UN report finds Israel deliberately targeted journalists – Reuters
https://www.rt.com/news/594254-israel-attack-journalists-lebanon/ 14 Mar 24
The news agency has obtained a copy of an investigation into the killing of one of its staff in Lebanon last October
An Israeli tank fired two shells at a group of international journalists clearly marked as such, in violation of international law, a UN investigation has reportedly found. The deadly incident happened in Lebanon in mid-October.
The conclusions, published by Reuters on Wednesday, are part of a seven-page report dated February 27, obtained by the news agency. They coincided with what it had found on its own while looking into the death of its employee Issam Abdallah and the injuries of six other journalists, including those working for Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Al Jazeera.
The report was produced by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the peacekeeper mission deployed on the border between Israel and Lebanon in 2006 as part of a deal that ended the Israeli occupation of the southern part of its neighbor. Tracking and investigating presumed violations of the truce is part of its job.
The attack happened on October 13, in the early days of Israel’s siege of Gaza in retaliation for a large-scale incursion by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Tensions ramped up at the Lebanese border as well, with sporadic attacks launched by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah militants.
Abdallah, a Reuters photographer, was part of a group of journalists covering the situation from a hill in Lebanon. An IDF Merkava tank fired two shots at them, the UNIFIL report confirmed. It called the attack a violation of the truce it is mandated to uphold and of international law.
”It is assessed that there was no exchange of fire across the Blue Line at the time of the incident,” the report noted, referring to the de facto border. “The reason for the strikes on the journalists is not known.”
An IDF spokesperson told Reuters that Israeli forces do not target civilians on purpose, including journalists, when asked about the UN investigation. He added that the incident is being examined by the General Staff’s Fact Finding and Assessment Mechanism – a body responsible for reviewing exceptional events.
Reuters released its findings in early December, based on eyewitness accounts, forensic analysis of evidence found at the scene and interviews with officials.
The UNIFIL report was sent to the UN on February 28 and shared with the Israeli and Lebanese governments, Reuters said citing a source. The mission’s investigations are normally not made public.
Hollywood stars put their name to a good message, but it’s the messengers who are problematic.
Nuclear Threat Initiative’s CEO is, yes, Ernest Moniz, the former US Energy Secretary, who is at the forefront of promoting nuclear power to anyone and everyone who wants it
Moniz is one of the chief architects behind the pro-nuclear infiltration of the COP28 climate summit
Make (some) nukes history, Hollywood stars put their name to a good message, but it’s the messengers who are problematic
By Linda Pentz Gunter, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/11/make-some-nukes-history/
A handful of Hollywood celebs, some highly recognizable including Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Lily Tomlin, Emma Thompson and Michael Douglas, as well as musicians such as Jackson Brown and Graham Nash, just signed their names to a letter published in the LA Times urging that we “Make Nukes History”.
Hooray, right? Well, only half hooray.
The Hollywood letter was part of a quickly launched campaign to coincide with the Oscar buzz around the successful feature film, Oppenheimer, in order to leverage attention for the need to abolish nuclear weapons. The Make Nukes History campaign aims to raise public awareness about the civilization-ending risks posed by today’s nuclear arsenals. It reminds us that while Oppenheimer is a history lesson, nuclear weapons are very much still with us, but that we can put an end to what J. Robert Oppenheimer started.
So far, all so good. Far too few of us are thinking about nuclear weapons and the threat they pose, let alone doing something about getting rid of them. It’s an important message that needs reiterating.
Meanwhile, Oppenheimer duly swept seven Academy Awards on Sunday. We waited hopefully for one of the winners to say something about the effect of Oppenheimer’s bomb down the ages. It came only from Cillian Murphy at the end of his Best Actor acceptance speech. “We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb and for better or for worse we are all living in Oppenheimer’s world so I would really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers, everywhere,” Murphy said.
The Make Nukes History message did not make it to the Oscar stage and the LA Times letter was surprisingly skimpy, failing to get at the heart of the two key takeaways missed in the Oppenheimer film: the unwilling, unrecognized and still uncompensated victims of Oppenheimer’s original Trinity bomb; and the on-going harm down generations to all peoples whose lands were seized and used for atomic tests.
The letter includes a quote from President John F. Kennedy, then states:
“At a time of great uncertainty, even one nuclear weapon—on land, in the sea, in the air, or in space—is too many. To protect our families, our communities, and our world, we must demand that global leaders work to make nuclear weapons history—and build a brighter future.”
Demand indeed. Some of us have been doing this for decades. And we have a treaty for that. But thank you for waking up.
But what does “build a brighter future” actually mean? That, it turns out, is the slogan of the organization behind the orchestration of the Hollywood letter and Oscar campaign — the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Let’s first take a look at who actually signed the letter. With two exceptions, all the signatories are white. There are no Native Americans on there. No US Marshall Islanders. Almost none of the Oppenheimer film cast and crew signed it. The last four signatures belong to the board of NTI.
NTI was the brainchild of Fonda’s ex, Ted Turner. NTI’s CEO is, yes, Ernest Moniz, the former US Energy Secretary, who is at the forefront of promoting nuclear power to anyone and everyone who wants it. Turner is also a firm supporter of nuclear power (I know because I tried to challenge him on it in person and was quickly deflected by a very large gentleman in possession of an impressive set of muscles.)
Moniz is one of the chief architects behind the pro-nuclear infiltration of the COP28 climate summit and its ridiculous “let’s triple global nuclear power capacity by 2050” proclamation. He will be in Brussels later this month, headlining the International Atomic Energy Agency’s propaganda-fest, billed as the First Ever Nuclear Energy Summit. So will Charles Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s grandson and another signatory to the LA Times letter.
So here we have a slightly star-studded short-lived campaign to proclaim an end to one kind of nuke, while behind the scenes the same organization is working hard to promote the other kind of nuke, thus ensuring that the door to nuclear weapons development stays firmly open.
So sorry, no two thumbs up for this bit of Hollywood theatre.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. All opinions are her own.
The Film RADIOACTIVE: The women of Three Mile Island will start streaming on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video from March 12
This film, more than many, brings the destructive impacts from nuclear technology into the hearts of a community of women who suffered from becoming Radioactive in Harrisburg, PA when the Three Mile Island reactor had its accident.
RADIOACTIVE: The Women of Three Mile Island will also be featured in Asheville NC, March 24 as part of the International Uranium Film Festival offerings here that weekend.
New York Time’s Morning Newsletter Blames Everyone but Israel for Israeli Crimes
HARRY ZEHNER, FAIR, 13 Mar 24
With over 17 million subscribers, the Morning, the New York Times’ flagship newsletter, is by far the most popular newsletter in the English-speaking world. (It has almost three times as many subscribers as the next most popular newsletter.)
Since October 7, as Israel has waged an unprecedented war on Palestinian children, journalists, hospitals and schools, the New York Times’ highly influential newsletter has bent over backwards to blame everyone but Israel for the carnage.
