Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Netanyahu tries to secretly record meeting with US delegation

MEMO | September 8, 2022

Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu placed cameras in the room where he met with a delegation of US senators, without informing them beforehand that the meeting’s venue would have recording equipment, Israeli website Walla News reported.

A member of the American delegation noticed a video camera in the meeting room, which one of Netanyahu’s advisers had turned on while Netanyahu was holding a microphone in his hand.

The news site added that the US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides asked Netanyahu why he was holding a microphone, but Netanyahu tried to evade the question saying, “This is nothing.” But the ambassador and the senators were not convinced and asked for that recording equipment to be removed before the start of the meeting.

Walla cited sources as saying that Netanyahu wanted to record the meeting in order to use the footage in his campaign for the upcoming Knesset elections.

Israel is set to hold its fifth election in four years in October after the Knesset was dissolved in June.

September 8, 2022 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

US Senator dismisses Israeli military probe on Abu Akleh’s murder

Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh
Press TV – September 7, 2022

A US Senator has dismissed an Israeli military investigation that claims there is a “high possibility” that veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was “accidentally hit” by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank four months ago.

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen for Maryland posted a tweet on Wednesday, saying the existing evidence did not support the claim that a soldier accidentally killed Abu Akleh in the midst of a gun battle in Jenin.

Van Hollen said the United Nations and reconstructions by major news outlets had found the female journalist was not in the immediate vicinity of fighting with the Palestinian resistance fighters and could not have been caught in the crossfire.

“The crux of the ‘defense’ in this military report is that a soldier was ‘returning fire’ from armed Palestinians” when Abu Akleh was struck, Van Hollen said. “But investigations … found no such firing at the time. This underscores need for independent US inquiry into this American journalist’s death.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists has labeled the Israeli report “late and incomplete.”

“They provided no name for Shireen Abu [Akleh’s] killer and no other information than his or her own testimony that the killing was a mistake.”

Palestinian officials, rights advocates, and family of the slain journalist have already denounced the findings of the Israeli inquiry.

The journalist’s niece, Lina Abu Akleh, said the family had no confidence in the report. “We could never expect any type of accountability or legitimate investigation from the very entity responsible for gunning down an unarmed and clearly identifiable journalist.”

The family said an independent American investigation was “the bare minimum the US government should do for one of their own citizens.” The family also said Abu Akleh’s killing was a “war crime.”

On Monday, the Israeli military admitted that the journalist was “accidentally” killed by the regime’s gunfire on May 11, saying, however, that it will open no criminal investigation into the assassination.

The acknowledgement came after a final Israeli investigation concluded there was a “high possibility” the journalist had been shot dead by an Israeli soldier who mistook her for an armed Palestinian.

The report claimed she could have been shot by Palestinian gunfire even though all independent investigations on the shooting have totally dispelled the allegation.

Wearing press attire, the 51-year-old journalist was murdered in cold blood while covering an Israeli military raid. Later, her funeral was also attacked by the regime forces.

Israel’s account shifted several times over the four months. However, eyewitness accounts and videos of Abu Akleh and the area around her at the time of her killing do not show a gun battle.

A United Nations investigation earlier found Israeli soldiers fired “several single, seemingly well-aimed bullets” at Abu Akleh and other journalists.

Investigations by the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN have questioned the official Israeli version of the episode.

Abu Akleh’s tragic death sent shock waves across the region, drawing global condemnation. Critics say the Israeli military has a long history of dissembling and making false claims over the killings of civilians.

September 7, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Social media giants ‘purge’ Palestinian journalists reporting on Israeli war crimes

The Cradle | September 6, 2022

Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip and occupied East Jerusalem say social media giants like WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok have closed the accounts of those reporting on Israeli war crimes.

“WhatsApp is now the latest app owned by Meta to conduct a purge of accounts owned by Palestinian journalists, activists, public figures, official spokespersons, and other Palestinian voices,” journalist Jalal Abukhater tweeted on 5 September.

Speaking to Lebanese organization SKeyes, freelance journalist Omar Abu Nada said that the social media platforms “accused me of breaching their publishing standards [for posting pictures] detailing the civilians killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip.”

In the wake of Israel’s most recent aerial blitz of Gaza, dozens of accounts belonging to Palestinian activists, journalists, and media institutions were restricted and deleted.

