A massacre within a massacre: How journalists reporting on Gaza deaths are being targeted
Over 160 media workers have been killed and 60 detained as the methodical destruction of the brutalized Strip continues.
Eva Bartlett, 9 Nov 24 https://www.rt.com/news/606860-journalists-killed-reporting-gaza/
In spite of experiencing two Israeli wars on Gaza, I never imagined the horrific scenes coming out of northern Gaza now: Israel is exterminating the population in broad daylight, broadcast for all the world to see.
And no one is doing a damn thing to stop it.
Israel has besieged northern Gaza for weeks, preventing most humanitarian aid from entering, putting the population of 400,000 already starving Palestinian civilians in the north at severe risk of full starvation. The Israeli parliament has voted to ban UNRWA, the United Nations agency for humanitarian aid, which has been the sole lifeline for many Palestinians.
Israeli forces have also bombarded water stations and wells, as well as cutting off communications with the outside world, depriving people of access to water, and leaving them trapped and isolated.
According to Euro-Med Monitor, in the last two weeks, 500 Palestinians have been confirmed dead in northern Gaza, “and thousands more have sustained injuries. Many remain unaccounted for, either in the streets or buried under the debris.”
As they have done elsewhere throughout the Gaza Strip during more than one year of genocide, Israeli forces are targeting hospitals in Gaza’s north. Euro-Med reported that, “Israeli army forces surrounded the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia. They fired two artillery shells at the hospital, cut off its electricity, and targeted anyone moving in the area.”
The army is firing on medics and other rescuers, as they’ve done throughout 2023-2024, and as they did in 2009, when medics I was with came under Israeli sniper fire, and another medic I knew was killed by a flechette (dart) bomb. By killing the rescuers and destroying the hospitals, Israel ensures maimed Palestinians will go without medical care and probably die.
This is, of course, illegal under international law. But as Israel’s genocidal actions have shown the world, the Israeli government, army and settlers believe laws don’t apply to them. Take the horrific video of an Israeli drone precision-targeting a Palestinian child, killing it, and then bombing the civilians who ran to try to rescue the child. Par for the course for the Israeli army. Were the perpetrator one of the United States’ enemies, there would be calls for no-fly zones, sanctions and corporate media howling 24/7
Not content to merely murder Palestinian civilians by bombing, sniping and starvation, the Israeli army has reportedly been deploying robots with explosives and leaving booby trapped barrels to remotely detonate.
The scenes which journalists have been able to publish are surreal, like science fiction, with quadcopters policing the streets. A week ago, a friend told me in a message that he had to choose between starving or risking being shot dead by Israel soldiers or quadcopters if he tried to get bread.
Some days ago, he messaged me at 4 in the morning: Israeli tanks were outside his home, the audio he sent was terrifying. He chose to stay in his home rather than endure another Nakba.
I don’t know if he is alive now.
War on journalists
Earlier this month, Palestinian cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi was shot in the neck by an Israeli quadcopter, leaving him paralyzed. Aside from Al Jazeera, for which Fadi worked, most Western media and journalist projection organizations are unsurprisingly silent.
Reporters Without Borders, which I previously wrote about for its downplaying the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel, has no entry on Fadi. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP), at least, does. Its entry notes:
“Al Wahidi was critically injured in the neck by a bullet fired from an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft while Al Wahidi and correspondent Anas Al-Sharif were covering an Israeli siege on northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp. Both men were wearing “Press” vests and clearly identifiable as journalists.”
Anas al-Sharif – who continues to courageously report from northern Gaza – told CJP they’d been in an area “completely far from the areas of operations of the Israeli occupation forces,” and full of residents when, “an Israeli reconnaissance drone fired at us. After the shooting, we tried to move to another safer place and hide from any danger, but a bullet from the plane hit our colleague Fadi Al-Wahidi in the neck, which led to his complete paralysis.”
Wahidi has since fallen into a coma. His colleagues and friends are pleading for some sort of international intervention to allow him to be taken abroad for medical care, to save his life.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported, citing the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), that between 7 October 2023 and 10 October 2024 168 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in the Gaza Strip, including 17 women, 360 were injured, and 60 were detained.
The extermination campaign continues
It’s absolutely devastating to watch every day pass with alarming new updates from or on northern Gaza. Like Anas al-Sharif, Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat courageously reports apocalyptic scenes of Israeli bombarding in northern Gaza.
In a live update on X recently, he said:
“We are witnessing genocide and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, specifically in Jabalia, which is under siege from all directions. Israeli occupation forces are bombing displaced civilians, detaining them, and attempting to ethnically cleanse them. They are targeting shelters for displaced civilians, and bodies are scattered everywhere in the north, along the roads. Thousands of civilians are being forcefully displaced (ethnically cleansed) from the north.”
Meanwhile, in a bout of meaningless theatrics, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin have “demanded Tel Aviv improves the humanitarian situation in Gaza within 30 days or risk losing US military aid and face possible legal action.”
But clearly Israel’s biggest backer is spouting nonsense: there will be no cut to military aid, there will be no legal action, the US will never take a position to force Israel to cease the massacre in Gaza. In fact, giving Israel one month before any supposed repercussion is, in my opinion, giving Israel a green light to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza as quickly as possible.
Israel seems hell-bent on implementing former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s ‘Five Fingers’ project, which envisioned carving Gaza into segments, all under Israeli security control. If this is Israel’s intent, we will see the same bloody scenes from northern Gaza repeated block by block Israel all over the rest of the already brutalized Strip.
Prepping Readers to Accept Mass Slaughter in Lebanese ‘Strongholds’
Belén Fernández, November 9, 2024, https://fair.org/home/prepping-readers-to-accept-mass-slaughter-in-lebanese-strongholds/
Back in May 2015, the New York Times’ Isabel Kershner decided to moonlight as an Israeli military propagandist by penning an alleged exposé (5/12/15)—headlined “Israel Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk”—in which she diligently conveyed all that Israel had to say about Hezbollah’s infrastructure in south Lebanon.
The minuscule hamlet of Muhaybib, for example, was said to contain no fewer than “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three anti-tank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post.” In the village of Shaqra, home to approximately 4,000 people, the Israeli army had meanwhile identified some “400 military sites and facilities belonging to Hezbollah.”
Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that “the Israeli claims could not be independently verified.” But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation, where Israel could not afford to concern itself with civilian lives in any future conflict. Driving the point home was former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, who informed Kershner that “many, many Lebanese will be killed” in the next showdown with Hezbollah.
I happened to be in south Lebanon at the time of the article’s publication, and drove over to Muhaybib and Shaqra to check out the fearsome landscape. Though I did not encounter any Hezbollah command posts, I did see some schoolchildren, elderly folks, bakeries, farms, clothing shops and, in Shaqra, a colorful establishment offering “Botox filling.”
Legitimizing destruction
Nine years have now passed since Kershner’s bout of weaponized journalism, and Amidror’s words have certainly rung true: Many, many Lebanese have been killed in Israel’s latest war on Lebanon.
From October 2023 through November 5, more than 3,000 people have been slaughtered in the country—among them 589 women and at least 185 children. The vast majority were killed in September through November of 2024, when Israel ramped up its assault on Lebanese territory as a sideshow to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
More than 800,000 people have been displaced. Muhaybib has literally been blown up in its entirety, and much of Shaqra has been pulverized as well. Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly a quarter of all buildings along the entire southern border.
And while the United States newspaper of record and other Western corporate media outlets have not exactly been preemptively calling in the strikes, à la Kershner, they have nonetheless done a fine job of legitimizing mass killing, displacement and destruction in other ways.
For starters, as FAIR has written about recently (10/10/24), there’s the insistence on following the US/Israeli lead in branding Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization and a “proxy” for Iran. Never mind that the Shia political party and armed group emerged as a direct consequence of the 1982 US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people and constituted a textbook case of terrorism, including the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
When Israel in September staged an unprecedented terrorist attack in Lebanon by detonating personal electronic devices across the country — killing 12 people, including two children—CNN (9/17/24) spun the episode thusly: “Exploding Pagers Injure Members of Iran-Backed Terror Group.”
Converting communities into targets
Then there is the matter of the term “Hezbollah stronghold,” to which pretty much every corporate media outlet has proved itself hopelessly addicted when describing the densely populated neighborhood of Dahiyeh in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
The Guardian (10/4/24) was one of numerous outlets that referred to Dahiyeh, a densely packed Beirut suburb, as a “Hezbollah stronghold”—painting the entire community was a legitimate military target.
Devastated in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, Dahiyeh is now once again under maniacal bombardment by the Israeli military, which on September 27 leveled a whole residential block in order to assassinate Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Sure enough, the New York Times (9/27/24) was standing by with the headline: “Israel Strikes Hezbollah Stronghold in Attempt to Kill Leader.”
Just google “Hezbollah stronghold” and you’ll see what I mean — that the press is apparently incapable of talking about Dahiyeh any other way. Or, if you’re not in the mood for googling, here are some illustrative links to the Washington Post, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, NBC News, Reuters and Associated Press. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
To be sure, there is substantial public support in Dahiyeh for Hezbollah—not that support for an anti-Zionist resistance organization should make anyone fair game for extrajudicial slaughter. There is also support for numerous other Lebanese parties and groups in this neighborhood of nearly 1 million people, although the “stronghold” designation tends to erase the diversity that exists.
But the real problem with the terminology is that, when deployed in the context of war, a “stronghold” is more likely to be interpreted as “a fortified place”—the first definition of the word appearing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In that sense, then, Dahiyeh is effectively converted into a legitimate military target, its inhabitants dehumanized by the linguistic arsenal of a media establishment that is ultimately committed to validating Israeli massacres of civilians.
And it’s not only Dahiyeh. The press has now expanded its obsessive use of the “stronghold” descriptor in accordance with Israel’s current killing spree in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, both of which regions we are now continuously reminded are also “Hezbollah strongholds.” When the Lebanese health ministry reported 60 killed in airstrikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on October 29, the BBC noted that “rescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.”
Back in July, the same outlet had warned that the south Lebanese city of Tyre would “be in the firing line in the event of all-out war, along with the rest of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.” Four months later, Tyre and the rest of southern Lebanon are an unmitigated horrorscape, blunted for a Western audience by media euphemism.
The Government-Media-Academia Misinformation Machine and “Ukraine’s Victory”
Russian and Eurasian Politics, by Gordonhahn, November 9, 2024
The U.S. government’s infiltration into mass media and academia may finally become exposed and its enormous misinformation and divisive effect on the American body politic perhaps diminished as a result of its massive overeach in a matter of war and peace – specifically the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War.
Those who comprise the government-media-academia complex have teams of researchers, access to government data, vast funding and other resources. They know or can learn the facts but choose to relay to the public fake realities. In short, what I describe below are not mistakes but intentional and well-worked out lies designed to manipulate the public contrary to its interests. If the reality were offered to the public, it would see how it runs counter to its interests and would seek policy changes.
This is what we heard from the flagship propaganda organ of said complex – the New York Times – in July as Russia’s offensive gained steam: „Russia is unlikely to make significant territorial gains in Ukraine in the coming months as its poorly trained forces struggle to break through Ukrainian defenses that are now reinforced with Western munitions, U.S. officials say“ (www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/us/politics/russia-ukraine-nato.html). At the same time, the axis in the persons of such ‚observers‘ as former U.S. General David Patraeus and former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul was feeding the American public quite the same line: that Ukraine was winning and would win (even as it said that Russia threatened all of Europe with military conquest).
There are alternative, if ostracized and little known sources for gathering real facts. Not to toot my own horn, but I noted in January 2024 on Glenn Diessen’s and Alexander Mercouris’s podcast that Russia would be very gradually increasing its territorial gains in hunting and ultimately defeating the Ukrainian armed forces: „There will be a very, very gradual acceleration, intensification of the offensive, the Russian…‚aggressive attrition‘ will gradually become more successful in that more and more territory will be taken each month, a few square kilometers more each month in the winter and spring, and then the big question becomes: Will Russia decide to turn that gradual succes into a major offensive…“ (https://youtu.be/P_MJi5H6HKU?si=rxRiaE0EglSgbclw, at the 1:00:45 mark).
In February 2024, I wrote: „This winter, with the demonstrated failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive obvious by autumn, we have begun to witness Russian forces’ transition to attrit and advance across the entire front, except on the Krynki foothold on the southern Dniepr in Kherson. In November, Russian forces occupied an addition some 13 kilometers and tripled that result in December. We can expect in January a multiple of December’s 40+ kilometers, evidencing the second ‘advance’ aspect of ‘attrit and advance’.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………….Now, as Ukraine’s defense lines are dissolving and its forces are retreating to the Dnieper River, the propaganda complex’s deceptive narrative has come in grave danger of being utterly exposed. This and nothing else, except perhaps a command from Pennsylvania Ave. or Langley, the complex flagship New York Times is coming clean in order to cover its ass, albeit. And it demonstrates what I — a lone, unknown, fully ostracized researcher — was writing early this year.
