nuclear-news

The Media is Whitewashing Trump’s Board of Peace.

The depraved Donald Trump and his so-called “Board of Peace” have promoted the idea that Gaza is theirs to conquer. All in the name of “regional stability,” they believe that they can go in, occupy the land, fill it with data centers and waterfront properties for the white wealthy class, and push Palestinians into concentration camps. This is the American occupation of Palestinian land. Yet, for some reason, we have major news outlets giving grace to those who want to do this.

February 7, 2026, By Jenin M for Codepink, https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/07/the-media-is-whitewashing-trumps-board-of-peace/

Imagine telling someone who has experienced the most apocalyptic conditions known to man to give their perpetrators a “chance.” That’s exactly what it felt like when I opened my phone the other day and saw headlines from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal talking about Trump’s sham “Board of Peace,” which is supposed to govern Gaza.

Not only is it tone deaf, but it’s also downright racist. Palestinians have spent decades being strung along like puppets, being told what’s going to happen to our land instead of letting us have it. We have been raped, maimed, starved, displaced, imprisoned, tortured, and killed by foreigners who come in and think they have the right to take something that’s not theirs. 

So to the news outlets who believe it’s their job to control the narrative: there will be no grace, no chances, no benefit of the doubt given to the monsters who’ve allowed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to be slaughtered, all while the world watched. Our media should not repeat the same mistakes that manufactured consent for a genocide in Gaza.

It’s despicable, though not surprising, that a board of old white men and their sycophantic stooges have joined forces to colonize more indigenous land for their benefit. At the end of the day, this has been their strategy since the beginning of time. But nowadays, we have a collective voice. We supposedly have a free and independent press that challenges power — a free and independent press that you’d think would call out history repeating itself, not praise it. However, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are doing just that: urging their readers to “Give the Board of Peace a chance” and view the board as a “technocratic turn that’s giving hope for Gaza.”

What these outlets are failing to point out is the sheer irony and insanity of a “Board of Peace” run by Trump, who has dubbed himself the “chairman for life.” This is someone who has used his position of power to accelerate the U.S.-Israeli genocide throughout his presidential term. The blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians is on his hands. Here in the U.S., the blood of migrants and protestors is on his hands as he orders their kidnappings and murders of our own in the streets in broad daylight. What sort of precedent does it set if “leaders” who know nothing but capital greed and bloodshed are allowed to position themselves at the forefront of “peace” efforts worldwide? If we accept this obvious scam, there will be no peace. There will be fascist control over everyone and everything, and histories and cultures will be lost, and the people will succumb to the fate of an elite ruling class propped up by our tax dollars and complicit media.

When the most recent ceasefire agreement was announced, I thought about what a true end to the genocide might look like. I imagined Gaza being returned to its rightful owners, the people being given the resources they need to rebuild, and the U.S. and Israel finally leaving them alone. Instead, they are installing a system to create perpetual, coordinated genocide — all while Gaza is becoming an apocalyptic wasteland. The Israeli and U.S. destruction of Gaza has reduced the Strip to rubble, makeshift camps, and starved masses. These are the same people who are vowing to bring peace to Gaza — and more broadly to the whole region. 

The depraved Donald Trump and his so-called “Board of Peace” have promoted the idea that Gaza is theirs to conquer. All in the name of “regional stability,” they believe that they can go in, occupy the land, fill it with data centers and waterfront properties for the white wealthy class, and push Palestinians into concentration camps. This is the American occupation of Palestinian land. Yet, for some reason, we have major news outlets giving grace to those who want to do this.

The “Board of Peace” is nothing more than an extension of the colonization that Palestine has faced for decades. But has it worked? Have Palestinians left their houses, abandoned their lands, and given it all up? Has the movement for Palestine been so completely forgotten that we would simply allow these war criminals to go and take Gaza? Absolutely not. I know I speak for all Palestinians when I say I will die trying to save my land from the bloody hands of people like Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and Tony Blair. 

I know deep in my core that Palestine will be free. All those who have been forced to leave the shores of Gaza, all the way to Akka, will return. Those waterfront homes will be ours to pass down to our children and grandchildren. What was once an apocalyptic wasteland will become our homeland reborn, and all the news outlets will report on it as if they weren’t complicit. I do not doubt this, and neither should you. So when you read about the Board of Peace, don’t feel doomed — we the people know the truth, and together we have the power to set the story straight. 

