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Category: Disinformation

  • America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3

    This is about the U.S. Government’s lie to the naive Gorbachev, which fooled him to accept the U.S. empire’s proposal that East Germany become a part of West Germany, and that the Soviet Union and its one-Party rule end, and that its Warsaw Pact military alliance end while America’s NATO military alliance wouldn’t. In other words: it’s about how the Cold War on America’s side continued secretly (and now again brings America and Russia to the very brink of WW3), after the Cold War on Russia’s side ended in 1991 — ended on the basis of America’s lie and Russia’s trust in that lie:

    On 10 September 2015, I documented this lie because so many U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ were alleging it not to have happened but to be mere ‘Russian propaganda’ (and, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, some have even alleged that “European security has in fact benefited significantly from NATO’s enlargement” — a lie on top of the basic one). I also quoted there ‘historians’ who denied this basic lie, so that a reader could see not only the truth but the regime’s agents’ lies denying that it (the West’s Big Lie) had actually happened or that it was important. But then, on 12 December 2017, the U.S. National Security Archives at George Washington University released even fuller documentation of the lie that had occurred by the U.S. Government, and here are highlights from their documentation of it, so that this continuing Big Lie will be recognized by every sane person as being what it is, the Big Lie that might end up producing World War Three:

    Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.

    Memcon from 2/9/90 meeting w/USSR Prem. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnaze, Moscow, USSR

    Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: “The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process” of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later in the conversation, Baker poses the same position as a question, “would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?” The declassifiers of this memcon actually redacted Gorbachev’s response that indeed such an expansion would be “unacceptable” – but Baker’s letter to Kohl the next day, published in 1998 by the Germans, gives the quote.

    Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38).

    *****

    Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner

    Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

    The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. …

    The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)

    *****

    In addition, there is this: On 11 August 2014, Mary Elise Sarotte headlined at the U.S. empire’s own Foreign Affairs journal, “A Broken Promise?” as-if there still had been any doubt that it was that, and so an honest title for her article would have been “A Broken Promise” or even “A Broken Promise!” Because there’s no question about it. She reported not only that it definitely was a lie, and one by the U.S. Government itself; and that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush told America’s stooge leaders, starting on 24 February 1990, that it was going to be a broken promise because “‘TO HELL WITH THAT! [promise]’ HE [Bush] SAID. ‘WE PREVAILED, THEY DIDN’T.’” In other words: on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush started secretly ordering his vassals to continue forward with the intention for the U.S. alliance ultimately to swallow-up not only the rest of the USSR but all of the Warsaw Pact and finally Russia itself. And this has been precisely what the U.S. regime and its colonies have been doing, up until 24 February 2022, when Russia finally put its foot down, to stop NATO’s coming within around a mere 300 miles of The Kremlin.

    Consequently, even if NATO served a constructive purpose during 1945-1991, it has afterward only endangered the world — including especially Europe, making Europe be again the main battlefield if another World War occurs — and thus its continuance after 1991 can reasonably be considered a massive international crime by the U.S. Government.

    NATO is an extension of the will of the U.S. Government, and this is so blatant a fact so that Article 13, which is the only portion of NATO’s charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, that says anything about how a member-nation may either quit NATO or be expelled from NATO, places the U.S. Government in charge of processing a “denunciation” (voluntary withdrawal) — the Charter’s term for resigning from NATO. This term “denunciation” (instead of “withdrawal”) clearly means that if any member does quit, then that will be interpreted by NATO as constituting a hostile act, which will have consequences (the resigning member will be placed onto NATO’s unspoken list of enemies). NATO’s charter has no provision by which a member can be expelled. Moreover, it fails to include any provision by which the charter can be amended or changed in any manner. No charter or constitution that fails to include a provision by which it may be amended can reasonably be acceptable to a democracy: it is so rigid as to be 100% brittle, impossible to adapt to changing challenges. The NATO charter itself is a dictatorial never a democratic document. It takes up, for the U.S. regime after 1945, the function that the Nazi Party had held prior to that in and for Germany: after Hitler died, America took up and has held high his torch for global dictatorship. In fact, “the Government of the United States of America” is also stated in Article 10 as the entity to process applications to join NATO, and, in Article 11, as being the processor of “ratifications” of applications to join.

    This Treaty is an imperial document, of the U.S. empire, none other. And, after 1991, its continuation is based only on lies, including the one that now is coming to a head in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, though Biden said it is — he said recently of Ukraine, that “they are part of NATO.” Tyrants imagine that what they want can simply be willed into existence, and they don’t care about the essential needs of others. Such individuals are driven by their own hatreds. That is what stands at the very top of NATO.

    And this is why we are now at the nuclear brink, because of an organization that ought to have ended in 1991.

    The post America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be

    Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.

    Here’s what happened:

    1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.

    3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

    5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”

    7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).

    If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.

    University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.

    The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.

    Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.

    Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.

    In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.

    There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.

    We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.

    The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden’s “Red Line” Continues to Move to Allow More Israeli Atrocities in Gaza

    For some time, President Joe Biden has claimed that there are limits to US support for Israel, that he cares about the loss of Palestinian life and that certain Israeli conduct (e.g., an invasion of Rafah, an Israeli-designated “safe zone”) would result in the loss of US backing.  The events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.

    The atrocities of Israel in Gaza continue to mount and to become more egregious by the day.  A month ago, on May 6, 2024, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden Administration.  Israel responded by rejecting this agreement and then immediately doing what Biden warned against doing – attacking Rafah where around 1.7 million Gazan refugees are now living in makeshift tents.  As part of this offensive, Israel closed off the Rafah crossing, the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza and preventing any people from leaving.  What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians which the Biden Administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.

    One of the worst massacres took place on May 27, 2024, when Israeli forces carried out an air assault upon a neighborhood in Rafah in which, as explained by CNN, “[a]t least 45 people were killed and more than 200 others injured . . . most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Palestinian medics. No hospital in Rafah had the capacity to take the number of casualties, the ministry said.”  Many were horrified by a video which went viral on social media showing a father holding his headless baby who had been decapitated in the assault.

    Not even this abominable act elicited a rebuke from the Biden Administration which said that it would leave Israel to investigate itself in regard to this incident, and that it had no plans of changing policy as a result.

    And now, Israel has just destroyed a school in Rafah which had been run by UNRWA and which had been sheltering 6,000 Gazan refugees at the time of its destruction.  In this assault, at least 40 civilians were killed, including 14 children and 9 women, bringing the total number of civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 36,000, including 15,500 children.  As is usually the case given that the US is by far the largest arms supplier to Israel, it was determined that Israel had used US munitions in this attack on the school.  After this atrocity, the UN added Israel to its “list of shame” — a distinction reserved for countries that bring extraordinary harm to children.  In response to this massacre and this shameful UN designation, the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be “transparent” about the assault.  No change in US policy toward Israel is forthcoming.

    If this were not enough, reports of more grisly crimes are emerging daily.  For example, accounts have emerged of the heinous treatment of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of Israeli correctional officers and investigators.

    As Mondoweiss explains in a June 7 article, “[b]ehind the bars of Israeli prisons, Israel has been waging war against Palestinian prisoners, creating conditions that make the continuation of human life impossible. The effects of this brutal campaign have reverberated among prisoners’ families outside of jail, who are watching their loved ones being systematically starved, beaten, tortured, and degraded.”  Mondoweiss cites a CNN exposé, based upon whistleblower testimony, which detailed “a number of medieval practices to which Palestinian prisoners have been subjected, including being strapped down to beds while blindfolded and made to wear diapers, having unqualified medical trainees conduct procedures on them without anesthesia, having dogs set on them by prison guards, being regularly beaten or put into stress positions for offenses as minor as peeking beneath their blindfolds, having zip-tie wounds fester to the point of requiring amputation, and a host of other horrific measures.”

    Mondoweiss also cites a New York Times article “based on interviews with former detainees and Israeli military officers, doctors, and soldiers who worked at the prison, bringing new horrors to light about the treatment of Gazan prisoners. Detainee testimonies repeated many of these same accounts but also included additional disturbing accounts of sexual violence, including testimonies of rape and forcing detainees to sit on metal sticks that caused anal bleeding and ‘unbearable pain.’”  And, of course, as Mondoweiss notes, the abominable treatment of Palestinian prisoners – which number in the thousands and includes women and children – has been going on long before October 7.

    All of this illustrates how Israel has no limits or restraints upon its treatment of the Palestinian people.  And this is so because its great patron, the United States, imposes no such restraints upon it.  For all of the crocodile tears shed by Biden, his Cabinet officials and his spokespeople, there truly is no “red line” which Israel could cross which would elicit a cessation of US support, including lethal support, for its war upon the Palestinian people.  And for this reason, the war Israel is waging upon Gaza proceeds without pause and continues to descend into greater acts of depravity and horror.  In truth, as protest planners organizing to surround the White House to show opposition to the war in Gaza, it is the American people who must therefore be the “red line” to stop this genocide.

    The post Biden’s “Red Line” Continues to Move to Allow More Israeli Atrocities in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Digital misinformation fueling Australia’s election angst

    Australians are worried about the impact of content that is digitally altered to fuel online misinformation, fearing it will have an impact on upcoming elections, according to a new consumer survey. The concerns come as the head of the electoral commission warned the integrity of upcoming elections is under threat from artificial intelligence generated deepfakes,…

    The post Digital misinformation fueling Australia’s election angst appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • John Minto: The first casualty of war is truth – the rest are mostly civilians

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Good slogans have people nodding their heads in agreement because they recognise an underlying truth in the words.  

    I have a worn-out t-shirt which carries the slogan, “The first casualty of war is truth — the rest are mostly civilians”.

    If you find yourself nodding in agreement it’s possibly because you have found it deeply shocking to find this slogan validated repeatedly in almost eight months of Israel’s war on Gaza.

    The mainstream news sources which bring us the “truth” are strongly Eurocentric. Virtually all the reporting in our mainstream media comes via three American or European news agencies — AP, Reuters and the BBC — or from major US or UK based newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times. 

    This reporting centres on Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications for what they are doing to Palestinians. Israeli spokespeople are front and centre and quoted extensively and directly.

    Palestinian voices, when they are covered, are usually at the margins. On television in particular Palestinians are most often portrayed as the incoherent victims of overwhelming grief.

    In the mainstream media Israel’s perverted lies dominate. 

    Riddled with examples
    The last seven months is riddled with examples. Just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters were accused of chanting “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House.

    The story was carried around the world through mainstream media as a nasty anti-semitic slur on Palestinians and their supporters. Four months later, after an intensive investigation New South Wales police concluded it never happened. The words were never chanted.

    However the Radio New Zealand website today still carries a Reuters report saying “A rally outside the Sydney Opera House two days after the Hamas attack had ignited heated debate after a small group were filmed chanting “Gas the Jews”.

    Even if RNZ did the right thing and removed the report now the old adage is true: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on”. Four months later and the police report is not news but the damage has been done as the pro-Israel lobby intended.

    The same tactic has been used at protests on US university campuses. A couple of weeks ago at Northeastern University a pro-Israel counter protester was caught on video shouting “Kill the Jews” in an apparent attempt to provoke police into breaking up the pro-Palestine protest.

    The university ordered the protest to be closed down saying “the action was taken after some protesters resorted to virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’”. The nastiest of lies told for the nastiest of reasons — protecting a state committing genocide.

    Similarly, unverified claims of “beheaded babies” raced around the world after the October 7 attack on Israel and were even repeated by US President Joe Biden. They were false.

    No baby beheaded
    Even the Israeli military confirmed no baby was beheaded and yet despite this bare-faced disinformation the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand was able to repeat the lie, along with several others, in a recent TVNZ interview on Q&A without being challenged.

    War propaganda such as this is deliberate and designed to ramp up anger and soften us up to accept war and the most savage brutality and blatant war crimes against the Palestinian people.

    Recall for a moment the lurid claims from 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floor. It was false but helped the US convince the public that war against Iraq was justified.

    Twelve years later the US and UK were peddling false claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” to successfully pressure other countries to join their war on Iraq.

    Perhaps the most cynical misinformation to come out of the war on Gaza so far appeared in the hours following the finding of the International Court of Justice that South Africa had presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide.

    Israel smartly released a short report claiming 12 employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had taken part in the October 7 attack on Gaza. The distraction was spectacularly successful.

    Western media fell over themselves to highlight the report and bury the ICJ findings with most Western countries, New Zealand included, stopping or suspending funding for the UN agency.

    Independent probe
    eedless to say an independent investigation out a couple of weeks ago shows Israel has failed to support its claims about UNRWA staff involved in the October 7 attacks. It doesn’t need forensic analysis to tell us Israel released this fact-free report to divert attention from their war crimes which have now killed over 36,000 Palestinians — the majority being women and children.

    The problem goes deeper than manufactured stories. For many Western journalists the problem starts not with what they see and hear but with what their news editors allow them to say.

    A leaked memo to New York Times journalists covering the war tells them they are to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.

    They have even been instructed not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” or the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza settled by Palestinian refugees driven off their land by Israeli armed militias in the Nakba of 1947–49.

    These reporting restrictions are a blatant denial of Palestinian history and cut across accurate descriptions under international law which recognises Palestinians as refugees and the occupied Palestinian territories as precisely what they are — under military occupation by Israel.

    People reading articles on Gaza from The New York Times have no idea the story has been “shaped” for us with a pro-Israel bias.

    These restrictions on journalists also typically cover how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media. Every Palestinian teenager who throws a stone at Israeli soldiers is called a “militant” or worse and Palestinians who take up arms to fight the Israeli occupation of their land, as is their right under international law, are described as “terrorists” when they should be described as resistance fighters.

    The heavy pro-Israel bias in Western media reporting is an important reason Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing violence which results from it, has continued for so long.

    The answer to all of this is people power — join the weekly global protests in your centre against Israel’s settler colonial project with its apartheid policies against Palestinians.

    And give the mainstream media a wide berth on this issue.

    John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law

    The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law.  Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.

    In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest.  Those regarding the Hamas trio of its leader Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and the organisation’s political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, would have left most Western governments untroubled.

    From Khan’s perspective, the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will focus on policies of starvation, the intentional causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, intentional attacks on the Palestinian population, including extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.

    The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is not what it claims to be.  Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering.  The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”

    The reaction from the Israeli side was always expected.  Netanyahu accused the prosecutor of “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”.  He rejected “with disgust the comparison of the prosecutor in The Hague between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas”.

    Israeli President Isaac Herzog also found “any attempt to draw parallels between these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel – working to fulfil its duty to defend and protect its citizens in adherence to the principles of international law […] outrageous and cannot be accepted by anyone.”

    Israel’s staunchest ally, sponsor and likewise self-declared democracy (it is, in fact, a republic created by those suspicious of that system of government), was also there to hold the fort against such legal efforts.  US President Joe Biden’s statement on the matter was short and brusque: “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.  And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”

    The democracy-as-purity theme, one used as a seeming exculpation of all conduct in war, surfaced in the May 21 exchange between Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.  Was the secretary, inquired Risch, amenable to supporting legislation to combat the ICC “sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent, legitimate, democratic judicial system”?  (No consideration was given to the sustained efforts by the Netanyahu government to erode judicial independence in passing legislation to curb the discretion of courts to strike down government decisions.)

    The response from Blinken was agreeable to such an aim.  There was “no question we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrong-headed decision.”  As things stand, a bill is already warming the lawmaking benches with a clear target.  Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act would obligate the President to block the entry of ICC officials to the US, revoke any current US visas such officials hold, and prohibit any property transactions taking place in the US.  To avoid such measures, the court must cease all cases against “protected persons of the United States and its allies”.

    The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer similarly saw the prosecutor’s efforts as a pairing of incongruous parties. “The fact however that the leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas whose declared goal is the extinction of the State of Israel is being mentioned at the same time as the democratically elected representatives of that very State is non-comprehensible.”

    From the outset, such statements do two things.  The first is to conjure up a false distinction – that of equivalence – something absent in the prosecutor’s application.  The acts alleged are relevant to each specified party and are specific to them.  The second is a corollary: that democracies do not break international law and certainly not when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, most notably when committed against a certain type of foe.  The more savage the enemy, the greater the latitude in excusing vengeful violence.  That remains, essentially, the cornerstone of Israel’s defence argument at the International Court of Justice.

    Such arguments echo an old trope.  The two administrations of George W. Bush spilled much ink in justifying the torture, enforced disappearance and renditions of terror suspects to third countries during its declared Global War on Terror.  Lawyers in both the White House and Justice Department gave their professional blessing, adopting an expansive definition of executive power in defiance of international laws and protections.  Such sacred documents as the Geneva Conventions could be defied when facing Islamist terrorism.

    Lurking beneath such justifications is the snobbery of exceptionalism, the conceit of power.  Civilised liberal democracies, when battling the forces of a named barbarism, are to be treated as special cases in the world of international humanitarian law.  The ICC prosecutor begs to differ.

    The post A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech

    The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.

    Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.

    This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to campus protests.

    Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies; policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

    And now, when they should be empowered to take their rightful place in society as citizens who fully understand and exercise their right to speak truth to power, they are being censored, silenced and shut down.

    Consider what happened recently in Charlottesville, Va., when riot police were called in to shut down campus protests at the University of Virginia staged by students and members of the community to express their opposition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

    As the local newspaper reported, “State police sporting tactical gear and riot shields moved in on the demonstrators, using pepper spray and sheer force to disperse the group and arrest the roughly 15 or so at the camp, where for days students, faculty and community members had sang songs, read poetry and painted signs in protest of Israel’s ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.”

    What a sad turn-about for an institution which was founded as an experiment in cultivating an informed citizenry by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president.

    Unfortunately, the University of Virginia is not unique in its heavy-handed response to what have been largely peaceful anti-war protests. According to the Washington Post, more than 2300 people have been arrested for taking part in similar campus protests across the country.

    These lessons in compliance, while expected, are what comes of challenging the police state.

    Free speech can certainly not be considered “free” when expressive activities across the nation are being increasingly limited, restricted to so-called free speech zones, or altogether blocked.

    Remember, the First Amendment gives every American the right to “petition his government for a redress of grievances.”

    Along with the constitutional right to peacefully (and that means non-violently) assemble, the right to free speech allows us to challenge the government through protests and demonstrations and to attempt to change the world around us—for the better or the worse—through protests and counterprotests.

    If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment with all its robust protections for free speech, assembly and the right to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances is little more than window-dressing on a store window—pretty to look at but serving little real purpose.

    After all, living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign.

    That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about: it assures the citizenry of the right to express their concerns about their government to their government, in a time, place and manner best suited to ensuring that those concerns are heard.

    Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

    In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

    Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

    Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

    Yet if Americans are not able to peacefully assemble for expressive activity outside of the halls of government or on public roads on which government officials must pass, or on college campuses, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

    If we cannot stand peacefully outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties that we cherish as Americans.

    And if we cannot proclaim our feelings about the government, no matter how controversial, on our clothing, or to passersby, or to the users of the world wide web, then the First Amendment really has become an exercise in futility.

    The source of the protest shouldn’t matter. The politics of the protesters are immaterial.

    To play politics with the First Amendment encourages a double standard that will see us all muzzled in the end.

    The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the final link in the police state chain.

    If ever there were a time for us to stand up for the right to speak freely, even if it’s freedom for speech we hate, the time is now.

     

    The post From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia not equipped to handle deepfake electoral threat

    Deepfakes present a growing threat to the integrity of Australia’s electoral system, according to the head of the Australian Electoral Commission, who has warned that the agency is not equipped to tackle AI-generated misinformation. Appearing before a Senate inquiry into AI on Monday, electoral commissioner Tom Rogers said “significant and widespread examples of deceptive AI…

    The post Australia not equipped to handle deepfake electoral threat appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • BJP’s 2024 poll campaign is riding on disinformation and Muslim vilification

    How big a part will disinformation play in the 2024 election campaign? The question has been asked by so many people on so many platforms. As the big fat Indian election season reaches its peak, the answer is quite clear. At the moment, the BJP’s Lok Sabha 2024 election campaign stands firmly on falsehoods, disinformation and communal hate. These are tools with which the party has always sought to create propaganda in its favour — it is the raison d’etre of the IT cell and Amit Malviya — but with the election season at its peak, the BJP has decided to use them in a no-holds-barred manner.

    Modi Leading the Way

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Banswara speech on April 21 — in which he served his audience a cocktail of disinformation and communal hate — was just one example. His denigrating reference to Muslims as ‘infiltrators’ and ‘those who produce more children’ out to take away the wealth of the Hindus drew sharp reactions from the Opposition and the international media while Right Wing trolls like OpIndia editor Nupur J Sharma celebrated it. And then he claimed that the Congress manifesto had said the gold owned by women, particularly their mangalsutra, would be taken away and given to Muslims. Alt News has already shown that the manifesto does not say anything remotely similar to this, by any stretch of the imagination.

    Other than deepening communal polarisation, what Modi’s speech was also able to achieve was to steer the entire political discourse, bang in the middle of the elections, to what he saw as a Congress-Muslim nexus to harm Hindus. Every top BJP leader has repeated the trope since. And this villainisation of Muslims, their projection as a devil out to devour the jobs and wealth of Hindus, fits well within the RSS-BJP’s larger communal agenda of ‘Hindu khatre mein hai’ (Hindus are in danger in this country).

    On April 23 in Rajasthan’s Tonk-Sawai Madhopur constituency, Modi repeated the falsehoods. He said, referring to his speech two days earlier, “When I came to Rajasthan the day before, for 90 seconds in my speech I presented some truths before the country. It created so much panic in the entire Congress and INDI alliance… I presented the truth before the nation that the Congress has hatched a deep conspiracy to snatch your property and distribute it among their special favourites. I exposed this a couple of days back.”

    For over 15 minutes in the 35-minute speech, Modi dwelt on the theory of a Congress-Muslim nexus. Pertinently, just after the publication of the Congress manifesto, Modi had called it the manifesto of the Muslim League. In Tonk, he urged his audience to vote for the BJP to make sure that Ram Navami could be celebrated and Hanuman Chalisa could be sung in the state. He also stated, “You know that they have written in the manifesto that there will be a survey of ‘stree-dhan‘ and ‘mangalsutra’ owned by our mothers and sisters… and then all your wealth which is in excess of your need will be confiscated and distributed. If you have two homes, one will be taken away.”

    Fact remains that there is no mention of wealth survey and distribution in the Congress manifesto. Several media outlets, including Alt News, have debunked the false claim by the Prime Minister, including Firstpost, BoomLive, ABP Live, NDTV.

    The Prime Minister repeated his claims on Congress’s ‘sinister’ plans to distribute the wealth of the majority among Muslims, in an interview to the Times of India published on April 29 and called it a ‘Maoist thinking and ideology’. Responding to a question on wealth distribution, he stated the following:

    Amit Shah

    Union home minister Amit Shah addressed a rally in Chhattisgarh’s Kanker the very next day. Shah asked why Congress wanted to do a survey of wealth. He challenged Rahul Gandhi to come clean to the people of India on whether the Congress manifesto talked about a survey. As already mentioned, the Congress manifesto does not talk about a wealth survey. Nor does it talk about redistribution of wealth, let alone among any particular community.

    Shah spoke at Guna in Madhya Pradesh on April 26 and in Chhattisgarh’s Bemetera district on April 28. At both the places, he claimed the Congress manifesto had made it clear that the party wanted to introduce Sharia Law and reintroduce triple talaq.

    “Read the Congress manifesto carefully. They have said they will re-implement the Muslim personal law and triple talaq. You tell me, can this country be run by Sharia?” he said in his speech in Madhya Pradesh.

    In Chhattisgarh, he said, “They have said they will make a separate law for minorities. Tell me, should this country function as per Sharia? Should triple talaq be reintroduced?”

    There is no mention of triple talaq or Sharia in the Congress manifesto. About personal laws, the manifesto says in the section titled, ‘Religious and Linguistic Minorities’:

    • Congress will ensure that, like every citizen, minorities have the freedom of choice of dress, food,
      language and personal laws.
    • We will encourage reform of personal laws. Such reform must be undertaken with the participation and
      consent of the communities concerned.

    Rajnath Singh

    Union defence minister Rajnath Singh, No. 3 in the Modi Cabinet, addressed a meeting in Vishakhapatnam on April 24, dubbed as ‘intellectual meet’. Singh started his speech by pointing out that India’s stature on the global stage has improved significantly in the Modi regime. And then he told the audience the ‘war rukwa di’ story that is so incredulous that it has now turned into a meme. “Our Prime Minister quickly spoke to Russian president Mr Putin and Ukraine president Mr Zelenskyy and the war stopped for four and a half hours and more than 22000 students returned to India. This is India’s stature.”  The ‘intellectuals’ clapped gleefully. The relevant part of his speech can be heard below:

    It is now known by many that Union external affairs ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi had refuted the claim in a press conference on March 3, 2022, adding, “to say that somebody is holding up bombing or this is something we are coordinating, (that) I think that’s absolutely inaccurate.”

    The Muslim question soon entered into his speech. Singh stated that Muslim appeasement and vote-bank politics were in the DNA of Congress which divided the country on the basis of religion together with the Muslim league. “BJP”, he asserted, “never politicized caste, creed and religion.”

    Singh lingered on the Muslim question and said that Andhra Pradesh was the first laboratory of Congress’s communal agenda and called it a ‘dirty game’. “Between 2004 and 2010, Congress tried four times to introduce Muslim reservation in Andhra Pradesh but they failed in their mission because of legal provisions and the alertness of the Supreme Court.”

    He further said, “The 2024 Congress manifesto cleverly and indirectly talks about introducing Muslim reservation.  Our PM Modiji has exposed this and Congress is now attacking him by claiming he is telling a lie. Truth is that Congress is fooling Indians… If one reads section 3 and section 6 of the chapter on minority in the Congress manifesto, their intentions become clear.” He then reads the two sections, which are as follows:

    • We will encourage and assist students and youth belonging to the minorities to take full advantage of the
      growing opportunities in education, employment, business, services, sports, arts and other fields.
    • We will ensure that the minorities receive their fair share of opportunities in education, healthcare, public
      employment, public works contracts, skill development, sports and cultural activities without discrimination.

    This promise of ensuring fairness, Singh said, was “a preparation for bringing religious-based reservation through the back door.” He then extrapolated this to say that all these provisions were based on Sachar Committee report, which sought to divide Indian Army on the basis of religion. “This year’s manifesto hints at reservation based on religion in government jobs. If this is implemented, armed forces may also come under its ambit. This will affect India’s unity and integrity.”

    Fact remains that there is no mention of religion-based reservation in the Congress manifesto. The third point in the ‘Equity’ section of the manifesto promises to implement the 10% reservation in jobs and educational institutions for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), for all castes and communities without discrimination. There is no mention of the Sachar Committee report in the document, either.

    The defence minister must be particularly fascinated with the ‘war rukwa di’ claim, because a day before the Vizag meet, he visited Uttar Pradesh’s Bisahda village in Greater Noida on the 23rd where he held a rally in support of BJP’s Gautam Buddha Nagar candidate Mahesh Sharma, and he repeated it there as well.

    He has actually made this false claim innumerable times in the past. (April 15, 2024; Jan 10, 2024; May 14, 2023) A lie, repeated again and again, assumes the shape of truth — is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi ideologue Joseph Goebbles.

    Yogi Adityanath

    Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath addressed a public meeting at Amroha on April 23. He repeated the claim that Congress in its election manifesto had expressed intention to implement Sharia law in the country. “Will this country be governed by the Constitution formulated by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar or by some Shariat”? asked BJP’s poster boy of bulldozer justice. He dwelt on the issue for some time, explaining that the promise of introduction of personal laws, i.e., Sharia was made in the Congress manifesto because “PM Modi had stopped triple talaq…”

    In another speech in UP’s Sambhal constituency, he claimed that the Congress manifesto had promised a free-hand to Muslims in slaughtering cows.

    Anurag Thakur

    Addressing a rally in Hamirpur in Himachal Pradesh from where he is seeking reelection, Union minister Anurag Thakur claimed that the imprint of foreign hands were clear in the Congress manifesto, which wanted to “give property of your children to the Muslims.”

    “In its manifesto, along with the hand of the Congress, hands of foreign forces are also visible who want to give your children’s property to Muslims, finish the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and divide the country in the name of caste and region,” Thakur said, adding, “It is for you to decide whether your property should go to your children or to the Muslims…”

    In all the above speeches, if any one thing was conspicuously clear, it was the attempt to communally polarize the electorate. The BJP, as this Al Jazeera piece notes, is leaving no stone unturned in its effort to turn the 2024 elections into a Hindu Vs Muslim fight. In an article titled “Why Did Modi Call India’s Muslims ‘Infiltrators’? Because He Could.”, the New York Times has traced Modi’s heightened anti-Muslim pitch back to his RSS pracharak days. Deliberating on the need for such a divisive strategy, the NYT writes, “It could be a sign of anxiety that his standing with voters is not as firm as believed, analysts said. Or it could be just a reflexive expression of the kind of divisive religious ideology that has fueled his politics from the start.”

    Social Media Foot Soldiers

    On expected lines, the trope has been picked up by the BJP’s social media warriors, which include the IT cell and influencers on X and other platforms. A video of Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah pledging equitable distribution of wealth irrespective of caste and religion was shared by Amit Malviya as ‘dangerous and divisive’.  Siddaramaiah had said last year addressing Muslims, “You too should get a share in the wealth of this country. You are also Indian right… This country should belong to you and us. The wealth of this country belongs to you and belongs to us, so I will work to distribute the wealth of this country to you too. In this case, I will say one thing you will not be treated unfairly for any reason. I work to protect you. Similarly, I work to protect people belonging to all religions and castes”. The video was falsely shared by Right Wing influencers like Rishi Bagree and Shashank Shekhar Jha as proof of Congress’s plan to take away the wealth of Hindus and distribute it to Muslims. Bagree and other users also shared a meme which showed Muslims taking over the house of a Hindu family. The caption says: “They’re coming for your family home, your memories, your sweat, your hardwork, your life savings.”

    On April 30, the BJP released an animated campaign video on its verified Instagram handle (bjp4india) which is solely about the villainization of Muslims. In it, Rahul Gandhi is portrayed as holding the party’s manifesto, which then turns into the Pakistan flag (Photo below, this is used as the thumbnail of the video as well). The voice-over says, “If Congress comes to power, it will snatch all the money and wealth from non-Muslims and distribute them among Muslims, their favourite community.”

    It further states that this has been happening in India since ancient times. “Ancient India was really beautiful. We were so rich and prosperous that each and every average citizen had plenty of gold, plenty of wealth, plenty of riches. And it was this prosperity that made infiltrators and robbers repeatedly invade India. They looted all our wealth and distribute it among themselves. Besides, they destroyed our temples. Congress has been empowering people of this community. Congress party’s manifesto is nothing but Muslim League’s ideology in disguise. If you are a non-Muslim, Congress will snatch your wealth and distribute it to Muslims. Narendra Modi knows of this evil plan. Only he has the strength to prevent it.”

    At the peak of the election season in India, the political discourse has thus been captured by false, hateful and, at times, bizarre narratives repeated by every major BJP leader led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These have been amplified by the party’s social media ecosystem. In all the above speeches that Alt News followed, there was no mention of the much publicized schemes brought in by the Modi government — Startup India, Make in India, Ayushman Bharat et cetera, and steps like demonitzation and the Modi government’s handling of Covid pandemic, which have always been portrayed by the BJP as its achievements. At the moment, the BJP’s 2024 campaign is riding on disinformation and anti-Muslim hate.

    The post BJP’s 2024 poll campaign is riding on disinformation and Muslim vilification appeared first on Alt News.


    This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Indradeep Bhattacharyya.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Chamber of Propaganda Horrors

    Tourists visiting Spanish cities like Córdoba, Toledo and Sevilla have the option of whiling away an hour or so at a ‘Museum of the Inquisition’, sometimes known as a ‘Gallery of Torture’. For around three euros, visitors can view an exotic range of devices used to impale, immolate, strangle and dismember human beings in the name of God.

    It’s tempting to reassure ourselves that these are relics of a far-distant past, horrors that could never happen now. But did the Dark Ages ever really end? Noam Chomsky commented:

    ‘Part of the tragedy of the Palestinians is that they have essentially no international support. For a good reason – they don’t have wealth, they don’t have power. So they don’t have rights. It’s the way the world works – your rights correspond to your power and your wealth.’

    It is indeed the way the world works. It is also the way the medieval world worked. UK Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron (Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton), recently passed judgment on the war in Ukraine at a Washington press conference:

    ‘It is extremely good value for money… Almost half of Russia’s pre-war military equipment has been destroyed without the loss of a single American life. This is an investment in the United States’ security.’

    According even to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, 31,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the conflict. US officials estimate 70,000 dead, while Russia claims to have killed 444,000. Are these deaths ‘good value for money’?

    And what about the 50,000 Russians estimated by the BBC to have died? Do they matter? After all, European civilisation is supposed to be founded on Christ’s teaching that we should love, not just our ‘neighbour’ but our ‘enemy’. On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine offered a different view to Bill, a caller from Manchester:

    ‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’

    Elsewhere, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, commented after Iran retaliated to Israel’s bombing of an Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing 16 people, including two senior Iranian generals:

    ‘The attacks on Israel by Iran this weekend were wrong. They risked civilian lives and they escalated the already dangerous tensions in the region. I pray for the peace and security of Israel’s people at this time and I appeal to all parties both for restraint and to act for peace and mutual security.’ (Our emphasis)

    If Christ had done political commentary, he would have declared both the Iranian and Israeli attacks wrong, and he would have prayed ‘for the peace and security’ of the peoples of Israel and Iran, and also Palestine.

    Cameron responded on the same issue:

    ‘[It was] a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done, and I think the whole world can see. All these countries that have somehow wondered, well, you know, what is the true nature of Iran? It’s there in black and white.”

    He was immediately asked: ‘What would Britain do if a hostile nation flattened one of our consulates?’

    Cameron’s tragicomic response:

    ‘Well, we would take, you know, we would take very strong action.’

    Naturally, ‘we’ would do the same or worse, but it’s a grim sign of Iran’s ‘true nature’ when ‘they’ do it. The ‘Evil’ have no right even to defend themselves when attacked by the ‘Good’. Standard medieval thinking.

    ‘Murderous’ And ‘Brutal’ – Tilting The Language

    In idle moments, we sometimes fantasise about opening our own Media Lens Chamber of Propaganda Horrors, a Hall of Media Infamy. It would be a cavernous space packed with examples of devices used to strangle and dismember Truth.

    A special section would be reserved for the sage effusions of BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner, who wrote recently of Israel:

    ‘It responded to the murderous Hamas-led attacks of 7 October… and then spent the next six months battering the Gaza Strip.’

    The Hamas attack was ‘murderous’, then, with Israel administering a mere ‘battering’ with its attack that has caused at least 30 times the loss of life. A ‘battering’ is generally bruising but not necessarily fatal. The term is certainly not synonymous with genocide. Is this biased use of language accidental, or systemic?

    Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) commented on their careful study of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal:

    ‘Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions. This was 73% of the time at the Times, 78% at the Post and 87% at the Journal. Only 23% of the time was “brutal” used to describe Israel’s actions…’

    The Intercept reported on a leaked memo which revealed that the New York Times had ‘instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land’. The Intercept added:

    ‘The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.’

    The memo was written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies. A Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity ‘for fear of reprisal’, said:

    ‘I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.’

    Our Chamber of Propaganda Horrors might feature this barely believable sentence from a BBC report by Lucy Williamson, which reads like something from the film ‘Dr. Strangelove’:

    ‘If you wanted to map the path to a healthy, functioning Palestinian government, you probably wouldn’t start from here.’

    Probably wouldn’t start from where? From the middle of a six-months genocide, with two million civilians starving, with children literally starving to death, with tens of thousands of children murdered, with Gaza in ruins? It is hard to imagine a more ethically or intellectually tone-deaf observation. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen added to the sense of surreality:

    ‘The decision not to veto the Ramadan ceasefire resolution is also an attempt by the Americans to push back at accusations that they have enabled Israel’s actions.’

    Is it an ‘accusation’ that the US has supplied billions of dollars of missiles and bombs without which Israel could not conduct its genocide? Is there any conceivable way the US could ever ‘push back at’ that unarguable fact? The Guardian described how the US has worked hard to avoid Congressional oversight:

    ‘The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval.

    ‘The Biden administration… has kept up a quiet but substantial flow of munitions to help replace the tens of thousands of bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny coastal strip, making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in military history.’

    These hidden sales are in addition to the $320m in precision bomb kits sold in November and 14,000 tank shells costing $106m and $147.5m of fuses and other components needed to make 155mm artillery shells in December.

    In response to the latest news of a massive additional supply of arms to Israel, Edward Snowden posted on X:

    ‘ok but you’re definitely gonna hold off on sending like fifteen billion dollars’ worth of weapons to the guys that keep getting caught filling mass graves with kids until an independent international investigation is completed, right?