Waging a legitimate war
According to the Morning—led by head writer David Leonhardt—Israel’s war on Gaza is a targeted operation designed to eliminate Hamas. The Morning propagates this narrative despite well-documented declarations of collective punishment and even genocidal intent by high-ranking Israeli officials—a tendency that South Africa has forcefully documented in their case before the ICJ (UN, 12/29/23). Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s comments on October 12, 2023, are typical: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.”
This sentiment has been echoed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, multiple cabinet-level ministers and senior military officials. Speaking from a devastated northern Gaza, one top Israeli army official said (UN, 12/29/23): “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”
Despite these statements and the body of supporting evidence, the Morning has consistently portrayed the war on Gaza as a focused campaign targeting the military infrastructure of Hamas.
For instance, in one October edition (10/13/23), Leonhardt and co-writer Lauren Jackson explained, “Israel’s goals are to prevent Hamas from being able to conduct more attacks and to reestablish the country’s military credibility.”
Despite these statements and the body of supporting evidence, the Morning has consistently portrayed the war on Gaza as a focused campaign targeting the military infrastructure of Hamas.
For instance, in one October edition (10/13/23), Leonhardt and co-writer Lauren Jackson explained, “Israel’s goals are to prevent Hamas from being able to conduct more attacks and to reestablish the country’s military credibility.”
The Morning did, in the same edition (1/28/24), quote Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s comments in the immediate aftermath of October 7:
After the Hamas-led October 7 terrorist attacks, Israel ordered what its defense minister called a “complete siege” of Gaza. The goal was both to weaken Hamas fighters and to ensure that no military supplies could enter.
This is, however, a downright fictional interpretation of Gallant’s quote (Al Jazeera, 10/9/23), given that the Morning failed to quote the next words out of his mouth:
There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.
Blame the terrorists
The Morning consistently has argued that Hamas makes densely populated civilian areas legitimate targets for Israeli attacks by conducting military operations nearby. This deflects blame from Israel and frames civilian casualties as a necessary evil, as in the October 30 edition of the newsletter:
Hamas has hidden many weapons under hospitals, schools and mosques so that Israel risks killing civilians, and facing an international backlash, when it fights. Hamas fighters also slip above and below ground, blending with civilians.
These practices mean that Hamas is responsible for many of the civilian deaths, according to international law.
Similar rhetoric was deployed in this December edition (12/20/23):
Hamas has long hidden its fighters and weapons in and under populated civilian areas, such as hospitals and mosques. It does so partly to force Israel to make a gruesome calculation: To fight Hamas, Israel often must also harm civilians.
The Morning has not yet found it pertinent to report on, for instance, the Israeli soldiers who dressed as doctors to gain access to the Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank, and proceeded to assassinate three Palestinian militants in their hospital beds.
To the Morning (11/14/23), Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians is unavoidable:
The battle over Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza highlights a tension that often goes unmentioned in the debate over the war between Israel and Hamas: There may be no way for Israel both to minimize civilian casualties and to eliminate Hamas.
It repeats this line again in a late January edition (1/22/24), once again framing the mass murder of civilians as a “difficult decision”:
The Israeli military faces a difficult decision about how to proceed in southern Gaza…. Israel will not easily be able to eliminate the fighters without killing innocent civilians.
And again in the October 17 edition:
Longer term, there will be more difficult choices. Many steps that Israel could take to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza, such as advance warnings of attacks, would also weaken its attempts to destroy Hamas’s control.
These themes are repeated across all editions of the Morning, and echo throughout the New York Times’ reporting on Israel. Israel’s motivations in the war (beyond eliminating Hamas) go unquestioned, while the openly genocidal statements made by high-ranking politicians and military leaders go unacknowledged.
And when Israeli mass murder of Palestinian civilians is mentioned, it is constantly qualified by the line that Hamas is fully or partially to blame.
Let’s break down one emblematic newsletter (12/7/23) written by Leonhardt in December, in which he “puts the [civilian death] toll in context and explains the reason for it.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
It is notable that—unlike with Israel—Leonhardt did not attempt to contextualize Hamas’ actions by noting the horrifying conditions that Israel has imposed on Gaza for years, or the over 900 Palestinian children killed by Israel in the decade preceding October 7. To Leonhardt, history is only relevant when it justifies Israeli aggression.
While Leonhardt states unequivocally that Hamas is violating international law, he does not find it worthwhile to investigate Israel’s flagrant and abundantly documented violations of international law. He also does not mention the Palestinian right to resist occupation, a right enshrined under international law.
This unequal treatment leads straight to the jarringly contrasting conclusions, in which he essentially excuses Israel’s genocidal war as unavoidable, while he condemns Hamas for “simply not prioritizing Palestinian lives.”
Leonhardt’s December 7 piece is not an aberration: It is emblematic of the language, selective contextualization and framing that the Times‘ Morning newsletter wields to provide ideological cover for Israel’s crimes. https://fair.org/home/nyts-morning-newsletter-blames-everyone-but-israel-for-israeli-crimes/
Film poses moral questions about 2011 Fukushima disaster displacement
Japan Times, BY MIE SAKAMOTO, KYODO 12 Mar 24
A new documentary that questions whether it is right to sacrifice a community’s way of life for the betterment of the wider public has revealed the turmoil and hardships faced by those who were displaced in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.
“Tsushima: Fukushima Speaks Part 2,” directed by freelance journalist Toshikuni Doi, features the testimonies of people seeking the return of their hometown, which was deemed uninhabitable for a century after the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.
The documentary explores the story of a minority group that must endure suffering for the happiness and convenience of others, a theme of global resonance, with Doi, 71, explaining that the film focuses on the impact the accident had on the daily lives of people forced to leave their homes.
Their hometown — Tsushima district in Namie, Fukushima Prefecture — is some 30 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, which was crippled by the massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. Most of its 1,400 former residents remain unable to return due to the contamination left behind by radioactive materials.
The 187-minute film, whose version with English subtitles will be available online for one week from March 11 for audiences outside Japan, delves into people’s memories of their hometown, with many expressing deep affection for their tight-knit rural community, where residents were close to each other.
“Many people don’t care much about nuclear issues,” Doi said in an interview. “But if the film can show the impact the accident had on people’s lives and what they thought about being driven away and losing their hometown, the audience will be drawn to it, even if they are not deeply interested in such issues.”
Many of the film’s 18 interviewees — who took part in Doi’s project of preserving disaster victims’ testimonies for future generations — have special feelings for their hometown. Some shed tears as they spoke about their personal histories and how their lives were changed irrevocably following the disaster.
The film begins with Yoshito Konno, who was among those told by officials of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (Tepco), and the central government in the fall of 2011 that people from Tsushima would likely be unable to return “for the next 100 years.”
“People were speechless,” Konno, 79, says in the film, continuing to say that it made him think there would be “no one left after 100 years,”
which prompted him to start compiling records on the histories of families who had lived in the area.
Kano Sudo, 72, lived in poverty with three children after she divorced her estranged husband. She worked hard at local factories to support her children, but even buying daily rice was a struggle.
“I had even thought about (suicide) with my three children,” she admits in the film, adding that she was only able to get through those times “because of the help of those around us.”
Her neighbors, she says, would routinely feed her kids and watch over them, to prevent them from being led astray as they grew up………………………………………………………………………………………..
