FCC chair Brendan Carr (Bloomberg, 7/24/25) enthused about Skydance‘s promises: “They’ve committed to addressing bias issues. They’ve committed to embracing fact-based journalism.”
The media production company Skydance is acquiring Paramount Global. The deal may be thought largely to be an entertainment merger, as Paramount owns Comedy Central, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Showtime and the Paramount film studio. But Paramount owns broadcast network CBS and its news programming, which means that the deal has enormous implications for journalism—particularly given that it requires federal approval.
The coast certainly seems clear for the merger at this point: Paramount has settled what is widely regarded as a frivolous lawsuit from President Donald Trump for $16 million over a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; it has also canceled its highly successful and long-running Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host was critical of the settlement. Meanwhile, Paramount‘s soon-to-be-owner has met with “anti-woke” crusader Bari Weiss about a potential partnership with CBS.
Trump has used his institutional power to attack media he dislikes such as ABC and CBS, as well as to defund liberal-leaning public broadcasters NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; Variety, 7/18/25; USA Today, 7/18/25). Late last year, Disney settled a similarly ludicrous Trump lawsuit over ABC‘s election coverage (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).
Trump has also used his power to take control of government broadcaster Voice of America, once a Cold War propaganda tool for US power projection abroad, and fill it with content from One America News Network (AP, 5/7/25), a pro-Trump outlet FAIR founder Jeff Cohen once said “makes Fox News sound like Democracy Now!” (FAIR.org, 10/15/21).
The latest moves from CBS‘s owners mark the latest seismic shift to the right in the US media landscape.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism” (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25).
The lawsuit that Paramount settled to pave the way for the deal preposterously claimed that an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the CBS show 60 Minutes was deceptively edited to favor her over Trump (BBC, 7/2/25). Anyone who cares about journalism or media freedom would have rooted for Paramount and CBS to fight the lawsuit, but Paramount‘s leading stockholder, Shari Redstone, apparently saw the settlement as a small price to keep Trump’s Federal Communications Commission from standing in the way of the lucrative sale. (Trump claims that the combined company has also agreed to air $16 million more in PSAs, described as messages that will “support conservative causes supported by President Trump,” as part of the settlement, though Paramount denies such a side agreement exists—Variety, 7/4/25).
The settlement has been “broadly criticized as capitulation” by CBS staffers (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25). Reuters (7/2/25) reported that one 60 Minutes source said
newsroom staff expressed ‘widespread distress’ about the settlement and concerns about the future of the CBS News prime time news magazine and its hard-hitting brand of journalism.
A filing with the FCC (Deadline, 7/18/25) suggested that an upcoming shift in CBS’s news coverage was part of the deal to get the acquisition approved. It said that Skydance and FCC officials had “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”
Presumably those “varied ideological perspectives” will not include those offensive to Trump, since airing those resulted in Paramount paying a multi-million-dollar settlement. As I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), FCC chair Brendan Carr is a lieutenant in the MAGA movement, and wrote the FCC section for Project 2025, the right-wing policy roadmap for the second Trump administration. While vowing to reduce regulation, he has shown no qualms about using state power to impose ideological limits on broadcast news.
Paramount also promised to install an ombud who would investigate “any complaints of bias or other concerns” at CBS News, and to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs (Wrap, 7/23/25).
Mother Jones‘ Inae Oh (7/18/25) wrote that “the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide.”
As the deal approached, it became clear that CBS’s ability to operate as a fair news provider was slipping, as Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, “announced his resignation, saying he can no longer make independent journalism decisions for the program” (NPR, 4/23/25). With Colbert’s termination, it’s unclear whether any part of the new Skydance empire will escape ideological purification.
CBS‘s announcement that it would cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been read as a muzzling of a prominent critic, not just of Trump, but of the Paramount settlement. The Writers Guild of America East (7/18/25) spelled out the authoritarian moment plainly:
On July 15, during a regular show of the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Colbert went on-air and called the settlement a “big fat bribe” in exchange for a favorable decision on the proposed merger between Paramount and Skydance, a charge currently under investigation in California.
Less than 48 hours later, on July 17, Paramount canceled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a show currently performing first in its timeslot, giving vague references to the program’s “financial performance” as the only explanation. For ten years, the show has been one of the most successful, beloved and profitable programs on CBS, entertaining an audience of millions on late night television, on streaming services and across social media.
Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that the Late Show’s cancellation is a bribe, sacrificing free speech to curry favor with the Trump administration as the company looks for merger approval.
In its first new episode in over a year, the Comedy Central flagship animated comedy South Park (7/23/25), often embraced by conservatives for its eagerness to offend liberals, attacked both Trump and the channel’s owner Paramount. In its raunchy style, USA Today (7/24/25) reported, it “referenced everything from the company’s controversial settlement with the president to its shock decision to cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had previously commented on X (7/2/25), “This merger is a shitshow and it’s fucking up South Park.” It remains to be seen whether the thin-skinned Trump White House will hold up the acquisition in retaliation for the satire.
Skydance‘s David Ellison “is said to be interested in infusing [Bari] Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News” (CNN, 7/11/25).
For those who are unfamiliar with Weiss, she is a former New York Times editor and writer who gained fame for attacking “wokeness” (Commentary, 11/21)—which for the right is any politics that seeks to address racial and gender inequalities—and her advocacy for Israel and against critics of its government (Intercept, 3/8/18).
While David Ellison donated to former President Joe Biden’s reelection efforts (CNBC, 4/16/24) and other Democratic campaigns, the political commitments of his father Larry Ellison may be more relevant. Larry is the co-founder of the software giant Oracle and, according to the Forbes 400 list, the fourth-richest person in the United States, behind Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos and X‘s Elon Musk. As the New York Times (4/2/25) noted, Larry “is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David, to buy Paramount.”
The elder Ellison is well-known for his contributions to conservative causes (Vox, 2/12/20; Washington Post, 5/20/22). He gave $4 million to a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio’s presidential bid (Politico, 2/20/16), and $15 million to one backing Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) (Politico, 2/19/22).
Slate (9/14/20) called Oracle the “Trump Administration’s Favorite Tech Company,” as evidenced by the fact that Trump picked Oracle to potentially “partner” with TikTok, giving the Chinese-owned social media company a reliable ideological watchdog in order to avoid a congressionally mandated ban (FAIR.org, 12/6/24).
A Jerusalem Post article (7/31/24) “written in cooperation with SkyDance”—that is, an advertorial—touted the young executives at Skydance and Paramount as “connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.”
One thing the Ellisons agree on is wholehearted support for Zionism. In 2017, Larry Ellison gave $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/5/17). Two years ago, the Hollywood Reporter (10/13/23) reported that “Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, has committed $1 million to humanitarian relief efforts in Israel” in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. It quoted the company:
Skydance stands with Israel, strongly condemns the attacks against its citizens, is donating support to the victims of this tragic act of terrorism, and prays for the safe release of innocents hostages.
Last year, the Jerusalem Post (7/31/24) ran a story “written in cooperation with SkyDance” that highlighted support for Israel by David Ellison and Redstone’s son, “Brandon Korff, heir to the Paramount empire.” The article quoted a “source familiar with the details” who described Ellison and Korff sharing “Zionist values” and noted that “both quietly donate quite a bit to the state of Israel and the IDF.”
