ANALYSIS: HOW THE UK AND US MEDIA DEHUMANISE PALESTINIANS
BY CLAIRE LAUTERBACH AND NAMIR SHABIBI | DECLASSIFIED UK | NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Nazis. Beneath animals.
This is a small sample of what Palestinians have been called by commentators speaking to Western media outlets in the last month of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – examples of the bestiary of zoological terms natural to a coloniser’s view of the colonised.
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote during France’s colonial war in Algeria of “hordes of vital statistics”, “hysterical masses”, “faces bereft of all humanity”, and “children who seem to belong to nobody”.
These are all terms that could describe how western media covers the suffering of Palestinians — “a tide of humanity… a teeming mass of Gazans”, as the BBC put it (15 October). This is all sharply in focus since Hamas’ October offensive, and Israel’s genocidal razing of the Gaza strip.
We analysed the front page coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza by five major US and UK news media — the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, and the BBC (the news landing page at 7am daily) between 7-26 October.
Over these three weeks following Hamas’ offensive, the mechanics of the Western press’ dehumanisation of Palestinians in death and life are revealed as clinical and routine.
Israelis are murdered, Palestinians die
The dehumanisation process begins (or ends) with questioning who counts in death, and how the killer and the victim are portrayed.
In the UK-US mainstream media, Israelis die actively. They are either killed or murdered by Hamas, or “after a surprise Palestinian attack”. “The Palestinians” stands in for “Hamas” for sloppy or ideological editors, for example in the Guardian on 8 October.
Palestinian civilians, by contrast, die passively – and yet it is they who have done most of the dying since 7 October; over ten times the number of Israelis killed.
Gazans aren’t killed by Israeli forces or Israeli government policies. They “dehydrate to death as clean water runs out” (Guardian, 18 October) while Israeli airstrikes “continue to pound the Palestinian territory”.
On 9 October, the BBC ran with “700 people have been killed on the Israeli side with more than 400 also dead in Gaza”, presumably succumbing to shock or an act of God.
On 8 November, the Times of London noted: “Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died”, which is of course qualified.
Palestinian deaths are natural, undifferentiated. This is only possible because the media treat Israel’s blockade of Gaza as wholly logical, proportionate and even restrained.
Violations of international law
Collective punishment, which is essentially what Israel is doing by striking civilian “targets” and totally blockading the “open prison” (in former prime minister David Cameron’s words), is also illegal. This is the view of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, UN human rights chief Volker Türk and Human Rights Watch, among others.
When UN chief António Guterres noted Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and called for an end to the siege, Israel’s UN representative demanded he resign. At least one of Guterres’ colleagues, the head of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, Craig Mokhiber, resigned of his own accord, protesting Israel’s “genocide unfolding before our eyes” in Palestine.
However, in none of the three weeks’ of front-page headlines and lead paragraphs for the five UK-US media analysed for this article are Israel’s serial violations of international law mentioned.
The exclusion of this important context on Israel’s crimes is important. As journalists we’re trained to account for the fact that most people don’t read beyond the headlines or first paragraphs.
Off the front page, some media published separate analysis pieces, such as the New York Times’ “Israel, Gaza and the laws of war” (12 October). This unsurprisingly goes nowhere near calling Israel’s crimes what they are: crimes.
Despite discussing at length how civilians cannot be targeted or disproportionately harmed for military purposes, the closest the New York Times gets to criticising the action of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is quoting the opinion of an expert on siege law.
This was that Israel’s siege is “an unusually clear-cut example of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, which is considered a violation of international humanitarian law, a crime against humanity and a war crime” (emphasis added).
A swift qualifier follows: “Jurisdiction over some war crimes would depend on whether the conflict is considered inter-state.” So some crimes are not a crime as long as Palestine or Palestinians don’t exist, as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir asserted over 50 years ago, repeated by current Israeli politicians.
By contrast, Hamas’ actions are, to the same cited expert, “not close calls”.
Preventable deaths
Moving on from, or ignoring completely, both the illegality of Israel’s total siege of Gaza, the UK-US media portray the starvation and preventable deaths resulting directly from it in almost entirely passive, naturalistic language.
For example, the Washington Post’s print version front page: “Civilian harm in Gaza looms over Biden’s visit; Rising human toll from attacks could threaten Israel’s global backing” (harm arising of course from Israel’s battering).
On 13 October, from the New York Times : “300,000 homeless in battered Gaza as food runs low” (because Israel is blocking food from entering Gaza). It continues: “Hospitals overwhelmed and fuel scarce” (because Israel is blocking medical supplies and fuel from reaching Gaza) “as Israel strikes back at Hamas.”
That’s fine then – the reader should feel at ease since Israel’s crushing of hospitals is merely an act of “self-defence”.
The Israeli military is not much a fan of Gazan hospitals – it regularly bombs them. It ordered 23 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate on 13 October, and seems to have been picking them off, with patients inside, ever since.
When Israel might have gone too far, as it did in almost certainly bombing Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October, most outlets covered the strike by repeating both Israel’s and Hamas’ “he said-she said” accusations against the other.
Nevertheless, the New York Times gave the IDF’s denial more weight with “Hamas fails to make case that Israel struck hospital” (23 October, emphasis added), which is a catchier headline than “We don’t know, and don’t want to work it out ourselves”.
Meanwhile, the Times ran with “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”, swiftly adding that “Israel denies responsibility and blames jihadis”, with no comment from a Palestinian voice.
Mirroring the discrepancy between how Palestinians have died (passively, often with no mention of Israeli actions) and Israelis have died (actively, directly attributed to Hamas or “Palestinian” actions) is how the media describes child victims of both sides.
Discussing a prisoner exchange, a Washington Post columnist described Israel’s “children hostages” while referring to Palestinian children as “young people”. Under Military Order 1591, the Israeli government can hold minors as young as 12 without trial and potentially indefinitely in “administrative detention”, UNICEF reports.
When Gazan civilian deaths from siege and strikes against civilian infrastructure are shown as authorless natural disasters rather than as war crimes, any access Gazans get to essential goods becomes “aid” or “relief”, and every tiny amount allowed to reach them is an act of Israeli mercy.
For example, the New York Times (19 October): “Deal lays groundwork for aid to reach desperate Gazans”. Or the Washington Post (12 October): “Closed borders, falling bombs choke Gaza; thousands injured as supplies wane”, adding “humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens” (due to Israeli siege, let’s not forget).
Also in the Washington Post is the incredible headline (16 October) “As Palestinian death toll rises, aid stuck in Egypt”, as if it couldn’t physically fit through the door, which ignores the fact that Israel prevented aid from entering Israel via Rafah, demanding proof it would not be diverted to Hamas.
The numbers
Having reduced Palestinians to numbers, the work then becomes to cast doubt on these numbers.
When Israel’s flattening of Gaza began raising international alarm, Biden said he didn’t trust that “Palestinians” (or the Hamas government, since to him the distinction is irrelevant) “are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
His statement was the latest in a time-honoured tradition of US administrations disputing the number of deaths wreaked by their allies abroad, from Suharto’s Indonesia, to Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and Saudi Arabia today, as historian Bradely Simpson notes.
No one seriously disputes the Gazan Ministry of Health’s numbers as too high. If anything, they are likely a serious undercount given how many bodies are trapped under rubble.
Nevertheless, the attribution of figures to the “Gaza Ministry of Health” is now almost always prefaced by “Hamas-government” or followed by “controlled by Hamas”. This would seem an odd waste of words, considering that everyone from the UN to the US State Department cites Gazan health ministry casualty data, and Gaza’s government is run by Hamas.