    ‘…right?’

    Because we no longer live in the Dark Ages, right?

    Waiting For The Hiroshima Bombing Scene

    People are generally not tortured on the rack in Western societies, but are we really any less callous?

    Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Oppenheimer’ has been lauded to the skies. It earned 13 nominations at the Academy Awards, winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. It also won five Golden Globe Awards.

    And yet the film is a moral disgrace. It focuses on the life of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, and particularly, of course, on his key role in developing the first atomic weapons. The direct results of his efforts were the dropping of nuclear fireballs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan that killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people.

    These were the first acts of nuclear terrorism, by far the greatest single acts of terrorism the world has ever seen. Although the moral doubts haunting the ‘Manhattan Project’ then and since feature strongly in the film, a portrayal of the hideous impact of Oppenheimer’s invention on civilians is almost completely absent. This single, dignified comment from an elderly Japanese viewer reported by the Guardian says it all:

    ‘“I was waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to appear, but it never did,” said Mimaki, 82.’

    Although the BBC sought out the opinion of cinemagoers in Hiroshima, ‘only meters away’ from where the bomb exploded, the film’s shocking moral failure was not mentioned.

    On reflection, our museum might be better called, The Museum Of Media Madness. Thus, the BBC reported on the refusal of event organisers, The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), to ban Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest. The EBU opined:

    ‘We firmly believe that the Eurovision Song Contest is a platform that should always transcend politics, promote togetherness and bring audiences together across the world.’

    The BBC claims to be obsessed with reporting ‘both sides of the story’, but it conveniently forgot to mention that Russia has been banned from the song contest since 2022 for a reason that did not ‘transcend politics’ – its invasion of Ukraine.

    Martin Österdahl, EBU’s executive supervisor for Eurovision, was asked to explain the contradiction. He responded that the two situations were ‘completely different’. True enough – Israel’s crimes in Gaza are much worse even than Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Österdahl’s casual brush off:

    ‘We are not the arena to solve a Middle East conflict.’

    Media and political voices seeking to challenge the reigning brutality are not burned alive, but they are buried alive in high security prisons like Julian Assange, beaten up on the street like George Galloway, and forced into exile like Edward Snowden. Dissidents may not be pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables in the stocks, but they are pelted with relentless media attacks intended to discredit them.

    In the Guardian, John Crace greeted the news that Galloway had returned to parliament, with a piece titled:

    ‘The Ego has landed: George Galloway basks in his swearing in as MP’

    Crace wrote:

    ‘Wherever he goes, his giant ego is there before him. Like most narcissists, the only fool for whom he makes allowances – for whom he has a total blindspot – is himself.’

    He added:

    ‘… there is a lot about Galloway to dislike. His self-importance is breathtaking. Most MPs suffer from an excess of self-regard, but George is off the scale. It has never crossed his mind that he is not right about everything.’

    Before Galloway’s victory, a Guardian news piece commented:

    ‘“A total, total disaster”: Galloway and Danczuk line up for Rochdale push – Two former Labour MPs are back to haunt the party in what has been called “the most radioactive byelection in living memory”’

    As we have discussed many times, this is the required view, not just of Galloway, but of all dissidents challenging the status quo – they (and we) are all toxic ‘narcissists’. Thus, the BBC observed of Galloway, a ‘political maverick’:

    ‘To his critics and opponents, he is a dangerous egotist, someone who arouses division.’

    What percentage of Tory and Labour MPs under (and including) Sunak and Starmer are not dangerous egotists? Are the thousands of MPs who, decade after decade, line up to vote for US-UK resource wars of aggression of first resort, for action to exacerbate climate collapse, not dangerous egotists?  Of course they are, but they are not labelled that way. The only egotism perceived as ‘dangerous’ by our state-corporate media system is one that threatens biocidal, genocidal and suicidal state-corporate narcissism.

    We have to travel far from the ‘mainstream’ to read a more balanced view of Galloway. Former British ambassador Craig Murray commented:

    ‘I have known George Galloway my entire adult life, although we largely lost touch in the middle bit while I was off diplomating. I know George too well to mistake him for Jesus Christ, but he has been on the right side against appalling wars which the entire political class has cheer-led. His natural gifts of mellifluence and loquacity are unsurpassed, with an added talent for punchy phrase making.

    ‘… But outwith the public gaze George is humorous, kind and self-aware. He has been deeply involved in politics his entire life, and is a great believer in the democratic process as the ultimate way by which the working classes will ultimately take control of the means of production. He is a very old-fashioned and courteous form of socialist.’

    We strongly disagree with Galloway’s views on fossil fuel production and climate change – in fact, he blocked us on X for robustly but politely challenging him on these issues. Nevertheless, it is clear to us that Murray’s view of Galloway is far more reasonable.

    Neon-Lit Dark Age

    In ‘Brave New World Revisited’, Aldous Huxley wrote:

    ‘The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.’ (Huxley, ‘Brave New World Revisited’, archive.org, 1958, p.109)

    This is certainly true of corporate journalists. Borrowing illiberally from authentically dissident media, a recurring Guardian appeal asks readers to support its heroic defence of Truth. The declared enemy:

    ‘Teams of lawyers from the rich and powerful trying to stop us publishing stories they don’t want you to see.

    ‘Lobby groups with opaque funding who are determined to undermine facts about the climate emergency and other established science.

    ‘Authoritarian states with no regard for the freedom of the press.

    ‘Bad actors spreading disinformation online to undermine democracy.

    ‘But we have something powerful on our side.

    ‘We’ve got you.

    ‘The Guardian is funded by its readers and the only person who decides what we publish is our editor.’

    They have indeed ‘got you’, many of you, and not in a good way. The real threat to truth in our time, quite obviously, is the fact that profit-maximising, ad-dependent corporate media like the Guardian cannot and will not report the truth of a world dominated by giant corporations. The declared aspiration is a sham, a form of niche marketing exploiting the gullible.

    The truth is that ‘mainstream’ media and politics are now captured in a way that is beyond anything we have previously seen. All around the world, political choices have been carefully fixed and filtered to ensure ordinary people are unable to challenge the endless wars, the determination to prioritise profits over climate action at any cost. The job of the corporate media system is to pretend the choices are real, to ensure the walls of the prison remain invisible.

    The only hope in this neon-lit Dark Age is genuinely independent media – the blogs and websites that are now being filtered, shadow-banned, buried and marginalised like never before.

    The post Chamber of Propaganda Horrors first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Amnesty’s annual State of the World’s Human Rights report 2023 is out

    • Powerful governments cast humanity into an era devoid of effective international rule of law, with civilians in conflicts paying the highest price
    • Rapidly changing artificial intelligence is left to create fertile ground for racism, discrimination and division in landmark year for public elections
    • Standing against these abuses, people the world over mobilized in unprecedented numbers, demanding human rights protection and respect for our common humanity

    The world is reaping a harvest of terrifying consequences from escalating conflict and the near breakdown of international law, said Amnesty International as it launched its annual The State of the World’s Human Rights report, delivering an assessment of human rights in 155 countries.

    Amnesty International also warned that the breakdown of the rule of law is likely to accelerate with rapid advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) which, coupled with the dominance of Big Tech, risks a “supercharging” of human rights violations if regulation continues to lag behind advances.

    “Amnesty International’s report paints a dismal picture of alarming human rights repression and prolific international rule-breaking, all in the midst of deepening global inequality, superpowers vying for supremacy and an escalating climate crisis,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard. 

    “Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law is compounded by the failures of its allies to stop the indescribable civilian bloodshed meted out in Gaza. Many of those allies were the very architects of that post-World War Two system of law. Alongside Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, the growing number of armed conflicts, and massive human rights violations witnessed, for example, in Sudan, Ethiopia and Myanmar – the global rule-based order is at risk of decimation.”

    Lawlessness, discrimination and impunity in conflicts and elsewhere have been enabled by unchecked use of new and familiar technologies which are now routinely weaponized by military, political and corporate actors. Big Tech’s platforms have stoked conflict. Spyware and mass surveillance tools are used to encroach on fundamental rights and freedoms, while governments are deploying automated tools targeting the most marginalized groups in society.

    “In an increasingly precarious world, unregulated proliferation and deployment of technologies such as generative AI, facial recognition and spyware are poised to be a pernicious foe – scaling up and supercharging violations of international law and human rights to exceptional levels,” said Agnès Callamard.

    “During a landmark year of elections and in the face of the increasingly powerful anti-regulation lobby driven and financed by Big Tech actors, these rogue and unregulated technological advances pose an enormous threat to us all. They can be weaponized to discriminate, disinform and divide.”

    Read more about Amnesty researchers’ biggest human rights concerns for 2023/24.

    Amnesty International’s report paints a dismal picture of alarming human rights repression and prolific international rule-breaking, all in the midst of deepening global inequality, superpowers vying for supremacy and an escalating climate crisis. Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

    “Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

    Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

    Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

    This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

    Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

    As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

    Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

    “We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

    On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

    This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

    Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

    We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

    This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

    Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

    Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

    You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

    However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

    This has been in the works for a long time.

    Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

    In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

    If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

    In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

    This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

    The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

    The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

    It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

    A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

    This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

    To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

    If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

    The post Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Says He Has Enough Votes to “Cancel” 2024 Presidential Election

    During a recent speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, billed as a “Border 9/11 Gala,” former President Donald Trump pushed a number of outright lies regarding the 2024 presidential election, claiming, without evidence, that fraud would affect its outcome. Trump’s comments echoed assertions he made in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, which laid the groundwork for him…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Civil society view of the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council

    At the 55th Human Rights Council session, 22 civil society organisations share reflections on key outcomes and highlight gaps in addressing crucial issues and situations [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/02/26/human-rights-defenders-issues-at-the-55th-session-of-the-human-rights-council/]:

    The failure of States to pay their membership dues to the United Nations in full and in time, and the practice of conditioning funding on unilateral political goals is causing a financial liquidity crisis for the organisation, the impacts of which are felt by victims and survivors of human rights violations and abuses. … Without the resources needed, the outcomes of this session can’t be implemented. The credibility of HRC is at stake. 

    We welcome the adoption of three resolutions calling for the implementation of effective accountability measures to ensure justice for atrocity crimes committed in the context of Israel‘s decades long colonial apartheid imposed over the Palestinian people, and for the realisation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. Special Procedures expressed their profound concern about “the support of certain governments for Israel’s strategy of warfare against the besieged population of Gaza, and the failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide” and called on States to implement an “arms embargo on Israel, heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling […] that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza […].”   This session, the Special Rapporteur on the OPT concluded that the actions of Israel in Gaza meet the legal qualifications of genocide. 

    We deplore the double standards in applying international law and the failure of certain States to vote in favor of ending impunity. This undermines the integrity of the UN human rights framework, the legitimacy of this institution, and the credibility of those States. From Palestine, to Ukraine, to Myanmar, to Sudan, to Sri Lanka, resolving grave human rights violations requires States to address root causes, applying human rights norms in a principled and consistent way. The Council has a prevention mandate and UN Member States have a legal and moral duty to prevent and ensure accountability and non-recurrence for atrocity crimes, wherever they occur.

    We want to highlight and specifically welcome the adoption of the first ever resolution on combating discrimination, violence and harmful practices intersex persons. The resolution builds on growing support in the Council on this topic and responds to several calls by the global coalition of intersex-led organisations. The resolution takes important steps in recognising that discrimination, violence and harmful practices based on innate variations of sex characteristics, such as medically unnecessary interventions, takes place in all regions of the world. We welcome that the resolution calls for States to take measures to protect the human rights of this population and calls for an OHCHR report and a panel discussion to address challenges and discuss good practices in protecting the human rights of intersex persons.

    We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism. As attested by human rights defenders with albinism, the mandate played an invaluable role by shedding light on human rights violations against persons with albinism through ground breaking research, country visits, and human rights training, and ensuring that defenders with albinism are consulted and take part in the decision-making. The organisations also welcomed the inclusion of language reflecting the important role played by “organizations of persons with albinism and their families”, and the reference to the role of States in collaboration with the World Health Organization, “to take effective measures to address the health-related effects of climate change on persons with albinism with a view to realizing their right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, particularly regarding the alarming incidence of skin cancer in this population, and to implement the recommendations of the report of the Independent Expert in this regard”.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. We also welcome the update of the title of the mandate acknowledging the recognition of this right by the Human Rights Council in its resolution 48/13 on 8 October 2021 and the General Assembly resolution 76/300 on 28 July 2022. We also welcome the inclusion of gender-specific language in the text, and we call on the Special Rapporteur to devote a careful attention to the protection of environmental human rights defenders for their strong contribution to the realisation of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, as called for by several States. We also welcome that the Council appointed for the first time a woman from the global south to fulfill this mandate, and we welcome the nomination of another woman as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change. 

    We welcome the resolution on countering disinformation, which addresses new issues whilst once again rejecting censorship and reaffirming the ‘essential role’ that the right to freedom of expression plays in countering disinformation. We welcome the specific focus on girls – besides women – as well as risks associated with artificial intelligence, gender-based violence, and electoral processes. We urge States to follow the approach of the resolution and to combat disinformation through holistic, positive measures, including by ensuring a diverse, free and independent media environment, protecting journalists and media workers, and implementing comprehensive right to information laws. Importantly, we also urge States to ensure that they do not conduct their own disinformation campaigns. At the same time, social media companies have an essential role to play and should take heed of the resolution by reforming their business models which allow disinformation to flourish on their platforms. The resolution also mandates the Advisory Committee to produce a new report on disinformation, and it is absolutely essential that this report mirrors and reinforces existing standards on this topic, especially the various reports of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression.

    Whilst we welcome the technical renewal of the resolution on freedom of religion or belief, we regret that the parallel resolution on combating intolerance (widely known by its original name Resolution 16/18) was not tabled at the session. Since 2011, these duel resolutions have been renewed each year, representing a consensual and universal framework to address the root causes of hate based on religion or belief in law, policy, and practice. We call on the OIC to once again renew Resolution 16/18 in a future session, while ensuring no substantive changes are made to this consensual framework. We also urge all States to reaffirm their commitment to Resolution 16/18 and the Rabat Plan of Action and adopt comprehensive and evidence-based national implementation plans, with the full and effective participation of diverse stakeholders.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on prevention of genocide and its focus on impunity, risks and early warnings, as well as the paragraph reaffirming that starvation of civilians as a method to combat is prohibited under international humanitarian law; however, we regret that the resolution fails to adequately reflect and address serious concerns relating to current political contexts and related risks of genocide. 

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the rights of the child: realising the rights of the child and inclusive social protection, strengthening the implementation of child rights-compliant inclusive social protection systems that benefit all children. We also welcome the addition of a new section on child rights mainstreaming, enhancing the capacity of OHCHR to advance child rights mainstreaming, particularly in areas such as meaningful and ethical child participation and child safeguarding.  We remain concerned by persisted attempts to weaken the text, especially to shift the focus away from children as individual right-holders, to curtail child participation and remove the inclusion of a gender perspective.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which addresses effective national legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture. We welcome the new paragraph urging States concerned to comply with binding orders of the International Court of Justice related to their obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

    We welcome the adoption of a new resolution on the human rights situation in Belarus. The Belarusian authorities continue their widespread and systematic politically-motivated repression, targeting not only dissent inside the country, but also Belarusians outside the country who were forced to flee for fear of persecution. Today, almost 1,500 prisoners jailed following politically-motivated charges in Belarus face discriminatory treatment, severe restriction of their rights, and ill-treatment including torture. The resolution rightly creates a new standalone independent investigative mechanism, that will inherit the work of the OHCHR Examination, to collect and preserve evidence of potential international crimes beyond the 2020 elections period, with a view to advancing accountability. It also ensures the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur who remains an essential ‘lifeline’ to Belarusian civil society.

    We welcome the resolution on technical assistance and capacity building in regard to the human rights situation in Haiti and emphasis on the role civil society plays in the promotion and protection of human rights and the importance of creating and maintaining an enabling environment in which civil society can operate independently and free from insecurity. We similarly welcome the call on the Haitian authorities to step up their efforts to support national human rights institutions and to pursue an inclusive dialogue between all Haitian actors concerned in order to find a lasting solution to the multidimensional crisis, which severely impacts civil society. We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the designated expert and reference to women and children in regard to the monitoring of human rights situation and abuses developments, as well as encouragement of progress on the question of the establishment of an office of the Office of the High Commissioner in Haiti. We nonetheless regret that the resolution does not address the multifaceted challenges civil society faces amidst escalating violence, fails to further address the link between the circulation of firearms and the human rights violations and abuses, and does not identify concrete avenues for the protection of civilians and solidarity action to ensure the safety, dignity and rights of civilians are upheld.

    We welcome the adoption of the resolution on Iran, renewing the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran and extending for another year the mandate of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran. The continuation of these two distinct and complementary mandates is essential for the Council to fulfill its mandate of promotion and protection of human rights in Iran. However, given the severity of the human rights crisis in the country, we regret that this important resolution remains purely procedural and fails to reflect the dire situation of human rights in Iran, including the sharp spike in executions, often following grossly unfair trials. It also fails to address the increased levels of police and judicial harassment against women and girls appearing in public without compulsory headscarves, human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists and families of victims seeking truth and justice, and the continued pervasive discrimination and violence faced by women and girls, LGBTI+ persons and persons belonging to ethnic and religious minorities in the country.  

    We welcome the adoption by consensus of the resolution on Myanmar, which is a clear indication of the global concern for the deepening human rights and humanitarian crisis in the country as a result of the military’s over three-year long brutal war against the people resisting its attempted coup. We further welcome the Council’s unreserved support for Myanmar peoples’ aspirations for human rights, democracy, and justice as well as the recognition of serious human rights implications of the continuing sale of arms and jet fuel to Myanmar.

    We welcome the resolution on the situation of human rights in Ukraine stemming from the Russian aggression. The latest report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) reveals disturbing evidence of war crimes, including civilian targeting, torture, sexual violence, and the unlawful transfer of children. These findings underscore the conflict’s brutality, particularly highlighted by the siege of Mariupol, where indiscriminate attacks led to massive civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction. The report also details the widespread and systematic torture and sexual violence against both civilians and prisoners of war. Moreover, the illegal deportation of children emerges as a significant issue, as part of a broader strategy of terror and cultural erasure. The COI’s mandate extension is crucial for ongoing investigations and ensuring justice for victims. 

    By adopting a resolution entitled ‘advancing human rights in South Sudan,’ the Council ensured that international scrutiny of South Sudan’s human rights situation will cover the country’s first-ever national elections, which are set to take place in De­cember 2024. With this resolution, the UN’s top human rights body extended the mandate of its Com­mis­sion on Human Rights in South Sudan.

    We welcome the resolution on the human rights situation in Syria and the extension of the mandate of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which will continue to report on violations from all sides of the conflict in an impartial and victim-centered manner. Syria continues to commit systematic and widespread attacks against civilians, in detention centers through torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance and through indiscriminate attacks against the population in Idlib. We welcome that the resolution supports the mandate of the Independent Institution of the Missing People and calls for compliance with the recent order on Provisional Measures by the ICJ – both initiatives can play a significant role in fulfilling victims’ rights to truth and justice and should receive support by all UN Member States. In a context of ongoing normalisation, the CoI’s mandate to investigate and report on human rights abuses occurring in Syria is of paramount importance.

    We continue to deplore this Council’s exceptionalism towards serious human rights violations committed by the Chinese government. At a time when double-standards are enabling ongoing atrocity crimes to be committed in Palestine, sustained failure by Council Members, in particular OIC countries, to promote accountability for crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and Muslim peoples in China severely undermines the Council’s integrity, and its ability to prevent and put an end to atrocity crimes globally. Findings by the OHCHR, the UN Treaty Bodies, the ILO and over 100 letters by UN Special Procedures since 2018 have provided overwhelming evidence pointing to systematic and widespread human rights violations across the People’s Republic of China. We reiterate our pressing call for all Council Members to support the adoption of a resolution establishing a UN mandate to monitor and report on the human rights situation in China, as repeatedly urged by UN Special Procedures. We further echo Special Procedures’ call for prompt and impartial investigations into the unlawful death of Cao Shunli, and all cases of reprisals for cooperation with the UN.

    We regret the Council’s silence on the situation in India despite the clear and compounding early warning signs of further deterioration that necessitate preventive action by the Council based on the objective criteria. The latest of these early warning signals include the recent notification of rules to implement the highly discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government just weeks before the election, along with recent intercommunal violence in Manipur and ongoing violence against Muslims in various parts of India amid increasing restrictions on civic space, criminalisation of dissent and erosion of the rule of law with political interference.

    We further regret that this Council is increasingly failing to protect victims of human rights violations throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The people of Yemen and Libya continue to endure massive ‘man-made’ humanitarian catastrophes caused in large part by ongoing impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other grave violations of international law. In Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and in other MENA countries, citizens are routinely subjected to brutal, wide-spread human rights violations intended to silence dissent, eradicate independent civil society and quash democratic social movements. Countless citizens from the MENA region continue to hope and strive for a more dignified life – often at the cost of their own lives and freedom. We call on this Council and UN member States to rise above narrow political agendas and begin to take steps to address the increasing selectivity that frequently characterises this Council’s approach to human rights protection and promotion. 

    We regret that once more, civil society representatives faced numerous obstacles to accessing the Palais and engaging in discussions, both in person and remotely, during this session. The UN human rights system in Geneva has always and continues to rely on the smooth and unhindered access of civil society to carry out its mandate. We remind UN Member States, as well as UNOG, that the Council’s mandate, as set out in HRC Res 5/1, requires that arrangements be made, and practices observed to ensure ‘the most effective contribution’ of NGOs. Undermining civil society access and engagement not only undermines the capacities and effectiveness of civil society but also of the UN itself.

    Signatories:

    1. All Human Rights for All in Iran
    2. Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)
    3. Association Arc pour la defense des droits de l’homme et des revendication democratique/culturelles du peuple Azerbaidjanais Iran -”ArcDH”
    4. Balochistan Human Rights Group
    5. Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies
    6. Child Rights Connect (CRCnt)
    7. CIVICUS
    8. Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)
    9. Egyptian initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)
    10. Ensemble contre la Peine de Mort
    11. Franciscans International
    12. Gulf Center for Human Rights
    13. Impact Iran
    14. International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI)
    15. International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
    16. International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA)
    17. International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
    18. Kurdistan Human Rights Network
    19. Kurdpa Human Rights Organization
    20. PEN America
    21. The Syrian Legal Development Programme (SLDP)
    22. United 4 Iran

    see also: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-geneva/eu-human-rights-council_en

    https://www.fidh.org/en/international-advocacy/united-nations/human-rights-council/55th-human-rights-council-session-israel-palestine-belarus-iran

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza

    After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

    Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.

    Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.

    With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.

    But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.

    Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.

    In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.

    Not this time.

    “This has to stop”

    Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”

    Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.

    When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were“indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?

    Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”

    The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.

    A salutary equation indeed.

    British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.

    But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.

    Israel’s playbook

    British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.

    But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

    Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.

    Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.

    They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.

    Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.

    Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.

    Gaza isolated

    But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

    Israel needed to take firmer action.

    The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.

    This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the region to protect its volunteers, while Israel formally banned the group from accessing the occupied territories.

    Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.

    Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.

    The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.

    With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.

    The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.

    The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.

    Western complicity

    That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.

    Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.

    The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.

    The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.

    Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.

    And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.

    This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.

    Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.

    Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.

    The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.

    WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.

    Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.

    Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.

    Life and death lottery

    Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.

    The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.

    Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.

    Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.

    According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.

    Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.

    Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.

    An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

    As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.

    Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”

    That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.

    Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.

    Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”

    This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.

    Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.

    If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.

    Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.

    Reporting stifled

    Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.

    Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.

    That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.

    Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.

    Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.

    What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.

    But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.

    The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.

    The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.

    His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.

    Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.

    Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.

    Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.

    Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.

    Rulebook torn up

    And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.

    Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.

    Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.

    Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.

    Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.

    Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.

    Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.

    Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.

    The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.

    The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.

    Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.

    Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.

    The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

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  • UN Human Rights Council again supports US regime change plans for Nicaragua

    When the United Nations sets up a “commission of inquiry,” it can result in a powerful analysis of violations of human rights law, such as the one appointed in 2021 to examine Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and its Apartheid practices. But other commissions can become political platforms aimed at demonizing a particular government by crafting narratives that give the semblance of objectivity, while suppressing all evidence that contradicts the prevailing geopolitical consensus. The ultimate aim of such commissions is not to investigate or to provide advice or technical assistance, but to support a campaign of destabilization. They make it plausible to the world at large that the human rights of the population of the targeted country are being grossly violated and that the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (known as R2P) should be activated.  In other words, regime change, even by force, would be preferable to inaction. This vulgar weaponization of human rights is a favorite device in the tool kit of some hegemonial states.  It is aided and abetted by non-governmental organizations financed by the hegemons and disseminated by the echo chambers of the mainstream media.

    A case in point is the work of the UN’s “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (GHREN), appointed to investigate alleged violations in the country in the period since April 2018. The date is chosen because it marked the start of violent protests, which quickly turned into an attempted coup d’état. The violence lasted for three months and left over 250 people dead, including opponents of the government, government officials and sympathizers, and 22 police officers.

    The group’s first report, in February of 2024, ran to 300 pages. It appeared to be very detailed: for example, it included a 9-page case study of events in one Nicaraguan city, Masaya, during the period April-July 2018. Yet despite this detail, the GHREN ignored the assignment which had been set for its work, which explicitly required it to investigate “all” relevant events. The report either omitted completely, or mentioned only very briefly, the many extreme acts of violence by those involved in the coup attempt. Instead, it focused only on alleged human rights violations by government officials and, in collecting evidence, the group gave preferential access to a number of NGOs which are highly critical of the Nicaraguan government.

    The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, a group made up of organizations and individuals in the United States and Canada, Europe and Latin America, including Nicaragua itself, responded in detail to the GHREN’s work. Its letter calling for the report to be withdrawn was signed by prominent human rights experts, 85 different organizations and over 450 individuals. Despite the number of people who were in support, the letter and detailed evidence submitted received no response whatever.

    Indeed, the GHREN continued its work, and in February of 2024 published a further report, this time without even passing mention of opposition violence. It made no reference to the Coalition’s submissions: it was as if the criticisms of the first report and the evidence substantiating them never existed.

    As one of the human rights experts who was critical of the first report by the GHREN, and as one of the organizers of the Coalition response, we have worked together to produce a second letter, which has been sent to the GHREN and to the President and senior officials of the UN Human Rights Council. This new letter says that the latest report is “methodologically flawed, biased and should never have been published.”  It contends that “excluding pertinent information submitted to the study group is a breach of responsible methodology, a violation of the ethos of every judicial or quasi-judicial investigation.” The letter is signed by ten prominent human rights experts and activists, 47 organizations and over 250 individuals in Nicaragua, USA and Europe, many with long experience in Nicaragua.  (The Coalition is continuing to collect signatures, which will be sent in follow-up at a later date.)

    What is wrong with the GHREN’s latest report? Many examples of bias and omissions can be found within its 19 pages. One is its reference to the amnesty announced by the Nicaraguan government in 2019 for those detained and found guilty of crimes, including even homicide, during the coup attempt. The amnesty was an outcome of negotiations with the Catholic Church and others, aimed at achieving reconciliation in the aftermath of the coup attempt. However, the GHREN portrays the amnesty as benefiting only the state itself, when, in fact, its main beneficiaries were more than 400 opposition figures, including coup organizers, who had been convicted of violent offences. One of the most prominent beneficiaries, Medardo Mairena, had organized several murderous attacks on police stations: the worst, in the small town of Morrito, led to five deaths and nine police officers being kidnapped and beaten. Despite his crimes, Mairena was portrayed as a victim by the GHREN: he was even one of the opposition figures invited to address the UN Human Rights Council in July of 2023.

    A second example is the report’s treatment of migration. Initially, the report claimed that 935,065 people had left Nicaragua; i.e., that one in eight of the population had “fled the country since 2018.” This was the figure that received publicity, even though it was absurdly high. Within a few days the GHREN realized their mistake and revised their report, so that the version currently on the website says instead that 271,740 Nicaraguans have become asylum seekers and 18,545 Nicaraguans are recognized as refugees worldwide (fewer than 1 in 20 of the population). But the report still gives no attention to the evidence that most migration from Nicaragua in the past five years has been economic in motivation, given the effects of US coercive measures on the country, and the economic downturns which resulted from the coup attempt itself and from the subsequent Covid-19 pandemic. It also takes no account of the fact that many migrants return to Nicaragua after periods of working abroad. In other words, even the lower figure likely exaggerates the numbers of Nicaraguans who (in the report’s original words) “fled the country.”

    The most egregious bias in the report is its treatment of opposition figures as victims. Yes, it is true that there have been arrests, imprisonments and the expulsion from the country (with US agreement and facilitation) of many of those arrested. But the GHREN’s report assumes that those affected are innocent of any crime and are merely being persecuted as opponents of the government. It feeds the narrative of Washington, its allies and corporate media that what happened in 2018 was peaceful protest, when in practice the violent coup attempt affected millions of Nicaraguans, with lives lost, public buildings destroyed, homes set on fire and scores of government officials and sympathizers kidnapped, tortured, wounded or killed. The GHREN ignored the plentiful, detailed evidence from the Coalition which presented a more accurate narrative of what happened.

    It is vital that the UN Human Rights Council pay attention to these criticisms and thoroughly review its dealings with Nicaragua. It is clear that the current expert group has totally failed in its assignment to consider “all” relevant events since April 2018 and is behaving in a completely unprofessional manner. Its work should be stopped, and a genuine attempt should be made to work with the Nicaraguan government based on a proper understanding of the needs of its people and of their experience of the 2018 coup attempt. Above all, it should urge the removal of the unilateral coercive measures (wrongly referred to as “sanctions”, implying that they are legitiamte), which are worsening conditions for Nicaraguans, not improving them.

    Coda by Alfred de Zayas

    The dysfunctional situation described above is not without precedent.  During my six years as Independent Expert on International Order (2012-18), I myself observed manipulations and double standards, and duly informed the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) that in my considered opinion some of my colleague rapporteurs were not rigorously observing their independent status and our code of conduct, particularly Article 6, which requires all rapporteurs to give due weight to all available information and to pro-actively seek explanations from all stakeholders, including the government of the state in questions, respecting the over-arching rule of audiatur et altera pars (“let the other side be heard as well”).

    When in the summer of 2017 I sought an invitation to visit Venezuela on official mission, I encountered opposition within OHCHR, which attempted to dissuade me.  When I did receive an invitation, thus breaking a 21-year absence of UN rapporteurs from Venezuela, I was surprised to receive letters from three major NGOs who actually asked me not to go, because I was not the “pertinent” rapporteur.  Evidently these NGOs and some officials at OHCHR were “concerned” with my independence, as already demonstrated in 12 reports to the General Assembly and Human Rights Council,  and feared accordingly, that I would write my own report on Venezuela, which  would not necessarily support the ubiquitous US narrative.

    It became clear to me that some officials at OHCHR were nervous that I would actually conduct a fair investigation, speak to all stakeholders on the ground and then make my own judgment.  Indeed, I read and digested all the relevant reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. When I was on the ground in Venezuela I fact-checked these and other reports, which I found to be seriously deficient.  I also consulted the reports of local non-governmental organizations in Venezuela, including those of Fundalatin, Grupo Sures and Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, and read the economic analysis by the Venezuelan Professor Pasqualina Curcio.

    When in November/December 2017 I became the first UN rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21 years, I was subjected to pre-mission, during-mission, and post-mission mobbing.  I endured a barrage of insults and even death threats.  Notwithstanding an atmosphere of intimidation, my mission resulted in positive results, including the immediate release of opposition politician Roberto Picon (his wife and son appealed to me, I then submitted the case to the then Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza), the release of 80 other detainees, enhanced cooperation between UN agencies and the government, and new memoranda of understanding. The mission opened the door to the visits of several other rapporteurs including Professors Alena Douhan and Michael Fakhri, as well as by High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet.  My report to the Human Rights Council in September 2018 addressed the root causes of problems, formulated proposals for solutions, incorporating the information received from all stakeholders, including the opposition parliamentarians, Chamber of Commerce, the press, diplomatic corps, church leaders, university professors, students and more than 40 NGOs of all colors.  The report was criticized by mainstream NGOs in the US and Europe, for whom only those rapporteurs are praiseworthy who engage in “naming and shaming” and promote regime change.

    Chapters 2 and 3 of my book The Human Rights Industry document the endemic problems in the functioning of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council that continue to cater to the priorities of the major donors.  However, the general perception of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council promoted by the mainstream media gratuitously grants both institutions authority and credibility, without addressing the problems already exposed by a number of rapporteurss, including myself.

    This dependence of OHCHR and the Human Rights Council on Washington and Brussels explains some of the abstruse decisions and resolutions adopted by the Council.  Part of the problem lies in the ways in which staff members are recruited and in the procedures by which experts, including rapporteurs, independent experts and commission members, are appointed.

    For example, it does not advance “geographical representation” simply by hiring someone from Mauritius or Indonesia, if that person has been trained and indoctrinated in US and UK universities.  “Geographical diversity” does not necessarily ensure the representation of a spectrum of opinions and approaches to problems.  It does not mean much when there are so and so many persons who are ticked off against a particular nationality; e.g., US, French, Russian, Chinese, South African.  What is crucial is to ensure that all schools of legal thinking and philosophy are represented.  What is important is that when a candidate from State X is recruited or appointed, that he/she have first and foremost the interests of the United Nations at heart, and that he/she is not a priori committed to support the interests of the US or one of the European powers. I do not challenge the competence or expertise of staff members and rapporteurs – I challenge their ethos and independence — their commitment to the values of the UN Charter and their commitment to impartiality.

    There are other obstacles to impartiality. Indeed, some OHCHR staff members are penalized if they do their work properly and do NOT follow the orders coming from above, which are mostly US-Brussels friendly.  It is a regrettable reality that the donors weigh heavily in setting the agenda. There is no mechanism to ensure that the code of conduct of rapporteurs is respected, in particular Article 6.  The impunity for openly siding with the US and Brussels and ignoring the rest of the world is notorious.  In other words, OHCHR and the Human Rights Council have been largely “hijacked” – as indeed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, European Court of Human Rights have been.  This raises the issue that Juvenalis formulated in his sixth Satire (verses 346-7): Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – “who will guard over the guardians?”

    Experience shows that being a solid professional does NOT facilitate getting a promotion.  One is likely to be penalized.  Abiding by the “unwritten law” of “groupthink” and supporting the Western narratives does contribute to career development. And, alas, most staffers are first and foremost interested in their careers, and not necessarily in promoting human rights.  As elsewhere, it is a job.

    Some outside observers have understood what game is being played and what the rules are.  Reality at OHCHR and the Human Rights Council is closer to Machiavellianism and Orwellianism than to the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, Charles Malik, P.C. Chang and others.  Notwithstanding these problems, we are optimistic that the system can be reformed, and we encourage all non-governmental people of good will and good faith to insist on reforming these institutions so that they serve all of humanity and not only the interests of a handful of powerful states.  Among the NGOs that are making concrete proposals for reform are the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities and the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, both in consultative status with the United Nations.

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  • The Answer to False Claims

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  • We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how

    For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.

    Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.

    Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.

    Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.

    These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.

    The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.

    The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.

    What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.

    Whitewashing genocide

    Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.

    Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.

    Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.

    Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.

    Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.

    The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.

    But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

    Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.

    It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.

    First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October – and those it did not – have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.

    The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.

    More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.

    A colonial arrogance

    Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.

    True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.

    Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.

    And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.

    No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves – were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.

    The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.

    Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.

    The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.

    The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza.

    Suicide mission

    The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.

    The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout – and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.

    Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.

    The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.

    They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.

    As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned.

    Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”

    For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.

    The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position.

    It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world.

    Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.

    Loss of focus

    But for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected.

    Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.

    With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.

    That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.

    And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza.

    It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media.

    Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.

    Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders.

    One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior US officials too.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims.

    Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.

    Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.

    Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.

    When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.

    Fabricating atrocities 

    Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.

    Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.

    Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.”

    In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.

    The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”.

    The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?

    The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary.

    Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”

    The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity.

    ‘Hannibal directive’

    Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas – particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.

    Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.

    In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.

    The commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those who did die in the house were killed by Israel.

    The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”.

    These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.

    In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.

    Woeful imbalance

    The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts.

    The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?

    In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

    But the problem runs deeper.

    This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years.

    Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target.

    That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism.

    A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.

    Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files, showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people.

    Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation.

    There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.

    Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps.

    And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide.

    Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm.

    Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.

    The post We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Government-Made Comic Books Try to Fight Election Disinformation

    With the 2024 elections looming, the Department of Homeland Security has a little-noticed weapon in its war on disinformation: comic books. Few have read them, but the series is attracting criticism from members of Congress. Calling the comics “creepy,” Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., complained earlier this month that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency-produced series was just another way for the federal government to “trample on the First Amendment” in its zeal to fight so-called disinformation.

