Israeli War Crimes: From the U.S.S. Liberty to the Humanitarian Flotilla
James Petras | My Catbird Seat | 05 June, 2010
Introduction: Israel Crimes on the High Seas
On June 8, 1967, two squadrons of Israeli warplanes bombed, napalmed and machine-gunned the US intelligence-gathering ship, USS Liberty, in international waters, killing 34 US sailors and wounding another 172. The assault took place on a sunny afternoon, with the US flag and identifying markers clearly visible. The Israelis targeted the antennae to prevent the crew from broadcasting for help and shot up the lifeboats to ensure no survivors. There were, however, survivors who rigged up an antenna and radioed their distress, a call for help that reached Washington D.C. In an unprecedented act of betrayal, President Johnson, in close liaison with powerful American Jewish Zionist political backers, covered up the mass murder on the high seas by issuing orders first to recall Mediterranean-based warplanes from rushing to assist their besieged comrades, then threatening to court-martial the survivors who might expose the deliberate nature of the Israeli assault and finally by repeating the Israeli line that the attack was a matter of mistaken identity, a lie which numerous military leaders later rejected.
Almost to the day, 43 years later, on May 31, 2010, Israeli warships, helicopter gun ships and commandos assaulted a convoy of humanitarian ships carrying ten thousand tons of aid to Gaza in international waters. Prior to the aid mission Turkish authorities had examined the passengers and the ship to ensure no weapons were on board. The Israelis never the less came on board shooting and clubbing the unarmed passengers, killing up to 19 and wounding dozens. Despite subsequent Israeli and Zionist claims to the contrary no weapons were found, apart from sticks used by some of the victims attempting to fend off the murderous premeditated assault planned, directed and defended by top Israeli leaders and the entire leadership of the major Zionist organizations in the US and elsewhere. The invading Israeli storm troopers systematically destroyed all cameras, videos and tape recorders that had documented their savage assault, in order to subsequently spread their brazen lies about their being subject to armed resistance.
The World Response
Within hours of Israel’s bloody act of piracy, nations, political leaders, human rights organizations and the vast majority of the international community condemned the Israeli state for its violation of international law. Turkey, Spain, Greece, Denmark and Austria summoned their Israeli Ambassadors to protest the deadly assault. The Financial Times, (June 1, 2010) referred to the Israeli assault as a “brazen act of piracy … hurtling into lawlessness” rooted in its “illegal blockage of Gaza”. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan called the Israeli assault an act of “state terrorism” which would have “serious consequences”. Israel’s attacks on ships flying Turkish, Greek and Irish flags on the high seas were described by legal experts as an “act of war”. The UN Security Council, NATO and the Secretary General of the UN demanded Israel cease its aggression, while tens of thousands of demonstrators marched denouncing Israel’s blatant act of state murder and wounding of pacifists, humanitarians and protesters from 60 countries. UN experts demanded that Israeli leaders “must be held criminally responsible”. Only the Obama regime refused to condemn the Israeli act of state terror, merely expressing “concern and regret”. The Israeli state defended its murderous assault, promised more in the future and insisted on maintaining its blockade of Gaza, even after the US suggested it might be loosened.
The Israeli Defense of Piracy and State Terror
As news of the Israeli massacre slipped out and the international community reacted with horror and anger, the Israeli government “sought to flood the airwaves with their versions of events … more importantly, the authorities ensured that their narrative gained early dominance by largely silencing the hundreds of activists who were on board during the attack” (Financial Times, June 2, 2010, p2.). The Jewish state held all the prisoners alive, wounded and dead incommunicado, seized their mobile phones and prohibited any interviews, barring all journalists. Like most terrorist states, the Jewish state wanted to monopolize the propaganda media. The Israeli propaganda machine via its state sponsored journalists and news media employed several ploys typical of totalitarian regimes.
- Israeli storm troopers invading the ship were turned into victims and the humanitarian pacifists were turned into aggressors. “Israeli Soldiers Met by Well-Planned Lynch Mob” (Jerusalem Post, March 31, 2010); “Israeli Soldiers Attacked” (IDF, March 31, 2010).
- Israel’s act of piracy in international waters was declared legal by a Professor Sabel of the Hebrew University.
- The humanitarian organizers were accused of having ties to terrorists according to Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon, though no evidence was presented (Ha’aretz, May 30, 2010). The organizers including the Turkish human rights group accused by Ayalon were cleared by the Turkish intelligence agency, the military and the Erdogan government, a member of NATO and for many years (in the past) a collaborator with the Israeli Mossad. The other 600 plus human rights volunteers, included pacifists, parliamentarians, former diplomats, as well as current members of the Israeli parliament.
- While dozens of human rights people were shot, killed and maimed, Israeli propagandists doctored video releases portraying one of the Israeli assailants on the deck, cutting out the preceding sequence of attack (Financial Times, June 2, 2010, p. 2).
- The Israeli sea and airborne assailants were described as the victims of a “Brutal Ambush at Sea” (Ynet News, June 1, 2010).
- The terrorized human rights workers were accused of being a “lynch mob”, attacking the Jewish commandos who were firing automatic rifles wildly across the deck and at cornered victims. The few courageous individuals who fought back to stop the murderous attack were slandered by the Zion-prop, which itself is as monstrous as the crimes they perpetrated.
Once the Israeli propaganda machine started spewing out its gutter lies, the entire leadership of the Zionist Fifth column swung into action … first and foremost in the United States.
The US Zionist Power Configuration: In Defense of the Massacre
Just as the entire leadership of the 51 principle American Jewish organizations defended every Israeli war crime in the past, from the bombing of the US Liberty, to the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza so too did these most honorable apologists repeat verbatim the lies of the Israeli state regarding the assault of the humanitarian flotilla.
The Daily Alert (May 31 – June 2, 2010), the official public propaganda organ of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, published every scurrilous Israeli state lie, about the Israeli commandos being ‘lynched’, ‘attacked’ and the human rights victims being responsible for the death of their comrades … at the hands of Israeli commandos. Not a single deviation, not a single word of criticism. Not even a single mention of even the superficial Israeli critics who faulted the execution, the use of deadly weapons, the assault in international waters, and the public relations fiasco. The vast majority of Israeli Jews and organized Zionists in the US supported the bloody massacre and were opposed by a small minority who has no access to the mass media. Zionist control over the mass media was once again demonstrated by the reporting through “Israel’s eyes” (FAIR, June 1, 2010). Essentially the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC presented the Israeli commandos attacking the humanitarian boat as being … “assaulted and beaten” (Washington Post, June 1, 2010). The New York Times gave credence to the Israeli claim that its act of piracy on the high seas was legal (NY Times, June 1, 2010). For the US mass media the problem is not Israeli state terror, but how to manipulate and disarm the outrage of the international community. To that end the entire Zionist Power configuration has a reliable ally in the Zionized Obama White House and US Congress.
The Obama Response to Israeli State Terror
There is only one basic reason why Israel repeatedly commits crimes against humanity, including the latest assault on the humanitarian flotilla: because it knows that the Zionist Power Configuration, embedded in the US power structure, will ensure government support, in this case the Obama White House.
In the face of the world-wide condemnation of Israel’s crime on the high seas, and calls from the international community for legal action, the Obama regime absolutely refused to criticize Israel. A White House spokesman said “The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding the tragedy” (AFP May 31, 2010). An act of state terrorism does not evoke “regrets” – it normally provokes condemnation and punishment. The power which caused “loss of life and injuries” has a name – Israel; the persons who suffered death and injuries during the Israeli assault – have a name – humanitarian volunteers. It was not simply a “loss of life” but a well planned premeditated murder which is openly defended by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his entire Cabinet. The “circumstances” of the murders are clear: Israel assaulted an unarmed ship in international waters, opening fire as they boarded the ship. The Obama regime’s obscene political cover-up of a deliberate criminal act in violation of international law is evident in his description of a serial homicide as a ‘tragedy’. Premeditated state terror has no resemblance to a tragic noble ruler forced by circumstances into a criminal act against their closest allies.
Washington, pressed to participate at a UN Security Council meeting, spent 10 hours eliminating all references to Israel’s illegal criminal act, ending in a resolution which merely calls for an “impartial” investigation, with Washington pushing for an Israeli investigatory committee. To the world at large, including the Turkish government, the Obama regime and the US government, by refusing to condemn Israel, are “accomplices to a mass murder”.
To understand why the Obama regime brought shame and infamy to itself in the eyes of the world, one need look at the Zionist composition of the Obama White House and, equally important, the direct power and access that the principle Jewish-Zionist organizations have over the US political system. In the week preceding Israel’s announced assault on the humanitarian flotilla, (pro-Israel) Jewish leaders met with over a third of US senators to pressure them to pass harsher sanctions on Iran by June. Among the key operatives attending were the Jewish Federation of North America, AIPAC and the rest of the Israeli Fifth Column (Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 26, 2010). The following day a squadron of leaders from the Jewish Federations flew into Washington to meet with top Obama administration officials, to ensure that the White House and Congress did not in any way or form publicly express any criticism of Israel’s settlement policy. No doubt the Zionist apologists for Israeli war crimes extended their agenda to include no public criticism of the Israeli assault on the flotilla. Rahm Emmanuel, top US Presidential aide, was in Tel Aviv as a guest of top officials of the Israel Defense Force a few days before the IDF launched the assault, no doubt having filled Rahm in on the details. The Israeli-American aide to Obama no doubt assured the war criminals of Washington’s unconditional political and military support for Israel’s acts of aggression.
From within the Obama Administration and without, the aggressive pressure from the 51 principle organizations of the American Zionists have guaranteed Israeli war criminals immunity from any War Crimes Tribunal, or even serious political condemnation by the UN Security Council. The Zionized White House’s tactic is to deflect attention from immediate consequential condemnation let alone sanctions, hoping that over time, aided by the blanket mass media apology in the US, the mass indignation and protest overseas will gradually wither away. Obama and his Zionist cohort are already in a belly crawl mode with Israel. Part of Rahm’s mission to Israel was to hand Netanyahu an invitation to the White House, during the week of the slaughter at sea. The only reason Netanyahu did not come to Washington was because he rushed back to Israel to buttress the Foreign Office’s defense of the slaughter in the face of world-wide outrage. But in a phone conversation, Obama promised Netanyahu a prompt new invitation – assuring the Jewish statesman that violating international laws and bloodying dozens of humanitarian activists is of no consequence, especially since it insures continued financial support by Obama’s Zionist backers.
Like Lyndon Johnson with the cover-up of the USS Liberty, Obama’s apology of Israel’s war crimes, is the price for ensuring the backing of billionaire Zionist financiers and media moguls, the tens of thousands of pro-Israel Jews and the 51 President of the Major American Jewish Organizations.
In the face of Washington’s complicity with Israeli war crimes, the only road is to intensify the world-wide boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign against all Israeli products, cultural activities and professional exchanges. Hopefully, the Islamic led mass protests will find echo in the wider anti-Zionist Christian and Jewish communities – especially, when Israeli apologists for state terror make public appearances. Even more important each and every Israeli involved in the mass assault should be subject to criminal prosecution wherever they visit. Only by making the Israelis understand that they will pay a high price for their serial homicides and violations of international law will reason possibly enter their political narrative. Only by moving beyond symbolic protests, like recalling diplomats, and taking substantive actions, like breaking relations, will the international community isolate the perpetrator of state terrorism. All Americans should send loud and clear to President Obama –NEVER AGAIN. Otherwise, with the Zionist Power Configuration active 7/24, the Obama regime, true to the Zionist agenda, will once again focus attention on attacking Iran. Israel’s action today with US complicity is a prelude of the kind of deadly force it has in store for sabotaging the recent Turkey-Brazil-Iran diplomatic agreement.
This is dedicated to the brave Turkish martyrs on the Mavi Marmara, May 31, 2010, and to the 34 murdered American sailors on the USS Liberty, June 8, 1967 – all victims of an unrepentant criminal state – Israel.
