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Beware of the BBC

By Stuart Littlewood | 22 January 2010

Its mission statement says: “Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.” However, people are complaining bitterly to the BBC about its pro-Israel stance when reporting on the situation in the Holy Land.

Once renowned as the benchmark for fairness and accuracy, the BBC nowadays is careless with the truth when handling news from the Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel – the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

We were treated to a prize example earlier this week. The flagship “Today” programme, which goes out weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Radio 4, marked the anniversary of Israel’s blitzkrieg with a feature on the Gaza economy, in which I heard presenters claim at least three times that the purpose of Operation Cast Lead was to stop the rocket attacks across the border.

This is untrue. The rockets stopped months before Israel’s assault with the start of the ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, which held from 19 June until 4 November 2008, when Israel deliberately dashed hopes for peace by staging an armed incursion into Gaza, killing several Hamas men.

Under the ceasefire Israel had undertaken to lift the economic blockade, but didn’t do so. Nevertheless Hamas kept its side of the bargain and fired no rockets.

So 1,400 Gazans, including some 350 women and children, didn’t have to die under Israeli bombardment. All Israel needed to do was extend the truce by keeping the peace and lifting the evil blockade as promised.

But it’s not about rockets, is it? No rockets are launched from the West Bank, yet Israel keeps the West Bank tightly sealed and all movement cruelly restricted under a punitive military and administrative matrix of control.

The death and devastation inflicted on Gaza is really about Israel’s unquenchable lust for land and its criminal desire to subjugate, expel or annihilate the native population.

The BBC also failed to provide accurate context regarding the Israeli township of Sderot, the main target for Hamas rockets. Edward Sturton, reporting from Sderot, didn’t explain how the land on which Sderot stands was once a Palestinian village called Najd, whose residents were ethnically cleansed and put to flight by Jewish terrorists in May 1948. Many of them ended up in refugee camps in Gaza. Sderot is therefore a source of real grievance to the Palestinians.

Under UN Resolution 194 and also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the villagers of Najd, along with hundreds of thousands of others who were dispossessed at gunpoint, are entitled to return to their homes but have been denied their rights by Israel.

So, has our “trustworthy” BBC fallen under Zionist influence just like the British government? It certainly gives a disproportionate amount of air-time to pro-Israel figures such as the Israeli ambassador, the regime’s spokesman Mark Regev, the chief rabbi and assorted politicians who wave the flag for Israel, all of whom speak good, clear English. On the rare occasions when the BBC interviews a Palestinian it chooses someone who is unintelligible. I can’t remember when I last heard the Palestinian ambassador, Manuel Hassassian, who speaks excellent English and can put the Palestinian case eloquently.

The BBC also adopts Israel’s language and definitions. Palestinians not Israelis are the militants. Hamas, not the murdering occupiers, are the terrorists. A single captured Israeli soldier is deemed more newsworthy than the 10,000 abducted Palestinians (some of them women and children) rotting in Israeli jails. It is imperative that Israelis not Palestinians feel secure within their borders. Israelis not Palestinians have a right of self-defence.

A few years ago a study of TV news coverage by Glasgow University’s Media Group showed how the BBC and others distorted the Arab-Israeli conflict and misinformed the British public by presenting the Israeli government perspective and featuring mostly pro-Israel politicians. Today the gap between the BBC and its mission pledge to be “independent, impartial and honest” seems just as wide.

Of course, none of this is news to the Palestinians. I make these points only for the benefit of Western readers, especially Britons and Americans who are victims of media bias, and for Israelis who live on a diet of fiction, and for Zionists everywhere who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it fell on them.

Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.

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January 21, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

David Brooks seeks to reframe Zionism

By Scott McConnell | January 18, 2010

When David Brooks puts forth a definition of Zionism, it merits our attention. Brooks is talented and sometimes incisive, but his main gift may be his acute sense of where Commentary leaves off and the ideological mainstream begins. There he parks, on the often shifting line between the two: kind of a neocon but not, understand, the frothing kind. It’s a slot he shares with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, sometimes described here as the most important Jewish journalist in America, and given the current configuration of power and opinion, a central one.

So in a seeming aside to his column praising Jewish over-representation in the world of intellect (should pro-Iraq-war media figures be quantified as well?) Brooks writes:

“Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.”

Perhaps also sensing that Americans need a refresher course in the purpose of Zionism, Jeffrey Goldberg immediately reproduced the above paragraph on his blog, appreciating that Brooks “frames Zionism in a completely different way than the news pages do” and “writes smartly about the competition between tribal and worldly Zionism”.

There is a tale in these carefully crafted sentences. David Brooks’s settlers are “stray”—as if some overly enthusiastic campers missed their trail, only to put down their rucksacks in Hebron—and not, as is actually the case, a well-financed salient backed by the American tax code, the Israeli government, and overseen by the IDF. (I’m reminded of the time, many years ago, when Leon Wieseltier explained to my wife that the Israeli army ended up on the outskirts of Beirut because they had misread their maps and got lost.)