“From an economic utility standpoint, the best policy would be to transfer us to another place and set up a compensation system so that we can make a living,” rather than spending massive amounts of the state’s budget so that some hundreds of Tsushima residents can return home, Konno says.
But he goes on to argue that it is wrong to sever the local residents’ ties to their former community while denying their basic rights to joy and fulfillment as human beings — in effect, turning a blind eye to the damage done to each individual whose life was upended.
“It is not only about Tsushima,” Konno says. “This issue should be common to all of Japan and the whole world.”
The film was released in Tokyo on March 2, which will be followed by screenings in other major cities, including in the prefectures of Osaka and Aichi. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/12/japan/society/japan-fukushima-displacement/
NewsGuard AI Censorship Targets People Who Read Primary Sources To Fact-Check The News
Artificial intelligence censorship tools are making sure you never read this article or share it with anyone it might persuade.
This article seems to me to be pretty pro Trumpist.
My problem is:
much as I dislike Donald Trump – purveyor of chaos , this article is probably true
JOY PULLMAN @JOYPULLMANN MARCH 07, 2024
NewsGuard announced last week it’s using AI to automatically prevent American citizens from seeing information online that challenges government and corporate media claims about elections ahead of the 2024 voting season.
“[P]latforms and search engines” including Microsoft’s Bing use NewsGuard’s “ratings” to stop people from seeing disfavored information sources, information, and topics in their social media feeds and online searches. Now censorship is being deployed not only by humans but also by automated computer code, rapidly raising an Iron Curtain around internet speech.
Newsguard rates The Federalist as a “maximum” risk for publishing Democrat-disapproved information, even though The Federalist accurately reports major stories about which NewsGuard-approved outlets continually spread disinformation and misinformation……………….
Newsguard rates The Federalist as a “maximum” risk for publishing Democrat-disapproved information, even though The Federalist accurately reports major stories about which NewsGuard-approved outlets continually spread disinformation and misinformation.
“The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others,” says a recent congressional report about AI censorship. These “…projects threaten to help create a censorship regime that could significantly impede the fundamental First Amendment rights of millions of Americans, and potentially do so in a manner that is instantaneous and largely invisible to its victims.”
Numerous federal agencies are funding AI censorship tools, including the U.S. Department of State, the subject of a December lawsuit from The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas. The report last month from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reveals shocking details about censorship tools funded by the National Science Foundation, one of hundreds of federal agencies.
It says NSF has tried to hide its activities from the elected lawmakers who technically control NSF’s budget, including planning to take five years to return open-records requests legally required to be returned within 20 to 60 days under normal circumstances. NSF and the projects it funded also targeted for censorship media organizations that reported critically on their use of taxpayer funds.
“In my dream world,” censorship technician Scott Hale told NSF grantmakers, people like him would use aggregate data of the speech censored on social media to develop “automated detection” algorithms that immediately censor banned speech online, without any further human involvement.
“Misinformation” that NSF-funded AI scrubs from the internet includes “undermining trust in mainstream media,” the House report says. It also works to censor election and vaccine information the government doesn’t like. One censorship tool taxpayers funded through the NSF “sought to help train the children of military families to help influence the beliefs of military families,” a demographic traditionally more skeptical of Democrat rule.
Federal agencies use nonprofits they fund as cutouts to avoid constitutional restraints that prohibit governments from censoring even false speech. As Foundation for Freedom Online’s Director Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson and journalist Jan Jekielek in recent interviews, U.S. intelligence agencies are highly involved in censorship, using it essentially to control the U.S. government by controlling public opinion. A lawsuit at the Supreme Court, Murthy v. Missouri, could restrict federal involvement in some of these censorship efforts……………………………………… https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/07/ai-censorship-targets-people-who-read-primary-sources-to-fact-check-the-news/—
US Media and Factcheckers Fail to Note Israel’s Refutation of ‘Beheaded Babies’ Stories
DAVID KNOX, FAIR, 8 Mar 24
In late November, the Washington Post (11/22/23) factchecked President Joe Biden’s repeated claims that babies had been beheaded during Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel.
Biden’s remarks during a November 15 news conference triggered the factcheck:
Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again, like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burning women and children alive.
Despite acknowledging a lack of confirmation of such atrocities, the Post stopped short of branding Biden’s statements false, and declined to dole out any of its iconic Pinocchios.
“It’s too soon in the Israel/Gaza war to make a definitive assessment,” Post Factchecker Glenn Kessler wrote, noting that even the most basic facts weren’t yet known.
“The Israeli prime minister’s office has said about 1,200 people were killed on October 7, down from an initial estimate of 1,400,” he said, “but it’s unclear how many were civilians or soldiers.”
An authoritative count
That statement isn’t true. While the exact number killed amid the extreme violence and chaos of October 7 may never be finalized, an authoritative count of civilian deaths—as well as data that definitively refutes claims babies were beheaded—was available to anyone with access to the internet little more than a month after the attack.
That’s when Bituah Leumi, or National Insurance Institute, Israel’s social security agency, posted a Hebrew-language website (11/9/23) with the name, gender and age of every identified civilian victim and where each had been attacked.
Two days later Bituah Leumi (also transliterated as Bituach Leumi) posted an English-language news release (11/11/23) publicizing the website as a memorial to the civilian victims of the “Iron Swords” war—Israel’s name for Hamas’s attack and Israel Defense Forces’ response. (The news release refers to “695 identified war casualties,” but there are no wounded; all the victims are listed as “killed.”)
The journalistic importance of the memorial website was shown less than a month later, when Haaretz (12/4/23), Israel’s oldest newspaper, used the social security agency’s data to debunk some of the most sensational atrocities blamed on Hamas.
‘Proved untrue’
Haaretz’s 2,000-word, English-language article was cautious, with allowances for mistaken and exaggerated reports from traumatized observers describing horrific scenes of carnage. But unlike the Washington Post’s factcheck, the Israeli newspaper didn’t pull its punches, flatly concluding that some of the claims of atrocities “have been proved untrue.”
Chief among the claims disproved was that Hamas fighters deliberately slaughtered dozens of babies—beheading some, burning and hanging others.
“According to sources including Israel’s National Insurance Institute, kibbutz leaders and the police, on October 7 one baby was murdered, 10-month-old Mila Cohen,” the Haaretz article stated. “She was killed with her father, Ohad, on Kibbutz Be’eri.” The child’s mother survived.
In addition to a single infant, the social security agency’s list of victims includes only a few other young children. Haaretz’s reporters were able to determine the circumstances of each of their deaths:
According to the National Insurance Institute, five other children aged 6 or under were murdered, including Omer Kedem Siman Tov, 2, and his 6-year-old twin sisters Arbel and Shachar, who were killed on Kibbutz Nir Oz. There was also 5-year-old Yazan Zakaria Abu Jama from Arara in the southern Negev, who was killed in a Hamas rocket strike, and 5-year-old Eitan Kapshetar, who was murdered with his parents and his 8-year-old sister, Aline, near Sderot.
Haaretz also used the social security data to refute allegations made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Biden that Hamas targeted and tortured children:
There is no evidence that children from several families were murdered together, rendering inaccurate Netanyahu’s remark to US President Joe Biden that Hamas terrorists “took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them.”
‘Details still sparse’
The Washington Post (12/4/23) acknowledged the Haaretz story the same day it was published, with a one-paragraph “update” inserted into its November 22 factcheck. While crediting Haaretz with doing a “detailed examination of unverified accounts of alleged atrocities disseminated by Israeli first-responders and army officers,” the Post downgraded the Israeli newspaper’s conclusion, saying only that “no accounts of beheaded or burned babies could be verified.”
While the Post noted that Haaretz “could document only one case of a baby being killed in the Hamas attacks,” the update did not explain that the source of that critical fact was an agency of the Israeli government. Nor did the Post alter the factcheck’s inconclusive, mishmashed “Bottom Line”:……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
‘War on truth’
The first major news outlet outside of Israel to use data from the social security agency’s website was the French wire service Agence France-Presse.
The AFP’s 1,000-word, English-language dispatch, headlined “Israel Social Security Data Reveals True Picture of October 7 Deaths,” was picked up by France24 (12/15/23), the Times of India (12/15/23), the financial weekly Barron’s (12/15/23) and a scattering of small newspapers, including the Caledonian (Vermont) Record (12/15/23).
The AFP story covered much the same ground as Haaretz’s analysis, listing the same slain infant—Mila Cohen—and five other young victims under 7 years old in refuting claims of wholesale slaughter of babies.
While Google searches found no US mainstream media reporting on the Israeli social security agency’s data, several independent journalists did.
Gareth Porter, an American historian and journalist whose credentials go back to the Vietnam War, cited the social security data in an article in Consortium News (1/6/24) that argued that the Netanyahu government sought to build support for the invasion of Gaza by “inventing stories about nonexistent atrocities and planting them with credulous US news outlets.”
In February, Jeremy Scahill used that data to make the same case in a 8,000-word article, headlined “Netanyahu’s War on Truth,” in the Intercept (2/7/24), the investigative website he helped found.
Both journalists credit the December 15 AFP dispatch as the source of the Israeli social security data. (Porter’s story provides a link to the Times of India; Scahill links to France24.)
Earlier this week a third independent journalist, Glenn Greenwald (3/3/24), quoted the December 4 Haaretz report, which used the Israeli social security data, in a YouTube video, titled “October 7 Reports Implode: Beheaded Babies, NY Times Scandal & More.”
Emotion-inflaming stories
In the months since the Haaretz and AFP reports were published, Bituah Leumi has updated its civilian death count to 779, including 76 foreign workers, as more victims are identified (Jewish News Syndicate, 1/15/24.).
But a detailed examination this week of the 16-page list of victims on the memorial website found no additional infants or young children—only those already accounted for by Haaretz and AFP—and a total of 36 children under 18 years old.
Mila Cohen remains the only infant reported killed in the October 7 attack.
US corporate media’s failure to cite the social security agency’s data to forcefully refute claims of butchered babies and other outrages comes at a high cost. Such emotion-inflaming stories continue to foul the public debate over whether Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians (AP, 2/29/24)—two-thirds of those women and children (PBS, 2/19/24)—is a criminally disproportionate response to the Hamas attack………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Unfounded horror stories about Hamas’s infant victims that should have been debunked were still being repeated by Biden (12/12/23) at a campaign fundraiser more than two months after Israel was attacked:
I saw some of the photographs when I was there—tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman—totally, completely inhuman.
This time the Washington Post didn’t factcheck Biden—even though the White House stated months earlier that the president had never seen such photos (CNN, 10/12/23).
Still no Pinocchios. https://fair.org/home/us-media-and-factcheckers-fail-to-note-israels-refutation-of-beheaded-babies-stories/
New York Times: Nuclear Risks Have Not Gone Away
The overriding question is how to reduce the risk of nuclear war, a topic that will no doubt be addressed as the Times series continues to be rolled out
William Hartung, https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhartung/2024/03/06/new-york-times-nuclear-risks-have-not-gone-away/?sh=1a2848863efe
For most Americans, nuclear weapons are a relic of the Cold War, out of sight and out of mind. But a surge of attention over the past year may put these world-ending weapons on the public agenda again, in a way that has not been seen since the rise of the disarmament movement of the 1980s.
First came the announcement that the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – which expresses the view of a panel of experts of how close we are to ending life as we know it through a nuclear conflagration or the accelerating impacts of climate change – was maintained at an uncomfortably close 90 seconds to midnight.
Then came the release a few months later of Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer, which told the story of the man pundits of his time called “the father of the atomic bomb.” The film followed the arc of Oppenheimer’s life and career, including his support for the dropping of the bombs on HIroshima and Nagasaki because he thought that once their sheer destructive power was understood, the human race would abandon war as a way of resolving disputes. He was tragically wrong, but the success of Oppenheimer and its prominent place in Hollywood’s awards season offers an opportunity to reflect anew on the history and consequences of the bomb, including issues that were largely ignored in the film, like the plight of the people exposed to lethal radiation from bomb tests in the U.S. and the Pacific, the devastating health problems of uranium miners, and, most terribly of all, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a death toll estimated by independent experts of over 140,000 people.
In the wake of these reminders of the nuclear danger, The New York Times NYT +1.2% has come out with a timely and urgently important series called At the Brink, which looks at current day nuclear risks based on nearly a year of reporting and research. It is a much needed corrective to our false sense of security regarding the continued presence and costly “modernization” of the world’s nuclear arsenals.
The opening essay of the series, written by longtime national security journalist and current New York Times opinion writer W.J. Hennigan, notes up front that “In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea.” He later notes that the risk of nuclear escalation in Ukraine is now relatively low, but that the overall state of the world has created the greatest risk of the use of nuclear weapons since the height of the Cold War. Hennigan also gives a graphic presentation of the devastating impact of even a relatively small nuclear weapon – the exact kind of sobering depiction that was omitted from Oppenheimer.
The Times piece reminds us of the vast scope of the Cold War nuclear arms race, as well as the current one among the U.S., Russia, and China – a competition that is all the more dangerous because the last U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, New START, is hanging by a thread, set to expire in February 2026.
The overriding question is how to reduce the risk of nuclear war, a topic that will no doubt be addressed as the Times series continues to be rolled out. The only way to be truly safe from nuclear weapons is to eliminate them altogether, as called for in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021 and has been ratified by 70 nations. Conspicuously missing from that list are the world’s nuclear weapons states, which still hold onto the illusion that a nuclear balance of terror can be sustained indefinitely. As wars proliferate from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond, the added risk posed by nuclear weapons underscores the need to move beyond outmoded rationales for continuing to build and deploy these devastating weapons. As the issue of nuclear weapons returns to public consciousness after years of denial, there is an opportunity to have a serious debate about whether and how to eliminate them before they eliminate us. We can’t afford to miss that chance.
When The Imperial Media Report On An Israeli Massacre
there is no atrocity Israel could possibly commit where it wouldn’t frame itself as the victim.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, MAR 1, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-the-imperial-media-report-on?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=142205540&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
In what many are now calling the Flour Massacre, at least 112 Gazans were killed and hundreds more injured after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians who were waiting for food from much-needed aid trucks near Gaza City on Thursday.