How Israeli propaganda shaped U.S. media coverage of the flotilla attack
By Glenn Greenwald | June 4, 2010
It was clear from the moment news of the flotilla attack emerged that Israel was taking extreme steps to suppress all evidence about what happened other than its own official version. They detained all passengers on the ship and barred the media from speaking with them, thus, as The NYT put it, “refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel’s version of events.” They detained the journalists who were on the ship for days and seized their film, video and cameras. And worst of all, the IDF — while still refusing to disclose the full, unedited, raw footage of the incident — quickly released an extremely edited video of their commandos landing on the ship, which failed even to address, let alone refute, the claim of the passengers: that the Israelis were shooting at the ship before the commandos were on board.
This campaign of suppression and propaganda worked to shape American media coverage (as state propaganda campaigns virtually always work on the gullible, authority-revering American media). The edited IDF video was shown over and over on American television without question or challenge. Israeli officials and Israel-devoted commentators appeared all over television — almost always unaccompanied by any Turkish, Palestinian or Muslim critics of the raid — to spout the Israeli version without opposition. Israel-centric pundits in America claimed, based on the edited IDF video, that anyone was lying who even reported on the statements of the passengers that Israeli fired first. In sum, that the Israelis used force only after the passengers attacked the commandos became Unquestioned Truth in American discourse.
But now that the passengers and journalists have been released from Israeli detention and are speaking out, a much different story is emerging. As I noted yesterday, numerous witnesses and journalists are describing Israeli acts of aggression, including the shooting of live ammunition, before the commandos landed. The New York Times blogger Robert Mackey today commendably compiles that evidence — I recommend it highly — and he writes: “now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways.” As Juan Cole says: “Many passengers have now confirmed that they were fired on even before the commandos had boots on the deck. Presumably it is this suppressive fire that killed or wounded some passengers and which provoked an angry reaction and an attack on the commandos.”
Whether the Israelis fired at the passengers before or after landing on the ship matters little to the crux of what happened here. The initial act of aggression was the Israeli seizing of a ship in international waters which was doing nothing hostile; that action was taken to enforce a horrific, inhumane blockade and, more generally, a brutal, decades-long occupation; and whatever else is true, at least nine civilians were killed by the Israeli Navy, only the latest example of Israel (and the U.S.) using massive military force against civilians.
But this incident illustrates — yet again — the eagerness of the American media to “report” on events by doing nothing but mindlessly repeating official government claims. How many of the TV hosts who paraded Israeli officials in front of their audiences all week will put these witnesses on their shows to narrate their version of events? Devotees to Israel have already been convinced that this ship was full of Terrorists and Terrorist-lovers (meaning: anyone who opposes Israeli policy), so anything these passengers say (indeed, anyone who disputes the Israeli version of events) will be automatically dismissed as unreliable — just as Muslim villagers who claim that the U.S. military kills civilians (rather than “militants”) are, for that reason alone, deemed suspect, and just as individuals who denied reports about Iraqi WMDs before the war were deemed suspect for that reason alone. But for those who are not committed to defending Israel no matter what it does, these witnesses deserve to be heard every bit as much as Israeli officials.
Nobody’s claims are entitled to an automatic assumption of truth, including these passengers. But as Mackey argues, all of this compellingly underscores the need for an independent — not an Israeli-led — investigation. Mackey quotes Israeli journalist and blogger Noam Sheifaz:
Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it.
Just as is true for the U.S. on so many occasions, Israel has made unmistakably clear that it is interested only in propagandizing and obfuscating. The very idea that they can be trusted to reveal what actually happened is ludicrous on its face.
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One of the more disturbing — though predictable — developments this week is the effort to suggest that Furkan Dogan, the 19-year-old American killed by the Israelis with four bullets to the head and one to the chest, is not a “real citizen.” That, of course, tracks the prior Joe-Lieberman-led proposal to strip Americans of their citizenship (now being replicated in Israel) and the Obama administration’s targeting of Americans for due-process-free assassinations. We now have at least two classes of citizenship: “real citizens” and “not really citizens.” John Cole says all that needs to be said about this disgusting suggestion.
The Israeli flotilla attack: victimhood, aggression and tribalism
By Glenn Greenwald | June 3, 2010
One of the primary reasons the Turkish Government has been so angry in its denunciations of the Israeli attack on the flotilla is because many of the dead were Turkish citizens. That’s what governments typically do: object vociferously when their citizens are killed by foreign nations under extremely questionable circumstances. Needless to say, that principle — as all principles are — will be completely discarded when it comes to the U.S. protection of Israel:
A U.S. citizen of Turkish origin was among the nine people killed when Israeli commandos attacked a Gaza-bound aid flotilla . . . An official from the Turkish Islamic charity that spearheaded the campaign to bust the blockade on Gaza identified the U.S. citizen as 19-year-old Furkan Dogan . . . . Dogan, who held a U.S. passport, had four bullet wounds to the head and one to the chest . . . .
Will the fact that one of the dead at Israel’s hands was an American teenager with four bullet wounds to his head alter the Obama administration’s full-scale defense of Israel? Does that question even need to be asked? Not even American interests can undermine reflexive U.S. support for anything Israel does; even the Chief of the Mossad acknowledged this week that “Israel is progressively becoming a burden on the United States.” One dead 19-year-old American with 4 bullet holes in his head (especially one of Turkish origin with a Turkish-sounding name) surely won’t have any impact.
Yesterday, newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron became the latest world leader to unequivocally condemn Israel, saying the attack was “completely unacceptable” and demanding an end to the blockade. But last night on Charlie Rose’s show, Joe Biden defended Israel with as much vigor as any Netanyahu aide or Weekly Standard polemicist. Biden told what can only be described as a lie when, in order to justify his rhetorical question “what’s the big deal here?,” he claimed that the ships could have simply delivered their aid to Israel and Israel would then have generously sent it to Gaza (“They’ve said, ‘Here you go. You’re in the Mediterranean. This ship — if you divert slightly north you can unload it and we’ll get the stuff into Gaza’.”). In fact, contrary to the Central Lie being told about the blockade, Israel prevents all sorts of humanitarian items having nothing whatsoever to do with weapons from entering Gaza, including many of the supplies carried by the flotilla.
One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration’s depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn’t it have been even more indefensible — or at least oozingly hypocritical — if the U.S. had condemned Israel? After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn’t routinely done and continues to do? As even our own military officials acknowledge, we’re slaughtering an “amazing number” of innocent people at checkpoints in Afghanistan. We’re routinely killing civilians in all sorts of imaginative ways in countless countries, including with drone strikes which a U.N. official just concluded are illegal. We’re even targeting our own citizens for due-process-free assassination. We’ve been arming Israel and feeding them billions of dollars in aid and protecting them diplomatically as they (and we) have been doing things like this for decades. What’s the Obama administration supposed to say about what Israel did: we condemn the killing of unarmed civilians? We decry these violations of international law? Even by typical standards of government hypocrisy, who in the U.S. Government could possibly say any of that with a straight face?
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What this really underscores is that the mentality driving both Israel and the U.S. are quite similar, which is why those two countries find such common cause, even when the rest of the world recoils in revulsion. One of the more amazing developments in the flotilla aftermath is how a claim that initially appeared too self-evidently ludicrous to be invoked by anyone — Israel was the victim here and was acting against the ship in self-defense –has actually become the central premise in Israeli and (especially) American discourse about the attack (and as always, there are far more criticisms of Israeli actions in Israel than in the U.S.).
How could anyone with the slightest intellectual honesty claim that Israel and its Navy were the victims of a boat which Jon Stewart said last night looked like “P Diddy’s St. Bart’s vacation yacht”; or that armed Israeli commandos were the victims of unarmed civilian passengers; or, more generally, that a nuclear-armed Israel with the most powerful military by far in the Middle East and the world’s greatest superpower acting as Protector is the persecuted victim of a wretched, deprived, imprisoned, stateless population devastated by 40 years of brutal Israeli occupation and, just a year ago, an unbelievably destructive invasion and bombing campaign? The casting of “victim” and “aggressor” is blatantly reversed with such claims — which is exactly the central premise that has been driving, and continues to drive, U.S. foreign policy as well. In Imperial Ambitions, Noam Chomsky — talking about America’s post-9/11 policies — described the central mental deception that is at the heart of all nations which dominate others with force:
In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, “There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them. We are outnumbered fifteen to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.” That is a constant refrain of imperialism. You have your jackboot on someone’s neck and they’re about to destroy you.
The same is true with any form of oppression. And it’s psychologically understandable. If you’re crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it, and it can’t be, “I’m a murderous monster.” It has to be self-defense. “I’m protecting myself against them. Look what they’re doing to me.” Oppression gets psychologically inverted; the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.
Thus, nuclear-armed Israel is bullied and victimized by starving Gazans with stones. The Israel Navy is threatened by a flotilla filled with wheelchairs and medicine. And the greatest superpower the Earth has ever known faces a grave and existential threat from a handful of religious fanatics hiding in caves. An American condemnation of Israel, as welcomed as it would have been, would be an act of senseless insincerity, because the two countries (along with many others) operate with this same “we-are-the-victim” mindset.
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A prime cause of this inversion is the distortion in perception brought about by rank tribalism. Those whose worldview is shaped by their identification as members of a particular religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group invariably over-value the wrongs done to them and greatly under-value the wrongs their group perpetrates. Those whose world view is shaped by tribalism are typically plagued by an extreme persecution complex (the whole world is against us!!!; everyone who criticizes us is hateful and biased!!!). Haaretz today reports that “Jewish Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. gave a rare demonstration of unity on Wednesday when they backed Israel’s raid of a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla.” Gee, whatever could account for that “rare demonstration of unity” between these left-wing Jewish progressives and hard-core, Jewish right-wing war cheerleaders who agree on virtually nothing else? My, it’s such a mystery.
I can’t express how many emails I’ve received over the last week, from self-identified Jewish readers (almost exclusively), along the lines of: I’m a true progressive, agree with you on virtually every issue, but hate your views on Israel. When it comes to Israel, we see the same mindset from otherwise admirable Jewish progressives such as Anthony Weiner, Jerry Nadler, Eliot Spitzer, Alan Grayson, and (after a brief stint of deviation) Barney Frank. On this one issue, they magically abandon their opposition to military attacks on civilians, their defense of weaker groups being bullied and occupied by far stronger factions, their belief that unilateral military attacks are unjustified, and suddenly find common cause with Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, and the Bush administration in justifying even the most heinous Israeli crimes of aggression.
It will never cease to be mystifying (at least to me) that they never question why they suddenly view the world so differently when it comes to Israel. They never wonder to themselves:
I had it continuously drummed into my head from the time I was a small child, from every direction, that Israel was special and was to be cherished, that it’s fundamentally good but persecuted and victimized by Evil Arab forces surrounding it, that I am a part of that group and should see the world accordingly. Is this tribal identity which was pummeled into me from childhood — rather than some independent, dispassionate analysis — the reason I find myself perpetually sympathizing with and defending Israel?
Doesn’t the most minimal level of intellectual awareness — indeed, the concept of adulthood itself — require that re-analysis? And, of course, the “self-hating” epithet — with which I’ve naturally been bombaded relentlessly over the last week — is explicitly grounded in the premise that one should automatically defend one’s “own group” rather than endeaveor to objectively assess facts and determine what is right and true.
This tribalism is hardly unique to Israel and Jews; it’s instead universal. As the Bush years illustrated, there is no shortage of Americans who “reason” the same way:
I was taught from childhood that America is right and thus, even in adulthood, defend America no matter what it does; my duty as an American is to defend and justify what America does and any American who criticizes the U.S. is “self-hating” and anti-American; the wrongs perpetrated by Us to Them pale in comparison to the wrongs perpetrated by Them on U.S.
