Middle East Eye
Myth-busting documentary finally breaks the stranglehold of Israel and its western media acolytes over the story of what happened on 7 October.
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Tags: #news #media #corporate_media #journalist #journalism #propaganda #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #war_crimes #documentary #hamas #war_crimes #international_law #un #un_resolutions
The Guardian
From Gaza to Ukraine, from Sudan to Myanmar, youngsters are being raped, abducted, maimed, killed and even recruited as soldiers.
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A Palestinian child carries empty containers to get food distributed by charities as Israeli attacks continue in Rafah, Gaza, on 25 January. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images.
Callous disregard for civilian lives and safety is a disturbing feature of modern armed conflict. From Ukraine and Gaza to Sudan and Myanmar, respect for the “laws of war” is being eroded or is non-existent. Non-combatants are deliberately targeted. Most shocking, and unforgivable, is the wanton harm – the UN term is “grave violations” – done to children.
In his latest report on children and conflict, UN secretary general António Guterres warned that children “continued to be disproportionately affected” by war-related violence and abuses. By this, he meant killing and maiming, rape, sexual violence, abductions, school attacks and recruitment of child soldiers. All were on the rise, he said. (...)
How shaming all this is. How truly shocking. That adults and nations choose to fight each other is normal, though regrettable. But a world war on children? How did it come to this?
Tags: #laws_of_war #international_law #Ukraine #Gaza #Sudan #Myanmar #isael #russia #children #Ethiopia #tigray #Boko_Haram #nigeria #Ecuador #Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo #Palestine #Somalia #Syria #Afghanistan #Yemen #Burkina_Faso #Mali
Human Rights Watch
Continue Funding as UN Agency Staff Is Investigated.
Governments should continue funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), given its vital role in averting a humanitarian catastrophe and the risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, while the agency investigates allegations that 12 of its staff were involved in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. (...)
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People line up for bread at a partially collapsed but still operational bakehouse in Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al Balah, Gaza, November 4, 2023. © 2023 Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images.
After Israeli authorities provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several of its employees in the October 7 attacks, UNRWA announced that it had “immediately terminated” the contracts of the employees identified and opened an investigation to “establish the truth without delay.” (...)
“The allegations against UNRWA staff are serious and the UN appears to be addressing them seriously. But withholding funds from the UN agency most able to provide immediate lifesaving food, water, and medicine to the more than 2.3 million people of Gaza shows callous indifference to what the world’s leading experts have warned is the looming risk of famine,” said Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. (...)
Instead of withholding critical funds, the European Union and France issued statements clarifying that they intend to “review the matter in light of the outcome of the investigation announced by the UN and the actions it will take” and “decide when the time comes.” (...)
Shortly after the October 7 attack, Israeli authorities cut off essential services, including water and electricity, to Gaza’s population and blocked the entry of all but a trickle of fuel and critical humanitarian aid, acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes. Human Rights Watch has also found that Israeli authorities are using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. (...)
Human Rights Watch has urged Israel’s key allies—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel so long as its forces commit, with impunity, widespread and serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians. (...)
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a multi-partner initiative that regularly publishes information on the scale and severity of food insecurity and malnutrition globally, issued a report published at the end of December concluding that the entire population of Gaza is at crisis level of acute food insecurity or worse. (...)
As the occupying power, Israel is obliged to ensure that the humanitarian needs of the population of Gaza are met. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered provisional measures on January 26 as part of South Africa’s case against Israel alleging violations of the Genocide Convention. (...)
“Despite mounting risks of famine and a binding order by the World Court in a case about genocide, Israel’s foreign minister has now announced that he will lead a brazen effort to shut down the UN agency most responsible for delivering lifesaving aid,” Kumar said. “Unless governments reverse their decisions to suspend aid to UNRWA, the main humanitarian channel into Gaza, they risk contributing to the current catastrophe.”
> See also: The Long War on Gaza
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank
The New York Review ($)
Over fifty-six years, Israel has transformed Gaza from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one.
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Palestinians in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, conducting search and rescue operations in the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, December 14, 2023
Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to “destroy Hamas” in retaliation for its attack that killed 1,200 in Israel’s south in October. But a number of critics, such as the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, have argued persuasively that Israel’s goal is less to vanquish Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel Palestinians from Gaza without international censure or sanction. (...)
The current desecration of Gaza is the latest stage in a process that has taken increasingly violent forms over time.
In the fifty-six years since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave, from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one. It has likewise removed Gaza’s residents from the sphere of politics, transforming them from a people with a nationalist claim to a population whose majority requires some form of humanitarian aid to sustain themselves. (...)
For decades the pressure on Palestinians in Gaza has been immense and unrelenting. The damage it has done—high levels of unemployment and poverty, widespread infrastructural destruction, and environmental degradation, including dangerous contamination of water and soil, among other factors—has become a permanent condition. (...)
Israel has never known what to do with this tiny strip of land. From the beginning of the occupation, the country’s leaders recognized that Gaza would have to be pacified to preclude the creation of a Palestinian state—their primary objective—and minimize Palestinian resistance were they to annex the West Bank. During the first two decades of the occupation, from the Six-Day War of 1967 to the start of the first intifada, their preferred tactic was controlling Gaza’s economy. (...)
The first intifada made it clear that this strategy of pacification had failed. Improved living standards could no longer compensate for the absence of freedom. (...)
That year [2007] Israel imposed a blockade that severely limited both trade with Gaza and the entry of specific food products into the Strip. But the blockade—now in its seventeenth year—is only a more extreme form of measures that were already in place. (...)
Early in 1991—before Hamas started launching rockets and orchestrating suicide bombings—Israel began restricting and periodically blocking the movement of workers to and from Gaza, as well as the trade upon which its small economy disproportionately depended. (...) In January 1991 Israel canceled the general exit permit that made it possible for Palestinians to move freely through Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (...)
The cancellation of the general exit permit marked the start of Israel’s closure policy. (...) As B’Tselem, another rights group focused on the West Bank and Gaza, has put it, “Isolating Gaza from the rest of the world, including separating it from the West Bank, is part of a longstanding Israeli policy.”
This policy of separation and containment became more explicit in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. In 1994 Israel built a fence around Gaza, the first of several enclosures. (...)
In 2005 Israel “disengaged” from the Strip, removing all of its settlements and military forces. Israeli officials have since argued that this formally ended the country’s occupation of Gaza. According to international law, however, Israel remains an occupier, as it maintains “effective control” over Gaza’s borders (except for Rafah, which Egypt controls), sea access, airspace, and population registry. (...)
Another crucial effect of Israeli policy—more noticeable after Hamas came to power in 2007. (...) Israel in effect recast its relationship with Gaza from occupation to warfare, as evidenced by the numerous deadly assaults it launched on the territory over the past seventeen years—among them Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Hot Winter (2008), Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Operation Breaking Dawn (2022), and Operation Shield and Arrow (2023). (...)
Under this new approach, Israel dispensed altogether with the notion that Gaza could have a market economy. “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza,” US officials wrote from Tel Aviv in November 2008, “Israeli officials have confirmed … on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” More specifically, they aimed to keep it “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” (...)
Since 2010, Israel has periodically eased restrictions, but the blockade has nonetheless almost entirely destroyed Gaza’s economy. On the eve of the current conflict, unemployment was at 46.4 percent. (In 2000, before the blockade, it was at 18.9 percent.) Approximately 65 percent of the population was food-insecure, meaning they could not safely access enough nutritious food to meet their dietary needs, while 80 percent required some form of international assistance to feed their families. (...)
Gaza could only experience relief, not progress. (...) “The West Bank and Gaza are now almost completely delinked,” a World Bank report stated in 2008, “with Gaza starkly transforming from a potential trade route to a walled hub of humanitarian donations.” (...)
Israel has, in other words, created a humanitarian problem to manage a political problem. (...)
For the past ten weeks, with the exception of a one-week “humanitarian pause,” Gaza has been under a total siege; Israel has virtually halted the entry of fuel and restricted the entry of food, among other critical necessities. (...)
Complete article ($)
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank
The Guardian
Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever.
What is the value of a Palestinian life? For those retaining delusions not already buried in the rubble of Gaza alongside entire families – like the Zorobs, the Kashtans, the Attalahs – Joe Biden offered a definitive answer last week. In a statement marking 100 days since the current horror began, he rightly showed empathy for the plight of hostages – whose abduction by Hamas represents a grave war crime – and their traumatised families. Yet there was not a single mention of Palestinians. (...)
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‘Life is cheap, they say: it is apparently meaningless if you are Palestinian.’ Palestinians search the rubble after airstrikes on Khan Younis, October 2023. Photograph: Mohammed Dahman/AP.
If the world’s powerful nations had not so brazenly shrugged off three-quarters of a million Palestinians being driven from their homes 76 years ago, accompanied by an estimated 15,000 suffering violent deaths, the seeds of today’s bitter harvest would not have been planted. (...)
If even some worth had been attached to Palestinian life then decades of occupation, siege, illegal colonisation, apartheid, violent repression and mass slaughter might never have happened. Oppressing others becomes difficult to sustain when their humanity is accepted. (...)
Surely 10,000 children suffering violent deaths, or the 10 kids having one or both legs amputated each day, often without anaesthetic, would stir powerful emotions. Surely 5,500 pregnant women giving birth each month – many having caesareans without anaesthetic – or newborns dying of hypothermia and diarrhoea would trigger unstoppable revulsion. (...)
This has not happened, and this is why the consequences will be severe.
The devaluing of Palestinian life is not a supposition, it is a statistical fact. According to a new study of coverage in major US newspapers, for every Israeli death Israelis are mentioned eight times – or at a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians. (...)
All this will have a profound impact. For a start, forget about any future western claims about human rights and international law. (...) After the west armed and backed Israel as it imposed mass death on Gaza through bombs, bullets, hunger, thirst and the destruction of medical facilities, nobody other than the terminally gullible will listen to such claims ever again.
But it’s not just other countries that western political and media elites should be panicking about. They face moral collapse at home, too. Younger generations in countries such as the US and Britain have grown up taking racism far more seriously than those before them, and polling shows they are far more sympathetic to Palestinians than older citizens are. (...)
What do these young people then make of media coverage, or the statements of politicians, that don’t seem to treat Palestinian life as having any worth at all? (...)
So yes, we have seen how the refusal to treat Palestinians as human beings made today’s nightmare inevitable. We can see how the moral claims used to justify western global dominance are permanently shredded. But little thought has been given to how political and media elites in western nations have torched their moral authority, leaving it to fester alongside thousands of unidentified Palestinian corpses buried under the rubble. A turning point, to be sure, with consequences that will only be understood when it is much too late.
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #media #news #journalism #journalist #media_coverage #international_law #war
The Guardian
Civilian proportion of deaths is higher than that in all world conflicts in 20th century, Haaretz newspaper says.
The aerial bombing campaign by Israel in Gaza is the most indiscriminate in terms of civilian casualties in recent years, a study published by an Israeli newspaper has found.
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An injured Palestinian girl in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. Photograph: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Shutterstock.
The analysis by Haaretz came as Israeli forces fought to consolidate their control of northern Gaza on Saturday, bombing the Shejaiya district of Gaza City, while also conducting airstrikes on Rafah, a town on the southern border with Egypt where the Israeli army has told people in Gaza to take shelter. (...)
In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Haaretz described as “unprecedented killing”. The ratio is significantly higher than the civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead.
“The broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it,” Haaretz concluded. “The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand.” (...)
The figures will make uneasy reading for the Biden administration, which is facing global criticism and isolation for vetoing a UN security council vote for a ceasefire on Friday. (...)