Jenin M is CODEPINK’s Palestine campaign organizer and a Palestinian-American organizer, advocate, and storyteller dedicated to justice for Palestine and collective liberation. With over five years in grassroots movement-building, her work focuses on advocacy, digital storytelling, and mobilizing communities against oppression. A graduate in Public Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, she bridges policy analysis and on-the-ground organizing

February 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Labeling Kidnapping a ‘Capture,’ Media Legitimate Violation of International Law.

The word “abduct” was never used in the voice of a reporter from any of these papers to describe what the US had done.

These linguistic choices matter. “Capture” and “arrest” paint Trump, Delta Force and the CIA as righteous heroes protecting their country—as well as Venezuela and the rest of the world—from the villainous Maduros. “Abduct” and “kidnap” morally invert the good guy and bad guy roles, and would portray US actors as the wrongdoers

Gregory Shupak, January 20, 2026, https://fair.org/home/labeling-kidnapping-a-capture-media-legitimate-violation-of-international-law/

Corporate media have deployed a lexicon of legitimation in their coverage of the deadly US invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife and fellow politician Cilia Flores. Major news outlets have routinely described these events using words like “capture” (New York Times, 1/3/26) or “arrest” (BBC, 1/3/26), which presents them as a matter of enforcing the law against fugitives or criminals, and carries the built-in but false assumption that the US had the right or even duty to conduct its operation in the first place.

The ludicrous premise is that any time an arrest warrant is issued somewhere in the United States, the US has the right to do anything, anywhere in the world, in pursuit of the subject—including bombing another country, invading it, killing its citizens, and spiriting away its president and first lady. Cornell Law School professor Maggie Gardner (Transnational Litigation Blog, 1/5/26) rebuked the idea that the US merely enforced the law in Venezuela, pointing out (emphasis in original):

The ludicrous premise is that any time an arrest warrant is issued somewhere in the United States, the US has the right to do anything, anywhere in the world, in pursuit of the subject—including bombing another country, invading it, killing its citizens, and spiriting away its president and first lady. Cornell Law School professor Maggie Gardner (Transnational Litigation Blog, 1/5/26) rebuked the idea that the US merely enforced the law in Venezuela, pointing out (emphasis in original):

I used the news aggregator Factiva to examine New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage from January 3 through January 5, the day of the US’s attack on Venezuela and the first two days after these developments. The papers published a combined 223 pieces that featured Maduro’s name, and 166 of these (74%) used the term “capture” or a form of it, such as “captured” or “capturing.” Sixty of these pieces, or 27%, included the word “arrest” or variations on the term, like “arrested” or “arresting.”

“Abduction” or “kidnapping”—synonyms that mean to take someone away unlawfully and by force—are far more suitable words for what the US did to Maduro and Flores. Only two pieces in the Post and one in the Journal used any form of “abduct” (such as “abduction”) in any of the articles that refer to Maduro—1% of the combined total articles. In each case, the term appears in quotation marks. The Times ran no pieces in which the word appeared.

The Post (1/3/26) shared a perplexing perspective from Geoffrey Corn—head of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, and a former top legal adviser to the US Army—who said that the US Supreme Court has been clear since the late 19th century that “you can’t claim that you were abducted and therefore the court should not be allowed to assert authority over you.” The article went on:

“Maduro is not going to be able to avoid being brought to trial because he was abducted, so to speak, even if he can establish it violated international law,” Corn said, adding that in his view, the administration’s overnight military operation lacked any “plausible legal basis.”

So, despite Corn’s view that the US attack was illegal, he couldn’t bring himself to present Maduro’s abduction as literal rather than figurative.

That article, as well another in the Post (1/3/26) and one in the Wall Street Journal (1/5/26), quoted  Democratic Senator Mark R. Warner:

If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting a similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president?

Even as Warner is skeptical about the US’s actions in Venezuela, he still uses the language of “capture” for Maduro, while using “abduct” for a hypothetical scenario in which the official enemy Putin carries out a parallel crime. None of the articles that included Warner’s quote  commented on this linguistic inconsistency.

The word “abduct” was never used in the voice of a reporter from any of these papers to describe what the US had done.

‘It’s not a bad term’

Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself (New York Times, 1/5/26), say that he was “kidnapped” by the US. They’re not the only ones. On Democracy Now! (1/3/26), Venezuelan journalist Andreína Chávez and US-based Venezuelan historian Miguel Tinker Salas both used that word to characterize what the US did to Maduro and Flores.

Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC (1/5/26), regarded the idea that Maduro was “kidnapped” as at least meriting serious discussion. Co-anchor Andrew Chang asked:

Did the US military just kidnap Nicholas Maduro?… “Kidnap” is a loaded word because it implies illegality. Maybe a more neutral way of describing Maduro’s capture is as an “abduction,” but the US government calls it an “arrest.”…

This isn’t some nerdy question about semantics. It’s a question about law, and whether the US has the legal right to extract world leaders from their homes, and maybe even whether other countries might have that right, too.

Notably, when Trump was told that Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez said it was a “kidnapping,” he didn’t push back, saying, “It’s not a bad term.”

However, the only times “kidnap” appeared in the Times, Journal or Post in relation to Maduro and Flores—in 10 pieces, or 4% of the coverage—came when that term was attributed to representatives of the Venezuelan state. Suggesting to readers that a government that has been demonized in US media for decades is the only source that regards Maduro and Flores as having been “kidnapped” is tantamount to suggesting that no credible sources take that position.

The three papers combined to run zero articles treating as an objective fact the view that America “abducted” or “kidnapped” a sitting head of state in defiance of international law, while they regularly used “captured” and “arrested” outside of quotation marks, as if those word choices are merely flat descriptions of reality.

ICE also ‘arrests’

These linguistic choices matter. “Capture” and “arrest” paint Trump, Delta Force and the CIA as righteous heroes protecting their country—as well as Venezuela and the rest of the world—from the villainous Maduros. “Abduct” and “kidnap” morally invert the good guy and bad guy roles, and would portray US actors as the wrongdoers.

This particular form of word play is part of a pattern for corporate media under this Trump administration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) round-ups of migrants in the United States have featured what can most accurately be described as abductions or kidnappings of people—off the streets, at courts, in workplaces and elsewhere—by armed, masked and unaccountable agents, into unmarked vehicles. It’s little surprise, then, that immigration lawyers, members of Congress, and law professors (LA Times, 10/21/25), among others, routinely use the word “abduct” to describe these events.

And describing ICE’s practices as “kidnappings” isn’t some fringe view. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.) uses the word (Independent, 12/5/25), as does Rolling Stone editor Tim Dickinson (7/2/25), and the academic and author Natasha Lennard of the New School for Social Research in New York (Intercept, 7/1/25). ICE’s victims (Mother Jones, 7/18/27; NPR, 7/27/25) and their families (Guardian, 4/15/25, 6/10/25, 6/26/25) frequently describe their ordeal in such terms.

Yet corporate media eschew such language for the same sanitized “arrest” or “capture” language they employed for Maduro and Flores. When I used Factiva to pair “ICE” with the words “abduct” or “kidnap,” just two articles turned up that included the perspective that ICE “abducts” people (New York Times, 7/13/25; Washington Post, 12/3/25), both attributed to critical sources. Five (2%) included a version of the word “kidnap,” all in quotation marks.

Three of these quotes were from the much-maligned Venezuelan government (New York Times, 3/18/25, 11/25/25; Washington Post, 5/4/25), one came from a man whose father and daughter-in-law had been detained by ICE (Washington Post, 3/21/25), and another from a member of the Chicago Board of Education (New York Times, 10/22/25).

The language is freighted in the same way, whether it is migrants under attack from US jackboots, or those same forces unleashed against socialist politicians in Global South countries seeking to escape imperial domination.

d “kidnap” morally invert the good guy and bad guy roles, and would portray US actors as the wrongdoers.

Gregory Shupak, January 20, 2026

Corporate media have deployed a lexicon of legitimation in their coverage of the deadly US invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife and fellow politician Cilia Flores. Major news outlets have routinely described these events using words like “capture” (New York Times, 1/3/26) or “arrest” (BBC, 1/3/26), which presents them as a matter of enforcing the law against fugitives or criminals, and carries the built-in but false assumption that the US had the right or even duty to conduct its operation in the first place.

The ludicrous premise is that any time an arrest warrant is issued somewhere in the United States, the US has the right to do anything, anywhere in the world, in pursuit of the subject—including bombing another country, invading it, killing its citizens, and spiriting away its president and first lady. Cornell Law School professor Maggie Gardner (Transnational Litigation Blog, 1/5/26) rebuked the idea that the US merely enforced the law in Venezuela, pointing out (emphasis in original):

Under customary international law, a sovereign can only exercise enforcement jurisdiction in the territory of another sovereign if it has that sovereign’s consent. This hard line limiting enforcement powers to a sovereign’s own territory is clear and well-established.

Venezuela, of course, didn’t consent to being bombed, or to having Maduro and Flores taken from the country at gunpoint. Accordingly, what happened in Caracas is best understood not as the US enforcing the law, but as the US breaking international law. It’s misleading, therefore, to use language like “capture” and “arrest,” which evoke the US upholding the law, to describe blowtorch-wielding, heavily armed US forces taking Maduro and Flores prisoner in the middle of the night (BBC, 1/4/26).