Or listen to Fox News fear-mongers declare how Christians in the U.S. and/or white males — comprising the vast majority of the population and every power structure in the country — are the Real Persecuted Victims, from the War on Christmas to affirmative action evils. Ronald Reagan even managed to convince much of the country that the true economic injustices in America were caused by rich black women driving their Cadillacs to collect their welfare checks. This kind of blinding, all-consuming tribalism leads members of even the most powerful group to convince themselves that they are deeply victimized by those who are far weaker, whose necks have been under the boots of the stronger group for decades, if not longer.
That’s just the standard symptom of the disease of tribalism and it finds expression everywhere, in every group. It’s just far more significant — and far more destructive — when the groups convincing themselves that they are the Weak and Bullied Victims are actually the strongest forces by far on the planet, with the greatest amount of weaponry and aggression, who have been finding justifications for so long for their slaughtering of civilians that, as Israeli Amos Oz suggested this week about his country, there are virtually no limits left on the naked aggression that will be justified. Thus, even when Israel attacks a ship full of civilians and wheelchairs in international waters and kills at least 9 human beings, this is depicted by its tribal loyalists as an act of justified self-defense against the Real Aggressors.
Lies, damned lies, and Israeli propaganda
By Omar Radwan | Middle East Monitor | 02 June 2010
Following Israel’s murderous attack on the Freedom Flotilla taking humanitarian aid to Gaza, it is hard not to conclude that sections of the media in Britain and other Western countries have been desperate to find ways to justify the crime. On the BBC and Sky News, a frequent argument has been that Israel feels “isolated” by the international community and is in a “war” situation, and therefore feels that it has to take extraordinary measures to defend itself. To shore up this argument, these media outlets have, once again, repeated two tired fabrications; Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction and Israel’s blockade of Gaza was imposed in response to Hamas rocket attacks.
The reality is, of course, very different. Israel is not isolated by the rest of the world. On the contrary, unlike, say, Iran and Syria (and before 2003, Iraq) in the Middle East, Israel has not been subject to sanctions in any way by the international community. It remains the largest recipient of US financial, political and military aid, despite the much-hyped rift between the Obama administration and the right-wing Netanyahu government and was recently co-opted to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development with the blessing of the European Union Nations. Nor is Israel in a war situation. None of Israel’s Arab neighbours pose a military threat to its existence and two of them, Egypt and Jordan, have full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state; Egypt cooperates actively with Israel in the siege of Gaza.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza is usually said to have started in June 2007, when Hamas took control of the territory after pre-empting a coup by a faction within political rivals Fatah, but Israel had been limiting the movement of goods and people into Gaza long before that. The rockets fired from Gaza are not a threat to Israel and are not the reason for the blockade. Israel conducts frequent and deadly raids into the Gaza Strip and the rockets are fired in response to these raids. These rockets are very basic and inaccurate, capable of causing limited damage; they are very rarely lethal and are the only “serious” weapon available to a desperate people who have been brutalised by Israel for years. What about the claim that Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction? Hamas has offered Israel an open-ended ceasefire if it withdraws from the West Bank and lifts the blockade of Gaza; Israel has refused. The very fact that this “hudna” has been offered is de facto recognition of the state of Israel.
It is still not known exactly how many fatalities there were during Israel’s assault on the flotilla. Most news reports claim that nine or ten of the passengers were killed by the Israeli commandos, but other sources suggest that the figure could be as high as nineteen. Israel has imposed an information blackout designed to make sure that only its version of events comes out. As part of this “hasbara” campaign, the Israeli military issued a grainy black and white video, labelled helpfully, showing some of its soldiers being attacked with iron bars and chairs, with one being thrown from one deck to another, as they stormed it from their helicopters. This film has been played without comment on Sky News, the BBC and other channels. In addition, Israeli claims that the activists were carrying knives and stun grenades on their ship have been taken at face value and reported without comment all too frequently. The Israelis would have us believe that helpless commandos were attacked by unarmed “terrorists” masquerading as activists and the main news channels in Britain and other countries have been more than willing to repeat this message.
In this way, the murder of at least nine unarmed people by soldiers armed to the teeth is made to look natural and justifiable. The Israeli video is so surreal and unbelievable that it is barely worth commenting on. Apart from the fact that there is another, better quality video of an announcement made by an activist to his fellow passengers telling them not to resist because there is nothing they can do against the Israelis’ live ammunition, suffice to say that Israel has used this tactic before. During the war on Gaza, in order to justify its attacks on civilians, the Israeli army posted videos of rockets being loaded or fired, which later turned out to be faked. Even if we suppose that the latest “attack” video is authentic, isn’t it natural for people under attack to defend themselves? And yet the activists are being portrayed as thugs, hooligans and terrorists for doing so.
Israel has called the Freedom Flotilla an “Armada of Hate” and said that the activists on board are linked with Hamas, al-Qaeda, and “global jihad”; again, these absurd claims have been taken at face value by sections of the media. The Turkish humanitarian organisation, IHH, which has played a leading role in the flotilla, has been smeared in the Daily Telegraph as a front organisation for al-Qaeda, without any evidence being proffered. This charitable society operates legally around the world apart from Israel where it is banned, as are many other legitimate charities which support Palestinians in the midst of a desperate humanitarian catastrophe; no credible evidence is ever provided for these bans. They are seen by many as just another tool used by Israel to deny Palestinians much-needed aid.
The same DailyTelegraph story mentions that the flotilla has been endorsed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the British Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. On board the flotilla were the Swedish bestselling author Henrig Mankell, the former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, Dennis Halliday and the founder of Northern Ireland’s “Peace People”, Mairead Corrigan Maguire. Did the Telegraph bother to ask why all these people endorsed and took part in a project organised by IHH if it was indeed an al-Qaeda front organisation?
One very important aspect has been played down amidst all this hostile media coverage – the dire need of the people of Gaza for the items on board the ships of the flotilla. Among other things the flotilla carried cement, building materials, school supplies and medical equipment. The admittedly limited quantity of aid on the convoy would still have been of immense value to the people of Gaza. The homes and buildings that Israel destroyed in its December 2008 assault on the territory are still in ruins because Israel has since blocked the import of building materials. In fact, there is a long and arbitrary list of items that cannot be imported: pencils, computers and other educational items, for example, are banned, as are many food items, such as canned fruit. The volume and category of goods permitted to be imported into Gaza are kept at a level low enough to create poverty, malnourishment and suffering but not too low to create a humanitarian catastrophe that will make Israel look bad in front of the cameras. Despite this, the statement by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman that there is “no humanitarian crisis in Gaza” and that Israel is allowing thousands of tons of food and equipment in has been reported without comment. The organisers of the Freedom Flotilla have also been criticised by some for not accepting Israel’s offer to unload their ships in Ashdod so that the Israelis can deliver their cargo “through the usual channels”. They were, of course, supposed to believe that the same “channels” which have made the people of Gaza suffer for so many years would suddenly and willingly help to alleviate that suffering.
Media complicity in Israel’s crimes has long been accepted by analysts, and Israel has spent a great deal of money on promoting its side of the long-running conflict narrative through a sophisticated propaganda machine. This latest episode, however, has exposed the double-standards and lack of genuine objectivity by the compliant sections of the media. On BBC Radio 5’s “Up all Night” programme on 2 June, Bruce Shapiro, the executive Director of the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia University in New York City, said that in most cases, the “facts” which emerge within the first 24-48 hours of incidents like Israel’s hijacking of the flotilla are usually shown to be false with the passage of time. Should this happen in this case (and it has already been admitted by an Israeli military spokesperson that none of the passengers had any weapons on them prior to the assault), a lot of media outlets will be left with egg on their faces because they have allowed the Israeli side of the story to be pushed almost unchallenged. How long will it be before members of the public grasp the fact that they are being duped, say enough is enough, and demand a balanced media approach to this conflict?
Blinded in Gaza: The “Liberal” Media’s Seeing Eye Dogma
Marsha B. Cohen| May 31st, 2010
The barks of pro-Israel media “watchdog” groups like CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), The Israel Project , and the meretriciously monikered website HonestReporting have echoed the Israeli government’s talking points about the Israeli navy’s attack on half a dozen civilian ships bringing aid to Gaza, in defiance of an Israeli blockade.
But if you’ve been looking to the so-called “liberal” media for more balanced coverage of the events as they’ve unfolded in the international waters off the Gaza coast, you’ve probably gotten the yip-yap of a pro-Israel poodle.
As usual, the “fool’s gold” standard, at the core of most news coverage in the “no sooner done than said” era, begins (and too often ends) with the Associated Press. AP entrusted it initial Gaza report to Amy Teibel and Tia Goldenberg. Teibel , who provides a a good deal of AP’s Israel coverage, is not on CAMERA’s list of journalists who arouse its ire. That’s not to say that Teibel is immune from scrutiny or censure by the “guardians of Israel,” some of it bordering on the bizarre. Neverthless, her articles earn her an occasional whimper, while some of her AP colleagues get a nasty snarl.
Teibel’s co-author, Tia Goldenberg, also isn’t on CAMERA’s journalistic hit list. Goldenberg is a Canadian-born Israeli and a former intern for the Canadian Jewish Congress. More to the point, either unnoticed or deliberately ignored by most newspapers, is that Goldenberg was reporting on the Gaza flotilla’s destruction from the Israeli warship INS Kidon. Not much chance of Goldenberg screwing the pooch, at least not from an Israeli perspective.
Reuters coverage of the confrontation between Israeli forces and the Gaza convoy has been authored or co-authored by Jeffrey Heller, currently the editor-in-charge of Reuters’ Jerusalem bureau. It’s instructive to contrast the development throughout the day in Heller’s online Feed with the one released later in the day.
In his first Feed entry today, Heller had written:
Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of Gaza-bound aid ships on Monday and more than 10 of the mostly international activists aboard were killed, provoking a diplomatic crisis and Palestinian charges of a “massacre.”
The violent end to a Turkish-backed attempt to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip by six ships carrying some 600 people and 10,000 tonnes of supplies raised an outcry across the Middle East and far beyond.
As the navy escorted the vessels into Israel’s port of Ashdod, accounts remained sketchy of the pre-dawn interception out in the Mediterranean, in which marines stormed aboard from dinghies and rappelled down from helicopters. Israel said “more than 10″ activists died. Israeli media spoke of up to 19 dead…
But the most recent Reuters version as of this writing (1:06 am IST June 1), co-authored with Alastair Macdonald, reads:
Israeli marines stormed a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza on Monday and at least nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, triggering a diplomatic crisis and an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.
European nations, as well as the United Nations and Turkey, voiced shock and outrage at the bloody end to the international campaigners’ bid to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Boarding from dinghies and rappelling from helicopters, naval commandos stopped six ships, 700 people and 10,000 tons of supplies from reaching the Islamist-run Palestinian enclave — but bloody miscalculation left Israel isolated and condemned…
The “commandos” have become “marines.” The ten “international activists” on board are now “pro-Palestinian activists.” The Gaza-bound aid ships are downsized to “a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza.” The consequences are muzzled too: a diplomatic crisis and the accusation that a massacre has taken place” is parlayed into “a profound diplomatic crisis.” And poor Israel is standing alone, “isolated and condemned,” on account of a mere “miscalculation.”
Heller isn’t on the list of journalists CAMERA disapproves of either.
CNN’s coverage of the fate of the Gaza convoy has had no bark and no bite. Its latest offering (as of this writing) begins with the pretense of “he said/she said” balance but slips easily into Israeli talking points:
Israel insisted Monday that its soldiers were defending themselves when they fatally shot nine activists aboard a ship in international waters that was laden with humanitarian goods for Gaza.
Israel’s assertion was denied by one of the groups that sponsored the boat. The competing claims could not be independently verified.
“They deliberately attacked soldiers,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters at a photo op in Ottawa, Canada, with his Canadian counterpart…
Not surprising that CAMERA was pleased by most of the coverage by the mainstream media, noting with satisfaction that:
AP, Reuters, CNN and the New York Times ran balanced stories, noting the participants are “pro-Palestinian activists,” that Israel is already assuring regular convoys of humanitarian supplies into Gaza and that Israel has additionally offered to transfer materials from the flotilla by land to Gaza. Some reported in detail the preparations in the Israeli city of Ashdod to house any possible detainees before returning them to their home countries.
