I remember that I have taken a particular interest in recent years in the question of the extent to which governments and parties need a spokesperson. Over time, with the expansion of the debate and the accumulation of practices, many in the Arab world have begun to seriously pose a more radical question: why do we need ministries of information in the first place?
Here, before going back to the models we had seen in the Arab world before the “setback of” 1967, or “Pravda” and “Izvestia” of the former Soviet Union, I would venture to say that what we have been hearing and seeing in many press conferences held in Western democracies... is not at all better than what we had heard from the “media” in the sixties.
In the Cold War era, audiences understood that the media they were consuming was controlled by totalitarian authorities and that everything they read or heard was more “a point of view” or “justification for a political position” than it was objective reporting or solid analysis. Today, however, the audience finds itself facing a whole host of problems, the most prominent of which are...
Firstly, strategic political interests, especially those of the major powers, have not changed and are not expected to fundamentally change, despite the development of media technologies and the challenges of “packaging” and “falsifying” them. Thus, justifying these interests and 'polishing' and promoting them - even with a considerable fabrication - is not as different today than it had been in the past as we might assume.
Secondly, Western political culture, which many of us have had the opportunity to experience and whose benefits many of us have enjoyed, is not as absolutely perfect as we may have imagined as we stood before it in awe. While it appears civilized, sophisticated, and tolerant under normal circumstances, it sheds these layers of civilization, sophistication, and tolerance when tensions escalate and hostility intensifies. This is exactly what we are seeing today, not only in the atrocities committed against civilians, hospitals, schools, and places of worship in the occupied Palestinian territories, but also in blatantly government crackdowns on freedom of speech in US universities, the British media, and the shameless advertising boycotts aimed at silencing dissent.
Thirdly, the blackmail and censorship (even criminalization) referred to above were a natural outcome of a series of developments following the end of the Cold War and the rise of the US as a “unipolar” power after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the past, Washington's pretext for building Israel's military arsenal was “maintaining the balance of power in the Middle East.” Since Moscow's fall, however, Washington has begun to openly talk about “the need to maintain Israel’s superiority,” completely disregarding the ”power balance” narrative.
Moreover, in the fall of 1975, before Washington became a unipolar power, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which labeled Zionism a form of racism, and called on every country in the world to resist Zionist ideology, which the Resolution asserted was a threat to global peace and security.
However, after the collapse of the Soviet challenge, Washington forced the repeal of this resolution in 1991. From then on, we have seen a shift in the opposite direction, with criticism of Zionism being seen as racist. This push has gained so much momentum that today, any criticism of the Israeli government, regardless of the politics behind it, is seen as an 'anti-Semitic' offense that should be criminalized.
Fourthly, the events of October 7th have been exploited to launch a war that has led to unprecedented levels of destruction and displacement, though most of the Arab world sincerely condemned it at the time and it became clear that Hamas officials had not been informed about it.
Indeed, the killing and displacement have yet to stop... despite several lies and rumors about the operation being exposed, as well as intelligence reports presenting findings that turned out to be inaccurate or false. Some of these reports referred to the fact that some of Gaza's tunnels had been dug by Israel during its occupation of the Strip, as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak has admitted, and the intelligence narrative relocating Hamas’s alleged command center from the Al-Shifa Hospital to Khan Yunis!
Fifthly, defying the global public and a substantial segment of the US public, Washington insisted on using its veto to prevent an end to the exacerbating humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza after nearly 18,000 people were killed in two months. The justification given by Washington for its veto against the Arab project premised purely on humanitarian grounds, was that it was “politically unbalanced” because it did not condemn Hamas... and thus “paves the way for another war”!
In any case, even though the “pretext” of the US representative was an insult to the intelligence of everyone who heard it, it remains far less problematic than the statements of White House Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council, John Kirby, who said at press conference, without batting an eye: “Tell me — name me one more nation, any other nation, that’s doing as much as the United States to alleviate the pain and suffering of the people of Gaza? You can’t. You just can’t.”
After all this, do we still need official spokespeople, responsible media, and respect for logic... let alone humanity and international law??
