News - Middle East: On May 30, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei published a letter addressed to students on US campuses protesting against the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza.

The title of the letter was “As the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it.”

Among his words of advice was a statement about the role of the media: The global Zionist elite – who owns most US and European media corporations or influences them through funding and bribery – has labeled this courageous, humane resistance movement as "terrorism."

To Western ears, this may sound like an exaggerated or simplistic account of how the media works. But let us examine the various elements of the media system and how it is influenced. 

The first thing to note is that perhaps the most important element setting the tone of coverage in the Western media is the role of official sources in defining what is legitimate and illegitimate violence. 

Thus, in the case of Palestine, Zionist regime sources have a built-in advantage over those of the resistance or even of Palestinians in general.

Studying media bias

Every decent study of Western media concludes the same.  For example the work of Greg Philo and Mike Berry in their series of books including Bad News From Israel and More Bad News from Israel, and most recently a study of the coverage of Gaza.

Greg’s recent death robs us of one of the most consistent critics of the idea that the media are biased against the Israeli regime.

These institutional practices are why we see the overwhelming blanket coverage of Zionist inventions like the 40 beheaded babies claim or the mass rape thesis or even the claim that “Hamas killed 1200”.

These have been debunked time and again since the events of October 7 but they still retain a meaningful grip on the Western imagination.

Even more fundamental than that is the definition of terrorism which is embedded in the counter-terrorism apparatus of most countries in the West.

Counter-terrorism with Zionist characteristics

Between 2003 and 2015, the following policies adopted neoconservative counter-terror policies in this order: the United Kingdom, European Union, Netherlands, France and Spain. 

These policies moved away from a law enforcement approach and adopted a policy based on “radicalization” in which nonviolent ideas, values and practices come to be seen as suspect and are subject to state sanction.

A fundamental and primary threat is seen to come from Islam.  This is a discourse that in the West is substantially informed by the Zionist regime.  As Remi Brulin has explained:

In the American and Israeli cases, this process of meaning construction is most clearly seen at work during the last decade of the Cold War. In July 1979, the Jonathan Institute, a group with intimate ties to the Israeli government, organized a major conference on “international terrorism” in Jerusalem.

This event announced the beginning of a deliberate, and ultimately extraordinarily successful, Israeli public relations offensive aimed at convincing the United States of the seriousness of the “terrorist” threat, a threat squarely identified with the Palestinians and their allies around the world…

By the end of Ronald Reagan’s first term, American elected officials had come to accept and adopt the main claims and assumptions that had, for years, been at the heart of the Israeli discourse on “terrorism.”

“Islamic terrorism” and “Islamism”

Concepts such as ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamic terrorism’ derive in origin substantially from the efforts of Zionist figures with a specific impetus from Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu himself, via the second Jonathan Institute conference organized in 1984 in Washington DC.

It can be noted that the term ‘Islamist’ was effectively invented in the late 1970s and then popularised especially by Zionist intellectuals like Bernard Lewis, most notably via the 1984 conference.

As a result, official sources inside a particular country are dominant (more dominant than those of a foreign power like the Zionist entity) in news about political violence, or Islam, and the security and intelligence sources of France, Spain or the UK predominate. 

But Zionist assumptions have already been baked into these policies.

We can see the macro pattern of the relation between official sources and the publication of books in English via the Google Ngram tool.