This is not to say that media coverage of the recent events in Gaza has been ideal from CAMERA’s point of view. Hardly! It has fallen short of CAMERA standards of “objectivity” in several respects:
Missing from all coverage thus far is any indication of the radical nature of the organizations sponsoring the flotilla. To characterize them as “pro-Palestinian,” while accurate, hardly conveys adequately who they are and what they promote. The organizations include far-left individuals, such as members of the Communist Party in Sweden and members of the extremist International Solidarity Movement which advocates “armed struggle” against Israel as well as Islamist groups fronting for Hamas and with ties to the global jihad and Al Quaeda.
Furthermore, CAMERA insists, the flotilla’s sponsors are nothing but a bunch of lying “European and American radicals and pro-Hamas Muslims.” Gaza doesn’t even need any aid:
Contrary to allegations of Free Gaza, there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Convoys of trucks continuously bring food, clothing, medicine and other essentials to the population.
Unfortunately, the harsh and narrow standards of hardline “pro-Israel” media watchdogs like CAMERA, while they may not fully succeed in imposing all aspects of their agenda, have a stultifying effect not only on journalists’ choice of terminology but how they view–and depict–the context of the various conflicts in the Middle East.
At this point, the progressive reader may be thinking that the way to avoid “indoctrination” is to entrust one’s news leash to one or more of the larger progressive media sites.
How about Alternet? As of this morning, the only news coverage was a home page link to an early French Press Agency (Agence France-Presse–AFP) reproduced in full on Raw Story, which was based exclusively on a not-particularly-informative Israeli television report.
According to Israel’s private channel 10 television, Israeli marine commandos had opened fire after being attacked with axes and knives by a number of the passengers on board the aid ships, the television said, without giving the source of its information.
The station did not say whether the dead and injured were passengers or members of the Israeli navy.
Israel’s army radio said between 10 and 14 people had been killed in clashes which broke out after the passengers allegedly tried to grab weapons off the naval commandos who tried to storm one of the boats.
It was not clear whether the clashes were taking place on just one of the six boats making up the aid convoy, and the Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident.
Shortly afterwards, the Israeli military censor ordered a block on all information regarding those injured or killed during the storming of the ship.
Raw Story also provides video footage courtesy of the Israel Defense Forces.
The main story featured on the Huffington Post home page for most of the day has been AP’s report, no byline for Teibel and Goldenberg. To its credit, HP did interject a link to video footage by Al Jazeera reporter Jamal Elshayyal, recorded while he was on board the aid ship Mavi Marmara. This afternoon an AP Analysis by Karin Laub and Matthew Lee, headlined High Seas Raid Deepens Israel’s Isolation, became Huffington Post’s lead story. CAMERA, which has a litany of grievances against Laub, isn’t going to like its first sentence, which Huffington Post included in in its own headline for the piece, making it a bit more juicy:
Israel’s bloody, bungled takeover of a Gaza-bound Turkish aid vessel is complicating U.S.-led Mideast peace efforts, deepening Israel’s international isolation and threatening to destroy the Jewish state’s ties with key regional ally Turkey.
The Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet of “must reads” is a teaser that provides a link to CNN’s coverage, complemented by IDF video footage. More insightfully, Reza Aslan posted a new entry in his Daily Beast blog this afternoon headlined “An Israel Raid’s Deadly Toll.”
The well-known English proverb “every dog has his day” is rendered Kul kalb bi’gi yomo in Arabic, Kol kelev ba yomo in Hebrew. Yizhar Be’er, writing on the Ir Amim website, points out that “unlike the phrase’s English cousin, which rosily promises that even the lowest among us will have a day of good fortune,” the Semitic form of the proverb is more along the lines of (quoting the author of the Forward’s On Language column) “Every scoundrel will receive his comeuppance.” In other words, karma will eventually run over dogma.
When it does, don’t expect to find it out much from the coverage from the “liberal” media.
Defending Israel: A How-To Guide
Today’s op-ed by the Wall Street Journal editorial board offers a fairly comprehensive list of the talking points which are de rigueur in defending Israel’s attack on civilian ships in international water.
1.) Mention the Gaza war in 2008 as an example of what happens when weapons get into Gaza.
Example from the WSJ:
Since [Hamas seized power in 2007], both Israel and Egypt have imposed a partial blockade on the Strip, mainly to prevent Hamas from arming itself with the kinds of weapons it used to spark a war with Israel in December 2008.
It’s interesting that Israel should bring up the Gaza war as an example of Hamas viciousness. This was a war where between 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinians were killed and 13 Israelis died. It’s hard to argue that Israel’s response to Hamas’s “spark” was proportional but we’ll talk about proportionality later.
2.) Emphasize that food, water and other necessary supplies enter Gaza on a daily basis through Israeli checkpoints.
Example from the WSJ:
Food, medicine and electricity continue to flow to Gaza.
World Health Organization reports have found that Israel is blocking vital medical supplies from entering Gaza and that building a well-functioning health care system is impossible without the regular delivery of supplies. Furthermore, mortality rates are 30-percent higher in Gaza than in Palestinian populations in the West Bank and chronic malnutrition is now over 10-percent. As to electricity, the UN’s Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on May 9th that:
“(A)lmost all of the 1.4 million Palestinians residing in the Gaza Strip, with the exception of those who live in the Rafah area, must cope with scheduled electricity cuts of 8-12 hours daily, compared to 6-8 hours prior to January 2010.
These power cuts exacerbate the already difficult living conditions in Gaza and disrupt almost all aspects of daily life, including household chores, health services, education and water and sanitation services.”
3.) Claim that the international community is biased against Israel, denies Israel its sovereign right to defend itself and constantly complains about Israel’s “disproportional” use of force. If possible, belittle the concept of proportionality.
Example from the WSJ:
The Gaza war also elicited international protests against Israel, which time and again is told what it can do in its own self-defense, with its critics deeming nearly every effective military action “disproportionate”.
It is true that Israel is frequently accused of using disproportionate force. From the wildly disproportionate death toll in the Gaza war to the killing of nine human rights activists this weekend, there is no shortage of Israeli disproportionality.
But none of that matters if you argue that disproportionality works and that discussions about “proportionality” are a waste of time.
Editorial writers and bloggers have been busy dusting off the argument that a disproportionate response is the only way to deal with terrorists that threaten our western values.
(I blogged earlier today about Michael Rubin’s defense of Israel’s disproportional use of force.)
4.) Insist that the IDF was just defending itself against an armed, bloodthirsty mob.
Example from the WSJ:
It was only after the humanitarians aboard the ship assaulted the commandos with clubs and knives that the Israelis used live fire. If the Internet videos of the commandos being viciously attacked as they descended from a helicopter are accurate, they were acting to defend themselves.
This characterization of events totally ignores the context in which the raid and the shooting of nine flotilla members occurred.
The IDF commandos had to fly seventy miles offshore, into international waters, before rappelling onto a Turkish- flagged passenger ship. Then, when not greeted with open arms, they shot nine people dead. An ambush would suggest that the Israelis were tricked into boarding the ships. No account of the events from either flotilla members or the IDF suggests that this was the case. Israel attacked a ship sailing in international waters. At what point did those aboard the vessel forfeit their own right of self-defense?
Craig Murray, a human rights activist and former British ambassador to Uzbekistan writes:
A word on the legal position, which is very plain. To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.
Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody’s territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.
There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.
Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.
Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorized Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.
In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.
5.) Set the stage for future conflicts which will derail the peace process.
Example from the WSJ:
We suppose Israel could have allowed the flotilla to pass to avoid the political fallout it is now enduring. Had it done so, however, it would have merely created a channel through which Hamas could be supplied with ever-more advanced weaponry (much of it courtesy of Iran) thus setting the stage for an even bloodier war in Gaza.
Israel knows exactly what risk it runs when it commits provocative acts such as the recent raid on the flotilla. Editorial writers and sympathetic journalists dutifully repeat the message that the Palestinian response to Israel “defending itself” could lead to a “new Intifada”. What better way to derail peace talks than to provoke violence before the parties have even gotten to the table?
The pressure is on Netanyahu to cease settlement expansion and make a meaningful attempt to negotiate borders and security arrangements with Hamas. Pressure from the White House might be difficult to completely ignore, but, with a loyal group of sympathetic journalists and bloggers, Netanyahu can try to drown out the voices of his international critics. That’s as long as his friends in the media stick to their talking points.
What does Israel fear from media coverage?
By Glenn Greenwald | June 1, 2010
The New York Times, today:
A day after Israeli commandoes raided an aid flotilla seeking to breach the blockade of Gaza, Israel held hundreds of activists seized aboard the convoy on Tuesday . . . .Reuters reported that Israel was holding hundreds of activists incommunicado in and around the port city of Ashdod, refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel’s version of events.
Physically blocking journalists from reporting on their conduct is what Israel does (as well as others); recall this from The New York Times on January 6, 2009, regarding Israel’s war in Gaza:
Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza
Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.
Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border.
And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.
Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.
Isn’t it strange how Plucky, Democratic Israel goes to such extreme lengths to prevent any media coverage of what they do, any journalistic interference with their propaganda machine, in light of the fact that — as always — They Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong? Is physically blocking the media from covering what happens the act of a government that is in the right? Thomas Jefferson answered that question quite some time ago:
Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.
Israel is now not only detaining the victims of its aggression, but also threatening to prosecute and imprison them. Israeli Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said yesterday: “All those who lifted a hand against a soldier will be punished to the full extent of the law.” So when Israel seizes ships in international waters and kills anyone who resists (and others standing near them), that is an act of noble, plucky self-defense. But those who fail to submit completely to this lawless and barbarous act of aggression are the Real Criminals who will be prosecuted and imprisoned “to the fullest extent of the law.” In other words, not only is Israel — which seized ships in international waters and killed civilians — the Real Victim, but the Real Criminals are those on the ship. But doesn’t the victim of a crime usually want media coverage of what the criminal did? How odd for the victim in this case to take such extreme steps to ensure that the world cannot hear from the witnesses.
* * * * *
Two other related points: (1) as I noted yesterday, the real question for Americans is our own country’s responsibility for what Israel does; as virtually the entire world vehemently condemns Israel’s conduct, the U.S. — as usual — acts to protect the Israelis at the U.N. and joins it in heaping blame on its victims; and (2) Robert Farley highlights a small though typical piece of false Israeli propaganda, this one from supreme propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, which pervades our discourse in unchallenged form.
Freedom Flotilla and the BBC’s Shame
By M. Idrees | Pulse Media | May 31, 2010
The BBC proves its despicable subservience to the Israeli propaganda machine once again. Before it was shamed by Al Jazeera and others into covering the Freedom Flotilla massacre, it reported the story as a mere Hamas claim. Here is how it first appeared on the BBC’s website:
BBC News – Israel intercepts Gaza flotilla, says Hamas
The Palestinian movement Hamas says the Israeli navy has intercepted a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip.
The massacre soon became the top news story on Google News and Twitter. The BBC could no longer pretend that it couldn’t see. It finally reported it as a matter of fact, but appended this line: “Hamas, a militant palestinian group that controls the Gaza strip, has fired thousands of rockets into Israel over the past decade.”
The victims weren’t innocent, you see. They were on their way to aid these terrible people who fire ‘thousands of rockets into Israel’. That’s all you need to know. And if you mention those hundreds of thousands of bombs, missiles and rockets that Israel has shot into Gaza…Why, you must be an anti-Semite!
I took the risk, and sent in a complaint. I am assuming I wasn’t the only one questioning the relevance of the line to the report because it was swiftly removed. In its place, it posted a short video segment in which the reporter went out of his way to ‘stress’ that according to the Israeli military no one was killed. He then went on to excuse the killings because ‘clearly when you have as many as 600 people on board these ships, at night, in high sees, it is a very very difficult situation…and you can imagine a rather chaotic situation. Of course the Israeli military is very well experienced with dealing with crowd control’. But turns out he wasn’t entirely shameless. He did add: ’but certainly if you’ve got live fire being fired as well as tear gas canisters which is what is being reported was fired, then that is a very dangerous situation in a very crowded space’.
