WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria, Nov. 23: Sabotage Tele Israel (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 By pure coincidence I returned to Sicily on October 7, the day of the

Hamas military attack against Israel. However, a premise is necessary
here: when I return to the island I go to sleep with my parents. It's
good for me, among other things, because in these periods I live a very
different daily life from the one I lead in Abruzzo, in the land I
chose. For example, in Sicily I go back to watching television. So over
the next two weeks I continued to inform myself about what was happening
along the Gaza Strip in this way: television news, all-news channels,
talk shows. I carefully avoided my usual information channels, and let
television tell me about perhaps the most complicated conflict in the
world, where there are so many reconstructions and contexts to be aware
of. It was a very educational experience. What struck me first of all
was the completely dehistoricized approach: on TV there is only the here
and now, the news of the fact, the opinion on the fact, the declarations
on the fact to be reported. Never a more complex reasoning, never a
broader reconstruction, never a connection with the past or lateral
thinking. Behind the presumed objectivity, TV - and I say TV without
distinguishing the channels because in the ongoing conflict the nuances
have been cancelled, and La7's story is essentially the same as that of
Rai and Mediaset - has made a choice of side: stand on Israel's side.
The first two-three days following October 7th were a proliferation of
horrors carried out by Hamas terrorists, lingering on macabre details
and exciting stories, even encouraging identification with the rave
participants who were kidnapped and killed by the Hamas guerrillas, even
if in Italy those who participate in raves, and we saw this last year
when the Meloni government invented a decree to eliminate them, have
always been seen as part of the scum. Then, when the horrors were
reversed, and it was Israel that killed children and forced an entire
population to remain without water and without energy, the distinctions,
the silences, the Sibylline supports began. In short: Italian TV has
become Tele Israel, without exceptions.

On TV I saw a binary narrative: the good guys on one side, Israel
obviously, and the bad guys on the other, Hamas but without ever really
distinguishing Islamic fundamentalism from the whole of Palestine. Arabs
therefore Islamists therefore terrorists is the undeclared
presupposition of any conversation I have witnessed on TV, and even
those few people who tried not to submit to this blackmail still had to
deal with it, invalidating any other vision. A real media manipulation
that starts from the assumption, a refrain repeated pervasively by
politicians and pseudo-journalists, that Israel is the only democracy in
the Middle East. The so-called reductio ad Hitlerum, as Ottolina TV
defined it, then compulsively returned: that is, all the enemies of the
West are always inevitably Nazis. If in the war in Ukraine, at least,
Hitler was identified with just one person, namely Vladimir Putin, here
the extension to an entire group, that of Hamas, is even more
propagandistic. The aim, clearly, is to deontologically disqualify
Hamas, prevent any form of negotiation and justify any form of
destruction that will be perpetrated against Gaza, never mind if in that
piece of land there are not only terrorists but also over two million
Palestinians. On TeleIsrael, the term "civilians" was used exclusively,
borrowed from military language, because perhaps if one remembered that
there are "people" on that territory then some form of identification
or, even worse, solidarity could be triggered.

Eliminating Hamas, that is, the watchwords of Netanyahu's fascist
government, has become the starting message of every discussion on Tele
Israel. A premise that cannot be discussed, renegotiated, rejected.
There were days when the catchphrase was "we must do as in Dresden",
without explaining that Dresden was one of the most terrifying bombings
of the Second World War. However, no one on TeleIsrael can afford to
point out the subsequent, much longer and more extensive practices of
Netanyahu's government as inhumane. Indeed, more and more commentators
have started using the term "Jewish state" instead of "state of Israel":
if you equate an ethnicity with a state, being anti-government is enough
to be accused of anti-Semitism.

The few reports on pro-Palestine demonstrations tendentiously, and
sometimes even more blatantly, suggested support for Hamas. I remember a
delirious report on TG2 which started from an episode that took place in
France, where an isolated guy had attacked a handful of people shouting
Allah Akbar, and then, without any logical connection, it talked about
the pro-Palestine demonstrations in Italy, associating that is, an
alleged supporter of Islamic fundamentalism, yet to be verified among
other things, to the political stance of thousands of people. We then
fell in love with Elena Basile, former ambassador (actually
plenipotentiary minister), who in various broadcasts supported a
position that was just a little more articulated and complex than the
"Israel good, Hamas bad" story. Basile reminded me very much of the
figure of Alessandro Orsini: vain, contradictory, perfect for the
so-called media circus. Apparently TV can't conceive other positions
without relying on the characters. Indeed, the aim appears to be
precisely that, that is, to give voice to other voices but only if they
are made isolated and caricatured. As if to say: do you see how
democratic we are? We even let freaks talk. A script that in recent
years, from Covid to the war in Ukraine, has always been repeated the
same. The backdrop of Tele Israel has always been the clash of
civilizations. Are you with democracy or are you with Hamas? for
example, the former Finian Italo Bocchino growled at the former Five
Star member Alessandro Di Battista in a TV programme, as soon as the
latter dared to start listing the Israeli atrocities. But it was like
that everywhere. Tele Israel revealed itself to be totally impregnated
with propaganda: if on the one hand it also gave prominence to that
remnant of Giuliano Ferrara and his gang with the stink under the nose
of Il Foglio (a little newspaper of people who get angry because they
know how to or with a glass), exaggerating what was a small pro-Israel
demonstration, on the other hand it never gave space to non-Zionist
Judaism, a Judaism critical of the Israeli governments of recent years
and which has taken to the streets several times in recent days , I am
thinking for example of that of Moni Ovadia. Until about thirty years
ago, as evidenced for example by the famous case of the Sigonella crisis
of 1985, Italian governments were more or less openly in support of the
Palestinian cause; if today, however, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni goes
to show solidarity with Netanyahu, and in the meantime he continues to
have bombs and missiles thrown into Gaza, Tele Israel will obviously
avoid any reflection on the matter and will limit itself to reporting
the meeting. To wit: Haaretz, one of the best known and most important
Israeli newspapers, with perhaps a greater echo abroad than internally,
wrote in those days of "incalculable crimes against humanity" committed
by Israel in the days immediately following the attack on Hamas. Some
Italian paper newspapers, from Il Fatto Quotidiano to Internazionale to
Il Manifesto, have reported on this. Tele Israel, however, does not.
Groucho Marx said that he found TV very instructive, because "every time
someone turns on the set, I go into the other room to read a book".
Today, however, the hope is that TV will become revolutionary, in the
sense that we understand the need to rebel in the face of such a false
and harmful narrative. To do this the first path is that of a boycott.
It is, after all, the path that many people of my generation have
chosen, as well as young people, for whom the TV is an appliance to be
scrapped. But faced with the still majority hold it has on the rest of
the population, I believe we must move on to the next phase.
Paraphrasing a well-known No Muos slogan, "Tele Israel taught us,
sabotaging TV is not a crime".

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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