The intellectual universe in the US is so spoiled that the NYT had to turn to a foreign institute to provide data for its belated, truth-telling, coming clean article. It cites Finnish mapper and analyst Pasi Paroinen. Citing Paroinen, the NYT admits now Russian forces have been making large gains for three months: „Half of Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine so far this year were made in the past three months alone, according to Pasi Paroinen, a military expert with the Finland-based Black Bird Group.“ „In August, Ukraine’s defensive lines buckled, and Russia rapidly advanced 10 miles“ In October, Russia made its largest territorial gains since the summer of 2022, as Ukrainian lines buckled under sustained pressure. October’s gains amounted to “more than 160 square miles of land in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region”(www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-ukraine-maps.html). But the However, NYT nor any other US mainstream media source or expert mentioned Russia’s August gains.
Moreover, the NYT came clean on something even more important: the im pending, if not imminent collapse of the Ukrainian frontline defense and army: NYT reported in a different piece that „Ukraine has enough soldiers to fight for six to 12 more months, one official said. After that, he said, it will face a steep shortage” (https://archive.is/QgomM). Collapse can occur well before the ‚steep shortage.‘
The NYT article only cites Poinenen regarding Russian gains in Donetsk, but Russian gains are being made all along the front line from the north in Kharkiv to the south in Zaporozhe. Paroinen’s measurement of overall Russian gains so far in 2024 confirms my own expectation of gradually increasing Russian territorial gains:………………………………………………………………………………………..
Naturally, the NYT tries to cover up the fact that all during this period of mounting Russian gains until the last day in October, it as the rest of the U.S. and Western mass media told readers that there was a stalemate in Ukraine…………………………………………………
The NYT and other organs of the government-media-academia do one thing somewhat effectively: glossing over its presentation of fables over fact, covering its ass, its tracks and the dripping Ukrainian blood (not to mention that of Russians and others). Will Americans see state apparat and its media-academic complex now? https://gordonhahn.com/2024/11/09/the-government-media-academia-misinformation-machine-and-ukraines-victory/
101 BBC journalists say it is biased against Palestine
Sat 2 Nov 2024, https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/101-bbc-journalists-say-it-is-biased-against-palestine/
JVL Introduction
The BBC has been accused of bias against Israel but here over 230 people, including 101 BBC journalists have argued that there is a strong bias towards Israel and certainly the Israeli narrative. The letter was sent to the Independent arguing that Broadcaster bias is failing to hold Israel to account.
It is noteworthy that only 72 of the 230 signatories felt able to sign openly and this included none of the BBC journalists. Distrust of mainstream media is growing but there is a real need for unbiased reporting. The BBC has previously claimed that the fact it receives complaints from those in support of Israel as well as those in support of Palestine shows its impartiality. This letter, and many other articles and letters before, show this to be nonsense.
LL
This article was originally published by Digi on Fri 1 Nov 2024. Read the original here.
Hundreds of journalists and personalities accuse BBC of bias in favor of Israel and call for a return to “fairness and impartiality”
More than 230 members of the media industry and personalities, including 101 BBC employees, accuse the British media outlet of providing favourable coverage of Israel and call on the public broadcaster to “recommit to fairness, accuracy and impartiality” in its reporting on the Gaza Strip.
Digi
In a letter sent to Tim Davie, signed by more than 230 members of the media industry, including 101 anonymous BBC employees, the corporation is criticized for failing to enforce its own editorial standards by lacking “fair evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza.”
Seen exclusively by The Independent, the letter, which was also signed by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and actress Juliet Stevenson, calls on the BBC to report “without fear or favour” and “to recommit to the highest editorial standards – with an emphasis on fairness, accuracy and due impartiality.”
The letter also calls on the broadcaster to implement a number of editorial commitments, including “reiterating that Israel does not offer foreign journalists access to Gaza; clarifying when there is insufficient evidence to support Israeli claims; clarifying where Israel is the perpetrator in article titles; including the usual historical context before October 2023; and firmly challenging the Israeli military and government in all interviews.”
The BBC denied these claims, insisting that it “strives to live up to our responsibility to provide the most reliable and impartial news”.
“When we make mistakes or have made changes in the way we report, we are transparent. We are also very clear with our audience about the limitations imposed on our reporting – including the lack of access to Gaza and restricted access to certain parts of Lebanon, as well as our continued efforts to attract reporters to those areas,” a spokesperson said.
Other signatories on the list include historian William Dalrymple, Dr. Catherine Happer, lecturer in sociology and director of media at the University of Glasgow, Rizwana Hamid, director of the Centre for Media Monitoring, and broadcaster John Nicolson.
This is not the first time the BBC has been criticised for bias during the Gaza war. In September, the BBC rejected claims that it had violated its own guidelines more than 1,500 times following a controversial report that claimed some BBC correspondents had excused or downplayed Hamas’ activities. A BBC spokesperson said at the time that it would “carefully consider” the complaint, but denied the allegations of bias.
However, the signatories of the letter insist that the BBC favors Israel. A current staff member who signed the letter told The Independent that some of their colleagues had left the institution because of its cover-up. “I have never witnessed, in my entire career, such low levels of confidence,” they said. “I have colleagues who have left the BBC in recent months because I simply don’t think our reporting on Israel and Palestine is sincere. Many of us feel paralyzed by fear.”
Another said they were “losing faith in the organisation they work for” after seeing a “huge difference” in the BBC’s approach to Israel. They added: “I really care about the future of the BBC and every day I see that we are losing the trust of audiences around the world. People change the channel to find the reality of what’s going on because we just don’t give it to them.”
Examples provided by staff include “dehumanizing and misleading headlines,” including the one given to an article about a six-year-old girl who was shot by the Israeli army in Gaza in January 2024. Speaking about the headline “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help,” a signatory of the letter said: “This was not an act of God. The perpetrator, Israel, should have been on the front page and it should have been clear that she was killed.”