The BBC has now added a sidebar in which ‘diplomatic correspondent’ Jonathan Marcus tells readers how terrible this massacre is…for Israel’s image! The clueless ass tells us that ‘this was always going to be a high-risk operation’… for Israel! He adds: ‘Taking over vessels at sea is no easy task, even if the units carrying out the mission are well-trained, and it is especially difficult if the people already on board the vessels resist.’ But at least he thinks the deaths are a tragedy…but for Israel! Because they ‘threaten to make what was always going to be a potential public relations disaster for Israel into a fully-fledged calamity.’ So the BBC pays a ‘diplomatic correspondent’ your tax money so he can worry about the myriad ways Israel hurts itself by killing innocent civilians in international waters!
Thanks to all who’ve written in. Don’t let them get away with using your tax money to feed you propaganda on behalf of a foreign criminal entity. For more on the BBC’s disgraceful record of whitewashing Israeli crimes here and here.
This is your money being used in the service of murderers and child molesters. You have a responsibility to act. At minimum, you can complain.
The Guardian reporting on Venezuela takes more than the biscuit
By Patrick J. O’Donoghue | VHeadline | May 28, 2010
The UK’s main solidarity group with Venezuela, the Venezuelan Solidarity Campiagn (VSC) has held a seminar in London on (UK) media bias against Venezuela. Chaired by veteran journalist, Hugh O’Shaughnessy, reporting on Venezuela by the UK liberal broadsheet, The Guardian and BBC online came under intense scrutiny and criticism.
In the debate reports filed by The Guardian’s correspondent in Venezuela, Rory Carroll were carefully analyzed by VSC’s professor Francisco Dominguez (Middlesex University). Carroll’s journalistic technique revolves around snide comments, such as referring to President Chavez as former tank commander (or self-styled revolutionary) rather than President, hammering the message of inevitable economic collapse, exposing a supposedly irrational anti-Americanism and above all, heralding Chavez’ alleged populism aimed at perpetuating himself in power.
Conclusion: Carroll’s underlying tone is a subtle mockery of Chavez as an exotic exception.
Reactions from the audience, many of whom read the Guardian, centered around why the paper continues to accept articles from the likes of Carroll, who distorts what is happening in Venezuela in a very “un-Guardian” like fashion. The main thrust of the seminar centered on a presentation by University of West England professor, Lee Salter, who is researching how the BBC reports on Venezuela. Salter’s key contribution was to outline the personal and cultural make up of BBC correspondents abroad and their view on the world.
The insight was confirmed by Telesur adviser Iain Bruce, who worked 30 years for the BBC … he warned it would be wrong to see the BBC involved in a conspiracy against Venezuela. One of the problems, he suggested, is how news is structured and over reliance on wires by BBC online.
Middlesex University professor Jason De Souza provided an interesting comparison of how the British magazine, The Economist, projected stories depicting a positive Colombian President Alvaro Uribe against a very negative Hugo Chavez. De Souza highlighted magazine editorials to illustrate the nature of his research.
One of the thoughts thrown out during the seminar touched on the need of “sensible news outlets being given information from the Venezuelan government on a daily basis.”
The overriding impression taken away from the seminar is that if the BBC and The Guardian are indeed engaged in propaganda against Venezuela, then it doesn’t feel like propaganda and therein, lies the real danger.
Did an American Mine Sink South Korean Ship?
By Yoichi Shimatsu | New America Media | May 27, 2010
BEIJING – South Korean Prime Minister Lee Myung-bak has claimed “overwhelming evidence” that a North Korean torpedo sank the corvette Cheonan on March 26, killing 46 sailors. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that there’s “overwhelming evidence” in favor of the theory that North Korea sank the South Korean Navy warship Cheonan. But the articles of proof presented so far by military investigators to an official inquiry board have been scanty and inconsistent.
There’s yet another possibility, that a U.S. rising mine sank the Cheonan in a friendly-fire accident.
In the recent U.S.-China strategic talks in Shanghai and Beijing, the Chinese side dismissed the official scenario presented by the Americans and their South Korean allies as not credible. This conclusion was based on an independent technical assessment by the Chinese military, according to a Beijing-based military affairs consultant to the People Liberation Army.
Hardly any of the relevant facts that counter the official verdict have made headline news in either South Korea or its senior ally, the United States.
The first telltale sign of an official smokescreen involves the location of the Choenan sinking – Byeongnyeong Island (pronounced Pyongnang) in the Yellow Sea. On the westernmost fringe of South Korean territory, the island is dominated by a joint U.S.-Korean base for anti-submarine warfare (ASW) operations. The sea channel between Byeongnyeong and the North Korean coast is narrow enough for both sides to be in artillery range of each other.
Anti-sub warfare is based on sonar and acoustic detection of underwater craft. Since civilian traffic is not routed through the channel, the noiseless conditions are near-perfect for picking up the slightest agitation, for example from a torpedo and any submarine that might fire it.
North Korea admits it does not possess an underwater craft stealthy enough to slip past the advanced sonar and audio arrays around Byeongnyeong Island, explained North Korean intelligence analyst Kim Myong Chol in a news release. “The sinking took place not in North Korean waters but well inside tightly guarded South Korean waters, where a slow-moving North Korean submarine would have great difficulty operating covertly and safely, unless it was equipped with AIP (air-independent propulsion) technology.”
The Cheonan sinking occurred in the aftermath of the March 11-18 Foal Eagle Exercise, which included anti-submarine maneuvers by a joint U.S.-South Korean squadron of five missile ships. A mystery surrounds the continued presence of the U.S. missile cruisers for more than eight days after the ASW exercise ended.
Only one reporter, Joohee Cho of ABC News, picked up the key fact that the Foal Eagle flotilla curiously included the USNS Salvor, a diving-support ship with a crew of 12 Navy divers. The lack of any minesweepers during the exercise leaves only one possibility: the Salvor was laying bottom mines.
Ever since an American cruiser was damaged by one of Saddam Hussein’s rising mines, also known as bottom mines, in the Iraq War, the U.S. Navy has pushed a crash program to develop a new generation of mines. The U.S. Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command has also been focused on developing counterparts to the fearsome Chinese naval “assassin’s mace,” which is propelled by a rocket engine.
A rising mine, which is effective only in shallow waters, rests atop a small platform on the sea floor under a camouflage of sand and gravel. Its detection system uses acoustics and magnetic readings to pick up enemy ships and submarines. When activated, jets of compressed air or solid-fuel rockets lift the bomb, which self-guides toward the magnetic center of the target. The blast rips the keel, splitting the ship or submarine into two neat pieces, just as was done to the RKOS Cheonan.
A lateral-fired torpedo, in contrast, “holes” the target’s hull, tilting the vessel in the classic war movie manner. The South Korean government displayed to the press the intact propeller shaft of a torpedo that supposedly struck the Cheonan. Since torpedoes travel between 40-50 knots per hour (which is faster than collision tests for cars), a drive shaft would crumble upon impacting the hull and its bearing and struts would be shattered or bent by the high-powered blast.
The initial South Korean review stated that the explosive was gunpowder, which would conform to North Korea’s crude munitions. This claim was later overturned by the inquiry board, which found the chemical residues to be similar to German advanced explosives. Due to sanctions against Pyongyang and its few allies, it is hardly credible that North Korea could obtain NATO-grade ordnance.
Thus, the mystery centers on the USNS Salvor, which happened to be yet right near Byeongyang Island at the time of the Cheonan sinking and far from its home base, Pearl Harbor. The inquiry board in Seoul has not questioned the officers and divers of the Salvor, which oddly is not under the command of the 7th Fleet but controlled by the innocuous-sounding Military Sealift Command. Diving-support ships like the Salvor are closely connected with the Office of Naval Intelligence since their duties include secret operations such as retrieving weapons from sunken foreign ships, scouting harbor channels and laying mines, as when the Salvor trained Royal Thai Marine divers in mine-laying in the Gulf of Thailand in 2006, for example.
The Salvor’s presence points to an inadvertent release of a rising mine, perhaps because its activation system was not switched off. A human error or technical glitch is very much within the realm of possibility due to the swift current and strong tides that race through the Byeongnyeong Channel. The arduous task of mooring the launch platforms to the sea floor allows the divers precious little time for double-checking the electronic systems.
If indeed it was an American rising mine that sank the Cheonan, it would constitute a friendly-fire accident. That in itself is not grounds for a criminal investigation against the presidential office and, at worst, amounts only to negligence by the military. However, any attempt to falsify evidence and engage in a media cover-up for political purposes constitutes tampering, fraud, perjury and possibly treason.
Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, is an environmental consultant and a commentator on Asian affairs for CCTV-9 Dialogue.
Bill Maher’s Cultural Supremacy and Religious Hierarchy
By Nima Shirazi | May 13, 2010
Bill Maher makes no secret of his contempt for religion. Via his comedy routines, his political commentary, his film Religulous, and his duties as host of Politically Incorrect and now HBO’s Real Time, Maher has long warned of the dangers and exploitation of organized religion and how incompatible dogma and doctrine are with the scientific enlightenment of modern society.
Inadvertently and less eloquently paraphrasing Voltaire, who once wrote that “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” Maher has said that the belief in religion, which he calls “a neurological disorder,” in our society “stops people from thinking” and “justifies crazies.” In a 2008 interview with Larry King, Maher stated that religion is “the ultimate hustle.”
Maher’s critique (or outright bashing) of religious doctrine, dogma, and zealotry is admirable – or would be, if only he weren’t such an arrogant hypocrite. While Maher himself claims to be “an equal opportunity offender” who thinks that “all religion is stupid and dangerous,” he clearly believes that some faiths are more equal than others. Even though his condemnation of Christianity, notably Catholicism, has won him the animus of bible-thumping bigots like Catholic League head William Donahue and he has excoriated the intolerance of Pat Robertson and reveled in the death of Jerry Falwell, Maher has consistently saved his most virulent attacks for Islam and its followers.
While, in Maher’s estimation, Jews are somewhat quaint and silly and Christian dogma relies on outrageously absurd fairy tales, Muslims – as a rule – are all brainwashed and violent. Whereas other religions are sometimes co-opted by a minority of extremist elements that represent misguided fundamentalism, Islam, according to Maher, is inherently radical and terroristic. For example, during a February 2007 broadcast of Real Time, Maher stated,
“[Religions] are not all alike! [Islam] was extremist to begin with. Mohammad was a warrior. The big lie is that all religions are basically alike. They all preach the same thing. Well, of course the Bible is full of a lot of violence. I mean, God in the Old Testament is a psychopath – he just kills, kills, kills, for no reason, good reasons, bad reasons, he’s jealous, he just wants to kill…But he doesn’t seem to aim it so much at outsiders. He wipes out the Jews except for Noah because they were bad to him or whatever. But he doesn’t keep saying…it seems to me that in the Qur’an, God keeps saying, if you’re not one of us, you’re an infidel, and burning would be too good for you.”
With this unusual statement, Maher clearly demonstrates a striking level of ignorance about both the Qur’an and Judeo-Christian scripture, particularly the Old Testament, especially for someone who talks about religion all the time and then made a movie about it. The Old Testament manifestly overflows with divinely-mandated genocide and the deliberate ethnic cleansing of non-believers in the so-called Holy Land. Take the mythology of Exodus, which sees Yahweh deliver his people from Egypt and promise them a land “flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3.7-8) What is commonly left out of this uplifting tale of deliverance, freedom, and chosen-ness is the rest of Verse 8, which states plainly that this promised land was already “the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” As such, due to the inconvenient presence of a large and diverse indigenous population of non-Hebrew peoples, Yahweh declared to Moses and his followers:
“When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods, or worship them, or follow their practices, but you shall utterly demolish them and break their pillars in pieces.” (Exodus 23.23-24)
Unfortunately, for the native inhabitants of historic Palestine (or their modern counterparts, for that matter), things didn’t get any better. When the kingdom of Heshbon was conquered, the Bible states, the Israelites “completely destroyed every inhabited city, and we killed all men, women and children; we left no survivor; we left no one alive. Only the livestock we took as spoil for ourselves, with the plunder of the cities that we captured.” (Deuteronomy 2:31-35) The kingdom of Bashan fared no better, as Moses’ army devastated 60 walled towns, “totally destroying every inhabited city, and we killed all men, women and children. But all the cattle, all the livestock and the plunder from their cities we carried off for ourselves.” (Deuteronomy 3:3-7) As usual, Yahweh’s instructions were clear:
“When Yahweh your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites…and when Yahweh your God gives them over to you…you must utterly destroy them…Show them no mercy…For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”(Deuteronomy 7.1-11)
Moses certainly took God’s orders to heart, as he later told his followers:
“But as for the towns of these peoples that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as Yahweh your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against Yahweh, your God.” (Deuteronomy 20.16-18)
Furthermore, the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead, including “the women and the infants” were slaughtered by a 12,000-strong army of marauding Hebrews (Judges 21:10) and, as revenge for waylaying the Israelites as they returned from Egypt, Yahweh ordered his people to “go and strike the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them, but kill men and women, children, infants and suckling, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:2-3) Needless to say, there are many more examples of Hebrew aggression throughout the Bible (read about the exploits of Joshua, Aaron, David, Elijah, and Samson, for example), all of them commanded by the Lord Almighty, and all of them against non-Jews. So much for Maher’s contention that the Hebrew god “doesn’t seem to aim [his murderous wrath] so much at outsiders.”
(Incidentally, Maher also appears to be ignorant of certain Muslim rules of engagement, found within the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sunnah, that expressly prohibit the killing of women, children, and the elderly, the cutting or burning of trees or orchards, the slaughter of livestock except for food, and the pillaging, plundering, or destruction of residential areas. Clearly, Yahweh’s own battle conventions were far less strict and more closely resemble the tactics of the Israeli military.)
Perhaps Maher’s decision to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the biblical Hebrews upon the indigenous people of the Levant, in favor of demonizing Islam and its adherents, should not be surprising considering his outspoken support for Zionism and the fact that he is a self-avowed “big supporter of Israel,” who believes not only that “Israel is a democracy in a part of the world that has none” but also that American blood and treasure should be spent in order to ensure the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Almost a decade ago, in the midst of the Second Intifada in late 2001, Maher hosted a panel to discuss Israel and Palestine on his round table talk-show Politically Incorrect. Rather than act as moderator, though, Maher wholly represented the Zionist perspective, complete with revisionist history and the constant invocation of Zionist mythology. After attempting to contextualize his first question by claiming that 4.5 million Jewish Israelis, armed with superior weaponry and a nuclear arsenal, are surrounded by a sea of 280 million hostile, bloodthirsty Arabs, Maher asked, “What if for one hour…the Arabs had the ability to annihilate the Jewish state? Do you think things would be different? Do you think they would show the restraint that Israel has for over 50 years?” One can only wonder what kind of “restraint” Maher was referring to considering Israel’s history of asymmetric aggression, apartheid-style oppression, disdain for international law and human rights, and settler-garrison ethnonationalist policy.
The rest of the show consisted mostly of Maher talking over his guests – the Arab ones anyway – and claiming that there really is no Israeli occupation of Palestine, that Palestinian rejectionism is to blame for statelessness, that Zionism is not a racist ideology, that Palestinians are better off under Israeli authority than under Arab rule, and that the forcible displacement and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Zionist colonialism and military expansion shouldn’t be a big deal considering that, in his view, there are plenty of other places for the indigenous people to resettle. “Here is Israel, this little bit of land,” Maher said, pointing to a map of the region. He continued,
“Here’s Syria. Here’s Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, Sudan, Libya. Look at all this. Now, the Arabs purport to be brothers, that’s what we always hear. It’s one Arab nation divided into falsely drawn countries by the colonial powers. If this whole bit of land are all brothers, how come at the time of the partition when they refused to share the land with Israel, and there was only 600,000 Palestinian refugees, how come they couldn’t find any home in this whole area?”
Later, when confronted by one of the panelists, a Palestinian student at Georgetown University whose family was forced out of its home and into a refugee camp in 1948, who asks how such displacement and aggression can be justified by Israeli apologists, Maher stepped in to explain, “Because your people were offered half the land, and you said no and chose to try to annihilate them, instead.”
Aside from Maher’s awkward understanding of international law, the rights of refugees, and complete disregard for the illegality and immorality of both the annexation of land by conquest and the forcible transfer or deportation of populations, he demonstrates a distinct lack of historical knowledge and perspective required to speak on this matter with authority. He seems to either forget or simply not care that Israel was established in 1948 on land that was already inhabited by an indigenous population. In 1947, despite representing no more than 30% of the total population of Palestine – a percentage reached only after decades of illegal mass immigration to the region – Jews were to be given 56% of the land for their own state as part of the UN Partition Plan, which was accepted only as a non-binding recommendation with a vote of 33 to 13 (and 10 abstentions) after much international bullying by both the US and Russia. As part of the Plan, the “Jewish” state was to be granted control of much of the best land, notably the fertile coastal plain and the hilly northeastern Galilee and Jerusalem was to be an internationally-administered city populated by an equal number of Jews and Palestinians.
While Maher is correct that the Jewish leadership at the time accepted the UN proposal (albeit reluctantly), the Zionist intention was never to live side-by-side an independent Palestinian state. As Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote, “large sections of Israeli society…were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the [brewing 1948] war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN-earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.” (Tikkun, March/April 1998.)
Zionist pioneers and Israel’s founding fathers were actually quite explicit in their goals. In 1937, before the horrors of Kristallnacht, Jewish pogroms and ghettos, and The Final Solution of Nazi-occupied Europe, Ben Gurion stated, “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them,” and elaborated elsewhere that, “if we have to use force to guarantee our own right to settle in those places…then we have force at our disposal.”
The next year, Ben-Gurion, who would soon become Israel’s first Prime Minister, stated that “after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine… The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine.”
A decade later, Ben-Gurion told Yoseph Weitz, director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund and head of the official Transfer Committee of 1948, “The war will give us land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, in war they lose their whole meaning.” This is the same Yosef Weitz who, in 1940, wrote in his diary, “It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples. No ‘development’ will bring us to our goal of independent nationhood in this small country. Without the Arabs, the land will become wide and spacious for us; with the Arabs, the land will remain sparse and cramped.”
In 1948, after Jewish authorities had agreed to the UN Partition Plan (which was never internationally accepted or legally implemented) and Israel had declared “independence” with total disregard for international law and the self-determination of Palestine’s native population, leader of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun and later Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, Menachem Begin chimed in, declaring, “The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”
Maher expunges from his own truncated history lesson the fact that Israel achieved “legitimacy” with the backing of Western world powers and gained “independence” as a colonial state through violent transfer of the native inhabitants, systematic ethnic cleansing, and the massacres and intimidation of paramilitary death squads. Immediately after declaring its creation, Israeli militias fought a war of expansion and annexed an additional 22% of Arab land as its own.
Maher also declines to mention, probably due to his historical ignorance, that immediately following Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in May 1948, the United Nations reassessed its approach to the partition of Palestine and appointed a mediator, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, to come up with new proposal while taking into account “the aspirations of the Jews, the political difficulties and differences of opinion of the Arab leaders, the strategic interests of Great Britain, the financial commitment of the United States and the Soviet Union, the outcome of the war, and finally the authority and prestige of the United Nations.” While Bernadotte’s second proposal was produced in consultation with British and American emissaries, then-President Harry Truman undermined its progress in the UN due to pre-election Zionist influence in the United States. On September 17, 1948, the day after the second proposal was presented to the UN, Bernadotte was assassinated in West Jerusalem by members of the Zionist terrorist organization Lehi (also known as The Stern Gang).
For the next 17 years, Palestinians in Israel were subject to martial law. In 1967, Israel launched a unilateral, unprovoked, preemptive strike on its Arab neighbors and militarily conquered the remaining 22% of Palestine. It has brutally occupied the entirety of historic Palestine ever since.
Later in the program, Maher stated his support for continued Israeli occupation and Jewish colonization of the West Bank due to his incorrect impression that area conquered in warfare becomes property of the victor. When asked about what Israel’s responsibilities actually are under international law, Maher quickly changed the subject and blamed the Palestinians for their own victimization.
Before signing off for the evening, Maher also made sure to claim that the Palestinian use of suicide bombing had more to do with religious dogma than desperate resistance to illegal Israeli occupation maintained by American money, weapons, and equipment. “There is a big difference in the religions [Judaism and Islam], come on, between this life and the other life,” he declared. “Muslims are a little more like the Catholics, ‘It’s gonna happen after you die.’ The Jews are more like, ‘Let’s make the deal now.'”
Little has changed for Maher over the years. Anti-Muslim sentiment is a staple on Maher’s HBO show Real Time, as is easily evinced by looking at a list of his guests, which includes notables such as Ann Coulter, David Frum, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Jonah Goldberg, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Even though Maher’s Real Time panels include “liberal” and “progressive” guests to off-set the right-wing commentators, anti-Muslim rhetoric is rarely challenged, and is more often reinforced, especially when Maher’s guests include such notables as the Lebanese-born neoconservative Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz crony and Council of Foreign Relations board member Fouad Ajami, literary blowhard and ridiculous fatwa-victim Salman Rushdie, “Muslim refusenik” and author of “The Trouble with Islam Today” Irshad Manji, and Muslim-turned-atheist and fellow at the war-mongering, imperialist think tank the American Enterprise Institute Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
In early 2007, when Maher hosted Hirsi Ali, whom he introduced as his “hero,” he asked her the extremely leading question, “Is Islam a religion of peace? You are one of the brave people who say it’s not really a religion of peace.” Hirsi Ali eagerly responded, “It’s not a religion of peace. Immediately after 9/11, they should have said, ‘it’s not a religion of peace, we’re up against Islam.'”
Strangely enough, less than three months later, Maher was seen advocating the words of his “new hero,” Congressman Ron Paul, who had impressed Maher during the recent Republican presidential debates. Maher praised Paul, saying, that he “spoke real truth about the war on terror, about 9/11, about Iraq. He said, ‘y’know what? They hate us because we’re over there. They don’t hate because of our freedom or any of those stupid slogans the Bush people put out.” Regarding Paul’s analysis of 9/11, Maher continued, during a satellite interview with Senator Chris Dodd,
“He [Ron Paul] wasn’t saying ‘We were asking for it.’ He was saying was ‘Maybe we should listen to our enemies. And maybe the reason they’re mad at us is because we have been meddling in the Middle East. We were in Saudi Arabia, that’s what Bin Laden was mad at us for. Now we’re in Iraq, and we’re screwing up that country. Maybe if we listen to them instead of just saying ‘We’re always the good people,’ we would actually make ourselves safer.”
Later in the same show, Maher repeated his agreement with the assessment that “They hate us ’cause we’re over there, we’re meddling in their affairs.”
Later that same year, however, Maher seemed to step back from this view during a conversation with the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, who suggested,
“America is fighting a war that doesn’t exist. We’re fighting because our leaders tell us that the Muslims hate freedom and hate liberty and hate women in the workplace, and that’s got nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world, what our policies are, and what our impact is there…”
Whereas Maher replied by saying, “I believe what you say and I think it’s more about our policy than our way of life,” he continued,
“but, would you grant me this, as long as there is an Israel in the world, and I’m a big supporter of Israel, as long as America backs it, the kind of Muslims that take their religion that seriously that they would strap on a suicide belt are always gonna be out for us and always gonna be trying to kill us?”
When Scheuer stated that he didn’t think Israel was “worth an American life or an American dollar,” Maher was flummoxed and almost speechless at the prospect. Unable to fathom how anyone could not support Israel, he just barely managed to respond by repeating Scheuer’s proposal in the form of a question, “You don’t think the existence of Israel in the world is worth an American life or an American dollar?”
Scheuer’s analysis was hardly radical. In fact, he was merely agreeing with an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004, which found,
“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.
“Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”
Nevertheless, Maher has long advocated the perspective that Judeo-Christian culture is superior to Islamic and Arabic culture and that Israel is a necessary “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” As such, any violations of human rights, war crimes, or crimes against humanity committed by “Western” countries against Muslims are not only justified, but also encouraged.
In 2003, during his comedy special “Victory Begins at Home,” Maher unabashedly supported the treatment that Middle Eastern abductees were suffering at the hands of the US government in the gulag of Guantanamo Bay. “I don’t feel bad for those 300 killers we’ve got down in Guantanamo Bay, always crabbing about how we don’t respect their religious practices,” Maher declared, as he strutted around the stage. “Y’know what? You lost, eat what we eat! Here’s a cheese-filled snausage, enjoy!”
Maher seemed not to care that the overwhelming majority of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were not, in fact, “killers,” had absolutely no connection to the Taliban, let alone al Qaeda, all were being held as combatants in the Bush-manufactured “war on terror,” and some were subject to, not only torture, but murder at the hands of their American captors.
In case Maher’s central thesis was lost on his audience, he stated plainly, “You have to understand, you have to embrace the values of Western civilization. They’re not just different, they are better.”
More recently, in the wake of the much-hyped controversy over an episode of Comedy Central’s cartoon South Park which depicted the prophet Mohammad in a bear costume (sort of) and resulted in the show’s creators receiving veiled death threats posted on the internet by a group called Revolution Muslim, Maher felt the need to restate his case. As part of the “New Rules” segment that closed his April 30th show, Maher stated that the South Park controversy “served, or should serve, as a reminder to all of us that our culture isn’t just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists, it’s better.”
What followed was a vitriolic and humorless tirade against all Muslims, not just so-called “extremists,” wherein Maher suggested that as bad as some elements of Western culture may be, nothing compares to the myopia and violence inherent in Islam. When he was finished, Zionist Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was a Real Time guest that evening, leaned over to Maher with a broad grin and could be seen saying, “That was great. That was great.”
Maher began by stating that, in reference to the threats levied at South Park, the developing world’s “religious wackos are a lot more wacko than ours.” What Maher failed to point out is that the group on whose website “Islamists” made the threats is based in Brooklyn, New York, that the threats were made by 20-year-old Virginia-native Zachary Adam Chesser (a recent covert to Islam who now goes by the name Abu Talhah al-Amrikee), and that the group itself was founded by “American-born Jew formerly known as Joseph Cohen who converted to Islam after attending an Orthodox rabbinical school.” According to journalist Maidhc Ó Cathail, in 1998, Cohen moved with his wife and family from Brooklyn to the ultra-Orthodox Israeli development town of Netivot where he was a supporter of the ultra-racist Shas political party of Mizrahi Haredi Jews. After he became “disillusioned with Israeli secularism,” Cohen apparently embarked on a two year “theological dialogue” in a Jewish internet chatroom with a persuasive sheikh from the United Arab Emirates and was duly transformed from being a staunch Zionist to a “sudden admirer of al-Qaeda and Hamas” and changed his name to Yousef al-Khattab. Perhaps Maher didn’t feel this information was relevant.
Maher continued by urging his audience to “think about the craziest religious wackos we have here in America…take the worst, the worst is the Christians who bring their ‘God Hates Fags’ signs to soldiers’ funerals. Can’t get worse than that. Now multiply that by infinity and give it an army, that’s the Taliban.” Here, Maher’s comparison is spurious at best. While he rightfully condemns the recent suspected actions of the Taliban involving the poisoning of schoolgirls in Afghanistan, he claims that it’s closest Western analogy is some ignorant bigot holding an offensive sign?
Maher chose not to mention that there have numerous instances of Jewish settlers poisoning water supplies and grazing grounds of Palestinian towns, resulting in the deaths of livestock and illnesses such as liver infections in children. While Maher warns of the tactics of the Taliban, which at its height of power in 2001 boasted a strength of about 45,000 troops, including the elderly and children (a level which has been cut in half in the past decade), there are currently over 400,000 heavily-armed Jewish settlers, subsidized by the Israeli government (and therefore US tax dollars) living in illegal fortified colonies and garrison-outposts all over Palestinian land in the West Bank. These messianic settlers have repeatedly been known to burn Palestinian crops and mosques, throw rocks at Palestinian children on their way to school, and murder Palestinians in cold blood (and sometimes have monuments erected in their honor).
Incidentally, the number 400,000 is applicable elsewhere. The new Quadrennial Defense Review published by the US Department of Defense in February 2010 states, “Including operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, approximately 400,000 U.S. military personnel are forward-stationed or rotationally deployed around the world.”
Furthermore, Maher’s claim that Christian fundamentalism only goes as far as waving stupid banners and pales in comparison to Islamic extremism is absurd. Perhaps his team of writers should have reminded Maher of Jim D. Adkisson who, on July 27, 2008, walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church with 76 rounds of buckshot and a shotgun in a guitar case, opened fire on the 200 member congregation as they watched a child performance of Annie, killing two. His stated motive was that “he hated the liberal movement” which, along with Democrats, African Americans and homosexuals, was destroying American institutions. Maybe Maher’s mention of anti-abortion, right-wing Christian Scott Roeder, who murdered doctor George Tiller in the lobby of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2009 because he felt “preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger” (and whose actions elicited praise from other American fundamentalists) was cut from his script due to time constrictions. Doubtful.
Additionally, Maher failed to address the fact that George W. Bush was a born-again Christian who often claimed his imperial foreign policy agenda was divinely inspired. Five days after the September 11 attacks, as plans to invade and occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq had already been drawn up, Bush declared that “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” Five months later, as he addressed American soldiers in Alaska, he spoke again of “this incredibly important crusade to defend freedom.”
In 2003, Bush even declared to then-Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath, “I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
And what about the reports that Bush’s top-secret daily briefings, the Pentagon’s Worldwide Intelligence Update, prepared by US General Glen Shaffer, and delivered by hand by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, routinely had images of American military might and warfare juxtaposed with inspirational verses from the Bible?
But Maher was just warming up. He continued,
“Now, I’ve been known to make fun of Christians, but I have the perspective to know that they’re a lot more evolved than people who target girls for going to school…And that’s because Muslims still take their religion too seriously.”
It can only be assumed that Maher didn’t mean the “enlightened” Christians who subscribe to “biblical discipline,” a form of corporal punishment intended to “train” children to be more obedient to their parents and God, which recently resulted in a Montana couple beating their adoptive children to death. Obviously, Maher also meant to exclude “enlightened” Mormon fundamentalists like brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty who committed double murder or Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, all in the name of God.
Naturally, Maher also didn’t feel like telling his audience about the more than 280 kindergartens, schools, and universities that the “enlightened” Israeli military deliberately destroyed during the 22-day assault on Gaza or about Palestinian children like Abir Aramin who are murdered by “enlightened” Israeli soldiers on their way to school.
Maher also makes sure to clarify that he wholly endorses painting all 1.2 billion Muslims, one quarter of the world’s population, with the same brush, by declaring, “It should, in fairness, be noted that in speaking of Muslims, we realize that, of course, the vast majority are law-abiding, loving people who just want to be left alone to subjugate their women in peace.” With this statement, Maher reveals his true agenda. He is not simply talking about a fundamentalist approach or extreme interpretation of a religion; he is stating, quite plainly, that all those who practice that religion are themselves fundamentalist and extreme. (Perhaps Maher would think it fair to claim that all Catholics are child molesters or all Jews are Ariel Sharon?)
This narrow-minded approach to Islam and its followers proves Maher’s bigotry. Apparently, in Maher’s view, all Muslims are misogynistic men and a poor, brainwashed, and beaten women. To Maher, all Muslim majority countries are oppressive dictatorships and Muslim culture is a monolithic entity that remains identical across thousands of miles, different geography, countries, ethnic backgrounds, races, and traditions.
He seems to think that all Muslim women are forced against their will to wear burqas and veils by their domineering and repressive husbands and fathers. Disproving this assumption hardly seems worth the time; nowhere in the Qur’an does it say that women must cover their hair or wear a veil, only that women (and men, for that matter) should be modest in their dress and actions. Incidentally, both Judaism and Christianity preach the same. Some Orthodox Jewish women shave their hair and wear wigs. Depictions of the Virgin Mary invariably show her in hijab. Does Maher feel that Catholic nuns are unjustly subjugated?
Muslim women from Albania to Morocco to Indonesia to Palestine to Tunisia to Pakistan to Egypt to Jordan choose whether or not they want to wear hijab. Well over 50% of college students in Iran are female (women make up 70% of Azad University’s Applied Physics Department graduates) and women hold high level jobs in all kinds of professions; they are business owners, university professors, filmmakers, artists, writers, and Cabinet ministers.
Unfortunately, Maher’s image of Islam seems to stop short at the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sayyid Qutb-inspired fundamentalism of Al Qaeda, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan. It’s apparently irrelevant to him that many Muslim countries, from Azerbaijan to Bangladesh to Niger to Lebanon to Gambia to Turkey, are secular presidential republics and parliamentary democracies or that women in Muslim Kyrgyzstan were granted voting rights two years before women in the United States. Obviously, no mention need be made about the eighteen female MPs elected to the Turkish Parliament in 1935, at a time when women in a significant number of other European countries had no voting rights whatsoever, or that women in Switzerland (a country so enlightened it banned minarets) couldn’t vote until 1971, or that Benazir Bhutto was twice elected Prime Minister in the Islamic state of Pakistan while the United States has never had a female president or vice president.
Maher rightly insists that separation of church (or mosque) and state is integral for a free and democratic society to flourish, yet seems to promote the idea of legally banning Islamic dress in Western societies, as is the case in France and, soon, Belgium. Oh, the irony.
But Maher still wasn’t finished. “I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “Civilized people don’t threaten each other…Threatening, that’s some old-school desert shit.”
By “civilized,” Maher clearly meant “American” or, at least, “Western” people, as opposed to the backwards, savagery of the Islamic world. One can only assume he was preferring our civilized overthrow, both overt and covert, of dozens of sovereign nations by the United States in the past century. Maybe Maher meant our civilized practice of “enhanced interrogation,” waterboarding, and torture. Or our civilized indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassination, black sites and secret prisons, and inhumane SAMS detention practices.
If Maher is so worried about threats, perhaps he should have mentioned the harassment US Congressman Bart Stupak has received lately by anti-choice nutjobs disappointed in his support for the new health care bill (which, incidentally, offers absolutely no federal funding for abortions). “In the past few weeks,” Stupak recently wrote in Newsweek, “I’ve received so many death threats that I was advised to get a security escort around Washington. My wife, Laurie, has had to unplug our home phone to avoid drunken messages from people screaming, swearing, and generally acting profane… One day I got 1,500 faxes, all hate mail.” Maher could have talked about the cancellation of a Texas college production of the Terrence McNally play “Corpus Christi” (which features a homosexual Jesus character) after the school was inundated with “threatening calls and e-mail messages.” Glenn Greenwald reminds us that this is “same play that was scheduled and then canceled (and then re-scheduled) by the Manhattan Theater Club back in 1998 as a result of “anonymous telephone threats to burn down the theater, kill the staff, and ‘exterminate’ McNally.”