Initial investigations by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor found that the crowd was fired upon by both IDF automatic rifles and by Israeli tanks, and that dozens of gunshot victims were hospitalized after the incident.
Israel’s version of events has of course changed over the course of the day as narrative managers figure out how best to frame publicly available information in a way that doesn’t harm Israel’s PR interests. Currently we’re at Israel admitting that IDF troops did indeed fire upon the crowd after previously denying this, but claiming that this isn’t what caused most of the the casualties, saying it was actually the Palestinians trampling each other in a human “stampede” which caused them harm. Essentially the current argument is “Yes we shot them, but that’s not why they died.”
The IDF claims Israeli troops only began firing on the Palestinians because the soldiers “felt threatened” by them, which goes to show that there is no atrocity Israel could possibly commit where it wouldn’t frame itself as the victim. Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir took the opportunity to praise the IDF for heroically fighting off the dangerous Palestinians and to argue that the incident proves it’s too dangerous to keep allowing aid trucks into Gaza.
As terrible as the Israeli spin machine has been on this atrocity, the western imperial media have been even worse. The verbal gymnastics they’ve been performing in their headlines to avoid saying Israel massacred starving people who were waiting for food would be genuinely impressive if it wasn’t so ghoulish.
“As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll” reads one New York Times header, like the summary of an episode of a Netflix murder mystery show.
“Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame,” says an indecipherably cryptic headline from The Washington Post.
“Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks,” says The Guardian. “Food aid-related deaths”? Seriously?
“More than 100 killed as crowd waits for aid, Hamas-run health ministry says,” reads a BBC headline. The UK’s state broadcaster is here using a tried and true tactic for casting doubt on death counts by deliberately associating them with Hamas, despite the fact that the Gaza health ministry’s death counts are considered so reliable that Israeli intelligence services use them in their own internal records.
“At least 100 killed and 700 injured in chaotic incident” says CNN, like it’s describing a frat party that got out of control.
“Carnage at Gaza food aid site amid Israeli gunfire” reads another CNN headline, as though the carnage and the Israeli gunfire are two unrelated phenomena which just unluckily occurred at around the same time.
CNN also repeatedly refers to the killings as “food aid deaths”, as though it’s the food aid that killed them and not the military of a very specific and very nameable state power.
(It’s probably worth noting at this point that CNN staff have been anonymously reporting through other outlets that there’s been a uniquely aggressive top-down push within the network to slant reporting heavily in favor of Israeli information interests, driven largely by the new CEO Mark Thompson.)
So that’s what happens when the imperial media report on an Israeli massacre, in case you were curious and haven’t been paying attention since October 7 or the decades which preceded it. The propaganda services of the western press operate in a way that is typically indistinguishable from the spinmeistering of officials in western governments, framing the western empire and its allies in a positive light and their enemies in a negative one.
This happens because the western mass media do not exist to report the news and give you information about what’s been going on in the world, but to manufacture consent for the political status quo and the globe-dominating power structure it supports. The only difference between our propaganda and the propaganda of a ruthless dictatorship is that the people who live under a dictatorship know they are being fed propaganda, whereas westerners are trained to believe they are ingesting impartial factual reporting.
The demolition of Gaza is alerting more and more westerners to the fact that this is happening, though, because the more blatant the atrocities the more ham-fisted the propaganda machine needs to be about running cover for them. It’s even opening eyes within the propaganda machine itself, which is why we’re seeing things like CNN staff blowing the whistle on their own CEO and New York Times staff telling The Intercept that their bosses committed extremely egregious journalistic malpractice in producing atrocity propaganda alleging mass rapes by Hamas on October 7.
The only good thing about what’s happening in Gaza is that it’s waking westerners up to the fact that everything they’ve been told about their society, their media and their world is a lie. Cracks are appearing in the illusion, and those of us who care about truth, peace and justice need to help draw attention to them. From there, real change becomes a genuine possibility.
Patrick Lawrence: The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour
SCHEERPOST, By Patrick Lawrence February 29, 2024
The New York Times recently ran a story called “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin.” Patrick Lawrence writes that these “secrets” only contained what the CIA “wanted and did not want disclosed,” and were “effectively authorized” by the agency.
f you have paid attention to what various polls and officials in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West have been doing and saying about Ukraine lately, you know the look and sound of desperation. You would be desperate, too, if you were making a case for a war Ukrainians are on the brink of losing and will never, brink or back-from-the-brink, have any chance of winning. Atop this, you want people who know better, including 70 percent of Americans according to a recent poll, to keep investing extravagant sums in this ruinous folly.
And here is what seems to me the true source of angst among these desperados: Having painted this war as a cosmic confrontation between the world’s democrats and the world’s authoritarians, the people who started it and want to prolong it have painted themselves into a corner. They cannot lose it. They cannot afford to lose a war they cannot win: This is what you see and hear from all those good-money-after-bad people still trying to persuade you that a bad war is a good war and that it is right that more lives and money should be pointlessly lost to it.
Everyone must act for the cause in these dire times…………………………………………………
you have Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s war-mongering sec-gen, telling Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that it will be fine if Kyiv uses F–16s to attack Russian cities once they are operational this summer. The U.S.–made fighter jets, the munitions, the money—all of it is essential “to ensure Russia doesn’t make further gains.” Stephen Bryen, formerly a deputy undersecretary at the Defense Department, offered an excellent response to this over the weekend in his Weapons and Strategy newsletter: “Fire Jens Stoltenberg before it is too late.”
Good thought, but Stoltenberg, Washington’s longtime water-carrier in Brussels, is merely doing his job as assigned: Keep up the illusions as to Kyiv’s potency and along with it the Russophobia, the more primitive the better. You do not get fired for irresponsible rhetoric that risks something that might look a lot like World War III.
What would a propaganda blitz of this breadth and stupidity be without an entry from The New York Times? Given the extent to which The Times has abandoned all professional principle in the service of the power it is supposed to report upon, you just knew it would have to get in on this one.
The Times has published very numerous pieces in recent weeks on the necessity of keeping the war going and the urgency of a House vote authorizing that $61 billion Biden’s national security people want to send Ukraine. But never mind all those daily stories. Last Sunday it came out with its big banana. “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” sprawls—lengthy text, numerous photographs. The latter show the usual wreckage—cars, apartment buildings, farmhouses, a snowy dirt road lined with landmines. But the story that goes with it is other than usual.
Somewhere in Washington, someone appears to have decided it was time to let the Central Intelligence Agency’s presence and programs in Ukraine be known. And someone in Langley, the CIA’s headquarters, seems to have decided this will be O.K., a useful thing to do. When I say the agency’s presence and programs, I mean some: We get a very partial picture of the CIA’s doings in Ukraine, as the lies of omission—not to mention the lies of commission—are numerous in this piece. But what The Times published last weekend, all 5,500 words of it, tells us more than had been previously made public.
Let us consider this unusually long takeout carefully for what it is and how it came to make page one of last Sunday’s editions…………………………………………………………..
Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz tell the story of—this the subhead—“a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.” They set the scene in a below-ground monitoring and communications center the CIA showed Ukrainian intel how to build beneath the wreckage of an army outpost destroyed in a Russian missile attack. They report on the archipelago of such places the agency paid for, designed, equipped, and now helps operate. Twelve of these, please note, are along Ukraine’s border with Russia.
………………………..The CIA handed these two material according to what it wanted and did not want disclosed, and various officials associated with it made themselves available as “sources”—none of the American sources named, per usual.
……………………………..The narrative thread woven through the piece is interesting. It is all about the two-way, can’t-do-without-it cooperation between the CIA and Ukraine’s main intel services—the SBU (the domestic spy agency) and military intelligence, which goes by HUR
……………………… Sloppy, tiresome. But to a purpose. Why, then? What is The Times’s purpose in publishing this piece?
………………………………..The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there for a reason. ………………………………………………..
more https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/29/patrick-lawrence-the-cia-in-ukraine-the-ny-times-gets-a-guided-tour/
The Show Trial against Julian Assange
If the US authorities succeed in convicting a journalist for exposing war crimes, this would have another serious consequence. In the future, it would become even more difficult and dangerous to expose the sordid reality of wars,
How US and British authorities are bending the law and undermining press freedom
FABIAN SCHEIDLER, FEB 24, 2024 ore https://fabianscheidler.substack.com/p/the-show-trial-against-julian-assange
“Those who tell the truth need a fast horse,” says an Armenian proverb. Or they need a society that protects the truth and its messengers. But this protection, which our democracies claim to offer, is in danger. As a journalist, Julian Assange has published hundreds of thousands of files documenting war crimes committed by the USA and its allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere. The authenticity of the documents is beyond question. However, none of the perpetrators have been brought to justice or convicted. In contrast, the messenger has been incarcerated in a high-security prison in London for five years with life-threatening health problems, having previously spent seven years locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy. He has been charged with no crime in the UK, in any EU country or in his home country of Australia. The only reason for his grueling deprivation of liberty is that the US government has initiated extradition proceedings accusing the journalist Assange of espionage, invoking a law dating back more than a hundred years to the First World War: the Espionage Act.
Never before has a journalist been charged under this law. The extradition process therefore sets a dangerous precedent. If it is successful, every journalist on Earth who exposes US war crimes would have to fear suffering the same fate as Assange. That would be the end of freedom of the press as we know it. Because it is based on the capacity to bring to light the dark sides of power without fear of punishment. Where this freedom is extinguished, it is not only the freedom of journalists that dies, but the freedom of us all: the freedom from the arbitrariness of power.
For this reason alone, this extradition process should never have been accepted by the courts in a functioning legal system. Julian Assange did not act as a spy in any way, but as a journalist and as such is subject to special protection. Incidentally, the key witness for the espionage charge was the notorious fraudster and convicted paedophile Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, who admitted in 2021 that he had lied on behalf of the FBI and had been granted immunity from prosecution.
Let us imagine the case with reversed roles: Suppose an Australian journalist had published war crimes committed by the Russian military and intelligence services and sought protection in a Western European country. Would the courts seriously consider extradition proceedings to Moscow for espionage, especially if the key witness is a convicted criminal?
Assange is facing the absurd sentence of 175 years in the USA. It is to be feared that he will not survive the extremely harsh conditions in the notorious US prison system. For this reason, the London Magistrates’ Court initially halted his extradition in 2021. The US government then published a paper stating that Assange would not face solitary confinement. However, according to Amnesty International, this declaration is “not worth the paper it is written on”, as the non-binding diplomatic note reserves the right for the US government to change its position at any time. The Court of Appeal, however, found this paper sufficient to clear the way for extradition – a travesty of justice, as Amnesty noted.
The hearings, which took place on February 20 and 21 at the High Court in London and whose verdict is expected in March, are the last opportunity for Assange to obtain an appeal against this extradition decision. However, there is a high risk that the law will once again be turned on its head. As the investigative platform Declassified UK reports, one of the two judges, Jeremy Johnson, previously worked for the British secret service MI6, which is closely intertwined with the CIA and whose illegal activities came to public attention through the work of Julian Assange.
For Julian Assange, the trial itself has already become a punishment. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, concluded after detailed investigations that Assange had been subjected to systematic psychological torture for years. The fact that the US was prepared to go even further came to light in September of the same year: according to reports in the Guardian, senior intelligence officials, including the then head of the CIA and later Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, planned to kidnap and murder Assange in 2017.[v]
The background:
Wikileaks had published documents that year that became known as “Vault 7”. They show the CIA’s massive activities in the field of cyber warfare and prove how the secret service systematically and comprehensively intervenes in web browsers, IT systems in cars, smart TVs and smartphones, even when they are switched off. This was one of the most sensational revelations by Wikileaks since the leaks by Edward Snowden, who uncovered the massive illegal surveillance by the NSA. The CIA was not to forgive Assange for this coup and subsequently classified Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” – a momentous neologism that allowed journalists to be declared enemies of the state. After Pompeo became Secretary of State in 2018, the US government initiated the extradition proceedings. This move replaced Pompeo’s original kidnapping and killing plan, with the goal remaining the same: the destruction of an inconvenient journalist.
The revelations of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and journalists such as Julian Assange have shown that in the shadow of the so-called war on terror, a vast parallel universe has emerged in recent decades that is obsessed with the illegal spying on its own citizens and the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and killing of political opponents. This world is largely beyond democratic control, indeed it is undermining the democratic order from within.
However, this development is not entirely new. In 1971, leaks revealed a secret FBI program for spying on, infiltrating and disrupting civil rights and anti-war movements, which became known as COINTELPRO. In the same year, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, which showed that four successive US administrations had systematically lied to their citizens about the extent and motives of the Vietnam War and the massive war crimes committed by the US military. In 1974, Seymour Hersh revealed the CIA’s secret programs to assassinate foreign heads of state and the covert operation to spy on hundreds of thousands of opponents of the war, which ran under the code name “Operation CHAOS”. Driven by these reports, the US Congress convened in 1975 the Church Committee, which carried out a comprehensive review of the secret operations and led to greater parliamentary control of the services.
Julian Assange is part of this venerable journalistic tradition and has made a decisive contribution to its renewed flourishing. However, there is one important difference to the 1970s: Today, the most important investigative journalist of his generation is openly persecuted, criminalized and deprived of his freedom. When states declare the investigation of crimes to be a crime itself, society enters a dangerous downward spiral, at the end of which new forms of totalitarian rule can emerge. As early as 2012, Assange remarked, at the time with regard to the increasingly comprehensive surveillance technologies: “We have all the ingredients for a turnkey totalitarian state”.
If the US authorities succeed in convicting a journalist for exposing war crimes, this would have another serious consequence. In the future, it would become even more difficult and dangerous to expose the sordid reality of wars, especially those wars that Western governments like to sell as civilizing missions with the help of embedded journalists. If we do not learn the truth about these wars, it becomes much easier to wage them. Truth is the most important instrument of peace.
Julian Assange has not yet been extradited and sentenced. Over the years, a remarkable international movement has formed for his release and the defense of press freedom. Many parliamentarians around the world are also raising their voices. The Australian parliament, for example, supported by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, passed a resolution by a large majority calling for Assange’s release. A group of over 80 members of the German parliament have joined in. However, the German government is still refusing to exert any serious pressure on Joe Biden’s government, which continues to persecute Assange. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who as the Green Party’s candidate for chancellor had spoken out in favor of freeing Assange, has persistently avoided questions on the subject since joining the government. Her ministry has left questions from MPs about the case unanswered for months, only to then make elusive rhetorical excuses. The leading politicians of the governing German coalition, who like to loudly present themselves as the guardians of democracy and the rule of law, must finally take action in this case of political justice and unequivocally demand the release of Julian Assange before it is too late. However, this would require overcoming the cowering attitude towards the godfather in Washington and actually standing up for the much-vaunted values of democracy.
New Israeli report alleging ‘systematic and intentional rape’ by Hamas relies on debunked Western media reports
The Grayzone, MAX BLUMENTHAL·FEBRUARY 22, 2024
The contents of the Israeli Association of Rape Crisis Center’s paper alleging “systematic” Hamas rape derive largely from discredited second-hand testimonies and debunked media reports. Among its most heavily cited sources is a dubious NY Times article that triggered a staff revolt at the paper.
Western media outlets are hyping a new report by the Israeli government-affiliated “Association of Rape Crisis Centers” (ARCC) which maintains that Hamas combatants carried out a campaign of “systematic and intentional” rape on October 7.
“Israeli report finds evidence of ‘systematic’ rape and abuse during 7 October attack,” a Guardian headline blared. “Report shows systematic rapes, murder of women in Israel on October 7,” Germany’s DPA screamed. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post shrieked, “Hamas terrorists forced families to watch loved ones get raped at gunpoint.”
Despite the AP’s acknowledgment that the report “did not specify the number of cases it had documented or identify any victims, even anonymously” and that its authors “declined to say whether they had spoken to victims,” dozens of mainstream outlets have presented its findings as incontrovertible fact.
Yet a close examination of the ARCC report reveals that the paper is short on new research, absent of hard evidence, and reliant instead on clips from factually-challenged articles by the same Western outlets promoting its publication. Among the paper’s most frequently cited sources is an infamously shoddy New York Times report by Jeffrey Gettleman purporting to detail “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7.”
Following an internal staff uproar prompted by a series of Grayzone exposés which highlighted major inconsistencies and demonstrable falsehoods by the paper’s sources, the Times canceled an episode of its “Daily” podcast about the article.
Despite the controversy surrounding the Times’ report, the ARCC cites it twelve times in its own paper, while sourcing testimony second-hand from many of the same discredited Israelis as the Times.
The ARCC also relies substantially on testimony from ZAKA, the ultra-Orthodox “rescue” group which introduced false allegations that Hamas beheaded babies, cut fetuses from pregnant women, and had lunch in an Israeli family’s home after killing and mutilating them. ZAKA has been lambasted in Israeli media for serially mishandling evidence from the October 7 attacks and even staging atrocity scenes for fundraising purposes.
At least one quarter of citations in the ARCC’s paper are drawn from the widely panned New York Times article and credibility-strained ZAKA volunteers. The rest of the paper relies on dubious self-proclaimed witnesses like the Israeli army reservist Shari Mendes, who falsely claimed that Hamas not only cut a fetus from a pregnant Israeli woman, but beheaded its mother.
In citing the NY Times to demonstrate systematic rape by Hamas on October 7, the ARCC points to “a video posted on social media” which shows “a woman in a torn dress, without underwear, injured and with her face burned. Police investigators ruled that she had been raped.”
This section refers to Gal Abdush, a young woman killed on October 7 who features as a central character in the NY Times article. As The Grayzone reported, Abdush’s sister and brother-in-law both publicly denied that she was raped, with the former accusing the Times of manipulating her family into participating by misleading them about their editorial angle.
The ARCC later cites a NY Times account of “an IDF paramedic” who claimed to have entered a room in Kibbutz Beeri “where the bodies of two girls were found, one of whom was found with her pants rolled down and the remains of semen on her back.”
The Grayzone has exposed this source as well, revealing him as a reservist paramedic from Israeli Air Force Special Tactics rescue unit 669 who identifies himself to the media only as “G,” but whose real name is Guy Melamed. As we explained, no girls were found on Kibbutz Beeri in a condition remotely similar to Melamed’s description.
The closest match to the paramedic’s account were two teenage residents of Beeri, Yahel and Noiya Sharabi, who were killed on October 7. But according to the Times of Israel, the girls’ bodies were “found in an embrace” with their mother, and not “alone, separated from the rest of the family.”
Israeli media has also reported, “Lianne and Yahel [Sharabi] could only be identified through DNA samples. Noiya was identified through her teeth only two days ago.”
So how was Melamed able to find semen on one of the girls, and bruises on the other, and view their states of undress, if their bodies had been burned beyond recognition? The only answer is that he fabricated the entire scenario.
Before Melamed cooked up atrocities for the NY Times, which were later reheated by the ARCC, he appeared on a right-wing Indian news channel to invent an account of discovering a dead baby discarded into a trash can by Hamas. Given that only one baby was killed on October 7 – a one year old accidentally shot by a Hamas militant – the paramedic’s story could not have possibly been true.
Melamed was just one character among a motley collection of self-styled Israeli rescuers who fabricated October 7 atrocity tales to gain notoriety in the Western press. The most prolific fabulists emerged from an ultra-Orthodox Israeli state-affiliated group called ZAKA. This was the outfit responsible for “confirming” the bogus story of Hamas beheading babies on October 7 and spinning out the tale of a Palestinian militant slashing a fetus from a pregnant Jewish woman.
As The Grayzone reported, ZAKA is an infamously corrupt organization founded by a prolific sexual abuser. Before October 7, the group was nearly insolvent, but since it attracted international attention the lurid lies its volunteers spun out, it has raked in millions from wealthy Jewish diaspora donors including Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Yossi Landau, the ZAKA “commander” who invented an array of debunked October 7 horror stories, has said that those who question his credibility “should be killed.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
ARCC paper paid for by Israel lobby bigwigs behind “10/7 Project” PR operation
Though released by an association seemingly dedicated to supporting sexual assault survivors in Israel, the ARCC’s paper alleging “systematic” rape by Hamas was paid for by Zionist pressure groups in the US. Its top sponsors include the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which has donated millions to AIPAC-related initiatives, and the Jewish Federations of Greater Miami.
AIPAC and the Jewish Federations are also key pillars in the coalition of Israel lobby outfits behind a new propaganda initiative called the “10/7 Project.” According to Axios, the 10/7 Project comprises “a centralized communications operation that aims to provide newsrooms and policymakers with fact-based information on the [Gaza] war.”
In its bid to justify Israel’s blood-spattered assault on the Gaza Strip, which has left nearly 30,000 dead in over 130 days – most of them women and children – the 10/7 Project has contracted high-powered Democratic Party PR firms like SKDK to, in its words, “retell the story about the butchery of the Oct 7 attack and make outcasts of 10/7 deniers.”
