish, will we be called anti-Semitic? Will you lose your job at Columbia? This is how absurd the thing is. It is
Robin Andersen 38:04
really
Robert Scheer 38:05
finally before we run out of time to your awareness of media, because yes, it’s the most appalling cases, I guess. Are you know that CBS is now owned by someone and managed by CBS News, by someone who thinks that you can’t criticize Israel, but, but the fact is, it oddly enough, this larger media world of the internet has opened up with all its flaws more space for dissent on these issues, including by Jewish people like Glenn Greenwald, can find a big audience, and yet the mainstream media, which we are constantly lectured. Oh, we have to worry, you know. We tell students, you must buy the New York Times, you must preserve the thing. The fact of the matter is, what we’ve seen is that the behavior of the new media is actually in many ways more responsible than the legacy media, and since you were an expert on media, it’s a damning point to make about what has happened to legacy media.
Robin Andersen 39:10
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you’re certainly right about Jewish professors, for example. You know, there are many Jewish professors at Columbia, they were the experts. They were many of the ones that were teaching history of the Middle East. So, these were experts, Jewish experts that are no longer able to teach their courses, right, because of these outside monitors and the restrictions on what they can and cannot say in the classroom. This is unprecedented. This is truly authoritarian, the way that the universities have been closed down, and not all of them, I’m not meaning to say all of them, but certainly at Columbia.
Robert Scheer 39:46
Okay, all of them. Why not? Because the fact of matter is, we had, from a free speech point of view, a democracy point of view, a vibrant campus debate going on across the country, right. Right, what was going on, vibrant, and if you really believe in academic freedom, you believe in the freedom for ideas to circulate, you believe truth will drive out error in a free environment, and even the Socratic method of teaching, any of that,
Robin Andersen 40:14
it
Robert Scheer 40:14
was time to really respect what was going on in American colleges with a new generation, they were thirsty for, and they were debating in an informed way, and so forth, that got shot down, as far as I could see, almost completely across the country, because they threatened their funding, fire everybody, and I must say, you know, our tenured faculty, which is supposed to be protected from this sort of thing, and that’s where they’re not speaking out. The fact is, on very few campuses do you get anybody pushing back, because, oh, then the administration, so you’re endangering our funding, and you’re preventing us from doing all this other stuff, blah blah blah, you know. So let’s use a good way to kind of wrap it up, if you want to take an extra nine minutes or so, I really think the state of academic freedom, the state of freedom in America. I never thought that protecting Jews would be used as the weapon, the bullets that would destroy freedom. This is the most grotesque interpretation of Holocaust,
Robin Andersen 41:20
but it’s a terrible
Robert Scheer 41:22
lie, you
Robin Andersen 41:23
know,
Robert Scheer 41:25
famous victims of what happened in Europe, including the ones who survived, like Einstein, you know, or, you know, any of these people, I mean, even Oppenheimer, he didn’t survive in Germany, but I mean, if you think of the people, you think of Eric from you think of any of the people that wrote about the Holocaust and Hannah Rent, and so forth. These are people who always spoke up. In fact, they were critical of aspects of the Zionist project. They were critical of that you will lose your universal respect for human rights and become partisan, and that’s a debate. Now, you can’t, you can’t even discuss that debate. You cannot actually, in an American campus, set of any major researchers who depended upon federal funds, seriously discuss Hannah Arendt, who was actually probably our most informed, well-informed scholar on what the Holocaust was really all about.
Robin Andersen 42:24
Well, the JVP director of activism in New York City, Elena Stein, a young, a young woman friend of mine, she said, and in behind a lectern, you know, when she was, you know, calling for a rally, she said these things aren’t complicated, you know. So much of this is under the guise of, oh, it’s just so complicated. You’ve got the, you’ve got the Israeli side, and she said it’s not complicated, you, you know what you see, the murder of people, the mass killing of people. You know, you can rely on your own moral understanding. It’s not complicated. She also said, I’m here behind with the help of my ancestors, my grandmother, who went through the Holocaust. And so these are people, and in New York City, they closed down the bridges, they closed down the Statue of Liberty, they closed down Grand Central Station with black T-shirts on that says JVP, not in our name, Jews against genocide. So these were the people right at the forefront of these of these protests, and to have a media system, the complete abandonment and legacy media of a set of standards and practices in journalism, such as accuracy and fairness, and not to repeat the same unreliable sources who have lied to you in the past, not to accept yet another audio visual doctored material that’s supposed to confirm what they say to finally get a clue, if you’re a journalist, if you’re the seasoned journalist of the New York Times, the one of the most prestigious and wealthy, you do know that there are 3000 journalists now employed by the New York Times, and it’s, it’s 7% of all working journalists in the US. This paper should be able to hire the people that they need to explain this story, and to, and to not simply take the words of Israeli talking points, and this is a, so this is a foreign government, they’re actually, you know, and you said they’re actually taking the word of a foreign government and not, not reporting in the name of the American public, and or or carrying out their democratic mission in in a society such as ours where you’re supposed to. Be able to make your decisions based on the information you receive in the media. They abandoned that whole mission to simply repeat what Israel kept saying they were doing and lying what they were actually doing. It’s actually astonishing, if you think about that.
