nuclear-news

CNN’s Israel bias has been laid bare. But CNN is the norm, not the exception

Middle East Eye, By Jonathan Cook, 9 February 2024 

Western media can never truly report the extent of Israel’s criminality because to do so would be to expose their long-running complicity in those crimes

eaks from within CNN reveal that for months its executives have been actively imposing an editorial line designed to reinforce Israel’s framing of events in Gaza, to the point of obscuring atrocities by the Israeli military. 

The dictates, say insiders, have resulted in senior staff refusing to accept assignments to the region “because they do not believe they will be free to tell the whole story”. Others suspect they are being kept away by editors who fear they will fight the restrictions. 

Internal memos insist that stories be approved by the station’s Jerusalem bureau, where staff are widely seen as partisans who slant reports in Israel’s favour. Palestinian perspectives are tightly restricted.

“Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice,” one staffer told an investigation by the Guardian newspaper.

According to staff accounts, CNN’s pro-Israel directives come from the very top – Mark Thompson, a TV executive who was hired from the BBC. Thompson, the Guardian article notes, was remembered by BBC staff for “bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions” – presumably one of the qualifications that won him the job heading CNN. 

It was he who notoriously championed in 2009 the BBC’s controversial decision for the first time not to air the annual fundraising appeal of the Disasters Emergency Committee, which is a group of major British charities, because the monies were going to Gaza after Israeli bombing had devastated it. 

Alongside the unhappiness at CNN, there is reported to be disquiet at the BBC. Staff, including senior presenters, held a meeting last month with Director General Tim Davie, one of Thompson’s successors, to accuse the corporation of anti-Palestinian bias.

They expressed concerns about the “dehumanising” language used to describe Palestinians killed in Gaza and the BBC’s failure to cover important stories reported by Al Jazeera and other networks.

A source told the Deadline website that the group of dissenters was surprised by Davie’s candour. He is said to have admitted that the pro-Israel lobby “was more organised than Palestinian supporters in its dealings with the BBC”.

Skewed agendas

None of this should come as a surprise.

Middle East Eye has highlighted the clearly skewed priorities of western news agendas since Hamas broke out of Gaza on 7 October – some 17 years after Israel began imposing a military siege that had already left the enclave barely habitable. 

In the carnage that day caused by Hamas’ attack – as well as Israel’s indiscriminate violent response – some 1,139 people in Israel were killed. 

As MEE has noted previously, the entire western press corps, not just CNN and the BBC, has failed in its basic duty to present a balanced picture of what has been going on over the past four months. 

It has also failed to treat Israeli claims with the scepticism they deserve, especially since Israel has a long track record of being caught out in lies and deceptions. 

Paradoxically, given its exposure of concerns at CNN, many of the accusations of journalistic failure levelled at CNN and the BBC could be directed at the Guardian newspaper too – or any other establishment media organisation.

Following Hamas’ 7 October break-out, Israel unleashed a devastating assault on Gaza’s population – so far leaving tens of thousands of Palestinians dead or missing under rubble.

Yet all western media misleadingly continue to frame Israel’s rampage in Gaza – including the collective punishment inflicted on civilians by denying them food and water – variously as “retaliation”, “a war with Hamas”, and “an operation to eliminate Hamas”. 

Western media have also largely avoided characterising as “ethnic cleansing” the Israeli military’s order for Palestinians to leave their homes. As a result, 1.7 million have been trapped in a small area in southern Gaza where they face relentless bombing. 

Similarly, there has been almost no mention of a long-held plan by Israel – which it now appears close to realising – to drive Gaza’s population into the Sinai desert, in neighbouring Egypt. 

And the same media outlets have refused to connect the all-too-obvious dots that Israel – in destroying most of Gaza’s homes, forcibly shutting almost all of its medical facilities and cutting off food and water, while also demanding international defunding of Unrwa, the United Nations’ main aid agency to Gaza – is pursuing an openly genocidal policy. 