‘Abducted, so to speak’

I used the news aggregator Factiva to examine New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage from January 3 through January 5, the day of the US’s attack on Venezuela and the first two days after these developments. The papers published a combined 223 pieces that featured Maduro’s name, and 166 of these (74%) used the term “capture” or a form of it, such as “captured” or “capturing.” Sixty of these pieces, or 27%, included the word “arrest” or variations on the term, like “arrested” or “arresting.”

“Abduction” or “kidnapping”—synonyms that mean to take someone away unlawfully and by force—are far more suitable words for what the US did to Maduro and Flores. Only two pieces in the Post and one in the Journal used any form of “abduct” (such as “abduction”) in any of the articles that refer to Maduro—1% of the combined total articles. In each case, the term appears in quotation marks. The Times ran no pieces in which the word appeared.

The Post (1/3/26) shared a perplexing perspective from Geoffrey Corn—head of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, and a former top legal adviser to the US Army—who said that the US Supreme Court has been clear since the late 19th century that “you can’t claim that you were abducted and therefore the court should not be allowed to assert authority over you.” The article went on:

“Maduro is not going to be able to avoid being brought to trial because he was abducted, so to speak, even if he can establish it violated international law,” Corn said, adding that in his view, the administration’s overnight military operation lacked any “plausible legal basis.”

So, despite Corn’s view that the US attack was illegal, he couldn’t bring himself to present Maduro’s abduction as literal rather than figurative.

That article, as well another in the Post (1/3/26) and one in the Wall Street Journal (1/5/26), quoted Democratic Senator Mark R. Warner:

If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting a similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president?

Even as Warner is skeptical about the US’s actions in Venezuela, he still uses the language of “capture” for Maduro, while using “abduct” for a hypothetical scenario in which the official enemy Putin carries out a parallel crime. None of the articles that included Warner’s quote  commented on this linguistic inconsistency.

The word “abduct” was never used in the voice of a reporter from any of these papers to describe what the US had done.

‘It’s not a bad term’

Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself (New York Times, 1/5/26), say that he was “kidnapped” by the US. They’re not the only ones. On Democracy Now! (1/3/26), Venezuelan journalist Andreína Chávez and US-based Venezuelan historian Miguel Tinker Salas both used that word to characterize what the US did to Maduro and Flores.

Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC (1/5/26), regarded the idea that Maduro was “kidnapped” as at least meriting serious discussion. Co-anchor Andrew Chang asked:

Did the US military just kidnap Nicholas Maduro?… “Kidnap” is a loaded word because it implies illegality. Maybe a more neutral way of describing Maduro’s capture is as an “abduction,” but the US government calls it an “arrest.”…

This isn’t some nerdy question about semantics. It’s a question about law, and whether the US has the legal right to extract world leaders from their homes, and maybe even whether other countries might have that right, too.

Notably, when Trump was told that Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez said it was a “kidnapping,” he didn’t push back, saying, “It’s not a bad term.”

However, the only times “kidnap” appeared in the Times, Journal or Post in relation to Maduro and Flores—in 10 pieces, or 4% of the coverage—came when that term was attributed to representatives of the Venezuelan state. Suggesting to readers that a government that has been demonized in US media for decades is the only source that regards Maduro and Flores as having been “kidnapped” is tantamount to suggesting that no credible sources take that position.

The three papers combined to run zero articles treating as an objective fact the view that America “abducted” or “kidnapped” a sitting head of state in defiance of international law, while they regularly used “captured” and “arrested” outside of quotation marks, as if those word choices are merely flat descriptions of reality.

ICE also ‘arrests’

These linguistic choices matter. “Capture” and “arrest” paint Trump, Delta Force and the CIA as righteous heroes protecting their country—as well as Venezuela and the rest of the world—from the villainous Maduros. “Abduct” and “kidnap” morally invert the good guy and bad guy roles, and would portray US actors as the wrongdoers.

This particular form of word play is part of a pattern for corporate media under this Trump administration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) round-ups of migrants in the United States have featured what can most accurately be described as abductions or kidnappings of people—off the streets, at courts, in workplaces and elsewhere—by armed, masked and unaccountable agents, into unmarked vehicles. It’s little surprise, then, that immigration lawyers, members of Congress, and law professors (LA Times, 10/21/25), among others, routinely use the word “abduct” to describe these events.

