Western media’s neglect toward Jewish history

Does a tree make a sound if it falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it? This question is rhetorical because the obvious and objective answer is yes. Not only is this statement true, but it can easily be proven without the presence of a witness to see it occur. Why then, does this logic not extend to the historical persecution of Jews?

When the Holocaust was actively unfolding during World War II, allied powers did not intervene immediately. There was skepticism that this rowdy Adolf Hitler was serious. While he certainly hated Jews and wanted to rid the Earth of them, there was no way enabling this to occur would lead Nazis down a path to world domination, right? In hindsight, we now know that standing idle is the same as being complicit. Would have over 6 million Jews been slaughtered if the United States and its peers stepped in earlier? Probably not. What transpired as a result of global complacency and doubt set a precedent for a term that has now seemingly loss all of its original meaning: genocide. 

World War II was concluding and it was becoming time for the world to reflect, but this also took longer than it should have because of that same doubt. There was no imaginable way that the Germans could have systematically executed that many people from the same identification group. That level of persecution would have been stopped if it was truly a valid analysis. But the Soviet Union began to warn the West months before their entry into the War with visual documentation in the media of the Nazis’ heinous acts. The issue was that America had its own problems with the Soviets and because of their predisposed imposition of their ideology, the United States were reluctant to come to terms with the facts that they were being faced with. In standard Communist fashion, the Soviet Union did not distinguish the different sub-genres of photography because of a need to level all cultures: consumption of photojournalism was meshed with creatively orchestrated photography. This was disparate from America’s propensity to categorize all visual data into different degrees of subjectiveness and objectiveness. Therefore, the United States could not possibly believe what we now know was factual evidence until they saw it for themselves.

This is the same issue we now face with the global, and particularly American, response to the October 7th massacre, where Hamas, like the Nazis, targeted the Jewish people in an attempt to exterminate them. Civilians were raped, mutilated and kidnapped. But we now face the same ahistorical ignorance that Holocaust survivors endured in the early 20th-century. 

In order for the Soviets to get the rest of the world to believe the immense tragedies caused by the Nazis, they had to physically place the nonbelievers into a setting that was undeniable: the concentration camps themselves. In 1944, the Soviet military proceeded to invite Western media to come see the genocide for themselves. This led to subsequent, full-throated reports by the likes of the New York Times, among others, that were aghast with the confrontational reality that they had previously been denying.

Israelis and Jews have the fair right to claim that they know a thing or two about when they believe an attempted genocide has unfolded. So, you would think that Western media would have learned from almost a century of reflection to trust claims of Oct. 7th being Hamas’ go at it. Instead, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were subjected to the same patronizing tone of Western media who wanted to see the truth for themselves because how could they trust an inherently biased information distributor like Israel’s own military? The IDF did the same as the Soviets and invited their detractors to see the short-threads of the webs of lies that they had been indulging. Unfortunately, unlike the indisputable magnitude of the Holocaust, the advanced generative and altering technology of today has still left many skeptical of the IDF’s claims. Calls to investigate the psychological warfare of sexual abuse that Hamas embarked upon during their Oct. 7th attack was only somewhat validated by the United Nations recently, and still cast a shadow of doubt on the extremities of Israel’s claims. 

War is war and now that the Jewish people have a nation-state that can self-sufficiently prevent the same consequences that they could not during World War II, why is the world trying to stop them? Reliving the horrors of genocide– the distinction that was coined by the Holocaust and created the country of Israel simultaneously –is not something that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or any Israeli or Jew takes lightly when discussing it. And for Oct. 7th to be rewritten as anything from an act of freedom fighting to simply absolving Hamas of any wrongdoing is abhorrent and akin to a time that I thought we had grown from as a global society.