In the last few years the term “Woke” has succeeded the similar and older term, “Political Correctness”, mainly because the former covered a swath of human behaviour that didn’t seem connected to politics, (even though it is via ideology), and also because it was less about the State enforcing ideas on people than individuals or groups doing so outside of government, usually around culture.

The latter term has also changed in its use over the decades, often melding into Woke via language control, but this is where it started:

The term first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line). 

As such it still has its uses, when there are events and policies explicitly linked to a political outcome, and the stories about those events are treated differently by observers depending on the political outcome they desire – in this case much of the legacy MSM trying to force Israel to stop its war on Hamas in Gaza, by crafting a narrative of starvation.

Thus the following starvation was ignored by the NYT because it was not politically correct, it didn’t follow their Party Line because it’s a Jew who is being starved to death.

On the other hand the following story did follow the Party Line because it was a Gazan child that was starving to death. Needless to say, because it’s the NYT, this picture went global.

The image was a lie, for two reasons.

First, it was cropped from a larger photo that clearly showed the boys older brother, a healthy 3 year old boy who is clearly not starving.

Second, because the child pictured, Mohammed al-Mutawaaq, was already known to the Israelis and the Gazans as a child with cerebral palsy that is wasting him away. A medical report on him was published back in May by the Basma Association for Relief in Gaza.

Both of those things could not have been unknown to the NYT, given the depth and breadth of reporting the story. These were not “mistakes” or reporters shrugging their shoulders at not knowing, or Hamas lying to them. They knew these facts and ran the story anyway – because that’s what propaganda campaigns do. The BBC did much the same, airing a 64 second video interview with the mother that somehow excluded the same information that the NYT did. Similarly with other MSM sources.

All this was revealed by an actual investigative journalist, David Collier, who discovered that yet another narrative about the situation – that Mohammed’s father was killed while desperately looking for food – was similarly “lacking context”, in that he died in an IDF air strike at a point where Hamas had been attacking the IDF for days and where they’d killed six IDF soldiers. People looking for food tend to avoid active shooting zones.

Collier pointed out that the mother has been truthful and upfront about this situation as she desperately seeks help for her child from anybody she meets. It was not her but the MSM that turned her child into a propaganda weapon. And when the NYT got caught out this is what they did:

  1. The New York Times published a “starving child in Gaza” image on their front page.
  2. They now (halfheartedly) “admit” that he wasn’t being starved.
  3. The account they use for the “correction” has only 89K followers (main account has 55M).

So bad is it that even a retired NYT news director, who worked for them for 35 years, had had enough, writing on Facebook where he accused them of conducting an…

… appalling twisting of the facts, and mindful, heartless concealment of the truth….Rather than running a photo of hostage Evyatan David being forced to dig his own grave by Hamas terrorists, and writing about the actual reaction of millions of Israelis to seeing it, the foreign desk and photo desk ran a photo of a relative handful of protestors in Tel Aviv, which the NYT labeled ‘Hundreds Protest in Tel Aviv After Hostage Videos Surface From Gaza’.
…
The symbolism of the photo is so apt, since digging our own graves is exactly what the current Times news, editorial and op-ed page writers and editors, and those justifiably fearful of the Islamic street in the the West are arguing daily that we should do.

As Collier says of his work:

I shouldn’t have to do this. It shouldn’t fall on me to call out the world’s biggest media outlets for their failure to act like journalists. Why are almost all of them functioning as Hamas’ useful idiots, amplifying propaganda with no effort to verify the facts? Is it really too much to expect them to do their jobs?

Asking such questions tells me that he still has belief in the MSM when it should be obvious by now that they’ll whore themselves out to anybody, even Hamas, if their political objectives align:

Hamas cannot afford to lose control over aid distribution – not if it intends to remain the ruling power in post-war Gaza. Channeling or controlling aid has always been one of the terrorist group’s most reliable sources of income. That’s why it has been essential for Hamas to discredit the US-Israeli GHF aid program and portray it as a failure. This has included an almost daily pantomime of unverified claims that hundreds have been killed in Israeli attacks while queuing for aid. Yet in the most documented conflict zone in history, credible video evidence remains conspicuously absent = despite claims of daily occurrences…The famine narrative is just the latest act in the play.

As always read the whole thing.

Another journalist in the WSJ provided the detail on the food shipments to “starving” people:

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has coordinated and facilitated the entry into Gaza of more than 1.86 million tons of humanitarian assistance, more than 78% of which has been food. The population of Gaza is about 2.1 million. The only comparable effort in modern history is the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, during which the Allies delivered 2.3 million tons of supplies to 2.5 million West Berliners over 15 months. Even then, the aid was going to an allied population. “There is no historical precedent for a military providing the level of direct aid to an enemy population that Israel has provided to Gaza,” writes John Spencer of the Modern War Institute at West Point.

But the fact is that this has been going on for a long time with the Palestinians, it’s been nicknamed “Pallywood”, where Hamas and other Palestinian groups set up staged photos and video for western media who swallow them whole and regurgitate them with the imprimatur that it’s their work when in fact foreign journalists have virtually no access to Gaza. There have been many exposures of this over the years, which have seemingly made no difference and it may well be that the latest, by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, won’t either:

”In the Gaza Strip, almost exclusively Palestinian photographers are now taking photographs – quite a few with Hamas connections.” Historian and photography expert Gerhard Paul told the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “In southern Gaza, Hamas controls 100 percent of image production.” The goal: to generate sympathy in the West and stir up anger against Israel.”

But it does result in these comparisons by other people who spread the message wider on non-MSM sources like Substack and Social Media:

Eve Barlow has the same problem as David Collier; she thinks the Western MSM have been played because the idea that they’re actively on Hamas’s side is too awful to accept, even as she writes that:

Now, a kneejerk reaction to my exposing of this wasn’t shock – but disgust. With me. Disgust with me, and not Hamas, or TIME. Disgust that I could be comfortable exposing a staged photograph of starvation.

Of course. That’s a vital aspect of a propaganda war; it only works if you trust the sources and so anything that threatens that trust must be attacked and destroyed.

We’ll see what happens to this whistleblower, this time talking about the Associated Press, which supplies stories to the MSM around the world.