Dead Palestinians are simply irrelevant for some media. The first mention of Palestinian deaths in Times headlines occurred 11 days after Hamas’ assault: “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”. It had by then run several front page pieces about specific, named Israeli victims, including an in-depth profile (with portrait) of a kibbutz family horrifically killed by the Hamas-led offensive [or not].
Unsurprisingly, on 12 October, the Telegraph published the number of Israelis killed in factors of “9/11s” in a striking infographic which didn’t even bother to include an estimate of Palestinian deaths.
Double standards
Once a people are truly dehumanised, it becomes logical – necessary, even – to apply a wholly different standard of (in)decency to them.
UK-US media report Palestinian deaths passively, as if through apparent acts of God, often couching the deaths in language suggesting that they were mostly Hamas or Hamas-adjacent, or at least that they inconveniently stood in missiles’ way.
For still-breathing Palestinians, it is not enough to have somehow escaped being killed by the almost 6,000 bombs Israel launched in its first six days punishing the densely populated territory. This is more than the US, not usually known for its restraint, deployed in any single year of its war in Afghanistan.
A living Palestinian must justify his or her continued aliveness by disavowing Hamas. A viral example of this can be seen in BBC Newsnight’s interview of the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot.
Presenter Kirsty Wark barely flinched upon hearing Zomlot describe in detail how members of his family had been killed by Israeli strikes in the previous days before repeatedly demanding Zomlot condemn Hamas’ actions.
To reverse this, in other words, to ask every Israeli who had lost a family member in this conflict to first begin by condemning Israel’s murders and collective punishment of civilian Gazans would be rightly seen as outrageous. Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any examples of such in the Western press.
The UK-US press also tells us that to support Palestinians is to support Hamas, in case anyone doubted the conflation.
The BBC declared London’s peaceful pro-Palestine protesters as providing “backing for Hamas.” It later retracted its “poorly phrased” comments.
Sky News did no better in using images of peaceful protesters bearing Palestinian flags to accompany its discussion of efforts by the London Metropolitan Police to “tackle extremism”.
These “slips” pale in comparison with the virulently offensive terms guests on BBC programmes have called Palestinians, completely unchallenged by their hosts.
For example, BBC Arabic hosted former Israeli intelligence veteran-turned academic, Mordechai Kedar who refused to recognise popular Israeli racism towards Palestinians, claiming that bestial comparisons of Palestinians are “denigrating to animals.”
Tellingly, the BBC Arabic host neither ejected Kedar from the interview, nor did she admonish him and demand an apology. Instead, the host pivoted away from Kedar’s genocidal language with the comment “that’s your opinion”.
Platforming Israeli justifications
UK-US media have also taken to running pieces platforming Israeli justifications for the IDF’s actions when the staggering number of dead Gazan civilians was becoming harder to write around.
“How Israelis justify scale of airstrikes” ran the New York version front page of the New York Times on 26 October. It was later rewritten as “Israel’s strikes on Gaza are some of the most intense this century”.
It is unthinkable that a Western newspaper would carry a piece platforming in the same benign-to-neutral terms Palestinian rage, or worse, justifications for Hamas’ crimes.
Another trend is to normalise Israel’s actions by focusing not on its costs in Gazan lives, but its intentions which, of course, are shown as benign. (Note: intentions don’t matter in the laws of war.)
Three days into Israel’s illegal total blockade of Gaza, the BBC asked: “Could an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza meet its aims?” (14 October). Charitably characterising Netanyahu as “risk-averse” (for Israelis, not Palestinians), the New York Times ran with “All-out war is untried ground”, comforting readers that “limited strikes in past were safe politically”.
Dissenting voices: harder to hear
Journalists at the BBC and Agence France Presse (AFP) who have been critical of their agencies’ bias against Palestinian lives and minimisation of Israeli war crimes told Declassified that there is no space to discuss editorial concerns.
Palestinian commentators have seen their segments edited out of mainstream news programmes. Palestinian Americans report their events are being cancelled while they’re called Hamas supporters.
Meanwhile, a senior editor at US publication Newsweek called for Gaza to be flattened to resemble a parking lot, apparently without censure.
Elsewhere in the media ecosystem, an official of the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM, Fadzai Madzingira, was suspended for a social media post criticising UK support for “ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians” and “this vile colonial alliance”.
None of these points – that Israel may be committing genocide, that it continues to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land or that Israel was founded as a colonial project which still uses settler outposts to consolidate territorial control – is outside of reasonable analysis of historical facts.
It’s looking an awful lot like the beginning (or end, depending on your starting point) of a genocide.
The IDF has instructed all Palestinians to flee south of the Wadi Gaza area “for their safety” from Israeli strikes. Some were struck as they were evacuating, and Palestinians are still being shelled by the IDF in southern refuge areas.
Soldiers plant Israeli flags on Gazan beaches, while Israel’s intelligence agency floats the idea of permanently expelling Gazans to Egyptian Sinai as a preferred solution. Netanyahu invokes a Bible passage where God orders the Israelites “to put to death men and women, children and infants” of a rival kingdom.
Still, the New York Times uncritically presents Netanyahu as “seeking [a] permanent end to threat but not a reoccupation” (13 October).
That last bastion of dissent, gallows humour, is also at grave risk. Michael Eisen, editor of science journal eLife, was sacked for posting on Twitter an article from humour site the Onion, with the headline “Dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas”.
The Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell’s contract was not renewed after his sketch of Netanyahu preparing to operate on his own stomach with an outline of Gaza was deemed too reminiscent of the “pound of flesh” anti-semitic trope.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a cartoon of a Hamas official with Gazan children and women strapped to him saying “How dare Israel attack civilians”. It’s since been deleted following racism complaints.
Yet the cartoonist is still drawing for mainstream media. Last week he published another cartoon in the Las Vegas Review showing a (fat, black) woman with a Black Lives Matter t-shirt holding up a sign saying “Terrorist Lives Matter: Blame Israel, Support Hamas”.
How dare Israel attack civilians indeed.
Claire Lauterbach is an independent investigative journalist and producer. She is the former Head of Investigations at Privacy International where she investigated the use and abuse of surveillance and military technologies, and a former Senior Investigator at Global Witness. Claire previously investigated war crimes in Goma, DR Congo for Human Rights Watch.
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist, visiting lecturer in Geopolitics at the University of Westminster, and PhD candidate researching covert paramilitary action in the ‘War on Terror’. He is a former International Committee of the Red Cross delegate investigating breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Darfur and Guantanamo Bay.
Why China’s ‘repressed’ Muslims suddenly got dragged back into the light
By Timur Fomenko | RT | November 24, 2023
At the beginning of this week, foreign ministers from a group of Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian National Authority, and Indonesia travelled to China in order to seek support for a ceasefire in the ongoing Gaza war.
The unconditional backing of Israel by the United States and its allies has tanked their credibility across the Islamic world, and Beijing has positioned itself as an advocate of peace when others are not willing to take up that role.
It is curious that within the following few days, a report was released by Human Rights Watch, accusing China of expanding its alleged campaign of closing down and repurposing mosques into regions other than Xinjiang – which had so far been the focus of accusations that Beijing is cracking down on the predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority. Even those allegations had been somewhat on the backburner in the establishment media lately, but the HRW report was quickly picked up and amplified.
Although relations between the US and China have somewhat calmed down, it is obvious that Washington does not want to see Beijing increase its influence in the Muslim world, as that would inevitably come at the expense of American clout. The attempt to draw attention back to China’s alleged repression of its Muslim population, while underreporting Israel’s devastating attack on the (also Muslim) population of Gaza, is an exercise in deflection and part of the ongoing narrative war between China and the US. Be it about Muslims or not, the Xinjiang issue has long been a key component of that struggle for influence.