And describing ICE’s practices as “kidnappings” isn’t some fringe view. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.) uses the word (Independent, 12/5/25), as does Rolling Stone editor Tim Dickinson (7/2/25), and the academic and author Natasha Lennard of the New School for Social Research in New York (Intercept, 7/1/25). ICE’s victims (Mother Jones, 7/18/27; NPR, 7/27/25) and their families (Guardian, 4/15/25, 6/10/25, 6/26/25) frequently describe their ordeal in such terms.

Yet corporate media eschew such language for the same sanitized “arrest” or “capture” language they employed for Maduro and Flores. When I used Factiva to pair “ICE” with the words “abduct” or “kidnap,” just two articles turned up that included the perspective that ICE “abducts” people (New York Times, 7/13/25; Washington Post, 12/3/25), both attributed to critical sources. Five (2%) included a version of the word “kidnap,” all in quotation marks.

Three of these quotes were from the much-maligned Venezuelan government (New York Times, 3/18/25, 11/25/25; Washington Post, 5/4/25), one came from a man whose father and daughter-in-law had been detained by ICE (Washington Post, 3/21/25), and another from a member of the Chicago Board of Education (New York Times, 10/22/25).

The language is freighted in the same way, whether it is migrants under attack from US jackboots, or those same forces unleashed against socialist politicians in Global South countries seeking to escape imperial domination.

January 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Everyone Wants Peace Until They Get Hit With The War Propaganda.

Caitlin Johnstone, Jan 15, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/everyone-wants-peace-until-they-get?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=184610045&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

Every normal person will tell you they want peace and abhor mass-scale violence. Then the mass media start doing what they always do and churning out stories about atrocities in an empire-targeted nation, and all of a sudden people find themselves supporting airstrikes on that nation’s capital, and believing they came to that position all on their own.

This happens because most people are unaware that the western news media do not exist to report the news. They exist to administer propaganda on behalf of the western empire.

Our news outlets. Our search engines. Our social media algorithms. Our most prominent online information resources. Our mainstream podcasts and Youtube pundits. Our AI chatbots. They’re all rigged by the rich and powerful to manipulate our understanding of the world. And most of us have no idea this is even occurring.

Propaganda is very effective if you don’t know it’s happening to you. That’s why westerners are far more propagandized than the populations of nations with overtly authoritarian governments. In a nation with strict speech laws and press regulation people know the state media they’re being fed is government propaganda, whereas westerners are so propagandized they don’t even KNOW they’re propagandized.

There’s an old joke that goes like this:

A Soviet and an American are on an airplane seated next to each other.

“Why are you flying to the US?” asks the American.

“To study American propaganda,” replies the Soviet.

“What American propaganda?” asks the American.

“Exactly,” the Soviet replies.

The mass-scale psychological manipulation worms its way into western minds without their having any idea that it’s happening. Then all of a sudden you’ve got Trump supporters who just spent ten years proudly proclaiming that their man is going to end all the wars and bring about world peace enthusiastically cheerleading for decapitation strikes in Tehran. They think they came up with the idea all on their own, but in reality they were skillfully manipulated into that position by the most powerful people in the world.

You see it over and over again. People’s natural, healthy impulse to support peace and oppose mass murder gets hacked and reversed by the mass-scale psychological manipulation of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed. From cradle to grave they are attacking our innate goodness and working to twist us toward evil and abusiveness.

We think we live in a free society, but in reality we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where people are systematically psychologically conditioned to support the world’s ugliest agendas driven by the most powerful and depraved individuals on our planet. The more you think about it, the creepier it gets.

But, again, propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. The more people understand that our view of world events is being aggressively manipulated by our rulers, the less effective these propaganda operations will become. All we have to do is help our fellow citizens and netizens wake up to the fact that that’s what’s going on. Once they lose the ability to manipulate the way we think, speak, act and vote, the possibility of a free and healthy world is just a click away.

January 20, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Aftermath of the Bondi massacre

14 January 2026 AIMN Editorial By Antony Loewenstein, https://theaimn.net/aftermath-of-the-bondi-massacre/

Welcome to 2026.

The year has started with a US invasion and kidnapping in Venezuela, ongoing Israeli killings in Gaza, surging violence in the West Bank, huge protests in Iran against its repressive regime, ongoing carnage in Sudan and seemingly never-ending attempts to silence Palestinian voices who dare to criticise Israel.

It’s hard not to feel despair at the state of the world and those forces pushing us towards greater division and violence.