The accounts targeted last month had published pictures of Israel’s victims and praised the resistance operations and targeting of Israeli cities.

Earlier in August, social media giant Meta launched a censoring campaign on posts referencing the killing of Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a senior commander of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

Meta also censored videos of Al-Nabulsi’s mother speaking to crowds and carrying her son’s body during his funeral.

Meta owns Facebook, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp.

According to Sada Social Centre (SSC)  – a “non-profit Palestinian youth initiative” that monitors the suspension of Palestinian content – within 24 hours of Al-Nabulsi’s death, at least 75 activist and journalist accounts were restricted or deleted on various social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

In December of 2020, SSC revealed that as many as 80 percent of Palestinian social media posts had been suppressed by social media companies.

A follow-up investigation revealed that the platforms had been only publishing content in Arabic that highlighted the normalization agreements between a handful of Arab states and Israel.

Last week, employees from tech giant Google accused the company of censoring them for protesting against a controversial $1.2 billion contract that provides Tel Aviv with advanced artificial intelligence (AI), which many fear will worsen human rights abuses in occupied Palestine.

September 6, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Proof that Israel found serious safety problems with the COVID vaccines then deliberately covered it up

By Steve Kirsch | September 2, 2022

The key facts in a nutshell:

  1. The Israeli health authority knew the vaccines were harming people: the side effects of the vaccine are neither mild nor short term. In fact, in 65% of the neurological cases that mentioned duration, the symptoms are all on-going.
  2. They also established causality: the side effects were caused by the vaccine. This is something no one else had been able to establish before.
  3. They don’t know how serious the harm is because they only looked at the data for the top five categories. Cardiovascular was #6. So they have only looked at a fraction of the data.
  4. The researchers do not know the prevalence of these serious side effects because they were just provided with the numerator, not the denominator (similar to VAERS).
  5. The Israeli authorities deliberately covered up the safety issues and hid it from the world, issuing a false report essentially saying “there is nothing new to see here folks, move along.”
  6. The only good news in all of this is that Israel protected Palestinians from getting this very unsafe vaccine. That was very humane of the Israelis.
  7. As of September 4, 2022 no one is being held accountable and everyone is ignoring this bombshell story:
    1. There is a press blackout on coverage in Israel of this. The Israel media refuses to even look at the evidence.
    2. Nobody in Israel is being held accountable for this corruption. There isn’t even an investigation.
    3. Nobody in the worldwide medical community is speaking out about the corruption either despite the fact that it affects people everywhere in the world.
    4. There is no coverage of this in any worldwide mainstream media.
    5. No public official, public health official, or mainstream media anywhere in the world is even calling for an investigation, nobody wants to see the original expert report, and nobody wants to see the safety data they gathered.
    6. We have the full video and we have the slides that were presented; use the Contact Me link if you are a health authority and want to see it before it is released to the public.
    7. Just to be sure the CDC knows about this, I just emailed hundreds of people at the CDC who are involved in the COVID vaccines (including Rochelle Walensky) to let them know that the report and video are available. All they have to do is hit reply. I bet not a single person at the CDC wants to see it. We are about to find out just how deep the corruption runs at the CDC.
    8. This isn’t surprising that they ignore this. All negative data on the vaccine is ignored. For example, when I discovered that young Canadian doctors were dying at a more than 12X normal after the second booster, the Canadian Medical Association, whose job it is to to be an advocate for the health of doctors, refused to comment. I sent five requests and they ignored all requests. They should change their website to say that they are an advocate for the drug companies, not the health of doctors.

Specifically:

  1. The Israel Ministry of Health (MoH) took 18 months from the launch date of the vaccine before they looked at the COVID vaccine safety data to see what it said.
  2. They only started collecting safety data in December 2021, one year after rolling out the vaccines to the public. Few people knew this.
  3. In December 2021, they tasked an outside expert panel led by Prof. Mati Berkowitz, a leading Israeli expert on pharmacology and toxicology from Asaf Harofe hospital, to examine the safety data they collected over the next 6 months (from early December to the end of May, 2022).
  4. The panel presented their findings to MoH personnel on or about Jun 6, 2022 in a Zoom call that was secretly recorded. They found that the COVID vaccines were much more dangerous to people than the world authorities admitted. They found serious adverse events that were never disclosed by Pfizer or any world government. These adverse events were also not found to be short term as the public was told.
  5. They also determined causality, something no other world health authority has ever been willing to do (because other governments never looked at the data either). Causality was both obvious and easy to prove using the re-challenge data that was collected (you can’t do this using the US VAERS data, for example).
  6. In short, the panel determined that the government was misleading the people of Israel.
  7. We still don’t know the whole extent of how dangerous the vaccines are because the outside team only looked at the top 5 most frequently cited events.
  8. Both the Israeli authorities and scientists analyzing the Ministry of Health (MoH) data acted to cover up the harms by releasing a fabricated report to the public to make the vaccine look perfectly safe and claim that there was nothing wrong..
  9. It is only thanks to the efforts of one courageous individual who released the recording of the full Zoom meeting between the MoH and their expert panel that we now know what was said at that meeting and what the data actually showed. Otherwise the world would still be in the dark.
  10. Leaders of our “trusted institutions” all over the world said absolutely nothing after the news broke on August 20, 2022. This suggests that there is widespread corruption in the medical community, government agencies, among public health officials, the mainstream media, and social media companies worldwide: they will not acknowledge any event that goes against the mainstream narrative.
  11. This is a level of corruption that is unprecedented. The atrocities here are clear cut. Everyone should be speaking out and calling for a full investigation and fully evaluating the safety data collected by the Israel government.

September 4, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Israel wants foreigners to report falling in love with Palestinians

Samizdat | September 4, 2022

According to new guidelines coming into force on Monday, foreigners will be required to inform the Israeli Defense Ministry if their romantic relationship with a resident of the West Bank gets serious – including plans to live together, get engaged or marry – to receive or extend an entry permit. The restrictions do not apply to those visiting Israeli settlements.

The new set of rules was originally drafted by the Defense Ministry’s agency for Palestinian civil affairs, COGAT, back in February, but its implementation faced several delays due to legal challenges. The lengthy 97-page document stipulates the procedure for entry and residence of foreign nationals in the Israeli-controlled Palestinian territories.

Foreign citizens, even those of Palestinian descent living abroad and officially married to a West Bank resident, will no longer be able to obtain a visa on arrival in Israel, and will have to file an application for an entry permit at least 45 days in advance, the Times of Israel reports. Additional requirements are also introduced for those who fall in love and “form a couple” after the arrival.

“If the relationship starts after the foreigner arrived at the Area, then the authorized COGAT official must be informed in writing… within 30 days of the relationship’s start,” the rules state. The “starting date” of the relationship is defined as the day of the engagement ceremony, wedding, or the start of cohabitation – “whichever occurs first.”

The couple must also “formalize” their status with the Palestinian Authority, and a failure to do so within 90 days will result in “immediate” expulsion. But even if the relationship status is formalized, the Israeli permit cannot be extended for more than 27 months, after which a foreigner will have to leave the country for at least 6 months.

COGAT officials said this “two-year pilot” program, which does not apply to those visiting Israeli settlements in the West Bank, is intended to make the entry process “more efficient and more suited to the dynamic conditions of the times,” according to AFP.

September 3, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli occupation forces confiscate 4 boats, sink 2 others off Gaza shores

Palestinian Information Center – September 2, 2022

GAZA – During the past two days, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) have escalated their attacks against the Palestinian fishermen off the Gaza shores.

The IOF chased and opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats sailing within the allowed fishing area in separate incidents. As a result, four boats were confiscated, and another was sunk, while a fifth was burned.

According to the Palestinian fishermen syndicate, the occupation forces burned a boat belonging to the fisherman Haitham Farwana after opening fire at it off Khan Yunis shores on Thursday.

The Israeli forces also confiscated on the same day the boat of the fisherman Abdel Moati Al-Habil.

Earlier on Wednesday, IOF confiscated a fishing boat where Ahmad Adel Mohammad Al-Bardawil was on board sailing within 3 nautical miles off western Rafah shore, southern Gaza Strip. There were also 2 generators and 30 searchlights on the boat.

The IOF also confiscated 2 fishing boats belonging to Muhannad Ra’fat Radwan Baker, and Tayseer Mohammad Abdulnouri, who are both residents of al-Shati refugee camp. They were sailing within 3 nautical miles off al-Waha shore, northwest of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.