Israel is making Gaza unlivable, just as Giora Eiland, adviser to the Israeli defence minister, vowed Israel would do at the outset of its assault: “Gaza will become an area where people cannot live.”

When the media do refer to genocide, it is strictly in the context of the International Court of Justice’s decision to put Israel on trial for the “crime of crimes”. Even then, the establishment media have largely minimised the significance of the World Court’s ruling, or even spun it as a victory for Israel. 

Astonishingly, the ICJ’s panel of 17 justices has proven to be far more courageous than western media journalists. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Career suicide

The problem is not just that the western media have acted as one in blanking out persuasive evidence of the crimes Israel committed on 7 October. They have also, again as one, been credulously ascribing particularly barbarous crimes to Hamas on the most tenuous of evidence – unsubstantiated claims that Israel has then been using to justify its genocidal rampage. 

That started in the immediate wake of 7 October with allegations that Hamas had variously beheaded babies, hung them from washing lines and roasted them in ovens. These claims were even echoed by the White House.

There is still zero evidence for any of them. 

CNN staff are upset that Hadas Gold, one of its reporters in Jerusalem – part of the unit vetting all copy about Gaza – uncritically recycled lies from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The real pressures

The Guardian offers various explanations for why CNN has failed so dismally to cover properly the slaughter in Gaza. All have an element of truth about them. 

CNN is indeed afraid of antagonising the US government and challenging a critical part of its foreign policy agenda. 

There are undoubted commercial pressures from advertisers. The Israel lobby can be confident its threats will be taken seriously when journalists face being accused of antisemitism for stepping out of line.  And all of these pressures are compounded by the difficulties its journalists face in accessing Gaza. 

But what the Guardian does not want its readers to notice is that all of these pressures apply not just to CNN but to every other corporate media outfit, including the Guardian itself. Which is why the failures are across the board, not confined to one or two broadcasters. …………………………………………………………….

The large corporations and billionaires that own the media are heavily invested in the arms and fossil fuel industries that require the West’s continuing colonial-style, military dominance of the planet and its resources……………………………… more https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/cnn-israel-bias-laid-bare-norm-not-exception

June 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Searchlight Journalist Receives 2024 MOLLY Award for Story on Trucheña Whose Plutonium Count Was New Mexico’s Highest

Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety Basia Miller, 31 May 24

The Austin newspaper, the Texas Observer, chose Searchlight reporter Alicia Inez Guzmán, to receive its 2024 MOLLY Prize on May 30th. Guzmán holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in New York. Her article, “Buried Secrets, Poisoned Bodies,” is exemplary investigative journalism. https://searchlightnm.org/buried-secrets-poisoned-bodies/ The prize, awarded to only one journalist a year, honors Molly Ivins, the Observer editor for six years in the 70’s.

Alicia, newly given the nuclear affairs beat at Searchlight, had been immediately intrigued on learning that a woman from Truchas was found at her death to have 60 times as much plutonium in her body as the average New Mexican. Alicia knew Truchas well. She’d grown up in the mountain village, elevation 8,000 feet and her grandfather and uncles had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as had Alicia, who interned there one summer.

The reporter’s challenge was two-fold, both to identify the unknown woman and probe the origin of the very high plutonium readings. To that end, Truchas village offered the possibility of a deeply personal connection and at the same time could serve as a point of leverage to investigate, measure, and publicize the threat of nuclear contamination to New Mexico’s residents.

Guzmán first explored Trinity Site statistics, since places as far away as Rochester, NY—2500 miles away—saw their nuclear readings rise from the drift after the 1945 test explosion there, just before the U.S. dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This takes Guzmán to the LAHDRA report (the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment, a project of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)) containing statistics on nuclear fallout. It includes autopsies–critical information in this case of questionable legality–for understanding how radiation affects the human body. Here Guzmán finds the very high readings for the Trucheña, still nameless. She says,

The only fact is the plutonium itself. Somewhere, somehow it          

entered her body in the form of barely visible specks of alpha

radiation. And once there, those particles began a long migration,

from her bloodstream to her kidneys and, ultimately, to her liver. The

question is how?