After the horrific anti-Semitic terror attack at  Bondi Beach in December, Australia witnessed within hours a highly distasteful and co-ordinated attempt to politicise the massacre by many in the mainstream media and pro-Israel lobby.

Apparently it was the fault of the pro-Palestine marches since 7 October 2023 and criticism of the Jewish state’s actions in Gaza and beyond. There was no evidence for this, more a pre-determined vibe that joined dots that didn’t exist.

It was all deeply cynical and must be rejected by sane people everywhere. Anti-Semitism is an ancient disease and will be fought vigorously. Talking about Israeli war crimes and genocide in Palestine is NOT anti-semitic (as much as many want to claim that it is).

(For a reasoned and compelling examination of anti-Semitism, what it is and what it certainly is not, I recently read this fantastic 
 book on the subject, On Anti-Semitism: A Word in History by historian Mark Mazower).

Now is the time for sober and reasoned conversations about Palestine, free speech and the egregious attempts to shrink the public space for honest debate.

What needs to be repeated ad nauseam: Israeli criminality, live-streamed to our phones for 2+ years, plus the Zionist lobby’s insistence on curtailing free speech is leading to way more anti-Semitism in the wider community. That’s the conversation that’s rarely had.

It’s a period where most in the mainstream media have shown themselves to be utterly unwilling, unable or ignorant of the threat of the far-right, the growing collusionbetween Israel and global fascism and Big Tech oligarchy.

Corporate media won’t save us.

Independent media and voices have never been more important………………………..

Since the Bondi terror attack, I’ve spoken out extensively about the weaponisation of Jewish trauma in the service of draconian and racist policies + ideas.

I recently launched The Antony Loewenstein Podcast, a weekly show with comments and interviews on issues of the day. It’s available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. I’m also now on TikTok.

January 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Genocide isn’t a mistake. Which is why the media can’t tell you the truth about Gaza.

9 January 2026, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2026-01-09/genocide-isnt-mistake-gaza/

A new film about Hind Rajab’s murder points to a deeply sick Israeli society, driven into the darkest of places by a racist ideology that says Jewish lives count, Palestinian lives don’t

The Voice of Hind Rajab, a devastating dramatised retelling of Israel’s slow-motion murder of a five-year-old in Gaza, arrives in UK cinemas next week. Please take the opportunity to see it. The vast majority of Americans were denied such an opportunity when it was released there last month.

Here’s what happened to the film in the US, via New York Times columnist M Gessen:

The Voice of Hind Rajab had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September and took the Grand Jury Prize, the second-highest honor. A few days later, it was screened to great acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival.

High-profile US distribution companies came calling. But then, the producers Odessa Rae and Elizabeth Woodward told me, one by one the companies peeled off.

In the end, Woodward, who has a small distribution company, put together something akin to self-distribution. The movie opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday. Elsewhere in the world this film, shortlisted for the Oscar for best foreign movie, has major distributors – but not in the United States or Israel. That’s a kind of coordination, too.

That may be the nearest you will hear the New York Times admitting to an Israel lobby and its extraordinary power to shape the West’s cultural and information landscape.

It is almost impossible to get serious criticism of the Israeli state, which (falsely) claims to represent the Jewish people, anywhere near mainstream US culture, even when it takes the form of a critically acclaimed movie, backed by Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix, that received a record 23-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.

For decades, pro-Israel lobby groups have dedicated their efforts to telling us that antisemitism is rampant across the West and takes the form of opposition of Israel – a message endlessly amplified by the western media.

Note this: the “antisemitism” threat just so happens to have grown precisely in line with the realisation among an ever-widening section of western publics that Israel is operating a system of apartheid rule over Palestinians and is now committing genocide in Gaza.

The role of the lobby, so readily given a platform by the establishment media, is to conflate any resulting increase in criticism of Israel with an increase in antisemitism. The solution, it hardly needs pointing out, is to shut down criticism of Israel to reduce antisemitism.

With this logic dominant among the professional class in the West – in fact, with it serving as the price of admission to that class – it is presumably easy to warn off film distribution executives from allowing into US cinemas a film that bears witness to Israel’s killing of a five-year-old.

Hind Rajab’s murder, of course, was nothing exceptional. Tens of thousands of other children in Gaza have suffered similar fates at the hands of the Israeli army over the past 27 months, though their horrifying experiences have not been turned into a movie.

Like anyone trying to get more real information about Israel into the mainstream, I have direct experience of these difficulties myself. As a journalist at the Guardian 30 years ago, I found that my new-found interest in the Israel-Palestine issue after I had completed a masters in Middle East studies propelled me headlong into conflict with senior editors. It was an experience I had never had before, and one I was totally unprepared for.

