72 Blogs Uncensored

Here's an interesting question. IDF soldiers have been uploading videos and pictures of themselves committing all sorts of horrible acts - clear war crimes, documented by the perpetrators, published to social media channels. Quite obviously, they are news and provide important context into the biggest story since October. Additionally - there are no international journalists in Gaza, so on the ground reporting of what's happening there is extremely limited. And yet there's been no coverage. Why?

The kneejerk answer is that mainstream media is too in the tank for genocide and they refuse to cover anything that puts Israel in a bad light. Now to be clear - this is definitely part of it. The ludicrous bias in coverage has been thoroughly documented. But - even with that bias in place - some stories get through. Some coverage happens. Even the New York Times with their obvious propaganda pieces have published stories that are quite damning of Israel (and also their own coverage of the conflict). And yet no one talks about the IDF videos.

Here's my theory - it's because it's a can of worms they really do not want to open. The videos of soldiers riding children's tricycles or dressing in women's clothing - knowing that the owners of that stuff have been either killed or displaced - that's pretty bad. The videos of soldiers whooping it up as they level entire neighbourhoods with planted explosives (meaning that the buildings were already clear enough for demo crews to go in and wire them to go boom) - pretty bad. The videos of soldiers forcing hundreds of men to engage in some kabuki theatre of surrendering while stripped to their skivvies? Also bad. And there are now thousands of these videos and pictures online. But these only represent the tip of the genocide iceberg. This video evidence of rampant and disgusting dehumanization of Palestinians is actually some of the least offensive shit IDF soldiers have done.

Those garden variety war crimes media are nothing compared to the worst of the what these genocidal monsters are celebrating. The IDF was running a snuff channel (as alluded to in this post's title) - hosting literally hundreds of videos of Palestinians being murdered and having their deaths mocked by Israeli soldiers. There are a lot of those videos - and reporting on the much milder generic war crimes captured on film opens up the question about the rest of the social media posts. It's kind of like reporting on a car accident and noting the damage to the vehicles while not mentioning how many people were killed.

So they don't want to go down that road. They know that it leads to some super dark shit that they really want memory-holed as badly as possible. Or maybe they just have not figured out a way of actually covering it without the Biden Administration declaring them terrorists and shipping them off to Gitmo. Regardless - they are being super careful about IDF social media posts because they know that reporting on that issue is way worse than it initially seems.