Robert Scheer 45:20
I just want to be clear, JVP is Jewish Voice for Peace. Yeah, Jewish Voice for Peace. We only have like four and a half minutes. Tell us about the New York Times and your book and what you basically write there, because that’s that is the premier newspaper. So,
Robin Andersen 45:39
well, I talk about the Jerusalem bureau, in which they’re actually occupying a house, the air on top of the house of a BBC sports journalist, Palestinian sports journalist who worked for the BBC, who had to leave his house. He left, he left immediately in the car in 1948 and his whole family left all their belongings, and they got out of there, and by occupying it’s called geostructure, I call it geostructural bias in the New York Times, it’s a conflict of interest because they are occupying a house where Palestinians can never come back to, and this became an issue because on Democracy Now, and I tell the story of a woman who went back and talked to the bureau chief, the daughter of the guy that was pushed out of the house, and she was a small child when she had to leave, but they’re in direct conflict with the with the right to return, which is a key proposition and a key demand on the part of the Palestinians, they need to be able to return to their homeland, but they also are all what I call deep personal integration, they’re all based in Jerusalem, they all, one of the Jody Ridoran, who was the bureau chief, you know, talks about how she landed as a young Zionist teenage organization, and she came to Jerusalem, and just loved the old city, and wanted to be there, and talk about it, and tell everybody about it, and she only wanted to tell the Israeli side of the story, and she never spoke Arab, right, so she didn’t know the Palestinians at all, and in fact, at one point she says on her Facebook, even though the Palestinians lose more people than the Israelis, the Israelis are almost more traumatized by it, because well, the Palestinians have this culture of martyrdom, and their lives aren’t as big as ours, and I’m not paraphrasing very much, Bob. This is what she actually said, and then she said people who have lost relatives, when I talk to them, they seem to be ho hum about it. This is the kind of thing that bureau chief or poised posting on their Facebook when they’re supposed to be reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian Middle East issue, this is that, that’s the point of view they’re coming from. And it was, and it was outrageous for most of the time. So
Robert Scheer 48:16
Chris Christoperson, we only have a few minutes. How do you think that’s going to be resolved? Will he will they impose a sort of self censorship, or is there any?
Robin Andersen 48:27
Oh, Nicholas Christophe. Yeah, Nicholas Kristof piece. I just finished it. You know, they, another one of these very Israeli-focused journalists, Isabel Kersner, Kirschner, her father, her husband was directly involved in the Israeli military, and does in the Israeli military complex, and that for a time he worked to do PR for the military, so so they put the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof’s truthful, long-known document documented by many human rights organizations, op-ed piece the following day. Bob, they wrote they allowed Isabel Kirchner, one of the most pro-Israel journalists at the New York Times, to publish yet another piece without verification, yet another supposed two year investigation done by the Israelis that Hamas weaponized rape on october 7, as if the first discredited one, first discredited story of december 28 2023 was not enough. So the Times is kind of grappling with itself, I believe that it knows that it has not been truthful, and I think that they could no longer ignore when Francesca Albanese keeps saying they’re there, they’re raping prisoners with dogs now, and the world is crying out. I think The New York Times felt. Compelled to publish that piece, I think they tried to do a balancing act with the with this next day Kirchener piece that reprised the completely debunked Hamas rape story, and I think they’re kind of groping, groping around at this point, and I think they’re trying to figure out what to do, but of course, Netanyahu was so incensed that he threatened to sue the New York Times for defamation. So it’s an ongoing story, and we’ll see how it plays out. Maybe the Times will get a conscience. I don’t know. I don’t think so, but we can always hope.
Robert Scheer 50:38
But now, if as a teacher somewhere, you defend Nicholas Kristof, and you say, as a journalist, he had the right to publish that, and to investigate, and it should be examined. You can be accused of being anti-Semitic. It’s that ugly, and that simple, and that crude. It’s really to prevent thought, and to do that, of the Jewish people to prevent thought, to prevent examination, prevent critical thinking. I think is a Shonda. It’s awful. So we’re going to end on that. The book is called The Complicit Lens. It’s out June 7, and it’s US media coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and it’s by Emirata Professor Robin Anderson. So, you don’t have to worry about your job now, but that’s right. It takes considerable courage to do this sort of work. Hopefully, others will follow your example. Okay, that’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence
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