Redstone herself has been an outspoken Zionist during her time at the head of Paramount; when CBS admonished host Tony Dokoupil for his hostile interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which Dokoupil suggested that Coates was an “extremist” on Palestine, Redstone publicly criticized network management (LA Times, 10/9/24).
Given the talks with Weiss and the Free Press, one might expect CBS coverage to skew even further to the right on the Middle East, as well as on the Trump’s administration effort to clamp down on critical speech against Israel’s genocide and its support from the US. While Weiss’s brand is all about free speech, she got her start in politics agitating for the censorship of professors with pro-Palestinian views (Jewish Currents, 7/23/20).
Featured image: The 60 Minutes interview (10/7/25) that CBS is paying Donald Trump $16 million for airing.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found last week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines.
A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – all pushed for months by the Israel lobby, and amplified by the British establishment media – were dismissed one after the other by Peter Johnston, director of the editorial complaints and review body that reports to the BBC director general.
Not that you would know any of this from the eagerness of BBC executives to continue apologising profusely for the failings the corporation had just been cleared of. It almost sounded as if they wanted to be found guilty.
The row is now set to drag on for many months more after Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, announced it too would investigate the programme.
All of this is exactly what the Israel lobby and the billionaire-owned media had hoped for.
The aim of manufacturing this protracted storm in a teacup was twofold.
First, the furore was designed to distract from what the documentary actually showed: the horrors facing children in Gaza as they have had to navigate a tiny strip of land in which Israel has trapped them, bombed their homes, levelled their schools, exposed them to relentless carnage for 21 months, destroyed the hospitals they will need in time of trouble, and is starving them and their loved ones.
Second, it was intended to browbeat the BBC into adopting an even more craven posture towards Israel than it had already. If it was reluctant before to give Palestinians a voice, now it will avoid doing so at all costs.
True to form, executives hurriedly removed How to Survive a Warzone from its iPlayer catch-up service the moment the lobby went into action.
The BBC’s ever greater spinelessness has real-world, and dangerous, consequences.
Israel will feel even freer to intensify what the International Court of Justice already suspected back in January 2024 was a genocide and what leading genocide and Holocaust scholars have subsequently concluded is a genocide.
There will be even less pressure on the British government to stop partnering Israel in its genocide by supplying weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover.
The enduring row will also hand a bigger stick to Rupert Murdoch and other media moguls with which to beat the BBC, making it cower even further.
Signs of the BBC’s defensiveness were already all too evident. While it was waiting for the Johnston report, the corporation ditched a separate documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, on Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and murder of some 1,600 health workers.
It has since been shown by Channel 4.
The BBC argued that – even though this second programme had repeatedly passed its editorial checks – airing it risked contributing to a “perception of partiality”.
What that bit of BBC gobbledygook actually meant was that the problem was not “partiality”. It was the perception of it by vested interests – Israel, its apologists, the Starmer government and the British corporate media – who demand skewed BBC coverage of Gaza so that Israel can carry on with a genocide the British establishment is utterly complicit in.
In other words, truth and accuracy be damned. This is about Israel – and the Starmer government – dictating to the BBC the terms of what can be said about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Which brings us back to the Johnston report. The only significant finding against the BBC was on a single issue in its documentary on Gaza’s children, How to Survive a Warzone.
The film had not disclosed that its 13-year narrator was the son of an official in Gaza’s Hamas-run government.
Even in the current febrile atmosphere, Johnston found no grounds to uphold the manifold accusations of a breach by the BBC of impartiality rules. Nothing in the film, he concluded, was unfair to Israel.
Instead, he stated that it was a breach of “full transparency” not to have divulged the child-narrator’s tenuous connection to Hamas through his father’s governmental work.
Paradoxically, the BBC’s coverage of Johnston’s findings has been far more inaccurate about the child-narrator than the original documentary. But there has been no uproar because this particular inaccuracy from the BBC squarely benefits Israel.
On the News at Ten last week, reporting on the Johnston report, presenter Reeta Chakrabati claimed that the film’s narrator was “the son of an official in the militant group Hamas.”
He is nothing of the sort. He is the son of a scientist who directed agricultural policy in Gaza’s government, which is run by Hamas.
There is zero evidence that Ayman Alyazouri was ever a member of the militant wing of Hamas. He doesn’t even appear to have been a member of its political wing.
In fact, since 2018 Israel had set up a system to vet most officials in Gaza like Alyazouri to ensure they were not linked to Hamas before they were able to receive salaries funded by Qatar.
Johnston himself concedes as much, noting that the programme makers failed to inform the BBC of 13-year-old Abdullah’s background because their checks showed Alyazouri was a civilian technocrat in the government, not involved in its military or political arms.
The team’s only failing was an astounding ignorance of how the Israel lobby operates and how ready the BBC is to cave in to its pressure tactics.
In reality, Johnston’s finding against the BBC was over little more than an editorial technicality, one intentionally blown up into a major scandal.
Johnston himself gave the game away when he noted in his executive summary the need for “full transparency” when the BBC makes programmes “in such a contested setting”.
In other words, special, much stricter editorial rules apply when the corporation intends to make programmes likely to upset Israel.
From now on, that will mean that, in practice, such programmes are not made at all.
The double standard is glaring. The BBC aired a documentary last year, Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, offering eyewitness testimony from Israeli survivors of 7 October 2023 at the Nova music festival, where hundreds of Israelis were killed during Hamas’ one-day break-out from Gaza.
Did the BBC insist that the backgrounds of the Israelis interviewed were checked and disclosed to the audience as part of the broadcast? Were viewers told whether festivalgoers had served in the Israeli military, which for decades has been enforcing an illegal occupation and a system of apartheid over Palestinians, according to a ruling last year by the world’s highest court?
And what would it have indicated to audiences had the BBC included such contextual information about its Israeli eyewitnesses? That their testimonies had less validity? That they could not be trusted?
If it was not necessary to include such background details for Israeli eyewitnesses, why is it more important to do so for a 13-year-old Palestinian?
And even more to the point, if the BBC needs to give details of 13-year-old Abdullah Alyazouri’s background before he can be allowed to read a script written by the programme makers, why is the BBC not also required to give important background about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he appears in reports: such as that he is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
Exactly how trustworthy a narrator of events in the devastated enclave does the BBC consider Netanyahu to be that it does not think this context needs including?
The gain from this manufactured row for the Israel lobby – and for a Starmer government desperate to silence criticism of its complicity in genocide – were set out in stark detail last week by the makers of the second documentary, about Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector.
In an article in the Observer newspaper, they recounted a series of startling admissions and demands from BBC executives made in script meetings.
The corporation insisted that Doctors Under Attack could not be aired so long as the award-winning investigative reporter leading the programme, Ramita Navai, was given top billing. They demanded that she be downgraded to a mere “contributor” – her role effectively disappeared – because she had supposedly made “one-sided” social media posts criticising Israel for breaking international law.
She was considered unacceptable, according to the BBC, because she had not been “supportive enough of the other side”: that is, of Israel and its military carrying out systematic war crimes by destroying Gaza’s hospitals, as documented in great detail in her film.