Human Rights Watch said the US risked “complicity in war crimes” by continuing to provide Israel with weapons and diplomatic support. Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said: “With this veto, the US government is shamefully turning its back on immense civilian suffering, a staggering death toll, and unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.” (...)
> See also: Genocide – The Gaze From The Abyss
Tags: #israel #gaza #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories #war #war_crimes #international_law #collateral_damage #weapons #victims #civilian_victims #humanitarian_aid #un #united_nations #ceasefire
Media Lens
(...) Imagine our surprise, then, when we saw this report from BBC Verify on the front-page of the BBC website:
‘Satellite images commissioned by the BBC reveal the extent of destruction across Gaza… While northern Gaza has been the focus of the Israeli offensive and has borne the brunt of the destruction, widespread damage extends across the entire strip.’ (...)
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The BBC report included a shocking photo montage showing how ‘a skyline of multi-storey buildings and a mosque was gradually reduced to rubble between 14 October and 22 November’. Note, this was not in reference to a single apartment block, but ‘a skyline of multi-storey buildings’. (...)
Josh Paul, former director of congressional and public affairs, who spent 11 years in the US State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the US government entity most responsible for the transfer and provision of arms to foreign countries. (...)
On 18 October, Paul sent a powerful letter of resignation to protest the massacre of civilians in Gaza. He wrote:
‘I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people – and is not in the long term American interest. (...)
In an interview with Democracy Now!, Paul added:
‘I decided to resign for three reasons, the first and most pressing of which is the very, I believe, uncontroversial fact that U.S.-provided arms should not be used to massacre civilians, should not be used to result in massive civilian casualties. And that is what we are seeing in Gaza and what we were seeing, you know, very soon after the October 7th horrific attack by Hamas. I do not believe arms should be — U.S.-provided arms should be used to kill civilians. It is that simple.
‘Secondly, I also believe that… there is no military solution here. And we are providing arms to Israel on a path that has not led to peace, has not led to security, neither for Palestinians nor for Israelis. It is a moribund process and a dead-end policy.
‘And yet, when I tried to raise both of these concerns with State Department leadership, there was no appetite for discussion, no opportunity to look at any of the potential arms sales and raise concerns about them, simply a directive to move forward as quickly as possible. And so I felt I had to resign.’
Apart from a single substantive mention and a couple of smaller mentions in the Guardian, Paul’s resignation has been buried by all other UK national newspapers, with a single mention on the BBC website. (...)
On 24 October, BBC correspondent Rami Ruhayem – a former journalist for the Associated Press, who has worked as a journalist and producer for BBC Arabic and the BBC World Service since 2005 – sent a letter to the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie:
‘Dear Tim,
‘I am writing to raise the gravest possible concerns about the coverage of the BBC, especially on English outlets, of the current fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions.‘It appears to me that information that is highly significant and relevant is either entirely missing or not being given due prominence in coverage.’
Ruhayem continued:
‘The nature of the Israeli response to the attack by Hamas on October 7 has prompted “over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies” to warn of ‘the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
‘They said:\r\n ‘“As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies, we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. We do not do so lightly, recognizing the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.”
‘I invite you to sift through our coverage, past and present, for any trace of the above; whether in explainers, or interviews, or features, or news analysis. Is it there at all, and if so, is it given the prominence it deserves?’
Ruhayem didn’t stop there:
‘Words like “massacre”, “slaughter”, and “atrocities” are being used—prominently—in reference to actions by Hamas, but hardly, if at all, in reference to actions by Israel.
‘Does this not raise the question of the possible complicity of the BBC in incitement, dehumanization, and war propaganda? How would the BBC respond to this?’
He continued:
‘Our current coverage kicked off following the Hamas attack. Doubtless, it is major news. But that doesn’t mean history started on October 7. We should incorporate into our coverage an accurate, balanced, fair, and truthful representation of the reality leading up to that moment.
‘I won’t go into detail, but simply remind you of three terms: apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism.
‘These are terms used by many experts and highly respected organizations to which the BBC usually defers. They are used to describe the nature of Israeli rule over Palestinians as well as the methods used by Israel to oppress generation after generation of Palestinians. They are based on extensive evidence.
‘To what extent is this reflected in our coverage? Without such context, can we claim to have adequately informed the public? Or are we withholding highly relevant and significant information without which the basics of the conflict cannot possibly be understood?’ (...)
Ruhayem’s vital whistleblowing has been blanked by the entire UK national press and the BBC. The fact that Ruhayem has not tweeted since October 25, the day after he sent the letter, surely tells its own story. (...)
It is quite obvious that violence and hatred born of cruelty and injustice cannot be erased by yet greater cruelty and injustice. What results do we expect from Israel intensifying the strategy of ethnic cleansing that gave rise to Hamas in the first place?
We live in a terribly cruel and cynical time where our supposed leaders ignore clear public support for a ceasefire, just as they ignore the vital need for immediate action on climate change. (...)
Yes, the West can devastate its enemies, but it cannot avoid the price described by Nietzsche:
‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’ (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Emmanuel, 1917, p.87) (...)
It turns out that one consequence of fighting with monsters – of building a global military-industrial machine dedicated to killing for profit – is that we lose the capacity to fight for life.
Tags: #journalist #journalism #media #news #bbc #censorship #israel #gaza #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories #war #war_crimes #international_law #collateral_damage #weapons #victims #civilian_victims
the Guardian
Footage to date fails to prove Gaza complex was nerve centre for attacks on Israel, as military has claimed. (...)
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Screengrab from IDF video of a bulletproof vest with Hamas insignia that it says was found with weapons in the MRI centre of al-Shifa hospital. Photograph: AP.
Prior to their capture of Dar al-Shifa hospital, the Israel Defense Forces went to great lengths to depict the medical complex as a headquarters for Hamas, from where its attacks on Israel were planned.
The evidence produced so far falls well short of that. IDF videos have shown only modest collections of small arms, mostly assault rifles, recovered from the extensive medical complex.
That suggests an armed presence, but not the sort of elaborate nerve centre depicted in animated graphics presented to the media before al-Shifa was seized, portraying a network of well-equipped subterranean chambers.
Even the videos produced so far have raised questions under scrutiny. A BBC analysis found the footage of an IDF spokesperson showing the apparent discovery of a bag containing a gun behind an MRI scanning machine, had been taped hours before the arrival of the journalists to whom he was supposedly showing it.
In a video shown later, the number of guns in the bag had doubled. The IDF claimed its video of what it found at the hospital was unedited, filmed in a single take, but the BBC analysis found it had been edited. (...)
“Israel has failed to provide anywhere even close to the level of evidence required to justify the narrow exception under which hospitals can be targeted under the laws of war,” said Mai El-Sadany, a human rights lawyer and the executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, in Washington. (...)
The absence of evidence so far, is beginning to recall past US intelligence failures, most dramatically those preceding the Iraq invasion. It further isolates Washington on the world stage, and deepens already significant rifts within the administration itself.
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories #gaza #gaza_strip #west_bank #terrorism #war_crimes #international_law #hamas #illegal_settlements #human_rights #hypocrisy #double_standard #bds
The Guardian
Ayman Safadi says credibility of international law at stake as he clashes with senior US official over terms for humanitarian pause.
Jordan’s foreign minister has said Arab troops will not go to Gaza as he delivered a blistering criticism of Israel’s war on Hamas. (...)
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Safadi speaking at the IISS Manama Dialogue summit in Bahrain on Saturday. Photograph: Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters.
Safadi, in a no-holds-barred attack on Israel and the cover being provided by the US, said faith in peaceful negotiation and international law was being destroyed by the west’s refusal to rein in Israel.
The credibility of international law had fallen victim to its selective application, he said. “If any other country in the world did a fragment of what Israel did, it would have sanctions imposed on it from every corner of the world.” (...)
He said: “International law has to apply to all. The message seems to be that Israel can do whatever it wants. That is what the world is seeing, [that] Israel is above the law.” (...)
Safadi urged Hamas to release the hostages, but said no preconditions should be set for a humanitarian pause, arguing that 2.4 million Palestinians were being held hostage by Israel in Gaza.
He refused to join the calls to liken Hamas to Islamic State. “Hamas did not create the conflict. The conflict created Hamas,” he said, adding: “You cannot bomb an idea out of existence. (...)
He said Jordan would do “whatever it takes to stop” the displacement of Palestinians. “We will never allow that to happen; in addition to it being a war crime, it would be a direct threat to our national security. (...)
“Denial of food, medicine and fuel to Gazans is a war crime and we have to call it out.” (...)
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories #gaza #gaza_strip #west_bank #terrorism #war_crimes #international_law #hamas #illegal_settlements #human_rights #hypocrisy #double_standard #bds
The Guardian
As the last few weeks have made abundantly clear, Palestinian lives don’t count.
I do not want to ever hear western democracies lecture the rest of the world on human rights ever again.
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‘It isn’t enough that Palestinians are dying and being displaced: we must be dehumanized and discredited too.’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Anadolu/Getty Images.
As I write this, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza – almost half of them children. One child is being killed every 10 minutes in Gaza. (...)
Those numbers don’t count the kids slowly dying of hunger and thirst. The kids getting sick from drinking sewage and sea water. They don’t count the kids with cancer who will not be able to get any care now that the Israeli siege has forced the only cancer hospital in Gaza to suspend operations. They don’t count the kids who are going to die from entirely avoidable diseases because hospitals in Gaza are ceasing to function. (...)
But also? Those numbers just don’t count, period. They’re Palestinians. And, as the last few weeks have made abundantly clear, Palestinian lives don’t count. They don’t count to many in the media, who steadfastly refuse to empathize with Palestinians. (...) Who immediately report anything that the Israeli government says, sending out every IDF statement as a push alert, while looking at Palestinian voices through a permanent lens of suspicion. (...)
Those numbers certainly don’t count to the president of the United States. (...) Joe Biden came right out and said: we don’t believe Palestinians about the death toll. (...)
what does Biden think is happening, exactly? (...) Does he think the pictures of entire neighborhoods being wiped out are some sort of AI deepfake? (...)
He knows very well that the numbers from the Gaza health ministry have been proven to be accurate time and time again. (...)
And, rather than champion the importance of the press, the US is actively trying to suppress coverage of the living hell in Gaza. Two weeks ago, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, asked Qatar to moderate Al Jazeera’s coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas. Can’t have too much of the truth coming out; too much truth is a terrible thing. (...)
Of course I will absolutely condemn Hamas massacring innocent Israeli civilians on 7 October and taking hostages. And let’s be very clear here: while nothing Hamas did on 7 October can be condoned, their actions did not take place in a vacuum. This conflict did not start on 7 October. Palestinians have been killed, displaced, humiliated, detained unlawfully, for decades; the media only sits up and pays attention, however, when an Israeli dies. Ask yourself this: do you know how many Palestinians were killed last year by Israeli forces and settlers? Do you know how many Palestinians are being forced out of their homes by settlers in the West Bank – where Hamas is not in charge? Do you know how many Palestinian children are being held by Israeli forces without trial or charge for “crimes” that can be as minor as waving a Palestinian flag?
I will absolutely condemn Hamas but I ask that the absolute condemnation goes both ways. (...)
As for non-violent resistance? That’s not allowed either. The US has long been trying to criminalize the peaceful boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. (...)
What are Palestinians supposed to do? That’s a rhetorical question because the last three weeks have made the answer to this crystal clear: we are supposed to shut up and die. (...)
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Mokhiber noted: “Usually the most difficult part of proving genocide is intent, because there has to an intention to destroy in whole or in part a particular group. In this case, the intent by Israeli leaders has been so explicitly stated and publicly stated – by the prime minister, by the president, by senior cabinet ministers, by military leaders – that that is an easy case to make.” (...)
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories #gaza #gaza_strip #west_bank #terrorism #war_crimes #international_law #media #news #journalism #journalist #hamas #illegal_settlements #human_rights #illegal_settlements #hypocrisy #double_standard #press #false_equivalence #bds
Media Lens
(...) Every time US-UK-NATO launches a war of aggression on Iraq, Libya, Syria – whoever, wherever – our TV screens and front pages fill with ‘beautiful pictures’ of missiles blazing in pure white light from ships. This is ‘Shock And Awe’ – we even imagine our victims ‘awed’ by our power. (...)
By contrast, the morning after Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, front pages were covered, not in tech, but in the blood of wounded civilians and the rubble of wrecked civilian buildings. (...)
Political analyst Ben Norton commented:
‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst since 2018’
This is no small matter. Norton added:
‘An estimated 377,000 Yemenis have died in the US-Saudi war on their country, and roughly 70% of deaths were children under age 5’
Some 15.6 million Yemenis live in extreme poverty, and 8.6 million suffer from under-nutrition. A recent United Nations report warned:
‘If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result.’ (...)
We can be sure that Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok will never be awash with the sentiment: ‘I stand with Yemen!’
As if the whole world belongs to ‘us’, our righteous rage on Ukraine is such that we apparently forget that we are not actually under attack, not being bombed; our soldiers and civilians are not being killed. Nevertheless, RT (formerly Russia Today), Going Underground and Sputnik have been shut down on YouTube and Google as though the US and UK were under direct attack, facing an existential threat. (...)
So how did we get here? State-corporate news coverage has some glaring omissions. (...)
In a rare example of dissent in the Guardian, Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote this week:
‘The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance…’
Carpenter concluded:
‘Washington’s attempt to make Ukraine a Nato political and military pawn (even absent the country’s formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.
‘History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.’ (...)
The New Yorker magazine describes political scientist John Mearsheimer as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’:
‘For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”’ (...)
In 2014, then US Secretary of State John Kerry had the gall to proclaim of Russia’s takeover of Crimea:
‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.’
Senior BBC correspondents somehow managed to report such remarks from Kerry and others, without making any reference to the West’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. (...)
Noam Chomsky highlights one obvious omission in Western media coverage of Ukraine, or any other crisis involving NATO:
‘The question we ought to be asking ourselves is why did NATO even exist after 1990? If NATO was to stop Communism, why is it now expanding to Russia?’ (...)
Conclusion – ‘Whataboutism’ Or ‘Wearenobetterism’?
Regardless of the history and context of what came before, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major international crime and the consequences are hugely serious.
Our essential point for over 20 years has been that the public is bombarded with the crimes of Official Enemies by ‘mainstream’ media, while ‘our’ crimes are ignored, or downplayed, or ‘justified’. A genuinely free and independent media would be exactly as tough and challenging on US-UK-NATO actions and policies as they are on Russian actions and policies.
To point out this glaring double standard is not to ‘carry water for Putin’; any more than pointing out state-corporate deceptions over Iraq, Libya and Syria meant we held any kind of candle for Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad. (...)
The American population was bombarded the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, waged here in the US while the Gulf War was waged over there.’ (Howard Zinn, ‘Power, History and Warfare’, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, p.12)
Tags: #russia #putin #ukraine #zelenskiy #freedom #war #war_propaganda #fake_news #disinformation #propaganda #john_pilger #stop_the_war_coalition #nato #syria #assad #chemical_weapons #imperialism #anti-imperialism #democracy #dictatorship #international_law #iraq #media #news #journalism #journalist #coporate_media #mainstream_media #RT #Russia_Today #Going_Underground #Sputnik #censorship #freedom-of_the_press #afghanistan #libya
