An excerpt from my upcoming book
The first 12 pages of 'How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza'.
Hi all, hope you are well.
My book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, is out in one week (4/21) and I am publishing an excerpt below from the first 12 pages which includes the introduction and beginning of chapter one. Pre-orders are always appreciated and help a lot and it’s available —
Directly from the publisher Pluto Press
Remember that 100% of the royalties are going to the Middle East Children’s Alliance For Peace.
I don’t like to publicly discuss process often, but I did want to note writing this book took almost two years and countless hours and your support for this Substack helped make doing this project possible, so thank you.
Adam
INTRODUCTION
“They are deceiv’d that acquiesce to things which they have heard, and believe not what they have seen.”
—Thomas Bartholin, The Anatomical History (1653)
In analyzing how American media helped create the political, ideological, and moral conditions for mass death in Gaza from October 2023 to October 2024, one must always make clear the stakes, situate the media criticism in the context of the actual humans who died—those who had limbs blown off, their children starved to death, watched loved ones waste away from preventable disease, saw their families torn apart. Lives upended, dreams snuffed out. Whole universes destroyed with the push of a button, the casual firing of a sniper rifle, the command to “remove a threat” from a faceless AI-assisted officer in an air-conditioned room. Death counts are abstractions: Numbers don’t register on a gut level, anything over what can be counted ceases to have significance in our mind’s eye, so it becomes cold, academic, numbing.
This is before the statistics detailing mass death on an unprecedented scale run through the normal Western cognitive dissonance filters that, of course, existed long before October 7, 2023: The Hollywood-curated heat ripple sunrise with the Islamic call to prayer in the background signaling a wholly different world, the soothing “they’ve been fighting for thousands of years” faux-savvy pseudo-history, the “War on Terror” framework that reduces all their violence to sadistic glee and ours to a reluctant, if messy, “Defense of Civilization.”
Center-Left mainstream news media in the US didn’t invent these initial prejudices but they certainly played to them, lent them fake intellectual credibility, built off of them, and constantly pandered to their corrosive and reductive version of history and present—all to create space for a Democratic president arming and funding what would end up being one of the worst, if not the worst, human rights crimes of the 21st century.
This book will argue that this process was neither inevitable nor self-sustaining: It took deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors—editors, reporters, bookers, producers, and TV personalities—who decided, early on in the so-called “Israel–Hamas war,” that defending the powerful and spinning a fictional narrative to soothe Western liberal audiences was more important than speaking plain truths, than defending a dispossessed people from a wholly asymmetric campaign carried out by Israel with the full backing of the US to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians of Gaza.
Like any good media critic, my job is one of prosecutor. What this book seeks to do is not to make this case with polemic or ideological assertions, or selective examples of bad coverage, but with robust data. By pulling from over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips in nine major outlets, and showing all the work in open source format, by interviewing sources who were in the room, and using comparative analysis of other contemporary conflicts, I will attempt to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the genocide in Gaza was enabled, facilitated, and cheerled by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting, and sexual violence.
And in doing so, we will always come back to the actual humans who actually died, who suffered, who lost arms, loved ones, homes, family heirlooms, and whole worlds. They existed and exist, they are real, they lived and had joy and hopes. And, as I will show, there’s a direct line between their subjugation and slow deaths buried under rubble, and American media’s decision to incite against them, dehumanize them, ignore them, strip them of their history and their narratives, and prioritize domestic political convenience and crude chauvinist narratives over doing what news media’s job ostensibly is: to tell the truth.
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
In alignment with determinations from Amnesty International,1 Human Rights Watch,2 Doctors Without Borders,3 the United Nations,4 and the consensus among genocide scholars,5 I chose to use the word “genocide” to describe the course of events outlined in this book, beginning on the evening of October 7, 2023, into the present. I made this decision and chose to use it in the title of the book, not to be provocative for its own sake, but because it is both a consensus in the academic and human rights world and also an objective, well-documented feature of our reality. My goal with this book was to write a sober, approachable, data-driven account of how the media provided cover for Israel’s destruction of Gaza—whatever one chooses to call it. In doing this, I wanted to describe, in clear and specific terms, the methods and explicit motives of US and Israeli officials without being needlessly polemical or hinging too much of my argumentation on totalizing, emotionally-charged terms. But reality is reality, and trying to discuss this destruction of Gaza without positioning it in the context of genocide would veer from sober and understated to dishonest and—frankly—what amounts to genocide denial. Throughout the book, I will thus use the term genocide and, when appropriate, ethnic cleansing. I will also employ more generic terms in the interest of variety and popular understanding, namely “war,” “conflict,” and related language. The point in doing so is not to undersell the totality of genocide, or to convey false symmetry, but to make the text more readable and varied.