Note too the passivity Brooks attributes to them. They don’t occupy, or build, or settle, or agitate. They “sit” –surrounded by “angry Palestinians.”

One wonders whether David Brooks, after five hundred or so NY Times columns, has considered what would happen if he devoted just one to depicting the actual situation in Hebron. Not the stray settlers who “sit” –but the settlers who throw stones at Palestinian children on their way to school, throw garbage and feces at the Palestinian markets, who scrawl “gas the Arabs” on Palestinian homes, cut apart olive trees belonging to the remaining Palestinians–all under the watchful protection of the Israeli army. Hebron is probably the closest thing to pure apartheid that exists anywhere in the world right now: Arab residents are barred from even walking on certain sidewalks in the old city. Many Israelis surely find it distasteful, but not enough to use their democracy to stop the army from protecting the settlers, not enough to terminate the state funds which build the settler roads and maintain infrastructure. Most Americans are oblivious; it’s not as if their mainstream media report from Hebron. So if David Brooks wrote a column about Hebron, it would multiply public awareness of what goes on there many times, and might be a huge step towards rectifying the situation.

But he doesn’t and probably never will. He is pleased to let us know that he finds the settlers a little bit infra dig, and that when Americans think of Israel they should think of software geniuses. It’s a skilled performance, but one almost prefers the forthrightness  of the neocons who make no pretense of desiring  a just settlement with the Palestinians, asserting instead that we should support Israel more than we do any other country in the world because it “shares our values.”

Source

January 19, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Doubts re Iran won’t deter neocon stampede

By Philip Weiss | January 18, 2010

Here are two reports of doubts re Iran’s nuclear program. First, in the Times online, Israeli general Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam says that Iran is not a nuclear threat:

A general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”.

Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.

And here is an American general and chief of Pentagon intelligence saying that “Iran [is] Not Committed to Building Nuclear Bomb”, in an article that suggests that the Obama administration is getting ready to up the intelligence ante visavis Iran:

“The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate in 2007] still hold true,” [Lt.General Ronald] Burgess [chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency] said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Matt Duss writes:

As there was with Iraq, there is a highly organized movement afoot to pretend that none of this matters, that “the mullahs” have always intended to get their hands on a nuke, and that we should therefore prepare to bomb the hell out of Iran do what is necessary. We’ve already seen the beginning of an effort by some neocons to resurrect a “Team B” approach to hype the threat of Islamic extremism, ignoring the fact that such an approach, in all of its previous incarnations, generated nothing but staggeringly wrong conclusions about enemy capabilities, resulting is disastrously counterproductive policies.

January 18, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | Leave a comment

Behind The Der Spiegel Tirades

Political Theatrics | January 17, 2010

At the beginning of the new year, German weekly magazine Der Spiegel ran a controversial report claiming that the Lebanese movement Hezbollah was involved in drug trafficking to finance its “terrorist operations against Israel”. The article proceeded to allege that individuals involved in the cartel had contacts with the central nexus of the resistance movement including its Secretary-General. Needless to state, no factual evidence was cited in support of the claims as in the case of a growing list of previous smear-campaigns.

In his widely acclaimed book, ‘Resistance is the Essence of the Islamist Revolution’, director of Conflicts Forum, Alastair Crooke, argues that the West not only suffers from a “blind spot” when it comes to comprehending ‘political Islam’, but that it regularly employs an historically potent association of Islam with violence to drive in a perception of “reason capsized into madness” when depicting present-day resistance groups. As such, these groups come to symbolise everything that an idealised West isn’t; a big-toothed bogeyman of sorts. The recent allegations made by Der Spiegel touch on these historical stereotypes, and in tune with age-old precedent, they aim to influence policy patterns in one form or another.

Before examining potential policy implications, a brief survey of Der Spiegel’s coverage of Hezbollah over recent years is instructive:

“Again and again [Nasrallah] seeks to provoke: No mention is made without any incitement against Jews.” (18.08.2006); “Hezbollah’s high-tech weapons endanger Germany Navy” (15.09.2006); “Hezbollah is not Suppenküche! It is a war party that wants to destroy Israel!” (23.03.2007); “Israel must adjust to a new wave of terrorist attacks against “Jewish targets” overseas … Hezbollah [has] activated its “sleeper” cells.” (21.07.2008), et al.

These brief snippets do not even begin to take into account the derogatory imagery – bordering on outright racist – resorted to when portraying supporters of Hezbollah. If you’re on planet Der Spiegel, these individuals are nonsensical maniacs with “crooked teeth” whose sole aptitude is sloganeering, whereas their fellow Lebanese are cultured beings whose women don “Fendi handbag[s]”.

To suggest the description ‘asinine’ fits well with this variety of journalism, far from sounding harsh, it would seem more like an understatement.