    “DC Comics won’t be adding these taxpayer-funded comic books … to their repertoire anytime soon,” cracked Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s annual report on government waste released in December. 

    The comics read like well-meaning (if corny) attempts to grapple with efforts by foreign governments to influence American public opinion, as articulated in intelligence community assessments. But there is a risk that the federal government’s fight against foreign disinformation positions it as an arbiter of the truth, which raises civil liberties concerns. The efficacy of the DHS “Resilience Series” of comic books is also far from obvious. 

    The members of Congress might be comforted to know that few people ever noticed the comics. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urges users to “share” their “Resilience Series” comics, but a search of the webpage’s address on X shows that it is linked to fewer than a dozen times. CISA also produced glossy-looking YouTube trailers for its two graphic novels that garnered just 4,000 and 6,000 views respectively — a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of views trailers for other graphic novels attract. 

    For CISA, disinformation is no laughing matter. “Disinformation is an existential threat to the United States,” declares CISA’s webpage detailing its “Resilience Series” of comic books.

    Third in sales by genre, only behind general fiction and romance novels, graphic novels are particularly popular among the youngest readers. One industry observer notes that in Japan, more paper is used for manga books than for toilet paper. School Library Journal concluded in their graphic novels survey last year that popularity increased over 90 percent year over year in school libraries. The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of school librarians reported opposition to graphic novels from teachers, parents, and others who didn’t consider them “real books.”

    Though first released in 2020 in anticipation of the Trump–Biden presidential election, the comics were intended to be an evergreen resource in the war on disinformation. “Learn the dangers & risks associated with dis- & misinformation through fictional stories that are inspired by real-world events in @CISAgov’s Resilience Series,” the U.S. Attorney for Nevada posted on X last April. 

    CISA produced two graphic novels, “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes.” “Real Fake” tells the story of Rachel O’Sullivan, a “gamer” and a “patriot” who infiltrates a troll farm circulating false narratives about elections to American voters. “Bug Bytes” addresses disinformation around Covid-19, following Ava Williams, a journalism student who realizes that a malicious cyber campaign spreading conspiracy theories about 5G technology is inspiring attacks on 5G towers.

    “Fellow comic geeks, assemble!” CISA said when the comic books were initially released. “Let’s band together to take on disinformation and misinformation.” The CISA post quotes another X post by the FBI’s Washington field office recommending the graphic novels and exhorting the importance of “finding trusted information.”

    “The resilience series products were released in 2020 and 2021 to raise awareness on tactics of foreign influence and disinformation,” a spokesperson for CISA told The Intercept, noting that despite continued reference by members of Congress and critics, that this series of comic books has now been discontinued.

    “The problem is not that panels about African troll farms (Real Fake) or homegrown antivaxxers (Bug Bytes) might make readers feel insecure—it’s that they don’t make readers feel insecure enough,” writes Russ Castronovo, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for the Humanities and professor of American studies and English, in Public Books magazine. “Or, more precisely, these comics might be judged aesthetic failures because—due to their proximity to propaganda—they leave little space for the vulnerabilities inherent in the act of reading. So, while readers learn that meddling by foreign powers ‘is scary, especially in an election year,’ the graphic fictions commissioned by US cybersecurity assume reading itself to be a process whereby information (as opposed to disinformation) is obtained, questions are answered, and doubts are resolved.”

    Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Thomas Gaulkin said that “the Resilience Series … conjures a certain jingoism peculiar to government publications that can mimic the very threat being addressed.” 

    All of which raises the question as to what role the Department of Homeland Security should play in adjudicating “media literacy,” as the series webpage says. 

    Both “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes” were written by Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who works as a contributor to MSNBC and is affiliated with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, and Farid Haque, an education technology entrepreneur who is CEO of London-based Erly Stage Studios and was previously CEO of StartUp Britain, a campaign launched by then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. 

    Watts, who writes and speaks about Russian influence campaigns, has testified to Congress on the matter and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Clearly knowledgeable, his own writings can sometimes veer into hyperbole — a potent reminder that even experts on disinformation are not infallible.

    “Over the past three years, Russia has implemented and run the most effective and efficient influence campaign in world history,” Watts said in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017. While Russia’s propaganda regarding its first invasion of Ukraine and Crimea was no doubt effective, that employed in 2016 against the U.S. presidential election was “neither well organized nor especially well resourced” according to a detailed study by the Pentagon-backed Rand Corporation. The think tank later concluded that “the impact of Russian efforts in the West has been uncertain.”

    Co-author Haque, according to an interview in Forbes, became involved in the Resilience Series after a chance meeting at a bookstore with actor Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks, who would later join Erly Stage’s advisory board and introduce Haque to his Americans contacts, which included Watts.

    “There is now a real need for schools and public authorities to educate young people on how much fake news there is across all forms of media,” Haque told Forbes.

    Related

    The Government Created a New Disinformation Office to Oversee All the Other Ones

    Counter-disinformation has become a cottage industry in the federal government, with offices and programs now dedicated to exposing foreign influence, as The Intercept has previously reported. CISA’s Resilience Series webpage directs questions to an email for the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (not to be confused with the FBI’s own effort, the Foreign Influence Task Force, or the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center). In 2021, the CISA Task Force was replaced by a Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation team according to a government audit, which CISA tells The Intercept has now been rolled into something called “the Election Security and Resilience subdivision.” (Malinformation refers to information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate, according to CISA.)

    The proliferation of various counter-disinformation entities has been disjointed, prompting the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general to conclude that “DHS does not have a unified, department-wide strategy to set overarching goals and objectives for addressing and mitigating threats from disinformation campaigns that appear in social media.”

    CISA’s mission, originally focused on traditional cyber and critical infrastructure security, evolved in the wake of the 2016 election. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson officially designated the election systems as a part of critical infrastructure. Since then, CISA has expanded its focus to include fighting disinformation, arguing that human thought can be said to constitute infrastructure.

    “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in 2021. 

    In pursuit of that cognitive infrastructure, CISA launched the Resilience Series, with an eye to mediums that would appeal to popular audiences.

    “We have to find new ways to engage with people through mediums that use soft power and creative messaging, rather than being seen to preach,” Haque said in the Forbes interview.

    The post Government-Made Comic Books Try to Fight Election Disinformation appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The Russiagate Hoax illustrates the Power the National Security Police State

    The US rulers and their national security state foisted two major campaigns of lies on us to win our support for their planned wars. The first that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This bogus story was rejected by the progressive and anti-war movements. The second that Trump colluded with Putin to steal the 2016 election; this, progressives fell for. It remains a shocking example of manipulation of supposedly well-educated progressive people – many of whom do not hesitate to ridicule MAGA people for their bigotry and ignorance.

    Russiagate, packaged as a tale of Putin and Trump collusion, was a plot against the government elected by the people. Russiagate, first leaked to the media in mid-2016 by CIA Director Brennan, sought to sabotage a presidential campaign and then delegitimize the Trump presidency. It was an essential tool for legitimizing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, costing hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.

    Yet, no evidence was ever presented that Trump colluded with Putin. No evidence was presented that the Russians hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers. No evidence was presented that any votes in 2016 were switched.

    Origin of anti-Russian campaign and the Russiagate Story

    In 2014 Washington instigated an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine. Then when Russia aided Syria in the US-provoked “civil war,” Russia bashing intensified. As General Wesley Clark revealed, the US had targeted Syria for overthrow at least since 2001 and was in a favorable position to accomplish this goal until Moscow began significant military aid to Damascus in 2015.

    CIA’s Brennan aimed to manipulate the public to prepare for a showdown with Russia. Mike Whitney wrote, “After Putin blocked Brennan’s operations in both Ukraine and Syria, Brennan had every reason to retaliate and to use the tools at his disposal to demonize Putin and try to isolate Russia.” Meanwhile, Trump was gaining ground in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries when he called for US troops to get out Syria and the Middle East and said the “deep state” lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Whitney adds, “It provided him [Brennan] the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, to deliver a withering blow to Putin and Trump at the very same time.”

    In Whose Bright Idea Was RussiaGate, Paul Craig Roberts elaborated:

    Russiagate was created by CIA director John Brennan. The CIA started what is called Russiagate in order to prevent Trump from being able to normalize relations with Russia. The CIA and the military/security complex need an enemy in order to justify their huge budgets and unaccountable power. Russia has been assigned that role. The Democrats joined in as a way of attacking Trump. They hoped to have him tarnished as cooperating with Russia to steal the presidential election from Hillary and to have him impeached.

    Russian expert Stephen Cohen concurred, reporting that Brennan was collecting material for the collusion story in late 2015 or early 2016 and instigated the FBI investigation into the Trump-Putin hoax. “Brennan played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative thereafter.” Cohen, in “Russiagate’s ‘Core Narrative’ Has Always Lacked Actual Evidence,” said the story was based on two documents: an “Intelligence Community Assessment” and the Steele dossier, compiled by a retired UK intelligence officer. The core narrative of both claimed Putin intervened in the 2016 presidential campaign to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy to help Trump. Journalist Aaron Mate further detailed CIA Director Brennan’s role as “a prime mover of Russiagate.”

    Steele Dossier

    “The Dossier” asserted Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton, claiming that Russia hacked the DNC computer servers. Mike Whitney and others point out the Steele Dossier was paid for by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. While the Dossier is now discredited, the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia was launched based on “information” gathered from this paid-for report. Steele “was a former M16 agent who was paid $160,000 for composing the dubious set of reports that make up the dossier. We don’t even know if Steele’s alleged contacts or intermediaries in Russia actually exist or not.”

    The “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA)

    CIA boss Brennan, along with the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Clapper, finally released the ICA report in January 2017, which concluded that Putin “ordered” a campaign aimed at influencing the election. The Assessment claimed:

    “Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order… We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency…We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump…Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards…. We have high confidence in these judgments.”

    The Assessment contained no evidence of Russia’s role but asserted Russia’s actions included hacking into the email accounts of the DNC along with intermediaries such as WikiLeaks to release the hacked information.

    Stephen Cohen adds, “Clapper subsequently admitted he had personally selected for the ICA analysts from the three agencies, but we still do not know who. No doubt these were analysts who would conform to the ‘core narrative’ of Kremlin-Trump collusion…. the ICA provided almost no facts for its ‘assessment.’”

    National Security State Directors Perpetuate their Trump-Putin collusion hoax

    CIA’s Brennan deceived Congress and the public by claiming sufficient evidence existed to investigate Trump’s campaign. The BBC 2017 article Ex-CIA chief Brennan says Trump-Russia inquiry ‘well-founded’ stated Brennan “told the House Intelligence Committee he was aware of intelligence showing contact between Russian officials and ‘US persons involved in the Trump campaign’.” Brennan said the Russians ‘brazenly interfered’ in the 2016 US elections and were ‘very aggressive.’”

    21st Century Wire reported that Clapper, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), had “leaked information on the ‘Trump dossier’ to CNN’s Jake Tapper, lied about it to Congress, and then was hired by CNN just a few months later.” Clapper later asserted that Putin “knows how to handle an asset and that’s what he’s doing with the President”.

    The third national security state boss, FBI Director Comey, proclaimed in Congressional hearings that Putin:

    hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much. They engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy. They were unusually loud in their intervention. It’s almost as if they didn’t care that we knew, that they wanted us to see what they were doing. Their number one mission is to undermine the credibility of our entire democracy enterprise of this nation. They’ll be back. They’ll be back, in 2020. They may be back in 2018.

    Mike Whitney remarked, “So among his other talents, Comey also knows how to read minds. He knows that Putin hates Hillary and favors Trump. He knows the Russians ‘engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy’, even though he hasn’t produced a lick of proof to verify his claims.”

    Whitney adds later, “The FBI made a “concerted effort to conceal information from the court” in order to get a warrant to spy on a member of a rival political campaign. The FBI failed to mention that the dossier was paid for by the Hillary campaign and the DNC.”

    The fourth national police state boss, NSA Director Michael Rogers, when asked on November 15, 2016, about the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails during the 2016 presidential campaign, declared, “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state [Russia] to attempt to achieve a specific effect.” He added, “This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance.”

    Thus, the Trump-Putin collusion and Russia hacking story was propagated by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and DNI, the backbone of the national security police state.

    The story that Russia “hacked” DNC-Hillary Clinton computers

    Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity pointed out that the “NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved…The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRClinton or any other servers were routed through the network.” Given that this hacking was allegedly by a foreign power, which the US considered an enemy, it would make sense to conclude the NSA knew Russia did not do it, but stayed mum.

    Instead of asking the NSA or FBI, the DNC hired CrowdStrike to investigate the “hacking” of their computers, despite the claimed significant US national security threat that a foreign power hacked presidential campaign computers to alter the election. CrowdStrike became the only actual source for “information” on the Russian hacking of DNC computers and Russia’s providing the scoop to WikiLeaks. FBI Director Comey never insisted on access to the DNC computers, nor was the FBI given an unredacted report. The only evidence of a hack comes from this company paid by the DNC.

    CrowdStrike’s chief technical officer was Dmitri Alperovich, a senior fellow with the Saudi and Rockefeller Foundation funded think tank, the neocon Atlantic Council. It has several former CIA directors on its board and considered to be NATO’s “think tank.”

    Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, knew from the head of CrowdStrike, Shawn Henry in December 5, 2017, that CrowdStrike had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked by Russia or anyone else. However, Schiff kept this from the public until May 7, 2020, two and a half years later.

    National  Police State Directors admit they made up the Trump-Putin collusion Story

    After the 2016 election, the DNI, CIA, NSA, and FBI bosses admitted they made up the collusion story and that the Intelligence Community Assessment they released to the public contained no evidence. CIA boss Brennan when asked on May 23, 2017 in a Congressional hearing into Russian collusion declared, “I don’t do evidence…I don’t know whether such collusion existed.”

    Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted to the House Intelligence Committee on July 17, 2017, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Clapper also owned up, in July 5, 2017 testimony that “17 intelligence agencies” had confirmed Russian interference in the 2016 election has been false all along.

    For his part, FBI Director Comey, in Congressional testimony on March 20, 2017, “stated there is no evidence to support collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia.” In a June 8, 2017 hearing, when asked “Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered?” Comey answered, “I’m confident.”

    Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, the three chief national security state bosses behind the Russiagate story admitted they made it up, that no evidence substantiates their hoax on the public.

    Too many progressives swallow the CIA invented Trump-Putin collusion story

    Thus, we have the heads of the national security state police agencies concocting a story to sway a US presidential election and incite anger at Russia. Progressives recognize the NSA, CIA and FBI as enemies of human rights and liberties. Most progressives also view Trump as fascist or “neo-fascist.” But here we have the curiosity of the national police state agencies interfering in a US election to stop a “fascist” from being elected. Progressives might reflect on why they have ended up opposing the same candidate the national security state opposes, how they put themselves in the position of voting for the candidates (Hillary and Biden) that the national security state preferred.

    We now have evidence to know the US national security state systematically interfered in a presidential election. They made up a story and convinced most of the US public of it. They even surveilled and wire-tapped members of the presidential campaign they opposed. This testifies to the colossal reach of the national security state over us, their ability to make us believe a falsehood is reality. And get away with it unpunished. It attests to their power over US society that no dared indict them for trying to fix our elections.

    That the national police agencies undertook this vast operation against the Republican Party, considered the more reactionary enforcer of the status quo of the two corporate parties, warns us what they have in store when an actual popular revolt against their status quo arises.

    Considerable information has existed for some years that the Russiagate hoax was no more true than Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, which few progressives swallowed. The opposite case here. Progressives drank the anti-Trump “Kool-Aid.” A 2018 Gallup poll showed that 90% of Democratic voters bought the Russia interference story compared to 67% of Republican voters. On whether Russia changed the election outcome, 78% of Democratic voters agreed. without evidence ever presented. Ironically, these voters include those who proclaim, “follow the science” and consider the MAGA crowd as uneducated and prejudiced.

    Many progressives had just supported Bernie in 2015-16 only to see Hillary Clinton’s dirty tricks snatch the Democratic nomination from him. Yet they welcomed this Clinton/DNC/national security state propagated hoax – the very people they just repudiated; a testimony of how the ruling class can manage consent.

    The police state agencies whipped up such a Russiagate hysteria that if you questioned it in a public forum, you were sure to be attacked as being a Putin stooge, disloyal, a MAGA bigot.

    This Putin-Trump collusion hoax and consequent hysteria laid the foundation for the later propaganda campaign to provoke the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. And we see in the 2018 poll that Democratic voters were more welcoming of aggressive action. Likewise, a poll revealed ten months into the Ukraine war that, “33% of Republicans agreed with that prolonged support, compared to 61% of Democrats and 46% of independents.” Remarkedly, Democratic voters have become more war-friendly.

    In addition, Russiagate gave impetus to the campaign of smearing independent, anti-war media as agents of Russian disinformation. Even articles in progressive media such as Counterpunch propagated this nonsense, labeling those who did not support the US attempts to overthrow the Syrian government or defend the Ukrainian coup regime as “Assadists” and “Putinists.” This shows the continuing threat to the anti-war movement, given that US national security police state disinformation operations still hold considerable sway, permitting them to repress and marginalize voices for peace more easily.

    The post The Russiagate Hoax illustrates the Power the National Security Police State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Censors Celebrated: Misinformation and Disinformation Down Under

    The heralded arrival of the Internet caused flutters of enthusiasm, streaks of heart-felt hope.  Unregulated, and supposedly all powerful, an information medium never before seen on such scale could be used to liberate mind and spirit.  With almost disconcerting reliability, humankind would coddle and fawn over a technology which would, as Langdon Winner writes, “bring universal wealth, enhanced freedom, revitalized politics, satisfying community, and personal fulfilment.”

    Such high street techno-utopianism was bound to have its day.  The sceptics grumbled, the critiques bubbled and flowed. Evgeny Morozov, in his relentlessly biting study The Net Delusion, warned of the misguided nature of the “excessive optimism and empty McKinsey-speak”, of cyber-utopianism and the ostensibly democratising properties of the Internet.  Governments, whatever their ideological mix, gave the same bark of suspicion.

    In Australia, we see the tech-utopians being butchered, metaphorically speaking, on our doorstep. Of concern here is the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.  This nasty bit of legislative progeny arises from the 2019 Digital Platforms Inquiry conducted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).  The final report notes how consumers accessing news placed on digital platforms “potentially risk exposure to unreliable news through ‘filter bubbles’ and the spread of disinformation, malinformation and misinformation (‘fake news’) online.”  And what of television? Radio? Community bulletin boards?  The mind shrinks in anticipation.

    In this state of knee-jerk control and paternal suspicion, the Commonwealth pressed digital platforms conducting business in Australia to develop a voluntary code of practice to address disinformation and the quality of news.  The Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation was launched on February 22, 2021 by the Digital Industry Group Inc.  Eight digital platforms adopted the code, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter.  The acquiescence from the digital giants did little in terms of satisfying the wishes of the Morrison government.  The Minister of Communications at the time, Paul Fletcher, duly announced that new laws would be drafted to arm the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with the means “to combat online misinformation and disinformation.”  He noted an ACMA report highlighting that “disinformation and misinformation are significant and ongoing issues.”

    The resulting Bill proposes to make various functional amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (Cth) as to the way digital platform services work.  It also proposes to vest the ACMA with powers to target misinformation and disinformation.  Digital platforms not in compliance with the directions of the ACMA risk facing hefty penalties, though the regulator will not have the power to request the removal of specific content from the digital platform services.

    In its current form, the proposed instrument defines misinformation as “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm.”  Disinformation is regarded as “misinformation that is intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm.”

    Of concern regarding the Bill is the scope of the proposed ACMA powers regarding material it designates as “harmful online misinformation and disinformation”.  Digital platforms will be required to impose codes of conduct to enforce the interpretations made by the ACMA.  The regulator can even “create and enforce an industry standard” (this standard is unworkably opaque, and again begs the question of how that can be defined) and register them.  Those in breach will be liable for up to $7.8 million or 5% of global turnover for corporations.  Individuals can be liable for fines up to $1.38 million.

    A central notion in the proposal is that the information in question must be “reasonably likely […] to cause or contribute serious harm”.  Examples of this hopelessly rubbery concept are provided in the Guidance Note to the Bill.  These include hatred targeting a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability.  It can also include disruption to public order or society.  The example provided in the guidance suggests typical government paranoia about how the unruly, irascible populace might be incited: “Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure.”

    The proposed law will potentially enthrone the ACMA as an interventionist overseer of digital content.  In doing so, it can decide what and which entity can be exempted from alleged misinformation practices.  For instance, “excluded content for misinformation purposes” can be anything touching on entertainment, parody or satire, provided it is done in good faith.  Professional news content is also excluded, but any number of news or critical sources may fall foul of the provisions, given the multiple, exacting codes the “news source” must abide by.  The sense of that discretion is woefully wide.

    The submission from the Victorian Bar Association warns that “the Bill’s interference with the self-fulfilment of free expression will occur primarily by the chilling self-censorship it will inevitably bring about in the individual users of the relevant services (who may rationally wish to avoid any risk of being labelled a purveyor of misinformation or disinformation).”  The VBA also wonders if such a bill is even warranted, given that the problem has been “effectively responded to by voluntary actions taken by the most important actors in this space.”

    Also critical, if less focused, is the stream of industrial rage coming from the Coalition benches and the corridors of Sky News, where Rupert Murdoch ventriloquises.  Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman called the draft “a very bad bill” giving the ACMA “extraordinary powers.  It would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.”  Sky News has even deigned to use the term “Orwellian”.

    Misinformation, squawked Coleman, was defined so broadly as to potentially “capture many statements made by Australians in the context of political debate.”  Content from journalists “on their personal digital platforms” risked being removed as crudely mislabelled misinformation.  This was fascinating, u-turning stuff, given the enthusiasm the Coalition had shown in 2022 for a similar muzzling of information.  Once in opposition, the mind reverses, leaving the mind to breathe.

    The proposed bill on assessing, parcelling and dictating information (mis-, dis-, mal-) is a nasty little experiment in censoring communication and discussion. When the state decides, through its agencies, to tell readers what is appropriate to read and what can be accessed, the sirens should be going off.

    The post Censors Celebrated: Misinformation and Disinformation Down Under first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Private Profits vs. Social Prophets

    …What we see at work is not an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs of political life.

    — Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, p. 343.

    We entered the massive marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and at this date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and off the books to insure that ruling power maintains control over American capitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal control officer or president of the United States. Given that, the spending and consciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befitting a system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity than American voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status of an American empire making more people rich than ever before while making multitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nations is not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economic organism.

    As the fading rulers of western capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead of leaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, mass murder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mental condition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking human beings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approaches the worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires of hell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that might make the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblical times when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as ruling wealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political and media servants of rulers do today.

    The continuing since 1917 American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a point in the current war using Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hope of winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various of the NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urge broadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists in their fevered minds, said fever having been planted by America since the end of the second world war.

    Meanwhile, the center of global anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloody horror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened and expressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948 when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been a haven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would be like Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making all others second class citizens once they took over, changed the language and culture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans ever had.

    In only one of thousands of contradictions of logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continue calling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semites commit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western world have their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everything else in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearing an end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changes underway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seem more dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of the imperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-pot dictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other past murderers.

    While it seems that the horrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will be the same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans have grown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both parties increase alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or national disorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracy in substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people who are told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economic form of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street are merely getting close to nature.

    While political madness depicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned and operated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimes committed by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps and hustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially Congress and the white house, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed by American taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what the world needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in the planning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to pass if Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late. Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil of the two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that does not involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handful become billionaires.

    The opening quote is from someone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term not even vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easily understandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, a socialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those same billions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts about people, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjust and work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by ending warfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as our pre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after we clear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx in his own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderous detractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand about why our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.

    The post Private Profits vs. Social Prophets first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza

    The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.

    Liberal democracy is not what it seems.

    It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.

    But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?

    Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.

    What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?

    And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.

    The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.

    The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.

    Depravity on show

    The West is desperately trying to cope. When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.

    They are given a name. It is Russia. It is Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. It is China. And right now, it is Hamas.

    There must be an enemy. But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry – a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years – that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore. The excuses are hard to swallow.

    Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter? Does the West really believe that the attack of 7 October warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?

    To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things. First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look. And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.

    Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.

    Starved by Israel

    To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage – especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.

    How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians? After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.

    A headline in the New York Times, for example, told readers last month, “Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children”, as if this were a famine in Africa – a natural disaster, or an unexpected humanitarian catastrophe – rather than a policy declared in advance and carefully orchestrated by Israel’s top echelons.

    The Financial Times offered the same perverse framing: “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza”.

    But starvation is not an actor in Gaza. Israel is. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children. It renews that policy each day afresh, fully aware of the terrible price being inflicted on the population.

    As the head of Medical Aid for Palestinians warned of developments in Gaza: “Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”

    Last week Unicef, the United Nations children’s emergency fund, declared that a third of children aged under two in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished. Its executive director, Catherine Russell, was clear: “An immediate humanitarian cease-fire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering.”

    Were it really starvation doing the stalking, rather than Israel imposing starvation, the West’s powerlessness would be more understandable. Which is what the media presumably want their readers to infer.

    But the West isn’t powerless. It is enabling this crime against humanity – day after day, week after week – by refusing to exert its power to punish Israel, or even to threaten to punish it, for blocking aid.

    Not only that, but the US and Europe have helped Israel starve Gaza’s children by denying funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, the main humanitarian lifeline in the enclave.

    All of this is obscured – meant to be obscured – by headlines that transfer the agency for starving children to an abstract noun rather than a country with a large, vengeful army.

    Attack on aid convoy

    Such misdirection is everywhere – and it is entirely intentional. It is a playbook being used by every single Western media outlet. It was all too visible when an aid convoy last month reached Gaza City, where levels of Israeli-induced famine are most extreme.

    In what has come to be known by Palestinians as the “Flour Massacre”, Israel shot into large crowds desperately trying to get food parcels from a rare aid convoy to feed their starving families. More than 100 Palestinians were killed by the gunfire, or crushed by Israeli tanks or hit by trucks fleeing the scene. Many hundreds more were seriously wounded.

    It was an Israeli war crime – shooting on civilians – that came on top of an Israeli crime against humanity – starving two million civilians to death.

    The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off. It has been repeated several times, though you would barely know it, given the paucity of coverage.

    The depravity of using aid convoys as traps to lure Palestinians to their deaths is almost too much to grasp.

    But that is not the reason the headlines that greeted this horrifying incident so uniformly obscured or soft-soaped Israel’s crime.

    For any journalist, the headline should have written itself: “Israel accused of killing over 100 as crowd waits for Gaza aid.” Or: “Israel fires into food aid crowd. Hundreds killed and injured”

    But that would have accurately transferred agency to Israel – Gaza’s occupier for more than half a century, and its besieger for the last 17 years – in the deaths of those it has been occupying and besieging. Something inconceivable for the Western media.

    So the focus had to be shifted elsewhere.

    BBC contortions

    The Guardian’s contortions were particularly spectacular: “Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks”.

    The massacre by Israel was disappeared as mysterious “food aid-related deaths”, which in turn became secondary to the Guardian’s focus on the diplomatic fallout.

    Readers were steered by the headline into assuming that the true victims were not the hundreds of Palestinians killed and maimed by Israel but the Israeli hostages whose chances of being freed had been “complicated” by “food aid-related deaths”.

    The headline on a BBC analysis of the same war crime – now reframed as an author-less “tragedy” – repeated the New York Times’ trick: “Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza”.

    Another favourite manoeuvre, again pioneered by the Guardian, was to cloud responsibility for a clear-cut war crime. Its front-page headline read: “More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy”.

    Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene. In fact, worse, the crime scene was removed too. Palestinians “died” apparently because of poor aid management. Maybe UNRWA was to blame.

    Chaos and confusion became useful refrains for media outlets keener to shroud culpability. The Washington Post declared: “Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame”. CNN took the same line, downgrading a war crime to a “chaotic incident”.

    But even these failings were better than the media’s rapidly waning interest as Israel’s massacres of Palestinians seeking aid became routine – and therefore harder to mystify.

    A few days after the Flour Massacre, an Israeli air strike on an aid truck in Deir al-Balah killed at least nine Palestinians, while last week more than 20 hungry Palestinians were killed by Israeli helicopter gunfire as they waited for aid.

    “Food aid-related” massacres – which had quickly become as normalised as Israel’s invasions of hospitals – no longer merited serious attention. A search suggests the BBC managed to avoid giving significant coverage to either incident online.

    Food-drop theatrics

    Meanwhile, the media has ably assisted Washington in its various deflections from the collaborative crime against humanity of Israel imposing a famine on Gaza compounded by the US and Europe de-funding UNRWA, the only agency that could mitigate that famine.

    British and US broadcasters excitedly joined air crews as their militaries flew big-bellied planes over Gaza’s beaches, at great expense, to drop one-off ready-made meals to a few of the starving Palestinians below.

    Given that many hundreds of truckloads of aid a day are needed just to stop Gaza sliding deeper into famine, the drops were no more than theatrics. Each delivered at best a solitary truckload of aid – and then only if the palettes didn’t end up falling into the sea, or killing the Palestinians they were meant to benefit.

    The operation deserved little more than ridicule.

    Instead, dramatic visuals of heroic airmen, interspersed with expressions of concern about the difficulties of addressing the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, usefully distracted viewers’ attention not only from the operations’ futility but from the fact that, were the West really determined to help, it could strong-arm Israel into letting in far more plentiful aid by land at a moment’s notice.

    The media were equally swept up by the Biden administration’s second, even more outlandish scheme to help starving Palestinians. The US is to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coast so that aid shipments can be delivered from Cyprus.

    The plot holes were gaping. The pier will take two months or more to construct, when the aid is needed now. In Cyprus, as at the land crossings into Gaza, Israel will be in charge of inspections – the main cause of hold-ups.

    And if the US now thinks Gaza needs a port, why not also get to work on a more permanent one?

    The answer, of course, might remind audiences of the situation before 7 October, when Gaza was under a stifling 17-year siege by Israel – the context for Hamas’ attack that the Western media never quite finds the space to mention.

    For decades, Israel has denied Gaza any connections to the outside world it cannot control, including preventing a sea port from being built and bombing the enclave’s only airport way back in 2001, shortly after it was opened.

    And yet, at the same time, Israel’s insistence that it no longer occupies Gaza – just because it has done so at arm’s length since 2005 – is accepted unquestioningly in media coverage.

    Again, the US has decisive leverage over Israel, its client state, should it decide to exercise it – not least billions in aid and the diplomatic veto it wields so regularly on Israel’s behalf.

    The question that needs asking by the media on every piece about “starvation stalking Gaza” is why is the US not using that leverage.

    In a typical breathless piece titled “How the US military plans to construct a pier and get food into Gaza”, the BBC ignored the big picture to drill down enthusiastically on the details of “huge logistical” and “security challenges” facing Biden’s project.

    The article revisited precedents from disaster relief operations in Somalia and Haiti to the D-Day Normandy landings in the Second World War.

    Credulous journalists

    In support of these diversionary tactics, the media have also had to accentuate the atrocities of Hamas’ 7 October attack – and the need to condemn the group at every turn – to contrast those crimes from what might otherwise appear even worse atrocities committed by Israel on the Palestinians.

    That has required an unusually large dose of credulousness from journalists who more usually present as hard-bitten sceptics.

    Babies being beheaded, or put in ovens, or hung out on clothes lines. No invented outrage by Hamas has been too improbable to have been denied front-page treatment, only to be quietly dropped later when each has turned out to be just as fabricated as it should have sounded to any reporter familiar with the way propagandists exploit the fog of war.

    Similarly, the entire Western press corps has studiously ignored months of Israeli media revelations that have gradually shifted responsibility for some of the the most gruesome incidents of 7 October – such as the burning of hundreds of bodies – off Hamas’ shoulders and on to Israel’s.

    Though Western media outlets failed to note the significance of his remarks, Israeli spokesman Mark Regev admitted that Israel’s numbering of its dead from 7 October had to be reduced by 200 because many of the badly charred remains turned out to be Hamas fighters.

    Testimonies from Israeli commanders and officials show that, blindsided by the Hamas attack, Israeli forces struck out wildly with tank shells and Hellfire missiles, incinerating Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives indiscriminately. The burnt cars piled up as a visual signifier of Hamas’ sadism are, in fact, evidence of, at best, Israel’s incompetence and, at worst, its savagery.

    The secret military protocol that directed Israel’s scorched-earth policy on 7 October – the notorious Hannibal procedure to stop any Israeli being taken captive – appears not to have merited mention by either the Guardian or the BBC in their acres of 7 October coverage.

    Despite their endless revisiting of the 7 October events, neither has seen fit to report on the growing demands from Israeli families for an investigation into whether their loved ones were killed under Israel’s Hannibal procedure.

    Nor have either the BBC or the Guardian reported on the comments of the Israeli military’s ethics chief, Prof Asa Kasher, bewailing the army’s resort to the Hannibal procedure on 7 October as “horrifying” and “unlawful”.

    Claims of bestiality

    Instead, liberal Western media outlets have repeatedly revisited claims that they have seen evidence – evidence they seem unwilling to share – that Hamas ordered rape to be used systematically by its fighters as a weapon of war. The barely veiled implication is that such depths of depravity explain, and possibly justify, the scale and savagery of Israel’s response.

    Note that this claim is quite different from the argument that there may have been instances of rape on 7 October.

    That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.

    To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.

    But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.

    Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.

    But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.

    More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.

    ‘Conspiracy of silence’

    The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.

    That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.

    To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.

    But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.

    Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.

    But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.

    More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.

    ‘Conspiracy of silence’

    The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.

    However, under questioning from the Intercept, a spokesperson for the New York Times readily walked back the paper’s original certainty, conceding instead that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” [emphasis added] Even that appears too strong a conclusion.

    Holes in the Times’ reporting quickly proved so glaring that its popular daily podcast pulled the plug on an episode dedicated to the story after its own fact check.

    The rookie reporter assigned to the task, Anat Schwartz, has admitted that despite scouring the relevant institutions in Israel – from medical institutions to rape crisis centres – she found no one who could confirm a single example of sexual assault that day. She was also unable to find any forensic corroboration.

    She later told a podcast with Israel’s Channel 12 that she viewed the lack of evidence to be proof of “a conspiracy of silence”.

    Instead, Schwartz’s reporting relied on a handful of testimonies from witnesses whose other easily disprovable assertions should have called into question their credibility. Worse, their accounts of instances of sexual assault failed to tally with the known facts.

    One paramedic, for example, claimed two teenage girls had been raped and killed at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. When it became clear nobody fitted the description there, he changed the crime scene to Kibbutz Beeri. None of the dead there fitted the description either.

    Nonetheless, Schwartz believed she finally had her story. She told Channel 12: “One person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random.”

    Schwartz got further confirmation from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organisation, whose officials were already known to have fabricated Hamas atrocities on 7 October, including the various claims of depraved acts against babies.

    No forensic evidence

    Interestingly, though the main claims of Hamas rape have focused on the Nova music festival attacked by Hamas, Schwartz was initially sceptical – and for good reason – that it was the site of any sexual violence.

    As Israeli reporting has revealed, the festival quickly turned into a battlefield, with Israeli security guards and Hamas exchanging gunfire and Israeli attack helicopters circling overhead firing at anything that moved.

    Schwartz concluded: “Everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place. How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like – it is impossible. Either you hide, or you – or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”

    But Schwartz dropped her scepticism as soon as Raz Cohen, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, agreed to speak to her. He had already claimed in earlier interviews a few days after 7 October that he had witnessed multiple rapes at Nova, including corpses being raped.

    But when he spoke to Schwartz he could only recall one incident – a horrific attack that involved raping a woman and then knifing her to death. Undermining the New York Times’ central claim, he attributed the rape not to Hamas but to five civilians, Palestinians who poured into Israel after Hamas fighters broke through the fence around Gaza.

    Notably, Schwartz admitted to Channel 12 that none of the other four people hiding in the bush with Cohen saw the attack. “Everyone else is looking in a different direction,” she said.

    And yet in the Times’ story, Cohen’s account is corroborated by Shoam Gueta, a friend who has since deployed to Gaza where, as the Intercept notes, he has been posting videos of himself rummaging through destroyed Palestinian homes.

    Another witness, identified only as Sapir, is quoted by Schwartz as witnessing a woman being raped at Nova at the same time as her breast is amputated with a box cutter. That account became central to the Guardian’s follow-up report in January.

    Yet, no forensic evidence has been produced to support this account.

    But the most damning criticism of the Times’ reporting came from the family of Gal Abdush, the headline victim in the “Screams without Words” story. Her parents and brother accused the New York Times of inventing the story that she had been raped at the Nova festival.

    Moments before she was killed by a grenade, Abdush had messaged her family and made no mention of a rape or even a direct attack on her group. The family had heard no suggestion that rape was a factor in Abdush’s death.

    A woman who had given the paper access to photos and video of Abdush taken that day said Schwartz had pressured her to do so on the grounds it would help “Israeli hasbara” – a term meaning propaganda designed to sway foreign audiences.

    Schwartz cited the Israeli welfare ministry as claiming there were four survivors of sexual assault from 7 October, though no more details have been forthcoming from the ministry.

    Back in early December, before the Times story, Israeli officials promised they had “gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas”. None of those testimonies has materialised.

    None ever will, according to Schwartz’s conversation with Channel 12. “There is nothing. There was no collection of evidence from the scene,” she said.

    Nonetheless, Israeli officials continue to use the reports by the New York Times, the Guardian and others to try to bully major human rights bodies into agreeing that Hamas used sexual violence systematically.

    Which may explain why the media eagerly seized on the chance to resurrect its threadbare narrative when UN official Pramila Patten, its special representative on sexual violence in conflict, echoed some of their discredited claims in a report published this month.

    The media happily ignored the fact that Patten had no investigative mandate and that she heads what is in effect an advocacy group inside the UN. While Israel has obstructed UN bodies that do have such investigative powers, it welcomed Patten, presumably on the assumption that she would be more pliable.

    In fact, she did little more than repeat the same unevidenced claims from Israel that formed the basis of the Times and Guardian’s discredited reporting.

    Statements retracted

    Even so, Patten included important caveats in the small print of her report that the media were keen to overlook.

    At a press conference, she reiterated that she had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.

    She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she conceded it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on 7 October was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.

    All of that was ignored by the media. In typical fashion, a Guardian article on her report asserted wrongly in its headline: “UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages”.

    Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.

    As the US Jewish scholar Normal Finkelstein has pointed out, Patten also relied on open-source material: 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence. Or as Patten phrased it: “No tangible indications of rape could be identified.”

    She admitted she had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and had not met a single survivor of rape or sexual assault.

    And she noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”.

    Collusion in genocide

    If anything has been found to be systematic, it is the failings in the Western media’s coverage of a plausible genocide unfolding in Gaza.

    Last week a computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives, even as the death-toll ratio showed that 30 times as many Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza than Hamas had killed Israelis on 7 October.

    The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.

    In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.

    A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.

    Faced with a plausible case of genocide – one being televised for months on end – even the liberal elements of the Western media have shown they have no serious commitment to the liberal democratic values they are supposedly there to uphold.

    They are not a watchdog on power, either the power of the Israeli military or Western states colluding in Israel’s slaughter. Rather the media are central to making the collusion possible. They are there to disguise and whitewash it, to make it look acceptable.

    Indeed, the truth is that, without that help, Israel’s allies would long ago have been shamed into action, into stopping the slaughter and starvation. The Western media’s hands are stained in Gaza’s blood.

    • First published in Declassified UK

    The post How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Taiwan aims to build global platform to counter disinformation

    Taiwan, which has confronted years of mainland Chinese disinformation, says it strives to build a platform that is internationally scalable and can transform into a global system to combat cognitive warfare.

    Numerous counter-disinformation organizations in the government, private sector and community have sprung up over the years. Their effective collaborations have most recently been seen during January’s presidential elections. But a structural approach that integrates entities to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts is currently lacking within and among government agencies.

    With the Cognitive Warfare Research Center that it established in January, the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau is taking the first step to building an island-wide government system that could develop into a global platform stringing together other countries with common standards and enforcement.

    “The whole world’s understanding of what cognitive warfare is like telling you about ghosts. What does a ghost look like, no one can tell; so cognitive is like a mess,” said Wen-Ping Liu, member of the ministry’s research committee in an interview with Radio Free Asia.

    “If you can’t tell me, you can’t concretize it,” Liu said, adding that the center’s first step is to “concretize cognitive warfare,” in other words, give it a form and definition. 

    “After you feel it out, you can do the next thing – guard against ghosts that can harm you. You must at least know what a ghost is.” 

    After combining its internal strengths, the bureau wants to integrate all forces and capabilities across Taiwan such as the coast guard, police and the defense ministry. Eventually, the objective is to elevate and transform the platform into an international facilitating network of control.

    Over the years, China has infiltrated Taiwan’s information ecosystem with misconstrued narratives and conspiracy theories to undermine its democracy and sow discord among its 23 million population. The disinformation campaigns are usually most intense around election periods.

    000_34EU2RB.jpg
    Local newspapers with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s victory in the presidential election on the front pages at the reception of an office building in Taipei on January 14, 2024. China’s disinformation campaigns are usually strongest during Taiwan’s elections. (AFP)

    In the recent presidential elections, one widely circulated narrative was the “yimeilun,” or U.S. skepticism, designed to convince Taiwanese people that America is an unreliable partner and domestically unstable. It would serve Chinese propaganda goals as closer ties between Taiwan and the U.S. would be associated with steering the island towards war with China. Closer relations with China, on the contrary, would be seen to mean peace.

    Nonetheless, the ramped-up pre- and-mid-election disinformation offensive didn’t prevent Beijing’s loathed Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) from winning an unprecedented third term.

    The University of Gothenburg in Sweden has identified Taiwan as the society most impacted by disinformation originating from beyond its borders. Inevitably, that compelled Taiwan to build, arguably, one of the world’s most mature communities of fact checkers, government support and educational efforts to raise public skepticism to sniff out falsehood and fend off China’s disinformation onslaught.

    Liu said the battle will continue, and the pace of attacks and therefore, the speed needed in response will only increase with advancement of technology and artificial intelligence. The narratives will also change, though what and how remains to be seen.

    The Chinese Communist Party is looking for other ways and narratives, Liu believes. “We are still observing what exactly it is going to use.”

    Economic enticement is a well-tried tactic but China’s slumping economy may have made this less viable. It will still be used, nevertheless, he added.

    Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Elaine Chan for RFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • China to US: Spreading Disinformation Cannot Inhibit China’s Progress but Will only Discredit US

    China News Service: It’s reported by Reuters that former US President Donald Trump signed a secret executive order in 2019 to authorize the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign aimed at smearing China by creating a special team of operatives who acted covertly such as buying off media outlets and using bogus internet identities in China, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and Africa. What’s your comment? 

    Wang Wenbin: I recall that CIA Director William Burns said publicly not long ago that the CIA has committed substantially more resources toward China-related intelligence collection. The report that you mentioned echoes Director Burns’s remarks. It has also once again shown that the US has spread China-related disinformation in an organized and well-planned way for a long time and it’s America’s important approach to wage a battle of perception against China.

    US Republican Senator Rand Paul once said honestly that the US government is the biggest propagator of disinformation. The US who often accuses other countries of spreading disinformation is in fact the true breeding ground of disinformation. 

    Concocting and spreading rumors will only get one lose credibility faster. Spreading disinformation cannot inhibit China’s progress but will only discredit the US. 

    The post China to US: Spreading Disinformation Cannot Inhibit China’s Progress but Will only Discredit US first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Exposing the 10 Biggest Zionist Lies re Jewish Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide

    The core ethos of Humanity is Kindness and Truth but this is grossly violated by genocidally racist and pathologically mendacious Apartheid Israel. Huge Zionist perversion and subversion of the  West  has enabled massive and  false Jewish Israeli propaganda to become the dominant  narrative  in the West. Google Searches reveal  the shocking extent of the adoption of 10 major Zionist lies about the Gaza Genocide in the Zionist-perverted US and US Alliance countries.

    (1).  “Israeli” is falsely used  when “Jewish Israeli” would be correct. 99% of the Israeli perpetrators  of the killing in this latest Gaza Massacre are actually “Jewish Israelis” because 99% of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) is Jewish and 21% of Israelis are Palestinians.

    (2). Re the current Gaza Massacre “terrorist” is vastly more applicable to Jewish Israeli and US killers than to  Hamas. Terrorism is as terrorism does and the killers of about 40,000 Palestinians  including  about 15,000 children to date in the Gaza Genocide  are vastly more  deserving of the descriptive “terrorist” than Hamas that allegedly killed 1,200 Israelis on  7 October (with possibly most actually killed by overwhelming IDF shelling and missile fire-power).

    (3). Google Searches reveal massive English-speaking  World lying by omission in ignoring  Palestinian exclusion from human rights. The fundamental problem in Apartheid Israel-ruled Palestine  has been egregious exclusion of Indigenous  Palestinian from human rights. 7 million Exiled Palestinians are excluded from the basic right to live in their own country. 5.6 million Occupied Palestinians are excluded from all the human rights  set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2.1 million Palestinian Israelis can vote for the government ruling them, albeit as Third Class citizens under  65 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws. 7.1 million Indigenous Palestinians are 50% of the Subjects of Apartheid Israel.

    (4). The Gaza Massacre has increased anti-Jewish sentiment globally but has also led to massive false Zionist claims of “antisemitism” in response to condemnation of the Gaza Genocide and other Apartheid Israeli crimes. The all-European and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has a definition of anti-Semitism  that has been used to falsely defame critics of Jewish Israeli crimes. The IHRA is anti-Jewish anti-Semitic and anti-Arab anti-Semitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim critics of Apartheid Israel as anti-Semites) and holocaust-denying (by ignoring all WW2 holocausts other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust).

    (5). Massive Western concern over 250 Israeli hostages while ignoring 5.6 million Occupied Palestinian hostages under highly abusive military rule with 10,000 in military prisons (egregious Zionist lying by omission). A glaring example of current Western anti-Arab anti-Semitism is massive Western coverage of the 250 Israeli hostages that routinely “balances” or indeed displaces reportage of the destruction and mass murder in Gaza (about 40,000 killed so far).

    (6). The West falsely  accuses Hamas of “hostage taking” war crimes and also “human shield” war crimes because it operates in one of the world’s most  densely populated  urban areas. Hamas’ 250 Israeli hostages are numerically negligible in relation to 5.6 million Occupied Palestinian hostages under violent and deadly military rule (now for 56 years), 10,000  of whom are highly abusively imprisoned in Israeli military prisons. As for “human shields”, if Hamas would gather above or below ground in uninhabited  areas they would be immediately totally destroyed by Israeli bombing.

    (7). The West overwhelmingly ignores the Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio – yet in the Gaza Genocide it is 65 versus the 10 ordered by Hitler. Conservatively assuming that the IDF caused 50% of the 1,200 Israeli deaths on 7 October, the Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio is presently 39,178/ 600 = 65.3, 6.5 times greater than the 10 ordered by Nazi mass murderer Hitler and subsequently effected in the 1944 Ardeatine Massacre. Nazi is as Nazi does.

    (8). Mainstream Western journalists are  too cowardly to report that Jewish Israelis in the Gaza Massacre lead the world in annual per capita killing of journalists. In May 2022 the “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year” was Occupied Palestine, 2.77;  Mexico, 0.75; Colombia, 0.37; the World, 0.084. Since 7 October  Israelis have killed 132 journalists over 5 months in Gaza, a territory with a population of 2.3 million. The “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year” in Gaza over the last 5 months has been 1,377, or 3,722 times more than for cartel-dominated Colombia and 16,393 times more than for the World.

    (9). The Zionists and pro-Zionists falsely assert that  “Israel has the right to  defend itself in Gaza” and that brutally subjugated Occupied Palestinians do not. Eminent International law expert and UN Rapporteur for Palestinians, Francesca  Albanese: “Israel cannot claim the right of self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies, from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation.” Conversely, the Occupied Palestinians have the right, like any other Occupied and subjugated people, to take up arms against tyranny as set out in the  Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by Article 51 of the UN Charter.

    (10). Jewish Israelis in Gaza lead the World by far for annual per capita killing of children – 17 times greater than for Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Europe. 14,622 Gaza children killed by Jewish Israelis in the 151-day period of  7 October 2023- 5 March 2024 converts to (14,622 children killed /151 days) x (365.25 days/ year)/ (2.3 million people in Gaza) = 15,378 children killed per year per million of total territory population, this being 203 times bigger than the previous World’s worst, Honduras (75.7). 1,500,000 Jewish children killed /6 years) / (280 million people in Nazi-occupied Europe) = 893 children killed per year per million of total territory population, 17 times less than for children in Gaza.

    This ongoing Jewish Israeli atrocity in Gaza and the attendant tsunami of Western-propagated Zionist falsehood is a horrible violation not just of Kindness, Truth and Humanity but also of the wonderful  humanitarian Jewish tradition from the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ “love thy neighbour”, through Baruch Spinoza and the Enlightenment to the great  Jewish humanitarian scholars of the present era from Hannah Arendt to Howard Zinn.

    Decent people around the world must (a) inform everyone they can, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts,  Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against genocidally racist Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries supporting this genocidal neo-Nazi state and its horrendous and unforgivable atrocities. The World must forcibly demand immediate cessation of the killing, and an immediate end to the Occupation so that the now starving and horribly deprived Gazans can be immediately given water, food, shelter, sanitation, medicine, medical care, commencement of gigantic reconstruction – and then forensically-informed  international war crimes trials of genocidal Jewish Israelis for one of the world’s worst atrocities.

    The post Exposing the 10 Biggest Zionist Lies re Jewish Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel’s “Flour Massacre”: When A Crime Becomes A “Tragedy”

    Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.

    Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:

    My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)

    Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:

    The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.

    But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:

    The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.

    I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.

    Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.

    In 2013, Simpson opined:

    The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…

    Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.

    Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:

    World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked

    Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:

    Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy

    Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:

    Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…

    The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

    Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.

    The BBC headline reporting this story read:

    Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO

    Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.

    Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:

    If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.

    Needless to say, that was not to be.

    On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:

    Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

    Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.

    On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

    As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals

    Author Assal Rad responded:

    Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.

    The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’

    What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:

    Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid

    And:

    Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks

    USA Today’s headline was surreal:

    112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers

    On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:

    More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy

    The standfirst (sub-heading):

    Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush

    Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.

    It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:

    ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104

    Compare also its standfirst:

    ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries

    On 1 March, Associated Press reported:

    The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)

    The following day, a BBC headline read:

    Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza

    A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:

    After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)

    The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:

    They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.

    And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.

    It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.

    Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.

    On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:

    The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.

    Brown commented on video footage:

    Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.

    Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.

    “Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”

    Brown added:

    Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”

    Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

    As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

    The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

    The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).

    This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.

    A BBC report on 5 March stated:

    Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.

    Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.

    Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?

    According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:

    After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.

    Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.

    Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:

    “It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.

    ”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.

    ”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”

    CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:

    We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.

    On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:

    UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

    “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

    The UN added of its experts:

    They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.

    “Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.

    None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:

    During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.

    Conclusion

    It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:

    Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows

    Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:

    Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.

    UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.

    The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.

    On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:

    The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)

    See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’

    Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.

    We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)

    With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:

    What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)

    The answer, of course, was oil.

    The post Israel’s “Flour Massacre”: When A Crime Becomes A “Tragedy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Who is the superpower? The US or Israel?’ Al Jazeera on the absurdity of airdrops in Gaza

    Pacific Media Watch

    The United States’ airdrops of aid into Gaza are a textbook case of cognitive dissonance on the part of the US administration — dropping food while continuing to send Israel bombs with which to pulverise Gaza, reports Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post.

    And, says the media watch programme presenter Richard Gizbert, the gulf between what is happening on the ground and the mainstream media’s reportage continues to widen.

    Gizbert criticises the airdrops, what he calls the “optics of urgency, the illusions of aid”.

    “An absurd spectacle as the US drops aid into Gaza while also arming Israel,” he says.

    Gizbert critically examines the Israeli disinformation strategy over atrocities such as the gunning down of at least 116 starving Gazans in the so-called “flour massacre” of 29 February 2024 — first denial, then blame the Palestinians, and finally accept only limited responsibility.

    “The US air drops into the Gaza Strip are pure theatre. The US has been supplying thousands of tonnes into the Gaza Strip — but those have been high explosives,” says Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya.

    “And then to claim that somehow it is ameliorated by 38,000 meals ready to eat is quite obscene to put it politely.

    “People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.”

    ‘Who is the superpower?’
    Australian author Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, says: “When I saw the US drop food, my first response was really anger; it was horror that this is apparently the best the US can do.


    Absurd Aid Air Drops in Gaza.   Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post, 9 March 2024

    “Who is the superpower here? Is it the US or Israel? There is no place that is safe. There is no place where you can find reliable food, where people can get shelter.

    “Gazans are exhausted, angry and scared, and do not buy this argument that the US is suddenly caring about them by airdropping a handful of food.”

    “People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.

    Contributors:
    Laura Albast — Fellow, Institute for Palestine Studies
    Mohamad Bazzi — Director of NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
    Antony Loewenstein — Author, The Palestine Laboratory
    Mouin Rabbani — Co-editor, Jadaliyya

    On Our Radar:
    Since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, the war has been a delicate subject for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The war has led to censorship of news coverage and suppression of public protest. Meenakshi Ravi reports.

    Israel’s cultural annihilation in Gaza
    The Listening Post has covered Israel’s war on Gaza through the prism of the media, including the unprecedented killing of Palestinian journalists. But there is another level to what is unfolding in Gaza: the genocidal assault on Palestinian history, existence and culture.

    Featuring:
    Jehad Abusalim – Executive director, The Jerusalem Fund

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Israel’s Disinformation Apparatus: A Key Weapon in its Arsenal

    Introduction

    During campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing, disinformation is a potent weapon—a tool to dehumanize victims, justify mass violence, and most importantly, sow seeds of doubt designed to muzzle calls for intervention. When information is weaponized, confusion and doubt no longer emerge from the “fog of war” as a symptom, but are purposefully cultivated with the explicit intention of creating it. 

    At the time of writing, Israeli forces have killed over 30,000 Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023. They have targeted hospitals, schools, and civilians fleeing their homes. Israel’s assault is marked not only by the historic scale of violence being inflicted upon Palestinians, but by the unprecedented flood of disinformation being deployed to justify it. 

    Propaganda and disinformation produced at industrial scale by official Israeli government and military sources are being legitimized and boosted by a wide network of journalists and open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts, who have discarded all vestiges of objectivity and analytical rigor in their coverage. Instead of bearing witness to Israeli war crimes and questioning the narratives put forth by a regime engaging in genocide, they have become complicit in them. As a result, Israeli information operations are benefiting from a media network acting not as unbiased reporters, but as enablers of Israeli mass atrocities. 

    This policy brief explores the information warfare tactics Israel has used to influence public perception of its ongoing genocide in Gaza, how these efforts have contributed to the decay of truth, and how they hamper efforts to organize a global response. It also explains how journalists and open-source intelligence analysts have become active enablers of Israeli war crimes by acting as uncritical conduits of Israeli propaganda. Finally, it offers recommendations for reporters, analysts, and the wider public to leverage open-source tools to refute dominant Israeli propaganda and disinformation.  

    Hasbara: A Long-Running Strategy 

    Israel has long recognized the information environment as a critical battle front to justify the perpetual oppressive structures of occupation and apartheid. “Hasbara,” which translates to “explaining” in Hebrew, has long embodied this recognition. Rooted in pre-existing concepts of state-sponsored propaganda, agitprop, and information warfare, hasbara aims to shape the very parameters of acceptable discourse. This involves a coordinated effort by both state institutions and NGOs to bolster Israeli domestic unity, secure support of allies, and influence how media, intellectuals, and influencers discuss Israel. 

    Israel has long recognized the information environment as a critical battle front to justify the perpetual oppressive structures of occupation and apartheid
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    For years, Israel’s hasbara efforts were coordinated by government bodies, such as the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. After the ministry’s closure in 2021, the Israeli cabinet approved a NIS 100 million ($30 million) project aimed at adapting Israeli hasbara for an evolving global audience. The initiative, led by then-Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, funneled funds indirectly to foreign entities, ranging from social media influencers to media-watch organizations, that would disseminate pro-Israel propaganda while concealing direct ties to the Israeli government. These concerted efforts seek to establish cognitive filters that validate Israeli interests while discrediting opposing narratives on Israeli settler colonialism and its systemic violence. 

    In adapting to an information-rich environment, hasbarists do not solely seek to block access to information but rather guide audiences towards selective interpretation. For over 75 years, they have cast Israel as the perpetual victim, despite its military dominance and role as occupier, and are now deploying the same tactics to justify genocide in Gaza. By accusing Hamas of using Palestinians in Gaza as “human shields,” painting Palestinian resistance groups as existential threats akin to the Nazis and ISIS, or smearing victims of Israeli air strikes as “crisis actors,” hasbara aims to justify the unjustifiable. 

    Sowing Seeds of Doubt

    Before the digital age, it was easier for Israel to discredit Palestinian claims by denying them outright. But the advent of the 24/7 news cycle and social media allowed images of Israeli atrocities to traverse the world at the speed of information, forcing Israeli hasbarists to change tactics. 

    On September 30, 2000, 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was shot and killed by Israeli forces during a gun battle between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security forces. The moment of Muhammad’s death, which was caught on camera, marked the birth of the hasbara term “Pallywood,” a racist smear that accuses Palestinians of acting out fake atrocities to blame on Israelis.

    Unable to deny Muhammed’s killing outright, Israeli propagandists resorted to delegitimizing the source altogether. After footage of Muhammad’s death went viral, Israelis insisted that he was a crisis actor and that his death was a hoax. It did not matter that Muhammad’s father buried his son with his own hands, nor did it matter that the murder was caught on video and confirmed by eyewitnesses. What mattered was that all Palestinian claims henceforth would be tainted by doubt, subjected to heightened scrutiny, or written off outright.

    The primary targets of Israeli disinformation are the two constituencies that matter most to Israel’s leaders: the Israeli public and Western audiences
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    During the years that followed, the practice of portraying Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes as crisis actors evolved from a conspiratorial fringe tactic to an official Israeli government strategy. On October 13, 2023, the official X account of the State of Israel posted a video of a dead Palestinian child, wrapped in a white burial shroud, claiming it was a doll planted by Hamas. Only after the original uploader of the video was tracked down, the child identified, and additional evidence shared, was the libelous post deleted without official explanation or retraction. By then, the fake news had already garnered millions of views and the damage was done. Henceforth, all images of dead Palestinian children would be written off by an audience primed to doubt their authenticity. 

    The next month, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was called out for attempting to pass off footage from a Lebanese film as evidence that Palestinians were faking injuries from Israeli attacks. The post remained up for days, despite an X community note and a BBC debunk. “Pallywood” smears have also been leveled at popular influencers in an attempt to discredit them. For example, viral posts from official Israeli social media accounts claimed that Saleh Aljafarawi, a popular influencer who has been covering Israel’s assault on Gaza, staged fake injuries at a hospital. This was likewise later debunked, as the footage was proven to instead be of Mohammed Zendiq, a young man injured during an Israeli incursion in the West Bank.

    Of course, Israeli claims of “Pallywood” propaganda were never designed to withstand even rudimentary fact-checking and scrutiny. But in an age in which over 50% of US adults get their news from social media and an even higher number do not read past headlines, Israeli disinformation can become engrained long before it is debunked. One study found that 86 percent of people do not fact-check news they see on social media. Another study found that the volume of social media posts citing Pallywood “increased steadily in the days after October 7”, and that the term was mentioned over 146,000 times between October 7th and October 27th. 

    The primary targets of Israeli disinformation are the two constituencies that matter most to Israel’s leaders: the Israeli public and Western audiences. In a battle for sympathy, the truth is rarely a requisite. Sometimes all it takes is a headline that captures attention and confirms preexisting biases. 

    Justifying War Crimes 

    With an international audience primed to treat Palestinian claims with skepticism from the outset, Israeli state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have become a critical tool in justifying war crimes. This strategy is centered on convincing foreign governments and the wider public that Palestinian resistance groups use civilians as human shields and civilian infrastructure for military purposes, rendering them legitimate targets. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in Israel’s systematic assault on Gaza’s hospitals and health infrastructure since October 7th, 2023.

    (Israel’s) strategy is centered on convincing foreign governments and the wider public that Palestinian resistance groups use civilians as human shields and civilian infrastructure for military purposes, rendering them legitimate targets
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    On October 27th, the Israeli military’s official X account posted a 3D rendition of an elaborate labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers underneath Al-Shifa Hospital, alleging Hamas was using it as a command center. Their claims were specific: Al-Shifa was the “beating heart” of Hamas’s command infrastructure, and several hospital buildings sat directly atop tunnels that could be accessed from hospital wards. Israel provided no evidence to back up their claims, but that did not stop the Biden Administration from unequivocally repeating the Israeli narrative. Speaking to reporters a day before Israeli forces stormed the hospital, John Kirby, a US National Security Council spokesperson, insisted that not only did “Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) members operate a command-and-control node from Al-Shifa,” but that they were using the hospital to “hold hostages” and were “prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation.” Like the Israeli military, Kirby presented no evidence to back up his statement. 

    On November 15th, Israeli forces stormed Al-Shifa hospital, hours after the Biden Administration had effectively given them the green light. What they found fell far short of their far-reaching claims. While Israeli forces did uncover a tunnel that ran under a corner of the hospital compound, none of the hospital buildings were connected to the tunnel network—which showed no signs of military use—and there was no evidence of access from hospital wards. Hamas fighters never mobilized en masse to defend the facility from within, as US intelligence predicted. There were no signs of hostages and, most importantly, no command center. 

    While Al-Shifa represents the cornerstone of Israel’s disinformation campaign against Palestinian health infrastructure, it is far from the only target. Israeli forces have carried out over 500 attacks on healthcare workers and infrastructure across Gaza and the West Bank since October 7th, averaging about 7 attacks per day. These numbers include attacks on hospitals and clinics, healthcare personnel, ambulances, patients, and medical aid stations. By planting the idea, regardless of its veracity, that Hamas and other resistance groups might be using hospitals for military purposes, Israel casts a shadow of doubt over whether Gaza’s entire health system enjoys the protections afforded by international humanitarian law. In doing so, Israel transforms the perception of attacks on hospitals from a brazen violation of international law to a norm.

    Journalists and OSINT Analysts as Enablers

    While the last three months reveal how uniquely callous and crude Israel’s information manipulation tactics are, they are not new. In fact, many of the Israeli talking points we have become so familiar with today are eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric the US employed to justify civilian massacres in Vietnam. But while much of the political establishment in the West has come to widely condemn the indiscriminate bombing campaigns, the use of internationally prohibited munitions, and the collective punishment of civilians by US forces in Vietnam, they now justify Israel’s use of the same tactics in Gaza. 

    When it comes to public opinion, much of the proclivity to exceptionalize Israeli war crimes is due to the failure of journalists to critically analyze Israeli narratives against the backdrop of Israel’s history of disinformation, even when open-source investigative tools readily contradict their claims. Indeed, Israel’s disinformation tactics would not be as successful as they are without the complicity of journalists and OSINT analysts. Rather than challenging and debunking false claims, many have abandoned objectivity and journalistic rigor and instead act as mouthpieces for the Israeli military.

    When it comes to public opinion, much of the proclivity to exceptionalize Israeli war crimes is due to the failure of journalists to critically analyze Israeli narratives against the backdrop of Israel’s history of disinformation
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    Journalists today enjoy two key advantages that those covering the Vietnam war did not have: the benefits of hindsight and the verification tools provided by OSINT analysis. Instead of treating Israeli claims with inherent skepticism, seasoned journalists are acquiescing to Israeli censorship and narrative control. In November, CNN’s White House correspondent Jeremy Diamond joined a small number of journalists, including ABC’s Ian Pannell and Fox News’s Trey Yingst, in announcing that they would be covering the “Israel-Hamas war” from inside Gaza—but under serious limitations: “As a condition to enter Gaza under IDF escort, outlets have to submit all materials and footage to the Israeli military for review prior to publication,” said Becky Anderson, who introduced Diamond’s report. While there is nothing new about journalists embedding with armed forces, Israel’s required screening and censorship of reporting stand out when compared to other militaries. Indeed, even the US military did not explicitly mandate that journalists embedded with its forces in Iraq submit all of their reporting for approval prior to publishing, except in select cases involving classified information. 

    Effective journalism requires constant verification and fact-checking, informed by an instinct for skepticism. By accepting Israel’s uniquely onerous censorship terms in Gaza, journalists are doing more harm than good. The information Israel allows to be published is carefully selected to justify the targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians, and by only reporting the approved narrative of a military currently engaged in genocide, journalists are effectively giving a platform to war crimes justifications. Uncritically regurgitating unverified claims made by a military with a history of information manipulation in the midst of a genocide is not journalism; it is stenography.

    Unobjective OSINT Analysts 

    As traditional journalism fails the tests of objectivity, OSINT once again finds itself in the spotlight. Over recent years, OSINT has emerged as a trusted source of news and objective analysis amid waning confidence in state institutions and traditional media. Much of this is due to the traceable, transparent nature of open-source investigations, which has made OSINT analysts popular sources of news and situational analysis for journalists, lawmakers, and the public alike. 

    Open-source investigations have been pivotal in countering Israeli state-sponsored disinformation. In one instance, a New York Times investigation refuted Israeli claims that a misfired Palestinian rocket hit Al-Shifa Hospital courtyard on November 10th, revealing that the projectile was, in fact, an Israeli artillery shell. This exposed not only Israeli responsibility for the strike but also their deceptive tactics, which went as far as providing a false mockup of radar data to deceive the media. 

    While OSINT has once again proven to be an integral tool in war crimes investigations by circumventing Israeli access denial and debunking disinformation, some popular OSINT accounts have discarded their facades of objectivity. While this is indicative of wider trends in the deteriorating information environment on social media, a growing number of popular OSINT accounts are using their far-reaching platforms to peddle Israeli disinformation and even cover up Israeli war crimes. 

    Perhaps the most obvious example of this is an X account by the name of OSINT Defender. A self-described “Open Source Intelligence Monitor focused on Europe and Conflicts across the World,” OSINT Defender gained prominence covering the war in Ukraine. Recent investigations have revealed OSINT Defender’s identity as Simon Anderson, a member of the US military and resident of the state of Georgia. Since October 7th, the account has developed a reputation for sharing Israeli disinformation, dehumanizing Palestinians, and justifying Israeli war crimes.  

    OSINT Defender has shared debunked Israeli claims of the alleged Hamas command center under Al-Shifa and described hundreds of Palestinian civilians rounded up and tortured by Israeli forces as “Hamas terrorists.” The Israeli military itself later admitted that those rounded up were indeed civilians, but OSINT Defender never retracted the original posts. He has also fueled racist “Pallywood” tropes and routinely describes peaceful protesters calling for a ceasefire as violent “Hamas supporters.” If that wasn’t enough, Anderson also claimed that the group of journalists killed by an Israeli tank shell in southern Lebanon were filming “current exchanges of fire,” when in reality, no active combat was ongoing at the time they were targeted. In none of these cases has OSINT Defender publicly retracted or corrected the false claims, even when debunked.

    While experienced analysts and journalists may be able to identify the disinformation and engagement farming that accounts like OSINT Defender are known for, the same cannot be said for the general public. Their understanding of Israel’s assault on Gaza continues to be shaped by analysts assumed to be objective who, in reality, act as an extended arm of the Israeli propaganda machine. For example, accounts such as Aleph א and Israel Radar provide more technical analysis of developments throughout the region, but never question Israeli military narratives or correct Israeli disinformation, even when it is publicly debunked. They routinely fact check other accounts for sharing disinformation, but give the Israeli military a pass from the same verification process. For example, while pro-Israel accounts were quick to share Israel’s fabricated radar data mockup that claimed misfired Palestinian rockets struck Al-Shifa on November 10th, they were nowhere to be seen when subsequent investigations debunked it.  

    Conclusion

    Israel’s strategy in Gaza is not limited to dehumanizing Palestinians and justifying war crimes under the guise of self-defense. In addition to saturating the information environment with an unprecedented deluge of state-sponsored disinformation, Israel has further isolated Gaza by deliberately targeting and destroying communications infrastructure. The resulting communications blackouts have thrust Gaza further into the dark, making it increasingly difficult for Palestinians to share evidence of Israeli war crimes with the outside world. As a result, efforts to push back against Israeli disinformation are severely hindered and Israeli propaganda can run amok. 

    Israel’s near-total control of the information environment is further compounded by the global network of journalists and OSINT analysts who, wittingly or unwittingly, act as uncritical conduits for pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian narratives. This phenomenon underscores a dangerous precedent, where the rapid dissemination of information—or disinformation—can shape international perceptions in real time before thorough verification or counter-narratives can take hold.

    Moreover, Israel’s information warfare tactics, deeply ingrained in the nation’s military and political ethos, serve as a stark reminder of the power of narrative control in facilitating mass atrocities. The case of Gaza presents a microcosm of a broader, global challenge: how to navigate and counter state-sponsored disinformation in a hyper-connected world. 

    Recommendations: 

    • Civil society and NGOs should collaborate to enhance media literacy and offer training opportunities designed to educate the general public on how to identify disinformation and propaganda. While this applies to all forms of media, training in basic OSINT collection methods would arm audiences with the tools they need to verify information as it comes out in real time. This could include training on conducting reverse image searches, geolocating footage shared online, and cross-checking information across multiple trustworthy sources. They should also advocate for increased funding of independent fact-checking organizations, such as Al-Haq and Forensic Architecture. 
    • Media organizations and journalists should adhere to widely recognized journalistic and editorial standards when it comes to fact-checking and source verification, especially during conflicts characterized by rampant human rights abuses and war crimes. Claims made by militaries or armed groups should be treated with heightened scrutiny. In light of access limitations imposed by Israel, it is imperative for media organizations to prioritize sourcing news content and situational updates from Palestinian sources and hiring Palestinian reporters wherever feasible. 
    • International law is woefully unprepared to address the evolving nature of state-sponsored disinformation in the digital age. In addition to developing wider legal frameworks to address the issue, the UN and other international bodies should establish a task force to monitor and document instances of Israeli state-sponsored disinformation designed to dehumanize Palestinians and justify mass killing. This information can be included as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent in ongoing and future investigations. 
    • Social media companies must take action to address their role in facilitating the spread of disinformation and propaganda that dehumanize Palestinians and justify war crimes. This includes implementing robust fact-checking mechanisms, enhancing transparency in content moderation efforts, collaborating with independent fact-checkers, strengthening community standards, and amplifying Palestinian voices, rather than censoring them. 

    The post Israel’s Disinformation Apparatus: A Key Weapon in its Arsenal appeared first on Al-Shabaka.


    This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Tariq Kenney-Shawa.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel’s Disinformation Apparatus: A Key Weapon in its Arsenal

    Propaganda and disinformation produced at industrial scale by official Israeli government and military sources are being legitimized and boosted by a wide network of journalists and open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts, who have discarded all vestiges of objectivity and analytical rigor in their coverage. Instead of bearing witness to Israeli war crimes and questioning the narratives put forth by a regime engaging in genocide, they have become complicit in them. As a result, Israeli information operations are benefiting from a media network acting not as unbiased reporters, but as enablers of Israeli mass atrocities. 

    With an international audience primed to treat Palestinian claims with skepticism from the outset, Israeli state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have become a critical tool in justifying war crimes. This strategy is centered on convincing foreign governments and the wider public that Palestinian resistance groups use civilians as human shields and civilian infrastructure for military purposes, rendering them legitimate targets. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in Israel’s systematic assault on Gaza’s hospitals and health infrastructure since October 7th, 2023.

    When it comes to public opinion, much of the proclivity to exceptionalize Israeli war crimes is due to the failure of journalists to critically analyze Israeli narratives against the backdrop of Israel’s history of disinformation, even when open-source investigative tools readily contradict their claims. Indeed, Israel’s disinformation tactics would not be as successful as they are without the complicity of journalists and OSINT analysts. Rather than challenging and debunking false claims, many have abandoned objectivity and journalistic rigor and instead act as mouthpieces for the Israeli military.

    Israel’s information warfare tactics, deeply ingrained in the nation’s military and political ethos, serve as a stark reminder of the power of narrative control in facilitating mass atrocities. The case of Gaza presents a microcosm of a broader, global challenge: how to navigate and counter state-sponsored disinformation in a hyper-connected world. 

    Recommendations:

    • Civil society and NGOs should collaborate to enhance media literacy and offer training opportunities designed to educate the general public on how to identify disinformation and propaganda. 
    • Media organizations and journalists should adhere to widely recognized journalistic and editorial standards when it comes to fact-checking and source verification, especially during conflicts characterized by rampant human rights abuses and war crimes. 
    • The UN and other international bodies should establish a task force to monitor and document instances of Israeli state-sponsored disinformation designed to dehumanize Palestinians and justify mass killing. 
    • Social media companies must take action to address their role in facilitating the spread of disinformation and propaganda that dehumanize Palestinians and justify war crimes. This includes implementing robust fact-checking mechanisms, enhancing transparency in content moderation efforts, collaborating with independent fact-checkers, strengthening community standards, and amplifying Palestinian voices, rather than censoring them. 

    The post Israel’s Disinformation Apparatus: A Key Weapon in its Arsenal appeared first on Al-Shabaka.


    This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Tariq Kenney-Shawa.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.