In a statement to Middle East Eye on its decision to shelve the documentary, the BBC spokesperson stated that, after Navai appeared on its Today radio programme and “called Israel a ‘rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians’, it was impossible for the BBC to broadcast the material without risking our impartiality.
“The BBC holds itself to the highest standards of impartiality and it would never be acceptable for any BBC journalist to express a personal opinion in this way. We believe this is one of the reasons we’re the world’s most trusted news provider. We were left with no choice but to walk away.”
Seen another way, offering apologias for genocide, as the BBC has been doing for the past 21 months, is apparently a requirement before the corporation is willing to give journalists a platform to criticise Israel.
Also revealing is who the state broadcaster looks to when deciding how to apply its editorial standards.
BBC executives told the film-makers they should not reference the United Nations or Amnesty International because they were supposedly not “trusted independent organisations”.
Meanwhile, the corporation openly and obsessively worried to the film-makers about what fanatically pro-Israel lobbyists – such as social media activist David Collier and Camera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organisation – would say about their film on Gaza.
The team were told BBC News executives were “very jumpy and paranoid” about coverage of Gaza.
This follows a long and dishonorable tradition at the state broadcaster. In their 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, media scholars Greg Philo and Mike Berry reported a BBC producer telling them: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”
If you had been wondering why the BBC has been reflexively both-sidesing a genocide, here is a large part of the answer.
A damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring last month analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.
It found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices”.
These included the BBC running over 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians; interviewing more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians; asking 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas but asking no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools; and shutting down more than 100 interviewers who tried to refer to events in Gaza as a genocide.
Only 0.5% of BBC articles provided any context for what was happening before 7 October 2023: that Israel had been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories for decades and besieging the enclave for 17 years.
Similarly, the BBC has barely reported the endless stream of genocidal statements from Israeli political and military leaders – a crucial ingredient in legally determining whether military actions constitute genocide.
Nor has it mentioned other vital context: such as Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive on 7 October 2023, licensing it to kill its own citizens to prevent them being taken captive; or its military’s long-established Dahiya doctrine, in which the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure – and with it, the likelihood of slaughtering civilians – is viewed as an effective way to deter resistance to its aggressions.
In the specified time period, the BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russian ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.
Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered”.
None of these were editorial slip-ups. They were part of a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour – a clear breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines and one that has created a permissive environment for genocide.
Journalists at the BBC are known to be in revolt. More than 100 signed a letter – anonymously for fear of reprisals – condemning the decision to censor the documentary Doctors under Attack. They said it reflected a mix of “fear” and “anti-Palestinian racism” at the corporation.
The BBC told MEE: “Robust discussions amongst our editorial teams about our journalism are an essential part of the editorial process. We have ongoing discussions about coverage and listen to feedback from staff, and we think these conversations are best had internally.”
The journalists, it seems, would prefer that these discussions are had out in the open. They wrote: “As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government’s involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications. These stories have instead been broken by the BBC’s competitors.”
And they added: “All too often it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military.”
They could have added, even more pertinently, that in the process the BBC has been doing PR for the British establishment too.
A former BBC press officer, Ben Murray, last week gave broader context to the meaning of the corporation’s famed editorial “impartiality”. His role, he wrote, had been a rearguard one to placate the Times, Telegraph, Sun, and most of all, the Daily Mail.
Those establishment outlets are owned by corporations and billionaires heavily invested in the very oil, “defence” and tech industries Israel is central to lubricating.
BBC executives, Murray noted, “were rightfully fearful of these publications’ influence, and often reacted in ways to appease them. Their task was to protect the BBC’s funding model, and by extension, their prestigious jobs and generous salaries.”
None of this went against the grain. As Murray pointed out, most senior BBC staff enjoyed private educations, have Oxbridge degrees, and have been “fast-tracked up the corporate ladder”. They see their job as being “to reinforce and maintain establishment viewpoints”.
If this weren’t enough, senior BBC staff also have to look over their shoulders to the British government, which sets the corporation’s funding through the TV licence fee.
The government, no less than the BBC, needs to keep its main constituencies happy.
No, not voters. Ministers, keen for favourable coverage, similarly dare not antagonise Israel-aligned media moguls. And equally they cannot afford to alienate powerful US administrations that pledge an undying, unshakeable bond to Israel as it projects western power into the oil-rich Middle East.
Which is precisely why Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, was only too keen to jump on the Daily Mail bandwagon in calling for heads to roll at the BBC over the supposed “failings” in its Gaza coverage.
“It makes me angry on behalf of the BBC staff and the whole creative industries in this country,” she said, apparently oblivious to the fact that many BBC journalists’ fury is not over the confected scandals generated by the Israel lobby and billionaire-owned media.
They are appalled at the corporation’s refusal to hold Israel or Nandy’s own government accountable for the genocide in Gaza.
In such circumstances, the BBC’s professed commitment to “impartiality” serves as nothing more than a smokescreen.
In reality, the corporation acts as an echo chamber, amplifying and legitimising the interests of media tycoons, the British government and the Washington consensus, however much they flout the foundational principles of international law, human rights and basic decency.
Anybody who stands outside that circle of influence – such as the Palestinians and their supporters, anti-genocide activists, human rights advocates, and increasingly the UN and its legal organs, such as the International Criminal Court – is assumed by the BBC to be suspect.
Such voices are likely to be marginalised, silenced or vilified.
The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room of American politics is the existence of a pedophilic blackmail network that involves some of the most powerful people in the country and the world. Despite efforts to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which saw the trafficking and sexual exploitation of thousands of children, justice continues to be evaded and the cabal associated with Epstein — President Donald Trump notwithstanding — continues its conspiracy.
Nick Bryant is a journalist and author who first published Epstein’s infamous “black book” in 2015 as well as Epstein’s flight logs.
The post Chris Hedges Report: Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump And Sexual Blackmail Networks appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Berlin, July 18, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by a bill under consideration in the Russian State Duma that would introduce fines for accessing or searching for “extremist” online content, threatening to further restrict press freedom and access to information.
The bill, which passed its second reading on July 17, 2025, is the “most serious step in censorship and the fight against dissent since 2022,” when lawmakers introduced penalties of up to 15 years in prison for disseminating “fake” news about the Russian army, according to the online independent news outlet The Bell. If lawmakers pass the bill and President Vladimir Putin signs it into law, it would take effect on September 1.
“Punishing people for seeking information online is a direct barrier to the free flow of information and an assault on access to independent news,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Senior Researcher Anna Brakha. “This vaguely worded, fast-tracked bill shows a clear disregard for open debate and create an even more repressive environment for the media and the public.”
The bill provides for fines from 3,000 to 5,000 rubles (USD$38 to USD$64) for accessing or searching content that is either included in Russia’s federal list of extremist materials or that calls for or justifies extremist activities.
Russian authorities maintain a list of over 5,400 banned “extremist” materials, including books, religious texts, songs, and films. To date, while independent media have been widely branded as undesirable and foreign agents, none have been labeled as extremist.
“Nothing prevents the authorities from declaring media outlets ‘extremists’ — which will allow them to effectively ban reading such publications,” independent media outlet Meduza said, calling the bill a step toward the “criminalization of reading.”
A representative from digital rights group Setevye Svobody, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, told CPJ he expects “the most massive example of chilling effect in the history” of the Russian internet.
Fines for reading online articles featuring so-called extremist content “will make tens of millions of users prefer to unsubscribe from the channels and stop visiting sites with information of any unofficial nature,” the representative said.
CPJ emailed the State Duma’s press service but did not immediately receive a reply.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
New Delhi, July 10, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for greater transparency and due process in how Indian authorities handle social media restrictions, following reports of the temporary block of multiple international news organizations’ X accounts over the weekend. X accused the Indian government of censoring the press.
“This incident once again underscores the serious lack of transparency and accountability in how the Indian government issues and enforces orders for the removal of social media content and the blocking of accounts,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative. “Any action affecting journalists or news organizations must be based on clear legal grounds, be subject to independent judicial oversight, and not infringe on press freedom. India still lacks a credible mechanism to review or challenge these opaque and arbitrary orders.”
On July 5, two of Reuters’ handles, @Reuters and @ReutersWorld, were blocked, with X saying the accounts were obstructed “due to legal demands.” Several reports also suggest that accounts of Turkish broadcaster TRT World and the Chinese state media outlet Global Times were censored. The accounts were restored the next day. A government official speaking on condition of anonymity told CPJ that the authorities had not issued any orders to block the accounts and that they were engaging with X to get them restored.
However, in a July 8 post, X countered the Indian claim and said that on July 3, the Indian authorities had ordered the platform to block 2,355 accounts. X also expressed concerns about “ongoing press censorship in India due to these blocking orders.” X has already sued the Indian government over a new official portal that it says grants “countless” government officials expanded powers to issue takedown orders.
The Indian government denied issuing any recent blocking order against Reuters and others and said the accounts were unintentionally restricted due to a previously issued directive that was part of broader digital enforcement measuresimplemented in the wake of heightened national security concerns.
Authorities said they’d asked X to restore access immediately and blamed a 21-hour delay on the platform for the continued impediment.
In May 2025, X expressed concern about the Indian government’s demand to block over 8,000 accounts, and asked for such executive orders to made public.
X and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not reply to CPJ’s emails seeking comment.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.
Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”
Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”
Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).
Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”
‘A Holocaust in Gaza’
Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).
It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.
Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”
Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”
Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”
Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.
If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.
Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.
Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”
Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).
‘Generated threats of personal violence’
A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.
Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.
Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”
After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.
It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.
Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
The Trump administration, for the first time, had to defend its policy of deporting immigrants for their political views in court Monday. A case filed by a group of professors will be heard in a Massachusetts federal court. The lawsuit challenges attempts by the Trump administration to arrest and remove foreign-born college students from the country based purely on their pro-Palestine speech.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A 15-year employee of a library in southern Georgia was fired from her position last month over her inclusion of a book featuring a transgender child in a display. The display created by Pierce County Library Manager Lavonnia Moore was part of a statewide “color our world” summer reading program. Moore said that children contributed to the display, which featured media of varying colors.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The world of literature has turned purple, not knowing which color, blue or red, fits the current dilemma that’s causing serious students of the art to tear their hair out. The age of social media has opened the door to a cascade of new challenges to literary freedom that stifles creativity.
Answers for what ails literature in today’s complicated world can be found in an upcoming new book: That Book is Dangerous (MIT Press, 2025) by Adam Szetela, PhD candidate in the Department of Literature in English at Cornell University.
That Book is Dangerous is scheduled to be published for purchase on August 12, 2025.
Szetela frames the current literature conundrum as follows: “At a moment when people are focused on the right’s moral panic over literature, it might seem strange that this book focuses on the left’s moral panic over literature. After all, right-wing panic has had more influence at the legislative level. That is true. But left-wing panic has had significantly more influence inside publishers, agencies, and other corners of literary culture. This is the reason why many of the progressives I interviewed are more concerned about the left than the right. While the right is remaking the world in its image, the left is standing in a circular firing squad.”
Szetela interviews people at the highest levels to discover massive self-censorship happening behind closed doors inside publishers, literary agents and other primary movers and shakers that publicly claim to be advocates of “free speech.” In contrast, he discovers a backhanded autocracy in publishing, making one wonder where the spirit of liberal democracy truly resides, if at all. Authors are subject to intimidation and dictates as to the meaning of content of their writing on a broad scale in this strange new breed of censorship hidden from public view.
Szetela gives an example of the horrors of trying to get a book published in chapter one, a YA author’s unpublished book caused an uproar on Twitter by people who had never read the book claiming it was racist because the ‘setting’ of the book was a fantastical world where oppression was not based upon skin color, therefore considering it anti-black by depicting slavery that was not African American slavery. The distressed, horribly harassed author canceled publication. The New York Times, at a later date, reported the book was to be published, but only after scrutiny by “sensitivity readers” to check for potentially offensive material.
According to the Szetela’s investigations, there’s an epidemic of mandatory sensitivity readings, plus demands to sign morality clauses in contracts as well as outright censorship of “dangerous” books in the name of antiracism, feminism, and other social norms affecting social justice. Much of this is an outgrowth of the new world of open internet exchanges of public outcries on X, Goodreads, Change.org, and other online platforms where authors are accused of racism, sexism, and homophobia, whether truly justified or not, whether reading the book or not, harsh consequences follow in the footsteps of clues as to content of a proposed book. It’s a form of mass public censorship based upon innuendo, guesswork, and misdirected testosterone.
Szetela’s book describes a national “moral panic” within the clutches of a moral crusade not all that different from the 1950s crusade to censure those who wrote and illustrated comic books as concerned adults pressured publishers and the U.S. Senate to censure distasteful material. Comic book burnings ensued in Chicago, Memphis, Port Huron, Cape Girardeau, and Binghamton, among others. Szetela’s simile explains it best: “When literature is treated as an immoral disease that is spreading like the plague, censorship is the only answer.”
This Orwellian intervention into YA and children’s literature appears to be now leaking into adult literary culture. For example, journalists at the New York Times have demanded sensitivity readers to ensure they do not offend readers; this shocker, as footnoted in the book, described in an article by Glenn Greenwald: “The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship of Colleagues.”
This bastardized moral crusade cruising throughout society is a piece of cake for anybody willing to get involved. Anyone with internet can be a moral crusader. No credentials necessary. Disturbingly, “research shows that expressions of moral anger and disgust, two emotions central to moral crusades, are associated with more retweets.” Even the most uniformed readers have an audience. The world of book reviews has turned into whack-a-mole amateur hour, as explained by one publisher: “People like a sensationalized story in our new world. An opinion can spread so quickly. I had a conversation last week about what we can do about Goodreads. How do we even know a review is real? It’s crazy. If it’s a negative response, it could kill a book.”
Open platforms have placed the world of intellect, of professional study, of publishing, of teaching in a strange new world that diminishes, sometimes obliterates, the search for true truthfulness. “The prevalence with which people freely admit they never read, nor have any intention of ever reading, books they passionately criticize is another indicator of how decrepitly anti-intellectual literary culture has become… the decline of reading — through skim reading, rushed reading, or not reading at all — is a perennial feature of the dystopian genre.” Ignorant, idiotic, silly, lunatic, stupid blabbering fools all have an official platform in today’s upside-down world.
The moral crusade has created a monstrosity of checks and balances that homogenizes literature while downsizing authors. A large cadre of sensitivity readers has sprung forth within only a few years. These are self-declared experts who ensure literature is not offensive, now being hired by Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and other major publishers.
Additionally, publishers now include “morality clauses” in contracts. These contracts specify that the publisher may terminate a contract if the author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals. Taking matters to the highest road, The Times has established a ‘sensitivity hotline’ for journalists to report on one another like tattletales found in children’s literature. And writers for the New Yorker have discovered morality clauses in their contracts that are wide open for abuse as the clauses state writers can be terminated if the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals.” What’s missing, if anything, from this list of misdemeanors? According to “Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard University: ‘No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.” (p. 185)
As described by Szetela: “The left’s approach to literature looks like the right’s approach to crime. On both sides, adults see themselves as punitive moral leaders who protect the rest of us from harm.” Fascinatingly, “there is a culture war between the punitive moral framework of the right and the compassionate moral framework of the left… These liberals are a real problem for the progressive movement.”
In the final analysis, Szetela emphasizes people must stand up to this cultural flap and resist: “In Fahrenheit 451, a retired English professor warns us: ‘I saw the way things were going, a long way back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally, they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me. By then, it’s too late.” (p. 195)
Adam Szetela:
A deluge of books have been canceled, rewritten, and otherwise censored in the past decade. My goal was to expose the current threats to literary freedom; where they came from, how they have reshaped publishing, and so on. That said, my book shows that much of this censorship occurs because people are scared to stand up to the censors. That culture of acquiescence needs to end.
World State (Brave New World, 1932)
Ministry of Truth (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)
Truth Social (Trump Media, 2022)
The post Dangerous Books? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
New York, July 2, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges Kyrgyzstan President Sadyr Japarov to veto a new mass media law that would require all publications to register with the state and heavily restricts any foreign legal entities from founding or owning media outlets.
Parliament passed the bill, which would allow an authorized state body to decide which media outlets can operate, on June 25, rejecting a compromise draft of the bill that had been the product of two years of negotiations with a working group that included journalists.
“Considering Kyrgyzstan’s unprecedented media crackdown, Parliament’s last-minute reintroduction of repressive clauses into the new media law bill is dangerous and rightly sparks deep concern for the press,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “We call on President Japarov to give substance to his verbal commitments to press freedom by vetoing this version of the bill and returning it to Parliament so it can pass a version supported by the country’s journalists.”
The compromise draft was passed in a first reading by parliament in April; in mid-June, deputies reintroduced the disputed clauses before rushing the bill through in two readings on June 25.
Several journalists and media experts who worked on the compromise draft have asked the government to revert to a version based on the draft.
If the current version is ratified, “those who will print any criticism or alternative views, will simply not be registered and won’t be able to publish,” Semetey Amanbekov, a member of local advocacy group Media Action Platform, told RFE/RL, adding that it will mean journalism in Kyrgyzstan will come to an end.
Japarov withdrew a similar draft media law in March 2024 following criticism from journalists and international human rights bodies.
Kyrgyzstan’s new media law comes amid a sustained assault on independent reporting in a country previously regarded as a regional beacon for the free press.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
As Europe’s summer music festival season rolls out, mainstream media and governments are struggling to keep Palestine solidarity off the stage. In its coverage of Glastonbury Festival, the BBC focused on censoring the Irish rap group Kneecap over their staunch pro-Palestinian stance – only to be met by a wave of artists who used their platform to call for a free Palestine and to demand broadcasters share real news about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Among them was the British duo Bob Vylan, who led the crowd in chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF,” denouncing war crimes committed by the Israeli army, including the starvation of children and the killing of civilians in humanitarian aid lines.
The post Artists Speak Up Against Genocide In Gaza At Europe’s Music Festivals appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Note: Another long opinion piece in the local rag, Lincoln County Leader, June 18, 2025.
First, though, let me explain. The idea is to not just rattle my fellow citizens’ cages, those self-imposed prisons of the mind. It’s my own journalistic and controlled demolition of the grand narratives this country has foisted on a public that has not only become unsuspecting, but absolutely habituated into brands, and consumer dialogue, talks about trips to Costco or Costa Rica, it’s all the same fucking 24 pack of paper towels to throw at hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.
This is the spawn of Nazis, the good Germans, the guy who is now a Jew, who was trained by Jew York Jews like Roy Cohen, and alas, his grandkiddos are Jewish, and that daughter is Jewish, and the mafia in his Minyan is composed of Jews and even freak Zionists like RFK, Jr.
It is a sickness that isn’t just one chapter in the DSM-V: Victoria Nuland and cookies, man.
What is the DSM-5?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often known as the “DSM,” is a reference book on mental health and brain-related conditions and disorders. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is responsible for the writing, editing, reviewing and publishing of this book.
The number “5” attached to the name of the DSM refers to the fifth — and most recent — edition of this book. The DSM-5®’s original release date was in May 2013. The APA released a revised version of the fifth edition in March 2022. That version is known as the DSM-5-TR
, with TR meaning “text revision.”
IMPORTANT: The DSM-5 and DSM-5-TR are medical reference books intended for experts and professionals. The content in these books is very technical, though people who aren’t medical professionals may still find it interesting or educational. However, you shouldn’t use either of these books as a substitute for seeing a trained, qualified mental health or medical provider.
Additionally, the APA also publishes books that supplement the content in the DSM-5-TR. Examples of these supplement publications include the DSM-5 Handbook of Differential Diagnosis and DSM-5 Clinical Cases.
What is the purpose of the DSM-5?
The first step in treating any health condition — physical or mental — is accurately diagnosing the condition. That’s where the DSM-5 comes in. It provides clear, highly detailed definitions of mental health and brain-related conditions. It also provides details and examples of the signs and symptoms of those conditions.
In addition to defining and explaining conditions, the DSM-5 organizes those conditions into groups. That makes it easier for healthcare providers to accurately diagnose conditions and tell them apart from conditions with similar signs and symptoms.]
[Photo: While Ronald Reagan demonized the welfare system as a whole in familiar terms, his ire was largely directed toward single mothers, and his racially coded language was sufficient to make clear his overarching intentions.]
All these things, these economic things, they are on people’s minds. The chaos of Trump and Company, as he plays out his dictator role, all of that is on everyone’s minds.
The cost of being poor is rising. And it’s worse for poor families of color. Great headline.
But the point of my short op-ed was to discuss how the silence of this genocide is deafening, in fact, defeating. This has a deep deep psychological effect on those who might have cared to speak up and who are distressed by the murder incorporated on a mass murder scale that the Jews in Israel are undertaking.
But the empire of chaos is about that chaos, and the chaotic nature of our news cycle with the demented POTUS and his even more demented cabinet members and his MAGA mutt followers, that this imploding diesel belching engine has thrown so many people into discombobulation syndrome.
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
The poor and forgotten nations of the world can blame their downward spiral on an emerging world order that Samir Amin in this brilliant essay calls the “empire of chaos.” Comprised of the United States, Japan, and Germany, and backed by a weakened USSR and the comprador classes of the third world, this is an empire that will stop at nothing in its campaign to protect and expand its capitalist markets.
The interview with Professor Samir Amin was conducted on 6 May 2018 in Beijing, by Professor Lau Kin Chi and Professor Sit Tsui Jade. Professor Amin criticized monopoly capitalism and the collective imperialism of the Triad (USA, Europe, and Japan). He analyzed the current major challenges to China. He strongly suggested that China should not join financial globalization, but on the contrary, keep capital account and exchange rate under control, as well as maintain collective ownership of land and the small peasantry. These were great weapons against financial globalization. He also discussed the possibilities of building people’s internationalism.
Even as Israeli violence becomes more visible, politicians like Ben Gvir are welcomed as honoured guests in the US
‘The crimes [in Gaza] are so egregious that are being carried out… The attempt to cover them up and whitewash them is failing’ Since 7 October, western media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza has come under intense scrutiny, particularly for the language and terminology used by many outlets. As a result, the coverage has been accused of bias against Palestinians effectively providing cover for Israel’s war on Gaza. To delve into this, we’re speaking to Assal Rad, an Iranian-American scholar of the modern Middle East and fellow at DAWN, who’s also made it her mission to call out and ‘fix’ misleading headlines. Her widely shared posts earned her the title of ‘headline fixer’, turning this into a trend of its own online.
This is just a watered-down version of what I really would love to write every day, and in a sense have the public square to discuss this silence, this mute echo of silence has pushed a collective insanity and amnesia into the populous.
The silence is deafening, here on the coast, and throughout most of the land. Forget about large universities and valiant young people and some faculty protesting the genocide which by many expert accounts — not cited in so-called legacy media – are 100,000 murdered civilians.
Targeted assassinations of journalists and of medical workers? And the AMA is silent. The American Medical Association represents hundreds of thousands of doctors.
“We’re seeing hospitals being bombed, ambulances being bombed, doctors and other medical workers being targeted and shot. The AMA is the sixth-largest lobbying organization in the United States, it’s bigger than Boeing. It’s bigger than Lockheed Martin, it’s bigger than the National Rifle Association. They have a tremendous amount of domestic and international influence, and because they carry such weight within the realm of health care, we felt it would be appropriate for them to use their voice in this way.”
Emily Hacker, a member of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, outlined that an important reason healthcare workers want the “AMA and all other healthcare institutions to be involved in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine” is that “the US can spend billions and billions of dollars on bombs and bullets, but there are 26 million Americans with no health insurance and 150 million Americans rely on Medicare or Medicaid.”
“People can’t afford their insulin, but there’s always money for bombs,” Hackerarticulated.
Cognitive dissonance is more than just interesting as a theory to study. In our daily lives we for the most part are silent. Hands down. No discussion of Israel’s genocide and the United States’ and Britain’s complicity because most Americans are dangerously poorly educated.
Miseducated. Brainwashed.
This is what many call “deep” or “master narratives” – that somehow the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel is the most democratic state in the Middle East. I witnessed genocide silence at the Yachats Commons June 1, where we listened to Oregon Black Pioneers presenter Zachary Stocks discuss the origin of black exclusion laws in our state as well as the pro-slavery mentality that dominated many of the state’s politicians and newspaper editors.
Good stuff he presented to a largely greying and older population. We did get some land acknowledgment from Joanne Kittel, known for her work around the Amanda Trail.
“For those of you who travel through Yachats, I ask you to pay respect to and honor the Alsea, Siuslaw, Lower Umpqua and Coos people who lost their lives as a result of their forced incarceration and mistreatment in Yachats, Waldport and Florence areas. The Amanda Trail that connects Yachats to Cape Perpetua is a spiritual and solemn path that remembers in perpetuity.” Joanne Kittel wrote this as a blurb for a book, Seeking Recognition: The Termination and Restoration of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, 1855-1984 by David R.M. Beck.
No moment of silence for Gaza? It would have been appropriate.
Deep, grand, meta or master narratives are dominant or commonly-shared stories within a society or culture. They are tools for shaping a collective idea or consciousness about who we are as a society, culture or people. Master narratives also limit our understanding of context and historical causes and effects, and they’re deployed to perpetuate stereotypes or dominant ideologies.
Erasing knowledge and context is the coin of the realm now especially with a shallow and sallow-minded president. This POTUS isn’t the be-all and end-all, but for the past five months people have been scrambling to anticipate his administration’s brand of proto- or neo-fascism. Erasing Black Medal of Honor winners or Jackie Robinson’s portrait from various locations and websites is just the tip of the iceberg of flipping around of history.
“A good Indian is a Dead Indian.” Or, from the other POTUS, Teddy Roosevelt: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
And now why is it the genocide of our times is never discussed in public or around dinner tables? Imagine that during World War Two not a word about Nazism or fascism in Italy and Spain. Silence? The price of bacon?
A Jewish Canadian journalist, many reading this might not know, Aaron Mate, says it bluntly about that Grand Narrative of Israel and Judaism: “Everything I Was Taught… Was a Lie” He says the indoctrination of how Israel is this grand democracy and mothership for all Jews starts early.
“This Jewish state commits genocide in our name. It’s a moral obligation to resist this,” Mate states.
It is more than bizarre and Orwellian, this current rampant ideology of “silence is transparency and lies are truth.”
Doctors, nurses, and medics are murdered and hospitals bombed. And no one in mixed company discusses Gaza, the genocide, the dehumanization of Palestinians, which is a dehumanization for us all.
Doctors? I have MDs in my family and I was a pre-med student for a while. Here is an anonymous statement I agree with, from a doctor condemning the American Medical Association’s complicity:
“As a doctor, I am saying loud and clear I am against all war and especially GENOCIDE. AMA and all our medical institutions that have remained silent and practiced unethical silencing, doxxing, firing of peace supporters or those speaking up for Palestine cast a long shadow of shame on our great profession.”
Silence, and the grand narrative just crumbles.
The post A Silence that is Defining Our Age and Which is Deafening first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Ontario’s education ministry supposedly bans “political” bias, but with the TDSB, that “bias” means banning support of Palestinian rights: Zionism is not apparently “political”! The most disturbing aspect is that these damaging CIJA-developed recommendations will probably be attempted at school boards across Canada.
Director of Education LaTouche, and Trustees:
Many of us have been disappointed by the TDSB’s highly political pro-Israel actions for years, but the actions this year (the trustees’ secret discussion and support of the “Affirming Jewish Identities & Addressing Antisemitism” report not to mention it’s support of the discredited “Nova Music Festival Exhibit” and dismissing of “No Other Land”!) have crossed a line of what should be acceptable by any school board.
I read the “Affirming Jewish Identities” report and believe that, if it were implemented, it would damage all non-Jewish students by giving Jewish students and staff the power to complain about what should be Charter- protected speech (and action). Its recommendations could be entitled, No Jew may be offended. The Toronto TDSB’s efforts to ensure students are exposed only to (political!) Zionist perspectives are described.
I attended the Nova Exhibit when I read that TDSB had sent students there and was appalled by the pornographic propaganda: tales that had been thoroughly documented as untrue before this exhibit was constructed. My experience visiting the Nova exhibit are described here.
I spent hours trying to find the Trustees’ discussion about this report in the public February meeting, but realized that that discussion had been held secretly and with voting results that were not visible. I understand that holding secret discussions like that is not legal in Ontario. On February 24th, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms sent a complaint to the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB) that its secrecy in a public meeting was unconstitutional.
