The Mainstream Press Keep Slamming Israel’s Hospital Bombing Story

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, OCT 19, 2023  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-mainstream-press-keep-slamming?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=138092278&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

A new report from the UK’s Channel 4 News adds to the surprising amount of opposition we’re seeing in the mainstream press to Israel’s narrative about the deadly explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza this past Tuesday.

The report, led by Channel 4 chief correspondent Alex Thomson, spotlights glaring plot holes in Israel’s claim that a failed rocket by Palestinian Islamic Jihad was responsible for the blast, and in the supposed audio clip Israel published which it claims is an intercepted conversation between two Hamas fighters saying Israel was not responsible. It also presents an argument that will be inconvenient for Israel apologists who’ve been claiming photos of the damage to the hospital rule out the possibility of an Israeli airstrike.

“So what of Israel’s explanation?” says Thomson. “Sensing a major problem they worked through the night to get their version out. Press conference first thing. Conclusion: an Islamic Jihad rocked caused it all.”

“They present what they say is two Hamas operatives talking about the attack,” Thomson reports. “Hamas call this an obvious fabrication. Two independent Arab journalists told us the same thing, because of the language, accent, dialect, syntax and tone. None of which is, they say, credible.”

“Equally, Israel claims the Islamic Jihad failed missile was fired from here: a cemetery very close to the hospital,” Thomson continues. “But look again at the video of the event — the trajectory of the missile doesn’t line up with that location. Too high. Too horizontal. Confusingly, the Israelis’ presentation also says the missile was fired from a location down in the southwest; it can’t be both.”

Thomson also reports that while the photos of the blast site do appear to rule out a ground-detonating Israeli munition, they’re entirely in keeping with other munitions used by Israel which could easily have taken such a toll on human life.

“This is what you see at the hospital today — small craters you’d expect to see from a mortar strike or artillery round, not a missile,” says Thomson. “Surrounding buildings have only superficial damage, not structural collapse. Some of the windows of an adjoining church remain intact. This makes a ground-detonating Israeli missile strike unlikely, but it doesn’t rule out an airburst munition, which could cause major loss of life, but would produce far less structural damage.”

Thomson also notes that “Israel has form when it comes to war propaganda”, citing its false denials of the IDF killings of British filmmaker James Miller and Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

On Twitter (or whatever we’re calling it now), Thomson’s remarks on the Israeli audio file were even more pointed.

“Several experts confirm Hamas’ view to Channel 4 News that the audio tape of ‘Hamas’ operatives talking about the missile malfunction is a fake,” tweeted Thomson. “They say the tone, syntax, accent and idiom are absurd.”

This is a still developing story with much still to be revealed, but this to me might be the most damning evidence against Israel yet. If Israel didn’t bomb that hospital, then why is it publishing fake audio clips of people posing as Hamas fighters agreeing with each other that Israel definitely didn’t bomb that hospital?

I mean, if people were saying I bombed a hospital, and I knew I didn’t, the last thing I’d do is publish an audio file of me pretending to be two guys talking about how Caitlin definitely didn’t bomb the hospital.

Picture a recording of me doing two blokey-sounding voices going,

“Hello my evil friend!”

“Hello!”

“Did you hear that Caitlin definitely did not bomb that hospital?”

“She didn’t?”

“No! It turns out it was we, the Evil Bad Guys!”

“We did it?”

“Yes, it was us!”

That would look pretty silly, right?

If Israel is making itself look this ridiculous, then it’s no wonder the western press are not lining up to help it cover up this particular misdeed. They’ve got to maintain at least some credibility if they’re going to keep manufacturing consent for other wars, after all.

October 20, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | 1 Comment

How Media Outlets Work With Israel To Control Gaza Narrative

The state of the free press in the Western world is far from free, in fact, they act as stenographers for the military class to ensure profits for weapons manufacturers continue.

From watchdogs to lapdogs: Mnar Adley reveals the disappointing state of the fourth estate in the West, exposing how biased media, often working directly with the Israeli government, has been complicit in whitewashing Israeli crimes in Palestine.

SCHEERPOST, Mnar Adley / MintPress News October 16, 2023

Israelis were killed, while Palestinians merely “died.”

That’s the leading headline on the BBC after Israel pummeled Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, with Western-supplied bombs after Hamas’s surprise attack and rockets that hit Israel.

Some media outlets are leading with images of injured Palestinian children while reporting on unverified crimes committed by Hamas.

As if given the same script, corporate media anchors and journalists repeat the line that Israel has a right to defend itself as it bombs Gaza’s 2 million Palestinian population, targeting civilians violating international law.

Meanwhile, the same anchors and journalists demand Palestinians denounce violence and Hamas and run with unverified stories handed to them by the Israeli government.

This week’s coverage by Western corporate media underlined its inability to hold the world’s 4th largest military to account for war crimes and instead give airtime to Israeli military officials to incite genocide against Palestinians, who are caged like animals in the world’s largest concentration camp.

Western corporate journalists cannot report neutrally on Israel/Palestine. And here’s just a few examples as to why:

Let’s take The New York Times, for example. Not only has the newspaper constantly supported Israel’s expansionist policies, but it has also directly participated in the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes…………..(examples given)………………………………………

Axel Springer – a giant German broadcaster that owns Politico – has explicitly told its staff that it is their duty to support Israel and those that don’t should leave. A wave of firings of Arab journalists across Germany underlined this message.

The BBC, meanwhile, is the state broadcaster for the United Kingdom, a nation that helped create the state of Israel in 1948. Many of its top foreign affairs journalists go on to work for NATO or big think tanks funded by weapons manufacturers who directly profit from war.

The BBC has been continuously criticized for not providing historical context to the crisis in Gaza and linking it to its own British colonial history of helping create the state of Israel through the Balfour Declaration and providing it with weapons to occupy Palestinian land ever since.

American journalists who don’t toe the line on Israel/Palestine are frequently made examples of.

CNN fired anchor Marc Lamont Hill for calling for a free Palestine. Katie Halper was fired from The Hill for (accurately) calling Israel an Apartheid state. And The Guardian sacked Nathan J. Robinson after he made a joke mocking US military aid to Israel.

Other journalists in the industry see these examples, and the message is clear: stick to the script on Israel, or lose your job.

In 2013, an investigation revealed that Buzzfeed was paid huge sums to become a public relations arm for the Israeli military to ensure millennials were sympathetic to the occupation and to show the sexy side of the IDF.

In 2016, an investigation that I personally conducted into VICE News showcased how the hipster rag publishes “soft propaganda” to an anti-mainstream audience while pushing a pro-US and pro-Israel government narrative.

VICE does this by regurgitating releases from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, an arm of the US government that disseminates propaganda abroad through outlets like Voice of America to push for regime change and forever wars that fuel the military-industrial complex.

However, after a lift of its ban to be used in the United States, its reach now is the average American through outlets like VICE.

Of course, these are just a handful of examples of how the media, which is supposed to act as a watchdog to those in power and in the military, is acting as a lapdog for their moneyed interests and military agendas.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the the many conflicts of interest within our media that most people don’t know about, including pundits and other journalists who appear within mainstream media outlets and newspapers as “experts” who are actually either simultaneously working with or are trained by think tanks, Public Relation outlets and Israeli lobby groups like AIPAC that take huge sums from the Israeli government and weapons manufacturers to ensure a pro-Israel, pro-war narrative is dominant.

This is why the context of Israel’s history as an occupier, an apartheid state that engages in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, is almost always left out. Instead, the public is fed with simplified versions of the conflict, presenting it as “complicated,” thousands of years of fighting between religions, Muslim vs Jews – a religious war.

The state of the free press in the Western world is far from free, in fact, they act as stenographers for the military class to ensure profits for weapons manufacturers continue.

This is exactly why in order to break through the fog of war and this soft propaganda, we must turn to independent media like MintPress and others who have preserved their principles of holding the permanent war state and elite accountable – that’s the role of journalism as defined by our first amendment.  https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/16/how-media-outlets-work-with-israel-to-control-gaza-narrative/ #Israel #Palestine

October 18, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Propaganda Blitz: How Mainstream Media is Pushing Fake Palestine Stories.

SCHEERPOST, By Alan MaCleod / MintPress News

After Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, IDF forces responded with airstrikes, leveling Gazan buildings. The violence so far has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 people. Western media, however, show far more interest and have much greater sympathy with Israeli dead than Palestinian ones and have played their usual role as unofficial spokespersons for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS, ZERO EVIDENCE

One case in point is the claim that, during their incursion into southern Israel, Hamas fighters stopped to round up, kill and mutilate 40 Israeli babies, beheading them and leaving their bodies behind.

The extraordinary assertion was originally reported by the Israeli channel i24 News, which based it on anonymous Israeli military sources. Despite offering no proof whatsoever, this highly inflammatory claim about an enemy made by an active participant in a conflict was picked up and repeated across the world by a host of media (e.g., in the United States by Fox News, CNN, MSN, Business Insider, and The New York Post).

Meanwhile, the front pages of the United Kingdom’s largest newspapers were festooned with the story, the press outraged at the atrocity and inviting their readers to feel the same way.

Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence, and a story like this should have been met with serious skepticism, given who was making the claim. The first question any reporter should have asked was, “Where is the evidence?” Given multiple opportunities to stand by it, the IDF continually distanced itself from the claims. Nevertheless, the story was simply too useful not to publish.

The decapitated baby narrative was so popular that even President Biden referenced it, claiming to have seen “confirmed” images of Hamas killing children. This claim, however, was hastily retracted by his handlers at the White House, who noted that Biden was simply referencing the i24 News report.

The story looked even more like a piece of cheap propaganda after it was revealed that the key source for the claim was Israeli soldier David Ben Zion, an extremist settler who had incited race riots against Palestinians earlier this year, describing them as “animals” with no heart who needs to be “wiped out.”………………………………………………….. more https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/14/propaganda-blitz-how-mainstream-media-is-pushing-fake-palestine-stories/ #Israel #Palestine

October 16, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Fukushima’s nuclear waste: Stigmatising Russia, approving Japan

By Richard Cullen, Sep 13, 2023  https://johnmenadue.com/fukushimas-nuclear-waste-stigmatising-russia-approving-japan/

Twenty years ago, Japan demanded Russia halt disposal of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. What changed? Is it the case that there is felonious nuclear waste – and respectable nuclear waste? Japan seems to believe that this is so and the Mainstream Media understands why this narrative may deserve its support.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), was catastrophically destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Japan has recently put into effect a decision to release, into the adjacent ocean, more than a million tonnes of water contaminated as a result of the destruction of that nuclear power plant, over the next three decades.

There is a serious debate about the real level of risk posed by this huge, extended release of contaminated water. TEPCO say that they are filtering and diluting the water to remove isotopes – apart from tritium, which will enter the sea in a safely attenuated form. A release on this scale is unprecedented, however. Moreover, regardless of this debate over the scientific case, what is additionally of real interest, is how the Mainstream Western Media (MWM) have largely covered this matter.

Japan’s decision is, unsurprisingly, controversial, not least in China and Korea and also across the fishing community in Japan. The forbidding impact on East Asia’s seafood industry is already evident.

Yet, as you read reports on what is happening in the MWM, what stands out is the understanding tone evident in most coverage. A recent Reuters report is indicative. It stressed how TEPCO would filter and dilute “until tritium levels fall below regulatory levels before pumping it into the ocean”, adding that, “tritium is considered to be relatively harmless”. There is no mention of what AL Jazeera argued in 2021. Their report highlighted TEPCO’s long-term, poor safety-management reputation, noting that:

One of the gravest charges was that the company’s own internal studies had concluded prior to the accident that the plant might be vulnerable to a large tsunami and needed a protective barrier.

The revealing Reuters report also told us that “water containing tritium is routinely released from nuclear plants around the world” (zero mention of the quantities) and that (unnamed) “regulatory authorities support dealing with the Fukushima water in this way”. The report reads as though it may have been appreciably based on a TEPCO press release.

Next, it is illuminating to consider how Tokyo dealt with the release of 900 tonnes of radioactive waste into the ocean to the north of Japan, in 1993, by Russia.

A recent commentary in the Korea Herald explained that, while this Russian waste had not been filtered, it was still regarded as low-level waste. Moreover, according to another recent report in the Global Times, although the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knew in advance of the Russian plan to dump this waste in 1993, it did not see a need to intervene.

However, twenty years ago, Japan demanded a permanent halt to the Russian disposal of the waste into the Sea of Japan, forthwith. The Russian Ambassador to Japan was summoned to hear Tokyo’s complaints and stipulations. Japan also sought to deploy international law arguments to bolster its case, despite the lack of any intervention by the IAEA. Remember, too, that the total waste disposal involved here was a tiny fraction of the planned purging of waste-water from the Fukushima plant.

Russia, in 1993, was still finding its sovereign-feet following the collapse of the USSR and it swiftly agreed to the demands to cease discharging any further waste under the pressure applied by Japan and other countries, including the US. The MWM today refer to waste water being “released” from the Fukushima storage tanks but in 1993, Russia was “dumping” nuclear waste.

One way to get a handle on the tilt of this commentary is to imagine a similarly ruinous destruction of a shoreline Chinese nuclear plant, coupled to a water-release solution of the same magnitude. Picture the sort of lurid headlines we would, by now, almost certainly be seeing across the MWM – led by its more feverish outlets: China set to poison the Pacific Ocean for decades to come; and The Chinese Communist Party demonstrates contempt for Planet Earth.

So, it transpires, depending on your standpoint, that there is felonious nuclear waste – and respectable nuclear waste. Which brings to mind a story related by a leading British Labour politician from his youth. He was marching in a Ban the Bomb rally. A more committed believer pointed out, when he said he was against all nuclear weapons, that he was misguided: the atomic bomb possessed by the USSR was in a different category, as it was the People’s Bomb.

September 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment