When Propaganda Masquerades as Editorial: A Rebuttal to Newspot Nigeria’s Israeli Apologia
Dear Editor,
For reasons best known to you, you chose to ignore my advice to:
1. Consider your reader’s education, knowledge, and sophistication when you write.
2. Stop garnishing your emotional prejudices with editorial cloaks.
In serious newspapers, Editorials are considered the best quality journalism possible, and the best minds in the organization write them.
Your latest outburst posing as editorials affronts any intelligent human being.
Here is my rebuttal.
Let us begin by stating the obvious: what you wrote as an editorial is anything but - it is an unvarnished press release drafted in Tel Aviv, printed in Lagos, and paraded as journalism. It is propaganda wearing the tattered agbada of objectivity, laced with emotional blackmail and lazy historical amnesia. The entire logic of what you choose to call editorial could be summarized thus: Israel is always right, no matter how many corpses it leaves in its wake.
It is unfortunate that in Nigeria, as in most of Africa, we have had our brains sautéed in CNN’s and BBC’s colonial skillet.
So allow me to remove the masquerade’s mask and expose the charade for what it is - a lopsided, morally bankrupt defense of impunity.
Let us first tackle the sanctified buzzword paraded with pious reverence: “self-defense.” According to your editorial, when Israel drops 2,000-pound bombs on hospitals, ambulances, and refugee tents, it is not committing war crimes—it is merely “defending” itself.
Let us consult the same international laws we claim to respect.
Article 51 of the UN Charter affirms a nation’s right to self-defense but does not grant impunity to punish civilian populations collectively. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, states unequivocally in Article 33:
“No protected person may be punished for an offense they have not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or terrorism are prohibited.”
So tell us, dear editor, how does burying 10,000 children under rubble fit into “self-defense”? Is starving 2.3 million people in Gaza—cutting off water, electricity, and medicine - also part of that noble doctrine?
Let us quote UN Secretary-General António Guterres speaking at the UN Security Council on October 24, 2023: “The appalling attacks by Hamas do not justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
But apparently, you belong to that cynical school of thought that believes Israel’s trauma confers eternal moral license to commit atrocities. At the same time, the Palestinians must suffer silently lest they be accused of “terror.”
Please, do you need a reminder that genocide is not a matter of opinion, but of law?
Let us move from sentiment to statute. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in South Africa v. Israel that there was a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. This is not a TikTok conspiracy or some feverish leftist fantasy - it is a sober ruling from the highest legal authority on the planet.
It is beyond belief that you were not aware of this!
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), to which Israel is bound, defines genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
And what did Israeli officials say during their campaign?
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked Amalek—a Biblical call to wipe out every man, woman, and child of a sworn enemy.
President Isaac Herzog declared that the entire population of Gaza was complicit, effectively criminalizing all 2.3 million people.
This is genocidal rhetoric. This is hate speech. And yet, you prefer to talk about Israeli “precision” and “restraint”—as if a missile guided by American software makes an orphaned baby any less dead.
What you called an editorial had the gall to compare Israel’s war crimes to Nigeria’s struggle with Boko Haram. What an insult. What a shameful, sanctimonious hypocrisy of selective sympathy. Nigeria is not occupying Maiduguri. Nigeria did not blockade Borno State and drop white phosphorus on fleeing civilians. Israel, however, has maintained an illegal occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967 - a fact recognized by the United Nations in over 30 resolutions.
In UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), the international community called on Israel to withdraw from territories occupied in the war of that year. Israel has refused.
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 affirms the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. Israel has refused.
UNSC Resolution 2334 (2016) condemned Israel’s settlement expansion as a “flagrant violation under international law.” Israel not only ignored it, but accelerated settlement-building under the cover of war.
So, when your editorial says “the international community must respect Israeli sovereignty,” one must ask: What about Palestinian sovereignty? Do they not bleed? Do they not deserve dignity?
Your editorial dredges up the Holocaust, as if the suffering of European Jews in 1940s gas chambers grants modern Israel the divine right to bomb Palestinian kindergartens. Sorry, but historical trauma does not negate moral accountability. Victimhood should never be promoted as a blank check for war crimes.
Let us hear from Professor Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories: “The genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure.”
Colonial process. Let that sink in.
I doubt that it will resonate with you, given your lack of knowledge of slavery and lynchings in your adopted country.
Israel is the only state in the modern world founded on a 20th-century European settler-colonial model. A state created in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians—an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Jewish historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé documented this expulsion. But your editorial, like most Western media, wants us to forget all that. Instead, they ask us to focus on October 7 - as if history began that day.
I have lamented in several articles that the greatest tragedy in Africa is how African media houses and the educational system have become parrots for the empire.
But your job, if you still respect it, is to inform and educate, not to launder atrocity behind borrowed moral platitudes. Journalism is not public relations. You can write whatever you fancy, but stop dressing them in an editorial halo. It is an insult to your readers’ intelligence.
You invoked Boko Haram. Very well. Then let us be consistent. If Boko Haram militants hide among civilians, and Nigeria bombs entire villages in response—killing hundreds of innocents—do we call that self-defense or state terrorism? When we start redefining genocide to suit political allies, we become accomplices in their crimes.
It is one thing to condemn the killing of Israeli civilians. We all do. No one justifies what Hamas did on October 7. But justice is not a one-way street. And when 38,000 Palestinians have been killed—over 70% of them women and children—you cannot call that “defense.” You call that what it is: a massacre.
You claimed in your editorial that Israel “does not need global approval to survive.” Fair enough. But it cannot murder with impunity and expect global silence. The days when African voices were mere echoes of colonial metropoles are over.
Stop being the echo chamber of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Let Israel defend itself within the bounds of law. Let Palestinians resist occupation—within the bounds of law. And let African journalists do what they are meant to: expose injustice, not excuse it.
As Chinua Achebe said, “Until the lions have their historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
You chose to glorify the hunter. I prefer to mourn the hunted.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Polemicist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Chronicler of collapsing empires.)
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Excellent rebuttal and exemplary journalism as to be expected from you. That editorial garbage puts shame on Newspot Nigeria editor. It also raises the question of whether or not Newspot Nigeria is propaganda vehicle for neo-colonialism and western imperialism.
Thank you.