In the run-up to the June 2009 elections in Lebanon, Der Spiegel put together its most daring attack to-date against the Lebanese movement by linking it to the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri. Less than two weeks from ballot day, the German magazine’s blinding front-page headline: “Breakthrough in Tribunal Investigation: New Evidence Points to Hezbollah in Hariri Murder”, had unmistakably clear motives. Despite the rapturous outburst, Der Spiegel was unbecomingly silent after the elections; the breakthrough that was glowingly pitched mere days earlier as an outcome of “serendipity à la Sherlock Holmes and the state-of-the-art technology used by cyber detectives” was deemed unworthy of further commentary. The story had satisfied its use.

Moving on to present, the timing for the explosive drug-cartel exposé is likewise edifying. In the US, the “Israel Lobby’s War on Al Manar TV” reflects a re-energised penchant on Capitol Hill to plaster the Lebanese movement with the dreaded “T” word. [1]

As with most, if not all, matters of relevance to the Middle East, one can trace the causes for Washington’s disposition to the not too distant Tel Aviv. The comments of Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, over the past week have heightened the possibility of a new war against Gaza, and increased the likelihood of another “July War” against Lebanon. Whilst the editors at Ha’aretz are making no secrets of an open-inclination towards an inevitable war path, their suggestion that the Israeli political-military complex calculates war decisions on the basis of whether and when all its citizens feasibly possess gas masks is rather inane, amongst other things. All in all, the prospect of war looms large over the Middle East with Hobbes’ caveat ringing loud and clear, “the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto”. Within this context, smear-campaigns and fear-mongering have obvious ends in mind.

Far more importantly, however, Der Spiegel’s smear-campaign against Hezbollah is aimed at policy circles within the EU. Over recent months, there has been growing momentum to adopt “dialogue” as the preferred paradigm in coming to grips with resistance movements in the Middle East. Organisations that have consistently stressed the importance of mutual dialogue, such as the Conflicts Forum, will have been encouraged, no doubt, by the positive steps taken during 2009 to shift away from a “failed” policy. [2]

Of the more notable exchanges, former British Cabinet member MP Clare Short visited Damascus to hold talks with Khaled Meshal, as part of a small delegation of MPs after which she underlined the need to “talk to Hamas”. Later in the same month, MP Hussein Hajj Hassan from the Loyalty to the Resistance party affiliated to Hezbollah visited Britain to take part in a symposium dealing with issues concerning the Middle East. Three months later in June, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana met with Hajj Hassan in Beirut, marking the first time a senior EU diplomat held talks with the political party.

The end of 2009 saw further drama for Israel. Towards the close of its rotating EU presidency role, Sweden proposed a resolution to recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. By this time, Tel Aviv had simply seen enough. Pro-Israeli lobby groups and EU allies (primarily France and Germany) frantically pushed their weight around, and heavily watered down the draft resolution which eventually called for Jerusalem as “the future capital of the two states”. [3]

Meanwhile, Israel’s foreign ministry, which has unsurprisingly shed all considerations for diplomatic courtesy under Avigdor Lieberman, lashed out at Sweden for putting forward the resolution. “The peace process in the Middle East is not like IKEA furniture,” remarked a foreign ministry official, in reference to the Swedish furniture chain. “It takes more than a screw and a hammer, it takes a true understanding of the constraints and sensitivities of both sides, and in that Sweden failed miserably”, he sarcastically went on to add.

Israel’s take on the happenings in Brussels – putting aside the childish rattle – was manifestly clear. The obvious lesson to be derived from 2009 for Tel Aviv, as far as EU involvement in the Middle East is concerned, was similarly evident.

One must underline at this point that despite consistent pressures exerted by Israel and co., the positions adopted by a growing number of EU parliamentarians vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict has been very honourable. Earlier on Friday, a 60-member strong delegation made their way into Gaza to assess the wide-scale damage caused by Israel’s brutal war last year, as part of a bid to mount pressure for an end to the Siege.

For Israel, this sort of involvement is clearly not welcome. And hence, the appearance of baseless slander and smear-campaigns in leading European media outlets, which aim to cast resistance movements as erratic, lawless, mafia-like entities whose “sleeper cells” and “networks” pervade across the heart of Europe. Der Spiegel’s recent claims, apart from being the usual, old vituperations, should rather be viewed in the context of a wider agenda to curtail dialogue between resistance movements and western officials.

Evidently thus, there are certain stakeholders who wish to see the EU mutate into some variant of a collectivised imbecile, which keeps a measured silence on all subjects whose implicit or explicit implications reach Israeli shores. Der Spiegel’s recent tirades have set the new strategy in motion. However, if the most recent words from Gaza are any indication, Israel will need to try much, much harder.

