The Media, Pitroda & Gaza

 

The Media, Pitroda & Gaza

The controversy in India about the Opposition Congress supporter Sam Pitroda evidently arises from the media’s wilful misrepresentation of what he said:

for when he rejoiced at the ethnic diversity of Indians, that was claimed racist  when he recommended redistribution Indians were told they would be impoverished to benefit Muslims.

The Press acts as self-appointed guardian of public memory. It remembers but has chosen to suppress how it aided Modi’s rise to power – by disseminating uncritically his promise of redistribution.

Namely to gift every poor Indian Rs 15 lakhs of Indian money supposedly held abroad by it was insinuated Congress Leader Sonia Gandhi. That would have meant giving Rs 417 trillion to 278 million people (https://pip.worldbank.org/country-profiles/IND). That undertaking has been evidently abandoned as billionaires have multiplied under Modi yet have often fled abroad when their gross theft of public funds has come to light.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) had warned us how by its selective silence it is the media that exercises the power of censorship. “Il y a une sorte de censure par le silence. Si, quand on veut faire passer un message, on ne trouve aucun echo dans le milieu journalistique… ce n’est pas diffuse. Les journalistes sont devenus l’ecran, ou le filtre, entre tout action intellectuelle et le public (footnote Produire l’opinion. Le nouveau jeu politique, Ed. de Minuit, 1990)”.

Or it may choose to promote untruth. In the West, the media smears as anti-Semitic those who protest the slaughter at Gaza.

Yet, given that almost every genocide in history including that of the Jewish people has been conducted by the West, & that the United States chose not to let in refugees from Hitler when it could have saved lives (Sarah Ogilvie & Scott Miller, Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust, 2010, Thomas & Morgan-Witts, Voyage of the Damned 1974 (See also);

 and that --not just Germany but France & Hungary among others played their part in the Shoah--- as Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961), Robert Paxton (Vichy France 1972 & Vichy France & the Jews1981), Randolph L. Braham (The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry 1961) among others have so authoritatively documented;

 & that Jews persecuted by Vichy France found refuge in the Arab world (&  Robert Satloff Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach Into Arab Lands Chapter 5 “The Arabs Watched Over the Jews”);

 denied refuge elsewhere, both Jewish & Catholic children from Poland found safe haven in the Indian princely state of Nawanagar during WW2 ( & further reference from the Prince’s old school).

It should be evident that the terrible monster of anti-Semitism has essentially always been a Western problem--- for which it seeks to avoid culpability by making it everybody else's responsibility but its own.

 Is not President Biden’s recent speech, only another instance?  

What greater proof that free speech is everywhere threatened-- & by the Press itself?