…………………………………………………………Alicia Guzmán’s article comes full circle, as she has been able to give the unknown Trucheña a solid identity for the record, and bring a kind of justice to a small corner of the world by discovering many truths for the family.    http://nuclearactive.org/—

June 2, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

SOS – An Antidote to Crackpot Neo-Nuclearism

“One cannot exist without the other.  Without civil nuclear power, there can be no military nuclear power, and without military nuclear power, there is no civil nuclear power.” – French President Emmanuel Macron

“Imagine a death technology calling itself a nuclear renaissance. All it is, is a nuclear rebirth of an even more gouging crony capitalism, or corporate welfare system.” – Ralph Nader

Nuclear power in the US is in decline…42 reactor projects were abandoned, 41 built but closed, and scores now operate only thanks to government rescues…Nuclear power is a minor distraction, adding each year at best only as much electricity supply as renewables add every few days. It has no business case or operational need anywhere. – Amory Lovins

[C]ivilian nuclear power is merely a cover for producing more nuclear weapons.” – Alfred Meyer

By James Heddle By Mary Beth Brangan – EON, MAY 31, 2024,  https://planetarianperspectives.substack.com/p/sos-an-antidote-to-crackpot-neo-nuclearism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=518676&post_id=145178002&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=cqey&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Psychopathological Nuclear Revivalism is on the Loose

At the last COP 28 Climate Summit, over 20 nuclear nations on four continents and their allies and vassal states pledged to triple their ‘nuclear capacities’ by the year 2050, thus multiplying planet-wide nuclear risks by orders of magnitude. Source

·      The U.S., China and Russia each have plans to build nuclear reactors on the moon. The reactors would be constructed by robots, run remotely via AI, and be prototypes for subsequent installations on other planets in the first phase of the hubristic galactic imperialism agenda. Source

·      Nuclear propulsion and energy production in space are considered essential for military uses like High Energy Laser (HEL) directed energy weapons, and for mining the resources on asteroids and other planets. Source

      Although no working model of much-touted Small, Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) has yet made it off the drawing board, mass production of such reactors continues to be advocated both as a fictitious ‘solution’ for climate change, and as a necessary power source for the planned build-out of Artificial Intelligence (AI) facilities.

·      This is the same specious rationale being used for extending the operating licenses of obsolete, aged, inadequately maintained old style nuclear reactors that are scheduled for shutdown and decommissioning – like Diablo Canyon. There is even a push to restart obsolete reactors already shutdown like Palisades in Michigan.

     The burgeoning spent nuclear fuel management industry is dominated by companies with dubious, predatory companies like Holtec International, which have their eyes on the massive accumulated decommissioning funds at each reactor site, dumping radioactive waste water into adjacent water systems, and even repurposing decommissioning sites for installation of their own brand of SMNRs.

   Former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, now head of the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation justifies nuclear revivalism because it supports the Nuclear Navy, spear tip of American power projection around the planet.

·      Nuclear energy, weapons and radioactive waste management industries are key, interlocking components of the Permanent War Economy, yet they could not survive without massive government subsidies and support (both overt and covert) with taxpayer dollars.

In her book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, M.I.T. professor and environmental historian Kate Brown reveals the schizoid cognitive and ethical contradictions of societies organized around the production of the deadly man-made element plutonium.  It is a history with relevance today. As the developments listed above clearly show, Crackpot Nuclearism is having a heyday.

In the widest context, this is the implied scope of what we have dubbed in our film ‘the San Onofre Syndrome.’  It is the dedication of unlimited resources to a quintessentially totalitarian technology, the products and societal spin-offs of which are antithetical to democracy and to life in all its forms.

