By Jeremy Salt

In professional solidarity, Markson could have questioned Netanyahu about the journalists murdered in Gaza but she did not.

We live in a ‘post-truth’ era. History has ended, according to Francis Fukuyama. Neither proposition is true. The catchy titles sell books but history does not end and truth does not go away. The problem lies in finding it, in history and in the events swirling around us, especially in the filthy water of politics.

As a purveyor of truth, the mainstream media has never been reliable. The exceptions are honorable but they are still exceptions.

Every news outlet, whether centrist, right or left aligned, ‘liberal’ or conservative, has red lines built on assumptions, received truth and the vested interests of proprietors and/or shareholders.

The depth of the red line and where it is drawn depends on the nature and ownership of the news outlet. The London Daily Mail in the 1930s reflected the global perspective of its proprietor, Lord Rothermere. The newspapers and electronic ‘news’ outlets in the Murdoch stable provide the same service for News Corporation’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.

The Daily Mail’s chief foreign correspondent in the 1930s was George Ward Price. Rothermere approved of national socialism and fascism, as did many of Britain’s titled class. The paper reflected his views, opening the door to Ward Price’s empathetic ‘exclusive’ interviews with Hitler and Mussolini.

Both could say whatever they wanted without any fear of being challenged. When Mussolini said Italy wasn’t bombing ambulances and using mustard gas in Ethiopia, Ward Price didn’t draw attention to the evidence that he was lying.

Like Netanyahu accusing Hamas of atrocities, Mussolini preferred to draw attention to the “level of barbarity” of the Ethiopian resistance and not the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Ethiopian civilians by the Italian army and air force.

It is by no means a stretch to link Sharri Markson to Ward Price. Markson is a journalist who moved within the Murdoch stable in Australia and overseas before being appointed to her present position as ‘investigations editor’ at Murdoch’s Australian flagship, the Australian newspaper. She also hosts her own Sky News program, ‘Sharri.’

While Markson has won awards for her general reporting, she has no sense of balance or journalistic integrity when it comes to Israel. On this subject she is a true believer, in the Biblical ‘I say unto you’ category.

Her connection with Israel surfaced in 2015 when she was detained there when trying to interview a “Syrian national” in the Ziv medical centre at Safed. At the time, Israel was treating wounded terrorists shifted by Israeli ambulances across the occupied Golan Heights and this “Syrian national” was obviously one of them.

Hence the security risk when Markson turned up with her notebook. It surely did not take much time to establish that she was there as a friend of Israel’s and be set free.

She attracted attention again in June 2018 when it was revealed that she and others had visited Israel to take part in the ‘Rambam Fellowship Program.’ As described on the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Committee (AIJAC) on its website, AIJAC “annually sponsors visits to Israel by selected senior journalists, politicians, political advisors, senior public servants and student leaders.”

‘Sponsors’ presumably includes covering all costs. AIJAC does not speak for Australia’s Jews and ‘Jewish affairs’ is no more than a cover for what it really does, which is run propaganda inside Australia for a foreign state.

Since October 7 Markson has shed rivers of tears for the Israeli victims of the Hamas attack, without shedding any for the tens of thousands of civilians killed by Israel since October 7 unless some focussed observer has spotted one.

While the bullets and missiles were being fired by Israelis, Markson holds Hamas responsible for ‘starting’ the war by attacking across the Gaza fence on October 7. In fact, as anyone with even a modest understanding of the history would know, the war ‘started’ at least a century ago.

Gaza has been the site of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Israeli attacks in the past 77 years. The older population was driven into Gaza from villages and land ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948/9.

How many Palestinians were killed in all these attacks, no one will ever really know but thousands have been killed just in the past two decades. The most recent include 2008/9, 1400 Palestinians killed; 2014, 2100 killed; 2018, 170 killed; 2021, 260 killed; and 2022, more than 30 killed. Many hundreds of children have been killed in these attacks, a prelude to the great slaughter of children since October 8, 2023.

So, very clearly, even if the war could be said to have ‘started’ in 1948 or 1967, it certainly did not start on October 7, 2023. But to get back to the similarity between Ward Price in the 1930s and Sharri Markson a century later.

Ward Price made no secret of where his sympathies lay, with Hitler and Mussolini and Markson makes no secret of where hers lie, with the government held responsible by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) early in 2024 for committing “plausible” war crimes and with the head of that government, Benyamin Netanyahu, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using starvation as a weapon of war.

If neither the ICJ or the ICC has proceeded with the cases before them we know the reason is the intimidation and threats directed against both (and personally the ICC chief prosecutor) by the US on behalf of Israel.

On August 21 Markson interviewed Netanyahu on Sky News. The interview is a case study in media propaganda of the worst kind. No journalist worthy of the name could have allowed Netanyahu to get away with the lies and distortions coming out of his mouth every time he opened it, yet not once did Markson pull him up, challenge him or contradict him.