In a separate incident, a fisherman named Omar Mohammad Ism’ail Al-Bardawil said that IOF’s gunboats stationed off the Fishermen Seaport, western Rafah, pumped water at a fishing boat he owns and sank it. The boat was sailing within 6 nautical miles and had a generator and searchlights on board.

So far in 2022, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) documented the injury of 19 fishermen and the arrest of 44 others, including 6 children; 2 fishermen remain in IOF detention. Also, the Israeli authorities continue to keep 18 fishing boats and dozens of fishing tools and equipment in their custody.

In this regard, PCHR reiterated its call upon the international community, including the States Party to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, to compel the Israeli authorities to cease their attacks and pursuit of Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza waters, and to allow them to fish freely.

September 2, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli naval delegation deployed to Yemen’s Socotra Island

The Cradle | September 2, 2022

Yemeni media reported on 2 September that a delegation of Israeli military experts has been deployed to the UAE-controlled Yemeni island of Socotra, located in the Gulf of Aden.

According to the report, the Israeli team has been on the island for the past few days, and is accompanied by several Emirati intelligence officers.

The report adds that the delegation, who belong to Tel Aviv’s navy, have been carrying out search operations and excavations across Socotra Island.

The island, inhabited by around 60,000 people, overlooks the Strait of Bab Al-Mandab, a major shipping corridor that links the Red Sea to both the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Over the past year, Israel has reportedly been working with its Gulf partner to establish a presence on Socotra.

According to a Yemeni media report from March, the UAE is involved in the development of a construction project to build facilities on the island for the purpose of hosting Israeli soldiers, officers, and other military experts and personnel.

This is allegedly part of a plan to turn the Yemeni island into a center for regional espionage, as well as to increase military control over maritime routes.

Last year, Israel signed an agreement with the UAE, allowing it to establish an intelligence center at the island’s Hadibu Airport.

Israel is also interested in the strategic Yemeni island because it serves as a potential flashpoint for a confrontation with Iran. In 2020, the Washington Institute published an analysis examining how Israeli submarines could potentially strike the Islamic Republic from positions near Yemen.

In January of this year, Socotra Island made headlines due to controversial photos of Israeli tourists who had visited the island under a UAE-issued visa.

In June of 2020, the UAE established control of the island by bribing its tribal authorities.

Former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi described the UAE’s takeover of the island as “a full-fledged coup,” however.

Since the start of the war on Yemen in 2015, the UAE has been an integral part of the Saudi-led coalition, backing mercenary groups across the country and taking part in indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

The Saudi-led coalition, which continues to violate the UN-brokered ceasefire agreement, receives logistical and military support from the US, the UK, France, and most notably Israel.

September 2, 2022 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel bombed both Syrian airports

Samizdat | September 2, 2022

Wednesday evening’s missile attack temporarily disabled the Aleppo international airport but also caused damage to the one in Damascus, the Syrian government said on Thursday. The attack, which Syria blamed on Israel, is the first known instance of targeting both civilian airports on the same day.

Israeli F-16s launched a total of 16 projectiles from outside Syrian airspace, said Major General Oleg Egorov, deputy chief of the Russian peacemaking mission in Damascus. Syrian air defenses shot down three of the incoming missiles, but the others struck the facilities in Aleppo and Damascus, he added.

According to the Syrian transportation ministry, the Aleppo runway was damaged but repairs are ongoing and the airport is expected to reopen for traffic by noon local time on Friday. As for the Damascus airport, the damage inflicted “did not affect” operations, the ministry said.

“Syria retains its full rights to hold the Israeli occupation authorities accountable and bear all legal, moral, political and financial responsibilities for deliberately targeting the international airports of Damascus and Aleppo and for endangering civilian facilities and lives,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a letter to the UN secretary-general and the Security Council, according to the state news agency SANA.

Back in June, a series of Israeli strikes took the Damascus airport out of service for several weeks, with traffic being rerouted to Aleppo – which had only reopened in February 2020, after being damaged in the decade-long civil war. Wednesday’s strike is the first known instance of Israel attacking both of Syria’s active international airports.

The international airport in Latakia is adjacent to the Khmeimim airbase used by the Russian expeditionary force, and has so far not been a target of Israeli attacks.

Israel has repeatedly targeted Syria with missiles, usually fired from Lebanese airspace or the occupied Golan Heights, wary of air defense systems provided by Russia to Damascus. On the rare occasions Jerusalem has acknowledged the attacks, the Israeli government said it was exercising preemptive self-defense against Iran. Tehran has offered military aid to Damascus in recent years against both Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists and other radical militants.