“Palestinians are always treated as an unreliable source and we consistently prioritise Israel’s version of events, despite the IDF’s well-documented history of lying,” says another BBC employee, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“It seems that we often prefer to drop Israel from the title, if possible, or question who might be to blame for the airstrikes. The level of verification expected for anything related to Gaza far exceeds what is the norm for other countries,” he said.
Other concerns raised by staff include coverage omissions, such as the failure to livestream the plea of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice on January 11, but the choice to livestream Israel’s defense the next day.
Of the 237 signatories, 72 signed publicly, including former British Foreign Secretary and Baroness Warsi and actress Juliet Stevenson, as well as dozens of academics. The letter, while focusing on the BBC, also highlights the shortcomings of other media outlets, including ITV and Sky.
“This conflict is one of the most polarizing stories that people are reporting on, and we know that people feel very much about how it is presented, not only on the BBC, but in all media. The BBC holds itself to very high standards and we strive to fulfil our responsibility to provide the most reliable and unbiased news – weighing and measuring the words we use, fact-checking and seeking a wide range of interviews and expert opinions,” the BBC said.
While acknowledging that “the BBC does not and cannot reflect any worldview”, a spokesperson insisted that it receives an almost equal measure of complaints alleging bias against Israel. “This does not mean that we assume that we are doing something right and continue to listen to all criticism – from inside and outside the BBC and reflect on what we can do better,” the institution also said.
Israel kills the journalists. Western media kills the truth of genocide in Gaza
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’
Jonathon Cook, Middle East Eye – 25 October 2024
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza – in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis – civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive – as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one – in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On Thursday night, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of hiw deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters this week, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide – from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel
Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached this week in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable – but sadly was all too predictable – CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
n its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims – even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians
Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations – including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian – are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
…………………………………………………………………………………………… Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last
……………………………………………………………………………………... Crushing dissent
Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its western patrons in crushing dissent at home. …………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-10-25/israel-kill-journalists-genocide-gaza/
Despite History of Fabrication, Press Uncritically Covers IDF-Provided Documents on Hamas
a pattern of Israel engineering misleading narratives to shape public opinion, and fabricating the evidence needed to do so.
Bryce Greene, FAIR, 1 Nov 24
Earlier this month, the New York Times (10/12/24), Washington Post (10/12/24) and Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) each published front-page articles based on different sets of documents handed to them by the Israeli military.
Israel claims it seized all the documents—in the form of meeting minutes, letters and planning documents—in its ground invasion of Gaza, and that they reveal insights into Hamas’s operations prior to the October 7 attacks. The documents include alleged evidence of Hamas’s pre-10/7 coordination with Iran, plans to blow up Israeli skyscrapers, and even a scheme to use horse-drawn chariots in an attack from Gaza.
Documents received directly from intelligence agencies should always be treated with skepticism, and that’s especially true when their government has a well-documented history of blatant lying. Yet leading newspapers took these Israeli document dumps largely at face value, advancing the agenda of a genocidal rogue state.
A history of lying
Israel’s use of fabrications to shape public perception is well known, and was put on display early in the assault on Gaza that began last October. After an explosion at Al Ahli hospital killed and injured hundreds (misreporting of which caused a great deal of confusion), the media naturally pointed the finger at Israel. The Israeli government, concerned about the public backlash, denied responsibility, claiming that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (See FAIR.org, 11/3/23.)
To back up their claims, Israel released a recording allegedly capturing two Palestinian militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by the firm Earshot found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together (Channel 4, 10/19/23). In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip in an attempt to clear itself of war crimes in the public mind.
Investigations based on open sources have since come to various conclusions about the attack (Guardian, 10/18/23; Bellingcat, 10/18/23; Human Rights Watch, 11/26/23; AP, 11/22/23; Michael Kobs, 2023; New Arab, 2/19/24), but Israel’s fraudulent attempt to manipulate evidence certainly suggests that they had something to hide, and demonstrates their lack of reliability as a media source. Recently, the UN released a report accusing Israel of systematically targeting healthcare infrastructure in Gaza, making their denials of this earlier attack far less credible.
In another instance, Israel presented 3D renderings of a supposed Hamas “command center” beneath Al Shifa hospital, claiming it was based on intelligence. However, no such command center was ever found (FAIR.org, 12/1/23). Upon storming the hospital, Israel staged scenes in order to bolster claims that the facility was used by militant groups. The deception was so blatant that mainstream outlets were openly calling it out.
Recently Israel was caught actually providing fabricated documents to the press with the aim of manipulating public opinion. Earlier this year, the Israeli government provided documents to both the Jewish Chronicle (9/5/24) and the German paper Bild (9/6/24) that purportedly showed that Hamas had no interest in a ceasefire, and had a plan to sneak the late Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar out of Gaza to Iran, along with some of the remaining hostages. The reports were then uncritically repeated in outlets like the Times of Israel (9/6/24).
Shortly after these documents were published, the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth (9/8/24) reported on an internal IDF investigation that found that they had been leaked to foreign media as part of a campaign to “shape public opinion on Israel.” The documents were determined to be forgeries, after a comprehensive search of all databases containing documents found in the wake of Israel’s operations. The IDF told the paper that an investigation was underway to determine the origin of the leak.
This non-exhaustive list of examples demonstrates a pattern of Israel engineering misleading narratives to shape public opinion, and fabricating the evidence needed to do so.
Questionable authenticity
Whether they are authentic or not, it is clear that the documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post serve the same purpose of propagandizing on behalf of Israel. In an attempt to preserve some journalistic integrity, the Post and Times both gave separate justifications for why they believed the respective documents leaked to them were authentic.
The Post was quick to note that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established,” but gave readers the impression there was reason to believe they were real. First, it claimed that the contents of the documents it received were
“broadly consistent” with US and allies’ post–October 7 intelligence assessments about Hamas’s long-range planning and complex relationship with Iran.
…………………………………………..While Haaretz made no note of the leaked documents provided to the Wall Street Journal, the article ironically acknowledged that
having them published by Fox News or even the Wall Street Journal would have looked like an Israeli public diplomacy operation rather than a legitimate journalistic investigative report.
Haaretz noted that the documents promote narratives that “Israel would be happy to burn into the world’s consciousness,” namely the well-known propaganda effort to equate Hamas with organizations that are universally reviled by Americans. The Post documents purportedly outlined a Hamas plan to blow up a skyscraper in Tel Aviv, evoking the September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center:
The Hamas documents are supposed to bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel isn’t fighting against a liberation movement seeking to free the occupied Palestinian people, or even against a paramilitary organization that is poorly funded and trained and lacks planes, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, tanks and artillery….