The Uyghur minority has, since 2018, been a tool of “atrocity propaganda” used to wage public relations offensives against China. It is a means to an end, which often disappears and resurfaces in the media, coinciding with the ebb and flow of anti-Beijing rhetoric coming from the US administration or the State Department. This includes using it to turn public opinion against Beijing in selected countries, including allies, or to manufacture consent for policies aimed at supply chain shifts or “decoupling,” through the accusation of forced labor, especially in the fields of key agricultural goods, polysilicon and solar panels, or to attempt to embarrass China diplomatically at the UN, or to push for boycotting events such as the Winter Olympics.
This is an incredibly opportunistic attitude to something Beijing’s detractors claim is a “genocide.” Since late 2021, the Biden administration has largely ignored the issue and it has fallen off the international agenda, precisely because Washington had gotten the sanctions they wanted from it at the time. However, the Israel-Gaza conflict introduces a new dynamic whereby the US and its allies are dramatically losing face and credibility among Muslim nations because they are backing Israel unconditionally in the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. From a geopolitical point of view, such a policy pathway is actually strategically disastrous because it alienates the entire Global South, serves as a beacon in projecting US hypocrisy and worse still, directly empowers China as a competitor.
So when you are faced with a situation whereby Beijing is gaining diplomatic capital over your own failures, what do you do? You desperately aim to deflect by trying to draw attention to another issue in the attempt to smear Beijing: Xinjiang and the Uyghurs. Now as it happens, Muslim countries mostly ignore US-led propaganda over the Xinjiang issue, because they see it for what it is and also share a common norm of respect for national sovereignty with Beijing, which is politically beneficial for them. The only Muslim nation who has ever made public comment about it is Türkiye, because Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group and the issues is viewed through the lens of Ankara’s Pan-Turk ideology. However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still likely to ignore the issue, or only involve himself in it based on what he can gain.
On the other hand, the Gulf States, the key US allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, support China’s position, and the Gaza issue is putting them under pressure regarding their relations with the US and the decision to normalize relations with Israel. So suddenly we are seeing a resurgence of Xinjiang material because the US, even if it cannot sway their governments, wants to kindle the anger of Muslim populations about another issue instead and diminish China’s credibility. Although this is less likely in Arab States, it could cause public opinion ruptures in key Asian Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, where significant resources were placed by organizations such as the BBC in relaying Xinjiang-related content in their respective languages.
But the question is, will this campaign succeed? It might be worth remembering that Xinjiang is an artificially imposed issue pushed “top-down” by governments and the media, whereas Palestine is a grassroots issue pushing from the bottom up, aspects of which media and politicians endeavor to selectively ignore. China’s heavy-handed management of Uyghurs in Xinjiang is not really a genocide, and it will never rank on the same level of severity as the outright bombardment and mass killing of Palestinians, no matter how hard you try.
BBC journalists accuse organization of pro-Israel bias
The Cradle | November 23, 2023
BBC journalists wrote a letter to Al-Jazeera to express their dissatisfaction with the British broadcaster over its coverage of Gaza, the Qatari news organization revealed on 23 November.
“The BBC has failed to accurately tell this story – through omission and lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims – and it has therefore failed to help the public engage with and understand the human rights abuses unfolding in Gaza,” the letter reads.
“Thousands of Palestinians have been killed since October 7. When will the number be high enough for our editorial stance to change?”
The journalists accused the BBC of repeatedly humanizing Israeli victims over Palestinians, abandoning vital historical context in their coverage.
BBC journalists continued to slam the UK public broadcaster by saying that terms such as “massacre” and “atrocities” have been exclusively used “only for [the actions of] Hamas, framing the group as the only instigator and perpetrator of violence in the region. This is inaccurate but aligns with the BBC’s overall coverage.”
“In comparison, humanizing coverage of Palestinian civilians has been lacking. It is a poor excuse to say that the BBC could not better cover stories in Gaza because of difficulties gaining access to the [Gaza] Strip … This is achieved, for example, by telling and following individual stories across weeks. Little attempt has also been made to fully utilize the abundance of social media content from brave journalists in Gaza and the West Bank,” the journalists wrote.
On 10 October, Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, spoke to presenter Kirsty Wark about his familial losses due to Israeli bombings of Gaza; Wark responded, “I am sorry for your own personal loss. I mean, can I just be clear, though? You cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel, can you?”
Al-Jazeera spoke to one of the letter’s co-authors, who said, “For me, and definitely for other people of color, we can see blatantly that certain civilian lives are considered more worthy than others – that there is some sort of hierarchy at play. That is deeply, deeply hurtful because actually, none of us struggle to empathize with Palestinian civilians.”
Other BBC journalists have been critical of the broadcaster’s coverage since start of the war. Rami Ruhayem, Beirut correspondent for the BBC, wrote to the news organization’s director-general, saying there are “indications that the BBC is – implicitly at least – treating Israeli lives as more worthy than Palestinian lives and reinforcing Israeli war propaganda.”
The BBC has shown bias in other cases; during the early days of the war, the London-based organization suspended and investigated several of their West Asia journalists for social media activity that they claimed to be “pro-Palestinian.”
Joe Biden’s Washington Post op-ed shows the US never learns its lessons
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | November 20, 2023
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has recently published an op-ed. Appropriately released through the Washington Post, it is, of course, really the equivalent of a regime policy declaration – a laying down of the party line, if you wish. As such, the text deserves attention, never mind that it is impossible that America’s leader, clearly challenged by worsening senescence, has written it himself. This is, to borrow a phrase from the Russia-watching crowd, America’s “collective Biden” speaking.
Translated from official jargon and scrubbed of empty rhetoric and euphemisms, the long proclamation makes only two substantial points about what the US and its “allies” (really clients and vassals) must do: Continue waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and continue backing Israel in its genocidal war against the Palestinians (no, it is not a “war against Hamas,” that’s a side effect).
In that sense, there is nothing surprising, or hopeful, in collective Biden’s announcement: It took them more words this time, but this Democratic administration of neocons is simply repeating the equally tone-deaf slogan of a former Republican president representing a past gaggle of neocons: Stay the course, as George W. Bush put it succinctly during the Iraq disaster. Deja Vue all over again, in the words of America’s greatest philosopher.
But the details of the text still merit scrutiny. Let’s pick out a few highlights:
Hamas is repeatedly denounced as carrying out “pure, unadulterated evil” and such. Every fair observer would reserve such terms by now for what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. But let’s set that aside for now and let’s also set aside that we now know that substantial numbers of Israelis were killed by Israeli forces. Let’s instead focus on Hamas. Is such language factual? The rational answer to that question is not a matter of opinion, and it has to be “no”: In reality, the empirical record shows that Hamas is a resistance organization engaged in a legally and ethically justified struggle against massive national oppression. It has attacked military targets, which is legitimate, as well as committed terrorist crimes. But if any political and armed organization that does both engage in legitimate violence and terrorist crimes is carrying out “pure evil,” then almost every halfway powerful state in this world has done just that or is doing it even now. Clearly, we are dealing with an absurd statement here.
Usually, the cause of such absurdities is strategic dishonesty. That holds here as well. For the Biden administration is transparently pursuing two aims with this Orwellian abuse of terminology: First, make Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians appear, if not justified, then at least so “understandable” or “inevitable” that we stop objecting to them (and, if we are Americans, vote for Democrats, even while they support these perfectly avoidable crimes).
