US media headlines systematically excised the word Palestinians from the dead
Evidence
Look at the following headline, which the New York Times ran hours after the Israeli strike against Palestinians commenced: “Israeli Gaza Strike Kills More Than 200.” You might well ask ” what?” … Could it be 200 Martians, Swedes, cats, dogs, mules, or ants? Where is the word “Palestinians”? Some 200 Palestinians—men, women, and children, young and old—had just been slaughtered. Did the dead not at least deserve to be identified as Palestinians? Instead, the New York Times immediately added, ” Airstrikes on Hamas Sites Are a Response to Rocket Fire.” The same with CNN: “Israeli air attacks on Gaza kill 155.” Nothing qualified that “155”; it could have been 155 geese, monkeys or ducks that the Israelis had killed. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 497
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Fits the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and ‘On Sacrifice’ pattern of documenting how media/language frames dehumanize victims — here the erasure of the name of the dead parallels the dehumanization mechanisms.
- SEED: Angle on how wartime news headlines grammatically delete the humanity of victims — usable as a media-critique essay on naming and erasure in atrocity reporting.
- QUESTION: Worth checking whether these 2008-09 headlines really did omit the word Palestinians, or whether Dabashi is selectively quoting.
Related
- Mainstream Western headlines erased Palestinian identity behind bare casualty numbers (similarity 0.87)
- European outlets named Palestinian victims while American media left them anonymous (similarity 0.84)
- News media were deleting the word Palestinians from massacre casualty reports (similarity 0.83)