radiofree.asia

Author: Gregory Shupak

  • Media Afraid to Call Ethnic Cleansing by Its Name

     

    CBC: Trump proposes 'permanently' displacing Palestinians so U.S. can take over Gaza

    News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).

    Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).

    After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”

    Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that

    Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.

    Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

    Clarity in the minority

    Amnesty: Israel/ OPT: President Trump’s claim that US will take over Gaza and forcibly deport Palestinians appalling and unlawful

    Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.

    I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.

    A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.

    Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).

    A ‘plan to free Palestinians’

    WSJ: Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza

    A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.

    Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”

    While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”

    Sadanand Dhume (Wall Street Journal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.

    Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that

    Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.

    Ethnically cleansing the West Bank

    Al Jazeera: Settler violence: Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan for the West Bank

    Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”

    A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.

    Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:

    Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.

    The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palestinian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.

    In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7,  Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.

    Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by

    the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.

    According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.

    Unnoteworthy violations

    I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”

    Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.

    Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.

    ‘Battling local militants’

    Washington Post: "Smoke rises after an explosion detonated Sunday by the Israeli army, which said it was destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. (Majdi Mohammed/AP)"

    The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”

    Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.

    A Washington Post  report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”

    Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.

    The rights of ‘neighbors’

    NYT West Bank? No, Judea and Samaria, Some Republicans Say.

    This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.

    The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”

    The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”

    Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.

    Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Credit Trump for Gaza Truce—Sidelining Palestinian Resistance and Solidarity

     

    WaPo: Trump’s ‘madman theory’ worked in Gaza when all else failed

    Shadi Hamid (Washington Post, 1/16/25): “Donald Trump might seem like a madman. But it turns out that might be a good thing—at least for the moment.”

    Many leading US media outlets were quick to attribute the suspension of hostilities in Gaza to incoming president Donald Trump’s intervention. Ariel Kahana argued in the Wall Street Journal (1/15/25) that “Trump Forced Netanyahu to Make a Deal With the Devil”—Satan, in this formulation, being Hamas, as opposed to the parties responsible for more than 15 months of genocide. In the Washington Post (1/16/25), a Shadi Hamid column contended that “Trump’s ‘Madman Theory’ Worked in Gaza When All Else Failed.”

    Other coverage highlighted how Trump’s team coordinated with the Biden administration in its final weeks. The Journal (1/15/25) foregrounded the “pointed debate over who deserves the credit” while the New York Times (1/15/25) marveled at the “remarkable collaboration between President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump, who temporarily put aside mutual animosity to achieve a mutual goal.” The Post (1/18/25) emphasized

    how incoming and outgoing administration teams with little ideological affinity—and considerable political enmity—embarked on a virtually unprecedented collaboration to seal the ceasefire deal.

    I ran a search using the news media aggregator Factiva and found that the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal ran a combined 19 articles containing the words “Gaza” and “ceasefire” in the five-day period from when the ceasefire was agreed upon, January 15, until it took effect on January 19. Yet these newspapers consistently ignored other crucial features of the environment in which the ceasefire came together.

    ‘Heavy losses on Israeli forces’

    Foreign Policy: Israel Is Facing an Iraq-like Quagmire

    Foreign Policy (4/9/24): The Biden administration warned Israel not to “get bogged down in an endless quagmire with no way out.”

    A major overlooked factor is that Israeli occupation forces faced fierce resistance from Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza. Israeli media and former Israeli officials have described Israel as being in a “quagmire” in Gaza (Haaretz, 8/15/24, 9/16/24). International media reached the same conclusion (Irish Times, 4/7/24; Foreign Policy, 4/9/24).

    As it became likely that a ceasefire would come to pass, Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel (1/14/25) wrote that

    until a deal is signed, Israel is bleeding in Gaza….  The number of fallen soldiers in the area has risen to 15 in less than a week. It’s not just that time is running out for the hostages. Soldiers, too, are dying without any clear reason in a prolonged operation in Northern Gaza….

    In practice, despite the heavy losses sustained by Hamas, it is clear that the operation has not yielded decisive results. The fighting in Jabaliya has subsided, but an estimated several dozen active [Palestinian fighters] remain there. A similar number are also active in Beit Hanoun and have managed to inflict relatively heavy losses on the Israeli forces.

    Despite using nearly apocalyptic force against Gaza and inflicting incomprehensible suffering on its civilian population, the US/Israeli alliance could not vanquish Palestinian resistance forces, and Israel was forced to absorb substantial casualties.

    However, the 19 Journal, Post and Times articles make only one mention of Israeli losses in Gaza. That occurred in the final sentence of a Post article (1/15/25), which read, “[Israel] says 405 soldiers have been killed during its military operation in Gaza”—a figure that cannot be verified because the Israeli military is secretive and censorious (+972, 5/20/24).

    Economic toll

    CNN: Israel’s economy is paying a high price for its widening war

    CNN (10/4/24): “As the conflict spills over into the wider region, the economic costs will spiral too.”

    Other costs were also exacted from Israel. For months, 68,000 Israelis living near the Israel/Lebanon armistice line have been evacuated from their homes because of rockets Hezbollah has fired, which the group consistently said it did to pressure Israel into a Gaza ceasefire. Although Hezbollah has stopped since it signed a “ceasefire” with Israel (that Israel has ignored—FAIR.org, 1/9/25), Israelis have not gone back to their homes in the north, and are not expected to until March at the earliest (Haaretz, 1/1/25).

    None of the 19 Journal, Times and Post pieces I examined make any reference to these almost 70,000 Israelis who have been driven from their homes by the Palestinians’ Lebanese allies.

    The drawn-out genocide exacted economic costs on Israel as well. In October, CNN (10/4/24) said that Israelis’ living standards are declining and that, prior to the events of October 7, 2023,

    the International Monetary Fund forecast that Israel’s economy would grow by an enviable 3.4% [in 2024]. Now, economists’ projections range from 1% to 1.9%. Growth [in 2025] is also expected to be weaker than earlier forecasts…. Inflation is accelerating, propelled by rising wages and soaring government spending to fund the war….

    The conflict has caused Israel’s budget deficit—the difference between government spending and revenue, mostly from taxes—to double to 8% of GDP, from 4% before the war….

    To shrink the fiscal hole, the government can’t rely on a healthy flow of tax revenue from businesses, many of which are collapsing, while others are reluctant to invest while it’s unclear how long the war will last.

    A Reuters headline (10/15/24) the next day noted that Israeli GDP growth for April–June 2024 had to be “Revised Down to 0.3% as Gaza War Takes Economic Toll.”

    Nevertheless, the 19 Journal, Times and Post articles in my data set contained zero references to Israel’s economic problems.

    ‘Costs piling up for importers’

    NYT: Houthi Attacks Turn Back the Clock for Shipping as Costs Pile Up

    New York Times (12/11/24): Yemeni attacks on cargo traffic in the Red Sea were “one of the most significant challenges that shipping has faced in a long time.”

    Along similar lines, the Yemeni group Ansar Allah (usually referred to in Western media as the Houthis) has been intercepting commercial ships in the Red Sea since October 2023, promising to stop once there is a Gaza ceasefire. Ansar Allah’s commandeering the vessels has had a substantial impact on the global economy. A Defense Intelligence Agency report said that Red Sea shipping usually accounts for 10–15% of international maritime trade, and container shipping through those waters declined by roughly 90% from December 2023 to February 2024.

    A December 2024 article in the New York Times (12/11/24) explained that Ansar Allah’s actions forced shipping companies to take a route “that is some 3,500 nautical miles and 10 days longer.” While “Western-led naval fleets were sent to the Red Sea…the attacks continued, and commercial vessels have, for the most part, stayed away.”

    According to the report, “the costs are piling up for importers,” as shipping “rates have surged,” and economists say that “the Houthi attacks have contributed to inflation around the world.” The Times said that “the cost of shipping a container from China to a West Coast port in the United States is up 217% over 12 months.”

    Meanwhile, AP (1/3/25) reported that “Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have all but shuttered an Israeli port in the city of Eilat.”

    Nor have Ansar Allah’s activities been limited to the seas. As AP pointed out:

    In recent weeks, missiles and drones from Yemen have struck nearly every day…setting off air raid sirens in broad swaths of Israel…. The rocket fire is posing a threat to Israel’s economy, keeping many foreign airlines away and preventing the country from jump-starting its hard-hit tourism industry.

    The 19 Gaza ceasefire articles in the Journal, Times and Post said nothing about the economic and military impact of Ansar Allah’s operations.

    An accounting of the ceasefire is incomplete if it excludes how anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist forces in the Middle East thwarted US/Israeli designs for over 15 months, levying considerable battlefield and financial losses. Palestinians are protagonists in their own history, whether the US media like it or not.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Syria Is Free, Say Media—But That Shouldn’t Mean Free of US Occupation

     

    Since the overthrow of the Syrian government, corporate media analysts have offered advice as to how the US should approach Syria going forward. These observers consistently opted not to call on the US and Israel to end their occupations of and violence toward Syria.

    WaPo: Why the U.S. needs to help build a new Syria

    The Washington Post (12/8/24) calls for “engaged diplomacy” from the incoming Trump administration to “help write a brighter next chapter for this strategically located, and long-suffering, country.”

    A Washington Post editorial (12/8/24), headlined “Why the US Needs to Help Build a New Syria,” said:

    Syria might seem far removed from US interests. Before Mr. Assad’s fall, President-elect Donald Trump posted: “DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” But America is involved. Some 900 US troops and an undisclosed number of military contractors are operating in northeastern Syria near Iraq, battling the Islamic State and backing Kurdish forces fighting the Assad regime.

    Estimates suggest that the US-led coalition that bombed Syria, ostensibly to defeat ISIS (Jacobin, 3/29/16), has killed at least 3,000 Syrian civilians and possibly more than 15,000. The Post misses a rather obvious point: The US can “help” Syria by withdrawing the forces that have slaughtered thousands of Syrian noncombatants.

    The Post also published a piece by columnist Josh Rogin (12/8/24), “For the First Time in Decades, Syria Is Free. Now It’s Time to Help.” Set aside that Syria is not “free”; it is under foreign occupation (CBC, 12/10/24). The article provided virtually no details about the forms he thinks that “help” should take. Rogin said that “for those in Washington who have long wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, [the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s government] might offer a path forward.”

    That falls short of saying that the US should withdraw its 900 troops and unknown number of contractors from the country, and Rogin said nothing about the US military bases in Syria, of which there are at least five, plus a minimum of two smaller sites (Stars and Stripes, 12/6/24). Through such mechanisms, the US has long exercised control over a quarter of Syrian territory, including its breadbasket and oil reserves (FAIR.org, 3/7/18; Responsible Statecraft, 7/28/24). Surely ending the US military occupation and returning sovereign control over the country’s vital resources are essential ways to “help” Syria, yet Rogin declined to call for these steps.

    ‘Promote stability and democracy’

    Boston Globe: Trump says ‘do not get involved.’ But that’s the wrong approach in Syria.

    Boston Globe (12/12/24): “A US military presence, however small, can make a difference.“

    The Boston Globe’s editorial board (12/12/24) said that the fall of the Syrian government

    represents an opportunity for the United States and the international community to reach out, to engage, and to help free Syria from the more cynical ambitions of Assad’s patrons in Iran and Russia.

    Yet the paper endorsed the US occupation of Syria, writing that “a US military presence, however small, can make a difference.” It also advocated continued US meddling in Syrian affairs, asserting that “American diplomats can help promote stability and democracy in the country while sidelining extremist groups.”

    Writing such a thing requires extraordinary cynicism, a goldfish’s memory, or both. The US teamed up with Al Qaeda in an effort to bring down the Assad government (Harper’s, 1/16). Weapons that America and its Saudi allies supplied to groups fighting the Syrian government “fell into” ISIS’ hands, significantly improving the quality of ISIS’ armaments, in quantities “far beyond those that would have been available through battle capture alone” (Al Jazeera, 12/14/17).

    ‘Cautious about removing sanctions’

    LA Times: Why the U.S. needs to help build a new Syria

    “The US should be cautious about removing sanctions,” advised the LA Times (12/13/24).

    In the Los Angeles Times (12/13/24), Matthew Levitt said Syria’s “people need and deserve American support now.” His definition of “support” includes the US “maintain[ing] its small but influential US military presence in Syria,” in part to enable America’s junior partners in northeast Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to “continue maintaining detention camps holding Islamic State fighters.”

    The conditions in these camps are abhorrent. An April report from Amnesty International concluded that the SDF and its local partners

    —with the support of the US government and other members of the coalition to defeat the Islamic State (IS) armed group—are engaged in the large-scale and systematic violation of the rights of more than 56,000 men, women and children in their custody. Most of these people were detained during the final battles with IS in 2019. They are now held in at least 27 detention facilities and two detention camps and face arbitrary and indefinite detention, enforced disappearance, grossly inhumane conditions, and other serious violations. Many of those detained are victims of IS atrocity crimes or trafficking in persons.

    Keeping Syrians in dungeons is a rather odd way to “support” them.

    Levitt also wrote that “the US should be cautious about removing sanctions against the Syrian state.” Maintaining sanctions is the opposite of “support[ing]” Syrians. In July, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia reported that the sanctions are negatively “impact[ing] large sectors of the population and the economy, including basic services (education, health, [water, sanitation, and hygiene]) and productive sectors (manufacturing and agriculture), as well as the work of humanitarian organizations.”

    The cruelty of the sanctions is such that during the war in Syria, according to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, Western sanctions have “severely restrict[ed] pharmaceutical imports,” undermining pediatric cancer treatment (Reuters, 3/15/17). Yet Levitt thinks the US shouldn’t hurry to lift such measures, even as doing so is a straightforward way to “support” Syrians.

    Meanwhile, neither the editorial board of the Post nor that of the Globe includes sanctions removal on its list of ways to “help” Syria.

    Furthermore, Levitt points out that, between the Assad government’s last hours and the first days after its overthrow, “the Israeli air force and navy have hit more than 350 strategic targets across the country, destroying an estimated 70% of Syria’s military capabilities.” Whatever Levitt’s definition is for “support,” it apparently includes the US allowing its Israeli surrogate to destroy Syria’s capacity to defend itself from foreign aggression. That won’t help Syria regain the sovereignty it has lost in the 13 years of international proxy war that have taken place on its soil, particularly when the party destroying Syrian military capacity is Israel, which maintains a decades-long regime of illegal occupation, colonization and annexation in Syria’s Golan Heights.

    ‘Suck Israel into Syria’

    NYT: The First New Foreign Policy Challenge for Trump Just Became Clear

    Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 12/13/24): “Middle Eastern countries…come in just two varieties: countries that implode and countries that explode.”

    Similarly, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (12/13/24) argued that the incoming Trump administration should “help with—dare I say it—nation-building in Syria.” He went on to say “it would cost the United States and its allies little money and few troops to try to help” Syria. Friedman subsequently claimed that “without American help and leadership,” Syria could devolve into a “forever war” that would “suck Israel into Syria.”

    Prior to Friedman’s article going to print, Israel had carried out 420 airstrikes in Syria in a week, hitting targets in 13 Syrian provinces. Israel had also set up shop on Mount Hermon, which is strategically located on the Syria/Lebanon border, in violation of 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria (BBC, 12/13/24).

    Setting aside that Friedman bizarrely cast Israeli involvement in Syria as a hypothetical rather than a long-running reality—Israel bombed Syria hundreds of times in the 13 years of war that led to the Syrian government’s demise—the author’s notion of America “help[ing]” with “nation-building” does not exclude its underwriting Israel’s nation-destroying and nation-stealing in Syria.

    In the same vein, the Globe’s editorial board says they want the US to “help free Syria,” but the Israeli violence that the US underwrites appears exempt, since it blandly describes some of what Israel has been doing, but doesn’t say it should stop:

    Israel continues to launch bombing raids of Assad’s chemical weapons plants, naval vessels and Russian-made bombers, which the Israeli government says it is doing to prevent those military assets from falling into the wrong hands amid the chaos.

    Thus, the authors seem to think the US can “help free Syria” without compelling its Israeli client to ends its relentless assault on the state. Meanwhile, stopping Israel’s bombing and conquest of Syria is not enumerated among the ways that Rogin or the Post’s editors think the US can “help” Syria have a brighter future.

    If these commentators genuinely wanted Syria to flourish, they’d insist that the US and its allies finally end their long campaign of intervening in Syria, with quite harmful effects on the country’s population (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17), and allow the nation to chart its own course.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Hawks Make Case for War Against Iran

     

    WSJ: Iran Opens the Door to Retaliation

    The Wall Street Journal (10/1/24) describes an Iranian missile barrage as a response to “Israel’s restraint”—rather than as a response to an Israeli terrorist bombing in Tehran, which went unmentioned in the editorial.

    The media hawks are flying high, pushing out bellicose rhetoric on the op-ed pages that seems calculated to whip the public into a war-ready frenzy.

    Just as they have done with Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 10/10/24), prominent conservative media opinionators misrepresent Iran as the aggressor against an Israel that practices admirable restraint.

    Under the headline, “Iran Opens the Door to Retaliation,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (10/1/24) wrote that Iran’s October 1 operation against Israel “warrants a response targeting Iran’s military and nuclear assets. This is Iran’s second missile barrage since April, and no country can let this become a new normal.”

    The editors wrote:

    After April’s attack, the Biden administration pressured Israel for a token response, and President Biden said Israel should “take the win” since there was no great harm to Israel. Israel’s restraint has now yielded this escalation, and it is under no obligation to restrain its retaliation this time.

    ‘We need to escalate’

    NYT: We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran

    “Bully regimes respond to the stick,” Bret Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) declared—citing the fact that Iran was reluctant to make a nuclear deal with the United States after the United States unilaterally abrogated the last deal.

    The New York Times‘ self-described “warmongering neocon” columnist Bret Stephens (10/1/24), in a piece headlined “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran,” similarly filed Iran’s April and October strikes on Israel under “aggression” that requires a US/Israeli military “response.” And a Boston Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that Iran “launched a brazen attack,” arguing that the incident illustrated why US students are wrong to oppose American firms making or investing in Israeli weapons.

    All of these pieces conveniently neglected to mention that Iran announced that its October 1 missile barrage was “a response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Hezbollah and Hamas” (Responsible Statecraft, 10/1/24). One of these assassinations was carried out by a bombing in Tehran, the Iranian capital. But we can only guess as to whether the Globe thinks those killings are “brazen,” Stephens thinks they qualify as “aggression,” or if the Journal believes any country can let such assassinations “become a new normal.”

    Likewise, Iran’s April strikes came after Israel’s attack on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers (CBS, 4/14/24). At the time, Iran reportedly said that it would refrain from striking back against Israel if the latter agreed to end its mass murder campaign in Gaza (Responsible Statecraft, 4/8/24).

    ‘Axis of Aggression’

    NYT: We Should Want Israel to Win

    Bret Stephens (New York Times, 10/8/24) thinks we’d be safer if “cunning and aggressive dictatorships…finally learned the taste of defeat.”

    A second Stephens piece (New York Times, 10/8/24) claimed that “the American people had better hope Israel wins” in its war against “the Axis of Aggression led from Tehran.” The latter is his term for the coalition of forces resisting the US and Israel from Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran, which refers to itself as the “axis of resistance.” Stephens’ reasoning is that, since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the country

    has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran; the diplomats and Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping.

    The war Israelis are fighting now—the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war,” but is really between Israel and Iran—is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.

    This depiction of Iran as an aggressor that has victimized the United States for 45 years, causing “suffering for thousands of Americans,” is a parody of history. The fact is that the US has imposed suffering on millions of Iranians for 71 years, starting with the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. It propped up the brutal Pahlavi dictatorship until 1979, then backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran, helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iranians (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13). It imposes murderous sanctions on Iran to this day (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23).

    Given this background, suggesting—as the Journal, the Globe and Stephens do—that Iran is the aggressor against the US is not only untenable but laughable. Furthermore, as I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 1/21/20), it’s hardly a settled fact that Iran is responsible for Iraqi attacks on US occupation forces in the country. Stephens’ description of the Navy SEALs who died in the Red Sea is vague enough that one might be left with the impression that Iran or Ansar Allah killed them, but the SEALs died when one of them fell overboard and the other jumped into the water to try to save him (BBC, 1/22/24).

    Stephens went on:

    Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.

    We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.

    What Stephens is deploying here is the tired and baseless propaganda strategy of hinting that World War II redux is impending if America doesn’t crush the Third World bad guy of the moment. More realistically, the “future of freedom” is jeopardized by the US/Israeli alliance’s invading the lands of Palestinian and Lebanese people and massacring them. These crimes suggest that, in the Journal’s parlance, it’s the US/Israeli partnership that is the “regional and global menace.” Or, to borrow another phrase from the Journal’s editorial, it’s Israel and the US who are the “dangerous regime[s]” from which “the civilized world” must be defended.

    ‘A global menace’

    Boston Globe: A strong Israeli defense against Iran benefits US interests

    “Iran launched a brazen attack,” the Boston Globe (10/3/24) editorialized—brazenly ignoring Israeli violence toward Iran.

    Corporate media commentators didn’t stop at Iran’s direct strikes on Israel, casting Iran as, in the Journal‘s words (10/1/24), “a regional and global menace”:

    It started this war via Hamas, which it funds, arms and trains to carry out massacres like the one on October 7, and it escalated via Hezbollah, spreading war to Lebanon. Other proxies destabilize Iraq and Yemen, fire on Israeli and US troops and block global shipping. It sends drones and missiles to Russia and rains ballistic missiles on Israel. All while seeking nukes.

    Stephens’ column (10/1/24) similarly argued that “Iran presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead.” The Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that “the threat posed by Iran extends beyond Israel’s borders.” Both cited the Houthis in Yemen, among other alleged Iranian “proxies.”

    Painting Iran as the mastermind behind unprovoked worldwide aggression helps prop up the hawks’ demands for escalation. But the US State Department said there was “no direct evidence” that Iran was involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, “either in planning it or carrying it out” (NBC, 10/12/23).

    As FAIR has shown repeatedly (e.g., FAIR.org, 4/21/21, 8/26/20), it isn’t true that Hezbollah is an Iranian puppet. The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, likewise aren’t mere proxies (Democracy Now!, 2/1/24)—and don’t expect the media hawks to tell you that the Houthis began attacking ships they understand to be Israel-linked in response to the US/Israeli assault on Gaza, and say that they will stop if the US/Israeli war crimes in Gaza end.

    Moreover, it’s clear that the Journal has no problem with US arms exports, including when they are used to carry out atrocities against civilians, so its posturing about the harm done by Iranian arms sales to Russia cannot be taken seriously (FAIR.org, 1/27/23).

    Propaganda goes nuclear

    LAT: Focus modeBreaking News Civil suit against Roman Polanski alleging 1973 child rape won’t go to trial; settlement reached Advertisement Opinion Opinion: What more do the U.S. and its allies need? It’s time to take out Iran’s nuclear sites

    Uriel Hellman (LA Times, 10/17/24) writes that “the responsible nations of the world have tried myriad methods to thwart this doomsday scenario” of Iran making a nuclear weapon, including “negotiated agreements.” The US has tried making deals with Iran, it’s tried violating those deals—nothing seems to work!

    As usual, those who are itching for a war on Iran invoke the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) wrote:

    This year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran was within a week or two of being able to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. Even with the requisite fissile material, it takes time and expertise to fashion a nuclear weapon, particularly one small enough to be delivered by a missile. But a prime goal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is plainly in sight, especially if it receives technical help from its new best friends in Russia, China and North Korea.

    Now’s the time for someone to do something about it.

    That someone will probably be Israel.

    By “something,” Stephens said he also meant that “Biden should order” military strikes to destroy the “Isfahan missile complex.” “There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too,” Stephens wrote suggestively.

    The LA Times published two guest op-eds in less than two weeks urging attacks on Iran based on its alleged nuclear threat. Yossi Klein Halevi (10/7/24) wrote:

    Today, Iran sits at the nuclear threshold…. The culminating moment of this war to restore Israeli deterrence against existential threat will be preventing Iran’s nuclear breakout.

    Ten days later, Uriel Heilman (LA Times, 10/17/24) argued: “With Iran’s belligerence in overdrive, the US and its allies should seriously consider a military option to take out Iran’s nuclear sites.”

    The first question posed by CBS‘s Margaret Brennan in the vice presidential debate (10/1/24)—”would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran?”—was premised on the claim that Iran “has drastically reduced the time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon. It is down now to one or two weeks time.”

    ‘Threshold’ is a ways away

    NYT: To Build a Nuclear Bomb, Iran Would Need Much More Than Weeks

    If this New York Times piece (10/2/24) seems to have a different, less alarmist tone than other corporate media reports, perhaps that’s because its author, William Broad, is a science reporter and not someone whose beat is foreign policy.

    Readers who aren’t versed in the technical terms used to discuss nuclear proliferation can be forgiven for thinking that a country at “the nuclear threshold” is mere days away from being able to use nuclear weapons against their enemies, as these media warnings seem to suggest. But in reality, as the blog War on the Rocks (5/3/24) explained:

    Three distinct elements distinguish a state that has achieved a threshold status. First, the conscious pursuit of this combined technical, military and organizational capability to rapidly (probably within three to six months) obtain a rudimentary nuclear explosive capability after a decision to proceed. Second, implementation of a strategy for achieving and utilizing this status. And third, the application of this status for gain vis-à-vis adversaries, allies and/or domestic audiences. Nevertheless, a threshold state remains sufficiently short of weapons possession and even from the capacity to assemble disparate components into a nuclear weapon within days.

    According to a Congressional Research Service document (3/20/24) published in March, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports “suggest that Iran does not yet have a viable nuclear weapon design or a suitable explosive detonation system.”

    Estimates of how long it would take for Iran to develop nuclear weapons vary. US intelligence said that Iran could enrich enough uranium for three nuclear devices within weeks if it chose to do so (Congressional Research Service, 9/6/24). Yet as noted by Houston G. Wood, an emeritus professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who specializes in atomic centrifuges and other nuclear issues, it “would take Iran up to a year to devise a weapon once it had enough nuclear fuel” (New York Times, 10/2/24).

    Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, likewise told the New York Times that “it would likely take many months” for Iran to develop nukes, “not weeks.” As the Times noted, CBS‘s question in the vice presidential debate “conflated the time it would most likely take Iran to manufacture a bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium with the overall process of turning it into a weapon. ”

    What’s more, US intelligence continues to say that Iran “is not currently undertaking nuclear weapons-related activities” (Congressional Research Service, 9/6/24). In 2003, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against building nuclear weapons that has not yet been rescinded (FAIR.org, 10/17/17).

    ‘Iran won’t stop itself’

    IAEA: Iran is Implementing Nuclear-related JCPOA Commitments, Director General Amano Tells IAEA Board

    “Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments,” the IAEA (3/5/18) said in March 2018. Two months later, the same could not be said to the United States.

    Even if Iran were pursuing nuclear weapons, nothing under international law supports the idea that Israel and the US therefore have the right to attack Iran. India would not have been within its rights to attack Pakistan to prevent its rival from building a nuclear weapon.

    But media assume different rules apply to Iran. The editors of the Wall Street Journal (10/1/24) contended:

    If there were ever cause to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, [Iran’s October attack on Israel] is it…. Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon and won’t stop itself. The question for American and Israeli leaders is: If not now, when?

    Recent history shows that Iran has been willing to “stop itself” from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran abided by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal, under which Iran limited its nuclear development in exchange for a partial easing of US sanctions. It stuck to the deal for some time even after the United States unilaterally abandoned it.

    Just before President Donald Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018, the IAEA reported that Iran was “implementing its nuclear-related commitments” under the accord. The year after the US abrogated the agreement, Iran was still keeping up its end of the bargain.

    ‘Provocative actions’ from US/Israel

    Responsible Statecraft: Killing the Iran nuclear deal was one of Trump's biggest failures

    Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24): “Relations between the United States and Iran have been so damaged by Trump’s withdrawal that it does not appear as though the deal can be resurrected.”

    Iran subsequently stopped adhering to the by then nonexistent deal—often advancing its nuclear program, as Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24) noted, “in response to provocative actions from the US and Israel”:

    In early 2020, the Trump administration killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and soon after Tehran announced that it would no longer abide by its enrichment commitments under the deal. But, even so, Tehran said it would return to compliance if the other parties did so and met their commitments on sanctions relief.

    In late 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by Israel. Soon after, Iran’s Guardian Council approved a law to speed up the nuclear program by enriching uranium to 20%, increasing the rate of production, installing new centrifuges, suspending implementation of expanded safeguards agreements, and reducing monitoring and verification cooperation with the IAEA. The Agency has been unable to adequately monitor Iran’s nuclear activities under the deal since early 2021.

    However, situating Iranian policies in relation to US/Israeli actions like these would get in the way of the Journal’s campaign, which it articulated in another editorial (10/2/24), to convince the public that “If Mr. Biden won’t take this opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, the least he can do is not stop Israel from doing the job for its own self-preservation.”

    Of course, the crucial, unstated assumption in the articles by Stephens, Halevi, Heilman and the Journal’s editors is that Iran’s hypothetical nuclear weapons are emergencies that need to be immediately addressed by bombing the country—while Washington and Tel Aviv’s vast, actually existing nuclear arsenals warrant no concern.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Demonizing Hezbollah to Legitimize a US/Israel Onslaught on Lebanon

     

    Corporate media’s handling of the US-supported Israeli assault on Lebanon has, like all war propaganda, entailed a campaign to demonize the purported bad guys—Hezbollah, in this case. The coverage of the US/Israeli assault on Lebanon has also evinced a casual disregard for Lebanese lives, and often an outright zest for killing the country’s people.

    One person’s terrorist…

    WSJ: Israel’s Deterrence Lesson for Biden

    The Wall Street Journal (9/29/24) celebrates assassination as “deterrence.”

    Denouncing Hezbollah as a terrorist outfit is pervasive in corporate punditry. A Wall Street Journal editorial (9/25/24) called the group “terrorists” three times, as in, “One lesson of October 7 is that Israel can’t let terrorists build up armies.”

    Another Journal editorial (9/29/24) used the T-word twice before asserting that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader Israel recently assassinated, was “a terrorist whose killers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Europeans.” The claim that Hezbollah is liable for killing “thousands of Americans and Europeans” is extraordinary, but the authors don’t make clear who or what they’re talking about, let alone offer any evidence to support their claim.

    In the New York Times (9/25/24), columnist Bret Stephens said Hezbollah is a “terrorist militia” and a “terrorist group” that “terrorizes its neighborhood.”

    Max Boot of the Washington Post (9/26/24, 9/28/24) called Nasrallah a “terrorist kingpin” and referred to Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization” three times. “It would be nice to think the Lebanese government could now disarm Hezbollah and end its reign of terror,” he mused, describing the organization as “one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups.”

    Violence they dislike

    Two decades out from 9/11, it should be clear to honest observers that the term “terrorism” is politicized to the point of uselessness. The US, Canada and other Western states have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but there is no universally applied objective measure of whether a given group deserves that label, nor is there a neutral body that decides who is and is not a terrorist. The US put Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress on a terror list in 1988, and Mandela’s name was not removed until 2008 (NBC, 12/7/13).

    Amal Saad: The US and other Western powers' designation of Hizbullah as a terrorist organization has effectively empowered Israel to escalate its campaign of state terrorism in Lebanon

    Amal Saad (X, 10/4/24): “The US and other Western powers’ designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization has effectively empowered Israel to escalate its campaign of state terrorism in Lebanon.”

    In practice, to paraphrase what Noam Chomsky said when asked if he thinks Hezbollah is a terrorist organization: “Terrorism” is used by the great powers to refer to violence that they dislike. The US considers Hezbollah a terrorist group, he argued, because the US supports Israeli invasions and occupations of Lebanon, and Hezbollah has twice driven Israel out of the country through successful military campaigns.

    Amal Saad of Cardiff University, a scholar who focuses on Hezbollah, raised the salient point about the US and its Western allies’ listing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization:

    The blanket proscription of Hezbollah, including its civilian and political branches, has created a direct conflict between domestic and international law. By criminalizing these non-military elements, it provides Israel with cover to blur the critical distinction in international law between combatants and noncombatants, enabling it to act with impunity….

    This was showcased by Israel’s strike on Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Unit, along with separate incidents where many other paramedics and healthcare workers were killed while attempting to rescue victims of Israel’s attacks. It was also shown by Israel’s pager attacks on Hezbollah cadres, most of whom were members of its mobilization unit (off-duty reservists and thus noncombatants), healthcare workers and other civilians.

    Lebanon ‘hijacked’ and ‘kidnapped’ 

    NYT: What This Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran Conflict Is Really About

    What the Mideast crisis is “really about,” according to Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 10/1/24): a struggle between “decent countries,” like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and “brutal, authoritarian regimes.”

    Stephens (New York Times, 9/25/24) built on the terrorism theme, writing that Hezbollah has “hijacked” Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies won the majority of seats in Lebanon’s parliament in 2018, and although the bloc lost its majority in 2022, it still won more seats than any other formation (Al Jazeera, 5/17/22). Performing well in elections isn’t “hijacking” a country.

    Nor is it “kidnapping” a country, as Stephens’ Times colleague Thomas Friedman (10/1/24) asserted. Friedman wrote:

    It is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah…were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon.

    Friedman is also wildly oversimplifying the range of views held by people in “the Sunni and Christian Arab world.” The Associated Press’ Bassem Mroue (9/28/24), writing from Beirut, characterized Nasrallah as “idolized by his Lebanese Shiite followers and respected by millions of others across the Arab and Islamic world,” even as Hezbollah lost some of its popularity after intervening on the side of the Syrian government in the war in that country.

    Saad Hariri, the two-time Lebanese Prime Minister and leader of the primarily Sunni Future Movement party, called Nasrallah’s assassination “a cowardly act that we condemn in its entirety.” He offered “heartfelt condolences to [Nasrallah’s] family and comrades,” and added that the killing has brought Lebanon and the region “into a new phase of violence” (LBC International, 9/28/24).

    Lebanese Christian leaders praised Nasrallah, including the country’s former president, Michel Aoun, who called Nasrallah “a distinguished and honest leader who led the national resistance on the paths of victory and liberation” (Newsweek, 9/28/24).

    Reduced to a ‘proxy’

    WaPo: A Death in Beirut

    For the Washington Post (9/29/24), Nasrallah’s assassination was “a much-deserved comeuppance for an Iranian proxy militia.”

    A slight variation on the effort to suggest that Hezbollah should be understood in purely sectarian terms are the ubiquitous reductions of the group to an Iranian “proxy” (Wall Street Journal, 9/29/24, 9/25/24; Washington Post, 9/29/24; Boston Globe, 10/6/24; New York Times, 10/1/24). Stephens (New York Times, 9/25/24) made the same allegation but in more racist, dehumanizing language, writing that “Tehran is the head of the octopus and Hezbollah…is merely one of its tentacles.”

    As I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 4/21/21, 8/26/20), it just isn’t true that Hezbollah is an Iranian vassal. The goal of this narrative is to misrepresent Hezbollah as a foreign imposition without a mass base in Lebanon.

    The point of presenting Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon in the most negative possible light is, of course, to make the US/Israeli onslaught against Lebanon sound legitimate: Readers who think Hezbollah is a terrorist group without any legitimacy in Lebanon are more likely to support a war to crush them than audiences who are aware of facts that don’t fit this narrative—such as the group’s record of building “a vast network of social services, including hospitals, schools and youth programs” (New York Times, 8/14/20).

    Nor, likewise, do simplistic tales that cast Hezbollah as a purely malevolent force capture the widespread popularity the group has at times garnered in Lebanon and elsewhere in Arab majority countries. It won considerable admiration in 2000 when its military forced Israel to end its 18-year occupation of Lebanon (AP, 9/28/24), and, as the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (3/8/16) conceded, when it successfully fought off Israel’s 2006 re-invasion.

    ‘Remarkable restraint’

    WSJ: Biden Tilts at Hezbollah Windmills

    The Wall Street Journal (9/25/24) claimed that Israel has given the last 11 months “over to diplomacy on its northern front.” That “diplomacy” has attacked Lebanon 7,845 times, killing more than 600 people, including at least 137 civilians (Al Jazeera, 9/11/24; Amnesty International, 9/25/24).

    The commentariat has also painted Hezbollah as the aggressor in its struggle with Israel. The first Journal editorial (9/25/24) on Israel’s Lebanon assault said that Israel had given the months since October 7 “to diplomacy on its northern front, even as Hezbollah fired 8,500 rockets and forced 60,000 Israelis from their homes.” The Journal‘s follow-up editorial (9/29/24) praised Israel for supposedly “exhibit[ing] remarkable restraint for nearly a year in response to Hezbollah’s thousands of rocket and missile attacks that have made the country’s north uninhabitable.”

    Carine Hajjar of the Boston Globe (10/6/24) rationalized Israel’s attacks in similar terms, writing that “in the past year, more than 60,000 Israelis have been displaced from the northern region by escalating rocket fire. No country would put up with that.”

    These are complete misrepresentations: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) shows (Al Jazeera, 9/11/24) that Israel was responsible for about 82% of all attacks on either side of the Lebanon/Israel armistice line between October 7, 2023, and September 6, 2024. In roughly the same period, prior to Israel’s most recent escalation, Israel had killed 137 civilians in Lebanon, whereas attacks by armed groups in Lebanon killed 14 civilians in Israel (Amnesty International, 9/25/24).

    Totally absent from the Journal editorials is the significant fact that Hezbollah has consistently indicated that it would agree to a ceasefire with Israel if Israel agreed to end its genocide in Gaza (Reuters, 2/29/24; AP, 7/2/24). Indeed, an Israeli official told NBC (9/28/24) that Israel “took the decision to assassinate Nasrallah after concluding he would not accept any diplomatic solution to end the fighting on the Israel/Lebanon [armistice line] that was not tied to an end to the war in Gaza.”

    Whatever corporate media say, Israel isn’t massacring people in Lebanon because Hezbollah is attacking Israel; it’s massacring them so that it can go on massacring Palestinians.

    Arab lives don’t matter to corporate media

    Al Jazeera: Lebanon sees deadliest day since civil war as Israeli attacks kill 492

    Arab deaths are rarely treated as having serious moral weight in US corporate media (Al Jazeera, 9/23/24).

    The op-ed pages have also demonstrated, at best, a callous indifference to Lebanese life and, at worst, rah-rah enthusiasm for the slaughter of Lebanese people.

    The first Journal editorial (9/25/24) wrote:

    Following the exploding pagers and successful attack on Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force commanders, Israel this week dropped evacuation notices and bombed Hezbollah’s missile stores. Israel says it destroyed tens of thousands of missiles and launchers, most hidden in civilian homes, leaving Hezbollah without half its strategic arsenal.

    Lebanon says more than 550 people have been killed, including terrorists.

    The attacks on the Radwan Force killed 15 Hezbollah members and 31 people in total (NPR, 9/21/24). Wiping out 16 non-Hezbollah persons, including three children (Le Monde, 9/21/24), evidently isn’t enough for the editors to qualify the extent to which this violence was a “success.”

    The subtext of the reference to the “evacuation notices” is that Israel did its due diligence by warning civilians—“death threats” is more apt than “evacuation notices”—but UN human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani pointed out that these “notices” seemed to presume that civilians would know where Hezbollah’s weapons are stored. The messages, she said, helped spread “panic, fear and chaos.” She went on to say:

    If you warn people of an imminent attack, that does not absolve you of the responsibility to protect civilians. The obligation to protect civilians is paramount. So, whether you’ve sent out a warning telling civilians to flee, [it] doesn’t make it okay to then strike those areas, knowing full well that the impact on civilians will be huge.

    According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (9/23/24), despite issuing these supposed warnings,

    in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the Israeli army deliberately denies civilians enough time to escape the areas being bombed, offering them no real protection from the dangers arising from military operations.

    Moreover, some of those Hezbollah “missile stores” the Journal referred to took the form of “hospitals, medical centers and ambulances,” all of which Israeli airstrikes damaged, as the Lebanese minister of health noted (Human Rights Watch, 9/25/24). The Lebanese Health Ministry also said that Israeli bombs hit “cars of people trying to flee” (Al Jazeera, 9/23/24). That the Journal didn’t mention Israel’s killing of 50 children in its September 23 attacks (CNN, 9/24/24) demonstrates how little value the paper assigns to Arab life.

    The same applies to a Washington Post editorial (9/29/24), which began:

    In a display of military and intelligence prowess reminiscent of its surprise victory over Arab armies in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has delivered a series of devastating preemptive blows on Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese paramilitary force, culminating in the assassination of its longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah, under a hail of bombs on Friday.

    The piece went on to say that

    Israel seems to prefer not to have to follow up its air campaign by going into Lebanon on the ground, which would be costly for both the Jewish state and civilians of Lebanon inevitably caught up in the fighting.

    Here Lebanon’s dead are erased, their murders cast as a hypothetical possibility rather than a well-documented reality, while Israeli brutality is praised as “a display of military and intelligence prowess.”

    ‘More Hezbollah’s fault’

    HRW: Lebanon: Israeli Strikes Kill Hundreds as Hostilities Escalate

    What the Wall Street Journal (9/29/24) called “a remarkable display of intelligence [and] technological skill,” Human Rights Watch (9/25/24) said “appears to violate the prohibition against booby-traps” under international law.

    When they didn’t ignore civilian deaths, some of these pundits blamed Hezbollah for them. The Journal editorial board (9/29/24) wrote:

    Israel has changed its strategy from tit-for-tat responses to a pre-emptive campaign to degrade Hezbollah’s missile stores, launchers and military leadership. These are all justified targets in war. It’s tragic when civilians are also killed, but that is more Hezbollah’s fault. Nasrallah, who knew he was a marked man, located his hideout under residential buildings.

    Israel’s campaign has been a remarkable display of intelligence, technological skill and above all political will. The sabotage of Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies wounded or killed scores of fighters. Its targeted bombings against Hezbollah’s terror masters showed how much Israeli intelligence has penetrated its communications. It continued to bomb Hezbollah targets on Sunday, including military commanders.

    Even if US/Israeli attacks were limited to what the Journal calls “justified targets in war,” the bombers’ obligations wouldn’t end there. It’s inadequate—not to mention callous—to brush aside dead civilians as being “more Hezbollah’s fault.” As Human Rights Watch (9/25/24) explained:

    The attacking party is not relieved from its obligation to take into account the risk to civilians, including the duty to avoid causing disproportionate harm to civilians if the defending party has located military targets within or near populated areas.

    Of course, the US/Israeli airstrikes didn’t just “degrade Hezbollah’s missile stores, launchers and military leadership.” Rather, they “randomly and directly target[ed] civilian buildings, including the buildings of surrounding hospitals and schools,” according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (9/23/24). According to the group, Israel also “used drones to light fires in southern Lebanon’s forests” and burn agricultural land.

    As the UN’s refugee agency put it two days prior to the publication of this Journal editorial, “118,466 Lebanese and Syrian people have been displaced inside Lebanon as Israel airstrikes continue to devastate civilian lives.” It’s patently false to describe such actions as “targeted bombings against…terror masters.”

    Likewise, Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attack (CounterSpin, 9/27/24) didn’t exclusively kill and wound “scores of fighters.” The sabotage killed at least 37 people, including children and medical workers, an apparent violation of the prohibition against booby-traps under international law (Human Rights Watch, 9/25/24). The explosions wounded nearly 3,000, many of them civilian bystanders (CNN, 9/27/24). Calling all this mass maiming and murder “a remarkable display of intelligence [and] technological skill” betrays a racist lust for Arab blood.

    Matthew Levitt of the Boston Globe (9/23/24) was similarly unconcerned with the harm done to noncombatants, and gushed over Israel’s technical mastery: “Israel, in an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger deception, outfoxed Hezbollah” in a “tactical success.” Yet the communication devices blew up “in crowded civilian areas, such as residential streets and grocery stores, as well as in people’s homes,” causing innumerable people to lose one or more eyes or hands or both (Amnesty International, 9/20/24).

    Whether it’s this cold-blooded attitude to people in Lebanon, or offering one-dimensional accounts of Hezbollah’s role in the country that reduce it to mere villainy, pundits appear to be using their platforms to try to get the public to sign off on savage US/Israeli violence.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Pundits Push for Regional Escalation in the Wake of Israeli Assassinations

     

    Following Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut—along with a woman and two children (Al Jazeera, 7/30/24)—and of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, corporate media pundits have called for the US and Israel to escalate the region-wide war.

    Wall Street Journal: Weakness Won’t Deter Hezbollah After Its Soccer-Field Attack

    According to the Wall Street Journal (7/28/24), the “way to make war less likely is to announce that American munitions transfers to Israel will be expedited immediately.”

    A Wall Street Journal editorial (7/28/24), using galaxy-brain logic, said the

    way to make war less likely is to announce that American munitions transfers to Israel will be expedited immediately, as they were earlier in the war and as Congress has approved, and that all oil sanctions on [Hezbollah ally] Iran will be enforced again.

    US-supplied weapons have already been a major part of Israel’s post–October 7 attacks on Lebanon, inflicting a terrible cost. The Washington Post (12/13/23) reported that, in October, Israel fired US-made white phosphorus—incendiary material that can cause ghastly injuries and death—into the Lebanese village Dheira; the attack incinerated at least four homes, according to residents, and injured nine. In March, Israel used a US-provided weapon in an airstrike on the Lebanese town of al-Habariyeh, killing seven volunteer paramedics, aged 18–25, in violation of international law (Guardian, 5/6/24).

    Prior to last week’s Israeli attack on Lebanon, Israel had killed at least 543 people in Lebanon since October 7 (Al Jazeera, 6/27/24), including roughly 100 civilians (BBC, 7/22/24); US fighter jets have played a key role in Israel’s Lebanon campaign (Deutsche Welle, 7/19/24). Far from “mak[ing] war less likely,” US armaments enable Israel to kill and maim Lebanese people. (According to Israeli officials, Hezbollah attacks have killed 33 Israelis, mostly soldiers, since October 7—BBC, 7/17/24.)

    The editorial invoked a tissue-thin casus belli on Israel’s behalf, saying that Hezbollah carried out a “rocket attack on Saturday [that] killed 12 children and wounded more on a soccer field in Israel’s Golan Heights.” One problem: There is no such thing as “Israel’s Golan Heights”; there is only Syria’s Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally occupied, illegally annexed and illegally settled (Foreign Policy, 2/5/19). Casting the deaths in Majdal Shams, the predominately Druze village in the Golan where the killings occurred, as an attack on Israel makes it sound as if Israeli violence against Lebanon (such as its Beirut bombing) is what the editorial calls Israel “defend[ing] itself.”

    ‘Israel returns fire’

    WSJ: Israel Returns Fire on Iran and Its Proxies

    The Wall Street Journal (8/1/24) maintains that the assassination of a Hamas negotiator could help peace negotiations, as “Hamas politicians remaining in Qatar now know their lives are also on the line if they continue to resist Israel’s reasonable terms.”

    A second Wall Street Journal editorial (8/1/24) pushed a similar line, deploying the headline, “Israel Returns Fire on Iran and Its Proxies.” Strangely, Iranian actions are not described as “return[ing] fire” for Israel’s years of attacks on Iranian territory, which have taken the form of sabotaging the Iranian electrical grid, cyberattacks (New York Times, 4/11/21) and murdering Iranian scientists (Politico, 3/5/18). Doubling down on its demands for belligerence, the editorial’s authors argued:

    The US can help Israel prevent a larger war by putting pressure on Hezbollah and Iran. Expediting weapons to Israel, including deep-penetrating bombs that would put Iran’s nuclear facilities at risk, would send a message, as would enforcing oil sanctions again. Sending US warships to the eastern Mediterranean, as after October 7, would also make Iran think twice about Hezbollah’s next move.

    The Journal seems to think that doing the same thing over and over again—namely, sending more weapons to Israel, choking Iranian civilians through sanctions (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23) and upping the US military presence in the region—will produce different results. Maybe this time, the authors seem to suggest, Iran and Hezbollah will decide to just let the US and Israel dictate what happens across West Asia.

    Nor does the editorial explore the possibility that Iran might be less inclined to strike Israel if Israel were to cease carrying out assassinations on Iranian soil, bombing its embassies (Reuters, 4/4/24) or carrying out genocide against Iran’s Palestinian allies.

    ‘Response to Hezbollah’

    NYT: Israel’s Five Wars

    For the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (7/30/24), Israel is at war not only with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, but with “Israel’s most strident critics” on campuses, with the “‘yes but’ thinking” that supports Israel while condemning civilian deaths, and with “Jews who provide moral cover and comfort to Israel’s enemies.”

    In the New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens (7/30/24) put forth a similar view, writing that

    the world will soon know the full shape and scale of Israel’s response to Hezbollah for [the] rocket attack on a Druze town in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 children.

    Another problem with this line of argument is that there is some doubt as to whether it was a Hezbollah projectile that hit the Golan, and a great deal of doubt as to whether, if it was Hezbollah’s rocket, it was deliberately fired at Majdal Shams (LA Times, 7/30/24).

    Despite Stephens’ suggestion that an Israeli assault on Lebanon would be a “response” to a Hezbollah “attack,” only 20% of Majdal Shams residents have accepted Israeli citizenship, while the bulk of the town’s inhabitants continue to be citizens of Syria (LA Times, 7/30/24).

    Not content with last week’s attack on Beirut, Stephens wrote that

    whatever Israel does next, it should be calculated to advance the national interests on all [fronts of its multifaceted wars]. If that means postponing a fuller response to explain its rationale, necessity and goal, so much the better.

    The “fuller response” he has in mind seems to be more Israeli violence, since what it would be “fuller” than is the bombing of Beirut, and the premise of the article is that the Israeli government is fighting a five-fronted war. Worry not, Stephens assures his readers, any further Israeli bombings and assassinations will by definition be a “response,” and thus defensible.

    ‘Iranian imperialism’

    NYT: America May Soon Face a Fateful Choice About Iran

    Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 8/1/24) recasts the Gaza crisis as “part of a broader Iranian campaign to drive America out of the Middle East.”

    Meanwhile, Stephens’ colleague Thomas Friedman (8/1/24) painted Iran as the primary aggressor in West Asia. He called Iran an “imperial power,” condemning “Iranian imperialism” and “Tehran’s regional imperialist adventure.” Iran’s goal, he asserted,  is “to control the whole Arab world.”

    Since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the state has carried out zero full-scale invasions of Arab majority countries (and zero such attacks on non-Arab nations). In the same period, the US, which is evidently not imperialist, and not trying to “control the whole Arab world,” has carried out full-fledged invasions of Libya and (more than once) of Iraq. In addition to annexing and colonizing part of Syria, Israel has repeatedly invaded Lebanon. Colonizing, occupying and annexing Palestinian land, and now committing genocide against Palestinians, presumably also constitute the US and Israel seeking to “control” an important slice of the “Arab world.”

    Yet in Friedman’s topsy-turvy universe, Iran is the main source of violence in the region. That misleading framing wrongly suggests that past and future acts of war against Iran are legitimate and necessary.

    Nobody knows what the political and military outcome of a broader conflagration in the Middle East would be, but the human and environmental toll on the region would be colossal. High-profile pundits in America are doing their part to help such an outcome materialize.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Acknowledging the Horrors of Gaza—Without Wanting to End Them

     

    The International Court of Justice in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The next month, in a lawsuit aimed at ending US military support for Israel, a federal court in California ruled that Israel’s actions in the Strip “plausibly” amount to genocide (Guardian, 2/1/24). Shortly thereafter, Michael Fakhri (Guardian, 2/27/24), the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said of Israeli actions:

    There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza—other than to deny people access to food….

    Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian. In my view as a UN human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide. This means the state of Israel in its entirety is culpable and should be held accountable—not just individuals or this government or that person.

    In March, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese released a report concluding “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” During its campaign in Gaza, Israel’s “military has been heavily reliant on imported aircraft, guided bombs and missiles,” and 69% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023 have come from the US (BBC, 4/5/24).

    WaPo: How the U.S. and Israel can get back on the same page

    The Washington Post (3/30/24) hopes the US can get back on the same page with “mainstream Israelis” who are “willing to see the war through to finish off Hamas.”

    In this context, corporate media, which have long been strong supporters of both the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the US imperial violence undergirding it, face a dilemma. At this stage, corporate media cannot simply conceal the daily horrors that are unfolding, particularly as much of their audience is exposed to it whenever they open a social media app. So media’s challenge is to frame the “plausible” genocide in a way that will not undermine long-term US/Israeli domination of Palestine. In this context, many corporate media analysts acknowledge the grave harm done to the Palestinians in Gaza—without also saying that it must end.

    A Washington Post editorial (3/30/24), for example, lamented how “hunger threatens Gaza’s civilians, who, through displacement, disease and death, have already paid a horrible price.” (“Israel is forcing hunger on Gaza with US support” would be better, but I digress.) Subsequently, the paper noted that “objective conditions for the 2 million or so people in Gaza, most displaced from ruined homes, are horrendous.”

    The editors’ prescription in “the short run” was “a six-week truce with Hamas, during which the militants would release at least some of their hostages and relief supplies could flow into Gaza more safely.” At that point, Palestinians can resume paying that “horrible price” in “horrendous” conditions, such as having “the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history” (New Yorker, 3/21/24).

    ‘The weapons it needs’

    NYT: Israel Is Making the Same Mistake America Made in Iraq

    David French (New York Times, 4/7/24) thinks the question of “whether Israel’s behavior as it battles Hamas complies with the laws of war” is “worth answering in full when the fog of war clears.”

    Columnist David French likewise wrote in the New York Times (4/7/24) that “the terrible civilian toll and looming famine in Gaza are a human tragedy that should grieve us all,” but endorsed “giving Israel the weapons it needs to prevail against Hamas.” He favorably compared the Biden’s administration’s lavishing Israel with weapons to Donald’s Trump’s remark that Israel has “got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.” French said:

    Though I have some qualms with the details of the Biden administration’s approach, its directional thrust—providing military aid while exerting relentless pressure for increased humanitarian efforts—is superior. It’s much closer to matching the military, legal and moral needs of the moment.

    “Israel,” French asserted, “possesses both the legal right and moral obligation to its people to end Hamas’s rule and destroy its effectiveness as a fighting force.” French’s argument was that the US should keep arming Israel, but ensure that more aid reaches Palestinians in Gaza. The absurdity of this position is that Israel’s use of that “military aid” is what causes “the terrible civilian toll and looming famine in Gaza.”

    At the time French was writing,  at least 27 Palestinians in Gaza had already starved to death, 23 of them children (Al Jazeera, 3/27/24). As the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification System, a hunger-monitoring coalition of multinational and nongovernmental organizations, noted in December:

    The cessation of hostilities and the restoration of humanitarian space to deliver…multi-sectoral assistance and restore services are essential first steps in eliminating any risk of famine.

    Commenting on the report, famine expert Alex de Waal (Guardian, 3/21/24) said that

    Israel has had ample warning of what will happen if it continues its campaign of destroying everything necessary to sustain life. The IPC’s Famine Review Committee report on 21 December authoritatively warned of starvation if Israel did not cease destruction and failed to allow humanitarian aid at scale.

    In short, the large-scale famine about which French professed concern can only be averted by ending the Israeli onslaught that he supports. (At least French has “qualms” about that, though.)

    Reversing reality

    NYT: Netanyahu’s government is to blame for rift in historic Israel-U.S. alliance

    The LA Times (4/9/24) insists “it is Hamas that keeps the war going,” even as it blames “Israel‘s retaliatory actions” for “leading the US to reassess the two nations’ relationship.”

    A Los Angeles Times editorial (4/9/24) expressed concern for “the level of death and destruction in Gaza” and wrote that, in a February news conference, “Biden was particularly critical—appropriately so—of the inability of humanitarian relief workers to get food and water to Gaza’s 2.3 million people, many of whom face famine.” The piece went on to call for “hostage releases and a lasting ceasefire.”

    Yet the article’s penultimate paragraph read: “It is Hamas that keeps the war going by continuing to hold the hostages it brutally kidnapped in its October attack.”

    That’s not accurate. Days earlier (Times of Israel, 4/6/24), the group reaffirmed its position in the “hostage negotiations,” demanding a

    complete ceasefire, withdrawal of the occupation forces from Gaza, the return of the displaced to their residential areas, freedom of movement of the people, offering them aid and shelter, and a serious hostage exchange deal.

    In contrast, the White House advocated a “pause in fighting” and “temporary ceasefire.” Washington’s Israeli client likewise sought a short-term break in the fighting, saying “that, after any truce, it would topple Hamas” (Reuters, 4/7/24).

    Thus, the reality was exactly the opposite of what the LA Times said: The Israeli/US side wanted to take a short break from slaughtering Palestinians, whereas the Palestinian side was insisting on the “lasting ceasefire” that the paper claimed to favor. Whatever the editors purport to want, regurgitating anti-Palestinian propaganda that essentially blames Palestinians for their own genocide, rather than the US/Israeli perpetrators, is hardly an effective way to contribute to ending the killing.

    I’ve cited four authoritative sources either saying that Israel is committing genocide, or that there are reasonable grounds for interpreting the evidence that way. Yet none of the opinion articles I’ve analyzed here contained the word “genocide,” even as each one suggested that it was worried about the well-being of Palestinians in Gaza. If corporate media were serious about that, they would accurately name what the US and Israel are doing. Instead, US media outlets are pretending that a genocide isn’t happening and, when the war on Gaza eventually ends, this approach will make it easier to act as if one hadn’t taken place, and as if the US and Israel have a right to rule Palestine.

     

    The post Acknowledging the Horrors of Gaza—Without Wanting to End Them appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians

     

    Since October 7, the day the escalation in Israel/Palestine began (FAIR.org, 10/13/23), American media outlets have persistently described the fighting as an “Israel-Hamas war.” From October 7 through midday on December 1, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have combined to run 565 pieces that use the phrase “Israel-Hamas war.”

    This paradigm has been a dominant way of covering the violence, even though Israel has been clear from the start that its assault has not been narrowly aimed at Hamas. At the outset of the Israeli onslaught, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23) said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Oxfam later said that such restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to eat—which left 2.2 million people “in urgent need of food”—mean that Israel is deploying a policy wherein “starvation is being used as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians.”

    A day later, Israeli military spokesperson Adm. Daniel Hagari (Guardian, 10/10/23) said that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on the Gaza Strip, and admitted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

    NY Times:Israel-Hamas War: Israel Launches Strikes and Orders Evacuations in Southern Gaza

    The New York Times‘ label (12/2/23) encourages readers to view Israel’s attacks on a population as really being aimed at a distinct group.

    The indiscriminate nature of Israel’s assault is clear. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on November 24 that “over 1.7 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80% of the population, are estimated to be internally displaced.” On November 25, the Swiss-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel had killed 20,031 Palestinians in Gaza, 18,460 of whom (or 92%) were civilians, since October 7.

    Thus, while Israel has openly acknowledged that it is carrying out indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, US media outlets do Israel the favor of presenting its campaign as if it were only aimed at combatants. “Israel-Gaza war” comes closer to capturing the reality that Israel’s offensive is effectively against everyone living in Gaza. Yet “Israel-Gaza war” appears in 265 pieces in the three papers, exactly 300 fewer than the obfuscatory “Israel-Hamas war.”

    Consider also the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor finding that Israel has slaughtered 8,176 children. If 41% of all the Palestinians Israel has killed in the first seven weeks of its rampage have been children, and 8% have been combatants, then it is less an “Israel-Hamas war” than an Israeli war on Palestinian children.

    Characterizing what has happened since October 7 as an “Israel-Hamas war” fails to adequately capture the scope and the character of Israel’s violence. Describing the bloodbath in Palestine this way obscures that grave violence is being visited upon virtually all Palestinians, whatever their political allegiances and whatever their relation to the fighting.

    Cognitive dissonance

     

    NBC: Cut from projects, dropped by agents: How the Israel-Hamas war is dividing Hollywood

    Contrary to the implication of NBC‘s headline (12/2/23), the divide in Hollywood is not between supporters of Israel and Hamas, but over the issue of Palestinian human rights.

    Corporate media have often stuck to the “Israel-Hamas war” approach even when the information the outlets are reporting shows how inadequate it is to conceive of Israel’s attacks in that way. For instance, the New York Times (10/20/23) ran a story about Israel ordering 1.2 million Gaza residents to evacuate their homes, and still classified the evacuation as part of the “Israel-Hamas war.” The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, is estimated to have 30,000–40,000 fighters (Axios, 10/21/23).

    The Wall Street Journal published a short piece (11/6/23) that noted:

    The United Nations said that the Israel-Hamas war has killed the highest number of UN workers in any single conflict. The UN said that over 88 workers in its Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA], the largest humanitarian organization in the Gaza Strip, have been killed since October 7.

    But UNRWA did not itself use the “Israel-Hamas war” narrative in the report to which the Journal referred, instead opting for “escalation in the Gaza Strip.” Indeed, Israel killing UN workers at a rate of almost three each day would seem to fall outside the bounds of an “Israel-Hamas war,” but that’s how the paper categorizes the violence. (“Israel’s war on the UN” falls well outside the bounds of the ideologically permissible in the corporate media.)

    A Washington Post article (11/7/23) titled “Israel’s War in Gaza and the Specter of ‘Genocide’” quoted several experts and political leaders making a credible case that, in the words of Craig Mokhiber, former director of the United Nations’ New York office on human rights, “the term ‘genocide’ needs to be applied” to what Israel is doing in Gaza.

    Nevertheless, the article’s author, Ishaan Tharoor, attributed such statements to “critics of Israel’s offensive against the Islamist group Hamas,” and described the violence as “Israel’s overwhelming campaign against Hamas.” Genocide as defined by the UN requires “the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.” So saying that Israel’s attacks are directed “against Hamas” twice in an article pointing to authorities on genocide invoking the term with reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza ought to generate cognitive dissonance.

    Violence on the West Bank

    BBC: Israel carries out air strike on West Bank city Jenin

    In the first two weeks of fighting, the BBC (10/22/23) reported, Israel killed 89 Palestinians on the West Bank.

    Another problem with classifying the bloodshed of the last seven weeks as an “Israel-Hamas war” is that Israel has also enacted brutal violence and repression on the West Bank, which is governed by  the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’ arch rivals; Hamas is mostly confined to Gaza (Electronic Intifada, 10/28/23).

    Between October 7 and November 26, Israeli forces killed 222 Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israel’s government-backed settlers killed eight more. In that period, Israel has also repeatedly carried out airstrikes in the West Bank, hitting such targets as the Balata refugee camp (Reuters, 11/18/23) and a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp (BBC, 10/22/23).

    Israel has also arrested hundreds of West Bank Palestinians since October 7 (AP, 11/26/23) and attacked a hospital in Jenin, shooting a paramedic while they were inside an ambulance and using military vehicles to block ambulances from entering hospitals.

    It would therefore make more sense to speak of an “Israel-Palestine war” than an “Israel-Hamas war,” but the former has been used in just two articles in my dataset.

    What the media presents as a war between Israel and an armed Palestinian resistance group is in reality an Israeli war on Palestinians’ physical survival, on their food and clean water supplies, on their homes, healthcare, schools, children and places of worship—a war, in other words, on the Palestinians as a people.

    The post ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet

     

    Politico: Nazi-linked veteran received ovation during Zelenskyy’s Canada visit

    Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota (Politico, 9/24/23) said of the SS veteran, “He’s a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”

    Media coverage of the Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation in September for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian who fought for the Nazis in World War II, has included egregious Holocaust revisionism.

    On September 22, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the Canadian parliament, Canada’s then–Speaker of the House Anthony Rota introduced Hunka:

    We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.

    Rota went on to call Hunka “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service” (Politico, 9/24/23). Parliamentarians of all political parties gave Hunka two standing ovations, and Zelenskyy raised his fist to salute the man (Sky News, 9/26/23).

    Then the New York–based Forward (9/24/23) pointed out that Hunka had fought for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division, of the SS. (The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, “Protection Squadron,” was the military wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.)

    ‘A complicated past’

    CBC: Speaker's honouring of former Nazi soldier reveals a complicated past, say historians

    “You have to tread softly on these issues,” said the main expert used by the CBC (9/28/23) to discuss the topic of Ukraine and Nazism.

    Covering the subsequent controversy, the CBC (9/28/23) ran the headline, “Speaker’s Honoring of Former Nazi Soldier Reveals a Complicated Past, Say Historians.” In the context of the Holocaust, “complicated” functions as a hand-waving euphemism that gets in the way of holding perpetrators accountable: If a decision is “complicated,” it’s understandable, even if it’s wrong.

    Digital reporter/editor Jonathan Migneault, who wrote the piece, soft-pedaled the Galicia Division in other ways too. He said that some of the Ukrainians who joined it did so “for ideological reasons, in opposition to the Soviet Union, in hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state.”

    That’s quite a whitewashing of the ideological package that goes with signing up for the SS, leaving out that this vision for an “independent Ukrainian state” included the extermination of Jewish, LGBTQ, Roma and Polish minorities. As far as the “hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state” alibi, the Per Anders Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that “there is no overt indication that the unit [of Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits] in any way was dedicated to Ukrainian statehood, let alone independence.”

    ‘Caught between Hitler and Stalin’

    Toronto Star: House Speaker pays price for ignorance — meanwhile Ukraine still needs weapons

    Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) mocked Poland for wanting to extradite Hunka, whose unit massacred Poles during World War II, because “Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism.”

    Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) also used the word “complicated” to diminish Nazi atrocities, and mock the Polish government’s interest in having Hunka extradited for war crimes:

    Funny, they’ve had 73 years to ask Canada for him. It’s almost as if Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism but that’s crazy talk….

    Rota should have understood how complicated history is, how, post-Holodomor, a Ukrainian caught between Hitler and Stalin made a fatal choice.

    We can hate Hunka for that now. I do.

    But would every Canadian MP have made immaculate choices inside Stalin’s “Bloodlands” in 1943? Of course you and I would have been heroic, joined the White Rose movement, been executed for our troubles. But everyone?

    Mallick refers to Ukraine as “Stalin’s ‘Bloodlands,’” citing the Holodomor, the 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians, as well as millions in other parts of the USSR. Yet her link takes readers to a review of the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which—its own flaws notwithstanding (Jacobin, 9/9/14)—discusses the killings in Ukraine and elsewhere by Stalin and, on a significantly more egregious scale, Hitler. Acknowledging that the phrase she’s borrowing refers to both Soviet crimes and the Nazis’ genocides would have made the choice of joining the Nazis seem rather less sympathetic.

    Meanwhile, Mallick’s baffling comments about Poland erase the Nazis’ systematic killing of Polish people. Polish history has indeed been marred by horrific antisemitism, with many Polish people complicit in the Holocaust, as she glibly references; this does not erase the fact that the Nazis also murdered 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, or negate Poland’s desire to see their killers brought to justice. As Lev Golinkin (Forward, 9/24/23) pointed out, the Galicia Division that Hunka belonged to

    was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ “willingness to slaughter Poles.” Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.

    The non-Nazi SS

    Politico: Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi

    Keir Giles (Politico, 10/2/23) advances the argument that joining the SS and swearing “absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler” doesn’t make you a Nazi.

    An old cliché uses the analogy of gradually boiling a frog to explain how fascism takes hold in societies, but readers of Keir Giles’ intervention (Politico, 10/2/23) will feel like they are eyes-deep in a bubbling cauldron.

    Giles, who said the relevant history is “complicated” four times and “complex” twice, wrote an article entitled “Fighting Against the USSR Didn’t Necessarily Make You a Nazi.” That’s a dubious claim in a piece focused on World War II, when the Soviet Union was the main force fighting Nazi Germany, and thus fighting the Soviets made you at least an ally of Nazis.

    More to the point, the unit Hunka belonged to was a formal division of the SS, trained and armed by Nazi Germany (Forward, 9/27/23), which “fought exclusively to serve Nazi aims” (National Post, 9/25/23).

    Giles, however, opened by writing:

    Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.

    And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.

    Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth….

    In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front.

    Setting aside that Giles omits “and butchering innocent people” when he describes Waffen-SS activities as “fighting Soviet forces,” his suggestion that calling Hunka a Nazi is a “lie” does not withstand even minimal scrutiny. For instance, Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that, from August 29, 1943, onward, Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits were sworn in with the following oath:

    I swear before God this holy oath, that in the battle against Bolshevism, I will give absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler, and as a brave soldier I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath.

    Vowing “absolute obedience” to Hitler, and swearing that you’re willing to die for him, makes you as root and branch a Nazi as Rudolf Hess or Hermann Göring.

    ‘Simple narratives’

    Himmler inspecting Galicia Division troops

    SS commander Heinrich Himmler inspecting troops from the Galicia Division.

    After drawing these bogus distinctions between the Nazis and their units, Giles moved on to genocide denial:

    The idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide….

    Repeated exhaustive investigations—including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities—led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.

    Giles doesn’t name any investigations by British or Soviet officials, so it’s unclear what he’s talking about on those points, but he’s lying about Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Tribunals did not specifically address the Galicia Division (Guardian, 9/25/23), but found that the combat branch of which they were a part, the Waffen-SS, “was a criminal organization”:

    In dealing with the SS, the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS, including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopfverbaende, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS.

    Giles asserted that “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes’ are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp”—but everybody in the SS was, quite literally, guilty of war crimes.

    Heavily censored report

    Ottawa Citizen: Liberal government called on to release still-secret documents on Nazi war criminals living in Canada

    The Ottawa Citizen (9/27/23), citing B’nai Brith, reported that “the Canadian government’s approach to Nazi war criminals had been marked with ‘intentional harboring of known Nazi war criminals.’”

    The Canadian investigation Giles refers to is a 1986 Canadian government report that claims that membership in the Galicia Division did not in and of itself constitute a war crime. This conclusion is highly suspect when read against the Nuremberg tribunal’s judgment, and the report also has to be understood in the broader context of Canadian state investigations into Nazis in the country. As the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese (9/27/23) explained:

    The federal government has withheld a second part of a 1986 government commission report about Nazis who settled in Canada. In addition, it has heavily censored another 1986 report examining how Nazis were able to get into Canada. More than 600 pages of that document, obtained by this newspaper and other organizations through the Access to Information law, have been censored.

    Neither Giles nor any other member of the public knows what the Canadian government is hiding about its investigation, or why it’s concealing this information, so it’s disingenuous for him to present the fraction of the government’s conclusions to which he has access as if it is the final word on the Galicia Division or anything else.

    As to Giles’ jaw-dropping complaint that people are “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide,” the Nuremberg Trial concluded that the SS carried out

    persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program, and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners.

    Perhaps the public is “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide” because the SS carried out genocide.

    As disconcerting as it is that authors like Giles are writing fascist propaganda—and that Mallick veers perilously close to the same—it’s even more alarming that editors at outlets like the Star, CBC and Politico deem such intellectually and morally bankrupt material worthy of publication.

    The post Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Papers That Ignore Causes of Violence Can’t Help Prevent It

     

    If the commentary that news media outlets offer up is supposed to equip audiences to understand the world, then major US outlets’ coverage of the unfolding horrors in the Middle East are failing spectacularly. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined ran seven editorials on Israel/Palestine between October 7–9: one from the Times, four from the Journal and two from the Post.

    These three days of coverage begin the day that Hamas fighters broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip to kill and take captive hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians, after which Israel launched yet another massive bombing campaign against the Strip, killing hundreds of Palestinian militants and civilians. At no point do these analyses provide readers with the information necessary to comprehend what is happening and why, and they consistently mislead readers about key facts.

    Root causes

    Amnesty International: Israel/OPT: Civilians on both sides paying the price of unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza as death toll mounts

    Amnesty International (10/7/23): “The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”

    Many credible observers have pointed to the relationship between this weekend’s escalation and Israel’s decades of mass violence against and dispossession of Palestinians. Amnesty International, for example, offered the following assessment:

    The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians. The Israeli government must refrain from inciting violence and tensions in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, especially around religious sites.

    Adalah, a Palestinian-run legal center based in Israel, called Hamas’ attacks “brutal and illegal,” and said that their “root causes” are

    the illegal 56-year-old Israeli military occupation, the longest occupation in modern history; the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians; the blockade on Gaza; Israel’s settler-colonial policies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; and the denial of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination—as well as the total disregard by the international community of its obligations to fulfill UN resolutions.

    The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem documents that since 2001, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. More than 2,000 of these were minors, almost a thousand of whom were children aged 13 and younger. Over the same time period, some 1,300 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, including 145 minors, 58 of whom were 13 or under. Nearly 9 out of 10 deaths this century have been on the Palestinian side—a reality to consider when deciding whose killings are to be considered “retaliation.”

    Democracy Now!: Mohammed El-Kurd: How Much Palestinian Blood Will It Take to End Israel’s Occupation & Apartheid?

    Mohammed El-Kurd (Democracy Now!, 10/10/23): Media outlets “are preemptively justifying the genocide of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians.”

    Palestinian journalist and poet Mohammed El-Kurd said on Democracy Now! (10/10/23):

    One wonders how much bloodshed, how much Palestinian death is necessary for people to realize that violence begets violence, and that the occupation and the colonization of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza Strip needs to end for all of this violence to end.

    An editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (10/8/23) noted that the current administration of Israel has established “a government of annexation and dispossession,” with “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.” The paper criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “overt steps taken to annex the West Bank” and “to carry out ethnic cleansing in…the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.” Under the current government, the paper pointed out, there has been

    a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in [Netanyahu’s] governing coalition.

    Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, condemned all attacks on civilians, and also called Palestinian violence a result of “decades of oppression imposed on the Palestinians, brutalization, structural violence, of course punctuated also by eruptive violence.”

    Lack of context

    WaPo: A Hamas attack on Israel terrifies — and clarifies

    Washington Post (10/7/23): The attack “clarifies” in that “we now know just how audaciously Iran and its proxies might act to preempt negotiations among the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

    As Ari Paul pointed out (FAIR.org, 10/11/23), the top US editorial boards downplayed or outright ignored the Netanyahu government’s expansionist policies.

    They also declined to offer any of the broader historical context that’s urgently necessary to understand the causes—and therefore paths to resolution—of the current violence in Israel/Palestine.

    The closest the Washington Post came was when its first editorial (10/7/23) alluded to “the legitimate Palestinian grievances that Hamas is exploiting.” Yet the paper gave no indication of what these are, omitting such foundational elements of Israel/Palestine as the 1947–48 Nakba, through which Israel created a Jewish majority by ethnically cleansing 750,000 Palestinians, and refusing to let them return to their homes despite their UN-stipulated right to do so. That history directly connects to contemporary events, in that approximately 2.1 million people live in Gaza—the territory that Hamas governs, and from which Palestinian fighters emerged on Saturday—and 1.7 million of these persons are Palestinian refugees.

    Knowing these details would give readers a much more comprehensive picture of the recent killings in Israel/Palestine, but the Post editorial abstracts them into the vague, dismissable category of “legitimate Palestinian grievances.”

    Without ‘immediate provocation’

    NYT: The Attack on Israel Demands Unity and Resolve

    The New York Times (10/9/23) endorses giving “America’s full support for Israel,” even as “the Israeli government is cutting off power and water to Gaza,” which “will be an act of collective punishment”—but only “if it continues.”

    The New York Times editorial (10/9/23), on the other hand, didn’t mention that Israel has done any harm to Palestinians at all, asserting that Hamas fighters “burst through border fences without warning or any immediate provocation.” Setting aside that the barrier is a prison fence and not a “border” (+972 Magazine, 5/17/18), the word “immediate” is doing quite a lot of work here.

    The UN noted in August that Gaza residents have

    been living under collective punishment as a result of the [Israel-imposed] blockade that continues to have a devastating effect as people’s movement to and from the Gaza Strip, as well as access to markets, remains severely restricted. The UN secretary general has found that the blockade and related restrictions contravene international humanitarian law, as they target and impose hardship on the civilian population, effectively penalizing them for acts they have not committed.

    Food security in Gaza has deteriorated, with 63% of people in the Gaza Strip being food insecure and dependent on international assistance…. Access to clean water and electricity remains at crisis level and impacts nearly every aspect of life. Clean water is unavailable for 95% of the population. Electricity is available up to an average of 11 hours per day as of July 2023. However, ongoing power shortage has severely impacted the availability of essential services, particularly health, water and sanitation services, and continues to undermine Gaza’s fragile economy.

    NPR: Israel strikes Gaza for the third straight day as West Bank violence escalates

    NPR (9/24/23): “Israel has been carrying out stepped-up military raids, primarily in the northern West Bank, for the past year and a half.”

    Furthermore, at the end of August, Human Rights Watch said that “the Israeli military and border police forces are killing Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability.” On September 23, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that Israeli government policies and government-condoned pogroms carried out by settler groups have displaced at least six West Bank communities. The group called this

    an illegal policy that implicates Israel in the war crime of forcible transfer…. a choice the [Israeli] apartheid regime is making in order to realize its goal of maintaining Jewish supremacy in the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

    In late September, Israel bombed Gaza for several days in a row (NPR, 9/24/23). Israeli settlers stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque complex, one of Islam’s holiest sites, days before the Hamas attack (Al Jazeera, 10/4/23). The Guardian (10/4/23) also reported on evidence of Israel shooting Palestinian protesters at the Gaza fence just prior to the Hamas onslaught. From January 1, 2023, to October 4, the Israeli military killed 234 Palestinians and rendered 821 Palestinians homeless through housing demolitions.

    Such actions would seem to meet the threshold of both “immediate” and “provoca[tive].”

    ‘No more condemnation’

    NYT: War Returns to the Middle East

    Wall Street Journal (10/7/23): “Saturday’s assault from Gaza shows the reality of the global disorder that is expanding by the month.”

    The Journal’s editorials went even further than those the Post and Times offered, not only neglecting to situate Palestinian violence but outright denying that Israel oppresses the Palestinians. Their first editorial of the weekend (10/7/23) admonished: “Please no more condemnation of Israel’s ‘blockade’ or ‘occupation.’ Israel has been allowing 17,000 Gazans to work in Israel each day.” The scare quotes suggest that Israel isn’t actually occupying Palestinian land or blockading Gaza.

    The UN, however, considers Gaza and the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, to be occupied territories. On August 30, the United Nations General Assembly Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People issued a study that “lends its weight to the growing body of evidence that Israel’s belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territory is illegal.”

    Moreover, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently noted:

    Since the imposition of the blockade in 2007, the Israeli authorities have restricted the entry into Gaza of goods they consider having a dual (civilian and military) use, such as building materials, certain medical equipment, and some agricultural items.

    Such measures, the OCHA pointed out, “continue to hinder access to livelihoods, essential services and housing, disrupting family life and undermining people’s hopes for a secure and prosperous future.”

    Observers who are serious about wanting an end to violence against civilians would consider its causes. The Times, Journal and Post have shown that they are not up to the task.

     

    The post Papers That Ignore Causes of Violence Can’t Help Prevent It appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Bloomberg Hits BRICS as US Power Challenged

     

     

    Map of current and future members of BRICS

    The current members of BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—along with the countries accepted for membership: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran.

    BRICS is an informal grouping of emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It provides a platform for its members to challenge the global financial system dominated by the United States and its allies in forums like the G7, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Sarang Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23), director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute and adjunct faculty at George Washington University, notes that many countries of the Global South are frustrated with the US dollar being the de facto world currency, because it leaves their

    economies at the mercy of US interest rates and sovereign measures such as quantitative easing, and enables harsh US-led sanctions regimes. For the Global South, alternative pathways of both development financing and currency settlements are attractive ways to achieve autonomy, enhance economic growth and at least partly protect themselves against the extraterritoriality of sanctions.

    Relatedly, the BRICS states appear to be seeking diplomatic autonomy, taking a variety of positions on the war in Ukraine that are at odds with Washington’s preferred view (The Nation, 6/27/23) and not always in perfect sync with that of the “R” in BRICS.

    In August, BRICS invited six new members to join: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. More than 40 countries expressed interest in joining BRICS, while 23 formally applied to become part of the club (Al Jazeera, 8/24/23).

    China too big?

    Bloomberg: BRICS Is Broken and Should Be Scrapped

    Dozens of countries are trying to join BRICS, but clearly they don’t read Bloomberg (8/18/23).

    The prospect of a group of nations almost entirely from the Global South working together to advance independent development sent the Bloomberg news service into attack mode. The outlet ran an op-ed by Howard Chua-Eoan (8/18/23) headlined “BRICS Is Broken and Should Be Scrapped.” His argument:

    The big trouble with the BRICS is that China (with its still enormous economic clout) dominates the group—and Beijing wants to turn it into another global forum to echo its denunciations of the US and EU.

    The assertion that China “dominates” BRICS is misleading. Three scholars (Conversation, 8/18/23) from Tufts University’s Rising Power Alliances project, which studies the evolution of BRICS and its relationship with the US, found that

    the common portrayal of BRICS as a China-dominated group primarily pursuing anti-US agendas is misplaced. Rather, the BRICS countries connect around common development interests and a quest for a multipolar world order in which no single power dominates.

    For instance, the authors note:

    China has been unable to advance some key policy proposals. For example, since the 2011 BRICS summit, China has sought to establish a BRICS free trade agreement, but could not get support from other states.

    Similarly, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) points out:

    In 2015, the five [BRICS] states founded the New Development Bank, with infrastructure financing and sustainable development as its focus. Although China’s GDP is more than twice that of the rest of the BRICS states combined, it agreed to an equal partnership on governing the bank and an equal share of subscribed capital of $10 billion each.

    ‘US economic leadership’

    Bloomberg: A Bigger BRICS Marks a Failure of US Leadership

    Bloomberg (8/29/23) blames the rise of BRICS on “the US turn away from economic leadership.”

    In another article, Bloomberg’s editorial board (8/29/23) worried that BRICS’ expansion “could weaken existing channels of cooperation at a time when collective action on global threats has never been more urgent.” For the authors, the BRICS countries are “sidelining the existing institutions” of “global governance,” thereby making “genuinely multilateral cooperation harder.”

    The editorial’s concern is not with developing international “cooperation” or “collective action on global threats” per se; its concern is with maintaining the current global system. The root of the threat to the status quo, the editorial maintained, was lack of US leadership:

    It’s no coincidence that the BRICS-11 arrives following the US turn away from economic leadership—accelerated by Donald Trump’s administration and affirmed by Joe Biden’s. The IMF and World Bank are increasingly rudderless. The WTO is all but defunct, as good as shut down by US obstruction. The organizing principle of US policy is no longer global prosperity but “Made in America.” Emerging economies can be forgiven for seeking alternatives to a global order that seems to put them last.

    The timing of this shift couldn’t be worse. Higher interest rates are adding to the financial stresses confronting many low- and middle-income countries. If a new global debt crisis lies ahead, the damage won’t be narrowly confined. The costs of climate change are mounting, and the efforts of the once-and-future BRICS in containing them will be pivotal. These challenges are unavoidably global and demand a cooperative global response.

    All this makes the fracturing of the multilateral order truly dangerous. Prodded by the BRICS enlargement, the US and its partners should work urgently to repair it.

    The editors are wildly misreading BRICS’ appeal. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times (5/23/23), “What brings its members together is the desire not to be dependent on the whims of the US and its close allies, who have dominated the world for the past two centuries.” Likewise, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) wrote:

    The multiple failures of the US-led world order to substantially support two core requirements of Global South states—economic development and safeguarding sovereignty—are creating a demand for alternative structures for ordering the world.

    Astrid Prange made a similar point in Deutsche Welle (4/10/23):

    In 2014, with $50 billion (around €46 billion) in seed money, the BRICS nations launched the New Development Bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition, they created a liquidity mechanism called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement to support members struggling with payments.

    These offers were not only attractive to the BRICS nations themselves, but also to many other developing and emerging economies that had had painful experiences with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and austerity measures. This is why many countries said they might be interested in joining the BRICS group.

    Contrary to the Bloomberg editorial’s claims, it’s not the US’s so-called “turn away from economic leadership,” or the stalling of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, that makes BRICS attractive. It’s precisely that the “multilateral order” Bloomberg refers to is US-led, and that the US has used its stranglehold on these institutions to exploit and control poorer nations.

    The democracy problem(s)

    Bloomberg: BRICS Enlargement Is Going to Worsen Its Democracy Problem

    Bloomberg (8/28/23) criticizes BRICS for lack of democracy; meanwhile, at the IMF, countries with 14% of the world’s population get 59% of the votes.

    Bloomberg (8/28/23) also ran a piece by Giovanni Salzano, headlined “BRICS Enlargement Is Going to Worsen Its Democracy Problem.” The piece comments that, of the six states invited to join BRICS,

    only Argentina can be considered a democracy—albeit a flawed one. That means the enlargement would leave the group dominated by non-democratic countries, with seven of them headed by hybrid or authoritarian regimes.

    Leaving aside the “democracy problem” of states at the core of the US-led world system—such as Canada and the US itself—Salzano offers an overly narrow conception of democracy. He exclusively focuses on the internal political systems of the BRICS nations, ignoring whether BRICS might help address the dearth of democratic procedures in existing international organizations.

    For example, as Al Jazeera (8/22/23) pointed out:

    The five BRICS nations now have a combined gross domestic product (GDP) larger than that of the G7 in purchasing power parity terms. In nominal terms, the BRICS countries are responsible for 26% of the global GDP. Despite this, they get only 15% of the voting power at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

    BRICS countries account for roughly 40% of the world’s population (Reuters, 8/24/23) while the G7 is home to just 10% (FT, 5/23/23). Jason Hickel (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20) of the London School of Economics observed:

    The leaders of the World Bank and the IMF are not elected, but are nominated by the US and Europe…. The US has de facto veto power over all significant decisions, and together with the rest of the G7 and the European Union controls well over half of the vote in both agencies. If we look at the voting allocations in per capita terms, the inequalities are revealed to be truly extreme. For every vote that the average person in the global North has, the average person in the global South has only one-eighth of a vote (and the average South Asian has only one-20th of a vote).

    It’s too early to say whether BRICS will help countries in the Global South to develop on their own terms. But Bloomberg’s opposition to the group is probably a good sign.

    The post Bloomberg Hits BRICS as US Power Challenged appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • To US Papers, Iranian Weapons Far More Newsworthy Than Those Made in USA

     

    NYT: Ukraine warns of growing attacks by drones Iran has supplied to Russia.

    One official enemy’s arms sales to another official enemy are frequently highlighted in headlines (New York Times, 9/25/22).

    Russia’s use of Iranian-made drones in the Ukraine war has garnered substantial attention in flagship US news outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. These papers’ first references to the matter came on July 11. Between then and the time of writing (January 24), the publications have run 215 pieces that mention Ukraine and the words “Iranian drones,” “Iranian-made drones,” “drones made in Iran” or minor variations on these phrases. That’s more than one mention per day over six-and-a-half months.

    The fact that some of Russia’s drones are made in Iran is not only frequently mentioned, but is often featured in headlines like “Iran to Send Hundreds of Drones to Russia for Use in Ukraine, US Says” (Washington Post, 7/11/22), “Ukraine Warns of Growing Attacks by Drones Iran Has Supplied to Russia” (New York Times, 9/25/22) and “Russia’s Iranian Drones Pose Growing Threat to Ukraine” (Wall Street Journal, 10/18/22).

    Drones are, of course, just one type of weapons export among many, and US-made armaments have not received similar coverage when they are implicated in the slaughter of innocents.

    US-made bombs in Gaza

    Middle East Eye: Arms trade: Which countries and companies are selling weapons to Israel?

    Middle East Eye (5/18/21): “The US has agreed…to give Israel $3.8bn annually in foreign military financing, most of which it has to spend on US-made weapons.”

    One example is Israel’s May 10–21, 2021, bombing of Gaza. According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Israeli military killed approximately 245 Palestinians, including 63 children, and “totally destroyed or severely damaged” more than 2,000 housing units:

    An estimated 15,000 housing units sustained some degree of damage, as did multiple water and sanitation facilities and infrastructure, 58 education facilities, nine hospitals and 19 primary healthcare centers. The damage to infrastructure has exacerbated Gaza’s chronic infrastructure and power deficits, resulting in a decrease of clean water and sewage treatment, and daily power cuts of 18–20 hours, affecting hundreds of thousands.

    Israel’s attack was carried out with an arsenal replete with US weaponry. From 2009–20, more than 70% of Israel’s major conventional arms purchases came from the US; according to Andrew Smith of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Israel’s “major combat aircraft come from the US,” notably including the F-16 fighter jets that were bombarding Gaza at the time (Middle East Eye, 5/18/21). As the Congressional Research Service (11/16/20) noted six months before the attack on Gaza, Israel has received more cumulative US foreign assistance than any other country since World War II:

    To date, the United States has provided Israel $146 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. At present, almost all US bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.

    I searched the databases of the Times, Journal and Post for the equivalent terms I used for the Iranian drones used in Ukraine, and added analogous terms. In the one-month period beginning May 10, just 15 articles in these papers mentioned Israel’s use of US weapons, approximately half as many stories as have been published on the Russian use of Iranian-made drones each month.

    ‘Strongly backing’ attacks on Yemen

    NYT: Saudi-Led Airstrikes Kill Scores at a Prison in Yemen

    Rather than making a top journalistic priority of the question of whether their readers’ own government contributed to the slaughter being reported on, the New York Times (1/21/22) waits until the 23rd paragraph to bring it up.

    A grisly case from the ongoing Yemen war is another worthwhile comparison for how Iranian weapons exports and their US counterparts are covered. On January 21, 2022, the US/Saudi/Emirati/British/Canadian coalition in Yemen bombed a prison in Sa’adah, killing at least 80 people and injuring more than 200. The US weapons-maker Raytheon manufactured the bomb used in the atrocity.

    In coverage from the month following the attack, I find evidence of only two articles in the three papers that link the slaughter and US weapons. A New York Times story (1/21/22) raised the possibility that US-made bombs killed people in Sa’adah:

    It was unclear whether the weapons used in the airstrikes had been provided by the United States, which in recent years has been by far the largest arms seller to Saudi Arabia and the [United Arab] Emirates, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors weapons transfers.

    The one piece that explicitly pointed to US culpability in the Sa’adah massacre was an op-ed in the Washington Post (1/26/22) that referred to “ample evidence showing US weapons used in the attack.” Thus the Wall Street Journal didn’t consider US  participation in a mass murder that killed 80 people to be newsworthy, and the Times and Post evidently concluded that US involvement merited minimal attention. The Post (1/21/22) even ran an article that misleadingly suggested the US had ceased to be a major factor in the war:

    The United States once strongly backed the Saudi-led coalition. But President Biden announced early last year that Washington would withdraw support for the coalition’s offensive operations, which have been blamed for the deaths of thousands of civilians. The Trump administration had previously halted US refueling of Saudi jets operating against the Houthis. Some members of Congress had long expressed outrage over US involvement in the war, including weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

    Yet mere weeks before Sa’adah killings, Congress signed off on a Biden-approved $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia (Al Jazeera, 12/8/21). That means Washington is still “strongly back[ing]” the coalition, notwithstanding the hollow claims that such weapons are defensive (In These Times, 11/22/21).

    ‘Expanding threat’

    WaPo: Beware the emerging alliance between Russia and Iran

    David Ignatius (Washington Post, 8/24/22) refers to drones that explode when they hit a target as “suicide drones.” Are missiles that explode when they hit a target committing suicide?

    The coverage of Iran’s weapons exports and the US’s also diverges in terms of the analyses that the outlets offer.

    David Ignatius told his Washington Post (8/24/22) readers to “beware the emerging Tehran/Moscow alliance.” In the periods I examined, there is a marked shortage of articles urging readers to “beware” the Washington/Tel Aviv or Washington/Riyadh alliances, despise the bloodshed they facilitate.

    The Wall Street Journal (10/28/22) contended that

    Russia’s expanding use of Iranian drones in Ukraine poses an increasing threat for the US and its European allies as Tehran attempts to project military power beyond the Middle East.

    The article went on to say that “the Western-made components that guide, power and steer the [Iranian] drones touch on a vexing problem world leaders face in trying to contain the expanding threat.” The piece cited Norman Roule, formerly of the CIA,

    warn[ing] that the combination of drones and missiles one day might be used against Western powers. “This Ukraine conflict provides Iran with a unique and low-risk opportunity to test its weapons systems against modern Western defenses,” Mr. Roule said.

    The US weapons that helped lay waste to Gaza and snuff out dozens of prisoners in Sa’adah are barely presented as having harmed their victims, and not at all as an “increasing” or “expanding” threat to rival powers such as Russia or China, or to anyone else.

    ‘Malign behavior’

    WaPo: The West should do whatever it takes to help Ukrainians survive the winter

    A co-author from the “United States Institute for Peace” (Washington Post, 12/6/22) suggests sending “US military escorts” into an active war zone. What could go wrong?

    In the New York Times (11/1/22), Bret Stephens contended that the Biden

    administration should warn Iran’s leaders that their UAV factories will be targeted and destroyed if they continue to provide kamikaze drones to Russia, in flat violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231. If Tehran can get away with being an accessory to mass murder in Ukraine, it will never have any reason to fear the United States for any of its malign behavior. Every country should be put on notice that the price for helping Moscow in its slaughter will be steep.

    Of course, the UN charter does not give individual countries the right to attack other nations they perceive as violating UN Security Council resolutions. And needless to say, the Times, Journal and Post do not say that US responsibility for mass murder in Palestine and Yemen means that weapons factories in the US should be “targeted and destroyed” by a hostile power. Nor do they suggest that the US should be “put on notice” that there will be a “steep” “price for helping” Tel Aviv or Riyadh in their “slaughter.”

    William B. Taylor and David J. Kramer argue in the Post (12/6/22) that Iranian drones are among the few “Russian weapons that work,” and that the US needs to “provid[e] Ukraine with missile defense, anti-drone and antiaircraft systems.” None of the articles I examined said that anyone should give military hardware to the Palestinians or Yemenis for protection against US-made weapons.

    If these outlets’ concern about Iranian arms exports to Russia were about the sanctity of human life, there wouldn’t be such a gap between the volume and character of this coverage compared to that of US weapons piling up corpses in Palestine and Yemen. Instead, corporate media have focused on how official enemies enact violence, and downplayed that which their own country inflicts.

     

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    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Corporate Media Continue Double-Standard on When ‘Self-Determination’ Is a Good Thing

    An American public that the corporate media have given only part of the story is more likely to acquiesce to a war with no end in sight.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Media Support ‘Self-Determination’ for US Allies, Not Enemies

     

    BBC: Russia's Invasion of the Donbas

    BBC maps showing separatist-held territories in the Donbas before the Russian invasion, and Russian-held territories now.

    Article 1 of the UN Charter says that one of the purposes of the UN is “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” However, what “self-determination” means in specific international legal cases is far from a settled debate. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute explains that

    contemporary notions of self-determination usually distinguish between “internal” and “external” self-determination, suggesting that “self-determination” exists on a spectrum.  Internal self-determination may refer to various political and social rights; by contrast, external self-determination refers to full legal independence/secession for the given “people” from the larger politico-legal state.

    Donbas seeks self-rule

    This question is germane to the war in Ukraine. The most intense fighting in the country is currently in the Donbas, a region in Ukraine’s east that largely consists of Russian speakers. Immediately before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Russian government announced it was recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, the Donbas’ two major regions, as independent states. They have been warzones since 2014, when Russia-aligned separatists began fighting Ukraine’s central government after the success of the US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government.

    WaPo: Eastern Ukrainians vote for self-rule in referendum opposed by West

    Washington Post (5/11/14): “The lines of voters appeared to reflect a significant protest vote against the central government in Kiev.”

    In April 2014, separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk declared the territories’ independence. The next month, they held a referendum on self-rule. The Washington Post (5/11/14) reported that people voted more than once at a polling station in Mariupol, and that the way the referendum was administered allowed for the possibility of further fraud; at the same time, the paper also noted that Donetsk and Luhansk residents “turned out in significant numbers…to vote in support of self-rule.” Here “self-rule” could mean the regions having greater autonomy within Ukraine, becoming independent countries on their own, or joining Russia.

    Ukraine’s government and its Western backers saw the vote as illegal. Ukraine’s military

    generally allowed balloting to proceed…. But Ukrainian national guardsmen shut down the voting in the eastern city of Krasnoarmeysk and later fired into a crowd outside the town hall, wire services reported. The Associated Press said one of its photographers saw two people lying motionless on the ground after the clash.

    The Post noted that despite the flawed voting process,

    many people here—at least those who voted—will see it as a powerful expression of popular will. At the very least, the lines of voters appeared to reflect a significant protest vote against the central government in Kiev….

    It did appear that turnout was relatively high. Journalists from several Western news organizations interviewed 186 residents in the Donetsk region, away from polling stations, and found that 116 had cast ballots or intended to. A total of 122 favored self-determination. The results were not scientific, but reflected the level of interest in the referendum.

    The Kosovo precedent 

    Responsible Statecraft: Russia’s move in Ukraine has parallels with US actions in Kosovo

    Sarang Shidore (Responsible Statecraft, 2/22/22):  “NATO proactively waged a 78-day war against Yugoslavia to ensure its break up and the creation of a new nation state.”

    Non-Western media outlets (Asia Times, 2/28/22; Balkan Insight, 3/9/22) have identified a precedent for Russia citing Donetsk and Luhansk’s right to self-determination as a rationale for attacking Ukraine: the Kosovo War. In 1999, NATO conducted a 78-day war that helped to dismember Yugoslavia and create a new state, Kosovo, a Serbian province whose population was 90% ethnic Albanians. Sarang Shidore (Responsible Statecraft, 2/22/22) summarized the Kosovo/Donbas parallel thusly:

    Kosovo [was] repressed in the past by Milosevic’s Serbia. NATO’s war resulted in major atrocities and ethnic cleansing of the minority Serb and Roma populations by the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army, as well as persecution of the Serbs who inhabit the sliver of a territory in the border region of Mitrovica. Yet the demands of the Serb population in Mitrovica to secede from Kosovo and merge their tiny region into neighboring Serbia is seen as an unacceptable transgression.

    Why is there one…standard for Kosovar Albanians and another for Kosovar Serbs?… Should it be a surprise that Ukrainian Russians are just the latest subjects of this list?…

    Ethnic Russians in Ukraine mostly support Moscow, and their cultural and linguistic rights have been increasingly violated by a nationalistic government in Kyiv. This has been used by Russia as a means to intervene and create new facts on the ground.

    The linguistic discrimination to which Shidore points is a January 2021 law that mandated using Ukrainian in the service industry—obligating, for example, shops and restaurants “to engage customers in Ukrainian unless clients specifically ask to switch.” This law followed 2019 legislation that required middle schools that taught in Russian and other minority languages switch to Ukrainian (France 24, 4/1/21).

    In addition, Donbas residents endured violence and bigotry from the Ukrainian government following the start of the 2014 war. James Carden of The Nation (4/6/15) reported that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko cut Donbas residents off from social services and benefits. He also blocked them from using the banking system, preventing them from accessing credit “or even the most rudimentary banking services,” such that commerce “ground to a standstill.” According to Carden, the Ukrainian state shelled Donbas civilians and deployed snipers, while “the Kiev government and its representatives in Kiev have repeatedly attempted to dehumanize [Donbas residents] by referring to them as ‘terrorists’ and as ‘subhumans.’”

    While Russia is the only country that formally recognizes Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, 117 of the 195 countries in the world recognize Kosovo—which means that 78 countries do not, including major world powers like Russia and China, as well as Western European nations like Spain and Greece (Deutsche Welle, 6/10/22).

    Crucial difference: US backing

    Wikipedia: Serbia and Kosovo

    From Wikipedia.

    The Kosovo/Donbas parallel may be inexact, but it has merit. In each case, residents were subjected to violence and discrimination, and a substantial portion of them expressed a desire to exercise their right to self-determination; in both Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, an outside power attempted to justify a military assault by saying that it needed to rescue a minority population from persecution.

    One crucial difference, of course, is that the Ukrainian government is supported by the US, while Donbas residents seeking self-determination are allied with Russia and Russia did the invading in the name of supposed humanitarianism; in contrast, the Yugoslavian government was backed by Russia, whereas Kosovars seeking self-determination were supported by the US, which invaded Yugoslavia allegedly for humanitarian reasons.

    My purpose here is not to adjudicate the self-determination or independence claims of the people of Kosovo or the Donbas (though I see pro-independence arguments as highly questionable in both cases, and think neither of the related military interventions was just). Rather, my aim is to investigate whether there were significant differences in how corporate media covered the Kosovo and Donbas cases despite their similarities.

    As a barometer of possible US media bias in favor of the home team, I examined how often Kosovars’ right to self-determination was cited in New York Times and Washington Post coverage of Kosovans’ independence claims, and compared it to the frequency with which self-determination was considered in the context of Donetsk and Luhansk’s independence claims. Invoking a peoples’ right to self-determination can function as a way of legitimizing their independence claims: Doing so suggests that those who are attempting to create an independent state are merely trying to shape their own destiny. (Even mentioning the term “self-determination” arguably carries the message that those who are seeking to create their own state have a plausible claim, even if that claim is not explicitly endorsed.)

    I looked at how the Kosovo and Donbas independence claims were handled in the coverage of the years leading up to and during the wars in both places. To gauge how often the media have discussed the possibility that Donetsk and Luhansk have the right to self-determination in the years immediately preceding and since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I examined the last five years of coverage. One New York Times piece in that period—an article in the New York Times Magazine (1/16/22)—included the word “self-determination.” However, it was not used in reference to Donetsk and Luhansk: It was used to describe the motive of a Russian fighting on the Ukrainian side in the Donbas who wanted to protect Ukrainian independence from Russia.

    ‘Pretext’ and ‘sham’

    WaPo: Putin is breaking 70 years of norms by invading Ukraine. What comes next?

    A Washington Post op-ed (2/25/22) noted that “it is so unusual for one country to so brazenly attack another’s political independence and territorial sovereignty today”—but NATO’s 1998 attack on Serbia, with similar justifications, was not offered as a precedent. 

    My search of the Post yielded similar results. Three Post articles in the last five years mentioned Donetsk, Luhansk and “self-determination,” but not to consider the territories’ assertation that they have this right. One piece (3/18/22) said that Ukraine “aspir[es] to prosperity and self-determination through memberships in NATO and the European Union.” Another (2/25/22) said that in 2014,

    there was the pretext of the Crimean “declaration of independence” and subsequent deployment of a self-determination justification for Crimea’s becoming part of Russia. Likewise, by recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, Russia is setting itself up to use a (sham) vote to justify irredentism—claiming these territories based on historical and ethnic ties.

    The referendum may have been flawed but, as the Post reported at the time, people in the Donbas “turned out in significant numbers…to vote in support of self-rule,” and leaving that out makes the notion of people in the Donbas region exercising their right to self-determination sound less plausible than might otherwise be the case.

    The third Post article (2/26/22) said that

    the [UN] Security Council remains a critical venue for smaller countries to affirm and argue directly for the UN Charter’s core principles of sovereign nonintervention and the equal self-determination of peoples.

    It went on to describe Kenyan ambassador Martin Kimani “decr[ying] Russia’s recognition of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions as independent states.”

    ‘In the interests of the West’

    In sum, both the Times and the Post declined to present readers with any information that might encourage them to have an open mind about Donetsk and Luhansk’s self-determination claims. In fact, the papers failed to even mention that there are “significant numbers” of people in these territories saying that they have a right to self-determination that they wish to exercise. Here we have a case of a self-determination claim that accords with Russian interests, and diverges from the US position, being concealed from the public.

    Kosovars’ self-determination and independence claims, which lined up with US interests and contradicted Russia’s, received far more of a hearing. From 1995–99, the five years leading up to and including NATO bombing campaign, the Times published 22 articles with the words “self-determination” and “Kosovo,” “Kosovar” or related variations. The Post ran 32.

    That’s not to say that every piece necessarily offered the view that Kosovo had a right to exercise self-determination, up to and including statehood. However, the idea that it did was treated as legitimate and worthy of debate, in a way that has not happened with Donetsk and Luhansk. Many of the articles did, in fact, back Kosovars’ self-determination claims.

    Noel Malcolm wrote in the Times (6/9/99) that Kosovo becoming independent is

    in the interests of the West. It is certainly the strong preference of the Kosovo Albanians themselves, who voted overwhelmingly for independence as long ago as 1991. It is what the volunteer soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army were fighting for; without some assurance on eventual self-determination, they will be very reluctant to give up their weapons.

    The Post’s Charles Krauthammer (6/17/99) contended that

    the case for [Kosovo’s] independence is not just practical but principled. If the overwhelming Albanian majority wants self-determination, democratic principles . . . should allow them to have what they want.

    Only part of the story

    Thus the coverage that I studied evinced a willingness to treat the notion of Kosovar self-determination seriously, and to explicitly support independence in some instances, and did not present the possibility of Donetsk and Luhansk’s having self-determination rights as something that readers should consider when formulating their perspectives on the present war in Ukraine. Articles outright endorsing Kosovar independence carry the added message, stated or unstated, that the US had at least a reasonable case for militarily intervening in the former Yugoslavia in the name of the Kosovars’ cause.

    Canadian Dimensions: Ukraine is at the centre of a superpower proxy war

    Greg Shupak (Canadian Dimensions, 3/18/22):  “Had the US seriously pursued peace, Minsk II could have both ended the war in Donbas and extinguished the NATO issue that was a driving factor in the invasion Russia launched.”

    On the other hand, failing to draw readers’ attention to Donbas residents’ self-determination arguments means offering audiences a one-dimensional view of the war in Ukraine: It presents it solely as an illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine, rather than as also an internal Ukrainian conflict in which eastern Ukrainians have legitimate grievances against Kyiv. This omission is significant, considering that the US discouraged negotiations that could have resolved outstanding issues surrounding the Donbas’ position in Ukraine before Russia’s February intervention (Canadian Dimension, 3/18/22).

    Another period of coverage is also revealing. Kosovo declared its independence on February 17, 2008. That month, the New York Times published four articles containing some versions of the word “Kosovo” and the word “self-determination.” The Washington Post also ran a 2008 article (2/17/08) containing both terms, though it did not explicitly state whether it believed that Kosovars have that right. In April 2014, the month that separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence, 11 Times articles mentioned the territories, but none said anything about “self-determination.” The Post published 12 articles on the matter, without mentioning “self-determination” in any.

    As people go on dying in eastern Ukraine and the region is leveled, an American public that the corporate media have given only part of the story is more likely to acquiesce to Washington inundating Ukraine with weapons to keep the war going (Bloomberg, 6/23/22; FAIR.org, 3/22/22) than to press for a diplomatic approach to ending the death and destruction as quickly as possible.

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  • Escalation Without Consequences on the Op-Ed Page

     

    Corporate media outlets are calling for the United States and its allies to react to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine by escalating the war. The opinion pages are awash with pleas to pump ever-more deadly weaponry into the conflict, to choke Russian civilians with sanctions, and even to institute a “no-fly zone.” That such approaches gamble with thousands, and possibly millions, of lives doesn’t shake the resolve of the press’s armchair generals.

    No-fly zone: ‘necessary and overdue’

    Daily Beast: Enough! A No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine Is Necessary and Overdue

    The Daily Beast (3/18/22) dismisses fears of nuclear war in one paragraph: “To those who would argue that a no-fly-zone would mean the beginning of an apocalyptic World War III, I would counter argue that history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future.”

    The Daily Beast (3/18/22) ran an opinion piece by Joshua D. Zimmerman contending that “A No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine Is Necessary and Overdue.” He said that

    NATO should immediately announce a 72-hour ultimatum—using the threat of a no-fly zone over Ukraine as leverage—to demand an immediate cease-fire and the beginnings of a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

    If Putin fails to meet these terms, then a NATO-led no-fly zone over Ukraine—at the express invitation of the Ukrainian government—will go into effect.

    It’s hard to imagine three words doing more work than “go into effect” are here. A “no-fly zone” could only “go into effect” by NATO destroying Russia’s air capacities—by launching, that is, a direct NATO/Russia war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (3/7/22) conveyed the risks of such a move:

    So long as NATO and Russian forces don’t begin fighting each other, the risk of nuclear escalation may be kept in check. But a close encounter between NATO and Russian warplanes (which would result if NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine’s airspace) could become a flashpoint that leads to a direct and wider conflict.

    Pesky details like nuclear war don’t bother Zimmerman, who claimed that “the only form of aid that today would halt Russia’s day-in, day-out slaughter of Ukrainian civilians is military intervention,” specifically a “no-fly zone.” He argued that “history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future,” citing events from the 1930s such as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Italy’s of Ethiopia and the Nazis’ conquests in the years leading up to the Second World War.

    Perhaps Zimmerman selected examples from more than 80 years ago because more recent cases, in contexts much more comparable to the present one, demonstrate the danger of advocating a “no-fly zone” to save Ukrainians. Every “no-fly zone” established in the post–Cold War era has been a precursor to all- out war and the destruction of a country.

    The United States implemented two “no-fly zones” over Iraq between 1991 and 2003, at which point the US and its partners moved on to the full-scale devastation of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands in the process (Jacobin, 6/19/14).  NATO created “no-fly zones” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later over Kosovo, during the period in which NATO was dismantling Yugoslavia (Monthly Review, 10/1/07). In 2011, NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” in Libya, ostensibly to protect the population from Moammar Gadhafi (Jacobin, 9/2/13): The result was ethnic cleansing, the emergence of slave markets, mass civilian casualties (In These Times, 8/18/20) and more than a decade of war in the country.

    Defending ‘US global leadership’

    WSJ: The Case for a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine

    Joe Lieberman (Wall Street Journal, 3/9/22): Some say a “no-fly zone” “might anger Mr. Putin and trigger World War III. But inaction based on fear usually causes more conflict than action based on confidence.” Positive thinking will allow the US to go to war with a nuclear power with nuclear war!

    The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed  by Joe Lieberman (3/9/22) in which he too states “The Case for a  No-Fly Zone  in Ukraine.” The former senator and vice presidential candidate bemoaned that

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have said they couldn’t support a no-fly zone over Ukraine because that would be an offensive action, and NATO is a defensive alliance. But that makes no sense. The offensive actions are being carried out by invading Russian troops. The purpose of a no-fly zone would be defensive, protecting and defending the people of Ukraine from the Russians.

    It’s Lieberman’s argument that “makes no sense”: NATO imposing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine would be an offensive action because it entails firing on Russian forces, and Russia has not fired at a NATO member.

    Lieberman went on to say:

    Sending American or other NATO planes into the air over Ukraine to keep Russian aircraft away would protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground, making it possible to defeat Mr. Putin’s brazen and brutal attempt to rebuild the Russian empire, undercut US global leadership and destroy the world order that we and our allies have built.

    “Keep[ing] Russian aircraft away” is a strange way of saying “shooting down Russian aircraft,” which is what Lieberman is actually describing. And not only aircraft would be targeted: Even a prominent proponent of the “no-fly zone,” retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, acknowledged (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 3/8/22):

    Probably what would happen even before that is if there are defense systems in the enemy’s territory that can fire into the no-fly zone, then we normally take those systems out, which would mean bombing into enemy territory.

    Or as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted behind closed doors while advocating for a “no-fly zone” in Syria (Intercept, 10/10/16; FAIR.org, 10/27/16): “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas.”

    In other words, Lieberman’s plan to “protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground” is to initiate a shooting war in Ukrainian territory between the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles (Independent, 2/28/22).

    ‘If they can shoot it, we can ship it’

    WSJ: Why Not Victory in Ukraine?

    The Wall Street Journal (3/16/22) praised Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s evocation of peace activist Martin Luther King before declaring that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.”

    A Wall Street Journal editorial (3/16/22) said that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.” The editors approvingly quoted Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse saying,

    “If they can shoot it, we can ship it.” MiGs and Su-25s, S-200s and S-300s, drones.

    An example are Switchblade drones that are portable and can destroy a target from a distance. The weapon is ideal for attacking tanks and some of the artillery units that are hitting cities and civilians. The latest US arms package reportedly includes 100 Switchblades. But the Pentagon should have delivered all of the Switchblades in the American arsenal to Ukraine at the start of the war, and then contracted to buy more.

    The Journal’s editors were hardly alone in wanting to flood Ukraine with weapons. A Washington Post op-ed (3/16/22) by former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul asserted that “Ukrainians will ultimately defeat Vladimir Putin’s army,” and that the only question is how long it will take, though the basis for this claim appears to be little more than a priori reasoning and a crystal ball.

    McFaul called on “the West” to  “boost” military aid to Ukraine “to hasten the end of the war [in Ukraine’s favor] and thus save Ukrainian (and Russian) lives. More weapons…do just that.” McFaul wrote that “President Biden and his team cannot escalate US involvement in ways that might trigger nuclear war,” though escalation short of that threshold is apparently fine.

    WaPo: Why the West must boost military assistance to Ukraine

    Michael McFaul assures Washington Post readers (3/16/22), “If the risk of Russia’s escalation can be assessed to be below the nuclear threshold, then…the transfer of planes or air defense systems will not trigger World War III.”

    Russia’s ruling class sees their country as having “a vital interest in preventing the expansion of hostile alliances on its borders” (Russia Matters, 3/14/19). Full Ukrainian membership in the alliance in question, NATO, may be far-fetched in the short-term, but last June, NATO insisted that Ukraine “will become” a member, and a year earlier, NATO recognized Ukraine as an “enhanced opportunities partner.” Given that Russia sees “preventing” that as “a vital interest,” McFaul and the Journal editors are on shaky ground when they assume that the West giving Ukraine more weapons will cause Russia to give up, rather than countering the move with more firepower of its own.

    Nor do the authors worry themselves with the peculiar habit US weapons have of finding their way to some of the nastiest factions in the warzones to which the US sends arms. ISIS benefited mightily from the US doling out weapons for use in Syria (Newsweek, 12/14/17), a practice that didn’t have  particularly salutary effects for Syrians or people living beyond the country’s borders.

    Arming proto–Al Qaeda against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was a central cause of such minor inconveniences as the 9/11 attacks and more than 40 years of war in Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21). The risks of a similar outcome in Ukraine are real, considering that the vicious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is part of the Ukrainian military (Haaretz, 7/9/18), and that “far-right European militia leaders…have taken to the internet to raise funds, recruit fighters and plan travel to the front lines” (New York Times, 2/25/22).

    Sanctions: ‘harsh’ but ‘appropriate’

    NYT: ‘I Want Peace.’ Zelensky’s Heroic Resistance Is an Example for the World.

    The New York Times (3/4/22) warned that ” it is the duty of all leaders to prepare their countries for…pain.”

    A New York Times editorial (3/4/22) deemed the latest round of “harsh, immediate and wide-ranging sanctions” to be “appropriate,” because they “demonstrated that there are consequences for unprovoked wars of aggression.” (Note that over the last 30 years, the New York Times has never opposed and has often endorsed the United States’ numerous acts of military aggression—none of which can be described with a straight face as “provoked.”)

    In this case, the “consequences”—”the ruble tanked, the Russian stock market plunged and Russians lined up at ATMs to withdraw money”—make life “harsh” for ordinary Russian civilians, irrespective of whether they support the war or the Putin government. (When polled, approximately one-fourth of Russia’s population expresses opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, roughly the same proportion of Americans that opposed the disastrous Iraq invasion—Meduza, 3/7/22; Gallup, 3/24/03).

    Peter Rutland (The Conversation, 2/28/22), a scholar who focuses on Russia’s political economy, notes that “the falling ruble pushes up the price of imports, which make up over half the consumer basket,” including about 60% of the medicines Russians consume. According to Rutland, “The new sanctions will severely impact the living standard of ordinary Russians.”

    Subjecting the Russian population to such policies is about as constructive a step toward a ceasefire in Ukraine as would be bombing St. Petersburg. Historically, sanctions have exacerbated rather than reduced international tensions; that sanctions preceded both Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last month, would suggest that the pattern is continuing (Washington Post, 3/3/22).

    ‘Punishing Russia’s economy’

    WaPo: Why Ukraine — and Russia’s aggression against it — matters to Americans

    The Washington Post (2/24/22) described the Ukraine invasion as “an aggressor’s bombs, missiles and tanks are wreaking horror and havoc on a weaker neighbor”—while the US’s similarly illegal invasions were “Middle Eastern wars that ended without clear victory.”

    A Washington Post editorial (2/24/22) said that consequences of

    unchecked Russian aggression…could be more damaging and more lasting than any turmoil stemming from the economic sanctions, limited troop deployments and other measures Mr. Biden has announced.

    “Raising the costs to Mr. Putin,” the article said, “may still have an impact, but not unless those costs are truly punishing to Russia’s economy.”

    In practical terms, “punishing…Russia’s economy” means penalizing virtually all Russians. Bloomberg (3/4/22) reports that Russia is now “on course for an economic collapse,” noting that JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s economists said that they “expect a 7% contraction in [Russia’s] gross domestic product this year, the same as Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Bloomberg Economics forecasts a fall of about 9%.”

    Apart from being collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, “punishing” an entire country to the point that its economy faces possible “collapse” may indeed have an “impact.” However, that may be something other than a groundswell of support inside Russia for the sort of functional relationship with the United States that could help end the violence in Ukraine and prevent US/Russian brinksmanship—including the nuclear variety.

    ‘Putin’s troubles’

    WaPo: The war is not going Putin’s way. Congress must pass Ukraine aid swiftly.

    The Washington Post (2/27/22) called the remilitarization of Germany “the sound of a mature democracy, Europe’s richest and largest, dealing a strategic defeat” to Russia.

    A Washington Post editorial (2/27/22) three days later advocated sanctions in a roundabout fashion, noting that polls suggest Americans support such moves:

    Lawmakers should consider these data from a new Washington Post/ABC News poll: 67% percent of American adults favor sanctions against Russia. More than half of adults said they would support sanctions even if it meant higher energy prices. Between the resistance of the Ukrainians and the unity of the West, Mr. Putin appears baffled. Congress should add to his troubles.

    Yet sanctions do not merely “add to [Putin’s] troubles”: They are acts of war. The paper is seeking an escalation in the US/Russia conflict from which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is inextricable (FAIR.org, 1/15/22; Canadian Dimension, 3/18/22).

    Corporate media may not be saying that America should launch a third world war, but the courses these outlets are recommending are geared toward prolonging the war in Ukraine, intensifying the violence and risking its expansion, rather toward achieving a negotiated end to the war as quickly as possible.

     

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  • Western Media Accuse China of Wanting to Do What US Does to Other Countries 

     

    WaPo: In their excesses, Putin and Xi might be unwittingly saving the West

    David Von Drehle (Washington Post, 2/15/22): “Xi…has reminded the world what a Chinese superpower really means—and why a strong alliance of democracies is necessary as an alternative.”

    A flurry of recent newspaper articles have denounced what they describe as Chinese imperialism. Such texts are part of a new Cold War media blitz against China that simultaneously serves US imperialism by blessing it or denying that it exists.

    Last month, the Washington Post (2/15/22) ran an opinion piece by David Von Drehle claiming that, “in a sense, the alliance of democracies” (by which he means the US and its partners) fell “into a fitful sleep” at the end of the Cold War. “What began as a happy dream of perpetual peace,” he contended, “changed in recent years to a nightmare,” featuring “Communist empire-building in China.”

    The notion that there was a “happy dream of perpetual peace at the end of the Cold War” that only recently became a nightmare because of international bad guys like China suggests that Von Drehle himself has been not merely snoozing but comatose. Just as the Cold War ended, the American empire killed thousands of civilians in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm (FAIR.org, 10/28/21). US-led imperialism spent much of the rest of the decade prosecuting a war against the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, ultimately helping to take the country apart (Monthly Review, 10/07).

    Before the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s demise, the US was attacking Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21), and less than two years after that it was carrying out an invasion of Iraq that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians (Jacobin, 6/19/14). That period, which Von Drehle regards as a favorable one in global affairs, was quite the “nightmare” for the millions on the wrong end of American bombs and bullets.

    Perhaps the author is worried that China might start doing to other countries what the US routinely does, even though China has not, at any point in its modern history, committed an international crime comparable to any one of those that the US enacted in the years immediately after the Cold War—or in the years since, in countries like Libya (Jacobin, 9/2/13) and Syria (New York Times, 11/13/21; FAIR.org, 4/20/18; Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17).

    ‘A semi-peripheral country’

    Monthly Review: China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?

    Minqi Li (Monthly Review, 7–8/21): “China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor.”

    Many academics who study Chinese foreign policy are reluctant to reduce China’s position in the world economy to that of “empire-building.” For example, Minqi Li of the University of Utah (Monthly Review, 7–8/21) writes:

    The currently available evidence does not support the argument that China has become an imperialist country in the sense that China belongs to the privileged small minority that exploits the great majority of the world population. On the whole, China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor and transfers more surplus value to the core (historical imperialist countries) than it receives from the periphery. However, China’s per capita GDP has risen to levels substantially above the peripheral income levels and, in terms of international labor transfer flows, China has established exploitative relations with nearly half of the world population (including Africa, South Asia and parts of East Asia). Therefore, China is best considered a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system.

    Claudio Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), the Argentine academic, argues that China is a “potential” empire: It “appropriates surpluses from the underdeveloped economies,” but its approach to the military dimension of geopolitics has been to act defensively.  He writes:

    In contrast to the United States, England or France, China’s capitalists are not accustomed to calling on the political-military intervention of their state when they confront difficulties in their international business. They have no tradition of invasions or coups when confronted by countries that nationalize companies or suspend debt payment. No one knows how quickly the Chinese state will or will not adopt those imperialist habits.

    Such level-headed analyses complicate Von Drehle’s simplistic assertions, which could be why he leaves them out of the conversation.

    ‘Imperialism on the march in the East’

    Wall Street Journal: Russia, China and the Bid for Empire

    Robert D. Kaplan (Wall Street Journal, 1/13/22): “Imperialism throughout history has often originated from a deep well of insecurity.”

    In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (1/13/22), Robert D. Kaplan described Western imperialism as a feature of the past, rather than a present reality, three times. “Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism,” the piece began. “But the imperialism on the march today is in the East.” He went on to claim that “unlike Western countries, which are busy apologizing for their former conquests, the Chinese…take pride in their imperial legacies.” The article ended with Kaplan’s assertion that “the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.”

    Meanwhile, the US empire “truly endures” in the approximately 750 military bases it has in at least 80 countries (Al Jazeera, 9/10/21). China, by contrast, has just one overseas military base (Foreign Policy, 7/7/21).

    A puerile cartoon accompanied Kaplan’s piece, and it too denied contemporary American imperialism: A pair of giant octopuses are standing on a chessboard shaking hands. One octopus is covered in the red and yellow stars of China’s flag, the other in Russian colors; they’re holding all of the chess pieces, while a much smaller Uncle Sam looks on without any. The United States, in other words, is a powerless bystander with no holdings in the imperial great game.

    The US spends more on its military than any other country, accounting for 39% of all global military expenditure in 2020, and dramatically outpaces China in this regard, especially in per capita terms: In 2020, the US spent an estimated $778 billion on its armed forces, and China allocated an estimated $252 billion to its military (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 4/26/21)—$2,365 for each US citizen vs. $180 for each citizen of China.

    Similarly, Washington and its Western allies’ grip on the global financial system demonstrates that Western imperialism is chugging along. The US dollar is the global reserve currency (Atlantic, 9/6/21), not the yuan. The US and its partners are in control of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20)—rather consequential chess pieces—while China doesn’t dominate any institution of global economics or governance of similar magnitude. Amid these conditions, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea and the rich economies of Europe—most of which are “in the West”—have drained $152 trillion dollars from the Global South since 1960 (Al Jazeera, 5/6/21).

    ‘No longer the imperialism of the West’

    Guardian: In China’s new age of imperialism, Xi Jinping gives thumbs down to democracy

    Simon Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21): “It’s difficult to regard Xi…as anything other than a totalitarian control freak with imperial fantasies.”

    Simon Tisdall of the Guardian (12/12/21) sounded a similar note in his article on “China’s New Age of Imperialism.” Like Kaplan, he referred to US imperialism in the past tense:

    Imperialism, in all its awful forms, still poses a threat. But it is no longer the imperialism of the West, rightly execrated and self-condemned. Today’s threat emanates from the East. Just as objectionable, and potentially more dangerous, it’s the prospect of a totalitarian 21st-century Chinese global empire.

    That Western imperialism is apparently “no longer” a threat will undoubtedly come as a relief to Afghans. Their country is on the brink of famine, with US sanctions effectively ensuring that Afghanistan can’t be fed  (New York Times, 12/4/21):

    Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and US sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.

    When Tisdall wasn’t erasing American attempts to starve millions of people, he was inflating alleged Chinese threats to America, writing:

    US media reported last week that the port city of Bata in Equatorial Guinea could become China’s first Atlantic seaboard naval base—potentially putting warships and submarines within striking distance of America’s East Coast. It is said to be considering an island airbase in Kiribati that could in theory threaten Hawaii. Meanwhile, it continues to militarize atolls in the South China Sea.

    Yet the US having bases that put it “within striking distance” of China isn’t just a theoretical possibility: The US military already has nearly 300 military bases spread across East Asia, with seven more in nearby Australia. In September, the US, Britain and Australia announced a new military alliance aimed at China, which will involve a further military buildup (Salon, 10/28/21).

    Tisdall reduced the militarization of the South China Sea to a simplistic tale of a belligerent Chinese empire, rather than discussing these and other contexts, such as RIMPAC, a biennial US-led naval maneuver. RIMPAC is the world’s largest maritime exercise and functions as a show of force to China, which was disinvited from the festivities in 2018 (Washington Post, 8/17/20). Similarly, the US routinely sends naval ships through the South China Sea (CNN, 5/20/21), a move that antagonizes China about as much as Chinese vessels sailing through the Gulf of Mexico would upset the US.