The London-based Iran International claimed that Wednesday’s strike was aimed at preventing an Iranian cargo plane from landing, first in Aleppo and then in Damascus. The plane reportedly belongs to an airline the US has designated as affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and placed under sanctions.

September 1, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Nuclear official slams IAEA demands from Iran as ‘excessive’

Press TV – August 30, 2022

The spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) has described the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) demands as “excessive,” saying they cannot be implemented due to the sanctions in place against the Islamic Republic.

“We consider the IAEA’s demands excessive, because their implementation is impossible due to sanctions,” Behrouz Kamalvandi said on Tuesday.

Kamalvandi elaborated on the current scope of Iran-IAEA ties, saying Tehran’s cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog is based on the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA), which, he added, revolves around the agency’s inspection of nuclear materials.

Aside from the CSA, he added, countries adhering to the Additional Protocol, have undertaken to give the IAEA access for inspection of their uranium enrichment equipment as well.

The official said Iran used to provide the UN nuclear watchdog with even broader access for inspection as part of the 2015 nuclear deal, which is currently in trouble due to Washington’s unilateral exit.

Iran, he said, decided to restrict the scope of its cooperation with the IAEA to the SCA under a law approved by the Iranian Parliament in late 2020, entitled “The Strategic Action Plan to Counter Sanctions.”

The law tasked the Iranian administration to take a set of measures to protect national interests, including limiting cooperation with the IAEA, in response to Washington’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and the European signatories’ failure to uphold their contractual commitments to Tehran.

Kamalvandi added, however, that “if the West lifts the sanctions and lives up to its own commitments under the nuclear deal, Iran will reciprocate,” he added.

Referring to Iran’s removal of 27 surveillance cameras at different nuclear sites, Kamalvandi said that if the other parties return to their commitments, it would be possible for the devices and cameras to be reinstalled.

Tehran will continue its constructive cooperation with the UN nuclear agency in line with its commitments under the CSA, the official added.

Iran ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970, which requires nonnuclear-weapon states to accept comprehensive IAEA safeguards. Four years later, Tehran concluded a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

As a goodwill gesture, Iran voluntarily chose to have extensive cooperation with the UN nuclear agency, beyond the safeguards agreement.

Back in June, Iran decided to stop its voluntary cooperation with the UN nuclear agency, while stressing that Iran’s commitments under the agreement will continue.

Iran and the IAEA are currently locked in a dispute triggered by the agency’s Israeli-influenced accusations, which were leveled against Tehran’s peaceful nuclear activities just as the Islamic Republic and other parties to the Iran deal appeared close to an agreement on reviving the Iran deal.

Iran asserts that an agreement on the revival of the Iran nuclear deal hinges on the settlement of Safeguards issues between Tehran and the IAEA, and that without settling those issues, reviving the 2015 accord makes no sense.

Last week, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi repeated previous accusations against the Islamic Republic, calling on Iran to explain what he claimed to be “traces of enriched uranium” found at the country’s nuclear research sites three years ago.

In an interview with with CNN on August 22, Grossi said the Agency would not drop that probe without “technically credible explanations” from Iran.

This is while Iran has already provided the necessary information and access to the IAEA.

August 30, 2022 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Israel must ‘eliminate’ nuclear arsenal: Official

The Cradle | August 23, 2022

On 23 August, Iran’s top UN Envoy Majid Takht Ravanchi decried the lack of progress over efforts to denuclearize West Asia, and called on Israel – the region’s only nuclear armed state – to eliminate its stockpile of weapons.

Tehran’s ambassador made these remarks during the Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) held at the UN’s headquarters in New York.

Takht-Ravanchi charged the US with exercising double standards, and demanded that Israel’s accession to the NPT “without precondition and further delay” and the placement of all of its nuclear activities and facilities under the comprehensive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards are essential in “realizing the goal the of establishing of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.”

The Iranian envoy said delays in 2012, 2013 and 2014 in convening the Conference – which is meant to advance the goal of eliminating weapons of mass destruction from the region – had caused serious setbacks for participating states.

