Earlier this week, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Jamie Lee Curtis – best known for her role in slasher films like Halloween – likened the wildfires spreading through the Los Angeles region to the horror of Gaza.
The neighbourhoods of the extremely wealthy look “war-torn”, the 66-year-old actress said on a television show. She was promoting a new film about showgirls, when she remarked: “The entire Pacific Palisades looks like, unfortunately, Gaza or one of these war-torn countries where terrible things have happened.”
Natural disasters are undoubtedly terrifying and tragic. But they have little in common with wars, which are waged often with an aim to kill as many civilians as possible and destroy critical infrastructure.
It’s not the first time Curtis has shown tone-deafness while wading into issues. The daughter of the late actor Tony Curtis, and the granddaughter of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, she has publicly sided with Israel since the conflict began.
Last year, she posted a photograph of terrified Gazan children staring up at the sky, surrounded by rubble and mayhem. She mistakenly identified them as Israeli children. “Terror from the skies,” she wrote. One of the children in the photo was later allegedly killed by Israeli bombs. Curtis deleted the photo.
To say that the actress is out of touch with reality is an understatement. But who is at fault? She lives in Los Angeles, where most people are fed a steady diet of news that rarely goes beyond US Route 101. Mainstream media in America, aside from a few outlets, has largely masked the misery of Gaza’s civilians. Curtis is probably not waking up reading about the Hamas-Israel negotiations in Qatar; she is presumably reading about Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest green juice or Nicole Kidman’s latest film.
It’s not just Los Angeles. Polls conducted before the US elections last November consistently showed that most people, perhaps understandably, cared more about the price of petrol than the wars in the Middle East. Last October, one year after the Gaza war began, the Pew Centre for Research conducted a poll that cited that only 61 per cent of Americans wanted their government to help diplomatically resolve the war.
It hasn’t helped that some key news organisations in the West have reported stories that were never substantiated with hard evidence. The New York Times’s article about the alleged rape of Jewish women during the Hamas-led assault on October 7, 2023 is a case in point.
Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, made a documentary on the subject and spoke widely about it before the newspaper published a correction. (It was later confirmed that one of the “witnesses” quoted in the article – a medic from an Israeli paramilitary unit – falsely claimed to have seen evidence that two women suffered sexual violence inside one of the communities on the day).
This is not to deny that horrible acts of violence did not occur on October 7, but some of these misleading reports surely helped to shape the narrative around the war.
However, mainstream media shouldn’t take all the blame for Curtis’s ignorance, or for the public’s attitudes towards the war. The administration of President Joe Biden has protected and supported Israel since October 7. Mr Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken – who recently gave a shockingly unsympathetic interview on his own legacy – both deliberately chose to look away from the reality of what Israel continues to do to Gaza.
Mr Biden, who is on his way out of the Oval Office next week, is also hurriedly trying to preserve his legacy. That legacy will have to include the dead in the Palestinian territory.
The Lancet, Britain’s most prestigious medical journal, recently wrote that the Gazan Health Ministry, which usually announces the death toll, has underestimated the number of casualties by about 40 per cent. It reported the number of dead to be closer to 65,000 people, with more than 59 per cent of them being women and children and people over 65 years of age.
Mr Biden rarely, if ever, mentioned the suffering in Gaza. Call it selective ignorance.
But in an essay in Foreign Affairs this week, Human Rights Watch’s Washington director, Sarah Yager, writes that “with the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world”, Biden “appeared to not register what the rest of the world could clearly see. Gaza has been destroyed more completely than almost any urban area in the history of modern warfare”.
In Yager’s view, the President essentially closed his eyes to unspeakable horror inflicted on civilians.
It’s not just Gaza. At the start of the year, the International Crisis Group released its report on the 10 conflicts to watch. Ukraine and Gaza headed the list; but Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Mexico and Haiti were also cited. “The slide into lawlessness continues,” the report says.
Many of these conflicts are relatively unknown, far from the public eye. Insurgencies continue in parts of North Africa, Mali and Burkina Faso. The Tigray war in Ethiopia has rarely been reported, but it has killed an estimated 300,000 people – with some reports suggesting the figures could be as high as 600,000.
We can chalk up Curtis’s remarks as clueless and leave it at that. But she is just a symbol of a world that is increasingly out of touch. This is something that came to light during the Covid-19 epidemic, when the richest 1 per cent headed to private islands even as the poor struggled to find vaccines or hospital beds.
Back in 2013, the American journalist Frank Bruni wrote a humorous but telling column about the phenomenon of closing one’s eyes. “According to a survey I stumbled across just weeks ago, 21 per cent [of Americans] believe that a UFO landed in Roswell, New Mexico, nearly seven decades ago and that the federal government hushed it up.”
I laughed reading the article, but it made me even more determined to not look away from the rampant human rights abuses and terror directed at civilians around the world.
Mainstream media may hardly ever reach an audience that includes Jamie Lee Curtis. Nonetheless, as journalists we can and should continue to try to shine a light on the darkest places.