Notes:

1. “The Israel Lobby’s War on Al Manar TV”, The Palestine Chronicle, 03 January 2010 http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15659

2. “Language – a tool to transform different into dangerous”, Conflicts Forum, 02 February 2008 http://conflictsforum.org/2008/language-a-tool-to-transform-different-into-dangerous/

3. “Jewish settlers: We’ll burn you all!”, ChamPress, 26 December 2009 http://www.champress.net/index.php?q=en/Article/view/50833

January 17, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

The Bogus Flight 253 ‘One-Way Ticket’ Meme: Anatomy Of A Myth

By Justin Elliott | TPM | January 11, 2010

In a remarkable example of how bad information can travel far and wide, dozens of media outlets around the world have said Umar Abdulmutallab was traveling on a one-way ticket to Detroit when he allegedly tried to blow up Flight 253, even though that has never been substantiated and appears to be flat wrong.

Abdulmutallab’s “one-way ticket” has been cited in recent days by the AP, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, even though the Nigerian government said Dec. 28 that Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket, and provided details to back it up.

The “one-way ticket” meme was originally sourced to anonymous U.S. officials and has since been recited as an undisputed fact.

It has been referenced repeatedly by commentators attacking the U.S. government for missing red flags about Abdulmutallab. See for example this Michael Gerson column in the Jan. 6 Post (“Airline attack shows Obama’s listless approach to terrorism”) and this Michael Mukasey Wall Street Journal effort (“The president’s job is not detecting bombs at the airport but neutralizing terrorists before they get there.”)

In a typical case on Dec. 28 — when the accurate information was already available — CNN anchor Erica Hill asked: “So, just how did a guy on a terror watch list with a one-way ticket paid for in cash, with no luggage … manage to board a U.S. airliner and allegedly try to blow it to pieces? Simply put tonight, who screwed up?”

And here’s Rush Limbaugh on Friday: “When a 20-something Muslim male buys a one-way ticket with cash and has no luggage, that’s not a dot. That’s a fire alarm! He may as well have “I’m a terrorist” taped on his T-shirt.”

But published reports on Dec. 28 cited the conclusion of the Nigerian government that Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket to Detroit. It had been purchased in Ghana on Dec. 16 for $2,831, according to the AP, citing Civil Aviation Authority director Harold Demuren. His return date was found by the Nigerians to be Jan. 8. (A Dutch government report described by the International Herald Tribune on Dec. 31 also said Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket, but it’s not clear whether the Dutch were simply relying on the Nigerians’ conclusion.) A full account of Demuren’s comments can be found in the Nigerian newspaper The Nation here.

While the New York Times published a correction on Dec. 30 saying it had erroneously reported Abdulmutallab’s ticket was one-way, many outlets that have mentioned the one-way ticket haven’t run corrections.

So where did the false meme come from? Anonymous U.S. government sources. And unless there’s classified information suggesting otherwise, those sources were clearly mistaken.

The first citation of a “one-way ticket” we could find is a report on Christmas day by MSNBC (cached version here): “Federal officials identified the man as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, of Nigeria, who was traveling one way, without a return ticket.”

Another early reference is in the Dec. 26 edition of the New York Daily News: “Officials said Abdulmutallab was traveling one way, without a return ticket.”

MSNBC’s Pete Williams tells TPMmuckraker: “Though there were federal officials who initially said it was one-way, we’ve [been] saying since that it was round trip, which it clearly was.”

But there are a whole lot of media consumers out there who believe Abdulmutallab came to Detroit on a one-way ticket.

The “one-way ticket” has been cited by CNN, Fox, Time, Newsweek, the AP, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Gannett News Service, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the Sacramento Bee, the Globe and Mail, the Washington Times, Congressional Quarterly and many other outlets, according to a review by TPMmuckraker.

The Today Show’s Matt Lauer even asked about the one-way ticket in a question to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (who did not address the matter in her answer).

The only substantiated reference to a one-way ticket we could find is the statement by a Ghanaian official last week that Abdulmutallab purchased a one-way ticket in cash from Accra, Ghana, to Lagos, Nigeria. That was in addition to the purchase of the ticket from Lagos to Detroit via Amsterdam, according to Deputy Information Minister Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, quoted in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal says Abdulmutallab took Virgin Nigeria flight 804 from Accra to Lagos on Dec. 24, before getting on a plane en route to Amsterdam.

There are few signs that the “one-way” meme will die any time soon.

The AP, which two weeks ago reported the correct information from Nigeria, ran a story Friday (“Experts say terror watch lists have limited uses”) stating that Abdulmutallab purchased a one-way fare.

January 12, 2010 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

The BBC’s ‘Conspiracy Files’

By Paul Holme |  January 12, 2010

At 16:15 local time Hong Kong and the Philippines, on Saturday, 9 Jan., the BBC World News service broadcast “The Conspiracy Files,” concerning lingering suspicions about 9/11 — specifically the anomalous, sudden, and complete collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by a plane.

This documentary was, as you might expect, as complete a snow job as the weather presently smothering the UK.

It left me with two lasting impressions:

1. That the relatively unprepared viewer — such as I would take the majority to be — would accept its conclusions as ‘the truth.’ The BBC, like CNN and I suppose Fox News, is the modern-day equivalent of the Bible for many who watch it regularly. It is their Authority, an esteemed organ of “objective” reporting, and so they approach it with their critical defenses down — especially in matters where they can’t claim expertise, and the more so when the BBC solemnly quotes such other purveyors of mainstream truth as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (whose graphic simulation of a beam buckling in Building 7 was deemed sufficient to convince us that every real beam and column gave way likewise, and simultaneously).

2. That it is — and has always been — the inevitable, primary function of the mainstream news outlets to create consensus, rather than division, around a core set of values that have evolved over the years, and which represent the status quo. You can’t broadcast everything, so from the start there’s inevitably a massive selection process. What guides the selection process? “Objectivity”? The very nature of the task logically excludes that possibility! What we actually end up seeing and hearing equally inevitably dominates our thinking. How can you think about what never reaches your senses? You can’t. And thus the status quo rolls effortlessly on.

Those of us who find ourselves uncomfortably outside the mainstream on the 9/11 issue believe that we see things “more objectively,” because, from our different perspective, we are acutely aware of the cherry-picking of “facts” that goes on in support of the Official Version. This cherry-picking is (for the most part) an entirely unconscious selection process. What we are probably less aware of is that we cherry-pick our “facts” too, and this selection is as glaring to the gatekeepers of acceptable knowledge as theirs is to us.

What this in turn betrays is our near-universal misunderstanding of what “facts” are and how we arrive at them. It is not that one group is more “objective” than another. That’s prideful, self-serving nonsense. We do not plug into an objective world that some see and others (for some reason) do not. It simply doesn’t work like that. Each person creates (as he must) his own reality from sensory data which he alone experiences, and then — with more or less vigor and conviction, and with whatever tools are currently fashionable — sets about convincing others to his point of view. This social component of reality is inescapable. Without it we would be living in something like the tower of Babel. Communication would not exist, and neither would society.

Insofar as humans are social beings, truth is a popularity contest (and, yes guys, we are social beings!). This conclusion seems like an outright denial of supposed scientific objectivity; but that is actually the way it is, and there’s no escaping it.

Thus it is that islands of popularity grow, like bacteria in a petri dish, around attractive beliefs, while those which cannot sustain interest wither and die. That, in a nutshell, is what the “factual” world is all about, always has been, and always will be. Facts are not hard and fast things “out there.” Facts are agreements, and like all agreements they can change.

In the BBC’s “The Conspiracy Files” architect Richard Gage, the founder and chief spokesman of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, asserts that the smoke observed on the south side of Building 7 before its sudden collapse was probably sucked there from Buildings 5 and 6. This theory of his is challenged by video evidence of fires burning on the same side, and other experts insisting that fires such as these could have “spread” and “engulfed” the building, destroying the integrity of the structural steel, and leading to “global collapse.”

The combined psychological force of the BBC, and the video footage, and the experts, and the even, reasonable tone of the commentator all pitted against bald Mr. Gage expostulating in his little office, is overwhelming. The unsurprising conclusion is reached by the Beeb that Building 7 collapsed without explosive assistance, as advertised. The gatekeepers are delighted, their worldview is vindicated, the enemy is brought low, and the status quo lumbers on, unshaken.

Facts? The merest suggestion of them is all that’s needed for those in authority (whatever authority that may be) to secure the hearts and minds of the faithful. “The Conspiracy Files” is the necessary force of social cohesion at work, operating through one of the organs which have evolved for this purpose. Strength resides in numbers. Might is right. To turn the tide requires tremendous perseverance, and the constant reintroduction of evidence which refutes the official version of events. This is subversion, and must be undertaken, of course, without the slightest help from where it counts — the mainstream media.

My own view (for what it’s worth) disagrees with that of Mr. Gage, as his naturally does with others. It is that it’s perfectly possible for the south face of Building 7 to have been blanketed in smoke without our jumping to the conclusion either that the smoke all came from elsewhere (Building 7 was on fire!), or that the six or seven windows (out of hundreds) on one floor (out of 47) at which fire could be seen were evidence that the building was about to collapse straight down at freefall speed into its own footprint. In fact this last assertion, seized on by the BBC and its chosen experts alike, strikes me as equally absurd after watching “The Conspiracy Files” as it did before. But then the BBC World News is not my authority, so I am free to question its selection of facts in a way which a gatekeeper to the official version is not.

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January 12, 2010 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nablus executions: Shoot first, ask questions later

Bridget Chappell writing from Nablus, occupied West Bank, Live from Palestine, 11 January 2010

Anan Subih’s children in their damaged home.

The brutal killing of three Palestinian men by Israeli military forces in Nablus last month on 26 December 2009 sparked grief and outrage across Palestine and brought the northern West Bank city to a standstill as thousands mourned the lethal attack. However, their voices are drowned out yet again by a well-played hand of Israel’s propaganda machine and repeated by the mainstream media.