Rather, it is fighting a terrifying “axis of evil” led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.
Haaretz also argued that this kind of propaganda campaign was designed to ensure that the violence continues to escalate:………………………………………………………….
………………….Israel’s campaign of genocide in Gaza and greater war in the Middle East has been successful in part because the Israeli government can count on Western press to present and contextualize facts in a way that advances their narrative. Despite Israel’s long history of fabrications, the corporate media will dutifully republish documents, statements and explanations with complete credulity. https://fair.org/home/despite-history-of-fabrication-press-uncritically-covers-idf-provided-documents-on-hamas/
Atomic Reaction – a highly recommended feature-length documentary film.
Atomic Reaction (90 minute documentary film)
Gordon Edwards. 30 Oct 24
This feature-length documentary film tells the story of how Canada supplied uranium for the World War II Atomic Bomb Project by using the leftovers from a radium mine on the shore of Great Bear Lake, just south of the arctic circle, and – of central importance – the radium refinery in Port Hope Ontario several thousand miles away. When uranium from the Congo entered the picture in December 1942, it too was refined at Port Hope for the Bomb program.
The film also tells the story of the most expensive and extensive environmental cleanup of any municipality in Canadian history, a cleanup of 1000 radioactively contaminated buildings (including homes and schools) in Port Hope that is costing 2 and a half billion dollars. The “cleanup” has been going on for forty years and just got a 10-year extension in 2023. The result of the cleanup will be an enormous engineered earthen mound of about one million tonnes of radioactive waste material that will remain dangerous for many thousands of years.
The gigantic “engineered mound” for Port Hope waste is situated in a marshy area just north of the town, on land that slopes down through the town to Lake Ontario. Incidentally, this small mountain of radioactive waste is not intended to be permanent but only good for the first 500 years, after which further decisions will have to be made. On the other hand the Chalk River mound (the so-called “Near Surface Disposal Facility”, which I call “the megadump”), although inspired by the Port Hope mound, is intended to be permanent. While the Port Hope mound is primarily built to hold highly dangerous naturally-occurring radioactive materials, associated with uranium ore processing, the Chalk River mound is designed to hold mainly human-made post-fission radioactive materials that were not found in nature before 1939. There are three court challenges to the CNSC 2022 approval of this “megadump” that are currently underway.
Atomic Reaction has been shown at the Uranium Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro, where it was given honourable mention, and more recently at the Durham Region International Film Festival in Ontario. On October 27 and 29 it was aired on the CBC Documentary TV Channel, where I saw it for the first time and was favourably impressed by how well the film-makers tell a complicated story in a clear and understandable way, with powerful visuals. The film will be available on GEM TV (streaming online) starting in January.
Look for it early in the New Year. It is well worth watching, once or even twice or more.
Meltdown nightmares: silent spring for climate change
“Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change,” strips away the myth that nuclear energy solves climate change
By Choi Hee-jin, October. 29. 2024, Korea Times: https://m-koreatimes-co-kr.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=384891—
Asia is buzzing with the 2024 Nobel Prize announcements. The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to a Korean author, Han Kang, and the Peace Prize to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, formed by Hibakusha in 1956 to improve support for victims and lobby governments to abolish nuclear weapons. Today, I would like to introduce a timely book that came out this summer on the topic of the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring,” a landmark book that ignited the modern environmental movement by exposing the hidden and devastating effects of widespread pesticide use. Her message raised public awareness about the harmful effects of DDT and led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Consequently, it contributed to banning DDT in the United States in 1972 and internationally in 2004.
Like Carlson’s book, the recently released “Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change,” strips away the myth that nuclear energy solves climate change and calls our attention to nuclear power. Its authors are Doug Brugge, professor and chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut, and Aaron Datesman, visiting professor at the University of Virginia and engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Before delving into the book, some fundamental questions about climate change should be addressed. Is climate change real? Yes, it is happening. As temperatures continue to rise swiftly, the melting of glaciers and polar ice is becoming more pronounced, serving as a visible and reliable sign of climate change. What is the cause? There is much debate on this topic, but human activity — particularly our reliance on fossil fuels in built environments, cities, and infrastructure — is the main culprit. What is crucial in addressing climate change? Time. It depends on how quickly we switch from fossil fuels to other energy sources. Nuclear power, even in “highly developed” countries, takes a significant amount of time to implement as a solution.
Hidden Costs
Brugge and Datesman conclude that the effects of nuclear power may be more severe and longer lasting because some radioactive materials have such long half-lives, and nuclear accidents are so catastrophic. It exposes the hidden problems of the nuclear industry by looking at its impacts on people and the environment, with a focus on uranium mining, waste management and the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
Uranium mining disproportionately impacts Indigenous communities, leaving a legacy of pollution and health problems. The waste dilemma poses another challenge, with no permanent storage solution for high-level nuclear waste, potentially poisoning water, food chains and ecosystems for thousands of years.
The history of Fukushima and Chernobyl still haunts us and reminds us of the danger of nuclear accidents. The authors say even well-designed reactors are prone to failure due to human error, natural disaster or terrorism. These types of accidents would be a national security issue and would require massive long-term clean-up, and the communities affected would continue to live with the effects.
Economic realities of nuclear power
The economics of nuclear are also covered. Supporters point to the financial benefits of nuclear. But the book shows that the actual costs still need to be added in. Recent numbers bear this out: between 2010 and 2020, the cost of utility-scale solar and onshore wind fell 85 percent and 56 percent, respectively, while nuclear costs increased. The economics are shifting and making nuclear look less and less like a solution to climate change. The authors argue that renewable energy technologies offer a safer and more viable path to a decarbonized future.
A call for responsible energy choices
Nuclear power is being promoted as a solution in many countries and regions. Still, its inherent risks and unsolved problems mean there are better options for achieving net zero emissions and a carbon-free world. “Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in the Age of Climate Change” calls for global action to transition to more sustainable and equitable energy solutions. No one knowingly leaves a ticking time bomb in their house when there are safer alternatives.
In industrial history, miners would take small canaries deep into the earth, their delicate respiratory systems acting as an early warning system for toxic gases. A canary’s song, or its silence, could mean the difference between life and death for miners. While we continue to grapple with the ever-present dangers of invisible nuclear radiation and the consequences of its hazardous waste, we seem to treat future generations as unwitting canaries.