While our just released, multi-award-winning feature documentary SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy – focuses on the potential impacts of informed people power, and the universal conundrum of responsible radioactive waste management, our broadest intent is to use SOS screenings as a wake-up call and catalyst for discussions helping to make viewers aware of the enveloping presence of what is termed by proponents and critics alike the over-arching ‘the nuclear enterprise.’  

The Nuclear Enterprise impacts virtually all sectors and institutions of our society and incorporates the mutually co-dependent nuclear energy and nuclear weapons production industries, their shared industrial base of extraction, milling, fabrication, transportation; an extensive infrastructure of education, research, labor training; the growing radioactive waste management industry; and a powerful lobbying arm with global reach.  It is a ‘public-private partnership’ on steroids.

We have examined aspects of this Nuclear Energy-Weapons-Waste Complex and the geopolitical and cosmic context for the ‘Save Diablo’ PsyOp in previous articles including: The Real Nuclear Triad; Joined At The  Hip; Nuclear Revivalism as a Cargo Cult; and The Hydra-Heads of Armageddon Man.  Because of the widespread impacts of this Nuclear Industrial Complex, we now live in a literally MAD world in which the certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction of adversarial nuclear weapons states is seen as the main ‘deterrent’ to nuclear war.  Is this clearly insane, or what?

 Both government control of business (or ‘communism’), and business control of government (or ‘fascism’) are in the thrall of the nuclear enterprise – or nuclear energy-weapons-waste complex. 

Our documentary SOS, The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy, portrays a microcosm of this general situation with universal implications. We show the reality of this monstrous death industry, and the state and federal agencies that provide for its support, structure, and funding through portraying the events at San Onofre and the ordinary citizens who grapple with them.

Our five main characters work tirelessly to first shut down the leaking reactors that they live close to, and then discover the horrifyingly inept waste management plans.

The waste is being stored only 108 ft. from the rising ocean, in a tsunami and flooding zone, surrounded by earthquake faults and only inches above rising groundwater.

The industry does not have a plan for how to remove the waste or to safely move it technically, yet it promises the public that if it only had a place to put it, it would be easily transportable.  Billions are being dangled before impoverished – often minority – communities to allow them to be ‘consolidated interim storage’ sites, or CIS.

SOS specifically opposes the concept of Consolidated Interim Storage (CIS). CIS requires that the lethal waste be moved twice.  We also oppose the storage and long-distance transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) in unsafe containers.  We oppose the idea of contaminating yet more land and communities, which are most of the time poor, minority people. 

SOS explicitly advocates for ongoing, transgenerational stewardship of spent fuel on existing reactor sites (or as close by as is safely possible to avoid the horrendous transportation risks) using aspects of the Swiss model for interim storage. 

The parts of the Swiss model technology that we need in the U.S. are:

1) a hot cell/dry handling facility for robotic handling; and

2) repackaging of the waste from inevitably short-term canisters into thick, monitored, inspectable, retrievable casks;  

3) stored in secure, climate-controlled buildings as close to the site of generation as is safely possible;

4) with ongoing skilled maintenance for as long as it is necessary.

This of course, is needed at every reactor site in the U.S. (and beyond) that currently is storing the ever-increasing volume of this lethal material.  Each site’s needs would be in the billions of dollars to do this properly.  But the industry makes decisions based on profit and so far, believes it won’t profit from safely managing the waste.

Therefore, it thinks of the problems of radioactive waste and nuclear risks in general, as a Public Relations problem and that if they only solve the P.R. problem, they can keep on making the messes and making profits from supposedly ‘dealing’ with them the cheapest, fastest way.  The billions in trust funds set aside for decommissioning from years of ratepayers’ fees are used by the industry with no adequate oversight or auditing.

So, this industry that must operate flawlessly to avoid catastrophic damage to the planetary DNA of all living creatures, makes decisions based on profits, not public health and safety.

Not even considering the any other adverse effects of this ultimate destructive force, the problem of the everlasting poisonous waste alone, in a sane society, would be enough to ban the use of this technology either for weapons or for boiling water to produce electricity.