Secondly, prepare the ground for the proposal, following further down in the proclamation, to entirely eliminate Hamas from any post-assault settlement and, instead, “ultimately” make a “revived Palestinian Authority” rule both the West Bank and Gaza, while work on some lasting settlement continues.
This proposal is wrapped in deceptive and revoltingly cynical rhetoric: If Joe Biden has a broken heart over the slaughtered children of Gaza, then Andrew Jackson must have cried while signing the Indian Removal Act. If Biden wants a two-state solution, then why is he allowing and helping one of the “two states” to wipe out the other? If he has “counselled” Israeli leaders to refrain from excessive violence, then why has he not backed up his kind words with using his massive leverage and stopping the flow of arms, money, information, and diplomatic cover to help their genocidal attack? If Biden is worried about antisemitism spreading, why does he allow far-right Zionists to claim that their policies, which lead to deaths of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children, are somehow “Jewish”?
Hypocrisy like that may still fool some Americans, namely those who really believe that the adequate answer to the umpteenth mass shooting at home is “thoughts and prayers.” But a US president and those writing and thinking for him would be well-advised not to embarrass themselves further before everyone else, at home and abroad.
The real policy proposal, meanwhile, is nothing else but an attempt to return to the post-Oslo Accords system on even worse terms. That means, creating a situation in which urgent, vital Palestinian needs and crystal-clear Palestinian rights will, once again, be de facto suspended in an endless dishonest “process,” which really only serves as a screen and stalling device for Israel, while the latter settles occupied land, practices the internationally recognized crime of apartheid, and conducts the occasional massacre.
But the proclamation addresses more than the Middle East. Turning on Russia, the collective Biden personalizes the issue, in bad old neocon style. Instead of any attempt at a rational – albeit critical, even hostile – approach to Moscow’s actions and interests, we find the usual daft insults: Russian President Vladimir Putin is juxtaposed with Hamas, as if he were a one-man “terrorist organization.” (Never mind that Hamas is not, actually, a terrorist organization, although it also engages in terrorist acts; see above.)
The war in Ukraine is reduced to Putin’s personal “drive for conquest,” as if there has been no history of two decades of American provocations by reckless over-expansion, bad faith, and refusal to negotiate serious issues of international security in earnest and constructively. In that regard, Russia is receiving the same rhetorical treatment as the Palestinians: When it fights, we are forbidden to notice all the very real reasons it was given to do so.
And finally, both “Putin” – read: Russia – and Hamas stand accused of two things: Wanting to “wipe a neighboring democracy off the map” and taking us to a new, vile international order, where the strong abuse the weak and might makes right.
Newsflash: Actually, neither Israel nor Ukraine are democracies. In Israel’s case, the claim is vitiated by the simple fact that its government exerts de facto control over millions of Palestinians, all of whom face discrimination and the vast majority of whom do not have a vote, or, for that matter any ordinary civil and human rights. Ukraine, meanwhile, has Vladimir Zelensky, Washington’s darling in decline, who started dismantling the country’s brittle democratic structures – for what they were worth – in 2021, well before the war, and clings to power by cooperating with a violent far-right, eliminating the political opposition, streamlining the media, and delaying elections. Again, these are not matters of opinion but facts.
Secondly, Hamas is not trying to wipe out Israel, despite endless claims to the contrary. In the past, it has repeatedly signaled a willingness to compromise and accept a two-state solution. Claiming Hamas wants the total destruction of Israel is akin to using one idiotic quote from former US President Ronald Reagan to “prove” that he wanted to erase the whole Soviet Union. Hamas also simply does not have the capacity – not by a very far stretch – to do so.
Likewise, Russia is not trying to abolish Ukraine. As its compromise proposals of late 2021 clearly showed, its key aim is a neutral Ukraine that is not used as a proxy by the West. It is true that Russia, by now, claims some Ukrainian territory. Depending on how long the war continues, it may end up claiming and taking even more. You may very well object to that. Yet it is not the same as a will to exterminate a whole state or, for that matter, its population.
Finally, regarding the warning that Hamas, Russia, and who knows who else (China? India? Brazil? Simply everyone who won’t do as told by Washington?) are hellbent on dragging us all into new dark ages of ultra-cynical realpolitik and brute force, guess what: That is precisely where we are now. And have been for the last quarter of a century, under the benevolent aegis of the USA. Don’t believe it? Ask Gaza.
In sum, all we can really learn from this letter from on-high is that the Biden administration has understood nothing and is determined to learn even less. If, in the words of the declaration, the world is ever supposed to have even a slight chance of seeing “more hope, more freedom, less rage, less grievance, and less war,” then we first need to see much less of Joe Biden and everything and everyone he stands for.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
Stop Misinforming about Malaria’s Spread, Washington Post
By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | October 24, 2023
A recent Washington Post (The Post) story, “Where Malaria is Spreading,” claims that climate change could put over 5 billion people at risk of malaria by 2040, primarily due to expanding seasons where mosquitoes can spread the disease, migrating mosquitoes, and increased populations and stagnant water caused by unusual flooding. This is false. Malaria already has a wide distribution, with many areas only avoiding it being endemic due to past suppression efforts. Population growth in areas where the disease remains common may lead to more instances of the disease unless available preventative and prophylactic measures are taken. However, there is no evidence malaria will spread geographically, due to either modestly rising temperatures or increased moisture.
The Post’s article, written by authors Rachel Chason, Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens, and Jahi Chikwendiu, mainly focuses on malaria’s increase in Mozambique. It has seen a 10 percent increase in malaria cases over the past six years. The Post than ties Mozambique’s malaria increase to claims made in a Lancet study, “Projecting the risk of mosquito-borne diseases in a warmer and more populated world: a multi-model, multi-scenario intercomparison modelling study,” which used climate and mosquito-borne disease models to estimate how the transmission seasons and population densities might change with global warming.
The study’s authors say their modelling shows malaria suitability may increase by 1-6 months in tropical highlands in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Americas. Dengue sees similar results, with suitability increasing in lowlands in the Western Pacific and the Eastern Mediterranean by 4 months.
Shamefully, like many studies making misleading and alarming claims attributed to climate change, the Lancet study uses the climate modelling scenario RCP8.5 (RCP meaning representative concentration pathway), which climate scientists admit runs way too hot. Any research that built upon that scenario is going to produce extremely skewed results, because RCP8.5 involves an amount of released carbon dioxide that is actually impossible, even if all the fossil fuels on the planet were burned.
While the Lancet study is suspect, it may still seem logical to assume that the modest warming of the past hundred or so years has and will continue to expand the range of mosquitoes, as well as the number of days during the year in which they are active and biting. However, a large body of research refutes this assumption.
A chapter in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, discusses the results of more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies which demonstrate that temperature alone is not enough to guarantee migration or longer survival of mosquitoes or mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria. There are far more factors that come into play, including human interventions, that outweigh temperature alone.
The report explains:
Gething et al. (2010), writing specifically about malaria, may have put it best when they said there has been “a decoupling of the geographical climate malaria relationship over the twentieth century, indicating that non-climatic factors have profoundly confounded this relationship over time.
More examples from Climate Change Reconsidered are discussed in a Climate Realism post, “Environment Journal Wrong About Climate Change Increasing Malaria,” including papers by a vector-borne disease expert, Paul Reiter, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which explain that while reemergence of malaria and similar diseases in some regions is concerning, “it is facile to attribute this resurgence to climate change.”
The Post admits that endemic malaria “was eliminated in North America and Europe in the mid-1900s, with a better understanding of how to control it.” This is true, and what’s more, a 2010 Nature study (Gething et al.) found that malaria was probably endemic on 58 percent of the world’s surface in 1900, before the period of modern warming, and only 30 percent by 2007, after decades of modest warming.