Perhaps the debate over nuclear power is outdated. It is essential to envision a completely new society with a carbon-free economy that ensures sustainable prosperity. We need to invest boldly in new alternatives and develop innovative technologies that harness nature’s limitless energy before it’s too late.
Choi Hee-jin is the author of “Future Cities” in The Routledge Handbook for Sustainable Cities and Landscapes in the Pacific Rim (2022), Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow (2023), and founder and CEO of RestFullness(restfullness.net), a platform for rest. She leads vocational formation and leadership sessions and coaches young leaders at METES Institute(metes.io).
Media Hawks Make Case for War Against Iran
This depiction of Iran as an aggressor that has victimized the United States for 45 years, causing “suffering for thousands of Americans,” is a parody of history. The fact is that the US has imposed suffering on millions of Iranians for 71 years, starting with the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. It propped up the brutal Pahlavi dictatorship until 1979, then backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran, helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iranians (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13). It imposes murderous sanctions on Iran to this day (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23).
What Stephens is deploying here is the tired and baseless propaganda strategy of hinting that World War II redux is impending if America doesn’t crush the Third World bad guy of the moment.
Gregory Shupak, FAIR, 25 Oct 24
The media hawks are flying high, pushing out bellicose rhetoric on the op-ed pages that seems calculated to whip the public into a war-ready frenzy.
Just as they have done with Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 10/10/24), prominent conservative media opinionators misrepresent Iran as the aggressor against an Israel that practices admirable restraint.
Under the headline, “Iran Opens the Door to Retaliation,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (10/1/24) wrote that Iran’s October 1 operation against Israel “warrants a response targeting Iran’s military and nuclear assets. This is Iran’s second missile barrage since April, and no country can let this become a new normal.”
The editors wrote:
After April’s attack, the Biden administration pressured Israel for a token response, and President Biden said Israel should “take the win” since there was no great harm to Israel. Israel’s restraint has now yielded this escalation, and it is under no obligation to restrain its retaliation this time.
‘We need to escalate’
The New York Times‘ self-described “warmongering neocon” columnist Bret Stephens (10/1/24), in a piece headlined “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran,” similarly filed Iran’s April and October strikes on Israel under “aggression” that requires a US/Israeli military “response.” And a Boston Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that Iran “launched a brazen attack,” arguing that the incident illustrated why US students are wrong to oppose American firms making or investing in Israeli weapons.
All of these pieces conveniently neglected to mention that Iran announced that its October 1 missile barrage was “a response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Hezbollah and Hamas” (Responsible Statecraft, 10/1/24). One of these assassinations was carried out by a bombing in Tehran, the Iranian capital. But we can only guess as to whether the Globe thinks those killings are “brazen,” Stephens thinks they qualify as “aggression,” or if the Journal believes any country can let such assassinations “become a new normal.”
Likewise, Iran’s April strikes came after Israel’s attack on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers (CBS, 4/14/24). At the time, Iran reportedly said that it would refrain from striking back against Israel if the latter agreed to end its mass murder campaign in Gaza (Responsible Statecraft, 4/8/24).
‘Axis of Aggression’
A second Stephens piece (New York Times, 10/8/24) claimed that “the American people had better hope Israel wins” in its war against “the Axis of Aggression led from Tehran.” The latter is his term for the coalition of forces resisting the US and Israel from Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran, which refers to itself as the “axis of resistance.” Stephens’ reasoning is that, since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the country has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran; the diplomatsand Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping.
The war Israelis are fighting now—the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war,” but is really between Israel and Iran—is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.
This depiction of Iran as an aggressor that has victimized the United States for 45 years, causing “suffering for thousands of Americans,” is a parody of history. The fact is that the US has imposed suffering on millions of Iranians for 71 years, starting with the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. It propped up the brutal Pahlavi dictatorship until 1979, then backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran, helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iranians (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13). It imposes murderous sanctions on Iran to this day (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23).
Given this background, suggesting—as the Journal, the Globe and Stephens do—that Iran is the aggressor against the US is not only untenable but laughable. Furthermore, as I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 1/21/20), it’s hardly a settled fact that Iran is responsible for Iraqi attacks on US occupation forces in the country. Stephens’ description of the Navy SEALs who died in the Red Sea is vague enough that one might be left with the impression that Iran or Ansar Allah killed them, but the SEALs died when one of them fell overboard and the other jumped into the water to try to save him (BBC, 1/22/24).
Stephens went on:
Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.
We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.
What Stephens is deploying here is the tired and baseless propaganda strategy of hinting that World War II redux is impending if America doesn’t crush the Third World bad guy of the moment. More realistically, the “future of freedom” is jeopardized by the US/Israeli alliance’s invading the lands of Palestinian and Lebanese people and massacring them. These crimes suggest that, in the Journal’s parlance, it’s the US/Israeli partnership that is the “regional and global menace.” Or, to borrow another phrase from the Journal’s editorial, it’s Israel and the US who are the “dangerous regime[s]” from which “the civilized world” must be defended.
‘A global menace’
Corporate media commentators didn’t stop at Iran’s direct strikes on Israel, casting Iran as, in the Journal‘s words (10/1/24), “a regional and global menace”:…………………………………………………………………
Painting Iran as the mastermind behind unprovoked worldwide aggression helps prop up the hawks’ demands for escalation. But the US State Department said there was “no direct evidence” that Iran was involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, “either in planning it or carrying it out” (NBC, 10/12/23)…………………………………………………………………………………..
Propaganda goes nuclear
As usual, those who are itching for a war on Iran invoke the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) wrote:
This year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran was within a week or two of being able to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. Even with the requisite fissile material, it takes time and expertise to fashion a nuclear weapon, particularly one small enough to be delivered by a missile. But a prime goal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is plainly in sight, especially if it receives technical help from its new best friends in Russia, China and North Korea.
Now’s the time for someone to do something about it.
That someone will probably be Israel.
By “something,” Stephens said he also meant that “Biden should order” military strikes to destroy the “Isfahan missile complex.” “There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too,” Stephens wrote suggestively.
The LA Times published two guest op-eds in less than two weeks urging attacks on Iran based on its alleged nuclear threat. Yossi Klein Halevi (10/7/24) wrote:…………………………………..
‘Threshold’ is a ways away…………………………………………………….
Recent history shows that Iran has been willing to “stop itself” from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran abided by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal, under which Iran limited its nuclear development in exchange for a partial easing of US sanctions. It stuck to the deal for some time even after the United States unilaterally abandoned it.