A small portion of this book will draw on previously published analysis and data, versions of which have run in the Nation,6 the Column,7 the Real News Network,8 and In These Times.9
SCOPE OF THE BOOK AND THE MOATS OF RATIONALIZATION
The book will not focus on the conservative or MAGA media’s dehumanization of Palestinians for the simple fact that the pernicious nature of their media regime is not in doubt or dispute. Outlets like Fox News, Daily Wire, right-wing AM radio, Sinclair News, and the pages of the Wall Street Journal are, for the most part, openly genocidal against Palestinians and make no pretense otherwise. They are proudly so, and any book detailing their torrent of incitement would likely be met by the reporters, pundits, and columnists under their employment with an “Okay, and?”
Thus, my focus will be on what I broadly call Center-Left, liberal, legacy, or even mainstream media. None of these three terms is ideal; they all have limitations and carry their own baggage. “Center-Left” implies a neat ideological orientation that undersells the diversity of thought within the media organizations I will be discussing. “Liberal media” has, of course, its own right-coded history. “Mainstream media” has become a pejorative associated with unsophisticated internet missives against such outrages as basic fact-checking and sensible appeals to authority. Nevertheless, in the absence of a perfect term, and given my queasiness with attempting to coin my own taxonomy, I will use these pop terms throughout the book, often interchangeably, while still acknowledging they are far from perfect. Put simply: I am concerned with media primarily consumed by Democrats that has influence on both Democratic voters and the broader Democratic Party ideological universe.
Why? Because, as I will argue in this book, there was a Democratic president in office when the genocide began in earnest, and support from Democrats in Congress and in the think-tank and media world was dispositive in continuing said genocide during the given time frame of my study. Obviously, President Trump has since overseen and co-authored the genocide in Palestine, and his responsibility—and the responsibility of the broader, openly pro-genocide Republican Party—should not be ignored or downplayed.10 But that responsibility is beyond the scope of the book, which focuses on the nominal leftwing party backing the arming and funding of the destruction of Gaza.
But most acutely, it’s simply a matter of timing. The reality is that once the initial shock and anger over the sheer brutality of Israel’s military campaign wore off after the first three to six months, the pressure to change the dynamics and compel Israel to agree to a ceasefire grew all the more difficult. Once the “facts on the ground” were established and daily mass deaths in Gaza began to be totally normalized in the American public’s mind, and removed from the daily front pages, efforts to end the genocide became far more difficult. Thus, the first year, and the first few months in particular, will primarily be the focus of the book. It was during this timeframe that the fundamental logic and axioms of the “war on Hamas” were cemented, and therefore genocide in Gaza became a fait accompli.
In this book, I will structure the pernicious role of Center-Left media in what I will call the “Moats of Rationalization.” The basic concept for this model is the nonstop destruction of Gaza for the twelve months I cover here, the sheer brutality and one-sidedness of which was obvious from the onset, and that was impossible for any otherwise moral person to ignore outright. So an elaborate framework of excuse-making, deflection, faux-savvy realpolitik, orientalist tropes, and glaring double standards emerged to justify the White House’s lockstep support for producing carnage everyone could easily witness across their social media timelines on a daily basis. Living in a world where our government, especially a Democratic president, could not possibly be supportive of such manifest cruelty, Moats of Rationalization emerged to allow the average media consumer—and media worker—to cope with the undeniable, and untenable war crimes being carried out by their leaders before their eyes. These Moats of Rationalization ran the spectrum from outright support for mass death to desperate liberal-left argument by Non Sequitur and argument by Trolly Problem, as seen overleaf.
Where Center-Left media intervened, and what we will mostly cover, are items three through seven. The primary role of our Center-Left media, I will argue, was not to accurately convey reality but, for want of a better descriptor, to make their readers and viewers feel better—to give them ready-made talking points pursuant to moats three through seven. To make them feel better about their country, their president, their party, their institutions, and themselves. It was to rationalize, negotiate, obscure, and, ultimately, deny the most inconvenient of truths: a genocide carried out, defended, and authored by elite liberals and liberal institutions.
They would, among themselves, never put it this way, but the outcome was the same. As sources from CNN to CBS to MSNBC repeatedly conveyed to me, it was never framed in such sinister terms within the newsrooms or over after-hours cocktails. It was, instead, packaged in the far more reasonable language of “nuance,” “lowering the temperature,” “combating antisemitism,” savvy appeals to “complexity,” and “limits on American power.” And, as November 2024 got closer, not poisoning the well too much with minority and young voters, and preventing Trump from marching back into the White House. All seemingly high-minded, all—in isolation—even sensible. But all very much, at least in principle, not the role of media. Truth took a back seat to feelings, the urgency of stopping a clear-as-day genocidal campaign in its infancy, and to the short-term electoral needs of Democrats.
So what followed was, I will argue in this book, the most consequential media scandal of the 21st century—more deliberate, more high-leverage, and more deadly than the build-up to the Iraq invasion, and, to this day, far less truly understood. The consequences of widespread media complicity in the Gaza genocide are still not fully appreciated; the impact—especially among the younger, more social media-oriented public—still not fully internalized. This book seeks to be a corrective, not to save Center-Left media from itself, or to try and improve it—indeed, such a task is well beyond my moral or intellectual scope—but for history, for those interested in posterity and what occurred in late 2023 into 2024, and for other media analysts and activists to build from. But, most of all, it’s a book for those interested in the truth in and of itself. And in a world where all intellectual output seems to have to fit a partisan narrative or serve some broader nonprofit goal of liberal improvement, I think there’s something to be said for the truth for its own sake.
CHAPTER ONE: “40 beheaded babies,” the ISIS-ification of Hamas, and how to prime the American public for revenge
There are many false stories justifying the destruction of Gaza. But to zero in on an object lesson in media complicity, especially in the early days of the assault when the American public was being primed for a long, brutal campaign of mass removal and death, there is no story that was more consequential for setting the stage than the supposed beheading of 40 Israeli babies. This claim went viral and quickly entered into the public consciousness—repeated even by the president of the United States.
Other reporters, academics, and commentators have done detailed work debunking this claim and tracing the media’s complicity. This includes early skeptical reporting by Electronic Intifada,1 Business Insider,2 the Intercept,3 Mondoweiss,4 and Aljazeera.5 I will expand on their findings but also seek to position the story as part of a broader PR campaign, and a much longer effort to obscure the antecedents of Palestinian violence and index the conflict in a plug-and-play “War on Terror” framework that Western audiences could easily dissect—and just as easily dismiss as mindless violence.
In the wake of the Hamas-led October 7 attack that left roughly 1,200 dead in southern Israel, when information was pouring in from Israeli officials and reporters on the ground, one story in particular struck a chord with an outraged public ready to believe just about anything about the “terrorists” in question: that rescue workers had found the remains of about “40 beheaded babies” at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, one of the communities attacked by Hamas and other Palestinian militants that Saturday morning. On October 10, Israeli news channel i24 reported that it had received “confirmation” from soldiers that “40 babies/children were beheaded.”6 That same day, a spokesperson for the IDF repeated this claim to Business Insider.7 And on October 11, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN that babies and toddlers were found with their “heads decapitated” in Kfar Aza kibbutz.8
In the days just prior and after, this claim was repeated, without evidence or skepticism, by CNN’s Nic Robertson,9 CNN’s Abby Phillip,10 Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz,11 New York Post’s Olivia Land,12 CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell,13 New Lines’ Lisa Goldman,14 The Hill’s Laura Kelly and Sharon Udasin,15 CBS News’ Holly Williams and Erin Lyall,16 an un-bylined piece at Reuters,17 Sky News’ Yashee Sharma,18 MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, NBC News’ Peter Alexander, Summer Concepcion, and Megan Lebowitz.19 And, live on-air, CNN’s Sara Sidner and Hadas Gold somberly repeated the claim on October 11, without an ounce of skepticism.20 “We have some really disturbing new information out of Israel,” Sidner said, looking into the camera, doing her best Walter Cronkite. “The Israeli Prime Minister’s spokesman just confirmed: babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated … that has been confirmed by the Prime Minister’s office.”
Sidner called the claim “beyond devastating,” then went on to lament, “For the families listening, for the people of Israel, for anyone that is a parent, who loves children, I don’t know how they get through this.”
Sidner then threw it over to a CNN reporter in Jerusalem, Hadas Gold, and implied the decapitation of babies would make peace or a ceasefire with Hamas an impossibility. Gold replied, “How can you when you’re dealing with people who would do such atrocities to children, to babies, to toddlers?” Gold again said the report had been “confirmed” by the prime minister’s office and proceeded to compare the alleged atrocity to the Holocaust. She responded to a Hamas denial that it had decapitated babies as not credible because “we literally have video of these guys, of these militants, of these terrorists, doing exactly what they say they’re not doing to civilians and to children.”
But no such video existed or currently exists because it never happened. It was a lie thrown out on-air by Gold and Sidner to millions of viewers.
The idea that a government cannot “confirm” their own self-serving tabloid claims appears not to have crossed the minds of CNN’s Standards department. The shocking viral story culminated with President Joe Biden telling reporters that not only had Hamas decapitated children, but that he had seen photos of the horrors himself.
“I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” he said at a public event on the afternoon of October 11.
Quickly, an unsourced, unverified rumor had made its way from Israeli officials to American reporters and into the statements of the most powerful person in the world. There was only one problem: The story was a whole cloth fabrication. Traced to Israeli military personnel and ZAKA, a Far-Right “disaster response” organization with a long history of fabulism, the gruesome tale didn’t need to be true—it just needed to serve the function of ISIS-ifying Hamas in the mind of the American public. By the time it was debunked or walked back by those attempting to maintain credibility, the meme had already spread, and the dehumanization of an entire population was sufficiently underway.
#HAMASISISIS AND THE UTILITY OF THE “WAR ON TERROR” FRAME
Israeli propagandists didn’t pick the “40 beheaded babies” narrative at random. It was chosen because it called on very specific anti-Arab, anti-Muslim tropes that could easily be internalized and instrumentalized by the Western audiences they relied on for political and military support. Indeed, the media grammar for essentializing Palestinian violence as inherently nihilistic and cruel has been long in the making, propped up by years of “War on Terror,” clash-of-civilization frameworks that positioned all Islamic, Arab, or Muslim-coded violence as something carried out for the sole purpose of sadistic glee, racial hatred of Jews, or an attempt to “martyr” oneself to achieve posthumous religious glory.
Rather than attempting to contextualize violence, explain its motivations—whether targeting civilians or combatants, whether justified or not—there was an early effort by both media decision-makers and pro-Israel pressure groups to ISIS-ify Palestinian militants, to reduce their motives to, at best, a racial hatred of Jewish people or, at worst, nihilistic jihadi bloodlust. The fact that Hamas had long been in violent conflict with ISIS and had a completely different theological and ideological program wasn’t important.21 What was important was to say Hamas and ISIS in the same sentence as much as possible. This was a strategy adopted by the Israeli government, which pushed out ads promoting the hashtag #HamasisISIS on social media and repeated this “Hamas is ISIS” talking point during every media appearance in the weeks after October 7.22 (It’s worth noting that in June 2025, Israeli outlet Haaretz reported that the Israeli military had been arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza to counter Hamas, a fact publicly confirmed by Netanyahu’s former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.)23
It was a message other Western leaders embraced. On October 10, President Biden said in a speech, “The brutality of Hamas’ blood-thirstiness brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS.”24 US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told an Israeli audience on October 13 that what Hamas did was “worse than ISIS.”25 On October 24, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared alongside Netanyahu and proposed an international coalition like the one that fought the Islamic State. “France is ready for the international coalition against Daesh,” he told reporters, “in which we are taking part for operations in Iraq and Syria to also fight against Hamas.”26
It was a talking point repeated, with little pushback, in American media. A review of the first month of coverage in both print and online media post-October 7 shows that Hamas was equated with ISIS in USA Today, CNN.com, Politico, the New York Times, Axios, Associated Press, and the Washington Post 149 times, largely reprinting uncritical quotes from Israeli and US officials. There were also 102 mentions in these publications of “beheadings,” the most infamous of these being the “beheaded babies/children” claim that, after it was debunked, vaguely drifted into generalized “beheadings” to avoid outright lying. The ISIS-ification of Hamas was much worse in cable news, with on-air CNN voices equating Hamas with ISIS 350 times and MSNBC commentators doing so 369 times in the first month of the war. CNN mentioned “beheadings,” including nonexistent beheadings of babies and infants, 77 times, and MSNBC did so 82 times.