Propaganda Literacy

Three measurable habits — matching story counts to casualty counts, naming one side's dead while counting the other's, and casting doubt only on Palestinian-sourced numbers — show how "neutral" formatting can still produce a one-sided picture.

Adidas Israel built its Single Shoe Service launch around an IDF veteran's 2021 injury — and closed with a line addressed to "all amputees." The campaign never mentions the more than 5,000 Palestinians who have lost limbs since October 2023, many of them children, in a war his former army is still fighting.

On October 10, 2023, an Israeli TV correspondent relayed a soldier's secondhand account of “forty beheaded babies” in Kfar Aza. Within a day it was repeated by CNN, NBC, and the Israeli government, and cited by President Biden as something he had seen “confirmed pictures” of. No forensic evidence was ever produced. This is the story of how a single unverified account became an unshakeable fact — and how the same mechanism has been used against Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim populations before.

Sam Fahd Abu Haikal was seven months old. The IDF says a soldier perceived a vehicle accelerating. His father says the car was stopped and the soldier was standing ten metres away in full daylight. This has happened before. And before that. And before that. The way Western media tells each story — and which stories it tells at all — is a case study in how language erases responsibility, one passive verb at a time.

The question is not a question. It is a mechanism — designed to end conversation before it begins, sort guests into acceptable and unacceptable categories, and immunize military operations from scrutiny regardless of how the guest answers.

Every word that names a conflict carries embedded assumptions about who holds power, who holds blame, and what history led to this moment. Reframing is the systematic process by which those assumptions are replaced — and with them, the conclusions audiences draw. This article traces the technique from the academic laboratory to its application in Israeli public diplomacy.