 For more information and viewing options:

SanOnofreSyndrome.com

June 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Endless Trump reporting in USA media, but very little reporting of genocide in Gaza

Why so little reporting of genocide in Gaza?

Walt Zlotow, 22 May 24 https://heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com/

If you only watch mainstream news, cable and network, you may not even be aware the US is enabling Israel’s grotesque genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. There’s a couple of reasons for that.

The entire commercial media has largely scrubbed reporting on genocide there. To cover it would reveal US complicity in the first major genocide of the 21st century, destroying any semblance of a livable existence for 2,300,000 Palestinians. Why expose the truth which doesn’t fit the now debunked narrative of American exceptionalism and decency round the world.

But there’s a more ghoulish reason scenes of genocide in Gaza are missing from the American version of Pravda. Israel is killing as many reporters on the ground as US 2,000 lb. bombs can obliterate. In the first 7 months of the genocide, 143 Palestinian reporters have been killed. That is more reporters than were killed in WWII and Vietnam War combined. But worse, it only includes credentialed reporters, not the many uncredited bloggers, writers and their family members killed along with them.

As in previous Israeli campaigns in Gaza, virtually all international media professionals are barred from entering Gaza to ensure Israeli crimes against the entire Palestinian people go unreported. Israel also imposes a gag order on its own journalists who might dare report the truth of its 8 month long genocide enabled by America. Just this week Israeli authorities seized Associated Press broadcasting equipment in southern Israel and blocked the outlet’s live feed of Gaza.

Turn on the endless loop of Trump trial coverage that passes for informing the American public and ponder: ‘If the genocide in Gaza is not being covered…does that mean it’s not happening?’

May 23, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | 1 Comment

New Lines: How Washington is Weaponizing Media

New Lines Magazine purports to be an independent media organization. Yet it constantly attacks genuine alternative media who stray from Washington’s official foreign policy line, all while employing many spooks, spies and other figures at the heart of the national security state.

Worse still, its parent organization, the New Lines Institute, has recently admitted to being directly funded by the U.S. government. MintPress News takes a closer look at this shady organization acting as Washington’s attack dog.

A Slick, Well-Funded Organization

If you read the Wikipedia entries for many alternative media outlets, they are written off as fringe conspiracy websites pushing debunked foreign propaganda. MintPress News, for example, is described as a “far-left news website” which “publishes disinformation and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” The Grayzone is similarly smeared as a “fringe” blog known for its “misleading reporting” and “sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes” such as Syria, Venezuela and China.

The evidence for these evidence-light smears comes primarily from the U.S. foreign policy journal, New Lines Magazine, a product of the New Lines Institute. New Lines is a very new organization that was established only in 2020. Despite this, it has already become a key player in setting U.S. agendas worldwide, boasting a staff of more than 50 and working with over 150 contributors. Headquartered on the prestigious Massachusetts Avenue NW (some of the most expensive real estate in the world), it sits between foreign embassies and many of America’s most prestigious think tanks, a stone’s throw – metaphorically and physically – from the White House.

New Lines describes its goal as “seeking to shape U.S. foreign policy” based on a “deep understanding of distinct regional geopolitics and value systems.” It began by focusing solely on the Middle East but quickly expanded to cover Ukraine, China, Venezuela and other political hotspots that most concern hawks in Washington. It certainly shapes public debate, and its research and experts are regularly quoted in influential outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN.

A Rogue’s Gallery of U.S. Officials

New Lines presents itself as an independent organization, claiming that it is “one of the few think tanks in Washington with no foreign or local agendas.” Yet its higher ranks are packed with former state officials.

Chief amongst them is New Lines Institute founder and president Ahmed Alwani. Alwani served on the advisory board of the U.S. military’s Africa Command and influenced Washington’s Middle East positions. His New Lines biography boasts that he “met the commanding generals of Fort Jackson, Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, Naval Station Norfolk and Joint Base Andrews as well as then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his staff numerous times during the Iraq War to consult on U.S. policy” – something many might not consider a badge of honor.