What disorientated me at the time was that my editors were barely concerned whether a story about Israel was true or not, or whether it was interesting or not. Or whether I could make a good case based on reliable sources. It soon became clear to me that the yardstick they were employing was whether my proposed piece would undermine Israel’s moral case for being considered a self-declared “Jewish and democratic state”.

Note that the Guardian was and is exceptional compared to the rest of the British media in permitting trenchant criticism of Israel. But that criticism was, nonetheless, highly circumscribed. The paper made a clear distinction between Israel’s occupation, which it regarded largely as an unwarranted, criminal enterprise, and Israel’s status as a self-professed Jewish state.

Israel’s “Jewishness” was treated as a moral, unquestionable necessity and a safeguard against antisemitism.

In practice, this meant I could submit articles exposing the crimes Israel was committing in Palestinian areas under occupation, but only in so far as those related to the inevitable problems Israel had enforcing its “security” in the inherently insecure environment produced by its army illegally occupying another people.

Such articles were allowed on condition they did not conflict with the paper’s core editorial premise that, were Israel to leave the occupied territories and return to its internationally recognised borders, all would be well.

No articles were allowed – whether reports from the occupied territories or from inside Israel – that indicated there were inherent problems with the notion of Israel as a Jewish state, or questioned the assumption that a state defining itself in ethno-religious terms could also be a democracy.

This was the unspoken editorial formula:

• 
  Articles suggesting that the occupied territories were a gangrenous limb that needed amputating – ok.
• Articles suggesting that the illegal occupation was a natural outgrowth of a highly militarised state, driven by an expansionist ideology of Jewish supremacy that necessarily dehumanises Palestinians – not ok.

That is the reason the Guardian, like so many others, has struggled to come to terms with Israel’s genocide in Gaza over the past two years.

Genocide, and the overwhelming support for it among Israeli Jews, hints at a sickness within the Israeli state itself and the ideology of Zionism. That dark underbelly of ethnic nationalism cannot simply be amputated, like a gangrenous toe. The whole body politic is infected. A holistic, root-and-branch solution is needed, as it was with apartheid South Africa. A process of decolonisation must be instituted, a programme of truth and reconciliation is required.

These are the reasons why the Voice of Hind Rajab did not make it into US cinemas. Because the Israeli army’s hail of bullets into the car containing Hind and her family, the Israeli army’s long delaying tactics before allowing an ambulance to tend to Hind, and the Israeli strike on the ambulance after its route had been approved – none of that can be explained by a mistake, or even a series of mistakes.

Similarly, Israel’s murder of tens of thousands of children like Hind, and the starvation of the rest, cannot be explained by a mistake.

These aren’t mistakes. Genocide isn’t a mistake. It is evidence of a deeply sick society, driven into the darkest of places by a racist ideology that says Jewish lives count and Palestinian lives don’t.

January 15, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

“Another Monroe Doctrine”: Journalists Warn U.S. Strikes on Venezuela Signal a New Era of Intervention

By Joshua Scheer, January 5, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/05/another-monroe-doctrine-journalists-warn-u-s-strikes-on-venezuela-signal-a-new-era-of-intervention/

ith reporting from the streets of Caracas and analysis from Vijay Prashad, BreakThrough News breaks down what’s unfolding in Venezuela — from local resistance to the United States’ emerging new Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuelan journalist Andreína Chávez Alava, reporting from Caracas, describes the aftermath of the U.S. strikes and the capture of President Maduro. According to her reporting, local communities are organizing, following guidance from authorities, and preparing to “resist in the streets” in a show of solidarity. Chávez characterizes the attack as “an illegal U.S. bombing against a civilian population” and frames it as part of a broader effort to force regime change and assert control over Venezuela’s political direction and oil resources. She also warns that the operation may mark the opening phase of a wider U.S. campaign in Latin America, referring to it as “another Monroe Doctrine,” and says she intends to “continue denouncing by every means necessary” what she views as an assault on Venezuela.

In an interview from Caracas, Venezuelan journalist Andrea Nach Chavez describes the aftermath of a pre-dawn U.S. military attack on Venezuela, reporting that strikes hit multiple locations, including residential areas—contradicting Washington’s claim that only military targets were struck. Chavez asserts that President Nicolás Maduro has been kidnapped by the United States, rejecting U.S. narratives of an arrest or lawful capture and calling for proof of life and his immediate return.

Chavez reports that crowds have gathered in the streets of Caracas, not in celebration—as some Western outlets have suggested—but in solidarity and outrage, denouncing the attack as an illegal act of war and a renewed attempt at regime change aimed at seizing control of Venezuela’s oil resources. She dismisses U.S. claims about democracy promotion and drug trafficking as long-standing pretexts for intervention.

The interview also addresses what Chavez describes as a coordinated campaign of psychological warfare and misinformation, particularly on social media, contrasting it with the Venezuelan government’s insistence that Maduro remains the country’s legitimate president and its call for popular and institutional resistance.

Contrary to portrayals of chaos, Chavez describes a population responding with calm vigilance: businesses largely closed, communities checking on one another, and people focused on securing essentials rather than celebrating political upheaval. She emphasizes that years of U.S. sanctions—especially the devastating measures imposed in 2017–2018 that crippled the oil industry and triggered a humanitarian crisis—have hardened Venezuela’s capacity for resilience and self-organization.

Chavez points to community-based food distribution programs and renewed domestic production as evidence that Venezuela has become less vulnerable to external pressure. She concludes by stressing the strength of the civilian-military alliance and the necessity of international solidarity from Latin America and the Global South, warning that the current assault signals a broader U.S. interventionist strategy rooted in a revived Monroe Doctrine. The interviewer underscores the critical role of independent and community journalists in countering Western media narratives and documenting events on the ground.

Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, offers his analysis of the U.S. strikes on Venezuela and the capture of President Maduro. In his view, the operation is driven by Washington’s long‑standing interest in controlling Venezuela’s oil reserves and weakening the Bolivarian Revolution. Prashad describes what he calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, placing the current actions within a broader historical pattern of U.S. intervention in Latin America. He also warns that Trump’s recent claim that the United States will “run Venezuela” could lead to what he characterizes as “a worse fiasco than Iraq.”

Prashad interprets Trump’s remarks not merely as bluster but as an implicit admission that Washington lacks a viable civilian proxy capable of governing Venezuela. He points to the political weakness and internal divisions of the U.S.-backed opposition—particularly the inability of figures like María Corina Machado to consolidate power—as well as the reconvening of Venezuela’s National Assembly, which complicates U.S. plans for a clean political handover.

Drawing on Trump’s past criticisms of the Iraq War, Prashad recalls Trump’s argument that the U.S. should have directly seized Iraq’s oil to finance the occupation. He notes that the legal groundwork for U.S. intervention in Venezuela predates Trump, tracing it to a 2015 Obama-era executive order that declared Venezuela a national security threat—an order Trump has expanded and weaponized.

While skeptical of the U.S. capacity to directly govern Venezuela—given catastrophic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan—Prashad warns that Trump’s rhetoric cannot be dismissed as harmless. Even limited intervention, he argues, could result in a debacle surpassing previous U.S. military disasters.

The discussion situates recent U.S. military strikes and electronic warfare operations in the Caribbean within a broader strategic doctrine. Prashad explains that Trump’s national security strategy revives the Monroe Doctrine, asserting unilateral U.S. dominance over the Western Hemisphere—a doctrine he describes as updated through a “Trump corollary” that justifies intervention by any means necessary. He likens recent operations to the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, suggesting a similar strategy of overwhelming force combined with symbolic spectacle.

Prashad further argues that Venezuela is only one node in a larger destabilization strategy aimed at isolating Nicaragua and Cuba, while facilitating a regional political shift. He points to the decline of Latin America’s “pink tide” governments and the rise of an “angry tide” of right-wing regimes, warning that upcoming elections in countries like Brazil and Colombia could further consolidate this shift.

Addressing economic justifications for intervention, Prashad rebuts claims—such as those made by Stephen Miller—that Venezuelan oil constitutes stolen “American wealth.” He explains that the Chávez government did not nationalize oil outright, but instead asserted greater state control over surplus extraction through the 2001 hydrocarbons law. The framing of Venezuelan oil as inherently American, he notes, has long been central to U.S. policy, reinforced by figures like Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO and Trump’s secretary of state.

Prashad emphasizes that U.S. interest in Venezuela is not driven by domestic energy needs—since the U.S. is a major oil exporter—but by the desire to control global energy flows and prevent oil revenues from supporting left-wing governments or international solidarity efforts, such as aid to Haiti.

In closing, Prashad offers a personal reflection on President Maduro, describing him as a reluctant leader who inherited a historic crisis rather than seeking power. He cautions against sections of the left abandoning Maduro without reckoning with the broader structures of imperial power at play. The discussion concludes with a call to engage with Tricontinental’s research on hyperimperialism and the shifting political terrain of Latin America and the Global South.

January 14, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment