Ha ha. – Facebook removed my post AGAIN!
Hardly surprising ! –
“We removed your post” – We removed your post – Noel Christina Wauchope Oct 14, 2024
This was the post: FACEBOOK hits a new low – removing a post that congratulated the Nobel Peace Prize winners !
I didn’t read their “reasons”. But I guess, as usual, I have “offended community standards” by saying something negative about nuclear. https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/uk-and-ireland-partners-congratulate-2024-nobel-peace-prize-winner/
Oct 14, 2024 We removed your post Noel Christina Wauchope Oct 14, 2024 https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/uk-and-ireland-partners-congratulate-2024-nobel-peace-prize-winner/ You shared this on your profile
Israel’s War on Journalism
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years………..What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Chris Hedges, October 25, 2024, https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/25/chris-hedges-israels-war-on-journalism/
Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.
It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves.
As the playwright Harold Pinter said:
US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next.
The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished.
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors. Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.
And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel’s onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza.
Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770 Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.
Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible. These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The New York Times, The Intercept writes, “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”
“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”
“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.
Retired general David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception.
Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There’s such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Lying Western Press Scramble To Frame Israel’s Attack On Iran As Self Defense.
26 Oct 2024 JOHNSTONE radio, Israel has launched a round of airstrikes on Iran which the western news media are falling all over themselves to falsely frame as “retaliatory” strikes against an unprovoked missile attack by Iran.
Let’s talk about…Mainstream Media (MSM) Coverage of Israeli War Crimes
Truth is irrelevant, narrative is all. That’s how the media works.
Kit Knightly, Off-Guardian Thu, 24 Oct 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/495700-Lets-talk-about-MSM-coverage-of-Israeli-War-Crimes
Two weeks ago, it was widely reported across all the Western legacy media that Israel had fire-bombed a hospital leaving patients to burn to death in their beds.
A few days later, we were told by the same Western legacy media that Israeli strikes inside Lebanon had destroyed a 2000-year-old village.
Today, CNN’s front page hosts an IDF soldier describing Israel’s practice of using civilians as human shields in Gaza, while the Guardian details an Israeli strike on school-turned-bomb shelter in Gaza.
Now, it’s not at all unusual that Israel should be committing war crimes, they’ve been doing so unchecked for decades.
But what is less usual is seeing these war crimes appearing on front pages and in headlines in the controlled media.
We’ve all been doing this long to have dispelled any idea the MSM cares about truth.
They don’t care about truth. Not at all. In fact these days their internal structures barely permit them to recognize truth as a concept.
Nothing – nothing – is so true the media have to report it, no crimes are so brutal they can’t be ignored.
Case in point, in Odessa in 2014 civilians protesting the NATO-backed coup in Ukraine were chased inside the Trade Union building by pro-coup neo-Nazis.
The building was barricaded and set on fire. People climbing out of the windows to escape the flames were shot at.
Forty people died, shot or burned to death. The neo-Nazis responsible celebrated by showing pictures of beetles being set alight (their disparaging term for ethnic Russians was “Colorado beetles” in reference to the orange and black ribbon of St George they wore).
How did the legacy media respond to this murder?
Well, they just lied.
They claimed the protesters set the fire by accident when they were throwing Molotov cocktails off the roof. This was a complete fabrication, contradicted by CCTV evidence, blaming the victims and covering for the fascists, but so what? They media didn’t care, they just kept repeating the lie and are still doing so today
Truth is irrelevant, narrative is all. That’s how the media works.
They’ve done the same in the past for Israel , the US, Saudi Arabia, NATO…whoever…countless times over the years.
And yet here we are, in 2024, with these Israeli crimes all over the controlled news.
They could lie if they wanted, as they usually do.
But they aren’t.
It prompts the eternal question: “Why this? Why now?”
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
Israel Continues Its War On Journalism
Caitlin Johnstone, 24 Oct 24, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-continues-its-war-on-journalism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=150646353&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
An Israeli airstrike destroyed the press office of the Lebanese news broadcaster Al Mayadeen on Wednesday night, continuing Israel’s historically unprecedented military assault on the press.
Also in continuation of Israel’s war on journalism, the IDF has published the names of six Al Jazeera reporters who it claims are actually members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, citing as evidence documents which it claims Israeli forces found in Gaza. These allegations would mark these journalists as legitimate military targets.
Al Jazeera has denounced these claims as unfounded, saying in a statement, “The Network views these fabricated accusations as a blatant attempt to silence the few remaining journalists in the region, thereby obscuring the harsh realities of the war from audiences worldwide.”
There is of course no reason to ever believe any claim Israel makes about anything whatsoever absent mountains of independently verifiable evidence, after the mountains of lies it has churned out over the last year. The fact that western news outlets are treating these allegations as plausible is evidence of their propagandistic nature.
Israel claims everyone it wants to kill is Hamas. The journalists are Hamas, the hospitals are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the aid trucks are Hamas, the schools are Hamas, the mosques are Hamas, the water infrastructure is Hamas, the civilian homes are all Hamas, and Hamas is hiding behind every woman and child in Gaza. The only exception to this rule is in Lebanon, in which case everyone Israel wants to kill is Hezbollah.
Israel hates truth, which is why it kills journalists at every opportunity and blocks them from entering Gaza. This is because truth tends to have a marked anti-Israel bias.
We saw this illustrated recently when Israel announced that there’s a secret Hezbollah bunker underneath a hospital in Beirut, so the press simply sent a bunch of reporters to go investigate because Israel can’t block the press from entering Lebanon like it can in Gaza. Even western outlets like the BBC and Sky News entered the hospital and interviewed medical staff, reporting that they found no trace of evidence supporting Israel’s claims and that the hospital staff all denied the existence of any Hezbollah bunker on the premises. And you may be sure those outlets would have eagerly reported any sign of Hezbollah if they were given the opportunity.
Criminal institutions need to function in the dark. They cannot function in the light of visibility and critical journalism and inconvenient video footage. That’s why the mafia murders witnesses. That’s why the inner workings of the US war machine are shrouded in government secrecy. That’s why Julian Assange spent five years in a maximum security prison. And that’s why Israel does everything it can to kill and obstruct journalists who tell the truth about its crimes.
Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News
Mint Press News, October 16th, 2024, Alan Macleod
ne year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.
The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.
Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.
White House Insider
Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.
Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.
Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
An Infamous Spy Agency
Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s largest and most controversial division.
Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyberwarfare, since October 7, 2023, the group has been at the forefront of the world’s attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine dead and around 3,000 people injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta.
Unit 8200 has also constructed an artificial intelligence-powered kill list for Gaza, suggesting tens of thousands of individuals (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the primary targeting mechanism the IDF used in the early months of its attack on the densely populated strip.
Described as Israel’s Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will be picked for service there, unlocking a lucrative career in Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector.
It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians.
Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel. One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.
Unit 8200 operatives have gone on to create some of the world’s most downloaded apps and many of the most infamous spying programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus was used to surveil dozens of political leaders around the world, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan’s Imran Khan.
The Israeli government authorized the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the most authoritarian governments on the planet. This included Saudi Arabia, who used the software to surveil Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.
A recent MintPress News investigation found that a large proportion of the worldwide VPN market is owned and operated by an Israeli company headed and co-founded by a Unit 8200 alumnus.
In 2014, 43 Unit 8200 reservists penned a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit on account of its unethical practices, which included making no distinction between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also noted that their intelligence was passed on to powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.
This public statement left Ravid bristling with anger at his co-workers. In the wake of the scandal, Ravid went on Israeli Army radio to attack the whistleblowers. Ravid said that to oppose the occupation of Palestine was to oppose Israel itself, as the occupation is a fundamental “part” of Israel. “If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, “then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system… and 8200 is a great spin.”
Leaving aside Ravid’s comments, the question arises: is it really acceptable that members from a group designed to infiltrate, surveil and target foreign populations, that has produced many of the planet’s most dangerous and invasive spying technology, and is widely to be behind sophisticated international terror attacks, are writing Americans’ news about Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in U.S. media were outed as intelligence officers for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Russia’s F.S.B.?
News About Israel, Brought to You by Israel
Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with deep ties to the Israeli state, however. Shachar Peled spent three years as an officer in Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour’s shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist.
Another Unit 8200 agent who went on to work for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the field and news desk producer for CNN’s notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem Bureau, where she was one of the principal journalists shaping America’s understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
CNN’s penchant for hiring Israeli state figures continues to this day. Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network, producing much of its Israel/Palestine content. This is despite having previously served as an official IDF spokesperson in the Israeli Defense Forces.
The New York Times, meanwhile, hired Anat Schwartz, an ex-Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer with zero journalistic experience. Schwartz co-wrote the infamous and now discredited “Screams Without Words” expose, which claimed that Hamas fighters systematically sexually violated Israelis on October 7. Times staff themselves revolted over the lack of evidence and fact-checking in the piece.
Multiple New York Times employees, including star columnist David Brooks, have had children serving in the IDF; even as they report or offer opinions on the region, the Times never disclosed these glaring conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it purchased a Jerusalem house for its bureau chief that was stolen from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi in 1948.
MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg (an American) dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising). In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that, while serving in the IDF., he helped cover up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
Social media companies, too, are filled with former Unit 8200 agents. A 2022 MintPress study found no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 operatives working for Google.
Facebook also employs dozens of ex-spooks from the controversial unit. This includes Emi Palmor, who sits on Meta’s oversight board. This 21-person panel ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other offerings, adjudicating on what content to allow, promote, and what to suppress……………………………………
Top Down Pro-Israel Censorship
When it comes to the Israeli attack on its neighbors, corporate media has consistently displayed a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, regularly refrains from identifying the perpetrator of violence when that perpetrator is the Israeli military and described the 1948 genocide of around 750,000 Palestinians as a mere “migration.” A study of the paper’s coverage found that words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” appear 22 times more frequently when discussing Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the gigantic disparity in the number of people killed on both sides.
Meanwhile, in a story about how Israeli soldiers shot 335 bullets at a car containing a Palestinian child and then shot the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives” – a title that could be interpreted that her death was a tragic accident.
This sort of reporting does not happen by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top. A leaked New York Times memo from November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times’ staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.
CNN staff are under similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”
Both the Times and CNN have fired multiple journalists over their opposition to Israeli actions or support for Palestinian liberation. ………………………………………………………………………………
Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?
Since Israel could not continue to prosecute this war without American aid, the battle for the American mind is as important as actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war wages, the lines between journalist and fighter blur. The fact that many of the top journalists supplying us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former Israeli intelligence agents only underlines this. https://www.mintpressnews.com/revealed-israel-unit-8200-spies-american-media/288457/
BBC viewers urge everyone to watch ‘bleak’ war film that has only ever been shown four times
Threads was the first film to ever show what devastation a nuclear winter would cause
Greg Evans, Friday 11 October 2024 ,
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/threads-bbc-iplayer-1984-movie-b2627786.html
BBC iPlayer viewers are encouraging others to watch the nuclear war film Threads, often described as one of the most harrowing movies ever made.
The 1984 film was made for BBC TV by The Bodyguard director Mick Jackson and Kes writer Barry Hines, with Jackson wanting to focus on the scientific ramifications of a nuclear attack and its fallout.
Threads was first aired on BBC Two on 23 September 1984 at the height of the Cold War, when nuclear tensions were as prevalent a talking point as they are today.
Although the film revolves around the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, after the latter invades Iran, it predominantly focuses on the lives of a couple in Sheffield, England and how the war impacts their lives.
The South Yorkshire city was chosen due to the belief that the Soviets would opt to strike an industrial city in the UK and that the local council, at the time, had a “nuclear-free zone” policy.
Despite having a budget of just £400,000, Threads was the first film to ever depict what a nuclear winter would actually look like, giving an uncompromising and brutally bleak outlook on the implications of nuclear war and the devastation it would create. It has been widely praised by critics and audiences alike ever since and holds a 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
It has only been repeated on BBC TV three times since its original broadcast, with the most recent being on 9 October, to celebrate its 40th anniversary.
The film is now available to watch on iPlayer, with many encouraging those who haven’t seen it to watch it despite the heavy subject matter.
On X/Twitter, one person wrote: “Watching Threads as a youngster (too young really) was a massively transformative experience for me. If you haven’t watched it, you owe it to yourself to do so.”
Another said: “One of the earliest films to not treat nuclear bombs as the end point. But instead focus on the horrors and hauntings that accompany surviving their impact. Rarely shown on TV, a must watch.”