Almost every credible study, not based on biased computer models, rejects the myopic causal view of the relationship between climate and malaria.
Extreme weather, The Post claims, like flooding are causing cases to rise in places like Mozambique, with “experts” telling them that the frightening trend is likely to continue. While The Post suggests the trends are mostly due to climate change, they also admit that other factors like “increased resistance of mosquitoes to insecticides and of the parasite to drugs” and improved disease reporting and tracking have played a role in the reported increase.
Flooding is unlikely to cause an increase in mosquito-borne illness, because even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports only low confidence that there is even any sign climate change has impacted flooding. Mozambique, a South-East African nation, has suffered some flooding in recent years, but as discussed in Climate Realism, here, any link to long-term climate change lacks evidence. Flooding is a regular occurrence in many parts of southern Africa, and population increases means that during the rainy season more people are living near mosquito-friendly standing water.
Before running this alarming story, The Washington Post should have examined the wider body of research available concerning mosquito-borne illnesses. There is no evidence that warming is currently causing, or will lead to, an increase in malaria cases or deaths. Facts, not fearmongering, should guide The Post’s and other legitimate news outlets’ coverage of climate and disease issues.
Israeli Deceit & the Ongoing Battle of Shifa Hospital
By Gareth Porter | Ron Paul Institute | November 17, 2023
The Israeli military has attacked and is occupying parts of al-Shifa hospital in an ongoing operation in northern Gaza. It is the biggest and most modern hospital in Gaza, which has ceased to function normally because of a lack of power, while tens of thousands of displaced Gazans take shelter in it.
An attack on a hospital is normally considered a clear violation of the rules of war. The Israeli Defense Forces is justifying it by claiming that Shifa has long served as civilian medical cover for the command center of the entire Hamas war operations and weapons storage.
That IDF claim has been cited constantly in Israeli propaganda as an argument that Shifa — and other hospitals in Gaza — should not be accorded the normal legal hospital immunity from attack.
Israeli forces closed in on Shifa while demanding for the last few days that the staff and patients remaining in the hospital be evacuated immediately. CNN reported Monday night that “the Biden administration has now signaled that it supports the Israeli position, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday: ‘You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.’”
Those Sullivan remarks were an obvious green light for the IDF to press on for complete evacuation of the hospital.
The problem with that “open source reporting” is that it is never anything more than unsupported claims based on mere supposition. In fact, when the history of supposedly damning revelations about Shifa hospital providing cover for Hamas military activities are examined more carefully it becomes clear that it has been no more than a thinly veiled excuse for the IDF to attack and close down Gaza’s most important provider of medical care for the population of Gaza.
A History of Deception
The Israeli claim that Shifa hospital was providing such a cover for an Hamas military presence there is in fact the longest running theme in Israeli war propaganda on Gaza, dating back nearly 15 years to the first days of the Gaza war of January 2009.
That was when Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, told Amos Harel of Haaretz newspaper that “many” senior Hamas officials were “believed” to be hiding in the “basements” of Shifa hospital, and that the Israelis knew all about those underground levels of the hospital, because they had originally been been built by the Egyptians before 1967 and extensively refurbished by the Israelis themselves in the mid-1980s.
Diskin also explained to Harel that Hamas was confident that it wouldn’t be attacked, because of the patients on the upper floors.
Apart from the fact that Israel’s intelligence service had admitted that it only suspected Hamas’ military presence under the hospital rather than having actual knowledge, Harel was, however, honest enough to report that his Palestinian contacts were telling him senior Hamas leaders never stayed in the same location but constantly moved from one location to another — a revelation that obviously made far more sense than the claim that those same senior Hamas officials were hanging out in a basement that was obviously well known to the Israelis.
Harel’s report also included a revelation — apparently from a Palestinian source — that raised problems for the nascent official Israeli propaganda line: “Some of the bunkers they are using,” Harel wrote, “were linked by tunnels Hamas built in recent years.”
The existence of numerous bunkers that could be used for command were thus independent of Shifa hospital, which the Israelis would always be able to invade. That reality clearly implied that it would make no sense for Hamas to depend on Shifa hospital for that purpose.
IDF Tale Resurfaces in Washington Post
Nevertheless, during the next Israeli-Palestinian war in July 2014, the IDF tale of the Hamas leaders’ secret hideaway in the basement of Shifa hospital re-emerged as if it were an unassailable fact that justified IDF threats to attack the hospital.
In a story published July 15, The Washington Post reported as unassailable fact that Shifa “has become the de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”
Post reporter William Booth clearly did not see Hamas leaders in Al Shifa himself. Had he done so, he would have described the scene and identified one or two Hamas figures who had been pointed out to him at the hospital. So he was apparently passing on the self-interested claim of his Israeli interlocutors without informing Post readers that the information in question was far less reliable than it was made to appear.
The IDF became fixated on closing up another Gaza hospital in July 2014 Just two days after that initial appearance of the Shifa-Hamas theme in the 2014 war, Israeli airstrikes bombed Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City and forced its closure.
The IDF specialists created a video distributed three weeks later aimed at defending the destruction of Wafa hospital as a necessary response to Hamas using the hospital for military operations. But they had resorted to multiple levels of trickery to make their political point, as this writer discovered in investigating the video.
The IDF propagandists had spliced together videos from five years earlier and from different times of day so as to suggest that firing from an unused building more than 100 yards away from the hospital was a recent Hamas rocket attack on IDF forces. Then they spliced in an audio clip from an entirely different incident in which the IDF returned fire to try to show that the IDF bombing of Wafa hospital was justified.
At the end of July 2014, the Post reaffirmed its support for Israel’s primary propaganda theme in that six-week war. Terrence McCoy reported from Washington that Shifa Hospital had “become a de facto headquarters” of Hamas. That reporting reflected in turn the general readiness of much of the national press in Washington to accept the word of the Israelis as all they needed to know on that pivotal issue.
Eight years later, the same Israeli propaganda line immediately resurfaced after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, as the Israelis mounted a new propaganda offensive. On Oct. 27, IDF Spokesman Adm. Daniel Hagari, briefed the International press on the main lines of Israel’s position regarding Shifa hospital and Hamas operations: He repeated the line that a bunker underneath Shifa is Hamas’ main base of operation, and that Hamas operates “several tunnels inside and under” the hospital.
Maximum Suffering
But Hamas’ tunnels outside Shifa could obviously be used for the same function of command of military operations without having to bother with Shifa hospital.
So the drumbeat of Israeli concern about the alleged Hamas command bunker underneath Shifa appears to have been a phony issue from the start, aimed merely at bringing pressure to bear on the medical system, namely to close down Shifa as the largest, most modern and most effective hospital in Gaza to create the maximum amount of suffering to the people of Gaza.
As of Tuesday, Shifa Hospital had ceased to function, as it had no electricity, having run out of fuel. The Israelis gallantly offered the hospital 300 liters of fuel — enough to function for about six minutes according to the hospital’s calculation.
They thus failed to take any emergency action to save 36 babies facing possible death from the non-functioning incubators after three had already died.
The scene at Shifa hospital early on Wednesday was eerie, as Israel tanks rumbled into the hospital grounds and Israeli troops entered the darkened main hospital building.
IDF spokesman Hagari would say only that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation “based on intelligence information and an operational necessity” and that it was in a “specified area in Shifa hospital”.
Later Wednesday the IDF’s Peter Lerner told CNN that the operation at al-Shifa hospital was “ongoing” and would say only that it had not found any sign of hostages in the hospital.