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of Israel’s winter invasion of Gaza, a force of several hundred Israeli soldiers entered Nablus and invaded the homes of Ghassan Abu Sharkh, Raed Sarakji and Anan Subih where they were executed in cold blood in front of family members. A statement by the Israeli military alleged that an operation was carried out to arrest the men suspected of involvement in the killing of an Israeli settler, Meir Avshalom Hai, two days earlier.

The portraits of the targeted men — armed perpetrators of another injustice — painted by the military’s statements have exploded throughout Israel’s media and beyond, subsequently footnoted by Israeli police’s forensic results, reporting a match between a rifle seized in the invasions and the weapon used to kill Hai, a rabbi and resident of the Shave Shomron settlement.

This postmortem revelation, which has not been verified by independent sources, raises alarming questions of Israel’s “shoot first, ask questions later” policy. It also echoes the disparities between the statements of the Israeli military, repeated by the Israeli and international media, and the testimony of the victims’ family members, which were collected by a handful of local media agencies and human rights organizations.

Ghassan Abu Sharkh’s wife, shot in the foot.

Ghassan Abu Sharkh’s brother Diyaa Abu Sharkh said Israeli military forces stormed their home in Nablus’ Old City at 12am. Sharkh’s wife and four children were forced outside and the entire family was handcuffed, whereupon Sharkh’s eldest son was kicked and beaten by soldiers with the butts of their guns. As Sharkh descended, unarmed, from the stairs inside in hopes of surrendering, soldiers immediately opened fire on him, riddling his body with bullet holes. Outside, Israeli soldiers continued to brutally beat Sharkh’s son while their counterparts prevented Red Crescent ambulances from entering the area.

According to Tahani Jaara, the wife of Raed Sarakji, the Israeli military then forced their way in to their home in the Old City at 2:30am, where Sarakji was shot in the head immediately. The force of the close-range fire was so great that it caused his head to split in two. As his pregnant wife ran forward to catch his falling body she was shot in the foot. Only at this point did soldiers confirm the identity of the man just executed, ordering his wife to hand over both their IDs and mobile phones. Soldiers opened fire once again on his now lifeless body, then ordered his wife to summon their children to behold the grisly remains.

Half an hour later, Israeli soldiers entered Nablus’ Ras al-Ain neighborhood. Quickly occupying several homes surrounding the house of Anan Subih, soldiers began firing anti-tank missiles at the upper levels of the building, blowing a giant cavity between the third and fourth stories. Farid Subih, brother of Anan, reported that soldiers entered the house on foot, firing live ammunition and destroying property as they forced family members out in to the street. Subih was found hiding in the rubble created by rocket blasts, where he was immediately executed.

A spokesman for the Israeli army claimed that after the men “refused to leave their houses and surrender, we entered. They continued hiding and endangering our soldiers, which made the shooting imperative.” How these three men sleeping at home with their families endangered an overwhelming armed military force is unclear. As is the justification for brutally excessive force employed lethally against the targeted men and wantonly upon their family members, including children.

The Israeli military’s trigger-happy strategies for the “liquidation” of those deemed a security risk have resulted in the tragic loss of hundreds of civilian lives in so-called “targeted killing” operations, as a result of both mistaken identity and the excessive use of force employed, such as the launching of missiles from aircrafts, tanks or missile launchers at densely populated areas. Although this did not occur during the 26 December Nablus incursion, it is particularly disturbing that the Israeli military issued a post-execution clarification of at least one of the slain men’s identities.

Israel’s long history of such extrajudicial killing operations carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) reached its height during and after the second Palestinian intifada. Israel’s assassination policy resulted in the deaths of 754 persons from December 2000 to June 2008 in 348 operations. As reported by the Palestine Centre for Human Rights in July 2008, 521 of those killed were targeted and 233 were bystanders.

Categorical execution without trial constitutes state terrorism, whatever statements military spokespeople may peddle regarding Israel’s exhaustive quest for “security” and the means necessary to enforce it. Whether or not Israeli intelligence’s suspicions of Sarakji, Sharkh and Subih were well-founded, the cold-blooded execution of these and hundreds of other victims are a grave departure from a human’s right to due process. Israel’s tired accusations of terrorism against those it kills are rarely supported by evidence, and only a handful of cases of those killed on these grounds have ever been investigated; fewer still have been accountable for their actions.

There are still plenty of questions left unanswered and will likely remain that way forever. Two groups of two factions, at entirely opposite ends of the political spectrum, claimed responsibility for the attack on the settler: the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade associated with the Fatah party and the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad.

Of the three men, Sarakji, released from a seven-year prison term last January, was the only one officially wanted by Israel for suspected involvement in the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. In contrast, according to his brother, Subih had surrendered his arms and received a full governmental pardon some years ago, while Sharkh’s wife states her husband’s only link to armed struggle was through his brother, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in 2004.

Israel’s attempt to depict their actions as the standard routine of criminal inquiry is clearly a farce. However admissible the findings of the victim’s armed involvement may be in a court of law, it amounts to little when those accused have already been tried and found guilty by the barrel of a gun. Whether these men were guilty or innocent — they were executed without trial in cold blood. They leave behind traumatized children, grieving families and thousands of ex-prisoners and fellow citizens wondering who will be next.

All images by Bridget Chappell.

Bridget Chappell is an Australian activist and writer who has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine since August 2009. She is based in Nablus.

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January 11, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Shadow Boxing at Sharm al-Sheikh

By Iqbal Jassat | January 11, 2010

As the media focus fades away from Egypt and the unprecedented brawl that occurred in the streets of Cairo, it is likely that the world will yet again be treated to Mubarak’s routine antics at Sharm al-Sheikh.
The Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh often serves as the setting for Mubarak to distract global attention from his political failures. It is here that he usually appears in a fake mask to don the appearance of a “peace-maker”, ostensibly to pursue “peace” on behalf of the Occupied Palestinians.

To add further mockery he usually has Mahmoud Abbas in tow to keep nodding his head in approval. Of course the seat on his right is usually reserved for whichever butcher in Israel may have been elected leader of the colonial-settler state.

And peeping over his shoulder will be the incumbent US Secretary of State, ensuring that the American puppet does not stray from the carefully worded pro-Israeli script. After all, the script would be prepared by a bunch of neo-conners or their hangers-on who share the view most recently expressed by New York’s Ed Koch, that Muslims are terrorists.

Thus room only for pliant betrayers such as the PA’s American-backed Fatah elite – not for movements such as Hamas listed by the US as terrorists! They and the rest of Palestine’s freedom fighters who are not exiled or are in the dungeons of Israel and the West Bank, courtesy of Abu Mazen, are in fact the target of proceedings at Sharm al-Sheikh!

Five years ago during February 2005, Mubarak hosted Ariel Sharon who on the eve of the summit at Sharm el-Sheikh even announced a willingness to declare that Israel would cease military activities against all Palestinians. There was optimism all round as well as the hollow rhetoric of Abu Mazen along the line of “… A new opportunity for peace is born today in the city of peace”.

What utter rubbish! Hoodwinking public opinion and raising false expectations has been a favorite pastime of the Palestinian Authority.

Mainstream western media was as usual quick to applaud this false dawn.

What they chose to ignore was Sharon’s public instruction to Abu Mazen to act against the resistance: “…To dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, to disarm and subdue it once and for all”.

The so-called “breakthrough” and the promise of “calm and hope” was no more than the artful trick of deception of which past and current Israeli leaders are known for.

It didn’t take long for Sharon to display his fraud. A day after the summit a twenty-year-old Palestinian in Gaza was shot dead from an Israeli army post near the settlement of Atzmona. A day later, another Palestinian was shot and killed as he was driving through the neighbourhood of Wadi al-Haramiya near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Not surprising, mainstream western media ignored these two routine shootings. What attracted their attention and grabbed headlines was when Hamas fired mortars and Qassam rockets at an Israeli settlement in Gaza in response to the shootings.

The international media led by US media blamed Palestinians for “breaking the ceasefire” only two days after the Mubarak brokered agreement as Sharm el-Sheikh – without any reference to the shootings!

Gaza’s suffering prior to the December 2008 bloodbath and following it with the on-going siege is reflective of a tragic narrative that sadly has been compounded by unfair and irresponsible media reports.

Mubarak’s role as Israel’s gatekeeper is similarly unaccounted by US media organizations. That many hundreds of American activists mobilized in Cairo against his high-handed approach in keeping the Rafah border gate sealed, did not warrant US media attention. It’s a tendency that says to the Occupied Palestinians that while we will apply pressure on you, we will retain absolute silence on Israeli brutality.

Meanwhile Mubarak will hand out gold-etched invitations to the paparazzi of western media as soon as he decides to sponsor another round of shadow boxing at Sharm al-Sheikh.

– Iqbal Jassat is chairperson of the Media Review Network (MRN), an advocacy group based in Pretoria, South Africa.

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January 11, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Rupert Murdoch Begins Blocking News Aggregators, Search Engines

By Joe Coscarelli | January 9th, 2010

New Corp honcho Rupert Murdoch has been known to refer to those running the web as “plagiarists” and “parasites,” threatening to remove all of his content from search engines like Google (especially if Bing is willing to pay up). Many wondered if he was bluffing, but now the process seems to have begun, with the Times Online blocking aggregation of its stories.

Aggregator NewsNow, via The Next Web, is reporting that they are being blocked from indexing Times Online stories:

As a consequence of this action — apparently the first change to the Times Online’s blocking policy since May 2008 — two million visitors to NewsNow.co.uk every month will no longer find headlines and links to content on the Times Online site in their news search results.

According to Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow: “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out. We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

The blocking has been technically implemented via the robots.txt protocol, a convention for requesting search engines, web spiders and other web robots refrain from asking for pages from all or part of a website.