Alwani also founded Fairfax University, a controversial private educational institution that Virginia state regulators considered shutting down in 2019. Auditors found that “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses,” academic quality was “patently deficient,” plagiarism was “rampant,” and students’ English levels were “abysmally poor,” making Fairfax look far more like a degree mill than a legitimate university.

New Lines’ senior director, Faysal Itani, has a similarly notable past. Before joining the organization, Itani was simultaneously a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council – a NATO-funded think tank that serves as the brains of the military alliance, and an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University – a department a previous MintPress News investigation exposed as a department filled with CIA agents that functions as a training ground for the next generation of American spies.

Another senior director, Nicholas Heras, was central to U.S. actions in Iraq and Syria…………………………………………………………………………………………

Spy Games

Perhaps the most notable New Lines Institute employee, however, is non-resident fellow Elizabeth Tsurkov. Tsurkov is a Russian-born Israeli who, before joining New Lines, worked at a number of hawkish think tanks, including the Atlantic Council and Freedom House……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

In a video released in November, Tsurkov stated that she was actually in Iraq on behalf of the CIA and Israeli intelligence outfit Mossad. …………………………………………..

Attacking Alternative Media

Studying their output, it is clear that New Lines has two principal targets: nations the U.S. has deemed enemy states and alternative media outlets that question the narratives that New Lines and the U.S. government are trying to establish. Indeed, New Lines has spent years investigating alternative media, promoting a narrative that opposition to U.S. foreign policy equals being in the pay of official enemy countries……………………………………………………………………………………………

State-Funded Media

Considering its output, its constant support for U.S. policy and attacks on both domestic and international opponents of Washington, speculation was rife that the U.S. government was secretly funding New Lines. But the institute had always denied this, presenting itself as a neutral, agenda-free organization. That was, at least, until late last year when it announced that it had reached a “cooperative agreement” with the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy at West Point to “jointly develop actionable recommendations for U.S. global leadership to address pressing global security challenges.” In other words, to plan out American military strategy. The New Lines Institute also noted that they would now “serve as an intellectual resource for solving military problems.”

Days later, New Lines’ “About Us” section was updated, removing all reference to being funded by the Fairfax Foundation and inserting a clause admitting U.S. government financial support, strongly suggesting that the military is now bankrolling it. It now reads (emphasis added):

Funding for The New Lines Institute is provided by the The [sic] Washington Institute for Education and Research, a 501c(3) nonprofit organization registered in Washington DC.

New Lines Institute accepts research grants and charitable donations from U.S. individuals, registered U.S. legal entities, and the U.S. Government in support of its research priorities, and only insofar as such support is in compliance with U.S. laws and regulations; aligns with the institute’s vision, mission, purpose and principles; and falls within its core areas of expertise.

The news did not come as a shock to those paying close attention. “It will come as a surprise to no-one that New Lines is funded by the U.S. government,” wrote investigative journalist Matt Kennard on Twitter. There is a certain tenor to the articles of these cut-outs that is instantly recognizable. Slightly critical—to be convincing—but only up to a point which leaves state narratives robust.”

May 13, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Biden’s war on Gaza is now a war on truth and the right to protest

media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.  

As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities. 

The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful

The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed

JONATHAN COOK, MAY 10, 2024, First published by Middle East Eye

As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden. 

The establishment media reverentially relayed the president’s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone. 

Biden declared the protesters had no “right to cause chaos”, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.  

This week, Biden raised the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism in the US. 

According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators – under growing pressure from the White House and their own wealthy donors – called in local police. 

In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.”

One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space. 

The students were calling on their universities to pull all investments from companies that are assisting Israel in carrying out what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza. Those weapons are being supplied in huge quantities largely thanks to the decisions of one man. 

Yes, Joe Biden. 

Law-breaking Biden

The “order” the US president wants to prevail is one in which his decisions to block any ceasefire and arm the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children go unchallenged. 