The Gazans who have been staying in Shifa have been afraid to take the approved routes away from the hospital because of relentless Israeli attacks on civilians trying to do so. The IDF will no doubt continue to use force against the hundreds of thousands huddled there to make them leave.
And now that Israel has control over many thousands of military age males in the hospital, it is doubtful that they will be allowed to go free, since they are considered as potential Hamas fighters.
The time has come for a reckoning on the long-running IDF propaganda ploy of claiming that Shifa has been used to hide Hamas’s command center.
Unless the IDF can show journalists convincing evidence of that long-claimed Hamas command presence under the hospital, they should stand for the truth and denounce that massive Israeli deception about Gaza.
Don’t gaslight me
By Richard Kelly | The view from down here | November 13, 2023
An email from the editor of a major daily Melbourne newspaper has come into my possession. I won’t say how, since it might incriminate me as being part of a household that pays for a subscription. Let’s just say that it’s possible that the subscription was taken out using an email address that I have access to. Or something. The very first words of the email are:
As a subscription benefit, from today [masthead name redacted] editor [name redacted] will send you an exclusive analysis of the week’s most important stories each Friday.
That’s what I call a ‘marmalade dropper’, a statement so utterly preposterous that to read it over breakfast would cause such a fit of apoplexy that one would choke on one’s marmalade toast and drop it on the floor, for it to be consumed by the dog.
Luckily, I’d had breakfast already. Intrigued by this alleged ‘benefit’, which might better be regarded as a ‘threat’, I read on. The newish editor started off by quoting a former editor:
[Masthead redacted] “does certain things differently from other newspapers simply because … we’re not there as a means of simply passing a word from a mouth to an eye, we’ve a responsibility to our readers and to society in general”.
That is an unabashed endorsement of the practice of selecting and then framing the stories they deem fit to print, rather than simply reporting the bare facts. Then this:
Readers of [masthead redacted] want more than the kind of imitable journalism they can find on countless free-to-read news sites and unoriginal, uninspiring and sometimes unhinged publications.
The editor couldn’t resist, either through spite or an inferiority complex, a swipe at other news sites. Too gutless to name those he thinks ‘unhinged’.
It goes on:
… our readers want depth and quality, excellence and rigour. They want a publication with scruples that is willing to fight for its readers, its city, and hold power to account, without fear or favour. One that will doggedly pursue public interest investigations to shine light on the darkest parts of our society, but also celebrate Melbourne’s successes and be constructive and mature in its approach to difficult subjects.
“Fight for its readers”? Did it fight for those who were shot in the back with rubber bullets when Victoria Police corralled them at the Shrine of Remembrance? “Doggedly pursue public interest investigations”? Did they doggedly pursue the hotel quarantine fiasco? As I recall it was only Peta Credlin who had the guts to ask the then Premier any hard questions about this and other Covid crimes. Did they ever get to the bottom of who ordered the curfew? Was it the Premier, the Chief Health Officer, or the Police Commissioner?
“… be constructive and mature in its approach to difficult subjects”? What a string of weasel words that is! The translation is “ignore totally any concerns about vaccine safety and smear anyone who raises the issue”.
But there’s more. The email goes on to list the things they did talk about in the last 12 months. See if you can spot what’s missing.
… war crimes of Australia’s most decorated soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith. We promoted mature discussion about the future of Melbourne and its suburbs. We broke the news that the nation’s biggest plastic bag recycling scheme was continuing to operate even though its recycling function had collapsed, resulting in millions of bags being stuffed into warehouses across the country.
We exposed huge failings in the Department of Home Affairs across a range of stories that exposed a failure to prevent human trafficking and questionable payments of Australian taxpayer money to foreign officials. When we reported that the influential head of that department, Mike Pezzullo, had attempted to influence and cosy up to politicians, he was stood down pending an investigation.
We pored over every detail of the state government’s cancellation of the Commonwealth Games and exposed the shambolic management of that decision. We sent reporters to cover a war in the Middle East with huge emotional impacts on many in Australia, and indeed on domestic politics.
We led the coverage of one of the most extraordinary murder investigations in recent history. We’ve looked at the schools we send our children to and turned our attention to the burgeoning suburbs where Melburnians are increasingly choosing to live.
We fought for our readers’ right to know what is happening within the justice system, by opposing suppression orders and battling for access to court documents in the Magistrates’, County and Supreme Courts, all the way up to the High Court of Australia.
We’ve celebrated the city’s major events. We didn’t miss a beat during one of the great AFL seasons. We took readers inside the Lord’s Long Room at one of the most controversial moments in its history and we replayed the Bairstow dismissal as frequently as we possibly could.
What great stuff. Plastic bag recycling. Australian Rules football. Cricket dismissals. Phonics in schools. A reporter sent to a war zone. A spectator at the bankruptcy of third-world Victoria, epitomised by the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games and the Airport Rail.
There’s an enormous gaping hole in the coverage, just like there’s an enormous gaping space in the foyers of office towers all over the city, as the utter destruction of our once beautiful Melbourne echoes the utter destruction of lives and livelihoods caused by mask mandates, ‘social distancing’ and vaccine mandates. Nothing about the morality of excluding people from daily society. No mention of excess mortality. No mention of the Forest of the Fallen. Nothing about the imminent WHO changes. Nothing about the dangers of Digital ID or the Misinformation Bill. Nothing about the risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies. Evidently the editor sees no “responsibility to our readers and to society in general” in respect of these issues. I’ll be waiting for an age, I think, to get that kind of coverage.
A final quote from the email is even more chilling:
You, our subscribers, made all this and more possible by supporting our journalism. And I can assure you, this is only the start of what we believe we can accomplish as a newsroom.
So what is it that they are only at the start of accomplishing as a newsroom? What is it, other than suppressing some stories and promoting others, that they want to do?
At least I don’t pay for this stuff. Oh, wait.
The scandal of excess death reporting (or lack thereof)
Imagine the noise if the unvaccinated were the ones dying…
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 16, 2023
In stark contrast to the 2020 relentless daily death counts, there has been a virtual media black-out on excess deaths since the vaccine rollout.
Waves of excess mortality were followed by a brand new medical product being rolled out to entire populations globally and then the excess deaths went up stepwise. Leaving aside for a moment that no proper follow-up was put in place, no pharmacovigilance, no monitoring of the group that chose not to have the injections, we are left with having to use our mathematical minds to prove that something very unsettling is happening which certainly won’t remain hidden forever. Death is not ambiguous.
If most of the excess deaths were in the unvaccinated group of the population, this would be a brilliant indicator of the amazing value of the ‘safe and effective’ injections. The media has had a clear editorial line for decades: “thou shalt not increase vaccine hesitancy.” The underlying quasi religious assumption is that any such hesitancy would be ‘catastrophic’ for society’s health. If, after the jab rollout, the unvaxxed were dropping like flies, you can bet your bottom dollar that the media jackals would be promoting this in lavish technicolour centrefolds. “As Jane drew her last breath, her final whispered words were, ‘I wish I’d just got the damned vaccine’”... and so on and so forth. The data would have been repeatedly promulgated ad nauseam, to prove what fools the unvaccinated were and how brilliant the vaccines are. But this is not what is happening, because it would be an outright lie. So instead, we have radio silence on the topic of excess deaths, to avoid uncomfortable questions being asked.
Key to understanding what is happening is in realising that the vast majority of those at most risk of dying have been vaccinated. Therefore, patterns in the overall population reflect what is happening among that majority. It is almost impossible for the minority unvaccinated group to be responsible for such an increase in mortality.