“We are firmly convinced that the Conference was postponed indefinitely because of the US opposition, and this has been the persistent policy of the US to turn a blind eye to the nuclear arsenals of the Israeli regime while not supporting the convening of the Conference,” he declared.

Israel reportedly possesses 200 to 400 nuclear warheads, making it the sole possessor of non-conventional arms in West Asia, yet Tel Aviv as yet to sign the NPT and refuses to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities.

Signatories from 191 countries have signed the NPT, including the US, UK, France, China, and Russia, making it the most highly ratified armaments agreement in history.

Experts suggest that the US and EU support for Israel has emboldened the country to increase its nuclear activities, despite essential oversight by the IAEA.

Over the years, Israelis are believed to have assassinated at least seven Iranian nuclear scientists and conducted a series of sabotage operations against Iran’s IAEA-monitored nuclear facilities.

Last week, Israeli officials called on western nations to “walk away” from the negotiating table with Iran, fearful that the US is on the cusp of returning to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that would freeze Tehran’s enrichment program.

During a phone call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on 18 August, Israel’s interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid demanded that Europe send a “clear and unequivocal message that there will be no more concessions to Iran,” according to Israeli media.

Lapid also met with the US ambassador to Israel and the chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee’s ‘Middle East’ Subcommittee, telling them: “In the current situation, the time has come to walk away from the table. Anything else sends a message of weakness to Iran.”

This comes after several Israeli assassination and sabotage operations inside Iran, in efforts to set back Iran’s advancements and scuttle JCPOA revival talks.

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Deliberate misrepresentation: Western media bias makes Israeli war on Palestinians possible

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | August 23, 2022

While US and western mainstream and corporate media remain biased in favour of Israel, they often behave as if they are a third, neutral party. This is simply not the case.

Take the New York Times coverage of the latest Israeli war on Gaza as an example. Its article on 6 August, “Israel-Gaza Fighting Flares for a Second Day” is the typical mainstream western reporting on Israel and Palestine, but with a distinct NYT flavour.

For the uninformed reader, the article succeeds in finding a balanced language between two equal sides. This misleading moral equivalence is one of the biggest intellectual blind spots for western journalists. If they do not outwardly champion Israel’s discourse on ‘security’ and ‘right to defend itself’, they create false parallels between Palestinians and Israelis, as if a military occupier and an occupied nation have comparable rights and responsibilities.

Obviously, this logic does not apply to the Russia-Ukraine war. For NYT and all mainstream western media, there is no question regarding who the good guys and the bad guys are in that bloody fight.

‘Palestinian militants’ and ‘terrorists’ have always been the West’s bad guys. Per the logic of their media coverage, Israel does not launch unprovoked wars on Palestinians, and is not an unrepentant military occupier, or a racist apartheid regime. This language can only be used by marginal ‘radical’ and ‘leftist’ media, never the mainstream.

The brief introduction of the NYT article spoke about the rising death toll, but did not initially mention that the 20 killed Palestinians include children, emphasising, instead, that Israeli attacks have killed a ‘militant leader’.

When the six children killed by Israel are revealed in the second paragraph, the article immediately, and without starting a new sentence, clarifies that “Israel said some civilian deaths were the result of militants stashing weapons in residential areas”, and that others were killed by “misfired’ Palestinian rockets.

On 16 August, the Israeli military finally admitted that it was behind the strikes that killed the 5 young Palestinian boys of Jabaliya. Whether the NYT reported on that or not matters little. The damage has been done, and that was Israel’s plan from the start.

The title of the BBC story of 16 August, ‘Gaza’s children are used to the death and bombing’, does not immediately name those responsible for the ‘death and bombing’. Even Israeli military spokesmen, as we will discover later, would agree to such a statement, though they will always lay the blame squarely on the ‘Palestinian terrorists’.

When the story finally reveals that a little girl, Layan, was killed in an Israeli strike, the language was carefully crafted to lessen the blame on her Israeli murderers. The girl, we are told, was on her way to the beach with her family, when their tuk-tuk “passed by a military camp run by the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad”, which, “at the exact moment, (…) was targeted by Israeli fire”. The author says nothing of how she reached the conclusion that the family was not the target.

One can easily glean from the story that Israel’s intention was not to kill Layan – and logically, none of the 17 other children murdered during the three-day war on Gaza. Besides, Israel has, according to the BBC, tried to save the little girl; alas, “a week of treatment in an Israeli hospital couldn’t save her life”.