A third added: “I beseech you, if you’ve never watched Threads before, make sure you do now. It’s only been shown 4 times on telly in 40 years and it’s a bleak, harrowing, but essential watch. Something you’ll never forget.”
Watching it for the first time, one viewer said: “Waking up the morning after seeing Threads for the first time… … Like all great art, shakes you to the core and makes you see the world in a new way. While the kitchen sink (antithesis of Hollywood) context makes it all the more terrifying.
Book: THE FALL OF ISRAEL: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military
“Israel is in deep trouble at home and abroad. It has become an apartheid state that is executing a genocide in Gaza. The Fall of Israel does an outstanding job explaining the causes and the evolution of the disastrous path that Israel is on.
Dan Steinbock, https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-fall-of-israel/ 15 Oct 24
The path to the obliteration of Gaza was paved by the confluence of a set of longstanding forces. This great conjuncture has transformed Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories while driving the region to the edge. In The Fall of Israel, Dr Dan Steinbock connects the dots among these lethal headwinds. What makes The Fall of Israel unique is its comprehensive scope. It covers Israel’s political, economic, social and military changes, the shifts in the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty, Israel’s degradation into apartheid rule, the attendant atrocities, the regional and global reverberations and the human and economic costs, both prior and subsequent to Israel’s fatal war on Gaza. There, its nightmarish actions have led to the engagement of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, renewed international boycotts, and massive domestic and international protests.
“Israel is in deep trouble at home and abroad. It has become an apartheid state that is executing a genocide in Gaza. The Fall of Israel does an outstanding job explaining the causes and the evolution of the disastrous path that Israel is on. This book deserves to be widely read by anyone interested in understanding contemporary Israel.”—JOHN MEARSHEIMER, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago and co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
“This impressive book provides a comprehensive and incisive answer to the question how we got to where we are in Israel and Palestine today. In a very accessible manner, Steinbock narrates the making of a messianic and theocratic Israel which is a menace for the Palestinians, the region and no less important, to itself. Its downfall as the book predicts is neigh, but on the way, it wreaks havoc and destruction. This is the picture world leaders must be aware of and challenge before it is too late.” —ILAN PAPPE, Professor of History, Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, Author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
“Eight years ago I said that Israel would not be a state in 20 years; today I reaffirm that prognosis adding only that it won’t take 12 more years. Many of my reasons for reaching that conclusion — and indeed far more — are elaborated in The Fall of Israel. Apparently, not many Americans want to know these truths — they’re too nuanced, complex, and damning; but if you happen to be in that group of us who believe strongly in the rule of law — U.S. domestic law and international humanitarian and criminal law in particular — and in democracy, then you need to read this book. When you finish, I hope you will understand that our current national path leads us straight to hell. “—LAWRENCE WILKERSON, Col, USA (Ret) and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell
The Fall of Israel is one of the most comprehensive academic books on the Palestinian crisis. . .This book thoroughly and accurately explains significant facts about the objectives and crimes of Zionism, the likes of which are rarely found in previous academic works.”—SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN, Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist, Princeton University
“Dr. Steinbock’s research illuminates what the public is reluctant to digest: Namely that Israel operates in open rebellion against international law, refusing to live in peace with Palestine’s native population and with neighboring States.”—ALFRED DE ZAYAS, Former UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order
“Dr Steinbock’s book The Fall of Israel is an illuminating and intelligent contribution to our understanding of the events in the Middle East.”—DR. ERKKI TUOMIOJA, Historian and longest serving Minister for Foreign Affairs, Finland, who had a prominent role as the spokesman for European foreign policy
“The Fall of Israel explains excellently how 76 years of repression and suffering for the Palestinians has been facilitated by the unconditional American support for Israelf.”—MOGENS LYKKETOFT, Former Danish Foreign Minister and President of the United Nations General Assembly 2015-2016
“Vital reading for anyone concerned with this issue, and provides perceptive insight that is sorely needed.” —JONATHAN KUTTAB, international human rights attorney, co-founder of Nonviolence International and co-founder of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq
Threads brings nuclear war fears to a new audience
“It is only in the last couple of years that the world is lurching towards world war three, that people start thinking about it again”
“the power station was a key target”
Julia Bryson, BBC News, 11 Oct 24
A television drama about a fictional nuclear attack on the city of Sheffield had a profound effect on many who watched it in the 1980s. Now it has aired once again, we spoke to some first and second-time viewers to gauge their reaction.
First broadcast in 1984, Threads has only been repeated a handful of times since – but having gained something of a cult following, it was repeated on BBC Four on Wednesday night to mark its 40th anniversary.
Andrea Cattermole, 56, from Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, said she loved the realism – but it made her “really anxious that it could really happen”.
She said: “It made me think if it did happen, I’d rather be one of the first to die and not have to live through it, with all the effects it has on everyone in the long term.
Ms Cattermole said she thought everyone should watch Threads to “understand the dreadful problems it causes to everyone and the planet for many years after the event”.
The post-apocalyptic film was created by Kes author Barry Hines, and watching it has become something of a rite of passage for people in his home city of Sheffield.
Val Yates, from Retford, Nottinghamshire, remembered watching Threads for the first time in the 1980s, because it was around the time of her 16th birthday.
Now 56, she said watching it for a second time was “like going back to being 16”.
“When we grew up in the 80s we lived with the threat of nuclear war,” she said.
“It has suddenly become poignant again, it’s happening again now but for a new generation.”
As a teenager, Ms Yates lived in the village of Clarborough, which was only about five miles from West Burton power station, where her father worked.
“I think I probably watched it on my own in my bedroom first time round, my dad worked at the power station, so it was even more scary,” she said.
“There was a lot of propaganda around at the time, even in schools we learned about the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis, it was very realistic.
“We were told the power station was a key target because it’s infrastructure.
“They said if a bomb went off in Sheffield it would take 11 minutes to reach us – there was a graphic which showed how quickly it would sweep the area and it terrified me.”
She added: “Everything settles down and today’s kids have no idea what it was like.
“It is only in the last couple of years that the world is lurching towards world war three, that people start thinking about it again,” she said……
The story is focused around two families who live in Sheffield when a nuclear bomb is detonated.
In the aftermath of the blast, increasingly desperate people are seen trying to seek medical help and food, and civilised society eventually breaks down. Within a generation, language has died out and survivors live in medieval conditions…………………………..
“It remains the most accurate depiction of what nuclear winter would look like,” said Mr Mann – whose documentary “Survivors – The Spectre of Threads” is set to be released next year.
“Nothing has ever captured what the consequences would be, and I think that is what the producer Mick Jackson intended to do.
“He made a stark warning of what that would look like. It is accurate and I think that is why it continues to scare people,” he added.
“It is not something at the immediate forefront of the consciousness at all times but it could still happen and I think that is why people find it so scary.”
Threads is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dp8197y3eo
US-Backed Israeli Military Forces Have Executed Numerous Journalists Since October 7
The Israeli military’s campaign of genocidal violence, carried out with the full support of President Joe Biden’s administration, has killed 138-175 journalists.
thedissenter, Kevin Gosztola, Oct 7, 2024
On October 6, Israeli military forces reportedly targeted and killed Hassan Hamad, a 19-year-old Palestinian journalist in Gaza, in his home in the Jabalia refugee camp.
Maha Hussaini, a Middle East Eye reporter in Deir al-Balah in the occupied Palestinian Territories, reported that Hamad had received threatening phone calls and text messages months ago.
Hamad had been covering an attack by Israeli troops on a residential home when he returned to his bedroom around dawn. “It’s clear [a] shell was fired directly and specifically at Hassan’s bedroom to intentionally target him,” said Ashraf Mashharawi, who manages the Media Town Production Company where Hamad worked.
As Mashharawi told Middle East Eye, his colleague had taken many photos and videos that had made headlines. “Apparently, this bothered [the Israelis]—the fact that his coverage gained attention.”
Barry Malone, the deputy editor-in-chief for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, responded, “Just saw the remains of [19-year-old] Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad reduced to a plastic bag and a shoebox. According to a fresh tally from CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists], 123 journalists have now been k
Record Number of Journalists Killed, Several Of Them Targeted For Execution
Over the past year, the Israeli military has carried out a campaign of genocidal violence with the full support of President Joe Biden’s administration, including a seemingly unlimited flow of weapons. Officials from the U.S. and Israeli governments ask the world to excuse the carnage because Palestinian fighters led by Hamas launched an attack on October 7, and to them, Hamas must be entirely eliminated.
Yet a coalition of American medical professionals who have volunteered in Gaza estimate that “the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.” That estimate includes a record number of journalists killed, making it the deadliest conflict for members of the press. illed in Israeli strikes. If you’re a journalist and you’re not speaking out in solidarity…why?”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The Highest Number Of Detained Journalists In The World’
The Israeli government has also detained at least 69 Palestinian journalists, with 43 still in detention, according to CPJ. Most of the journalists detained are from the West Bank, and ten journalists have been confined under an “administrative detention law” that allows for “indefinite renewal of detention orders.” At least five journalists have been allegedly tortured and abused.
CPJ reported, “On a per capita basis, Israeli authorities now hold the highest number of detained journalists in the world in a given year over the past two decades, followed by Turkey, Iran, and China.”
A censorship regime imposed by the Israeli government has prohibited nearly 4,000 journalists from entering Gaza to report on the war, and as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged, the country’s legislature passed a law to ban foreign media organizations that are deemed a “national security” threat.
The most prominent media organization to be banned was the Arabic news media organization Al Jazeera. In September, Israeli soldiers illegally raided Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau and shut it down. But Lebanese broadcaster Al Mayadeen TV, Radio Dream, a local radio station in Hebron, and the West Bank-based J-Media were all ordered to cease their operations.
Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who was behind the media censorship law that targeted Al Jazeera, threatened to sanction the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for “false propaganda” The Times of Israel reported that Karhi proposed a government resolution to block “any new commercial agreements with the newspaper, halt all advertising in it even if it has been paid for, and halt any outstanding payments from being made.” But Karhi backed away from his proposal after it was denounced.
Destroying All Media Institutions
“Since October 7, 2023,” according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), “Israeli forces have destroyed all media institutions in the Gaza Strip. Airstrikes have demolished 73 media facilities, including 21 local radio stations, 15 local and international news agencies, 15 TV stations, 6 local newspapers, 3 broadcasting towers, 8 printing presses, and 13 journalistic service institutions.”
PJS additionally recalled, “In the early days of the genocidal war on Gaza, the Israeli military targeted most of the high-rise buildings in Gaza that housed both local and international media offices. For example, the Al-Shawa and Al-Haseeri towers in Gaza City, which contained 15 floors of media offices, were completely destroyed by an Israeli airstrike on December 18, 2023, causing extensive damage to the surrounding area.”…………………………………………………………………………………….
IFJ Secretary General Anthony Bellanger concluded, “The vast majority of the world’s media are effectively cut off from a huge news story whose daily horrors pass them by. Their only available sources are the journalists who are members of the PJS and the IFJ, who take all the risks to film and photograph with their phones.”
“Gazan journalists are determined to tell their story, and for so long as that is the case, it is the IFJ’s duty to support them doing this in whatever way we can.” https://thedissenter.org/us-backed-israeli-military-forces-have-executed-numerous-journalists-since-october-7/
“The First Live-Streamed Genocide”: Al Jazeera Exposes War Crimes Filmed by Israeli Troops Themselves
SCHEERPOST, By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now! October 9, 2024
Anew documentary from Al Jazeera takes a look at evidence of war crimes in Gaza in the form of social media posted by Israeli soldiers recording and celebrating their own attacks on Palestinians. We play excerpts from the film Investigating War Crimes in Gaza, now available online, and speak to two of the journalists involved in its production, director Richard Sanders and Gaza-based correspondent Youmna ElSayed. “Israelis themselves were telling us precisely what they were doing and why they were doing it,” says Sanders about the evidence the team reviewed. “They don’t think it’s complicated. They don’t think it’s nuanced. Their rhetoric is often overtly genocidal.” ElSayed adds, “They’ve had all the courage to do that because they know that they are not even going to be condemned.”
Transcript
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Health officials in Gaza say the death toll from Israel’s war has now topped 42,000, though many fear the actual death toll is far higher. We begin today’s show looking at how Israeli troops have repeatedly filmed themselves committing and celebrating war crimes in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has just released a documentary on Israeli war crimes, based in part on social media posts from Israeli soldiers themselves. The documentary begins with the Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa, as well as footage of the Al-Awda school massacre in July, when Israeli troops killed at least 31 people at a school sheltering displaced Palestinians. The moment the bomb exploded was captured on video by someone recording a youth soccer game in the Al-Awda school courtyard…………………………………………………
This is another clip from the documentary. We hear from Human Rights Watch’s associate director for the Middle East and North Africa, Bill Van Esveld [sic]. The clips begin with video posted online by the Israeli 202nd Paratroopers Battalion that shows a possible war crime of the shooting of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. This is a graphic warning…………………………………………………………
We’re joined now by two guests. Youmna ElSayed is a correspondent for Al Jazeera who is based in the Gaza Strip. And Richard Sanders is the director of Al Jazeera I-Unit’s new feature-length documentary, Investigating War Crimes in Gaza.
Youmna, let’s begin with you, as you narrate this film. If you can talk about the video footage that we see, that is actually taken by Israeli soldiers themselves?
YOUMNA ELSAYED: Yes. Thank you for having me on your show again, Amy.
Of course, Israeli soldiers in Gaza taking these videos and posting them on different social media platforms, they haven’t been — they’ve had all the courage to do that because they know that they are not even going to be condemned by posting these videos. They are showing off how much they dehumanize Palestinians, how much they kill. They destroy their properties. They completely torture them and dehumanize them in different ways, whether they’re children, they’re men, they’re women. They brag about it, and they’re very proud of their doings.
And all this comes back to the fact that the Israeli army acts with complete impunity, and they know that even these videos being posted online, they won’t even be shown in other Western news outlets to point out how horrific these videos have actions committed by the Israeli army towards the civilians. On the contrary, Benjamin Netanyahu comes out and says, “We are the most moral army in the world,” when in reality they are the most inhumane army in the world.
As a journalist, as a civilian in any war zone, I am supposed to have the guarantee that a soldier from any other — any other place in the world, any other nationality in the world, as long as he carries that term, that definition that he is a soldier, he must have morals, he must have ethics that he would not hurt me as an unarmed civilian, as a journalist, as a paramedic. But in Gaza, for them, every single Palestinian, as long as you are a Palestinian, you are a legitimate target………………………………………………………
RICHARD SANDERS: Well, thank you for having me, Amy.
Yes, and that’s precisely why we begin the film with those comments from Susan Abulhawa. The essential point of the whole film is no one can hide. The Israelis themselves were telling us precisely what they were doing and why they were doing it. The film is rooted in these soldiers’ videos, of which there are thousands and thousands. And we didn’t pick particularly damaging examples. They’re all like that. I mean, one thing that’s very striking is, what you don’t see in these videos is combat, or very rarely. There’s very little combat. Every now and then you see soldiers expending an enormous amount of ammunition, but they’re frequently standing up, and there’s clearly no incoming. So, that’s what you would think soldiers would want to post online, but they don’t.
…………………………………………….Listen to Israelis. They don’t think it’s complicated. They don’t think it’s nuanced. Their rhetoric is often overtly genocidal. It’s certainly frequently all about ethnic cleansing. They couldn’t have been clearer about what they were doing. And if we are ignorant, we’re willfully ignorant.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Richard Sanders, how do you interpret the fact that these videos were made and posted so liberally by Israeli soldiers themselves?………………………………….. what do you make of the fact that soldiers themselves so openly, transparently and widely distributed their own acts that could be construed as war crimes?
RICHARD SANDERS: They clearly felt this would be popular in Israel. They were competing for clicks, you know. And they were right. These videos were popular. You know, they were using some of the photos they took of themselves on dating apps. And yes, as you say, it speaks to an astonishing sense of impunity. I mean, the clip you’ve played there, where you actually see unarmed men being shot, that’s fairly unusual, but even so, that was put on YouTube by the people who did it…………………………………
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to another clip from your new Al Jazeera Investigates documentary, when we see Israeli soldiers, in footage that they themselves shared, talking about the complete destruction of the Shuja’iyya refugee camp in Gaza.
ISRAELI COMMAND: [translated] Butterfly station, this is command. We’re launching Operation 8th Candle of Hanukkah, the burning of Shuja’iyya neighborhood. Let our enemies learn and be deterred. This is what we’ll do to all our enemies, and not a memory will be left of them. We will annihilate them to dust. Command out.
………………………….RICHARD SANDERS:………………………. One of — the only thing, I would say, that surprises me — I’m not surprised that the Israeli soldiers feel complete impunity and so on, but the fact that higher up the chain of command and in the government, they clearly feel the same impunity, as well. No one has come down the line and cracked down on this and said, “Stop doing it.” It’s quite clear that Israeli politicians and Israeli military commanders feel that they enjoy complete impunity for what they’re doing in the Gaza Strip, as well.
……………………………………………………………………………………………. YOUMNA ELSAYED: …………………………………………………………………………….. the violation, the aggression against the Palestinian journalists, because we are Palestinian and we are inside the Gaza Strip, has been unprecedented, the killing. One hundred seventy-five Palestinian journalists, until today, have been killed. How many others, dozens others have been injured, and our families threatened and killed and injured? Unimaginable numbers…………………. more https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/09/the-first-live-streamed-genocide-al-jazeera-exposes-war-crimes-filmed-by-israeli-troops-themselves/—
Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering
Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 07, 2024
I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, placing strikes on my accounts in the process.
Both Facebook and Instagram have deleted screenshots of a post I made on Twitter (or whatever you call it now) which reads as follows:
Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror.
In the reasons given for this censorship, both Facebook and Instagram said “It looks like you shared symbols, praise or support of people and organizations we define as dangerous, or followed them.”
My appeals against this removal have been denied, saying the post “does not follow our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organisations.”
Hours later, Instagram removed a second post citing the same reasons, this one about Lebanon and Hezbollah. It was two screenshots from a longer Twitter post which reads as follows:
Hezbollah are just Lebanese people. There’s this framing of “liberating Lebanon from Hezbollah” like they’re some kind of invasive, alien presence, when they’re an entirely native fighting force organically arising from the injustices and abuses inflicted by Israel and the west.
The imperial spin machine always does this. The empire uses narrative to try and de-couple the people it wants to kill from the rest of the population in the nation they are targeting in order to legitimize the violence they want to inflict upon the country. They want to take out a certain government or element within a nation that conflicts with their interests, so they start babbling about “terrorists” or “evil dictators” or “regimes” in order to make it seem like they’re not just attacking a country and murdering people who disobey them.
If they can uncouple a nation from the people in that nation who they want to kill in the eyes of the public, then they can portray that killing as a heroic act of liberation from a force which doesn’t belong there. If they can get you to believe that, then they can get you to believe they’re killing people for the benefit of the nation they’re attacking, instead of for their own benefit.
It’s literally always solely and exclusively for their own benefit, though. It’s literally always a lie.
As you can see, both of these posts are just criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States, the nation where Meta is based. Meta has an extensive history of working hand in glove with the US government to regulate speech.
This is indistinct from government censorship. If the US government designates its enemies as “terrorists” and massive Silicon Valley platforms are censoring criticism of US wars against those enemies in order to be in compliance with US law, then the US government is just censoring speech which criticizes US warmongering, using a corporate proxy in Silicon Valley.
Meta has been ramping up censorship of speech that’s critical of Israel and its US-backed atrocities for a while now, with a sharp increase that was anecdotally noticeable immediately after the company announced back in July that it would be instituting vague new censorship protocols against the word “Zionism”. After that move, critics of US foreign policy like Aaron Maté, Jonathan Cook, and Tadhg Hickey began reporting that their posts about Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza were being unexpectedly taken down on Facebook.
I also had one of my articles which was critical of Israel removed from Facebook in July, which the platform refused to reinstate. This followed other acts of censorship that Facebook has been imposing on my account since last October, all for my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza.
Last November Facebook deleted a Twitter screenshot from my page which read, “You don’t understand man, Hamas uses human shields. Really really advanced human shields, the kind where there aren’t even any Hamas members anywhere near them. It’s just 100% human shield with 0% combatant, the most secure kind of shield there is.”…………………………………………………………………………
I think it’s important to document all this in detail because Meta is such a massive tool of US imperial narrative control. Facebook has a staggering three billion users worldwide, and Instagram has two billion. It’s impossible to overstate the impact that censoring speech in a pro-US direction will have on worldwide human communication.
From my earliest days at this gig I’ve been making a point of forcefully criticizing the world’s mightiest and most tyrannical power structure and then documenting the various ways the imperial narrative managers have worked to diminish my reach. I’ve been algorithmically throttled on Facebook since 2017, I’ve been permanently banned on TikTok and keep encountering censorship there under my new account, and I was even banned from Twitter until some commentators with larger voices than my own intervened on my behalf.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and the manipulation of information on the internet is a major agenda of the US-centralized empire toward that end. These pricks won’t be happy until we’re all a bunch of mindless, bleating sheep. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/meta-is-aggressively-censoring-criticism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=149899947&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Media Urge Expansion of Ukraine War—Nuclear Risk Be Damned
Julie Hollar, 3 Oct 24, https://fair.org/home/media-urge-expansion-of-ukraine-war-nuclear-risk-be-damned/
Ukraine has for months been asking the Biden administration for permission to use long-range US, British and French weapons to strike deeper in Russian territory, which would be a clear escalation in the war. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the move would cross a red line for him, and recently announced that he was loosening Russia’s nuclear doctrine for using nuclear weapons.
Despite the risks of such escalation—and a lack of evidence that it would shift the war in Ukraine’s favor—Biden’s public reluctance to loosen his limits has been met in the war-hungry media primarily with derision.
Lowering the bar
The US, Britain and France have all supplied Ukraine with long-range missiles, including Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). But Biden has thus far limited their use to border areas. Britain and France are following Biden’s lead on range limitations.
Last month, in response to further advances by Russia into Ukraine, Ukraine launched a surprise invasion into Russian territory in Kursk. Since then, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pressed the US for more and longer-range missiles, Putin has increasingly raised the specter of nuclear retaliation.
Under its 2020 nuclear doctrine, Russia could respond with nuclear strikes to nuclear or conventional attacks it deemed a “threat to its existence,” if they came from a nuclear power. His new doctrine lowers the bar, so that a “critical attack” on Russia carried out with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” would be grounds for launching a nuclear response—including against the supporting power.
In other words, if Ukraine used long-range missiles supplied by a NATO power to launch an attack on Russia that it deemed “critical,” Putin could respond with a nuclear strike, against either Ukraine or against that NATO country.
Dismissing the nuclear risk
In the opinion pages of US corporate media, the risk of nuclear war or other retaliation by Putin was quickly dismissed, as outlets pressed Biden for further escalation.
The Washington Post editorial board (9/22/24) urged Biden to acquiesce to Zelenskyy under the headline, “Ukraine Needs Long-Range Missiles Before Winter’s Onset.” The board argued that since Putin has issued “red lines” in the past that could prompt nuclear war, and “has not followed through on his threats,” therefore –
there’s no reason to think now he would risk a wider war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at a time when his forces are already severely depleted.
The board suggested that Putin is more likely to “align himself with Iran or its proxies to strike at US forces in the Middle East.” Though it deemed that “a risk worth weighing,” it didn’t discuss it any further. It concluded: “Mr. Biden needs to give permission and set the ground rules quickly.”
Politico editor-at-large Matthew Kaminski (9/18/24) called Zelenskyy’s request “a fair ask.” He made a similar argument to the Post editors that Putin’s “threatening noises” after each “allegedly escalatory step” from the US never turn into actions.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (8/28/24) simply dismissed worries of escalation out of hand:
The Biden administration fears Mr. Putin might escalate his war if Ukraine puts more of his military at risk, but the war isn’t winding down. Ukraine has been attacking Russian targets with domestically produced drones, and on Sunday President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the “first successful combat use of our new weapon—a Ukrainian long-range rocket drone” designed “to destroy the enemy’s offensive potential.”
The Hill published a column by Joseph Bosco (10/1/24) that sneered, “Biden is clearly intimidated by Putin’s threats of retaliation, as stated again last week regarding Zelenskyy’s request for longer strike authority.” Apparently readers were supposed to just dismiss those threats, because Bosco didn’t even try to make an argument about them.
Barely bothering to justify
When it came time to justify the escalation, pundits seemed content to make noises about the need for victory, barely bothering to offer actual arguments about why long-range missiles in particular would achieve that goal.
The Journal editors wrote that Biden’s “latest bad excuse” for not giving Zelenskyy what he wants “is that such strikes wouldn’t make much of a difference.” They cited the neoconservative, military industry–funded Institute for the Study of War, which suggested that even if Russia has already moved 90% of its military aircraft out of reach of those missiles, as Biden officials argued, there were plenty of other things a trigger-happy military could hit. The Journal concluded with the vague claim that “the US can strengthen Ukraine’s position and make negotiations to end the war more likely.”
The Post also cited the ISW, and wrote weakly that the long-range missiles “could” hit Russian “arms depots, air fields and military bases,” which “perhaps…might force Mr. Putin to draw back his deadly cache further from Ukraine’s borders.”
Politico‘s Kaminski simply argued that Ukrainians need “a morale and momentum shift,” and “lowering the restrictions on missile use could help.”
Dubious experts
Establishment media’s news sections were sometimes little better than their opinion sections. The New York Times (9/12/24) splashed on its front page an article about the pressure on Biden to give Ukraine the green light that suggested a growing consensus among experts that Biden’s reluctance is nonsensical:
To a growing number of military analysts and former US officials, the administration’s reticence makes no sense, especially since, they say, Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk has yet to elicit an escalatory response from Moscow.
“Easing the restrictions on Western weapons will not cause Moscow to escalate,” 17 former ambassadors and generals wrote in a letter to the administration this week. “We know this because Ukraine is already striking territory Russia considers its own—including Crimea and Kursk—with these weapons and Moscow’s response remains unchanged.”
Two weeks later—and buried on page 9—the Times (9/26/24) reported quite a different story:
US intelligence agencies believe that Russia is likely to retaliate with greater force against the United States and its coalition partners, possibly with lethal attacks, if they agree to give the Ukrainians permission to employ US-, British- and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, US officials said.
The intelligence assessment, which has not been previously reported, also plays down the effect that the long-range missiles will have on the course of the conflict, because the Ukrainians currently have limited numbers of the weapons and it is unclear how many more, if any, the Western allies might provide.
‘Silver bullet or powder keg’?
The same day, a USA Today headline (9/26/24) read, “Why Long-Range Missiles Could Be Either a Silver Bullet or a Powder Keg for Ukraine/Russia War.” The promised “silver bullet” never fully materialized in the text, but the paper’s sole quoted source—who was given several paragraphs—skewed the article entirely in that direction.
That source was Fred Kagan of the neoconservative, military industry–funded American Enterprise Institute. Kagan is also affiliated with the Institute for the Study of War (which was founded by his wife, Kimberly Kagan) and was an influential proponent of “surges” in both Iraq and Afghanistan—in other words, he’s about as hawkish as they come.
Under the subhead, “How the weapons could help Ukraine fight Russia,” the paper quoted Kagan explaining that long-range missile strikes could “reduce the effectiveness of Russian military action.” It also paraphrased an anonymous “senior Defense official” who, unlike their administration, seemed to favor the move, noting that one “strategic effect” would be that “the war would drag on even longer.” (The official presented this as a positive development, in that it would force Moscow to “to reconsider its costs.”)
USA Today also gave Kagan the last word, to argue that Putin’s threats are “hollow”:
“The burden thus far has been put on those advocating for allowing Ukraine to strike legitimate military targets in Russia,” Kagan said. “But I think the burden really needs to shift now to those who say that some fear of an unspecified escalation should continue to cause us to hold the Ukrainians back.”
Contrary opinions hard to find
It’s been hard to find voices calling for restraint in major corporate media—with a few notable exceptions. One came in a Hill column (9/17/24) under a byline shared by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump, Jr. They warned that “nuclear war would mean the end of civilization as we know it, maybe even the end of the human species.” The op-ed took the opportunity to plug candidate Donald Trump as the one “who has vowed to end this war.”
Trump, of course, argued in his televised debate with Kamala Harris that “we’re playing with World War III” in Ukraine. What he and his Hill proxies neglected to mention is that Trump, while in office, pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, both of which greatly increased the likelihood of nuclear war or “World War III.”
Another pro-restraint take came from longtime Post columnist David Ignatius, who just over a year ago reported being compelled by Ukraine’s “moral argument” for using cluster bombs (FAIR.org, 7/8/23). Ignatius (9/30/24) struck a markedly less hawkish tone recently, writing that “the Ukraine conflict is probably as close as we’ve come to the brink of all-out superpower war since the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.” He concluded: “We’re very lucky, on balance, that [Biden] doesn’t play a reckless game.”
Otherwise, one mostly had to look to outlets in the tank for Trump, or independent outlets like the Nation (9/18/24) and Current Affairs (9/25/24), for skepticism of military escalation.
As Current Affairs‘ Nathan Robinson points out, even if Biden resists the pressure,
with the foreign policy “blob” so willing to risk all of our lives, the next president, whether Trump or Harris, may well be less resistant to the pressures that push presidents toward taking extraordinarily risky gambles that imperil all of humanity.
We could sure use a media more skeptical of that blob, rather than one that gleefully joins in.
‘Western Press Obscured the Sheer Terror of What Israel Had Carried Out’: CounterSpin interview with Mohamad Bazzi on Lebanon pager attacks
So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon.
Janine Jackson interviewed NYU’s Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s terror attacks in Lebanon for the September 27, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Speaking of Israel’s remote detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies of suspected Hezbollah members in Lebanon, former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta told CBS, ”I don’t think there is any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”
Panetta’s remarks were widely reported, mostly straight, but for Fox, where Sean Hannity said Panetta “had the gall to say Israel is engaging in terrorism against the terror group Hezbollah.”
It seems worth noting: Just before Panetta, CBS viewers heard from a former FBI analyst who said of the explosions in stores, cars and homes that killed some 39 people and injured more than 3,000, including children:
Tactically, what Israel has done has been brilliant. They have severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. They’ve severely degraded Hezbollah’s ability to respond to Israeli things. They’re really hoping that, strategically, Hezbollah gets the message: Stop firing rockets into our country.
That “tactic” has led to more death, more destruction and, some say, more chance of a still wider, more devastating war.
Joining us now to talk about unfolding events and US media’s depictions is Mohamad Bazzi. He’s director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, as well as former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mohamad Bazzi.
Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you for having me.
JJ: CBS segued from the “brilliant tactic” guy to Leon Panetta by saying that some saw Israel’s action as a “deception one step too far. The United Nations labeled the operation a violation of international law, and it’s raised some eyebrows here at home too.” It’s equally hard to imagine that this wasn’t a violation as that it wouldn’t immediately be condemned as such, had anyone else carried it out, would you say?
MB: That’s an excellent point. It would certainly have been condemned, let’s say, if Russia had carried out a similar operation, or even something a fraction of this kind of attack, in Ukraine.
I think one of the things that struck me, and I suspect it struck you and others who watch the Western media, is the sense of marvel over the ingenuity of Israel’s technological prowess. So what we had is a lot of the coverage framed as, “Oh, this is taking a page out of a spy thriller, or a dystopian movie.”
And in some ways, what unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives. And so many in the Western media were fixating on the novelty of Israel’s attack, and sometimes celebrating it, but they neglected to acknowledge or even consider the sheer terror experienced by tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. And this is a society that suffered through years and years of trauma, and this was the latest attack that unfolded in this incredibly pernicious way.
A lot of the coverage also didn’t get into the question of whether this constituted a war crime. And, on the face of it, it seems to meet the definition of a war crime: Human Rights Watch, a few other rights organizations, issued statements noting that international humanitarian law forbids the use of booby traps, especially with objects that have such important use for civilians. I think it would fit the definition of a war crime, beyond just being an act of terrorism that’s meant to instill terror in a civilian population.
JJ: Hezbollah, like Hamas, is for many US media consumers almost like a sports team, or like a kaiju, a monster like Godzilla. And I think it might sound strange to some to think that they aren’t solely a military force in Lebanon, but in fact have a much broader role.
MB: Yeah, a lot of media consumers and listeners in the US don’t get the context. They don’t get the background that Hezbollah is not only a militia, it is not only the militia that’s labeled a terrorist group by the US and by many countries in the EU, but it’s also the most dominant military force in Lebanon, and it’s also the most powerful political party and political movement in the country.
So Hezbollah runs an extensive social service network. It operates schools and hospitals and supermarkets and credit unions.
…………………………..It’s the act of terror. It’s the imprecise nature, this deliberate setting off of detonations of thousands of small bombs that went off at the same time on a Tuesday afternoon, as people were going about their daily lives. And so the bombs went off in grocery stores and hospitals and sidewalk cafes and barbershops. The next day, on Wednesday, some of the walkie-talkie explosions went off during the funerals of people who had been killed the day before during the pager explosions.
So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
JJ: There are calls now for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to resign after it’s been reported, I believe by ProPublica, that he was in receipt of assessments, from both USAID and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau, that Israel had blocked deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He had that information, Blinken did, when he went before Congress, and said there was no evidence of that.
Short even of his resignation, though, how many times do US officials need to lie or hide or dissimulate before journalists stop quoting them credulously? Isn’t it just insulting to readers and to the public at some point?
MB: We certainly have many decades of this, going back to Vietnam, of course, US officials lying about war and lying about US support for allies who commit atrocities.
The report from ProPublica has been an exception. It’s an excellent report. It just came out in the last couple of days, based on internal leaks, because there are officials in the State Department, and elsewhere in the Biden administration, that find all of this unconscionable, and don’t want to see this continued support.
And it’s a very important leak, not just because of what it tells us about Blinken and others in the administration, and their ability and willingness to lie to the US public and to lie to the US media, but it also shows us that there’s actually a fairly straightforward path for the Biden administration to stop its weapons transfers to Israel, because those weapons transfers violate US laws. And if they were honest, and they had admitted it, they would’ve had to stop sending weapons, because that’s what US law requires. It’s what the Biden administration’s own guidelines require.
So that was a tremendously important leak by ProPublica. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen some references to it in the past few days, but it’s not getting the widespread attention in the corporate media and in the legacy media that it should be getting.
It’s certainly getting a lot of attention on social media. People are sharing it, and sharing the documents, and it’s creating these calls for Blinken to resign, or for Biden to do something. But it’s certainly troubling to see the legacy media ignore this as well.
And it all raises the question, what more do you want? What more can be presented to the media for it to change its approach to covering this war?
…………………MB: I would certainly like to see more humane coverage. It’s a basic ask, and it’s unfortunate that we have to make this ask, but I would like to see more humane coverage of Palestinians, of Lebanese, of other Arabs and Muslims.
I think one of the things we’ve seen, just in this past week, in the way that the pager explosions and the walkie-talkie explosions were covered—this marveling over Israel’s ingenuity, it ignores the reality on the ground, but it also contributes to the dehumanization of Palestinians and Lebanese and Arabs, this widespread dehumanization that we’ve seen, certainly for decades, but we’ve seen it ramp up to an extreme since Israel launched its war on Gaza. …..more https://fair.org/home/western-press-obscured-the-sheer-terror-of-what-israel-had-carried-out/
Nuclear Priesthood, and Police Repression: Feminist Confrontations of Violent Industries, and Movements to Abolish Them
This report investigates the nexus between the nuclear and fossil fuel industries, and state repression of activism against these industries.
‘Petrobromance,’ Nuclear Priesthood, and Police Repression: Feminist Confrontations of Violent Industries, and Movements to Abolish Them analyses, from a feminist and gender-transformative perspective, trends and parallels in how the nuclear and fossil fuel industries operate and entrench their power; their impacts on communities, including gendered impacts; and the ways in which resistance against these industries is suppressed by police, militaries, and private military and security companies. Drawn from research and consultation with activists, organisers, academics, and members of impacted communities, this research aims to create a shared knowledge base and illuminate paths forward for deeper collaboration across movements, including, but not limited to, among antinuclear, environmental, and land and water defence movements.
Authors: Ray Acheson, Katrin Geyer, Genevieve Riccoboni, Laura Varella
Editor: Ray Acheson
Research support: Emma Murray and Michelle Benzing
Copy review: Genevieve Riccoboni and Zarin Hamid
Design: Nadia Joubert
Credit: The term “petrobromance” was coined by Joni Seager
This report was made possible with support from the Ploughshares Fund.
We are delighted to offer the online version for free, but please consider making a donation to Reaching Critical Will to help us cover the costs the other materials and information services that Reaching Critical Will provides.
1 This Month
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- September 2026 (184)
- August 2026 (330)
- July 2026 (355)
- June 2026 (287)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (267)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (375)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 