My attempts to find out the status of the possible implementation of this report have been disappointing, with no response to calls to my trustee, the head trustee, or my letter to Education Director LaTouche. I have had the impression for the last several years that if a member of their public does not agree with TDSB’s Zionist agenda, no Trustee or employee feels any obligation to have any contact with them. The TDSB looks as if it is run like a little fiefdom with no responsibility to deal with any dissent from those who voted them in.
As things now stand, I would not want any child in our family to attend a TDSB school until it shows that it is fully compliant with Charter rights and the implications of international humanitarian law in Canada. It is unacceptable that children in at least one TDSB school have been subjected to racist hatred: “Kids in Gaza deserve what they get.” TDSB’s “anti-racism” program should deal with all racism together, not piece-meal.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
ECJ advocate general condemns ‘stigmatising’ law that bars such content from schools and primetime TV
A Hungarian law banning content about LGBTQ+ people from schools and primetime TV has been found to violate basic human rights and freedom of expression by a senior legal scholar at the European court of justice.
The non-binding opinion from the court’s advocate general, Tamara Ćapeta, issued on Thursday, represents a comprehensive demolition of the arguments made by the Hungarian government defending its so-called childprotection law, passed in 2021.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
To boil it all down (and the speakers here have never yet been found to be wrong about this war, which they have been analyzing ever since 2016): the only way that America and its allied countries can now avoid a total defeat in this war is by directly going to war themselves against Russia. Though that would not start out as being a nuclear war, what would the loser in the conventional war then do? Would it surrender? Or would it instead initiate nuclear war against the side that has won the conventional war (which would then become World War Three)? And why are the stakes in this war (possible annihilation of civilization) not even being discussed in U.S.-and-allied media? Is this the media that would be the media in a democracy, or instead in a dictatorship?
There already are indications that the U.S. and its allies are intensively preparing for WW3. Is this because there is a public demand for these multi-trillion-dollar measures, or is it instead because the individuals who are in control over our governments (and their news-media) want these expenses by their Government? Why are people not pondering these questions? But perhaps the reason is that they’re not being informed that this is even happening. And why aren’t they?
UK and Israel are part of this empire, and at 7:45-20:30 in this video is the U.S.-UK-Israel plan laid out and documented (see especially the map at 17:57) for the completion of their final solution to the Palestinian problem in Gaza. Then, from 29:00 till 34:00 is a truthful description of how the U.S. Government’s ceaseless craving to conquer both Russia and China — and to continue providing the weapons that Israel uses to exterminate Gazans — is increasingly foreclosing any other (any peaceful) paths by which America’s economy can even grow.
U.S.-and-allied major media say that alternative viewpoints are presented by them, but why are THESE alternative viewpoints NOT among the “alternatives” (I would instead call them truths) that they present? Why are these ‘viewpoints’ censored-out by them? How and why is that done? Is this a democracy? Or is it something else?
The post Why do US/EU Media Hide this Truth about the War in Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Few Western voices have braved the gates of Gaza during Israel’s ongoing military assault. Fewer still have returned to tell the story. Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American writer and humanitarian, is one of them.
In this sobering episode of “The Watchdog,” Abulhawa sits down with host Lowkey to describe the irreversible psychological toll of witnessing Israel’s war on Gaza from inside the Strip and the political price of telling the truth in the West.
“I wish I never left,” she says, recounting her time in Gaza earlier this year. “I left thinking I was going to come back in a couple of months to resupply and bring back in medicines and supplies.”
The post Susan Abulhawa: Censored At Oxford After Witnessing Gaza Genocide appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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Online censorship in China by some regional governments is even more aggressive than enforcement of the national-level ‘Great Firewall’ by the central government, according to a recent study and local sources.
The Great Firewall Report (GFW Report) highlights how the central Chinese province of Henan has adopted its own provincial firewall which is less sophisticated and robust than the central government’s but more volatile and aggressive, blocking significantly more websites than the national-level censorship system.
Local sources told Radio Free Asia that the heightened restrictions at the provincial government level may reflect uncertainty about instructions from higher authorities, leading to “excessive blocking” to avoid blame for failing to carry out their duties.
GFW Report is a censorship monitoring platform, primarily focused on China. During one experiment its researchers ran between Dec. 26, 2023 and March 31, 2025, they found that the Henan Firewall blocked 4.2 million domains, about six times that of the 741,542 at the national level.
Since 2023, netizens in Henan had reported a rise in the number of websites that were inaccessible in the region but accessible elsewhere in China, the study found.
“This localized censorship suggests a departure from China’s centralized censorship apparatus, enabling local authorities to exert a greater degree of control within their respective regions,” researchers Mingshi Wu at GFW, Ali Zohaib and Amir Houmansadr at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Zakir Durumeric at Stanford University, and Eric Wustrow at the University of Colorado Boulder wrote in the GFW Report published in May, “A Wall Behind A Wall: Emerging Regional Censorship in China.”
But the phenomenon extends beyond Henan, sources inside China told RFA.
Local governments in neighboring Hebei, another central Chinese province, as well as those in Tibet and Xinjiang have been operating similar censorship systems as the one reported in Henan for at least four years, Zhao Yuan, a network engineer based in Hebei, said.
“In the past, we could access overseas websites that were not blocked by the national firewall,” Zhao said. “Now, even virtual private networks (VPNs) in Henan and Hubei don’t work.”
While the national-level firewall, known as the Great Firewall, targets more news and media sites, in line with China’s long-standing policy of censoring politically sensitive information, the provincial-level firewall systems, like the one in Henan, blocks domains focusing on topics like the economy, technology, and business, GFW Report researchers found.
The Chinese Communist Party has, in recent years, emphasized a multi-pronged approach to censorship, including the management of all types of propaganda at the domestic and international level through a framework known as “territorial management” and implementation of “digital stability maintenance” measures, such as policing of sensitive content online on dates deemed politically sensitive by the government.
“Local governments have taken the initiative to establish local blocking systems, indicating that the top leaders are increasingly vigilant about the flow of information,” Wei Sicong, a Beijing-based political observer, said.
‘Turning off the whole world’
Researchers at GFW found that the Henan firewall monitors and blocks traffic leaving and entering the province, as opposed to the national-level censorship system that is focused on traffic entering and exiting the country.
Other sources in the region told RFA that the heightened restrictions at the provincial government level suggest lack of clear legal know-how about how to enforce instructions from higher-ups.
“Officials would rather block more and more than take responsibility. So the result you see is ‘turning off the whole world’,” network engineer Zhang Jianan said.
GFW Report researchers said their analysis showed no regional censorship in other areas they studied, such as Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Jiangsu.
In Henan and Hebei, however, local residents told RFA that even the websites of some foreign universities are inaccessible, as a result of which they turn to VPNs and other circumvention tools to bypass government censorship and surveillance.
“Some classmates can connect in Beijing and Shanghai, but we can’t in Zhengzhou and can only rely on circumvention software,” Zhang, a student at Henan’s Zhengzhou University, said.
Hebei-based network engineer Zhao said, “The censorship is getting stricter and stricter. We can’t even connect to some foreign university websites.”
RFA found that as early as December 2023, a university in Henan province sought to purchase a “public opinion monitoring system,” specifically aimed at international students, students and dissidents, and had conducted an open bidding process.
Henan University of Science and Technology had laid out a 2024-2025 budget of 120,000 yuan (or US$16,657) for the public opinion monitoring service system to provide 24/7 real-time monitoring, early warning analysis and crisis response of public opinion information on the entire network, covering news websites and social media platforms such as Weibo and Douyin, the university’s website showed.
When RFA contacted the university, a teacher confirmed they are using an old monitoring system and that they have now started a bidding process for a new one.
Edited by Mat Pennington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang and Tenzin Pema for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
For several years, Amy Stelly has been partnering with the Louisiana State University School of Public Health in New Orleans to monitor air quality next to the Claiborne Expressway, a busy highway that runs northwest of the city’s iconic French Quarter. At a community meeting in April, Stelly, who runs an organization called the Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio, was excited to unveil…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced new visa restrictions that he claims are targeted at foreign officials who perpetuate “censorship” of Americans on social media platforms — while his agency, under his direction, is scouring the social media accounts of immigrants in the U.S. for dissent. In a statement announcing the policy on Wednesday, Rubio cited supposed concerns over free…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
What happens when the most powerful people give up on the future — but still control the schools? To understand what’s happening in education today — the banning of books, the rise of AI that surveils and dehumanizes learning, the outlawing of honest lessons on race and gender, and the criminalization of critical thought — we must look beyond the classroom and name the dystopia being built…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Microsoft has implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, Drop Site News reported on 22 May.
According to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees, an automated filter silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients.
The filter became effective on Wednesday following Microsoft’s Build developer conference, which faced repeated disruptions by the activist group, Drop Site added.
Microsoft has faced internal dissent from employees upset over the company’s collaboration with the Israeli military in its ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza, which scholars widely consider genocide.
The post Microsoft Bans Use Of ‘Gaza, Palestine’ In Internal Emails appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
After 17 years at Emerson College, I was fired for my activism in support of Palestinian liberation. My last day was October 11, 2024, just over one year into the genocide in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine.
Over my time at Emerson, I established my professional home, weathering the financial crash and the pandemic. During my time, I helped organize the professional staff with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and served my peers as a steward. I started a free, public film series with a strong focus on social justice cinema that I successfully ran for over twelve years.
The post I Was Fired From Emerson College For Speaking Out About Palestine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
By Russel Norman
The iconic Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior will return to Aotearoa this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original campaign ship at Marsden Wharf in Auckland by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.
The return to Aotearoa comes at a pivotal moment — when the fight to protect our planet’s fragile life-support systems has never been as urgent, or more critical.
Here in Aotearoa, the Luxon government is waging an all-out war on nature, and on a planetary scale, climate change, ecosystem collapse, and accelerating species extinction pose an existential threat.
As we remember the bombing and the murder of our crew member, Fernando Pereira, it’s important to remember why the French government was compelled to commit such a cowardly act of violence.
Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective. We posed a very real threat to the French government’s military programme and colonial power.
It’s also critical to remember that they failed to stop us. They failed to intimidate us, and they failed to silence us. Greenpeace only grew stronger and continued the successful campaign against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
Forty years later, it’s the oil industry that’s trying to stop us. This time, not with bombs but with a legal attack that threatens the existence of Greenpeace in the US and beyond.
We will not be intimidated
But just like in 1985 when the French bombed our ship, now too in 2025, we will not be intimidated, we will not back down, and we will not be silenced.
We cannot be silenced because we are a movement of people committed to peace and to protecting Earth’s ability to sustain life, protecting the blue oceans, the forests and the life we share this planet with,” says Norman.
In the 40 years since, the Rainbow Warrior has sailed on the front lines of our campaigns around the world to protect nature and promote peace. In the fight to end oil exploration, turn the tide of plastic production, stop the destruction of ancient forests and protect the ocean, the Rainbow Warrior has been there to this day.
Right now the Rainbow Warrior is preparing to sail through the Tasman Sea to expose the damage being done to ocean life, continuing a decades-long tradition of defending ocean health.
This follows the Rainbow Warrior spending six weeks in the Marshall Islands where the original ship carried out Operation Exodus, in which the Greenpeace crew evacuated the people of Rongelap from their home island that had been made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons testing by the US government.
In Auckland this year, several events will be held on and around the ship to mark the anniversary, including open days with tours of the ship for the public.
Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Russel Norman
The iconic Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior will return to Aotearoa this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original campaign ship at Marsden Wharf in Auckland by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.
The return to Aotearoa comes at a pivotal moment — when the fight to protect our planet’s fragile life-support systems has never been as urgent, or more critical.
Here in Aotearoa, the Luxon government is waging an all-out war on nature, and on a planetary scale, climate change, ecosystem collapse, and accelerating species extinction pose an existential threat.
As we remember the bombing and the murder of our crew member, Fernando Pereira, it’s important to remember why the French government was compelled to commit such a cowardly act of violence.
Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective. We posed a very real threat to the French government’s military programme and colonial power.
It’s also critical to remember that they failed to stop us. They failed to intimidate us, and they failed to silence us. Greenpeace only grew stronger and continued the successful campaign against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
Forty years later, it’s the oil industry that’s trying to stop us. This time, not with bombs but with a legal attack that threatens the existence of Greenpeace in the US and beyond.
We will not be intimidated
But just like in 1985 when the French bombed our ship, now too in 2025, we will not be intimidated, we will not back down, and we will not be silenced.
We cannot be silenced because we are a movement of people committed to peace and to protecting Earth’s ability to sustain life, protecting the blue oceans, the forests and the life we share this planet with,” says Norman.
In the 40 years since, the Rainbow Warrior has sailed on the front lines of our campaigns around the world to protect nature and promote peace. In the fight to end oil exploration, turn the tide of plastic production, stop the destruction of ancient forests and protect the ocean, the Rainbow Warrior has been there to this day.
Right now the Rainbow Warrior is preparing to sail through the Tasman Sea to expose the damage being done to ocean life, continuing a decades-long tradition of defending ocean health.
This follows the Rainbow Warrior spending six weeks in the Marshall Islands where the original ship carried out Operation Exodus, in which the Greenpeace crew evacuated the people of Rongelap from their home island that had been made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons testing by the US government.
In Auckland this year, several events will be held on and around the ship to mark the anniversary, including open days with tours of the ship for the public.
Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
“It’s a chilling feeling,” Tariq explains to me. “Here at Yale, immigration authorities have revoked at least four students’ visas so far.” Tariq Khan is an interdisciplinary historian and lecturer at Yale University. “A lot of students are scared,” he explains. “I have international students in my classes. They’re really worried that their visas might be revoked. The Trump administration’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Online dissent is a serious crime in China. So why did a Weibo censor help me publish posts critical of the Communist party?
By Murong Xuecun. Read by Zhang Wang Li
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Over the past weekend, several candidates in suburban Texas school districts who opposed book bans won their elections, defeating conservative officials who had supported and implemented such policies in recent years. Book bans in the Lone Star State have largely targeted titles with LGBTQ themes, Black or Brown characters, or authors of the same backgrounds. In the 2022-23 academic year…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.