To use an analogy, imagine if 90% of cars were given a new device claimed not only to be effective at preventing extra accidents but also super safe. Afterwards, there’s a 10% overall rise in car accidents from 100 a month to 110. If all the extra accidents were happening in the 10% of unaltered vehicles that would mean that among this group were the 10 accidents that represent the background rate in 10% of the population plus the extra 10 accidents. That would imply the accident rate had doubled in the cars that had not been altered. If, however, the new innovation was responsible, then the 10 extra accidents would be added to the 90 background accidents in the altered group, which would make for an overall increased rate of 11%. The latter scenario is much more likely and is much easier to believe, mathematically speaking.
Thinking of that analogy, let’s look at what has happened to deaths after the vaccine rollout. Take the 50-64 year age cohort as an example. From July 2022-Sept 2023, there were 12.5% more deaths than expected in this group, some of which were attributed to covid. Even excluding excess deaths that were blamed on covid, there were still 8.8% more deaths than expected in this age group. If these deaths were happening to the unvaccinated (because they hadn’t received the miracle drug), the mortality rate would have had to have doubled in that group for eighteen months straight. To put that into context, the excess from March 2020 to December 2021 (during the height of BBC daily reporting on excess deaths) was 19% higher than baseline average.
This is a rather mathematically complicated way of saying that the deaths are clearly not happening predominantly in the unvaccinated cohort because mathematically speaking, it just doesn’t add up as a possible scenario.
Table 1: Percentage increase in deaths (July 2022-Sept 2023) by age group if all excess were in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations. First two columns are for all cause deaths and the second two exclude deaths blamed on covid.
For the over 75 year olds the situation is the most ridiculous. Many old people have already died in excess in recent years, so now we ought to be seeing a deficit in deaths in this group. If there are extra deaths, they first have to make up for this deficit before they can count as “excess” deaths. If we assume the excess in among the vaccinated then the excess is indeed small at 5% for all cause deaths. However, if we attribute those excess deaths to the unvaccinated then that population is dying at three times the expected rate! Even if we exclude all deaths blamed on covid the unvaccinated would still have to be dying at double the expected rate. Why? What’s killing them?
Where’s the outcry?
Where are the weekly press conferences and the demand that we must make any sacrifice in order to save even one life?
Looked at in this way it is clear that the actual problem must lie in unexpected deaths among the vaccinated population.
The media’s Nord Stream lies just keep coming
Why do billionaires and governments scramble to control the media? Because the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
BY JONATHAN COOK | NOVEMBER 14, 2023
Want to understand why the media we consume is either owned by billionaires or under the thumb of government? The latest developments in the story about who was behind the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe provide the answer.
Although largely forgotten now, the blasts in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 had huge and lasting repercussions. The explosion was an act both of unprecedented industrial sabotage and of unparalleled environmental terrorism, releasing untold quantities of the most potent of the greenhouse gases, methane, into the atmosphere.
The blowing up of the pipelines plunged Europe into a prolonged energy crisis, tipping its economies deeper into a recession from which they are yet to recover. Europe was forced to turn to the United States and buy much more expensive liquified gas. And one of the long-term effects will be to accelerate the de-industrialisation of Europe, especially Germany.
There can be almost no one in Europe who did not suffer personal financial harm, in most cases significant harm, from the explosions.
The question that needed urgently answering at the time of the blasts was one no media organisation was in a hurry to investigate: Who did it?
In unison, the media simply recited the White House’s extraordinary claim that Russia had sabotaged its own pipelines.
That required an unprecedented suspension of disbelief. It meant that Moscow had chosen to strip itself both of the lucrative income stream the gas pipelines generated, and of the political and diplomatic leverage it enjoyed over European states from its control of their energy supplies. This was at a time, remember, when the Kremlin, embattled in its war in Ukraine, needed all the diplomatic influence it could muster.
The need to breathe credibility into the laughably improbable “Russia did it” story was so urgent at the time because there was was only one other serious culprit in the frame. No media outlet, of course, mentioned it.
The United States had both the motive and the means.
US officials from Biden down had repeatedly threatened that Washington would intervene to make sure the Nord Stream pipelines could not operate. The administration was expressly against European energy dependency on Russia. Another gain from the pipelines’ destruction was that a more economically vulnerable Europe would be forced to lean even more heavily on the US as a guarantor of its security, a useful chokehold on Europe when Washington was preparing for prolonged confrontations with both Russia and China.
As for the means, only a handful of states had the divers and technical resources enabling them to pull off the extremely difficult feat of successfully planting and detonating explosives on the sea floor undetected.
Had we known then what is gradually becoming clear now, even from establishment media reporting – that the US was, at the very least, intimately involved – there would have been uproar.
It would have been clear that the US was a rogue, terrorist state, that it was willing to burn its allies for geostrategic gain, and that there was no limit to the crimes it was prepared to commit.
Every time Europeans had to pay substantially more for their heating bills, or filling up their car, or paying for the weekly shop, they would have known that the cause was gangster-like criminality by the Biden administration.
Which is precisely why the establishment media were so very careful for the first months after the explosions not to implicate the Biden administration in any way, even if it meant ignoring the mass of evidence staring them in the face.
It is why they ignored the incendiary report by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – who has broken some of the most important stories of the last half century – detailing exactly how the US carried out the operation. When his account was occasionally referenced by the media, it was solely to ridicule it.
It is why, when it became obvious that the “Russia did it” claim was unsupportable, the media literally jumped ship: credulously reporting that a small group of “maverick” Ukrainians – unknown to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course – had rented a yacht and carried off one of the most daring and difficult deep-sea stunts ever recorded.
It is why, later, the media treated it as entirely unremarkable – and certainly not worthy of comment – that new evidence suggested the Biden administration was warned of this maverick Ukrainian operation against the whole of Europe. It apparently knew what was about to happen but did precisely nothing to stop it.
And it is why the latest reporting from the Washington Post changes the impossible-to-believe “maverick” Ukrainian operation into one that implicates the very top of the Ukrainian military. Still, the paper and the rest of the media steadfastly refuse to join the dots and follow the implications contained in their own reporting.
The central character in the new drama, Roman Chervinsky, belongs to Ukraine’s special operations forces. He supposedly oversaw the small, six-man team that rented a yacht and then carried out the James Bond-style attack.
The ingenuous Post claims that his training and operational experience meant he was “well suited to help carry out a covert mission meant to obscure Ukraine’s responsibility”. It lists his resistance activities against Russia. None indicate that he had the slightest experience allowing him to mastermind a highly challenging, extremely dangerous, technically complex attack deep in the waters of the Baltic Sea.
If the Ukrainian military really was behind the explosions – rather than the US – all the indications are that the Biden administration and Pentagon must have been intimately involved in the planning and execution.
Not least, it is extremely unlikely that the Ukrainian military had the technical capability to carry out by itself such an operation successfully and undiscovered.
And given that, even before the war, the Ukrainian military had fallen almost completely under US military operational control, the idea that Ukraine’s senior command would have been able to, or dared, execute this complex and risky venture without involving the US beggars belief.
Politically, it would have been quite extraordinary for Ukrainian leaders to imagine they could unilaterally decide to shut down energy supplies to Europe without consulting first with the US, especially when Ukraine’s entire war effort was being paid for and overseen by Washington and Europe.
And of course, Ukrainian leaders would have been only too aware that the US was bound to quickly work out who was behind the attack.
It would be telling indeed that, in such circumstances, the Biden administration would apparently choose to reward Ukraine with more money and arms for its act of industrial sabotage against Europe rather than punish it in any way.
It would be equally astonishing that the three states supposedly investigating the attack – Germany, Sweden and Denmark – would not also soon figure out for themselves that Ukraine was culpable. Why would they decide to cover up Ukraine’s attack on Europe’s economy rather than expose it – unless they were worried about upsetting the US?