On the same day as the interview, Israeli forces killed at least 81 Palestinians in Gaza, including both parents and three children, aged four, seven and nine burnt alive in a tent. The day before they had killed 58 people.

By this time the Israeli military had killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza, close to 20,000 children among them. These are the only deaths the authorities have been able to count: the real figure will be many times higher.

No real journalist could have possibly interviewed Netanyahu without challenging him about these figures but Markson managed it. Her ‘questions’ were framed so that Netanyahu could say whatever he wanted, with her body language and the occasional murmur of agreement signifying that she was with him all the way. She was no more an objective journalist than Ward Price was in the 1930s,

Thus, instead of questioning him about Israel’s mass killing of civilians, she asked “Have you been shocked at the anti-semitism, the violence, the hatred you’ve seen unfolding on our streets in Australia and then the lack of action and the lack of leadership from the very top?”

No surprise that he was. When the question of appeasement came up, Markson obviously did not mean the way Israel has been routinely appeased for nearly eight decades, but Albanese’s ‘appeasement’ of Hamas by declaring Australia’s intention to recognize a Palestinian state.

As invited, Netanyahu jumped in straight away with a reference to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, particularly as it related to Sudetenland, which was Czech territory with a significant German-speaking minority of about three million people. The Nazis wanted it. “They gave that part to Hitler and what did he do – he started World War Two,” Netanyahu replied.

In fact, Sudetenland was part of the Czech republic while the West Bank and East Jerusalem (in fact the whole of Jerusalem) are occupied territory in fact and under international law. Israel has no more right to it than Germany had to Sudetenland, but in both cases the aggressor was looking for territorial expansion and in both cases the aggressor was appeased.

If there is another parallel, it is that the same class of politicians and newspaper proprietors and editors that appeased Nazi Germany in the 1930s have been appeasing Israel for decades and are still doing it despite the genocide.

Markson remarked that “part of the problem here is that a very effective propaganda campaign is being run against Israel.”

Coming from a woman who takes line honors for running propaganda in Australia for Israel, this was more than a bit rich but she went on to claim that “the Albanese government is aiding and abetting it and so are some media outlets.”

Again, a striking claim considering the propaganda pouring out of her own newspaper and television channel in support of a genocidal state. Then she asked Netanyahu “What do you say to the libels that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinian children?”

A libel? No, a fact. Using starvation as a weapon of war is one of the ICC’s indictments against Netanyahu and limiting the calorie intake of Palestinians has been used against them by Israel for years. The deliberate destruction of 93 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land has added to the blockage of outside aid by preventing Gazans from growing food to feed themselves.

Netanyahu’s ministers and army commanders have openly proclaimed their intentions to starve the Palestinians into submission or death. Tom Fletcher, who heads the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, describes the Gaza famine as “a 21^st century famine watched over by drones and the most advanced military technology in history. It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war.”

Cued in by Markson, Netanyahu turned the genocide into a blood libel. The same lies were leveled at the Jewish people in the Middle Ages. They were accused of killing Christian children for their blood and now “it’s the same thing. Israel is starving Palestinian children? What lies!”

As for genocide, Israel had sent out millions of messages urging people to “get out harm’s way so we can shepherd you to safe places and many did … many didn’t because Hamas shot them if they tried … Israel has done what no army has done in trying to avoid civilian casualties … I’m just stating a fact …. The lengths we go to, to protect the civilian population, is unheard of.”

In professional solidarity, Markson could have questioned Netanyahu about the journalists murdered in Gaza but she did not. Neither did she have any questions to ask about the killing of 20,000 children, in their beds, burnt to death in their tents, sniped at in the streets and if they survived, condemned to a life without arms or legs.

Netanyahu then spoke of “fighting a war of western civilization against these barbarians … ultimately all Australians will get it if they don’t get it now, ” Markson murmured “they do” (get it now), quite incorrectly, as what the Australian people are getting is the genocide.

On the question of a ceasefire, Netanyahu said, “we’re not going to leave Hamas there … it would be like leaving the SS in Germany …. Getting the hostages out is our goal …. We have Gazans fighting Hamas.” Another murmur from Markson “so brave”, referring to Abu Shabab and his armed Israeli mercenary gang.

This sycophantic ‘exclusive interview’ allowed the architect of the Gaza genocide to repeat his lies in the same way that Ward Price’s ‘exclusive interviews’ allowed Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s to repeat theirs.

It is hard to know whether to feel sorrow or contempt for someone so thoroughly brainwashed and puffed up with self-righteousness as Sharri Markson. This will catch up with her in later life when the genocide has been written into history and her name is one of the first to come up when questions are asked about who enabled it in the Australian media.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.