Whether or not the 10/7 Project is responsible for the publicity blitz surrounding the ARCC’s new paper on “systematic” Hamas rape, it is clear Western media has become a laundromat for Israeli propaganda about October 7, recycling discredited allegations through a seemingly endless series of dodgy dossiers, and hyping each one as freshly obtained evidence of Palestinian savagery. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/02/22/israeli-hamas-debunked-western-media/
An Open Letter from Editors and Publishers: Publishing is Not a Crime
The following is a letter from The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL urging the U.S. government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.
By The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL, https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/18/an-open-letter-from-editors-and-publishers-publishing-is-not-a-crime/
Twelve years ago, on November 28th 2010, our five international media outlets – The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL – published a series of revelations in cooperation with Wikileaks that made the headlines around the globe.
“Cable gate”, a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US State Department disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.
In the words of The New York Times, the documents told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money”. Even now in 2022, journalists and historians continue to publish new revelations, using the unique trove of documents.
For Julian Assange, publisher of Wikileaks, the publication of “Cable gate” and several other related leaks had the most severe consequences. On April 11th, 2019, Assange was arrested in London on a US arrest warrant, and has now been held for three and a half years in a high security British prison usually used for terrorists and members of organized crime groups. He faces extradition to the US and a sentence of up to 175 years in an American maximum security prison.
This group of editors and publishers, all of whom had worked with Assange, felt the need to publicly criticize his conduct in 2011 when unredacted copies of the cables were released, and some of us are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database. But we come together now to express our grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials.
The Obama-Biden Administration, in office during the Wikileaks publication in 2010, refrained from indicting Assange, explaining that they would have had to indict journalists from major news outlets too. Their position placed a premium on press freedom, despite its uncomfortable consequences. Under Donald Trump however, the position changed. The DOJ relied on an old law, the Espionage Act of 1917 (designed to prosecute potential spies during World War 1), which has never been used to prosecute a publisher or broadcaster.
This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.
Holding governments accountable is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy.
Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalised, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.
Twelve years after the publication of “Cable gate”, it is time for the U.S. government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.
Publishing is not a crime.
The editors and publishers of:
- The New York Times
- The Guardian
- Le Monde
- DER SPIEGEL
- El Pais
Patrick Lawrence: The Crisis at The New York Times
From Israeli Propaganda to Page One.
By Patrick Lawrence ScheerPost 12 Feb 24
It has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side. The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable.
The Israelis took this risk and they have lost. We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity one would have thought beyond what is worst in humanity—and certainly beyond what any Jew would do to another human being. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, as American media do not, that the Israel Defense Forces covertly sponsor a social media channel disseminating this degenerate material in the cause of maintaining maximum hatred.
It is a psychologically diseased nation that boasts as it inflicts this suffering on The Other that obsesses it. The world is invited—the ultimate in perversity, this—to partake of Israel’s sickness and said, in a Hague courtroom two weeks ago, “No.”
Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now. The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart—its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities—and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself. When the history of America’s decline as a hegemonic power is written, the Gaza crisis is certain to figure in it as a significant marker in the nation’s descent into a morass of immorality that has already contributed to a collapse of its credibility.
We come to U.S. media — mainstream media, corporate media, legacy media. However you wish to name them, they have gambled and lost, too. Their coverage of the Gaza crisis has been so egregiously and incautiously unbalanced in Israel’s behalf that we might count their derelictions as unprecedented. When the surveys are conducted and the returns are in, their unscrupulous distortions, their countless omissions, and—the worst offense, in my view—their dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza will have further damaged their already collapsing credibility.
We come, finally, to The New York Times. No medium in America has had further to fall in consequence of its reporting on Israel and Gaza since last October. And the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record, fairly suffocating amid its well-known hubris, falls as we speak. It has erupted, by numerous accounts including implicitly its own, in an internal uproar over reportage from Israel and Gaza so shabby—so transparently negligent—that it, like Israel, may never fully restore its reputation.
Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, described the crisis on Eighth Avenue better than anyone in the Jan. 30 segment of The Hill’s daily webcast, Rising. “We’re looking at one of the biggest media scandals of our time,” he told Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave. Indeed. This well captures the gravity of The Times’s willful corruptions in its profligate use of Israeli propaganda, and Blumenthal deserves the microphone to say so. Since late last year The Grayzone has exhaustively investigated The Times’s “investigations” of Hamas’s supposed savagery and Israel’s supposed innocence.
This is more than “inside baseball,” as the saying goes. We now have a usefully intricate anatomy of an undeservedly influential newspaper as it abjectly surrenders to power the sovereignty it is its duty to claim and assert in every day’s editions. It would be hard to overstate the implications, for all of us, of what The Grayzone has just brought to light. This is independent journalism at its best reporting on corporate journalism at its worst.
What we find as we read The Times’s daily report from Israel, and from Gaza when its correspondents unwisely accept invitations to embed with the IDF, is a newspaper unwilling to question either its longstanding fidelity to Israel or its service to American power. These two ideological proclivities—well more than what its reporters see and hear—have defined the paper’s coverage of this crisis. This is bad journalism straight off the top.
It was inevitable, then, that The Times would serve as Israel’s apologist as soon as the IDF began its murder spree last October.
. This was not a rampage worthy of the Visigoths, as plentiful video footage carried on social media and in independent publications revealed it to be: It was dignified as “a war,” a war waged not against Palestinians but “against Hamas,” and Israel fought it in “self-defense.” Hamas is “a terrorist organization,” so there is no complexity or dimensionality to it, and therefore no need to understand anything about it.
It has been a question of minimizing and maximizing in the pages of The Times. Israel’s genocidal intent is indecipherable to anyone relying on its coverage. The physical destruction of Gaza is never described as systematic. The IDF does not target noncombatants. The newspaper has reported the shocking statements of Israeli officials, some openly favoring genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and the like, only when these have been so prominently reported elsewhere that The Times could no longer pretend such things were never said. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
And so on. You have descriptions of all kinds of unimaginable, B–movie perversities—militiamen playing with severed breasts, militiamen walking around with armfuls of severed heads—that rest upon “witnesses” whose testimonies, given how often they shift or do not line up with what was eventually determined, simply cannot be counted as stable.
And then there are the official statements. Among the most categoric of these is one from the Israeli police, issued after The Times published “‘Screams Without Words’” Dec. 28 and asserting that they have found no eyewitnesses to rapes on Oct. 7 and see nothing in media reports such as The Times’s constituting evidence of systematic sexual violence.
And so on. You have descriptions of all kinds of unimaginable, B–movie perversities—militiamen playing with severed breasts, militiamen walking around with armfuls of severed heads—that rest upon “witnesses” whose testimonies, given how often they shift or do not line up with what was eventually determined, simply cannot be counted as stable.
And then there are the official statements. Among the most categoric of these is one from the Israeli police, issued after The Times published “‘Screams Without Words’” Dec. 28 and asserting that they have found no eyewitnesses to rapes on Oct. 7 and see nothing in media reports such as The Times’s constituting evidence of systematic sexual violence. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/12/patrick-lawrence-the-crisis-at-the-new-york-times/
1 This Month
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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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