He also could have discussed the medieval Hebrew curses hurled by Rabbi Mordechai Aderet at a household of Iranian Jews in Great Neck, Long Island, the invective spewed by those offended by Danish artists Surrend who recently posted maps of the Levant all over Berlin with the name “Ramallah” replacing “Israel” and a title reading “The Final Solution” at the top, the desecration of the graves of Muslim WWII soldiers in a French cemetary, or the death threats, hate mail, and defacing of the home of outspoken Israel-critic Rabbi Michael Lerner by right-wing Zionists who disagree with his vocal anti-occupation stance. Maybe Maher should warn his viewers of the dangers of Israeli Rabbis like Yitzhak Shapira and Yossi Elitzur of Od Yosef Hai yeshiva in Yitzhar near Nablus, who last year published a 230-page guide to Biblical laws governing the killing of non-Jews. Maher could point out that the yeshiva itself is funded by tax-deductible donations from America. He could also throw in some information about the Israeli Jewish Rabbinate which, during the 2008-9 Gaza massacre, indoctrinated young Israeli troops with pamphlets claiming that they were holy warriors fighting to expel the “murderers” (all Palestinians) who are “interfering with our conquest of this holy land.” The rabbis preached that showing mercy was “terribly immoral.”
One might think Maher would mention the ecstatic Jews in New York City, who danced in the street in support of the Israeli military’s slaughter of over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza. Or the signs posted around the wealthy Riverdale section of the The Bronx which advertise “Camp Jabotinsky,” a self-described “Jewish Survival Camp” in Upstate New York where “Jewish youth learn how to shoot,” in addition to learning “karate, legal and proper weapons training, street fighting and how to be a proud Jew who can defend the Jewish people,” boasting that “the Nazi Scum better watch out.” It’s not a joke.
Neither is the fact that Maher’s beloved “only democracy in the Middle East” isn’t actually a democracy at all and that a recent Tel Aviv poll revealed that the democracy-loving Jewish Israelis (remember, the ones serving as a civilized vanguard against the barbarous Muslims of the Orient?) don’t care much for Maher’s much-touted Western values. The survey found that over 57% of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely, the majority felt that “there is too much freedom of expression” in Israel, 43% said “the media should not report information confirmed by Palestinian sources that could reflect poorly on the Israeli army,” 58% “opposed harsh criticism of the country,” 65% thought “the Israeli media should be barred from publishing news that defense officials think could endanger state security, even if the news was reported abroad,” and 82% said they “back stiff penalties for people who leak illegally obtained information exposing immoral conduct by the defense establishment.”
The poll also found that “most of the respondents favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country, and support punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the defense establishment.” Additiontally, of those polled who said they were right-wing, 76% said “human rights groups should not have the right to freely publicize immoral conduct on Israel’s part.” How “civilized.”
It’s true that the “civilized” people Maher praises sometimes don’t issue threats, as he claimed Muslims do. More often, they just drop bombs and shot bullets at the viciously brutal Muslims. For example, it may be difficult for Maher to pick out the most civilized massacre committed by US troops in Iraq when given a choice of so many, from the 1991 Amiriyah shelter massacre to the more recent massacres in Haditha (24 killed, ages 1 to 76 years old), Fallujah (over 600 killed), Ishaqi (11 killed, ages 6 months to 75 years old), and Nisour Square (17 dead), not to mention the rape/murder of a 14-year-old girl and the murders of her family in Mahmudiyah by US Army soldiers and the bombing and shooting of a wedding party in Mukaradeeb that killed 42 civilians. And that’s not all.
Maybe Maher was speaking of the “civilized” – dare someone say “righteous? – invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, where the enlightened US troops just can’t seem to stop murdering hundreds of civilians and then trying to cover it up.
Maybe the “civilized” thing to do is to murder hundreds of Muslims via remote-controlled Predator drones. Perhaps though, like US General Tommy Franks, Bill Maher doesn’t “do body counts.” Or maybe, like George H.W. Bush, Maher should just declare, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are!” Moral superiority in the face of genocide has been a staple for Western civilization for a while.
How else could all those “civilized” American soldiers bear to call their supposed adversaries japs, nips, gooks, ragheads, camel jockeys, sand niggers, and hajjis, or simply scum while they were busy killing journalists, women and children and using gruesome chemical weaponry like depleted uranium and white phosphorus against civilian populations? If the troops weren’t so “civilized,” how else would they be able to rape all those women in Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, and within their own ranks? Is it any wonder that, in our “civilized” nation, the unemployment rate for military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan has reached 14.7% (nearly 50% higher than the national rate), on any given night well over 100,000 veterans are homeless, and the chilling reality is 18 veterans commit suicide every day.
Maher must be aware that the “civilized” United States will have a military budget of over $767 billion next year, a staggering total that, if allocated elsewhere could single-handedly eradicate world hunger for our planet’s 1.02 billion undernourished and starving population for almost four years. But that obviously won’t happen since “civilized” people believe that murdering half a million children under five, that committing “genocide,” that “destroying a entire society,” through economic sanctions is the price some have to pay for the rest of us to remain “civilized.” As one of the leaders of “civilized” America declared on behalf of the Western world, “We think the price was worth it.”
In 2006, when the first free democratic elections in the Arab world brought Hamas to power in Gaza, democracy stalwarts Israel and the United States decided that they didn’t like the results and would place heavy economic sanctions on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the already besieged Strip to punish them for their brazen self-determination. The Israeli prime minister’s advisor reportedly joked to a team of government and military officials, “It’s like an appointment with a dietitian. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.” The crowd rolled with laughter. As a result, 95% of businesses have been shuttered, unemployment is over 60%, and more than 80% of Gaza’s residents are dependent on food aid when they’re not being murdered by Israeli soldiers with American weapons in their own homes. Is this the Western civility of which Maher speaks so fondly?
Perhaps Maher forgets that Fascism, Nazism, and Zionism are all Western – not Muslim – ideologies. Or that Muslims didn’t drop two atomic bombs on innocent Japanese civilians. Nope, superior American values did that.
Yes, Bill Maher is a comedian. He makes that clear whenever he derides Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, by quickly following up his jab by saying, “I kid, I kid!” But he doesn’t ever do that with Muslims. Why? Because he’s not kidding. Unfortunately, as a comedian, Maher should have more perspective and less invective.
It seems that Bill Maher’s major problem with Muslims is not so much that “they” are more inherently dangerous and violent based on their chosen religious affiliation, but rather that he is more scared of them. As a result, rather than being the clear-headed, out-spoken realist that he’s conjured himself to be, Maher winds up being more of a holographic torchbearer of truth, a peon of moral relativism rather than a champion of moral obligation.
As such, Maher is not the “equal opportunity offender” he claims to be since he clearly discriminates against one group of people and holds other groups of people – groups he belongs to – as superior. In this way, he is no better than the zealots that so offend him. Just last Friday, in response to the bogus justification for aggressive imperialism, We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here, Maher made sure to remark, “There’s already millions of Muslims in America. The problem is in their head.”
American literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “This whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.”
It is with this in mind that Maher’s insistence, addressing an audience on premium cable from a Los Angeles television studio, that “our system is better” rings hollow and shameful.
John Lennon once said, “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.” As usual, John is right. Especially if that TV is tuned into Real Time.
Sometimes Conspiracy Theories Are True
By Alexander Cockburn | The American Conservative | July 1, 2010 Issue
Unlike the French or the Italians, for whom conspiracies are an integral part of government activity, acknowledged by all, Americans have been temperamentally prone to discount them. Reflecting its audience, the press follows suit. Editors and reporters like to offer themselves as hardened cynics, following the old maxim “Never believe anything till it is officially denied,” but in truth, they are touchingly credulous, ever inclined to trust the official version, at least until irrefutable evidence—say, the failure to discover a single WMD in Iraq—compels them finally to a darker view.
Once or twice a decade some official deception simply cannot be sedately circumnavigated. Even in the 1950s, when the lid of government secrecy was more firmly bolted down, the grim health consequences of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, Utah, and Nevada finally surfaced. In the late 1960s, it was the turn of the CIA, some of its activities first exposed in relatively marginal publications like The Nation and Ramparts, then finally given wider circulation.
Even then the mainstream press exhibited extreme trepidation in running any story presuming to discredit the moral credentials of the U.S. government. Take assassination as an instrument of national policy. In these post-9/11 days, when Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, publicly declares, as he did before the House Intelligence Committee, that the government has the right to kill Americans abroad, it is easy to forget that nothing used to more rapidly elicit furious denials from the CIA than allegations about its efforts, stretching back to the late 1940s, to kill inconvenient foreign leaders. Charges by the Cubans through the 1960s and early 1970s about the Agency’s serial attempts to murder Fidel Castro were routinely ignored, until finally the Senate hearings conducted in 1976 by Sen. Frank Church elicited a conclusive record of about 20 separate efforts.
Indeed, there was a brief window in the early ’70s, amid revulsion over the Vietnam War and the excitement of the Watergate hearings, when the press exhibited a certain unwonted bravado, in part because investigative committees of Congress, enlivened by Watergate, made good use of subpoena power and immunity from threats of libel. Hence the famous Lockheed bribery hearings.
Decorum soon returned, however, amid stern warnings by the late Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company. “The press these days should … be rather careful about its role,” she told the Magazine Publishers’ Association. “We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and seeing conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.” Mrs. Graham’s employees duly took heed. “Conspiracy-mongering” can be a deadly charge leveled at a reporter or an editor.
Just over 20 years later, in 1996, the Washington Post fired off a six-part series, concocted with the help of Harvard profs, decked out with doleful front-page headlines such as “In America, Loss of Confidence Seeps Into Institutions.” Cutting through the underbrush of graphs and pizza-slice charts, one found something simple: it’s as if P.T. Barnum set forth across the country to see if one was being born every minute, got to the edge of the Midwest, looked around and then muttered to himself mournfully, “No suckers!” The Post’s earnest message was that mistrust is bad and that it is better for social stability and contentment to trust government, as in the golden ’50s, which, the older crowd may recall, was a time when government told soldiers it was safe to march into atomic test sites and when government-backed doctors offered radioactive oatmeal to retarded kids without their parents’ knowledge.
The mainstream press—what’s left of it—sees an important duty to foster confidence in public institutions. On May 6, right after disclosure of Goldman Sachs’ double dealing, came the plummet and surge in the stock market that for a brief moment sliced 998 points off the Dow, prompting serious losses to small investors who had placed stop-loss orders on individual stocks. On Comedy Central, Jon Stewart showed a stream of news anchors characterizing everything from the GM bailout to the mortgage crisis to the rescue of AIG as caused by a “perfect storm.” Stewart said, “I’m beginning to think these are not perfect storms. I’m beginning to think these are regular storms and we have a s—ty boat.” But the mainstream press zealously steered clear of suggestions that market manipulators might have engineered a killing.
The integration of journalists into Washington’s policy apparatus, with its luxuriant jungle of lobby shops thinly disguised as nonprofits, with their seminars, “scholars in residence,” and fellowships, has led to a decorous tendency to ignore the grime of politics at the level of corruption, blackmail, and bribery—mostly inaccessible anyway without the power of subpoena. There’s an interesting genre of books, some written by political fixers in the aftermath of exposure or incarceration—Bobby Baker’s Wheeling and Dealing is a good example—that usefully describe the grime, but these are rarely reviewed in respectable journals.
Sometimes a cover-up does surface, propelled into the light of day by a tenacious journalist. Then there’s the outraged counterattack. Are you suggesting, sir, that the CIA connived to smuggle cocaine into America’s inner cities? Gary Webb’s career at the San Jose Mercury News was efficiently destroyed. Those who took the trouble to read the subsequent full report of CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz found corroboration of Webb’s charges. But by then the caravan had moved on. A jury issued its verdict, but the press box was empty.
Maybe now the decline in power of the established corporate press, the greater availability of dissenting versions of politics and history, and the exposure of the methods used to coerce public support for the attack on Iraq have engendered a greater sense of realism on the part of Americans about what their government can do. Perhaps the press will be more receptive to discomfiting stories about what Washington is capable of in the pursuit of what it deems to be the national interest. Hopefully, in this more fertile soil, Syd Schanberg’s pertinacity will be vindicated at last, and those still active in politics who connived at this abandonment will be forced to give an account. 
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How Ukraine Tortured and Slaughtered Donbass
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | July 11, 2024
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
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