I didn't expect I'd be dragging the New York Post twice in a week, but they did it again
Lesson in media literacy #2
On Friday afternoon, the New York Post continued on their zionist tirade by posting an article about Shani Louk’s body being found, for the fourth consecutive time, in Gaza.
You have to wonder how the information warfare is going when you rely on the tabloid New York Post to push your message.
I previously wrote about Shani here in a bold thesis that is further proven correct by this new article from the Post: even the dead still have blood to spill. Even in death, settlers are not free to rest. They must be squeezed out of everything they’re worth to serve the colonial project.
In that sense, Shani has served four times now as justification for the invasion of Gaza. Regardless of her own wishes when she was in a coma, regardless of her agency as a human and a woman, regardless of whether that invasion would put her in danger — and it did, like it did all the other POWs taken in October.
The colonial project killed Shani, and then bragged about retrieving her body in a very hasbara article that ticks all the right boxes for the most mindless drivel possible.
You can read the NYP interview with her parents side-by-side here: New York Post article (archived so as not to give them traffic).
More so than the topic of the article, what’s interesting in this one is the language and phrasings.
First, let’s recap all four times Shani was witnessed “dead”:
Back in October, a video filmed by Gazans showed what purported to be Shani Louk on the back of a truck, bringing her to a hospital in Gaza. At that point, several zionist accounts already said she was dead just from the video.
The next month in November, Shani’s mother said she had received confirmation her daughter was being treated in a hospital in Gaza. Zionists on social media did not believe these news however, and still claimed Shani was dead and the mother lied for reasons even they did not know.
Not even two weeks later, a fragment of Shani’s skull was miraculously found in the rubble of Gaza and, in mere days, the IOF was able to positively identify this piece (of which no pictures have been released to the public) as belonging to Shani.
Finally, Shani was revived (metaphorically) for a last time just a few days ago with this New York Post piece, as the rest of her body has now apparently been found.
This is where our story picks up. It seems Shani can’t help but reappear at the most opportune moments, to divert the public’s eyes away from whatever atrocities ‘Israel’ is committing in Gaza (the destruction of civilian apartments in October, Al-Shifa in November, and now the invasion of Rafah).
A fed story
The first thing that struck me as I was reading the story was how much it felt like it had been fed to the family. At one point, they even echoed Herzog’s [‘Israel’ president] words about the “children of light and children of darkness” by telling the Post, verbatim:
We are lucky that these two pictures were all over the world. One of them is very cruel…I’m happy that my daughter Shani is connected to the picture because the picture shows the light from one side, which is Shani, and the other side of the photo shows militants, which is darkness.
They also make mention of a miracle, saying that their daughter’s body has been perfectly preserved, giving biblical tones to this story — a context that can’t be ignored when this propaganda piece is made for the supposedly Jewish state.
“I think she’d been in one of the tunnels which was very, very cold…that’s why the body is complete and beautiful and the skin is still the same color, you still see the tattoos, it’s amazing,” [Shani’s father] told The Post as part of a conversation with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.
This is something Shani’s father may very well believe but not something he can prove. It also attributes the proclaimed perservation of Shani’s body to supernatural, i.e., non-human, removing the agency and humanity Palestinians displayed when they worked to preserve Shani’s body. I mean, as long as we’re making uneducated guesses, there’s no reason to believe Shani was preserved in tunnels, and I don’t think coldish (7-10C) damp environments are conducive to preserving a body.
This is why I say this article is hasbara; it is able to weave three or four propaganda points in just one seemingly simple statement. Media literacy is important exactly for this purpose, to understand what we are being shown.
If you think this is impossible and the parents spoke freely, remember that last year, when the first waves of POW exchanges happened, the released POWs to ‘Israel’ were instantly segregated into individual hotel rooms and not allowed to make public statements to the media or even to their family.
The article shows some more statements by the family (or rather relayed by the family and made by their handler), and suddenly switches mid-way through to talking about the genocide in Gaza by using words such as “Hamas massacred 364 Israeli concert-goers”, even after an investigation made earlier this year proved that they were killed by the IOF. The use of words like massacred, abducted, kidnapped, half-naked, disturbing images, grisly killing, etc. aim to subconsciously make you think certain things, things that the media outlet wants you to think. But because they don’t assert it directly that this is what happened, they can claim they bear no responsibility in describing things this way.
Let’s remember that legally, it has not been established whether the Resistance did “massacre”, “abduct” or “kidnap” anyone. In any other scenario, all of these claims would be prefaced with the word alleged — something the media knows to do well when they report on criminals, because they know that not using this word opens them up to lawsuits from the defendant.
The “half-naked” keyword is also interesting here. Another video shows that the clothes Shani was wearing on the back of the pickup truck were the clothes she was wearing at the festival just moments earlier. The New York Post does not make any mention of this.
Words have meaning, and the press knows this very well. We’ve seen, for example, how the New York Times contorts itself into non-euclidian shapes to try and avoid placing the responsibility of killings in Gaza on the IOF.
The most on the nose sentence in the article, perhaps, comes right after this aside:
Even in death, Shani continues to inspire Israeli soldiers on the front line to press on.
“One soldier told me that he went to Gaza to fight after he saw the picture of my daughter because he said, ‘it cannot be, such a thing’, you know?” [Shani’s father] described an interaction with a member of IDF.
“A guy I met, a soldier that was wounded, he said, ‘you know, I’m fighting and I’m always thinking about what happened to your daughter.”
In November last year, I wrote the following:
This is how the Zionist Entity treats its citizens. Even in death, you still have blood to give. You are only valued insofar as you are useful to the colonial project. Once you have nothing left they can take from you, you will be discarded and written off (like the 60+ POWs “Israel” has already killed through their endless bombing of Gaza).
Shani is now lionized by the same entity that killed her when they fired indiscriminately into the crowd at the Nova festival (a festival which was held only 2 kilometers away from Gaza). She is being made into a symbol of settler “resistance”, replenishing morale through her youthful beauty — itself a whole other problematic topic — for an army that is badly losing in Gaza despite all the destruction their planes and bombs are able to cause there.