Whether this will be the first domino in a line of things to come remains to be seen — Google News is, of course, far more noteworthy than a “homegrown” UK aggregator — but it is certainly a move in the direction previously threatened by Murdoch and his companies. But if it does happen, expect a far larger outcry when Murdoch and crew start blocking sites that steer the internet conversation.

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January 11, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Is Anyone Telling Us The Truth?

By Paul Craig Roberts | January 7, 2010

What are we to make of the failed Underwear Bomber plot, the Toothpaste, Shampoo, and Bottled Water Bomber plot, and the Shoe Bomber plot? These blundering and implausible plots to bring down an airliner seem far removed from al-Qaida’s expertise in pulling off 9/11.

If we are to believe the U.S. government, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaida “mastermind” behind 9/11, outwitted the CIA, the NSA, indeed all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies as well as those of all U.S. allies including Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, Airport Security four times on one morning, and Dick Cheney, and with untrained and inexperienced pilots pulled off skilled piloting feats of crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers, and the Pentagon, where a battery of state of the art air defenses somehow failed to function.

After such amazing success, al-Qaida would have attracted the best minds in the business, but, instead, it has been reduced to amateur stunts.

The Underwear Bomb plot is being played to the hilt on the TV media and especially on Fox “news.” After reading recently that The Washington Post allowed a lobbyist to write a news story that preached the lobbyist’s interest, I wondered if the manufacturers of full body scanners were behind the heavy coverage of the Underwear Bomber, if not behind the plot itself.  In America, everything is for sale. Integrity is gone with the wind.

Recently I read a column by an author who has a “convenience theory” about the Underwear Bomber being a Nigerian allegedly trained by al-Qaida in Yemen.  As the U.S. is involved in an undeclared war in Yemen, about which neither the American public nor Congress were informed or consulted, the Underwear Bomb plot provided a convenient excuse for Washington’s new war, regardless of whether it was a real attack or a put-up job.

Once you start to ask yourself about whose agenda is served by events and their news spin, other things come to mind.  For example, last July there was a news report that the government in Yemen had disbanded a terrorist cell, which was operating under the supervision of Israeli intelligence services. According to the news report, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told Saba news agency that a terrorist cell was arrested and that the case was referred to judicial authorities “for its links with the Israeli intelligence services.”

Could the Underwear Bomber have been one of the Israeli terrorist recruits?  Certainly Israel has an interest in keeping the US fully engaged militarily against all potential foes of Israel’s territorial expansion.

The thought brought back memory of my Russian studies at Oxford University where I learned that the Tsar’s secret police set off bombs so that they could blame those whom they wanted to arrest.

I next remembered that Francesco Cossiga, the president of Italy from 1985-1992, revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, a false flag operation under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.  The bombings were blamed on communists and were used to discredit communist parties in elections.

An Italian parliamentary investigation unearthed the fact that the attacks were overseen by the CIA. Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated in sworn testimony that the attacks targeted innocent civilians, including women and children, in order “to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

What a coincidence. That is exactly what 9/11 succeeded in accomplishing in the U.S.

Among the well-meaning and the gullible in the West, the supposition still exists that government represents the public interest.  Political parties keep this myth alive by fighting over which party best represents the public’s interest.  In truth, government represents private interests, those of the office holders themselves and those of the lobby groups that finance their political campaigns. The public is in the dark as to the real agendas.

The U.S. and its puppet state allies were led to war in the Middle East and Afghanistan entirely on the basis of lies and deception.  Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist and were known by the U.S. and British governments not to exist.  Forged documents, such as the “yellowcake documents,” were leaked to newspapers in order to create news reporting that would bring the public along with the government’s war agenda.

Now the same thing is happening in regard to the nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons program.  Forged documents leaked to The Times (London) that indicated Iran was developing a “nuclear trigger” mechanism have been revealed as forgeries.

Who benefits? Clearly, attacking Iran is on the Israeli-U.S. agenda, and someone is creating the “evidence” to support the case, just as the leaked secret “Downing Street Memo” to the British cabinet informed Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government that President Bush had already made the decision to invade Iraq and “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The willingness of people to believe their rulers and the propaganda ministries that serve the rulers is astonishing.  Many Americans believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program despite the unanimous conclusion of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to the contrary.

Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives fought hard with limited success to change the CIA’s role from intelligence agency to a political agency that manufactures facts in support of the neoconservative agenda.  For the Bush Regime creating “new realities” was more important than knowing the facts.

Recently I read a proposal from a person purporting to favor an independent media that stated that we must save the print media from financial failure with government subsidies. Such a subsidy would complete the subservience of the media to government.Even in Stalinist Russia, a totalitarian political system where everyone knew that there was no free press, a gullible or intimidated public and Communist Party enabled Joseph Stalin to put the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution on show trial and execute them as capitalist spies.

In the U.S. we are developing our own show trials.  Sheikh Mohammed’s will be a big one.  As Chris Hedges recently pointed out, once government uses demonized Muslims to get the new justice (sic) system going, the rest of us will be next.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term.  He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

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January 10, 2010 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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