Canadian Mainstream Media’s Orientalist Stance Towards Palestinians

 

Canadian mainstream media manufactures consent to support Israel through biased language, withholding historical context, and conflating any criticism of the Israeli state with antisemitism. When the Canadian mainstream media covers the question of Palestine, they usually frame it as a religious issue and withhold the historical and socio-political context.

In the last 19 months, the mainstream Western media have done little to challenge Israel’s genocide that has killed over 61,709 Palestinians and injured at least 125,834.

Emboldened by the alliance between the U.S and Israel, Canadian mainstream media have continued to dutifully manufacture consent to support and defend Israel through biased language that removes the mention of the word “Palestine” or the word “genocide” from their reporting, withholding historical  context that situates Palestine as the ancestral lands for Palestinians through misleading terminology, referring to the ongoing genocide as a “conflict,” and conflating any criticism of Israeli state with antisemitism. Moreso, when the Canadian mainstream media covers instances of anti-Palestinian hate crimes or the Palestinian right of return, they usually frame them as religious issues and withhold the historical and socio-political context.

Part of the problem, according to Shenaz Kermalli, journalism instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University, is that Canadian journalists lack accurate historical or political knowledge of global issues. “I feel, reporters lean more on simplified narratives that fit neatly into their preconceived or pre-existing Western paradigms and Orientalist stereotypes that they hold of Palestinians,” says Kermalli, who is also a freelance journalist. “Canadian media is incompetent and has little knowledge of geopolitics or how to cover international affairs. The entire post-9/11 era has been marred with the pattern where the Canadian mainstream media reports on international stories with a good guy versus a bad guy mentality. There has been no growth, evolution of training in Canadian media, and they have shut down the foreign desks,” says a source from Toronto Star.

Kermalli also says that when journalists highlight religion over the historical and political roots, they sideline historical facts such as British colonialism, the Nakba, land dispossession, settler colonialism and apartheid, thereby removing accountability from the political actors involved. While anti-Palestinian racism (APR) and Islamophobia have similar roots, embedded in the Western Orientalist imagination of Arabs and Muslims as barbaric, deceitful, and inherently violent, framing Palestine exclusively under the banner of Islamophobia conceals more than it reveals the core of the issue. Kermalli says, “if the struggle (for Palestinian liberation) is seen only as a religious issue, then calls for justice and self-determination or the right of return are often dismissed as sectarian zealotry rather than legitimate demands of a people resisting occupation and displacement.” Moreover, orientalism manifests in dehumanizing language about Palestinians as we have seen from Israeli officials, such as “children of darkness” and “human animals,” which is used to justify the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, irrespective of religious affiliation.  (more...)

Canadian Mainstream Media’s Orientalist Stance Towards Palestinians