Though Israeli politicians have spoken blatantly about killing Palestinian children – and, in the case of former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, “the Palestinian mothers who give birth to ‘little snakes'” – the BBC report, and other reports on the latest war, have failed to mention this. Instead, it quoted Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who reportedly said that “the death of innocent civilians, especially children is heartbreaking.” Incidentally, Lapid ordered the latest war on Gaza, which killed a total of 49 Palestinians.

Even a human-interest story about a murdered Palestinian child somehow avoided the language that could fault Israel for the gruesome killing of a little girl. Furthermore, the BBC also laboured to present Israel in a positive light, resorting to quote the occupation army’s statement that it was “devastated by (Layan’s) death and that of any civilians.”

The NYT and BBC have been selected here not because they are the worst examples of western media bias, but because they are often cited as ‘liberal’, if not ‘progressive’, media. Their reporting, however, represents an ongoing crisis in western journalism, especially relating to Palestine.

Books have been written about this subject, civil society organisations were formed to hold western media accountable and numerous editorial board meetings were organised to put some pressure on western editors, to no avail.

Desperate by the unchanging pro-Israel narratives in western media, some pro-Palestine human rights advocates often argue that there are greater margins within Israel’s own mainstream media than in the US, for example. This, too, is inaccurate.

The misnomer of the supposedly more balanced Israeli media is a direct outcome of the failure to influence western media coverage on Palestine and Israel. The erroneous notion is often buoyed by the fact that an Israeli newspaper, like Haaretz, gives marginal spaces to critical voices, like those of Israeli journalists Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

Israeli propaganda, one of the most powerful and sophisticated in the world, however, can hardly be balanced by occasional columns written by a few dissenting journalists.

Additionally, Haaretz is often cited as an example of relatively fair journalism, simply because the alternatives – Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post and other rightwing Israeli media – are exemplary in their callousness, biased language and misconstruing of facts.

The pro-Israel prejudices in western media often spill over to Palestine sympathetic media throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, especially those reporting on the news in English and French.

Since many newspapers and online platforms utilise western news agencies, they, often inadvertently, adopt the same language used in western news sources, thus depicting Palestinian resisters or fighters, as ‘militants’, the Israeli occupation army as “Israeli Defence Forces” and Israeli war on Gaza as ‘flare ups’ of violence.

In its totality, this language misinterprets the Palestinian struggle for freedom as random acts of violence within a protracted ‘conflict’ where innocent civilians, like Layan, are ‘caught in the crossfire.’

The deadly Israeli wars on Gaza are made possible, not only by western weapons and political support, but through an endless stream of media misinformation and misrepresentation. Though Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians in recent years, western media remains as committed to defending Israel as if nothing has changed.

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Mossad Likely Behind Salman Rushdie Stabbing: Denver Professor

Al-Manar | August 23, 2022

The last week’s stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie, the author of a sacrilegious anti-Islam book may have been orchestrated by the Mossad, suggested Nader Hashemi, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver.

In a Saturday interview with Negar Mortazavi, host of the Iran Podcast, Hashemi questioned the timing of the attack, highlighting what he believed to be two possible explanations.

Hashemi said that one possibility is that Iran wanted to take vengeance on the United States for the 2020 assassination of IRGC general Qassem Suleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad Airport.

Another possibility, Hashemi said, adding that he believes this is more likely, is that Rushdie’s attacker, Hadi Matar, had been convinced to commit the attack by a Mossad agent masquerading as an IRGC operative or supporter.

“That so-called person online claiming to be affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran could’ve been a Mossad operative.”

“The other possibility, which I actually think is much more likely, is that this young man Hadi Matar was in communication with someone online who claimed to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member or supporter and lured him into attacking Salman Rushdie and that so-called person online claiming to be affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran could’ve been a Mossad operative.”

Hashemi went on to suggest that the Zionist entity’s motive for carrying out a false flag operation would be to galvanize opposition to the ongoing efforts of world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement.

“Israel has taken a very strong position against reviving the Iran nuclear agreement,” he said. “We were in very sensitive negotiations, like an agreement was imminent, and then the attack on Salman Rushdie takes place. I think that’s one possible interpretation and scenario that could explain the timing of this at this moment during these sensitive political discussions related to Iran’s nuclear program.”

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism | , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »