Barred from view

We do not see what is happening in Gaza. We see just enough to keep us quiet. Famished children with bloated bellies. Grieving mothers clutching dust-covered blankets. Aerial views of neighborhoods reduced to rubble. These images flicker across our screens like stock footage, sanitized, muted, pitiable but distant. They are permitted not to move us to act, but to pacify our conscience.

What we are not shown are the images that would make war impossible to ignore.

We are not shown what a child’s body looks like after an airstrike. We are not shown a teenager’s torso shredded by bullets. We do not hear the gurgled cries of someone whose lungs are filling with blood. The clips we do see often have no sound, have you noticed that? Silence is part of the censorship. As if the horrors of war can be made palatable by pressing mute.

We’re told these images are “too disturbing.” That they’re “not for public consumption.” Too graphic. Too real. But that is precisely the problem. By shielding us from the unfiltered truth, corporate media – and the political interests it serves – enable a collective apathy. The less we see, the easier it is not to care.

Yes, we are desensitized – but not to the truth. We are desensitized to its substitutes: bland headlines, recycled footage, hollow narratives “about” massacres. We are drowning in simulation, not sensation.

If we were allowed to really see, our senses would revolt. We would hear the bones break, the skin blister, the screams through smoke and fire. We might imagine how blood smells, how fear tastes. We would not forget. We would not look away. And that is what frightens the architects of this war. Doctors, survivors, photojournalists, those who have seen war up close, know it is hell. They know that most people, if made to bear witness, would never support it. Only sociopaths and fanatics love war.

I often think of that searing image from Vietnam: Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the “Napalm Girl,” running naked down a road, her skin on fire. The photo, taken on June 8, 1972, outside the village of Trang Bang, captured the indiscriminate agony of a war that killed millions. That single image, by photographer Nick Ut, helped turn public opinion. It showed war not as politics or policy, but as a child on fire.

Kim Phuc survived, thanks in part to the man who took that photo. She still bears the scars. “I will never forget that moment,” she later said. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I got burned, I will be ugly, and people will see me a different way.’ But I was so terrified.”

Her terror made the war impossible to ignore. That’s what Gaza is missing. Not suffering, but permission to see it.

If the American public were shown even five unbroken minutes of real footage from Gaza – uncensored, unfiltered – they would demand an end to the carnage. Not tomorrow. Today.

But we are not being shown the truth. Because truth, in full light, demands something from us.

Excerpted: ‘Why We’re Not Allowed to See Gaza’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org