Mona Chalabi Minces No Words on Media Bias vis-à-vis Israel’s War on Palestine

She is what, for want of the most appropriate terminology or description, I choose to label as a “Media Cliometrician” or a “Cliometrical Journalist,” that is, a statistically oriented reporter who objectively applies statistical principles to interpret the grim realities of contemporary lives and events. We are here, of course, talking about Ms. Mona Chalabi, the renowned Iraqi-descended British-born, award-winning writer and editor who recently held the feet of the editors and the publishers of the New York Times to the figurative fire, literally speaking (See “After Pulitzer win, N.Y. Times contributor criticizes Gaza coverage” Washington Post 11/17/23).

I have been keeping the afore-referenced news item, as Nigerian newscasters are wont to call it, on file for close to five months now, because I find the recent Pulitzer Prize Awardee’s carping of the editors and the publishers of the various New York Times’ media portals and publications to be both conscionably unimpeachable and opportune in the morally depraved “Ethnic Cleansing” of Palestinian residents of both the Gaza Strip, in particular, and the West Bank by the Netanyahu-led Neo-Fascist Likud Coalition Government of hardline Zionists.

As usual, the bipartisan Government of the United States of American, comprised of the ruling Democratic Party (DP) and the main opposition Republican Party (RP), has conveniently chosen to staunchly back the clearly and inexcusably genocidal activities of the Netanyahu regime, which is hellbent on unleashing Hitlerite kind of “Final Solution” for the “Palestinian Menace,” mischievously disguised as a military operation that is surgically geared towards the radical and the total elimination of the democratically elected Hamas Government on the Gaza Strip, a very small land space that is occupied by an estimated 2-million-plus people.

As of this writing, media reports citing some authorities of the Gaza-based Palestinian Health Ministry, indicated that about 50,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly defenseless civilians made up of women, children and the elderly, have been slaughtered, Biblical or Sauline and Davidian Style, by the Zionist regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom, as of this writing, had been called upon to resign by hundreds of thousands of street demonstrators in Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and other major towns and cities and villages in Israel.

For Ms. Chalabi, who freelances for the New York Times but has been on the staff of the US Guardian newspapers for quite a remarkable while now, what is most worrisome and may very well have immensely contributed to the wantonly inexorable and the barbaric slaughtering of the Palestinians, is the clear and conspicuous bias with which media coverage, especially by major newspapers and the electronic media establishments, right here in the United States of America and several Western-European nations, appears to have been deliberately skewed in favor of Israel and, in the process, thereby making the precarious plight and the humanity of the Palestinians who, by the way, are also bona fide Arab-descended, seem far less significant and worthy of the sedulous attention of the global community.

She does not make any specific reference to it, but it is implicitly unmistakable for any critically thinking reader to conclude that Ms. Chalabi is of the firm belief that the kind of “exoticism” that the late Palestinian-American scholar and Great Literary Theorist, Prof. Edward Said, of New York City’s Columbia University, poignantly articulated in his classic tome or disquisition titled “Orientalism,” may very well be very much in play here. In particular for Ms. Chalabi, who recently donated all the $15,000 (USD) that came with her Pulitzer Prize Award to an association of Palestinian journalists, there is an imperative need for the perennially “asymmetrical” coverage and the ideologically supremacist elevation of “Israeli Voices” and the seemingly deliberate “Muffing Up of Palestinian” and other Non-Western Voices promptly rectified to ensure the morally necessary balance.

What is equally significant, Ms. Chalabi is quick to confidently and passionately point out, is that she has the statistically based empirical evidence to back up her caustic criticism of Western Media Bias (WMB) in the coverage of the Israeli Defense Forces’ relentless and genocidal assault on the Palestinian People, in the dubious name of a justifiable reprisal for the October 7, 2023 Hamas guerilla attack on the southern rim of the State of Israel.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
May 12, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]