And of course, there is the elephant in the room: the Washington Post’s earlier reporting indicated that the US had prior knowledge that Ukraine was planning the attack. That is even more likely if the pipeline blast was signed off by Ukrainian military commanders rather than a group of Ukrainian “mavericks”.
The Washington Post’s new story repeats the line that the Biden administration was forewarned of the attack. Now, however, the Post casually reports that, after expressing opposition, “US officials believed the attack had been called off. But it turned out only to have been postponed to three months later, using a different point of departure than originally planned”.
The Washington Post simply accepts the word of US officials that the most powerful country on the planet fell asleep at the wheel. The CIA and Biden administration apparently knew the Ukrainian military was keen to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines and plunge Europe into an energy crisis and economic recession. But US officials were blindsided when the same small Ukrainian operational team changed locations and timings.
On this account, US intelligence fell for the simplest of bait and switches when the stakes were about as high as could be imagined. And the Washington Post and other media outlets report all of this with a faux-seriousness.
Either way, the US is deeply implicated in the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure and the undermining of its economy.
Even if the establishment media reporting is right and Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, the Biden administration must have given the green light, overseen the operational planning and assisted in the implementation and subsequent cover-up.
Then again, if as seems far more likely, Hersh is right, then there was no middle man – the US carried out the attack on its own. It needed a fall guy. When Russia no longer fitted the bill, Ukraine became the sacrificial offering.
A year on, these muffled implications from the media’s own reporting barely raise an eyebrow.
The establishment media has played precisely the role expected of it: neutering public outrage. Its regimented acceptance of the initial, preposterous claim of Russian responsibility. Its drip-feed, uncritical reporting of other, equally improbable possibilities. Its studious refusal to join the all-too-visible dots. Its continuing incuriousness about its own story and what Ukraine’s involvement would entail.
The media has failed by every yardstick of what journalism is supposed to be there for, what it is supposed to do. And that is because the establishment media is not there to dig out the truth, it is not there to hold power to account. Ultimately, when the stakes are high – and they get no higher than the Nord Stream attack – it is there to spin narratives convenient to those in power, because the media itself is embedded in those same networks of power.
Why do billionaires rush to own media corporations, even when the outlets are loss-making? Why are governments so keen to let billionaires take charge of the chief means by which we gain information and communicate between ourselves. Because the power to tell stories, the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.
US media say Israel is retaliating. The facts show the opposite
A woman taking part in the women’s march near Israel’s fence imprisoning Gazans on July 3, 2018 is carried on a stretcher
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | November 8, 2023
US media reports virtually always say that Israeli violence against Palestinians is “retaliation”. The chronology, however, shows the opposite.
Time after time, US news coverage of the issue begins when Palestinians have committed violence, without noting that this violence was preceded by Israeli violence.
Most recently, US news reports make it appear that the current violence began on October 7th, while failing to mention that Israeli forces had been killing Palestinians regularly in the days, weeks, months, and years before that.
Current news reports also fail to note that October 7th was basically a prison break from what many have accurately described as the world’s largest open air prison, imprisoning over 2 million men, women, and children.
Media reports also neglect to inform Americans that the communities surrounding Gaza are built on stolen Palestinian land, many of the former owners imprisoned in the Gaza ghetto, destitute and desperate.
Media reports also fail to inform Americans that before the October operation, thousands of Gazans had gathered every week for over a year and a half to protest their imprisonment and dispossession – and Israeli forces had shot them, week after week.
Media also fail to inform Americans that it is Israel that regularly initiates the violence after periods of calm, according to an MIT professor’s study on the subject.
This type of news coverage is not new, and has often been found in alternative media as well as legacy media companies.
While the pro-Israel lobby in the US is arguably the most powerful special interest group in the country (it appears that $19 billion may go to Israel this year alone), and while media coverage of the issue is demonstrably slanted toward Israel, there are growing numbers of Americans who are demanding a stop to US support for Israeli crimes.
Until Americans learn the many facts on this issue being obscured by US media, the tragic violence in the region, and the wars fought on Israel’s behalf, will continue, and Americans, too, will continue to die.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.
How big does Palestine rally need to be for honest reporting?
By Yves Engler | November 7, 2023
On Saturday over 50,000 marched in Montréal against Justin Trudeau’s role in enabling Israel’s genocidal siege and slaughter in Gaza. I say this confidently having walked from one end of the march to the other and watched overhead drone footage. This was the largest antiwar/international solidarity mobilization in Montréal since the 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq.
The largest Palestine solidarity demonstration in Canadian history concluded in front of CBC’s office to highlight pro-Israel media bias. Proving the point, Global News reported that “hundreds gathered”.
While Global’s Farah Nasser described how “hundreds gathered in Montreal” the images on the screen showed at least ten thousand rallying. The jarring juxtaposition between lived reality and the “journalism” that is supposed to report the truth puts into context why some protestors put fake blood on the building’s glass doors and wrote “call it genocide” and “justice for journalists in Gaza” on the ground in front of the CBC.
At the end of the march, I was asked to speak outside the CBC/Radio-Canada offices as part of protesting Canadian media coverage of the 10,000 Palestinians killed in recent weeks.
Below is a portion of my prepared remarks:
“The Canadian media is enabling Israel’s genocidal siege and violence in Gaza. CTV and Global both recently fired Palestinian/Arab reporters for opposing the genocide on their social media.
“The media humanizes Israelis and dehumanize Palestinians. For instance, a young Vancouverite who travelled 10,000 kilometers from their home to join the Israeli military is lauded and mourned, but any Palestinian killed fighting Israel isn’t even considered.
“On multiple occasions Canadian outlets have directly manufactured consent for Israel’s war crimes. As an example, yesterday the National Post and other Postmedia outlets published “How Hamas uses hospitals as shields during war against Israel”.
“The media have been promoting the narrative that Israel has a right to defend itself. But Israel is the occupying power that has been oppressing Palestinians for more than 75 years and it always kills many times more Palestinians during every flare up in violence.
“Two weeks ago a leftist journalist began a list of prominent commentators supporting Israel’s genocidal violence. A few days ago he began asking them how many more thousands of Palestinian children would have to be killed before they supported a ceasefire. They mostly refused to respond.
“Media bias against Palestinians is not new and there are innumerable examples to point to. CBC English has mandated its reporters not to use the word “Palestine”. In 2019 they even forced a radio host to apologize for using the word Palestine when interviewing an author who published a graphic novel titled Palestine!
“When I published Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid in 2010 a Montreal Gazette reporter told me he enjoyed the book and would’ve sought to review it if the title hadn’t included the word apartheid. When a (single) daily paper reviewed my book it prompted a counter review. In the lead-up to the London launch, University of Western Ontario professor David Heap submitted a positive review to his local paper. But two weeks later, the London Free Press published Honest Reporting Canada (HRC) head Mike Fegelman’s response claiming it was “professionally unethical for Heap to not disclose his highly partisan stance on the Mideast file” when reviewing Canada and Israel.
Of course, the HRC did not disclose it is a well-resourced ‘flack’ organization that criticizes media for not towing their pro-genocide and apartheid line. They write replies, submit complaints and instigate email campaigns to media outlets when they publish something deemed objectionable.
But the HRC does nothing more than reinforce the dominant media’s broader structural bias towards power. On Palestine they largely echo the position of the Israel lobby, Canadian government and US empire.
Still, it was shocking to witness the media crassly downplay such a large demonstration. As thousands chanted in front of CBC “every time the media lies another family in Gaza dies”.
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Lawrence of Cyberia | March 19, 2010
In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.
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