Just before President Donald Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018, the IAEA reported that Iran was “implementing its nuclear-related commitments” under the accord. The year after the US abrogated the agreement, Iran was still keeping up its end of the bargain.
‘Provocative actions’ from US/Israel
Iran subsequently stopped adhering to the by then nonexistent deal—often advancing its nuclear program, as Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24) noted, “in response to provocative actions from the US and Israel”:
In early 2020, the Trump administration killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and soon after Tehran announced that it would no longer abide by its enrichment commitments under the deal. But, even so, Tehran said it would return to compliance if the other parties did so and met their commitments on sanctions relief.
In late 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by Israel. Soon after, Iran’s Guardian Council approved a law to speed up the nuclear program by enriching uranium to 20%, increasing the rate of production, installing new centrifuges, suspending implementation of expanded safeguards agreements, and reducing monitoring and verification cooperation with the IAEA. The Agency has been unable to adequately monitor Iran’s nuclear activities under the deal since early 2021.
However, situating Iranian policies in relation to US/Israeli actions like these would get in the way of the Journal’s campaign, which it articulated in another editorial (10/2/24), to convince the public that “If Mr. Biden won’t take this opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, the least he can do is not stop Israel from doing the job for its own self-preservation.”
Of course, the crucial, unstated assumption in the articles by Stephens, Halevi, Heilman and the Journal’s editors is that Iran’s hypothetical nuclear weapons are emergencies that need to be immediately addressed by bombing the country—while Washington and Tel Aviv’s vast, actually existing nuclear arsenals warrant no concern. https://fair.org/home/media-hawks-make-case-for-war-against-iran/
Ha ha. – Facebook removed my post AGAIN!
Hardly surprising ! –
“We removed your post” – We removed your post – Noel Christina Wauchope Oct 14, 2024
This was the post: FACEBOOK hits a new low – removing a post that congratulated the Nobel Peace Prize winners !
I didn’t read their “reasons”. But I guess, as usual, I have “offended community standards” by saying something negative about nuclear. https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/uk-and-ireland-partners-congratulate-2024-nobel-peace-prize-winner/
Oct 14, 2024 We removed your post Noel Christina Wauchope Oct 14, 2024 https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/uk-and-ireland-partners-congratulate-2024-nobel-peace-prize-winner/ You shared this on your profile
Israel’s War on Journalism
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years………..What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Chris Hedges, October 25, 2024, https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/25/chris-hedges-israels-war-on-journalism/
Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.
It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves.
As the playwright Harold Pinter said:
US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next.
The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished.
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors. Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.
And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel’s onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza.
Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770 Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.
Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible. These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The New York Times, The Intercept writes, “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”
“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”
“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.
Retired general David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception.
Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There’s such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Lying Western Press Scramble To Frame Israel’s Attack On Iran As Self Defense.
26 Oct 2024 JOHNSTONE radio, Israel has launched a round of airstrikes on Iran which the western news media are falling all over themselves to falsely frame as “retaliatory” strikes against an unprovoked missile attack by Iran.
Let’s talk about…Mainstream Media (MSM) Coverage of Israeli War Crimes
Truth is irrelevant, narrative is all. That’s how the media works.
Kit Knightly, Off-Guardian Thu, 24 Oct 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/495700-Lets-talk-about-MSM-coverage-of-Israeli-War-Crimes
Two weeks ago, it was widely reported across all the Western legacy media that Israel had fire-bombed a hospital leaving patients to burn to death in their beds.
A few days later, we were told by the same Western legacy media that Israeli strikes inside Lebanon had destroyed a 2000-year-old village.
Today, CNN’s front page hosts an IDF soldier describing Israel’s practice of using civilians as human shields in Gaza, while the Guardian details an Israeli strike on school-turned-bomb shelter in Gaza.
Now, it’s not at all unusual that Israel should be committing war crimes, they’ve been doing so unchecked for decades.
But what is less usual is seeing these war crimes appearing on front pages and in headlines in the controlled media.
We’ve all been doing this long to have dispelled any idea the MSM cares about truth.
They don’t care about truth. Not at all. In fact these days their internal structures barely permit them to recognize truth as a concept.
Nothing – nothing – is so true the media have to report it, no crimes are so brutal they can’t be ignored.
Case in point, in Odessa in 2014 civilians protesting the NATO-backed coup in Ukraine were chased inside the Trade Union building by pro-coup neo-Nazis.
The building was barricaded and set on fire. People climbing out of the windows to escape the flames were shot at.
Forty people died, shot or burned to death. The neo-Nazis responsible celebrated by showing pictures of beetles being set alight (their disparaging term for ethnic Russians was “Colorado beetles” in reference to the orange and black ribbon of St George they wore).
How did the legacy media respond to this murder?
Well, they just lied.
They claimed the protesters set the fire by accident when they were throwing Molotov cocktails off the roof. This was a complete fabrication, contradicted by CCTV evidence, blaming the victims and covering for the fascists, but so what? They media didn’t care, they just kept repeating the lie and are still doing so today
Truth is irrelevant, narrative is all. That’s how the media works.
They’ve done the same in the past for Israel , the US, Saudi Arabia, NATO…whoever…countless times over the years.
And yet here we are, in 2024, with these Israeli crimes all over the controlled news.
They could lie if they wanted, as they usually do.
But they aren’t.
It prompts the eternal question: “Why this? Why now?”
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
Israel Continues Its War On Journalism
Caitlin Johnstone, 24 Oct 24, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-continues-its-war-on-journalism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=150646353&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
An Israeli airstrike destroyed the press office of the Lebanese news broadcaster Al Mayadeen on Wednesday night, continuing Israel’s historically unprecedented military assault on the press.
Also in continuation of Israel’s war on journalism, the IDF has published the names of six Al Jazeera reporters who it claims are actually members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, citing as evidence documents which it claims Israeli forces found in Gaza. These allegations would mark these journalists as legitimate military targets.
Al Jazeera has denounced these claims as unfounded, saying in a statement, “The Network views these fabricated accusations as a blatant attempt to silence the few remaining journalists in the region, thereby obscuring the harsh realities of the war from audiences worldwide.”
There is of course no reason to ever believe any claim Israel makes about anything whatsoever absent mountains of independently verifiable evidence, after the mountains of lies it has churned out over the last year. The fact that western news outlets are treating these allegations as plausible is evidence of their propagandistic nature.
Israel claims everyone it wants to kill is Hamas. The journalists are Hamas, the hospitals are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the aid trucks are Hamas, the schools are Hamas, the mosques are Hamas, the water infrastructure is Hamas, the civilian homes are all Hamas, and Hamas is hiding behind every woman and child in Gaza. The only exception to this rule is in Lebanon, in which case everyone Israel wants to kill is Hezbollah.
Israel hates truth, which is why it kills journalists at every opportunity and blocks them from entering Gaza. This is because truth tends to have a marked anti-Israel bias.
We saw this illustrated recently when Israel announced that there’s a secret Hezbollah bunker underneath a hospital in Beirut, so the press simply sent a bunch of reporters to go investigate because Israel can’t block the press from entering Lebanon like it can in Gaza. Even western outlets like the BBC and Sky News entered the hospital and interviewed medical staff, reporting that they found no trace of evidence supporting Israel’s claims and that the hospital staff all denied the existence of any Hezbollah bunker on the premises. And you may be sure those outlets would have eagerly reported any sign of Hezbollah if they were given the opportunity.
Criminal institutions need to function in the dark. They cannot function in the light of visibility and critical journalism and inconvenient video footage. That’s why the mafia murders witnesses. That’s why the inner workings of the US war machine are shrouded in government secrecy. That’s why Julian Assange spent five years in a maximum security prison. And that’s why Israel does everything it can to kill and obstruct journalists who tell the truth about its crimes.
Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News
Mint Press News, October 16th, 2024, Alan Macleod
ne year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.
The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.
Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.
White House Insider
Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.
Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.
Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
An Infamous Spy Agency
Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s largest and most controversial division.
Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyberwarfare, since October 7, 2023, the group has been at the forefront of the world’s attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine dead and around 3,000 people injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta.
Unit 8200 has also constructed an artificial intelligence-powered kill list for Gaza, suggesting tens of thousands of individuals (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the primary targeting mechanism the IDF used in the early months of its attack on the densely populated strip.
Described as Israel’s Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will be picked for service there, unlocking a lucrative career in Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector.
It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians.
Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel. One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.
Unit 8200 operatives have gone on to create some of the world’s most downloaded apps and many of the most infamous spying programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus was used to surveil dozens of political leaders around the world, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan’s Imran Khan.
The Israeli government authorized the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the most authoritarian governments on the planet. This included Saudi Arabia, who used the software to surveil Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.
A recent MintPress News investigation found that a large proportion of the worldwide VPN market is owned and operated by an Israeli company headed and co-founded by a Unit 8200 alumnus.
In 2014, 43 Unit 8200 reservists penned a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit on account of its unethical practices, which included making no distinction between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also noted that their intelligence was passed on to powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.
This public statement left Ravid bristling with anger at his co-workers. In the wake of the scandal, Ravid went on Israeli Army radio to attack the whistleblowers. Ravid said that to oppose the occupation of Palestine was to oppose Israel itself, as the occupation is a fundamental “part” of Israel. “If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, “then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system… and 8200 is a great spin.”
Leaving aside Ravid’s comments, the question arises: is it really acceptable that members from a group designed to infiltrate, surveil and target foreign populations, that has produced many of the planet’s most dangerous and invasive spying technology, and is widely to be behind sophisticated international terror attacks, are writing Americans’ news about Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in U.S. media were outed as intelligence officers for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Russia’s F.S.B.?
News About Israel, Brought to You by Israel
Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with deep ties to the Israeli state, however. Shachar Peled spent three years as an officer in Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour’s shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist.
Another Unit 8200 agent who went on to work for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the field and news desk producer for CNN’s notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem Bureau, where she was one of the principal journalists shaping America’s understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
CNN’s penchant for hiring Israeli state figures continues to this day. Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network, producing much of its Israel/Palestine content. This is despite having previously served as an official IDF spokesperson in the Israeli Defense Forces.
The New York Times, meanwhile, hired Anat Schwartz, an ex-Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer with zero journalistic experience. Schwartz co-wrote the infamous and now discredited “Screams Without Words” expose, which claimed that Hamas fighters systematically sexually violated Israelis on October 7. Times staff themselves revolted over the lack of evidence and fact-checking in the piece.
Multiple New York Times employees, including star columnist David Brooks, have had children serving in the IDF; even as they report or offer opinions on the region, the Times never disclosed these glaring conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it purchased a Jerusalem house for its bureau chief that was stolen from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi in 1948.
MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg (an American) dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising). In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that, while serving in the IDF., he helped cover up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
Social media companies, too, are filled with former Unit 8200 agents. A 2022 MintPress study found no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 operatives working for Google.
Facebook also employs dozens of ex-spooks from the controversial unit. This includes Emi Palmor, who sits on Meta’s oversight board. This 21-person panel ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other offerings, adjudicating on what content to allow, promote, and what to suppress……………………………………
Top Down Pro-Israel Censorship
When it comes to the Israeli attack on its neighbors, corporate media has consistently displayed a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, regularly refrains from identifying the perpetrator of violence when that perpetrator is the Israeli military and described the 1948 genocide of around 750,000 Palestinians as a mere “migration.” A study of the paper’s coverage found that words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” appear 22 times more frequently when discussing Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the gigantic disparity in the number of people killed on both sides.
Meanwhile, in a story about how Israeli soldiers shot 335 bullets at a car containing a Palestinian child and then shot the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives” – a title that could be interpreted that her death was a tragic accident.
This sort of reporting does not happen by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top. A leaked New York Times memo from November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times’ staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.
CNN staff are under similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”
Both the Times and CNN have fired multiple journalists over their opposition to Israeli actions or support for Palestinian liberation. ………………………………………………………………………………
Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?
Since Israel could not continue to prosecute this war without American aid, the battle for the American mind is as important as actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war wages, the lines between journalist and fighter blur. The fact that many of the top journalists supplying us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former Israeli intelligence agents only underlines this. https://www.mintpressnews.com/revealed-israel-unit-8200-spies-american-media/288457/
1 This Month
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com/
12 February – Webinar The Big Push: New Nuclear Projects in Canada
Thursday, February 12, 7 pm Eastern | 2nd of 4 sessions in the 2026 Nuclear Waste Online webinar series
Join a webinar on the push for new nuclear generation in Canada. Go to Northwatch.org to register or use the registration link https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZfWOf1GITqSRIZX8CB-A9w
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