Biden has been so indulgent of Israel’s destruction of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government crossed the president’s supposed “red line” this week. Israel launched the initial stages of its long-threatened final assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. Some 1.3 million Palestinians have been huddling in makeshift tents there. 

Biden could easily have forced Israel to change course at any point over the past seven months, but chose not to, even as he feigned concern about the ever-rising death toll among Palestinian civilians. Only under growing popular pressure, fuelled by the protests, has he finally appeared to pause arms shipments as the attack on Rafah intensifies.    

The White House has authorised vast shipments of arms to Israel, including 2,000lb bombs that have levelled whole neighbourhoods, killing men, women and children outright or leaving them trapped under rubble to slowly suffocate or starve to death.

Late last month Biden signed a further $26bn of US taxpayers’ money to Israel, the majority military aid – just as mass graves of Palestinians killed by Israel were coming to light. He has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in US law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes. 

Human rights groups have warned his administration repeatedly that Israel is routinely breaking international law. 

At least 20 of Biden administration’s own lawyers are reported to have signed off on a letter that Israel’s actions violate a host of US statutes, including the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Laws, as well as the Geneva Conventions.  

Meanwhile, the State Department’s investigations show that, even before Israel’s destruction of Gaza began seven months ago, five Israeli military units were committing gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the separate enclave of the Occupied West Bank. 

There, Israel doesn’t even have the one-size-fits-all excuse that the abuse and killing of Palestinian civilians are unfortunate “collateral damage” in an operation to “eradicate Hamas”. The West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas.

Nonetheless, no action has been taken to stop the arms transfers. US laws, it seems, don’t apply to the Biden administration, any more than international law does to Israel.

Protest quicksand

In denying students the right to protest at the US arming of Israel’s plausible genocide, Biden is also denying them the right to protest the most consequential policy of his four-year term – and of at least the last two decades of US foreign policy, since the US invasion of Iraq. 

And it is all happening in a presidential election year.

The students’ immediate aim is to stop their universities’ complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But there are two obvious wider goals.

The first is to bring attention back to the endless suffering of Palestinians in the tiny, besieged enclave. Until this week’s attack on Rafah, the plight of Gaza had increasingly dropped off front pages, even as Israeli-induced famine and disease tightened their grip over the past month. 

When Gaza has made the news, it is invariably through a lens unrelated to the slaughter and starvation. It is details of the interminable negotiations, or political tensions over Israel’s Rafah “invasion”, or plans for the “day after” in Gaza, or the plight of the Israeli hostages, or their families’ agonies, or where to draw the line on free speech in criticising Israel.

The students’ second goal is to make it politically uncomfortable for Biden to continue providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that have permitted Israel’s actions – from slaughter to starvation, and now the imminent destruction of Rafah. 

The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking. 

But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says.

Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.  

Last Sunday, the head of the UN Food Aid Programme, Cindy McCain, warned that northern Gaza was in the grip of “full-blown famine” and that the south was not far behind. Dozens of children were reported to have died of dehydration and malnutrition. “It’s horror,” she said.  

The head of Unicef pointed out last week, a few days before Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah: “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.” 

A separate UN report recently revealed it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, based on the historic levels of materials allowed in by Israel. On a highly unlikey, best-case scenario, it will take 16 years. 

As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities. 

The students are caught in a protest equivalent of quicksand: the more they struggle to draw attention to the Gaza genocide, the more the Gaza genocide sinks from view. The media have seized on their struggle as a pretext to ignore Gaza and turn the spotlight on to their protests instead.

Feeling ‘unsafe’

The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful – a fact that is all the more obvious when compared to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US in 2020, with Biden’s approval. 

Four years ago there were many episodes of property damage, but that has been all but unheard of in the student protests, which are mostly confined to encampments on university campus lawns………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/bidens-war-on-gaza-is-now-a-war-on?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=144499809&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

May 12, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment