Op-Ed: Gaza – Global ugliness and social media making it worse as usual

Smoke billows above Gaza City after an Israeli air strike hit the Palestine Tower building on October 7, 2023. — © AFP

The news from Gaza and Israel is bad enough. On social media, it’s a lot worse. The deaths of hundreds of people are just an excuse for the bigots and nutcases. Images are everywhere. Spin is everywhere. The sponsored hate is everywhere. It’s a free lunch for propagandists.

On X, which is sometimes also the symbol for a wrong answer, it’s pretty bad even by current standards. Jewish posters reflect a mindset dating back millennia. In the wider posts about Gaza, opposing views simply promote themselves.

There’s also a lot of naivete in these polarized posts. Some posters are now saying the Israelis are using white phosphorous over Gaza. …As though anyone cares. You don’t kill hundreds of people and then start talking about legalities.

Please be aware that some of the materials on the Gaza link are highly objectionable.

This isn’t “free speech”, honest speech, or anything of the sort. It’s a sewer of self-serving propaganda. It’s a venue for hate. There seem to be few if any rules. A lot of the content appearing on X would never have been allowed in the past.  

Of course, you can’t keep politics out of any form of human misery. The direct and indirect political overtones from the US are everywhere. These are the well-paid insane polarized politics of hysteria and hate, as applied to any and every subject on Earth since 2016. Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, far more seriously, Israeli and foreign hostages have been taken. As usual, people just living their lives are targeted by terrorists. This is not ideology. It’s not “religion”. This is terrorism and nothing but terrorism. Nothing but carnage can result. There can be no other outcome.

This is why the old saying “Never negotiate with terrorists” came into being so many years ago. It should be noted that this tactic seems popular lately. The Russians have also kidnapped or taken into custody Ukrainian citizens and kids. Coincidence?  It’s utterly futile in any case. There definitely will never be a Palestinian state or anything like one on the basis of this barbarism.

There will, of course, be long-term major retaliation against Hamas and its backers by agencies worldwide. The probability is that Hamas itself will be simply targeted to extinction as a direct result of this obscene event. Their rule over Gaza will definitely end as a result. It should never have been allowed.

Assuming the Israelis don’t simply bulldoze the entire Gaza Strip and kick everyone out, the next moves are likely to be all bad for the inhabitants. The Palestinians have also been taken hostage by Hamas. Their future suddenly looks a lot worse than the usual awful stagnation.

Thanks to social media, notably X, the heat will be stoked up to keep the carnage going. In the same way that Russian propaganda is all about excuses for World War 3, these are excuses for another century of Middle Eastern violence.

Just one more point to make about social media. Nothing on the internet is or has ever been immune to law. There’s no legal status called “online is OK”. Anti-terrorism laws aren’t exactly vague. Encouraging and supporting terrorism can be a major criminal offense, with good reason. You might want to think about that.