I recently told a friend that I feel as though I am the screaming persona in Edward Munch’s acclaimed painting, The Scream, while the rest of the world, and especially those thuggishly corrupt oil-rich Arab potentates hiding behind, and using their phony Islamic faith to suppress their people, with, of course, the best Israeli spy technology, taking their leisurely walk down the boardwalk of history.
Because of their sacred duty to Truth, Accuracy, and Objectivity, American media, collectively referred as The Press, employs thousands of dedicated women and men to disseminate local, state, national, and international news. And because of this sacred duty, the Press has been designated as the Fourth Branch.
And because of partisan and ideological advocacy, often blurring the lines between fact and friction, the press has had its issues. Unfortunately more people are drawn to the 24/7 cable news networks or quickie digital updates unfolding and affecting the comfortable bubbles they’ve circumscribed for themselves.
Further, when journalists are killed, imprisoned, or banished because the truth they utter challenges those in power, we lose. And killing the truth is a heinous assault on every citizen. Think of Saudi Arabia’s Jamal Khashoggi vanishing in the labyrinth of Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul Embassy. Think also of the 247 Gaza Palestinian journalists incinerated with U.S. made weapons, compliment of we, the taxpayers.In his July 28, 2025 column under the title Preaching to the Choir While Children Die: The Cost of Silence on Gaza, Craig Nash, Good Faith Media’s editor, states that while Good Faith Media produces “both news and opinion articles on our online platforms, the reality is that we don’t have on-the-ground presence in the Middle East. So any hard, breaking news coverage we might provide would simply be restating facts from established global news services.”
On its online site, Good Faith Media describes itself as “a merger between two historic Baptist Entities: Baptists Today (operating as Nurturing Faith and Baptist Center for Ethics).One can criticize U.S. foreign policy all one wants. However, criticizing Israel will plant the AI (anti-Semitic) letters on one’s forehead, or worse, one might be arrested, detained, stripped of one’s citizenship, and possibly deported.
Unfortunately, U.S. media (in all its forms) and politicians from both sides of the aisle, are held hostage to ADL (anti-Defamation League) and AIPAC’s (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) assaults on any entity that criticizes Israel’s years-long human rights violations and the unabated theft of Palestinian land in both the West Bank and Gaza. In short, the charge that one is an anti-Semite has been, and continues to be, as currently defined by the Trump administration, used as a weapon and a sword. And for years Mike Huckabee and like-minded Evangelicals have been ardent supporters of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Brother Huckabee et.al. state that Palestinians are an invented people, an idea that was propagated by Golda Meir. He is also asserting that Palestinians belong in Muslim countries. You’d think that Baptist preacher Huckabee would be preaching the beatitudes, proclaiming that Christ’s message was one of harmony, love, peace, and caring for the least.
Sadly, for these Christian warriors of the Hegseth and Huckabee types, what is unfolding in Palestine is a countdown to Armageddon, an eschatological final human destiny time when only Christians will be saved from the scourge of fire and death. And the Israel-cheering, even by the vast majority of Republican Congresspeople, goes on, unabated.
From my perspective, Saddam Hussein’s ill-advised invasion of Kuwait and Israel’s 1982 assault on Lebanon were but two Mothers of All Wars of the 1980. And during America’s two Iraq wars, journalists were embedded with Pentagon personnel whose purpose it was to filter the news in a sanitized manner, thus rendering the reports a watered-down good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, civilized vs. uncivilized narratives. Reporting on the heinous and brutal November 8, 2004 assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, was a white-wash of the death of thousands of Iraqi citizens and the pulverization of a major Iraqi city. Should the reader wish to read about this gruesome and vengeful (Dick Cheney et. al.) destruction of the city of Falluja, the online “The Fallujah Files,” as described and chronicled by a U.S. Marine involved in this dastardly act, is “the story [in] an unvarnished, unsanitized [sic.] firsthand account … that includes descriptions and photos that are candidly disturbing. In telling this story [states the narrator] , I promised my fellow Marines that I would not sugarcoat our experience.”
And, to answer Mr. Nash’s posited observation about the lack of “on-the-ground presence,” Israel has never allowed any reporters into its Gaza colosseum of genocidal savagery. And for several months after the brutal October 7, 2023 Hamas assault on Southern Israel, the media exploded into a 24/7 frenzy detailing every gruesome act – so much so – some fabricated untruths became fact, without serious American or Western journalistic scrutiny or verification.
Israel’s deliberate blackout on its Genocidal war crimes, including the deliberate starvation and killings of aid workers and destitute starving Gazans of all ages, has been, until recently, glossed over. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, for example, run by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical Christian Zionist, Israel, the U.S., and contracted American mercenaries, has not allowed journalists to report on its shadowy, Machiavellian scheme whose sole purpose is to draw Gazans to four isolated locations so as to make the impending ethnic cleansing a benign natural outcome of war. Luring pauperized, starving people who’ve walked miles in searing heat for a morsel of a handout and then shooting them to death is a depraved, psychopathic crime. And the footage of a young lad, scooping flour into a makeshift bag formed by his extended ragged t-shirt is the Cri de Coeur for the starving 2.3 million population.
Add insult to injury, The Gaza Mediterranean shoreline, the only place Gazans are able to bathe or fish, have been declared off limits; the watchful eyes of armed Israeli drones are enforcing this brutality.
If the reader has not done so, she/he is urged to look up Mike Huckabee’s’ buffoonish performance for the media. Dressed in a military helmet, a diminutive flak jacket that highlights his girth and protruding gut as a result of eating well, the photograph, full of irony, depicts a bearded man oblivious to the starvation he and his boss have been orchestrating in a most bizarre danse macabre performative charade.
On Sunday, August 10, 2025, the Israeli army assassinated Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and five of his colleagues “in a targeted airstrike on a journalists’ tent outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The strike has effectively wiped out the entire staff of Al Jazeera in Gaza City, claiming the lives of one child and six journalists, including Al Jazeera correspondent Muhammad Qreiqeh.” Further, “Widely celebrated as the voice of Gaza, al-Sharif’s assassination comes after months of incitement against him and puts an end to his coverage ahead of an expected Israeli invasion of Gaza City. The Israeli army has reportedly given Gaza City residents until October 7 to evacuate, when the Israeli army plans to invade northern Gaza as part of its stated plan of conquering the entire Strip.”
According to Israeli hasbara, Anas was a Hamas operative. But then every Palestinian man, woman, child, and fetus is a Hamas operative who must be neutralized by a drone, jet, tank, or machinegun.
Mr. Nashe’s assertion that GFM does “not have on-the-ground presence in the Middle East” is both on target and understandable. It takes a big purse and logistics for GFM (an online entity that “provides reflection and resources at the intersection of faith and culture through an inclusive Christian lens”) — to have on the ground reporters in the Middle East.
Had it not been for on the ground Palestinian Gaza journalists, Israel’s complete blackout on the large number of civilian deaths and apocalyptic destruction would have gone unnoticed by a world that has, until recently, lost its moral compass, and only because the victims are brown people. And the same goes for the millions of starving Sudanese And somehow in all the political, social, economic, retributive vengeful actions, including all the environmental disasters of the past few months – befalling this nation, the Israeli assassinations of 232 (now 237) Gaza journalists who lie, with their sinews, cameras, mikes, helmets, and press insignia, whose buried remains are under the rubble or incinerated to ashes, strewn across the Gaza sand.
The killing of reporters who shed light on the grotesque bestiality of an army, led by a self-indulging megalomaniac prolonging the war to save himself from prosecution, is immoral. With Goya’s moving 82 etchings (Disasters of War) depicting the hauntingly ghastly and macabre barbarity of France’s early 19th century slaughter of Spanish citizens, to the tune of some 375,000 lives, the surviving Gaza Palestinian journalists’ reports will be etched in the annals of history, Never to be Forgotten. And like Picassos’ Guernica, the haunting images of Gazans will forever be the shameful canvas in the Museum of Modern Day Bestiality.
Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ April 1, 2025 report on the Cost of Wars reported that as of April 2025, 232 Gaza journalists were killed by Israeli forces, “with the vast majority being Palestinians, [and] nearly 380 have been wounded. … This is the highest journalist death toll of any U.S. war since the Civil War, and in fact tops the combined toll of journalist casualties in the U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, The Korean War, the Vietnam War (including assaults on Cambodia and Laos), the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Ukraine War.” The report also states that this would be the equivalent of 8,500 U.S. journalists killed in the ongoing Gaza Genocide. And, in addition to targeting and killing journalists, “Israel has employed a full spectrum effort to undermine the free flow of information,” because of the “Israeli military’s destruction of the communications system in Gaza and intimidation and widespread repression of the press.”
When a Palestinian journalists’ photos become a target practice
See Israeli Journalist Jonathan Ofir’s Mondoweiss 5/9/25 report under the title “Israeli soldiers are using slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s face for target.” A U.S. citizen, on 5/11/2022 Shireen was reporting on Israel’s assault on a Palestinian Jerusalem neighborhood. An Israeli sniper “took her out” with a bullet to her head. Even though she is a U.S. citizen, the Biden Administration never fully investigated the shooting of Shireen and refused to meet with her family while at the same time I am a Zionist to the core Biden had several meetings with Israeli hostage families.
Regretfully, the vast majority of America’s journalists are complicit in a code that silences any criticism of Israel’s brutalities and defiance of some 57 U.N. Resolutions, with Mike Huckabee and his ilk leading the charge
And just as silence is complicity, so is the recently delivery of 2,000 bombs to Israel (totaling $509 million), at a time when budget cuts for vital human needs are slashed by a misguided president and a compliant Republican Congress.
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