    Even though Tisdall repeatedly denied that American imperialism is ongoing, near the end of the article he acknowledged that the US has vastly more global power than China: “By key measures—the number of overseas bases, alliances, military strike-power—America still greatly outstrips China’s regime.” He then changed his earlier opposition to “imperialism, in all its awful forms,” asserting that the US “greatly outstrips” China “in terms of respect for human values and rights.”

    Yet weeks before Tisdall’s article, UNICEF reported that 10,000 Yemeni children have been killed in the war on the country, which the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and which the US fuels and has fueled from the start (In These Times, 11/22/21; Middle East Eye, 11/17/17). The US has likewise demonstrated its disrespect for “human values and rights” by using its control of the international financial system to levy sanctions against Venezuela that, according to an estimate from two US economists, killed approximately 40,000 Venezuelans between August 2017 and April 2019 (CEPR, 4/25/19). No contemporary Chinese foreign policy is responsible for nearly as much suffering.

    ‘Imperial geography’

    To try to prove that China is the world’s foremost imperial threat, the coverage also points to China’s relations with Taiwan, and to its treatment of peoples living in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau. This aspect of the argument is odd, in that imperialism, in its contemporary usage, tends to refer to international relations. For instance, Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21) says Chinese state repression of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, or of residents of Hong Kong, amount to Xi acting like “a latter-day Roman emperor,” a plank in the writer’s assertion that China has less “respect for human values and rights” than the US empire.

    While there is evidence of significant human rights violations in both places, Tisdall provides no basis for believing that China has less of a claim to them than the US—or its close settler-colonial allies, such as Canada, Australia or New Zealand—does to Indigenous lands seized by European invaders from thousands of miles of way, or that China has done so in an even more brutal fashion.

    Like Tisdall, Kaplan (Wall Street Journal, 1/13/22) calls Hong Kong and Macau part of China’s “imperial geography,” a peculiar way to describe two regions returned to China by Western imperial powers: Britain gave back Hong Kong in 1997, and Portugal did the same with Macau in 1999. The author also writes that Xinjiang and Tibet “represent colonial legacies of former Qing rule,” which is one way of saying that China has had authority over Xinjiang since the 18th century (BBC, 9/26/14). As for Tibet, Robert Barnett (NPR, 4/11/08), director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, says that “Tibet has never been considered independent by major players on the world stage.”

    Kaplan also points to Chinese saber-rattling against Taiwan. The latter has many of the trappings of a state, but only 13 countries regard it as an independent nation (New York Times, 12/10/21).

    None of this is to suggest that China should resolve the Taiwan question militarily. Nor is to endorse Chinese policies in Macau, Hong Kong, Tibet or Xinjiang. The point is that authors like Tisdall and Kaplan are playing fast and loose with history and international law, and applying wildly unequal standards that cast China as an evil empire and the United States as alternately a benign empire or not an empire at all.

    Longer-term trend

    Atlantic: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth

    Atlantic (2/6/21): “The truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.”

    These recent articles are part of a longer-term trend across much of the corporate media. Last summer, a Slate article (7/14/21) maintained:

    Beijing is capable of perpetuating imperialism in its own right. One case in point is the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive program of investments and infrastructure projects abroad. Designed to overcome China’s own overproduction dilemma at a time of stagnating wages and inadequate domestic demand, it targets developing countries in the region with extraterritorial legal arrangements, debt-trap diplomacy and, unsurprisingly, environmental exploitation.

    The authors aren’t the only ones in corporate media to make this claim about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Washington Post, 8/27/18). While BRI can give China leverage over borrowers, there is academic research that calls into question whether BRI amounts to imperialism: For example, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire (Atlantic, 2/6/21), of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard, respectively, studied BRI and disputed the charge that it is a form of “modern-day colonialism.” “Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” they noted.

    In 2020, a Wall Street Journal op-ed (10/1/20) characterized BRI as “imperial overreach,” citing Africa and Latin America as examples. Justin Podur (FAIR.org,  1/31/22) recently demonstrated  that there is no convincing analogy between China’s policies in Africa and those of European empires, and it’s equally rich for the leading US financial paper to accuse another country of imperialism in Latin America. Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), noting the “overwhelming intrusion of the US embassies” in Latin America, points out that “China is miles away from any such encroachment”: “Profiting from the sale of manufactured goods and the purchase of raw materials is not the same as sending the Marines, training police and financing coups d’état.”

    Two months before the Journal essay, a Newsweek article (8/31/20) claimed that

    Xi is now openly promoting imperial-era views that the Chinese emperor had the right and obligation to rule tianxia, or “all under heaven,” thereby suggesting China should now be considered the world’s only sovereign state.

    It would be remarkable if Xi said that China should rule “all under heaven,” or be the “world’s only sovereign state,” but the author provides no source to that effect, and I can find no evidence that Xi has. While US leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power the US has secured for itself comes closer than that of anyone else. While Washington’s leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power it has secured for itself  brings the US government much closer to having that type of authority than any other state.

    Instead of carefully considering the implications of China’s rise for the rest of the world, these articles have opted to whip up xenophobia against the country while also glossing over—if not outright cheering—US imperialism.

     

    The post Western Media Accuse China of Wanting to Do What US Does to Other Countries  appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Beware the Hawkish Pundits Pushing for War Over Ukraine

    Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Hawkish Pundits Downplay Threat of War, Ukraine’s Nazi Ties

     

    NYT: How the United States Can Break Putin’s Hold on Ukraine

    Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 12/10/21): “A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support” could persuade Russians “to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition”—i.e., regime change.

    With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.

    Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that “the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance.” He argued that “the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” even while calling for a strategy that “avoids crossing into military adventurism.” He went on to say that “the United States has to be more assertive in the region.”

    Yet the US has been plenty “assertive in the region,” where, incidentally, America is not located. In 2014, the US supported anti-government protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of democratically elected, Russia-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (Foreign Policy, 3/4/14). Russia sent its armed forces into the Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.

    Since then, the US has given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles (Politico, 6/18/21).  The US government has applied sanctions to Russia that, according to an International Monetary Fund estimate, cost Russia about 0.2 percentage points of GDP every year between 2014 and 2018 (Reuters, 4/16/21).

    Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance hostile to Russia—has grown by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War. NATO expanded right up to Russia’s border in 2004, in violation of the promises made by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).

    WaPo: Ukraine stood with the West in 2014. Today we must stand with Ukraine.

    “Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding,”  Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen argue in the Washington Post (12/24/21)—ignoring the US’s violated commitment to not expand NATO eastward.

    In the Washington Post (12/24/21), Republican Sen. Rob Portman and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen jointly contended in Orwellian fashion that the Biden administration should take “military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility.” They wrote that “the United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities.” The authors claimed that these actions “will help ensure a free and stable Europe,” though it’s easy to imagine how such steps could instead lead to a war-ravaged Europe, or at least a tension-plagued one.

    Indeed, US “military measures” have tended to increase, rather than decrease, the temperature. Last summer, the US and Ukraine led multinational naval maneuvers held in the Black Sea, an annual undertaking called Sea Breeze. The US-financed exercises were the largest in decades, involving 32 ships, 40 aircraft and helicopters, and 5,000 soldiers from 24 countries (Deutsche Welle, 6/29/21). These steps didn’t create a “stable Europe”: Russia conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia (AP, 7/10/21), and would go on to amass troops along the Ukrainian border.

    Afghan precedent

    WaPo: To deter a Russian attack, Ukraine needs to prepare for guerrilla warfare

    Max Boot (Washington Post, 12/15/21) suggests the US should point out to Russia “that Ukraine shares a lengthy border—nearly 900 miles in total—with NATO members Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland.” Pretty sure they’re aware of that, Max.

    Max Boot, also writing in the Post (12/15/21), argued:

    Preventing Russia from attacking will require a more credible military deterrent. President Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending US combat troops to Ukraine, which would be the strongest deterrent. But he can still do more to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.

    The United States has already delivered more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, with $450 million of that coming this year. There are also roughly 150 US troops in Ukraine training its armed forces.

    But Ukraine is asking for more military aid, and we should deliver it. NBC News reports that “Ukraine has asked for air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies.” The Defense Department could begin airlifting these defensive systems and supplies to Kyiv tomorrow.

    Later in the article, Boot contended that the US should help prepare Ukraine to carry out an armed insurgency in case Russia intensifies its involvement in Ukraine. He said that “outside support” is “usually the key determinant of the success or failure of an insurgency”: Because of aid from the US and its allies, he noted, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan “were able to drive out the Red Army with heavy casualties.” Amazingly, Boot said nothing about the many alumni of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Jacobin, 9/11/21).

    That it might be possible to reach an agreement in which Ukraine remains neutral between NATO and Russia (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22) is not the sort of possibility that Boot thinks is worth exploring. He apparently would prefer to dramatically increase the danger of armed conflict between two nuclear powers.

    Whitewashing Nazis

    Nation: Secretary Blinken Faces a Big Test in Ukraine, Where Nazis and Their Sympathizers Are Glorified

    The Nation (5/6/21): “Glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine.”

    US media should present Americans with a complete picture of Ukraine/Russia so that Americans can assess how much and what kind of support, if any, they want their government to continue providing to Ukraine’s. Such a comprehensive view would undoubtedly include an account of the Ukrainian state’s political orientation. Lev Golinkin in The Nation (5/6/21) outlined one of the Ukrainian government’s noteworthy tendencies:

    Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to 2014 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters, and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.

    Every January 1, Kyiv hosts a torchlight march in which thousands honor Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who headed an OUN faction; in 2017, chants of “Jews Out!” rang out during the march. Such processions (often redolent with antisemitism) are a staple in Ukraine….

    Ukraine’s total number of monuments to Third Reich collaborators who served in auxiliary police battalions and other units responsible for the Holocaust number in the several hundred. The whitewashing also extends to official book bans and citywide veneration of collaborators.

    The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can’t be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected [Volodymyr] Zelensky, a Jewish president. Zelensky, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, “To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that’s cool!”

    Furthermore, according to a George Washington University study, members of the far-right group Centuria are in the Ukrainian military, and Centuria’s social media accounts show these soldiers giving Nazi salutes, encouraging white nationalism and praising members of Nazi SS units (Ottawa Citizen, 10/19/21). Centuria leaders have ties to the Azov movement, which “has attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students, the LGBTQ2S+ community and Roma people”: the Azov movement’s militia has been incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard (CTV News, 10/20/21). Azov, the UN has documented, has carried out torture and rape.

    Absent information

    The fact that that Ukraine’s government and armed forces include a Nazi-sympathizing current surely would have an impact on US public opinion—if the public knew about it. However, this information has been entirely absent in recent editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.

    From December 6, 2021, to January 6,  2022, the Times published 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, nine of which contain some variation on the word “Nazi.” Zero percent of these note Ukrainian government apologia for Nazis or the presence of pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine’s armed forces. One report (12/21/21) said:

    On Russian state television, the narrative of a Ukraine controlled by neo-Nazis and used as a staging ground for Western aggression has been a common trope since the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014.

    Nothing in the article indicates that while “controlled” may be a stretch, the Ukrainian government officially honors Nazi collaborators. That doesn’t mean Russia has the right attack Ukraine, but US media should inform Americans about whom their tax dollars are arming.

    In the same period, the Post ran 201 pieces that mention the word “Ukraine.” Of these, six mention the word “Nazi,” none of them to point out that the Ukrainian state has venerated Holocaust participants, or that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian military. Max Boot (1/5/22) and Robyn Dixon (12/11/21), in fact, dismissed this fact as mere Russian propaganda. In Boot’s earlier Ukraine piece (12/15/21), he acknowledged that the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and killed thousands of Polish people, but his article nevertheless suggested that the UPA offer a useful model for how Ukrainians could resist a Russian invasion, asserting that “all is not lost” in case of a Russian invasion, because “Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers”:

    They have done it before. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 to fight for that country’s independence. Initially, it cooperated with Nazi invaders but later fought against them. When the Red Army marched back into Ukraine in 1943, the UPA resisted. The guerrillas carried out thousands of attacks and inflicted thousands of casualties on Soviet forces while also massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine. The UPA continued fighting until the 1950s, forcing Moscow to mobilize tens of thousands of troops and secret policemen to restore control.

    “All is not lost,” for Boot, though the lives of thousands of Poles and Jews were, the latter of whom he didn’t bother to mention. Calling the perpetrators of such atrocities “Ukrainian patriots” is a grotesque euphemism that, first and foremost, spits on the victims, and also insults non-racist Ukrainians. After a two-paragraph interval, Boot wrote that

    the Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of US and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare. Volodymyr Zelensky’s government should even prepare supply depots, tunnels and bunkers in wooded areas, and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.

    Evidently neither the UPA’s precedent of fascist massacres, nor the presence of similarly oriented groups in contemporary Ukraine’s armed forces and society, give Boot pause.  He’d rather the US continue flooding the country with weapons; the consequences aren’t a concern of Boot’s.

    Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.

     

    The post Hawkish Pundits Downplay Threat of War, Ukraine’s Nazi Ties appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • The Media’s Lies About Colin Powell’s Lies

     

    USA Today: A Warrior, Diplomat and 'Great American'

    USA Today‘s front-page obituary for Colin Powell (10/19/21) called him “a Warrior, Diplomat and ‘Great American.” Accompanying stories called him “A Man Trusted by Presidents and the Public Alike,” and “Always Willing to Stand Against Racism.” The only hint of criticism was a story that said that “Iraq Tarnished [His] Storied Career.”

    Former Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell received virtually wall-to-wall adulation in corporate media coverage of his death last week.

    In the New York Times (10/19/21), Bret Stephens called Powell “an exemplary military leader and presidential adviser.” Stephens’ Times colleague Maureen Dowd (10/23/21) said Powell was “the best America had to offer” and a “great man.” Theodore R. Johnson wrote in the same paper (10/21/21) that “we should take inspiration from Mr. Powell’s accomplishments.”

    Powell led, as David Ignatius tells it in the Washington Post (10/18/21), an “extraordinary life of service,” characterized by “a sterling career of public service.” Like Ignatius, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal (10/21/21) lacked a thesaurus, describing Powell as “a great man” and one of “the great ones.” In another Journal piece, Paula Dobriansky (10/20/21) called him “a true inspiration and a model not only for military leaders and diplomats but all Americans,” a “hero of our time.”

    This gratuitous fawning deflects readers from reckoning with Powell’s record. Consider the heinous acts the “great man” admitted to carrying out in Vietnam.  (See Consortium News, 7/8/96.) In his memoir, My American Journey, Powell said of his unit in Vietnam: “We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters.” The “hero of our time” wrote:

    Why were we torching houses and destroying crops?  Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam…. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?

    Similarly, Powell’s “sterling career of public service” involved obstructing the truth of US war crimes in Vietnam. After the My Lai Massacre, when Powell was an Army major posted in Saigon, he was tasked with investigating a soldier’s letter describing US barbarism against the Vietnamese (Columbia Journalism Review, 4/3/09). Powell denied the charges, writing, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

    Selling the Iraq invasion

    AP: Colin Powell Dies, Trailblazing General Stained by Iraq

    AP‘s obituary (10/18/21) described Powell as a “trailblazing soldier and diplomat whose sterling reputation of service to Republican and Democratic presidents was stained by his faulty claims to justify the 2003 US war in Iraq.”

    The only aspect of Powell’s life that corporate media coverage of his death identified as a flaw with some consistency was the infamous 2003 speech to the United Nations, in which he helped sell the invasion of Iraq by falsely claiming the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction. Even on this issue, corporate media were soft on Powell.

    Ignatius said that the case Powell laid out “turned out later to have [been] based on flawed intelligence.” Stephens claimed that the so-called evidence Powell put forth “had the full confidence of the intelligence community.” Dowd wrote that “Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.”

    These are lies about Powell’s lies, as a Jon Schwarz article for the Intercept (2/6/18) demonstrated three years back. The “flawed intelligence” behind what Powell told the UN wasn’t, as Ignatius wrote, something that “turned out later” to be wrong: Powell claimed that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes supposedly for their covert nuclear weapons program but, prior to the speech, his own intelligence staff prepared a memo that pointed out that this assertion was untrue. Powell said that the tubes were built “to a tolerance that far exceeds US requirements” for comparable conventional weapons, but the memo noted that this was false.

    Nor did what Powell alleged at the UN have, as Stephens wrote, “the full confidence of the intelligence community”: Powell told the UN that “weapons experts at one [Iraqi] facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents” so as to “deceive [weapons] inspectors,” but another memo from his intelligence staff pointed out that this statement was “not credible.”

    That Powell kept these claims in his speech gives lie to Dowd’s attempt to portray Powell as doing his best to “scrub his speech of . . . the deceptions,” as does Powell’s active fabrication of evidence: Powell played an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers talking about searching ammunition dumps to make sure they weren’t accidentally holding onto banned chemical weapons, but he doctored  what they were saying in a way that made it sound like they were discussing the hiding of proscribed weapons (Intercept, 2/6/18).

    Powell’s deliberate lies shatter the myth that he was a “reluctant warrior,” as the Times’ Eric Schmitt (10/18/21) put it, a talking point that Ignatius (Washington Post, 10/18/21) repeated. Powell described a satellite picture as showing “a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong,” one of the “sure signs” that Iraqi “bunkers are storing chemical munitions.” Yet, Schwarz showed, another memo from Powell’s intelligence staffed flagged this claim as “WEAK,” and noted that “decontamination vehicles—cited several times in the text—are water trucks that can have legitimate uses.” Powell may have had misgivings about the assault on Iraq at various points in the lead up to it, but a person who knowingly distorts the truth so as to help bring about an invasion cannot reasonably be described as a “reluctant warrior.”

    Enthusiastic warrior

    WaPo: Colin Powell, the Reluctant Warrior

    One of David Ignatius’ main examples (Washington Post, 10/18/21) of how Powell was a “reluctant warrior” was the 2003 invasion of Iraq that he played a pivotal role in selling—which Ignatius called “a painful ending to a sterling career of public service.”

    The coverage of Powell’s death was silent on the consequences of other instances where Powell was quite the enthusiastic warrior. A Washington Post editorial (10/18/21) claimed that

    successful military operations…—the Gulf War, the 1989 invasion of Panama—benefited from Mr. Powell’s insistence that their costs and benefits be thoroughly weighed and that, when used, force should be deployed swiftly and overwhelmingly.

    Schmitt too mentioned both of these US aggressions—launched when Powell headed the Joint Chiefs of staff—and declined to say anything about their costs for Panamanians or Iraqis.

    A proper count of the civilians Washington killed in its attack on Panama—which a UN General Assembly resolution called a “flagrant violation” of international law (AP, 12/29/89)—has never been tabulated, but estimates believe it to be in the thousands, with the Panamanian poor subjected to the bulk of the violence (Al Jazeera, 1/31/16). Shortly after the war, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) found that the attack had displaced 15,000 people, and that at least 3,000 civilians were injured to the extent that they needed emergency treatment.

    In the invasion’s aftermath, Human Rights Watch concluded that

    American forces inflicted a toll in civilian lives that was at least four-and-a-half times higher than military casualties in the enemy, and 12 or 13 times higher than the casualties suffered by US troops. By themselves these ratios suggest that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civilians, where doing so would not compromise a legitimate military objective, were not faithfully observed by the invading US forces.

    Thus, there are thousands of Panamanians who might demur from the Post characterizing the war as having “benefited” from Powell’s “insistence” on using US military might “swiftly and overwhelmingly.”

    Somewhere in the range of 142,500 and 206,000 Iraqis died in the Gulf War, between 20,000 and 35,000 of them civilians. In one hideous incident, US forces bombed an Iraqi infant formula factory. At the time, Powell claimed that “it is not an infant formula factory…. It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure.” A UN investigation found that what he said wasn’t true.

    Helping to keep people dying

    The coverage was also quiet about other important aspects of Powell’s legacy, including his role in Iran/Contra, a policy under which the US armed Iran in its war against Iraq—which was the US’s principal ally in that war—helping to keep people dying in both countries. The US would use that money to arm the Contras, a mercilessly violent band of counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua, to circumvent congressional legislation against supporting them.

    The Contras were, as Human Rights Watch reported at the time,

    major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict, including by launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians, selectively murdering non-combatants, and mistreating prisoners.

    The report went on to say that US support for the Contras was

    sustain[ing] a force that has shown itself incapable of operating without consistently committing gross abuses in violation of the laws of war. The policy also has placed in jeopardy the holding of elections by encouraging Contra attacks on the electoral process.

    Powell, by his own admission, “had a role in this [Iran/Contra] business.” As Robert Parry and Norman Solomon (Consortium News, 9/16/96), “It was Powell who short-circuited the Pentagon covert procurement system that otherwise would have alerted the military brass that thousands of missiles were headed to Iran,” which the US said it regarded as a terrorist state. Even after the fallout from the affair, Powell would continue fighting on behalf of the Contras, traveling to Central America with Contragate kingpin Elliott Abrams to deliver a message that US aid would be in jeopardy unless the guerrilla war against Nicaragua continued (New York Times, 1/14/88).

    Earlier, in 1983, Powell was part of a supposed fact-finding mission to El Salvador that concluded that the US should keep training and lavishly funding the Salvadoran military, even though it had—with US assistance—massacred 600 people at El Sumpul and 1,000 at El Mozote, where half of the victims were under 12 years old (Democracy Now!, 10/19/21). A year after Powell’s visit, the Salvadoran military massacred 80 non-combatants in Cabanas province and at least 50 displaced persons in Chalatenango, in both cases “raping and murdering peasant women and systematically executing unarmed civilians” (AP, 3/28/85).

    Not ignorance but indifference

    WaPo: Colin Powell’s greatest legacy is in the people he inspired

    Condoleezza Rice (Washington Post, 10/18/21): The best thing Colin Powell did was inspire people like me.

    Taken together, the obituaries suggest that it’s not that corporate media journalists don’t know about the blood Powell helped shed; it’s that they think it’s all well and good that he did. Thus, the Post’s editorial board can assert that his “mistakes” were “outweighed by his accomplishments,” without fretting over some torched Vietnamese homes and efforts to starve Vietnamese people to death. He can be called “a great man” and a “hero” because the people who write such things are indifferent to piles of corpses in Latin America, or think  that their murders were justified.

    If these outlets found the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis objectionable, they wouldn’t fill their pages with praise for one of the people most responsible for the deaths, nor would they have had him eulogized by co-conspirators like Condoleezza Rice (Washington Post, 10/18/21) and Karl Rove (Wall Street Journal, 10/20/21). Lionizing someone who, like Powell, should have stood trial for war crimes, will—if left unchecked—prime the public to admire the next batch of would-be war criminals…rather than stopping them.

    Featured image: Main photo from the New York Times‘ obituary for Colin Powell (10/18/21).

    The post The Media’s Lies About Colin Powell’s Lies appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure

     

    Corporate media coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the country’s US-backed government has offered audiences more mystification than illumination. I looked at editorials in five major US dailies following the Taliban’s retaking of Kabul: the Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. The editorial boards of these papers consistently trivialized South Asian lives, erased US responsibility for lethal violence, and made untenable assertions about Washington’s supposedly righteous motives in the war.

    Uncounted civilian cost

    NYT: The Tragedy of Afghanistan

    The New York Times (8/15/21) ran the next best thing to a photo of a helicopter taking off from the Kabul embassy roof: a photo of a helicopter flying over the embassy roof.

    The editorials evince a callous indifference to the toll of the war on civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the war has also been fought. The New York Times (8/15/21) referred to “at least 2,448 American service members’ lives lost in Afghanistan,” and to “Afghan casualties so huge—60,000 killed since 2001, by one estimate—that the government kept them a secret.” The link makes clear that the authors are talking about deaths among Afghan police and soldiers. Yet, as of April, more than 71,000 civilians—over 47,000 Afghans and more than 24,000 Pakistanis—have been directly killed in the US-initiated war.

    The Boston Globe’s piece (8/16/21) described “two decades of the United States propping up Afghan forces to keep the Taliban at bay at the cost of more than $2 trillion and more than 2,400 lost military service members.” Tens of thousands of dead Afghan and Pakistani civilians evidently aren’t significant enough to factor into “the cost” of the war.

    “The war in Afghanistan took the lives of more than 2,400 American troops,” said the Los Angeles Times editorial (8/16/21), which went on to add, “For decades to come, America will be paying the medical bills of veterans suffering from the emotional and physical toll of their trauma and injuries.” The authors ignored dead, wounded and psychologically scarred South Asian civilians, though the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) logged 3,524 civilian injuries in the first half of 2021 alone, and 5,785 in 2020.

    The Wall Street Journal (8/15/21, 8/16/21), meanwhile, didn’t mention any deaths that took place during the war.

    “Some 66,000 Afghan fighters have given their lives in this war during the past 20 years, alongside 2,448 US service members,” the Washington Post (8/16/21) pointed out, declining to spare a word for noncombatants. US troops, the article assured readers, “endured very modest casualties, since 2014,” without noting that the US inflicted a great many on Afghan civilians in that period: For instance, a 2019 Human Rights Watch report noted that, in the first six months of that year, the US and its partners in what was then the Afghan government killed more civilians than the Taliban did.

    Forever war > withdrawal

    WaPo: The debacle in Afghanistan is the worst kind: Avoidable

    The “Afghan debacle” was “avoidable,” the Washington Post (8/16/21) argued, if only Biden had been willing to commit to an indefinite military occupation.

    Two of the editorials were clear that they would prefer continuous US war against Afghanistan to withdrawal. The Washington Post (8/16/21) claimed that

    a small US and allied military presence—capable of working with Afghan forces to deny power to the Taliban and its Al Qaeda terrorist allies, while diplomats and nongovernmental organizations nurtured a fledgling civil society—not only would have been affordable, but also could have paid for itself in US security and global credibility.

    Costs such as the harm the “US and allied military presence” does to Afghans did not enter into the Post’s accounting for “affordability.” No explanation is offered as to why Afghans should endure the lack of “security” entailed in “US and allied” bombs falling on their heads. Nor did the authors clarify why the US’s “global credibility” is a higher priority than, say, stopping the US from killing Afghan children, as it did last October.

    The Wall Street Journal (8/15/21) professed concern for the “thousands of translators, their families, and other officials who are in peril from Taliban rule and didn’t get out in time,” and said that what it sees as the impending “murder of these innocents” will be a “stain on the Biden presidency.” Yet the authors argued that the US should continue bombing Afghanistan indefinitely, asserting that

    Afghans were willing to fight and take casualties with the support of the US and its NATO allies, especially airpower. A few thousand troops and contractors could have done the job and prevented this rout.

    Over the course of the war, that airpower tended to mean the mass death of Afghan civilians: In 2019, for example, US airstrikes killed 546 of them (Washington Post, 9/4/21). In advocating the continued American bombing of Afghanistan to stop the “murder of these innocents,” the authors are calling for the “murder of…innocents,” just by the US rather than the Taliban.

    The ‘American dream’

    LAT: The Afghan government’s collapse is tragic. It was also inevitable

    The Los Angeles Times (8/16/21) praised the US”s noble hopes to build a multiparty democracy,” insisting that “the people of Afghanistan were failed by their leaders.”

    The New York Times’ editorial board (8/15/21) gushed about the purity of US values, saying that the Taliban’s return to power is

    unutterably tragic. Tragic because the American dream of being the “indispensable nation” in shaping a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule proved to be just that: a dream.

    The editors did nothing to explain how they square their view that the US’s “dream” entails worldwide “civil rights” and “women’s empowerment” with the US’s carrying out torture in Afghanistan or its propensity for killing Afghan women (Guardian, 7/11/08).

    The board went on:

    How [the war] evolved into a two-decade nation-building project in which as many as 140,000 troops under American command were deployed at one time is a story of mission creep and hubris, but also of the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy.

    That faith in “freedom” was manifest by such practices as training warlords who killed and abused civilians, and propping up an Afghan state that included officials who sexually assaulted children—actions that US troops were told to ignore, as the New York Times (9/21/15) itself reported.

    Similarly, the Los Angeles Times (8/16/21) claimed that

    the US and its Western allies had noble hopes to build a multiparty democracy—with respect for the rights of women and minorities, an independent judiciary and a new constitution—but nation-building was not an appropriate goal.

    It’s anyone’s guess how the paper reconciles the US and its partners’ “noble hopes” for such things as “respect for the rights of women” with the US working with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to finance and arm extremely conservative forces in Afghanistan, so as to undermine progressives in the country while strengthening reactionary elements, a history (described in Robert Dreyfuss’ book Devil’s Game) that all of the editorials obscure.

    Swallowing official justifications

    WSJ: Biden’s Afghanistan Surrender

    The Wall Street Journal (8/15/21) argued that Mr. Trump’s withdrawal deadline was a mistake, but Mr. Biden could have maneuvered around it”—meaning he could have ignored it.

    Indeed, the editorials suffered from a basic failure to question the official justifications offered for the war and occupation. The New York Times editorial board (8/15/21) wrote that

    the war in Afghanistan began in response by the United States and its NATO allies to the attacks of September 11, 2001, as an operation to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary in a country run by the Taliban.

    There’s no place in that narrative for the fact that eight days into the war, in October 2001, the Taliban offered to discuss turning over Osama Bin Laden (Guardian, 10/14/01). The Journal characterized the Taliban as “the jihadists the US toppled 20 years ago for sheltering Osama bin Laden.” But it was in mid-November 2001 (Guardian, 11/17/01) that the US toppled the Taliban, a month after they had said they were willing to talk about extraditing bin Laden.

    In the same vein, the Los Angeles Times editorial (8/16/21) said that

    after the US ousted the Taliban—which had hosted the Al Qaeda terrorist network and refused to turn over terrorists such as Osama bin Laden — the George W. Bush administration expanded the goals of the mission in ways that in hindsight were never realistic.

    This phrasing implies that the US overthrew the Taliban because they “refused to turn over terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.” However, in addition to the Taliban signaling that it could be open to extraditing the Al Qaeda leader in October 2001, according to a former head of Saudi intelligence (LA Times, 11/4/01), the Taliban said in 1998 that it would hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, the US’s close ally; the Saudi intelligence official says that the Taliban backed off after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda.

    The outlets thus failed to inform their readers that, had the US pursued negotiations for bin Laden’s extradition, Afghans may have been spared 20 years of devastating war. That US planners might have drawn up their Afghanistan policies with a view to the country’s vast resource wealth and strategic position—and there’s evidence that they did (In These Times, 8/1/18)—is not a perspective that the editorials opted to share with their readers. Neither is the idea that the US doesn’t have the right to decide who governs other countries.

    Engineering forgetfulness about America’s Afghan war, if left unchallenged, will make it easier to wage the next one.

    The post As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • US Corporate Media Fixin for a Cold War Fight With China

    Inflaming tensions like these has a very long and bloody history.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Media Applaud the New Cold Wars—but Could US Be More Aggressive, Please?

     

    US media are fixin’ for a fight with China, Russia—or both. Commentary on the recent G7 and NATO summits, as well as President Joe Biden’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, was replete with examples of news outlets alternately praising the Biden administration for ramping up new cold wars with China and Russia, and criticizing it for not being even more aggressive. As it propagandized about the US supposedly fighting for democracy, this coverage betrayed a total indifference to the potential costs of these hostilities.

    Putting missiles to ‘actual use’

    WSJ: A Bipartisan Missile Buildup

    The Wall Street Journal (6/22/21) applauds the Army’s development of  missiles “designed to destroy high-value, high payoff targets” over 900 miles away.

    A Wall Street Journal editorial (6/22/21) explicitly praised Democrats and Republicans for escalating the possibility of nuclear war:

    A bipartisan consensus is forming that accepts and capitalizes on President Trump’s 2019 exit from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). This is good news for American security.

    The INF treaty between Washington and Moscow banned all nuclear and non-nuclear missiles with short and medium ranges, except sea-launched weapons; the Journal argued that the INF constrained a US nuclear build-up, while China was free to develop its nuclear arsenal. Yet China has an estimated total of 320 nuclear warheads, less than 6% of the size of the US’s 5,800-warhead nuclear arsenal (The Nation, 5/19/21).

    Nevertheless, the Journal’s editors want the US government to pursue the means for nuclear holocaust even more voraciously than it has: The 2022 Biden defense budget, they write, doesn’t let the INF restrain the US, but “doesn’t take as much advantage of the post-INF possibilities as it should.” They go on to argue:

    The biggest failing is that the budget doesn’t fulfill the Marines’ $96 million request to buy 48 Tomahawk missiles, part of the corps’ proof-of-concept for a more versatile force in and around Pacific islands. That could suggest some remaining skittishness in the Biden Pentagon about putting ground-launched weapons with significant range into actual use.

    The cataclysmic consequences for human life and the environment of putting such weapons “into actual use” apparently does not merit the paper’s contemplation. But a typical modern nuclear weapon can flatten the downtown of an entire city, “burn everything flammable in an area at least four miles across,” while the “burning cities could inject enough soot and smoke into the stratosphere to blot out the sun, dramatically disrupt the climate, ruin crop production, and put billions of people at risk of starvation” (Progressive, 6/1/19).

    The ‘Chinese challenge’

    WSJ: China Has Stopped Biding Its Time

    “We cannot persuade or force [China’s] leaders to abandon their drive for technological and military superiority,” William Galston writes in the Wall Street Journal (6/22/21)—despite China having a military budget one-third the size of the US’s.

    William A. Galston of the Journal (6/22/21) was similarly upfront with his warmongering:

    It remains to be seen whether we can agree on the investments and strategic decisions that an effective military response to the Chinese challenge will require—and whether we can restore a sense of common purpose across partisan lines without which such a response cannot be sustained.

    Galston’s use of the word “will” is the key here: a costly arms race between the two nuclear powers is, in his view, an inevitability, rather than a dangerous possibility that strenuous efforts should be taken to avoid.

    Galston’s rationale for maximum hostility toward China is partly based on “28 Chinese fighter jets and other aircraft conduct[ing] exercises over waters south of Taiwan.” He wrote as though the US hasn’t been carrying out such exercises to menace China since well before Chinese flights near Taiwan: The US has sent a nuclear-capable B-52 to the South China Sea, along with cruisers, destroyers and submarines, while also overflying the area with two nuclear-capable B-1B supersonic bombers, and sailing a guided missile destroyer within 12 nautical miles of Chinese military bases (The Nation, 7/30/20).

    US/Russia bombast

    Bombast about US/Russia relations was roughly as plentiful as anti-China warmongering.

    WaPo: America needs NATO allies who share its renewed dedication to maintaining an orderly world

    George Will (Washington Post, 6/20/21) says that under Biden, “the United States is ready to resume its responsibilities regarding the maintenance of an orderly world”—”orderly” here being shorthand for a world in which the US can invade wherever it likes and overthrow whomever it wants.

    In the Washington Post (6/20/21), George Will criticized NATO members for not “stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will deepen Europe’s, and especially Germany’s, dependence on Russian energy.” He didn’t say exactly which means he thinks NATO should employ to stop the pipeline. However, Will was clear that he favors having US troops on European soil to try to intimidate Russia, increasing the chances of a ground war in the continent:  “President Biden,” Will said, “has wisely reversed his predecessor’s order reducing US forces in Germany.”

    Will’s preference for a military standoff with Russia was that much more apparent when he complained that NATO members aren’t spending enough on their militaries, writing that

    it is probable that only the United States, Britain and five smaller nations will in 2022 spend the 2% of their gross domestic product on their militaries that is the minimal target that NATO adopted seven years ago to be reached by 2024.

    Will doesn’t note that NATO’s combined military budget in 2020 exceeded $1 trillion—as compared to Russia’s estimated annual military expenditure of $61 billion.

    Will ridiculed past NATO rhetoric that suggested the possibility of sustained cooperation with Russia, presenting a litany of reasons he thinks Russia can’t be trusted. He omits the context of NATO growing by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War, reaching Russia’s border in 2004, in violation of promises that presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton made to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).

    ‘Steady pressure’ on Russia

    NYTL We’ve Come a Long Way Since Trump. Putin Is Still Winning.

    When Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 6/16/21) writes that he’s reassured that President Biden will “be critical of human rights violations,” it goes without saying that he’s referring to violations by the official enemy.

    Alexander Vindman, director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council from 2018 to 2020, penned an essay in the New York Times (6/16/21) that praised Biden for promising a “muscular response” to Russian activities. He endorsed “steady pressure” on Russia, arguing that “the United States will need to remain engaged with Russia in order to provide clarity on the severe ramifications of further transgressions.”

    Vindman further claimed that

    constraining Russia’s belligerence will take far more than tough talk or unilateral US actions. It will take unwavering toughness from Mr. Biden and a solid front among allies—all united and clear-eyed in the belief that Mr. Putin is fundamentally an adversary who needs to be kept in check.

    The author said that he wanted to avoid “full-blown confrontation” between the US and Russia, even as he advocated confrontational policies of the sort that “muscular,” “severe ramifications” and “unwavering toughness” to keep Russia “in check” call to mind.

    Besides the phrase “Russia’s belligerence,” Vindman wrote of “Russian aggression” three times and “Russia’s growing aggression” once. Casting Russia as an implacable enemy, and the US and its allies as helpless victims, points readers to the conclusion that Russia must be stopped, and that the only way it can be stopped is through force. The US’s plans to co-host annual NATO military exercises with Ukraine in the Black Sea, right in Russia’s neighborhood, from June 29 to July 10 (Newsweek, 6/7/21) complicates this narrative, which could be why Vindman doesn’t mention them.

    Democracy-washing

    Former foreign service officer Elizabeth Shackelford wrote in the Chicago Tribune (6/17/21) that “America today is arming up economically and diplomatically, as well as militarily, to take on not only a rising China but growing authoritarianism across the globe.” Despite professing a desire to “keep a hot war at bay,” Shackelford democracy-washed the US’s “arming up,” casting moves that increase the risk of war as standing up to repression.

    One of America’s more puzzling strategies to “take on . . . growing authoritarianism across the globe” is giving the Colombian government approximately $300 million per year, roughly half of which goes to country’s military and police, forces that appear to have killed at least 41 protesters in two weeks in May, and are accused of dozens of sexual assaults against demonstrators (Foreign Policy, 5/19/21).

    A Washington Post op-ed (6/17/21) from E.J. Dionne Jr. on the Biden/Putin meeting uncritically repeated US government talking points about its noble intentions. Dionne wrote of “the gulf between the thuggish habits of the Russian leader’s regime and Biden’s hopes for a world friendlier to democratic liberties.”

    Dionne saw no contradiction between Biden’s supposed ideals and his government’s policies, which include continuing to transfer arms to Israel (Wall Street Journal, 5/23/21) despite its use of such arms to kill 247 Palestinians—66 of them children—a people to whom Israel denies “democratic liberties”  (FAIR.org, 4/26/19).

    Human rights ‘their’ problem

    Vindman in the New York Times (6/16/21) wrote that what he

    found most reassuring were Mr. Biden’s statements that he would stand firm on defending democratic values, be critical of human rights violations, protect the free press and seek justice for American citizens wrongfully detained by the Russian government.

    Vindman appears only to be concerned with human rights violations inside Russia, and perhaps in nations where Russia has influence. Even though he lives in the United States, he evidently does not seek “reassuring” that Biden will seek to curb human rights violations that the United States carries out both inside and outside its borders. Yet, as FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Salon, 6/22/21) pointed out:

    There is no more precious human right than the right to be free from jail or prison. So it’s a human rights violation of epic proportions that the United States has more than 2 million people incarcerated, way more than any other country.

    There’s also the human right to not be shot to death by the police, but more than 5,000 American have died that way since 2015. These extrajudicial killings are also discriminatory: Black people are 140% and Latinx people 80% more likely to be killed by police violence than whites (Washington Post, 7/30/21).

    The US tortures migrant children (Pediatrics, 1/21). It executed 17 people last year, 22 the year before that, and has been the only country in the Americas to execute anybody for 12 years running.

    The US government, of course, also habitually curtails thousands of humans’ rights by invading their countries and killing them (Jacobin, 6/19/14; In These Times, 8/1/18, 8/18/20). Nothing in Vindman’s article betrayed a concern for such rights violations, which unlike anything that happens in Russia, his audience might actually be able to affect.

    Cold wars turn hot

    Helping to create a climate for a great power confrontation is not the only problem with the media inflaming new cold wars with China and Russia. While the US and the Soviet Union avoided a direct, full-scale military conflict with each other during the original Cold War, it was in that context that the US directly and indirectly killed millions in Korea, Southeast Asia, Central America and Africa. Already the present century’s US/Russia cold war is one dimension of the scorching wars in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. When corporate media advocate for the new cold wars, they are endorsing more slaughters like these.

     

    The post Media Applaud the New Cold Wars—but Could US Be More Aggressive, Please? appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Israel/Palestine Coverage Presents False Equivalency Between Occupied and Occupier

     

    WSJ: Israel Strikes Hamas Targets After Rockets Fired at Jerusalem

    The Wall Street Journal headline (5/10/21) presents the Gaza violence as a clear-cut case of aggression and retaliation.

    Media coverage of heightened violence in Israel/Palestine has misrepresented events in the Israeli government’s favor by suggesting that Israel is acting defensively, presenting a false equivalency between occupier and occupied, and burying information necessary to understand the scale of Israeli brutality.

    Corporate media have presented Israel’s killing spree as defensive, as a reaction to supposed Palestinian aggression. A Financial Times headline (5/10/21) read, “Hamas Rocket Attacks Provoke Israeli Retaliation in Gaza.” The New York Times’  description (5/12/21) was, “Hamas launched long-range rockets at Jerusalem on Monday evening, prompting Israel to respond with airstrikes.” An article in Newsweek (5/12/21) had it that “Hamas rained down rockets on Israeli civilian targets, and the Israeli military responded with surgical air strikes against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza.” A CNN headline (5/12/21) said, “At Least 35 Killed in Gaza as Israel Ramps Up Airstrikes in Response to Rocket Attacks.”

    The Wall Street Journal (5/12/21) ran the headline, “Hamas Attack on Israel Aims to Capitalize on Palestinian Frustration,” which makes it sound as if Israel were simply minding its own business and Hamas lashed out for no reason. The Journal reinforced this impression by describing Israel’s bombing of Gaza as merely a “response” to and a “counterstrike” against the rockets from Palestinian resistance factions.

    Imagine for a moment that the entire history of Israel/Palestine began on May 10. Even then, Hamas’ rocket fire was a follow through on its promise (Ynet, 5/10/21) to fire rockets in “response” to and “retaliation” against Israel if the latter didn’t remove its forces from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheik Jarrah, where Israel has been attempting to force Palestinians from their homes and repressing the resultant protests, and from the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which Israel had just raided during Ramadan, Islam’s holiest month (Jacobin, 5/14/21).

    More to the point is that Israel, and its forerunners in the Zionist movement, have been carrying out a war against Palestinians for over 100 years, so Israeli self-defense against Palestinians is a logical impossibility (Electronic Intifada, 7/26/18). As an occupying power, Israel does not have a legal right to claim self-defense against the people it occupies (Truthout, 5/14/21). Israel has been subjecting Gaza to a military siege for 12–14 years, depending on the metric one uses to determine the starting point, which has left the territory effectively unlivable (Jacobin, 3/31/20); a siege is an act of war, so the party enforcing it cannot claim to be acting defensively in response to anything that happened subsequent to the start of the blockade.

    ‘Both sides’ narrative

    NBC: Over 70 killed as Israel, Palestinians exchange worst violence in years — and prepare for more

    NBC News (5/12/21): “Both sides appear to be preparing for more violence.”

    Similarly, media have had a long-running tendency to amplify the view that violence across historic Palestine should be understood as roughly equivalent fighting on “both sides.” This remains a commonplace feature of the coverage, exemplified by NBC headline (5/12/21), “Over 70 Killed as Israel, Palestinians Exchange Worst Violence in Years.”

    A Washington Post editorial (5/11/21) was headlined “New Israeli/Palestinian Fighting Serves Political Agendas on Both Sides.” It said that “the worst conflict in years has erupted between the two peoples, with Palestinian missiles raining down on Israeli cities and airstrikes rocking the Gaza Strip.”

    A David Ignatius article in the Post (5/13/21) was headlined, “The Vicious Cycle Gets Worse for the Israelis and Palestinians.” The author wrote that Israelis and Palestinians “both” are “swept up yet again by the cycle of violence.”

    The word “clash” is frequently employed to avoid acknowledging that violence is overwhelmingly inflicted by one side on the other, as in headlines like Reuters‘ “Israeli Police, Palestinians Clash at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa, Scores Injured” (5/8/21). The headline gives no clue that 97% of the injuries were being suffered by Palestinians.

    The fatal flaw in the “both sides” narrative is that only the Israeli side has ethnically cleansed and turned millions on the Palestinians’ side into refugees by preventing them from exercising their right to return to their homes. Israel is the only side subjecting anyone to apartheid and military occupation. It is only the Palestinian side—including those living inside of what is presently called Israel—that has been made to live as second-class citizens in their own land. That’s to say nothing of the lopsided scale of the death, injury and damage to infrastructure that Palestinians have experienced as compared to Israelis, both during the present offensive and in the longer term.

    Amnesty International: End brutal repression of Palestinians protesting forced displacement in occupied East Jerusalem

    Amnesty International (5/10/21) declared unequivocally that “Israeli security forces have used repeated, unwarranted and excessive force against Palestinian protesters in occupied East Jerusalem.”

    The “both sides” approach, however, permeates the coverage. The New York Times (5/12/21) relied on a bogus symmetry between oppressor and oppressed, with Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley writing:

    For weeks, ethnic tensions had been rising in Jerusalem, the center of the conflict. In April, far-right Jews marched through the city center, chanting “Death to Arabs,” and mobs of both Jews and Arabs attacked each other.

    In contrast, Amnesty International (5/10/21) documented:

    “Evidence gathered by Amnesty International reveals a chilling pattern of Israeli forces using abusive and wanton force against largely peaceful Palestinian protesters in recent days. Some of those injured in the violence in East Jerusalem include bystanders or worshipers making Ramadan prayers,” said Saleh Higazi, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

    “The latest violence brings into sharp focus Israel’s sustained campaign to expand illegal Israeli settlements and step up forced evictions of Palestinian residents—such as those in Sheikh Jarrah—to make way for Israeli settlers. These forced evictions are part of a continuing pattern in Sheikh Jarrah, they flagrantly violate international law and would amount to war crimes.”

    Eyewitness testimonies—as well as videos and photographs taken by Amnesty International’s researchers on the ground in East Jerusalem—show how Israeli forces have repeatedly deployed disproportionate and unlawful force to disperse protesters during violent raids on Al-Aqsa mosque and carried out unprovoked attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah.

    The Wall Street Journal (5/12/21) presented the Israeli police as neutral peace keepers, obscuring power differentials between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel:

    Israel is also facing an internal conflict, as pro-Palestinian Arab residents clashed with their Jewish neighbors in mixed towns, prompting the government to bring in border police troops to quell riots.

    The reality is that Israeli police have violently assailed Palestinian demonstrators across Israel. That the Palestinians arrestees have been denied legal rights and necessary medical treatment is also omitted.

    Another Journal (5/12/21) article referred to “Palestinian anger over what they see as years of efforts to push them out of Jerusalem and limit their access to land they claim, as well as infringing on their basic rights.” Yet these views are not simply a matter of “what [Palestinians] see as” discrimination. As Human Rights Watch (5/11/21) noted:

    Nearly all Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem hold a conditional, revocable residency status, while Jewish Israelis in the same area are citizens with secure status. Palestinians live in densely populated enclaves that receive a fraction of the resources given to settlements and effectively cannot obtain building permits, while neighboring Israeli settlements built on expropriated Palestinian land flourish.

    Israeli officials have intentionally created this discriminatory system under which Jewish Israelis thrive at the expense of Palestinians. The government’s plan for the Jerusalem municipality, including both the west and occupied east parts of the city, sets the goal of “maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city” and even specifies the demographic ratios it hopes to maintain. This intent to dominate underlies Israel’s crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

    Presenting as debatable the indisputable fact that Palestinians in Jerusalem are denied “their basic rights” is a form of “both sides-ism,” taking incontrovertible factual information about the status of Palestinians in Jerusalem and reducing it to merely one of multiple possible narratives.

    Important facts left out

    I looked at Gaza coverage during the first four days of Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rocket fire, focusing on the databases of the five US newspapers with the highest circulation: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Crucial aspects of what is happening in Gaza have been severely underreported.

    For instance, Israel closed Kerem Shalom Crossing on May 10, “blocking the entrance of humanitarian aid and fuel destined for Gaza’s power plant” (Gisha, 5/12/21). Kerem Shalom is also Gaza’s main commercial crossing, which means that the closure will further devastate Gaza’s economy, already in ruin thanks to the Israeli siege. Between May 10 and May 13, the five newspapers published a combined 114 articles that refer to Gaza. Only two pointed out that Israel has tightened the siege during the bombing campaign. The New York Times (5/10/21) ran an article that noted that Israel “shut a key crossing between Gaza and Israel,” but said nothing about the consequences of doing so.

    WaPo: Israel’s military assault on Gaza threatens to worsen the pandemic in the enclave

    In the first four days of the assault on Gaza, this Washington Post article (5/13/21) was the only report in a major US newspaper that mentioned that the Israeli government had blocked humanitarian aid, including Covid vaccines, from entering the occupied territory.

    A Washington Post report (5/13/21) quoted Sasha Muench, Palestinian territories director for the US-based humanitarian group Mercy Corps:

    At the moment, no goods or people can enter Gaza because the border crossings are closed. This means no medical supplies, including vaccines, can enter…. In addition, no fuel to run the generators can enter, and Gaza authorities are warning of increased blackouts, including at hospitals, and potentially having no electricity in Gaza at all within a few days.

    The latter is the only one of the 114 articles that mentioned that Israel has been blocking the entrance of humanitarian aid even more so than before it began this round of violence against Gaza.

    On May 12, the Israeli human rights group Gisha noted that Israel is “banning all access to Gaza’s sea space, a cynical and punitive measure that harms fishermen’s livelihoods and food supply,” and that this move is a form of collective punishment that is illegal under international law. Restricting Palestinians’ food access is particularly egregious, given that 68.5% of Gaza residents are already food insecure.

    Collectively, the five newspapers ran 88 articles that mentioned Gaza between May 12 and 13. Just one mentioned anything about Israel barring access to the sea, a New York Times piece (5/10/21) that said Israel “barred fishermen from [Gaza] from going to sea,” but did not point out that there is already a major problem with food access in the Strip that Israel’s move is sure to worsen. In fact, zero of the 88 articles mention that there is widespread food insecurity in the territory that Israel is incinerating.

    Thus, the enthusiastic cheers for attacks on Palestinians, coming from, say, the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (5/13/21), are not the only form of media misdeeds against Palestinians. It’s the inversion of attacker and attacked, or the flattening of distinctions between the two. It’s the burying of information that clarifies the scope of Israeli criminality. Such approaches can confuse the public about the differences between those who fight for liberation and those who fight to snuff it out.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media’s Top Meaning for ‘Proxy’ Is ‘Iranian Ally’

     

    Foreign Policy: Iran's Proxy Threat Is the Real Problem Now

    Foreign Policy (1/10/20) depicts “Iran’s proxy threat” as “the real problem.”

    “Proxy,” defined as someone who works on someone else’s behalf, is a term of delegitimation in international politics: It undermines the credibility of both those who are accused of being “proxies” and those accused of having “proxies.” In the former case, the term suggests that the party in question is not representing its peoples’ interests, but rather those of an outside actor. The nation described as having proxies is implicitly accused of meddling in another country’s affairs.

    When I searched the databases of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post for the last ten years, I found that variations on the terms “America’s proxy,” “American proxy,” “United States’ proxy” and “US proxy” appeared a total of 183 times. In contrast, all forms of the term “Iranian proxy” were used a total of 798 times. In other words, Iran is said to use “proxies” more than four times as often as the United States, even though the US has a vastly larger global footprint than Iran. Thus, these outlets are downplaying the extent of US interference in other countries, while frequently portraying Iran as undercutting other peoples’ independence.

    Saudi Arabia and Yemen

    WaPo: Saudi Arabia is a partner, not an ally. Let’s stop the charade.

    A Washington Post column (3/4/21) debates whether Saudi Arabia is an “ally” or a “partner”–but “proxy” is not on the menu.

    A Washington Post column (3/4/21) by Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky, two long-time State Department employees, mentioned “Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.” The article is about the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, and at no point is the Saudi government described as America’s “proxy.”

    Yet there are grounds for applying the term. Rutgers University historian Toby C. Jones (Jacobin, 10/22/14) provides an overview of the trajectory of US/Saudi relations, writing:

    Although American political and corporate interests surrendered direct control of Saudi Arabia’s oil resources in the early 1980s, they were present in the eastern province, in and around Shiite communities, from the late 1930s through much of the 20th century.

    Fearful of politically mobilized Saudi labor in the mid twentieth century, the Arabian American Oil Company (which was known to employ CIA officials) coordinated closely with Saudi leaders from the 1940s until the 1970s in building a centralized, discriminatory political order that was anti-democratic, anti-labor, and that sought to create disciplined and docile bodies in a place where the al-Saud lacked much in the way of political legitimacy….

    American policymakers no longer think in terms of the interests of an American oil company that controls Saudi oil. But its practical and political economic interests have changed very little. Since the late 1970s, in fact, these connections have proliferated, most importantly through weapons sales and the entanglement of the American military/industrial complex with Saudi oil wealth. There is no greater engine for the recycling of Saudi and Gulf Arab petrodollars than massive and expensive weapons systems. These sales are largely justified in the language of security and by invoking regional threats like Saddam Hussein and whatever regime sits in Tehran. The reality, though, is that they are hugely profitable.

    While the United States is no longer dependent on importing Saudi oil the way that it once was, the State Department makes clear that it nevertheless regards Saudi reserves as critical, saying that “Saudi Arabia is the third leading source of imported oil for the United states, providing about half a million barrels per day of oil to the US market.”

    The department also emphasizes that oil is not the only reason the US thinks the Saudi government is useful, writing that

    Saudi Arabia’s unique role in the Arab and Islamic worlds, its holding of the world’s second largest reserves of oil, and its strategic location all play a role in the longstanding bilateral relationship between the Kingdom and the United States.

    It calls Saudi Arabia “a strong partner in security” and “in military, diplomatic and financial cooperation,” and says that the two countries work together in “counterterrorism efforts” (a rather dubious term for such operations).

    Furthermore, the State Department highlights the continued relevance of Jones’ point about “the entanglement of the American military/industrial complex with Saudi oil wealth,” noting that “Saudi Arabia is the United States’ largest foreign military sales (FMS) customer, with more than $100 billion in active FMS cases.”

    A sponsor/“proxy” arrangement typically involves a power asymmetry in which a weaker party is dependent on a stronger one. A Congressional Research Service report from March report is telling in this regard:

    The Al Saud have sought protection, advice, technology and armaments from the United States, along with support in developing their country’s natural and human resources and in facing national security threats. US leaders have praised Saudi cooperation in security and counterterrorism matters, and have sought to preserve the secure, apolitical flow of the kingdom’s energy resources and capital to global markets.

    Clearly, the state that seeks “protection,” as well as “support” in resource development, is in a subordinate relationship with the state they’re asking to provide these. My argument is not that there are never any tensions in the US/Saudi relationship, or that the Saudi government never has any leeway to chart its own course, but it is remarkable that, given how readily the word is employed in Iranian contexts, the sample I examined included no cases where Saudi Arabia was called a US “proxy.”

    This rhetorical choice obscures the degree of US complicity in Saudi Arabia’s internal crimes, which include “repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly,” according to Amnesty International:

    Among those harassed, arbitrarily detained, prosecuted and/or jailed were government critics, women’s rights activists, human rights defenders, relatives of activists, journalists, members of the Shi’a minority and online critics of government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Virtually all known Saudi Arabian human rights defenders inside the country were detained or imprisoned at the end of the year. Grossly unfair trials continued before the Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) and other courts. Courts resorted extensively to the death penalty and people were executed for a wide range of crimes. Migrant workers were even more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation because of the pandemic, and thousands were arbitrarily detained in dire conditions, leading to an unknown number of deaths.

    Crucially, referring to the Saudis as US “proxies” would make it unambiguous that the US, which has provided targeting assistance, weapons, logistics, training and intelligence sharing to the Saudis (In These Times, 2/4 /21), has direct responsibility for the war on Yemen that has killed nearly a quarter of a million people (The Nation, 3/27/21) and brought famine to the country (CNN, 3/11/21).

    NBC: Iran Uses Proxies to Punch Above Its Weight in Middle East, Experts Say

    NBC (5/24/19) suggests that it’s Iran’s “proxies”—and not the fact that it’s one of the largest Middle Eastern countries—that gives it a significant role in the Middle East.

    Perversely, Yemen’s Houthi movement is constantly decried as an Iranian “proxy.” The Wall Street Journal (9/9/19) asserted that “using the Houthis as its proxy, the Iranian regime has established a strategic outpost in war-torn Yemen.” Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times (11/29/20) that “the Saudis have been trying to [fight a shadow war] versus Iran’s proxies in Yemen.” The Washington Post (2/19/21) alleged that “Iranian proxies, such as the Houthis in Yemen, are not rewarding Biden’s more diplomatic approach with restraint.”

    Seeing the Houthis as mere Iranian “proxies” is an over-simplification and a misrepresentation. Political scientist Stacey Philbrick Yadav (Jadaliyya, 1/21/20) argued that the Houthis should be seen as Iran’s allies rather than its “proxies,” pointing out that

    the Houthi insurgency predates substantial Iranian involvement. It has existed as an armed movement since 2004, and developed out of a broader populist movement during the 1990s.

    Similarly, Vincent Durac of University College Dublin  (The Conversation, 9/19/19) said that

    while the Houthis have benefited from support from Iran, the suggestion that they constitute little more than an Iranian proxy is wide of the mark.

    There is limited evidence that Iran controls the Houthis’ strategy. The Houthis reportedly ignored Iranian advice not to take over Sanaa in 2014 and, while the Arab coalition spends between $5-6 billion each month on the war, Iran’s spending on the Yemen war has been estimated at little more than several million dollars each year.

     Syria and Lebanon

    Including Syria on the list of Iranian “proxies,” as Miller and Sokolsky did in the Washington Post, is commonplace. For instance, an article by Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal (3/1/21) cited “the military success of Iranian proxies” in countries such as “Iraq, Syria and Lebanon,” the type of “regional aggression” by Iran on which the Biden administration wants to place “restraints.”

    NYT: Iran Used the Hezbollah Model to Dominate Iraq and Syria

    Ranj Alaaldin (New York Times, 3/31/18) writes, “The Shiite proxies of Iran in Syria are motivated by the fear that the overthrow of the Assad regime would be an existential threat to the Shiite faith, a fear that Tehran encourages.” Or maybe they were worried about the threat of genocide from ISIS not because they’re “proxies,” but  because ISIS openly threatened genocide against Shia?

    A New York Times op-ed (3/31/18) by Ranj Alaaldin is a particularly revealing example of the chicanery that the word “proxy” allows. Alaaldin made seven references to Iranian “proxies” fighting on the government’s side in the Syrian civil war. He used their presence to argue that the US should continue to militarily occupy Syria for an unspecified period:

    Iranian allies will shape the future of the Syrian state and the political landscape of the whole Middle East. The United States can alter the course of events if it commits to staying in Syria, builds on the current deployment of American forces and nurtures long-term partnerships to ensure that the fate of Syria and the region is not left to Iran and its proxies.

    Alaaldin also wrote that

    The United States has failed to even establish red lines, let alone enforce them when it comes to both its own interests and those of its allies on the ground, as Syrians, Kurds, Arab Sunnis and Western-aligned Shiite factions in Iraq have found out.

    For Alaaldin, the US has allies, a term that evokes a partnership between co-equals, but Iran’s “allies” are also “proxies.” The only other way that groups fighting against the Syrian government were characterized in the article was as “Syrian rebel groups”: At no point in the piece is any Syrian faction called a “US proxy.”

    However, the New York Times (8/2/17) reported that in “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA,” more than $1 billion dollars over the four-year life of the operation, the US teamed up with Saudi Arabia and “armed and trained thousands of Syrian rebels” to fight the Syrian government. It is unclear what would make a group a “proxy,” if not receiving training and armaments from what sounds an awful lot like a sponsor.

    Alaaldin, Mead, and Miller and Sokolsky all mentioned Iranian “proxies” in Iraq. While each article presented Iranian influence in Iraq as a problem that needed to be solved, they said nothing to suggest that the presence of US troops in Iraq is problematic. That Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel US troops (NPR,  1/6/20) does not earn a mention from Miller and Sokolsky, or from Mead, whose articles were written after the vote, and they aren’t the only ones to make this omission (e.g., New York Times, 2/22/21; Washington Post, 3/3/21). Evidently, it’s not OK to have “proxies” in a country, but military occupation against the will of elected officials is just fine.

    VoA: Iran Proxies Appear Emboldened by US Drawdown Decision

    Voice of America (9/19/20) reported that “Iran proxies” in Iraq were “emboldened” by a US decision to withdraw some troops, as they called on the US to withdraw all its troops—as did the Iraqi legislature, but perhaps it’s full of “Iran proxies” too.

    Lebanon’s Hezbollah is routinely described as an Iranian “proxy.” Alaaldin’s thesis is that “Iranian proxies do not just turn up for battle, fight and return home. Hezbollah’s political prominence and ‘state within a state’ status in Lebanon was once the exception, but now it is a model that is being replicated by other militia groups” in other countries.

    Similarly, Miller and Sokolsky complain that Saudi Arabia has not been confrontational enough toward Iran and its partners such as Hezbollah, writing:

    The Saudis have talked a good game about countering Iran’s malign regional influence, but they have done relatively little to counter Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

    A Wall Street Journal (2/20/20) report by Benoit Faucon and Ian Talley described “internationally recognized terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas that act as Iran’s international proxies.”

    That view oversimplifies the Iran/Hezbollah partnership. Amal Saad, a Lebanese scholar and a leading authority on Hezbollah, found that

    Hezbollah’s expanding regional role and advanced military capabilities make it an invaluable strategic ally for Iran and has created a sense of mutual dependency whereby Iran has increasingly come to depend on Hezbollah’s regional clout and power; interdependence rather than subordination and control, defines the essence of this relationship.

    Saad went on to write:

    Hezbollah has in fact a vast degree of autonomy from Iran, as demonstrated by its indisputable role in mobilising support for the besieged Assad government and in persuading Iran to directly intervene. That Syria is now far more dependent on Hezbollah than the converse is testimony of Hezbollah’s rising status as a regional power, placing it on a par with Iran as a junior partner and ally, rather than a subordinate.

    By reducing the group to mere Iranian puppets, writers like Miller and Sokolsky, and Faucon and Talley, nurture the mistaken impression that Hezbollah is simply a tool of a foreign power with no popular base in Lebanon. This mystification serves to justify US sanctions against Hezbollah, and lends plausibility to the far-fetched claim that one could harm the organization without harming the Lebanese population (FAIR.org, 8/26/20), never mind the even shakier presumption that the US should do such a thing.

    Faucon and Talley are hardly the only ones to characterize both Hezbollah and Hamas as Iranian “proxies.” For example, a Washington Post article (9/11/15) praised Hilary Clinton for her promise of “cracking down on Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.” Just as the Iranian “proxy” label obscures the sense in which Hezbollah is an organic Lebanese force whose original raison d’etre was to fend off US/Israeli attacks, saying that Hamas is a mere Iranian “proxy” transforms a key branch of the Palestinian liberation movement into the plaything of an outside agitator. A struggle between colonizer and colonized is recast an international conflict between two states, Iran and Israel.

    Israel/Palestine

    The media sample that I’ve examined also leaves out the corollary to the Iranian “proxies” in Lebanon and Palestine, namely that there are ample grounds for calling Israel—a regular invader of the first and ethnic cleanser of the second—a US proxy. When one state gives another $3.3 billion a year in military aid, as the US does with Israel (In These Times, 9/20/16), it’s likely that the giver expects something in return.

    Israel has certainly rendered innumerable useful services to the US ruling class, many of which have taken place far from the lands that Israel controls, including helping the United States provide support to dictators like Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo (when it was still Zaïre), Jean-Bédel Bokassa of Centfural Republic, and the apartheid governments in Zimbabwe (when it was known as Rhodesia) and South Africa, despite international bans against doing so in the latter two cases. In Latin America, Israel acted as a US arms broker by selling weapons that, because of congressional legislation, the United States often could not sell directly to the murderous tyrannies in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua (In These Times, 1/8/19).

    That’s not to say that Israel has no capacity to act independently of the United States. However, in view of the dynamics I’ve laid out, it is curious that I found zero cases of the word “proxy” being used to characterize the US/Israeli relationship in the Times, Journal or Post in the last ten years. This reduces the likelihood of Israel being broadly seen as a pawn of the world’s sole superpower, and obfuscates the degree to which the US attempts to dominate the peoples of the Middle East by using Israel as one of its “cops on the beat” (along with the Shah’s Iran), in the words of Melvin Laird, Nixon’s Defense secretary.

    Bloomberg: How Iran Pursues Its Interests Via Proxies and Partners

    Bloomberg (1/5/20) presents an “asymmetric fight” between Iran’s “proxy fighters” and the “forces of the US and its allies.”

    Of the 183 references to America’s “proxies,” some use the term in the sense I’ve outlined: to describe the US leveraging political forces in countries where it is trying to assert its will.  For instance, in a New York Times column (5/30/14), Anand Gopal wrote about “predatory American-backed strongmen” in Afghanistan, and calls them “American proxies.” A Wall Street Journal piece (3/15/17) employed “American proxies” in its account of the US war ostensibly aimed at defeating ISIS. David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post (8/30/16) that “American proxies were fighting each other” in Syria. In another Post article (7/21/17), Michael Gerson lamented what he saw as “the ignoble cutoff of aid to American proxies” in Syria, part of what the author dubiously described as “Trump’s breathtaking surrender to Russia.”

    However, many of those 183 are not examples of “proxies” being used in the manner on which this article focuses. The New York Times (12/30/20), for instance, said that “Beijing is not known to provide substantial support to anti-American proxies in combat zones like Afghanistan.” An entry on the Times’ blog (7/8/13) noted that “Institutional Shareholder Services, the biggest American proxy advisory firm, recommended that Dell investors accept the $13.65-a-share offer made by Mr. Dell and the investment firm Silver Lake.” A Washington Post (10/31/19) article mentioned how the early 20th century author and lawyer Adolf Berle “saw in the public corporation the American proxy for the European welfare state.” The Wall Street Journal (2/21/14) wrote about how, during World War I, “The Germans, through an American proxy, established a plant in Connecticut that tried to purchase the ingredients for explosives, in order to deny them to factories manufacturing bullets and shells for the Allies.”

    Media outlets use the word “proxy” unevenly, applying it far more frequently to Iran and its partners than to the US and its partners, with no sound basis for doing so. Through this practice, Iran and its allies are portrayed as interlopers and flunkies, while the US and its associates are represented as peers in a consensual relationship. In this regard, “proxy” functions as a propaganda term for corporate media that vilifies enemies while either disguising or sanitizing the US empire.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Purging Inconvenient Facts in Coverage of Biden’s ‘First’ Air Attacks

     

    NBC: Biden orders airstrikes in Syria, retaliating against Iran-backed militias

    NBC‘s headline (2/26/21) is more confident than the article it accompanies, which says that “Iranian-backed militias were most likely behind the attack the US said it was “retaliating against.”

    When the Biden administration bombed Syria on February 25, the attack killed “at least 22,” most of them members of Iraqi militias, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring organization opposed to the Syrian government. The US said the bombing was retaliation for three rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq that it claims were carried out by groups allied with Iran (NBC, 2/25/21). In one of the attacks, rockets fired at Erbil airport killed a military contractor and an Iraqi civilian.

    The US does not say that its airstrike on Syria was aimed at the group that carried out the Erbil attack, which, as the New York Times (2/26/21) reported,

    was claimed by a previously unknown armed group calling itself the Guardians of the Blood. United States officials said it appeared to be affiliated with one or more of Iraq’s better-known militias, and Thursday’s strikes in Syria targeted facilities belonging to them.

    Furthermore, the site that the US bombed in Syria “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” (CNN, 2/25/21).

    A New York Times (2/25/21) report from Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt ran with the headline, “US Airstrikes in Syria Target Iran-Backed Militias That Rocketed American Troops in Iraq.” However, the 11th paragraph of the article said that “little is known about” Guardians of the Blood, “including whether it is backed by Iran or related to the organizations that used the facilities the American airstrikes targeted on Thursday.”

    Manufactured amnesia

    The less clear the US population is about the frequency and scale of murderous violence its government carries out, the easier it is for the US ruling class to go about its wars. Fortunately for the US state, corporate media help manufacture collective amnesia by expunging US aggression from the record.

    CNN’s Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann and Nicole Gaouette (2/25/21) said the February 25 airstrikes “mark the US military’s first known action under President Joe Biden,” while their colleague Fareed Zakaria (GPS, 2/28/21) had a segment about them called “Biden’s First Military Action.” Christian Science Monitor (3/2/21) ran an editorial called “Biden’s First Use of Force Overseas.”

    NYT: U.S. Airstrike Kills Top ISIS Leader in Iraq

    This New York Times story (1/29/21), less than a month old, was completely forgotten by Pentagon reporters who called the February 25 Syria strike “the US military’s first known action under President Joe Biden” (CNN, 2/25/21).

    Yet not even a month before Biden bombed Syria, the US carried out an airstrike in Iraq that it said killed ISIS commander Jabbar Salman Ali Farhan al-Issawi and nine other ISIS fighters (New York Times, 1/29/21). Furthermore, Airwars, a nonprofit monitoring group affiliated with the University of London, suspects the US of carrying out or helping to carry out four bombings in Somalia in the period between Biden’s inauguration and the attack on Syria, killing 2–4 people in one case and 6–12 on two other occasions. The US military stopped disclosing its airstrikes in Afghanistan last year, but it is unlikely that military operations in the US’s longest overseas war came to a halt when Biden took office.

    Purging inconvenient facts is another way of producing mass forgetfulness and confusion.

    A Times article (2/26/21) by Ben Hubbard and Jane Arraf said that the US “targeted members of the Iran-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and an affiliated group, the Guardians of the Blood,” and that Kataib Hezbollah has “repeated calls for the Iraqi government to expel US forces.” Based on this phrasing, readers could be forgiven for concluding that Kataib Hezbollah is the sole source of the demand that the US leave the country, and at no point do the authors mention that the Iraqi parliament voted to oust US forces more than a year ago (NPR, 1/6/20). Evidently Cooper and Schmitt decided that the presence of US troops in Iraq against the express will of the Iraqi legislature is not relevant context for understanding events that include rocket fire at those troops’ bases.

    Flying colors

    WaPo: Biden actually has a strategy for the Middle East, not just a Twitter account

    Max Boot (Washington Post, 2/26/21): “So far [Biden] is passing his early tests with flying colors.”

    To praise Biden’s killings, corporate media pretended the US was fighting back against a bully. Max Boot of the Washington Post (2/26/21), writing that Biden “is passing his early tests with flying colors” and “is off to an excellent start,” claimed that “if Biden did nothing in response to the latest Iranian provocations, he would have risked sending a message of weakness that would have further emboldened Tehran.” In Boot’s opinion,  “Biden ordered the right response: an airstrike on a Syrian base used by Iranian-backed militias.” He praised Biden for negotiating with Iran while simultaneously “engaging in a policy of active containment and deterrence to curb Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region,” which he characterized as “regional aggression.” (The Times‘ February 26 piece used similar language, writing that the prospect of a new nuclear deal with Iran is overshadowed by “the issue of Iran’s destabilizing activities across the Middle East.”)

    Forget for a moment that no evidence has been provided that Iran was actually behind the relevant rocket attacks: Boot apparently doesn’t think he even has to say what “Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region” are, nor where its “regional aggression” takes place, let alone offer any proof for these claims. The US murdered an Iranian general who was revered in his country (FAIR.org, 1/21/20), invaded Iraq and causing the death of upward of 1 million people (Jacobin, 6/19/14), resupplied Israel with weaponry (Al Jazeera, 7/31/14) as it slaughtered more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, played a central role in a war that has made Yemen home to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis (Middle East Eye, 11/17/17): For Boot, evidently, nothing on this nonexhaustive list of recent US crimes in the Middle East constitutes “regional aggression” or “destabilizing activities in the region” that need “active containment and deterrence.”

    Boot was hardly the only journalist who rationalized the American bombing by portraying the US as acting defensively. The Post‘s Jennifer Rubin (2/28/21) said Biden had “responded forcefully” to “Iranian proxy attacks,” and thereby sent an “important…signal to Iran that the new administration will not look the other way on Tehran’s regional conduct simply to encourage discussion about” Iran’s nuclear power program.

    Cooper and Schmitt (New York Times, 2/25/21) noted that the US dropped “seven 500-pound bombs” on Syria, and described this as Biden taking “a more measured response to the rocket fusillade in Erbil than Mr. Trump’s pitched campaign against Iran and past actions of its proxies in Iraq.”

    Set aside the absurdity of calling dropping nearly two tons of bombs “measured”; set aside the lack of evidence of Iranian responsibility for the deaths at Erbil; set aside that the US doesn’t claim that it bombed the parties that fired the rockets that killed the contractor and the Iraqi civilian in Erbil, and assume for the sake of argument that Iran is behind those acts.

    If that’s the case, Rubin, Cooper and Schmitt leave readers guessing as to how many people in the United States, or an allied country, the authors believe Iran is permitted to kill as part of a “measured response” to send an “important…signal” to the US that it must lift sanctions on Iran that are “targeting basic foodstuffs [and] lifesaving medicines” (Jadaliyya, 12/3/19) and killing cancer patients  (Foreign Policy, 8/14/19). Rubin, Cooper and Schmitt are equally unclear as to what body count Iran may inflict, and how many thousands of pounds of bombs it may use, in a “measured response” to send an “important . . signal” to the American government that it has to stop its Israeli proxy from killing people who are seen as “national hero[es]” in Iran, as Israel did three months ago when it murdered Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (New York Times, 11/29/20).

    The pretense that the US defended itself by carrying out last week’s airstrikes also necessitates glossing over the fact that the country Washington actually bombed, Syria, is accused of neither sponsoring nor carrying out the rocket attacks on American bases in Iraq that should not be there in the first place. The articles I’ve examined all acknowledge that the US airstrikes hit Syria, but it’s remarkable how little attention they pay to the country, especially considering that the bombing was aimed at groups allied with the Syrian government in that country’s war, so the attack amounts to an intervention on behalf of anti-government forces there. Had the coverage paid more notice to how Biden’s bombing was carried out against a country that the US has helped to decimate (FAIR.org, 3/7/18; Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17), despite Syria not attacking or threatening to attack the US, the narrative that Biden was merely conducting a “response” to bad actors would have been that much more obviously threadbare.

    Securing consent for running a lethal, worldwide empire requires unremitting propaganda: Redacting the historical record and playing the victim are two useful strategies.

    Featured image: CNN‘s Oren Liebermann, Don Lemon and Arwa Damon (2/26/21) discussing what were not, in fact, the “first known strikes under President Biden.”

    This post was originally published on FAIR.