Elections in Latin America are often controversial. While many countries in the Global North regularly shuffle between parties offering alternating versions of neoliberalism, voting in Central and South America often offers starker contrasts: An anti-imperialist candidate in the mold of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez might be up against a neoliberal such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. It could hardly be otherwise, in a region with the world’s biggest gap between the richest and poorest.
North American and European corporate media are conscious of this complexity, but rarely convey it to their readers, instead issuing reports that lack sufficient context or history.
AP (4/13/25) attributes Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s re-election to “voters weary of crime”—even though murders rose sharply under his administration.
Elections in Latin America are often controversial. While many countries in the Global North regularly shuffle between parties offering alternating versions of neoliberalism, voting in Central and South America often offers starker contrasts: An anti-imperialist candidate in the mold of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez might be up against a neoliberal such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. It could hardly be otherwise, in a region with the world’s biggest gap between the richest and poorest.
North American and European corporate media are conscious of this complexity, but rarely convey it to their readers, instead issuing reports that lack sufficient context or history. Washington’s influence on their messaging—as if the media had their own Monroe Doctrine—is never far below the surface, especially when it comes to reporting political turning points such as elections. Doubts about the results, or questions about outside influence, can be set aside if the outcome fits the consensus narrative, especially if it is endorsed by a White House spokesperson, or a surrogate body like the Organization of American States (OAS).
Ecuador provides an example. Its President Daniel Noboa, son of the country’s richest landowner, began his second term of office on May 25. He was declared victor by a huge margin in a run-off election on April 13, even though his opponent, leftist Luisa González, virtually tied with him in the first round in February.
According to the corporate media, Noboa’s victory was clear-cut, the reasons for it were obvious and there was little reason to question the outcome. The Washington Post (4/13/25) headlined “President Who Declared War on Ecuador’s Drug Gangs Is Reelected.” The Wall Street Journal (4/13/25) said “Ecuador Re-Elects Leader Fighting War on Gangs Smuggling Cocaine to US.” The New York Times (4/13/25) proclaimed that “Ecuador’s President Wins Re-Election in Nation Rocked by Drug Violence.” The headlines were so similar they might have been modeled on the agency story from the Associated Press (4/13/25): “Daniel Noboa Is Reelected Ecuador’s President by Voters Weary of Crime.”
Linking the election to the war on drugs added a useful North American perspective. And, of course, this could be strengthened by reminding readers that Noboa is an ally of Donald Trump, as the Post, Journal and Times duly did.
‘Increasingly authoritarian’
The New York Times (4/13/25) dismissed candidate Luisa González as someone “largely seen as the representative of the former president” Rafael Correa, who is condemned for his “authoritarian tendencies.”
Had González won instead, she would have become Ecuador’s first female president (aside from Rosalía Arteaga, who was president for two days in 1997). However, all three outlets felt it necessary to remind readers of her dangerous link to former President Rafael Correa, known for “antagonizing the United States,” as the Post put it. The Times patronizingly suggested she would be Correa’s “handpicked successor,” or even “the representative of the former president, a divisive figure in Ecuador” (emphasis added), who (the Post claimed) “grew increasingly authoritarian” before he left office in 2017.
This grossly inverts history. Arguably, Ecuador “grew increasingly authoritarian” after Correa’s presidency (FAIR.org,8/17/20). His party, and three others, were banned in 2020. This decision was later reversed, but then both Correa and his vice president, Jorge Glas, were convicted of corruption, in what appeared to be obvious cases of “lawfare,” based on evidence from a source funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy.
Correa fled to Belgium, where he was granted asylum. Glas spent five years in prison and, seriously ill and facing new charges after Noboa first took office in late 2023, was granted asylum by Mexico. He never managed to leave Quito, because Noboa had him violently abducted from Mexico’s embassy and thrown into prison, in a clear breach of international law (London Review of Books, 4/9/24).
Five years of escalating violence
Correa had successfully reduced violence in Ecuador, making it one of Latin America’s safest countries. Progress was reversed under successive neoliberal governments, beginning with President Lenín Moreno. Victims have included several political figures, but the most egregious incident occurred only five months ago under Noboa’s presidency, when a group of soldiers captured, tortured and then murdered four children in Ecuador’s second city, Guayaquil (El Pais, 5/5/25).
Source: Primicias (5/21/25), based on Ecuadorian police data for the first four months of each year.
Violence continues to escalate, despite Noboa’s promises to tackle it. The first four months of 2025 saw a 58% increase in homicides, compared with the same period in 2024 (see chart), turning Ecuador into the most dangerous country in the Americas. Much violence is related to drug trafficking, with Ecuador now “an open funnel for cocaine exports and money laundering” under recent right-wing governments (London Review of Books, 4/30/25). Despite being part of the problem, Noboa maintained that only he could solve it, offering to adopt the hardline policies for which El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has become famous.
Ecuador’s contested ballot
After the media chorus of welcome for Noboa, it seems almost churlish to ask if he really won a clean election. Yet while Foreign Policy (4/17/25) said his win was “not surprising,” it certainly did surprise many commentators. It is instructive to review the evidence, starting with the first round of the elections and ending with the results of the final round.
February’s first round could hardly have been closer, with Noboa gaining 44.17% of the votes, barely ahead of González with 44.00% (see table), a difference of only 16,746 votes. Turnout was 82%. The result suggested that opinion polls were exaggerating Noboa’s popularity, since for the preceding month they had given him a comfortable average lead.
A third candidate, representing the largest Indigenous party, garnered 5.25%, and was obliged to drop out ahead of the final top-two round two months later. This candidate would later support González, but smaller Indigenous parties would favor Noboa.
The electoral campaign period saw a series of illegal moves on Noboa’s part. He refused to step down temporarily, as required constitutionally. Instead he suspended his vice-president, Verónica Abad, ignoring a court ruling that she should temporarily replace him and shut her office (Financial Times, 1/18/25). A right-wing rival was barred from standing, and Ecuadorians in Venezuela were denied the vote while their compatriots elsewhere were not.
Noboa’s massive social media campaign was allegedly financed from public funds (La Calle, 10/22/24); troll centers were established to attack his opponent (Pandemia Digital, 2/3/25). Bonuses costing over $500 million were paid to hundreds of thousands of poor Ecuadorians from public funds (Primicias, 3/28/25); CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot dubbed this “vote buying,” at an estimated $475 each. Noboa was photographed with Trump, Ecuador’s Washington embassy having paid at least $165,000 for the opportunity (People’s Dispatch, 4/6/25).
Like El Salvador’s Bukele, Noboa enhances his powers by declaring states of emergency. Prior to the poll on April 13, he declared one that covered the capital and several urban centers which González had won in the first round, intimidating voters and allowing unannounced searches (CBS News, 4/12/25). On election day, machine gun–bearing soldiers were posted at polling stations. Even so, two exit polls showed a close result, one indicating a win by González. During the count, images were posted of voting sheets published by the Noboa-manipulated electoral council that were invalid because they were unsigned.
‘Impossible’ result
The April 13 results were extraordinary, awarding Noboa victory by a full 11.25 percentage points. They gave Noboa 1.3 million more votes than he won in the first round, while González gained only 160,000. This happened despite the first-round tie, González’s endorsement by the leading Indigenous candidate, opinion polls slightly favoring her, two close exit polls and a much smaller difference (2 percentage points) between the two candidates’ parties in the simultaneous vote for the National Assembly.
Former President Rafael Correa wrote in his X account:
Ecuadorian people: You know that, unlike our adversaries, we have always accepted the opponent’s victory when it has been clean. This time it is NOT. Statistically, the result is IMPOSSIBLE.
González’s requests for recounts were twice rejected by the judicial bodies governing the election, in a series of decisions demonstrating bias in Noboa’s favor. Several leftist presidents, such as Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, endorsed González’s protests, and the latter refused to recognize Noboa’s presidency.
Truthout (5/2/25): “President Noboa carried out one of the dirtiest and unequal campaigns in memory—relying on fake news, vote buying and threats.”
A week after the poll, Denver University Professor Francisco Rodríguez published a statistical comparison of the result in Ecuador with 31 other recent Latin American run-off elections. He concluded that Ecuador’s was “not normal,” and “deviates sharply from regional experience.” He said he was not claiming fraud, but was calling for careful scrutiny.
Ecuadorian political sociologist Franklin Ramírez Gallegos went further in Truthout (5/2/25): “These were absolutely unequal, opaque, fraudulent elections,” he said. Within a few days of the election, there were reports of Noboa’s opponents being persecuted, and of a “blacklist” naming more than 100 people to be tracked down.
None of the US corporate media suggested the election was problem-free. But where, for example, they reported that González had claimed fraud, they qualified this by saying she did so “without presenting evidence” (Washington Post, 4/13/25). They also repeated Noboa’s phony counterclaims of irregularities (AP, 4/13/25). Reassurances by electoral observers from the OAS and US State Department were duly cited (Reuters, 4/14/25).
Framing Latin American elections
The New York Times (10/23/19) shows highly selective skepticism over Latin American electoral results.
The OAS has a 70-year history of bending to Washington’s whim when judging elections. Media reliance on its verdicts, despite—or really because of—its close alignment with US interests, speaks to the wider problem of media reporting of Latin American elections. Here are just three further examples—of many.
In 2019, the unsubstantiated findings by OAS observers of faults in the presidential election in Bolivia were swallowed wholesale by corporate media (FAIR.org, 11/18/19). The New York Times, citing the OAS’s “withering assessment” (10/23/19), quickly scorned the “highly fishy vote” (11/11/19) which extended the presidency of leftist Evo Morales. It turned out not to be fishy at all, but before the truth emerged, Morales had resigned, faced likely assassination and fled to Mexico. Morales’s forced resignation by Bolivia’s rightist-aligned military was called a “coup” by Argentina and Mexico.
The year before, when Bolsonaro won the election in Brazil while his principal opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was imprisoned (later to be released, post-election), the Times published 37 relevant articles, but not one examined the falsity of the charges. Reporting from Brazil, journalist Brian Mier (FAIR.org,3/8/21) observed that this “helped normalize” Bolsonaro’s victory and “opened the door for a neofascist/military takeover of Brazil.”
In Honduras in 2013, after the neoliberal candidate Juan Orlando Hernández had “all the ducks lined up for a fraudulent election” (London Review of Books, 11/21/13), the Washington Post (11/26/13) produced a scurrilous editorial claiming that his victory had avoided a dictatorship. Instead, it created one: Hernández won two fraudulent elections, was extradited on drug charges after leaving office, and is now in a US prison.
After the dubious victory
Since the election, Noboa has been busy in pursuing the “blacklisted” political opponents who tried to stand in his way. A few days before his May 25 investiture, dubious charges were pressed against former presidential candidate Andrés Arauz. It was Arauz who published the images of invalid voting sheets on April 13—to no avail, as they were ignored not only by the electoral authorities, but by the observers from the OAS and European Union.
Noboa’s big if highly questionable victory will strengthen his hand in creating a permanent and violent security state. Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince was hired in April to help him in the task. Two new military bases, one of them in the Galápagos Islands, have been offered to the US, in defiance of a prohibition on foreign bases in Ecuador’s constitution—a prohibition that the National Assembly rescinded this month at Noboa’s request.
On April 30, the Defense and interior ministers were pictured in El Salvador, inspecting Bukele’s notorious CECOT prison (Infobae, 4/30/25). Presumably these are the first steps in delivering the promise, made in Noboa’s short and vacuous speech at the investiture last month, to “rescue” Ecuador.
Opposition parties say Aotearoa New Zealand’s government should be going much further, much faster in sanctioning Israel.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters overnight revealed New Zealand had joined Australia, Canada, the UK and Norway in imposing travel bans on Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Some of the partner countries went further, adding asset freezes and business restrictions on the far-right ministers.
Peters said the pair had used their leadership positions to actively undermine peace and security and remove prospects for a two-state solution.
Israel and the United States criticised the sanctions, with the US saying it undermined progress towards a ceasefire.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, attending Fieldays in Waikato, told reporters New Zealand still enjoyed a good relationship with the US administration, but would not be backing down.
“We have a view that this is the right course of action for us,” he said.
Behind the scenes job
“We have differences in approach but the Americans are doing an excellent job of behind the scenes trying to get Israel and the Palestinians to the table to talk about a ceasefire.”
Asked if there could be further sanctions, Luxon said the government was “monitoring the situation all the time”.
Peters has been busy travelling in Europe and was unavailable to be interviewed. ACT — probably the most vocally pro-Israel party in Parliament — refused to comment on the situation.
The opposition parties also backed the move, but argued the government should have gone much further.
Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has since December been urging the coalition to back her bill imposing economic sanctions on Israel. With support from Labour and Te Pāti Māori it would need just six MPs to cross the floor to pass.
Calling the Israeli actions in Gaza “genocide”, she told RNZ the government’s sanctions fell far short of those imposed on Russia.
“This is symbolic, and it’s unfortunate that it’s taken so long to get to this point, nearly two years . . . the Minister of Foreign Affairs also invoked the similarities with Russia in his statement this morning, yet we have seen far less harsh sanctions applied to Israel.
“We’re well past the time for first steps.”
‘Cowardice’ by government
The pushback from the US was “probably precisely part of the reason that our government has been so scared of doing the right thing”, she said, calling it “cowardice” on the government’s part.
“What else are you supposed to call it at the end of the day?,” she said, saying at a bare minimum the Israeli ambassador should be expelled, Palestinian statehood should be recognised, and a special category of visas for Palestinians should be introduced.
She rejected categorisation of her stance as anti-semitic, saying that made no sense.
“If we are critiquing a government of a certain country, that is not the same thing as critiquing the people of that country. I think it’s actually far more anti-semitic to conflate the actions of the Israeli government with the entire Jewish peoples.”
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer . . . “It’s not a war, it’s an annihilation”. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the sanctions were political hypocrisy.
“When it comes to war, human rights and the extent of violence and genocide that we’re seeing, Palestine is its own independent nation . . . why is this government sanctioning only two ministers? They should be sanctioning the whole of Israel,” she said.
“These two Israel far right ministers don’t act alone. They belong to an entire Israel government which has used its military might and everything it can possibly do to bombard, to murder and to commit genocide and occupy Gaza and the West Bank.”
Suspend diplomatic ties
She also wanted all diplomatic ties with Israel suspended, along with sanctions against Israeli companies, military officials and additional support for the international courts — also saying the government should have done more.
“This government has been doing everything to do nothing . . . to appease allies that have dangerously overstepped unjustifiable marks, and they should not be silent.
“It’s not a war, it’s an annihilation, it’s an absolute annihilation of human beings . . . we’re way out there supporting those allies that are helping to weaponise Israel and the flattening and the continual cruel occupation of a nation, and it’s just nothing that I thought in my living days I’d be witnessing.”
She said the government should be pushing back against “a very polarised, very Trump attitude” to the conflict.
“Trumpism has arrived in Aotearoa . . . and we continue to go down that line, that is a really frightening part for this beautiful nation of ours.
“As a nation, we have a different set of values. We’re a Pacific-based country with a long history of going against the grain – the mainstream, easy grind. We’ve been a peaceful, loving nation that stood up against the big boys when it came to our anti nuclear stance and that’s our role in this, our role is not to follow blindly.”
Undermining two-state solution
In a statement, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson Peeni Henare said the actions of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir had attempted to undermine the two-state solution and international law, and described the situation in Gaza as horrific.
“The travel bans echo the sanctions placed on Russian individuals and organisations that supported the illegal invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
He called for further action.
“Labour has been calling for stronger action from the government on Israel’s invasion of Gaza, including intervening in South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, creation of a special visa for family members of New Zealanders fleeing Gaza, and ending government procurement from companies operating illegally in the Occupied Territories.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
COMMENTARY:By Steven Cowan, editor of Against The Current
The New Zealand Foreign Minster’s decision to issue a travel ban against two Israeli far-right politicians is little more than a tokenistic gesture in opposing Israel’s actions.
It is an attempt to appease growing opposition to Israel’s war, but the fact that Israel has killed more than 54,000 innocent people in Gaza, a third under the age of 18, still leaves the New Zealand government unmoved.
Foreign Minister Peters gave the game away when he commented that the sanctions were targeted towards two individuals, rather than the Israeli government.
Issuing travel bans against two Israeli politicians, who are unlikely to visit New Zealand at any stage, is the easy option.
It appears to be doing something to protest against Israel’s actions when actually doing nothing. And it doesn’t contradict the interests of the United States in the Middle East.
Under the government of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, New Zealand has become a vassal state of American imperialism.
New Zealand has joined four other countries, the United States, Britain, Australia and Norway, in issuing a travel ban. But all four countries continue to supply Israel with arms.
Unions demand stronger action
Last week, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions demanded that the New Zealand government take stronger action against Israel. In a letter to Winston Peters, CTU president Richard Wagstaff wrote:
“For too long, the international community has allowed the state of Israel to act with impunity. It is now very clearly engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
“All efforts must be made to put diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel to end this murderous campaign.”
THE CTU has called for a series of sanctions to be imposed on Israel. They include “a ban on all imports of goods made in whole or in part in Israel” and “a rapid review of Crown investments and immediately divest from any financial interests in Israeli companies”.
The CTU is also calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador.
This article was first published on Steven Cowan’s website Against The Current. Republished with permission.
The United States has denounced sanctions by Britain and allies — including New Zealand and Australia — against Israeli far-right ministers, saying they should focus instead on the Palestinian armed group Hamas.
New Zealand has banned two Israeli politicians from travelling to the country because of comments about the war in Gaza that Foreign Minister Winston Peters says “actively undermine peace and security”.
New Zealand joins Australia, Canada, the UK and Norway in imposing the sanctions on Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Peters said they were targeted towards two individuals, rather than the Israeli government.
“Our action today is not against the Israeli people, who suffered immeasurably on October 7 [2023] and who have continued to suffer through Hamas’ ongoing refusal to release all hostages.
“Nor is it designed to sanction the wider Israeli government.”
The two ministers were “using their leadership positions to actively undermine peace and security and remove prospects for a two-state solution”, Peters said.
‘Severely and deliberately undermined’ peace
“Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have severely and deliberately undermined that by personally advocating for the annexation of Palestinian land and the expansion of illegal settlements, while inciting violence and forced displacement.”
The sanctions were consistent with New Zealand’s approach to other foreign policy issues, he said.
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (left) and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich . . . sanctioned by Australia, Canada, the UK and Norway because they have “incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights. These actions are not acceptable,” says British Foreign Minister David Lammy. Image: TRT screenshot APR
“New Zealand has also targeted travel bans on politicians and military leaders advocating violence or undermining democracy in other countries in the past, including Russia, Belarus and Myanmar.”
New Zealand had been a long-standing supporter of a two-state solution, Peters said, which the international community was also overwhelmingly in favour of.
“New Zealand’s consistent and historic position has been that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are a violation of international law. Settlements and associated violence undermine the prospects for a viable two-state solution,” he said.
“The crisis in Gaza has made returning to a meaningful political process all the more urgent. New Zealand will continue to advocate for an end to the current conflict and an urgent restart of the Middle East Peace Process.”
‘Outrageous’, says Israel
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the move was “outrageous” and the government would hold a special meeting early next week to decide how to respond to the “unacceptable decision”.
His comments were made while attending the inauguration of a new Israeli settlement on Palestinian land.
Peters is currently in Europe for the sixth Pacific-France Summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in Nice.
US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters: “We find that extremely unhelpful. It will do nothing to get us closer to a ceasefire in Gaza.”
Britain, Canada, Norway, New Zealand and Australia “should focus on the real culprit, which is Hamas”, she said of the sanctions.
“We remain concerned about any step that would further isolate Israel from the international community.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Noam Chomsky offered a rule of thumb for predicting the ‘mainstream’ response to crimes against humanity:
‘There is a way to calibrate reaction. If it’s a crime of somebody else, particularly an enemy, then we’re utterly outraged. If it’s our own crime, either comparable or worse, either it’s suppressed or denied. That works with almost 100 percent precision.’ (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.27)
Now is an excellent time to put Chomsky’s claim to the test.
A BBC headline over a photograph of an emaciated Palestinian baby read: ‘“Situation is dire” – BBC returns to Gaza baby left hungry by Israeli blockade’
‘Left hungry’? Was she peckish? Was her stomach rumbling? The headline led readers far from the reality of the cataclysm described by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 12 May:
‘The entire 2.1 million population of Gaza is facing prolonged food shortages, with nearly half a million people in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death.’
Another BBC headline read: ‘Red Cross says at least 21 killed and dozens shot in Gaza aid incident’
Given everything we have seen over the last 20 months, it was obvious that the mysterious ‘incident’ had been yet another Israeli massacre. Blame had indeed been pinned on ‘Israeli gunfire’ by Palestinian sources, the BBC noted, cautioning:
‘But the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said findings from an initial inquiry showed its forces had not fired at people while they were near or within the aid centre.’
Again, after 20 months, we know such Israeli denials are automatic, reflexive, signifying nothing. More deflection and denial followed from the BBC. We had to keep reading to the end of the article to find a comment that rang true:
‘Mohammed Ghareeb, a journalist in Rafah, told the BBC that Palestinians had gathered near the aid centre run by the GHF when Israeli tanks approached and opened fire on the crowd.
‘Mr Ghareeb said the crowd of Palestinians were near Al-Alam roundabout around 04:30 local time (02:30 BST), close to the aid centre run by GHF, shortly before Israeli tanks appeared and opened fire.’
A surreal piece in the Guardian by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett clearly meant well:
‘I have seen images on my phone screen these past months that will haunt me as long as I live. Dead, injured, starving children and babies. Children crying in pain and in fear for their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. A small boy shaking in terror from the trauma of an airstrike. Scenes of unspeakable horror and violence that have left me feeling sick.’
Such honest expressions of personal anguish are welcome, of course, but the fact is that the word ‘Israel’ appeared nowhere in Cosslett’s article. How is that possible? Of the mass slaughter, Cosslett asked: ‘What is it doing to us as a society?’ Her own failure to shame the Israeli genocidaires, or even to name them, gives an idea.
The bias is part of a consistent trend. 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. BBC insiders have described how the corporation’s reporting is being ‘silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments’.
The bias is not, of course, limited to Gaza. The BBC’s Diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams reported a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian bomber base, noting the ‘sheer audacity’ and ‘ingenuity’ of an attack that was ‘at the very least, a spectacular propaganda coup’.
Imagine the grisly fate that would await a BBC journalist who described an attack on the West in similar terms.
The exalted BBC Verify, no less, began a report on the same ‘daring’ attack: ‘It was an attack of astonishing ingenuity – unprecedented, broad, and 18 months in the making.’
Now imagine a BBC report lauding the ‘astonishing ingenuity’ of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US.
In similar vein, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s veteran International Editor, described Israel’s pager attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria in September 2024 as ‘a tactical victory to Israel’ and ‘the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller’. Again, imagine Bowen describing a Russian attack on Ukraine as a ‘spectacular coup’ worthy of a thriller.
On X, the former Labour Party, now independent, MP Zarah Sultana commented over a harrowing image taken from viral footage showing a Palestinian toddler trying to escape from a fiercely burning building:
‘This photo should be on the front page of every major British newspaper.
‘But it won’t be — because, like the political class, they’re complicit.
‘It’s their genocide too.’
‘Very Modest Opposition’ From ‘The Morally Enlightened’
People utterly aghast at the political and media apologetics for, indifference to and complicity in the Gaza genocide – that is, people who missed the merciless devastation, for example, of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – might like to focus on an idea as unthinkable as it is undeniable. In their classic book, The Politics of Genocide, the late Edward S. Herman and David Peterson commented:
‘The conquest of the Western Hemisphere and the wiping-out of its indigenous peoples were carried out over many decades, with very modest opposition from within the morally enlightened Christian world. The African slave trade resulted in millions of deaths in the initial capture and transatlantic crossing, with a cruel degradation for the survivors.’ (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.22, our emphasis)
If the ‘very modest opposition’ was ugly, consider the underlying worldview:
‘The steady massacres and subjugation of black Africans within Africa itself rested on “an unquestioning belief in the innate superiority of the white race, … the very bedrock of imperial attitudes,” essential to making the business of mass slaughter “morally acceptable,” John Ellis writes. “At best, the Europeans regarded those they slaughtered with little more than amused contempt.”’ (p.22)
Has anything changed? You may be different, we may be different, the journalists cited above may be different, but as a society, as a collective, ‘amused contempt’ is an entrenched part of ‘our’ response to the fate of ‘our’ victims.
The brutality is locked in by an additional layer of self-deception. A key requirement of the human ego’s need to feel ‘superior’ is the need to feel morally superior. Thus, ‘our’ military ‘superiority’ is typically viewed as a function of ‘our’ moral ‘superiority’ – ‘we’ are more ‘organised’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘civilised’, and therefore more powerful. But a problem arises: how, as morally ‘superior’ beings, are ‘we’ to justify ‘our’ mass killing of other human beings for power, profit and land? How to reconcile such an obvious contradiction? Herman and Peterson explained:
‘This dynamic has always been accompanied by a process of projection, whereby the victims of slaughter and dispossession are depicted as “merciless Indian savages” (the Declaration of Independence) by the racist savages whose superior weapons, greed, and ruthlessness gave them the ability to conquer, destroy, and exterminate.’ (p.22)
‘They’ are ‘merciless’, ‘they’ are savages’; we are ‘God-fearing’, ‘good’ people. The projection is so extreme, that, with zero self-awareness, ‘we’ can damn ‘them’ for committing exactly the crimes ‘we’ are committing on a far greater scale.
Thus, on 9 October 2023, Yoav Gallant, then Israeli Defence Minister, announced that he had ‘ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.’
Barbaric inhumanity, one might think. And yet, this was the rationale:
‘We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’
In his book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, published in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, wrote:
‘In 1944 the RAF set out to bomb Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. The bombers, however, missed and instead hit a hospital, killing scores of children. This was a tragic accident of war. But in no sense can it be called terrorism. What distinguishes terrorism is the willful and calculated choice of innocents as targets. When terrorists machine-gun a passenger waiting area or set off bombs in a crowded shopping center, their victims are not accidents of war but the very objects of the terrorists’ assault.’ (Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, p.9, our emphasis)
Perhaps a plaque bearing these sage words can be sited atop one of the piles of rubble where Gaza’s hospitals once stood. Last month, WHO reported 697 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since October 2023. As a result, at least 94% of all hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. In March 2025, a United Nations investigation concluded that Israel had committed ‘genocidal acts’ in Gaza by systematically destroying its reproductive healthcare facilities.
Netanyahu has himself denounced the Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ – a reference to a well-known biblical story in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people from the face of the earth: men, women, children – everyone.
Denying Genocide Denial
Another useful way to test Chomsky’s assertion that ‘our’ crimes will be ‘suppressed or denied’ is to check the willingness of ‘mainstream’ media to mention the problem of ‘genocide denial’ in relation to Gaza.
As veteran Media Lens readers will know, the term is routinely deployed with great relish by critics of dissidents challenging the West’s enthusiasm for Perpetual War. In 2011, the Guardian’s George Monbiot devoted an entire column to naming and shaming a ‘malign intellectual subculture that seeks to excuse savagery by denying the facts’. ‘The facts’ being ‘the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda.’ Monbiot accused Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, and Media Lens of being political commentators who ‘take the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers’.
One can easily imagine a parallel universe in which journalists are having a field day denouncing the endless examples of ‘mainstream’ reporters and commentators belittling, denying or apologising for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Last month, the Telegraph published a remarkable piece by Colonel Richard Kemp asserting that the Israeli army ‘has been waging this hugely complex war for 19 months with a combination of fighting prowess and humanitarian restraint that no other army could match’.
Israel, it seems, has ‘been so determined to avoid killing the hostages and where possible to avoid harm to civilians in line with their scrupulously observed obligations under International Humanitarian Law’.
We can assess the evidence for this ‘scrupulously observed’ restraint in recently updated Google ‘before and after’ images of Gaza, revealing Israel’s erasure, not just of Gazan towns, but of its agriculture. Last month, the UN reported that fully 95 per cent of Gaza’s agricultural land has been rendered unusable by Israeli attacks, with 80 per cent of crop land damaged. According to the report, only 4.6 per cent of it can be cultivated, while 71.2 per cent of Gaza’s greenhouses and 82.8 per cent of its agricultural wells have been destroyed by Israeli attacks.
Using the ProQuest media database, we searched UK national newspapers for mentions of the term ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide denial’ over the last twelve months. We found not a single mention.
No surprise, given that, as Chomsky noted, ‘our’ crimes are systematically ‘suppressed or denied’. Why would the press expose their own genocide denials?
There is another possibility, of course. Could the lack of usage instead be explained by the fact that what is happening in Gaza is not, in fact, a genocide? After all, doesn’t genocide mean killing, or trying to kill, all the people in a given group?
Answers were supplied in a report published by Amnesty International last December, ‘Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’. The report concluded:
‘Amnesty International has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel committed, between 7 October 2023 and July 2024, prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. Amnesty International has also concluded that these acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, who form a substantial part of the Palestinian population, which constitutes a group protected under the Genocide Convention.
‘Accordingly, Amnesty International concludes that following 7 October 2023, Israel committed and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.’
Amnesty explained the reasoning:
‘Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Each of these acts must be committed with a general intent to commit the underlying act. However, to constitute the crime of genocide, these acts must also be committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such…”This specific intent is what distinguishes genocide from other crimes under international law.’ (Our emphasis)
The report added a key clarification:
‘Importantly, the perpetrator does not need to succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established. International jurisprudence recognizes that “the term ‘in whole or in part’ refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction”. Equally important, finding or inferring specific intent does not require finding a single or sole intent. A state’s actions can serve the dual goal of achieving a military result and destroying a group as such. Genocide can also be the means for achieving a military result. In other words, a finding of genocide may be drawn when the state intends to pursue the destruction of a protected group in order to achieve a certain military result, as a means to an end, or until it has achieved it.’ (Our emphasis)
As Amnesty noted, other organisations have arrived at similar conclusions:
‘In the context of the proceedings it initiated against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)… South Africa also provided its own legal analysis of Israel’s actions in Gaza, determining that they constitute genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Other states have since made public their own legal determination of genocide as part of their applications to the ICJ to intervene in the case. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967 reached similar conclusions in her reports in 2024. Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food concluded that Israel “has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people which evidences genocide and extermination”.’
Israel’s crimes clearly do qualify as a genocide. The refusal of the press to even discuss the possibility of genocide denial in relation to this assault points to their own complicity and culpability.
Many people have been closely following the journey this week of the Madleen, a small humanitarian yacht seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with a crew of 12 on board, including humanitarian activists and journalists.
This morning we woke to the harrowing, yet not unexpected, news that the vessel had been illegally hijacked by Israeli forces, who boarded and took the crew captive into Israeli territories, in contravention of international law.
Yet another on the long list of war crimes Israel has committed over the last 20 months of genocide, and decades of illegal occupation.
Communication with the crew was lost after the final moments of tense onboard footage as they donned lifejackets, threw phones and other sensitive data overboard, and raised their arms in preparation for whatever might come next.
Israel has a detailed history of attacking all previous freedom flotillas — including the 2010 mission aboard the Mavi Marmara in which 10 crew were killed and dozens more injured when Israeli forces hijacked the humanitarian vessel.
Another mission earlier this year was cut short when it was targeted by an airstrike in international waters, injuring crew.
The next updates were scenes filmed by Israeli forces which appear to show them calmly handing bread rolls and water to the detained crew, painting a picture which immediately recalled my own experience last year being unlawfully arrested in the southern West Bank.
Detained while documenting
I was detained while documenting armed settler violence, taken illegally to a military base where myself and three other internationals were given a bathroom stop, bread and water.
While we ate, they filmed us, saying “You are unharmed, yes? We are looking after you well?”
We were then loaded into a police van where a Palestinian farmer sat blindfolded, in silence, with his hands zip-tied behind him.
Eleven of the 12 crew members on board the humanitarian yacht Madleen before being arrested by Israeli forces today. Image: FFC screenshot APR
Israel loves to put on a show of their “humane treatment” when internationals are present and cameras are rolling, but it’s a shallow and sinister facade for their abusive racism and cruelty towards Palestinians.
It appears their response to the Madleen’s crew over the next few days will be exactly that. Don’t buy into it; this is no more than deeply sinister propaganda to cover state-backed racism, supremacy, and cruelty.
Families in Gaza are still facing indiscriminate airstrikes, continuous displacement, forced starvation, and the phony Israel/US “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” which has led to more than 100 civilians being shot while desperately seeking food.
Thousands of trucks still wait at the border to Gaza, barred entry by Israeli forces, while Palestinians face severe malnutrition and a man-made famine.
The New Zealand government has still not placed a single sanction on the Israeli state.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Many people have been closely following the journey this week of the Madleen, a small humanitarian yacht seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with a crew of 12 on board, including humanitarian activists and journalists.
This morning we woke to the harrowing, yet not unexpected, news that the vessel had been illegally hijacked by Israeli forces, who boarded and took the crew captive into Israeli territories, in contravention of international law.
Yet another on the long list of war crimes Israel has committed over the last 20 months of genocide, and decades of illegal occupation.
Communication with the crew was lost after the final moments of tense onboard footage as they donned lifejackets, threw phones and other sensitive data overboard, and raised their arms in preparation for whatever might come next.
Israel has a detailed history of attacking all previous freedom flotillas — including the 2010 mission aboard the Mavi Marmara in which 10 crew were killed and dozens more injured when Israeli forces hijacked the humanitarian vessel.
Another mission earlier this year was cut short when it was targeted by an airstrike in international waters, injuring crew.
The next updates were scenes filmed by Israeli forces which appear to show them calmly handing bread rolls and water to the detained crew, painting a picture which immediately recalled my own experience last year being unlawfully arrested in the southern West Bank.
Detained while documenting
I was detained while documenting armed settler violence, taken illegally to a military base where myself and three other internationals were given a bathroom stop, bread and water.
While we ate, they filmed us, saying “You are unharmed, yes? We are looking after you well?”
We were then loaded into a police van where a Palestinian farmer sat blindfolded, in silence, with his hands zip-tied behind him.
Eleven of the 12 crew members on board the humanitarian yacht Madleen before being arrested by Israeli forces today. Image: FFC screenshot APR
Israel loves to put on a show of their “humane treatment” when internationals are present and cameras are rolling, but it’s a shallow and sinister facade for their abusive racism and cruelty towards Palestinians.
It appears their response to the Madleen’s crew over the next few days will be exactly that. Don’t buy into it; this is no more than deeply sinister propaganda to cover state-backed racism, supremacy, and cruelty.
Families in Gaza are still facing indiscriminate airstrikes, continuous displacement, forced starvation, and the phony Israel/US “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” which has led to more than 100 civilians being shot while desperately seeking food.
Thousands of trucks still wait at the border to Gaza, barred entry by Israeli forces, while Palestinians face severe malnutrition and a man-made famine.
The New Zealand government has still not placed a single sanction on the Israeli state.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Contact has been lost with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla humanitarian aid boat Madleen after Israeli commandos intercepted it in international waters.
The commandos demanded that everyone on board turn off their phones, and the boat lost contact with Al Jazeera Mubasher journalist Omar Faiad as well as its live feed, reports the AJ live tracker.
International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf confirmed that they had also lost contact with the Madleen.
Arraf, whose ISM is supporting the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, later said from Sicily: “Just moments ago, communication seemed to be cut.”
“So, we have lost all contact with our colleagues on the Madleen.”
“Before that, we know that they had two drones hovering above them that dropped some kind of chemical on the vessel. We don’t know what that chemical was,” she said.
“Some people reported that their eyes were burning. Before that, they were also approached by vessels in a very threatening manner.”
So at least for the last hour the Madleen crew had been threatened by Israeli forces.
“The last we saw, were able to hear from them, they were surrounded . . . by Israeli naval commandos and it looked like the commandos were about to take over the vessel.”
The Freedom Flotilla earlier posted a message on social media saying “Red Alert: The Madleen is currently under assault in international waters.” It also said: “Israel navy ‘here right now, please sound the alarm’.”
“Red Alert: The Madleen is currently under assault in international waters.” Image: Gaza Freedom Forum Coalition
A video posted by Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza showed Brazilian activist Thiago Avila on board the Madleen wearing a life jacket.
“The IOF [Israel Occupation Forces] is here right now, please sound the alarm. We are being surrounded by their boats,” he said in the video.
“Yes this is an interception, a war crime is happening right now,” he said.
Israeli tanks opened fire last Sunday on a crowd of thousands of starving Palestinians at an aid distribution center in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The victims had gathered in hopes of finding food for themselves and their families, following a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade of the territory. At least 31 people were killed; one Palestinian was also killed by Israeli fire the same day at another distribution site in central Gaza.
On Monday, June 2, three more Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli projectiles while trying to procure food, and on Tuesday there were 27 fatalities at the aid hub in Rafah. This brought the total number of Palestinian deaths at the newly implemented hubs to more than 100 in just a week.
More than 150 press freedom advocacy groups and international newsrooms have joined Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in issuing a public appeal demanding that Israel grant foreign journalists immediate, independent and unrestricted access to the Gaza Strip.
The organisations are also calling for the full protection of Palestinian journalists, nearly 200 — the Gaza Media Office says more than 230 — of whom have been killed by the Israeli military over the past 20 months.
For more than 20 months, Israeli authorities have barred foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, says RSF in a media release.
During the same period, the Israeli army killed nearly 200 Palestinian journalists in the blockaded territory, including at least 45 slain for their work.
Palestinian journalists who continue reporting — the only witnesses on the ground — are facing unbearable conditions, including forced displacement, famine, and constant threats to their lives.
This collective appeal, launched by RSF and CPJ, brings together prominent news outlets from every continent demanding the right to send correspondents into Gaza to report alongside Palestinian journalists.
“The media blockade imposed on Gaza, combined with the massacre of nearly 200 journalists by the Israeli army, is enabling the total destruction and erasure of the blockaded territory,” said RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin.
“Israeli authorities are banning foreign journalists from entering and ruthlessly asserting their control over information.
“This is a methodical attempt to silence the facts, suppress the truth, and isolate the Palestinian press and population.
Asia Pacific Report . . . one of the signatories to the Gaza plea. Image: APR
“We call on governments, international institutions and heads of state to end their complicit silence, enforce the immediate opening of Gaza to foreign media, and uphold a principle that is frequently trampled — under international humanitarian law, killing a journalist is a war crime.
“This principle has been violated far too often and must now be enforced.”
RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin speaking at the reception celebrating seven years of Taipei’s Asia Pacific office in October 2024. Image: Pacific Media Watch
The media blockade on Gaza persists despite repeated calls from RSF to guarantee foreign journalists independent access to the Strip, and legal actions such as the Foreign Press Association’s (FPA) petition to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Palestinian journalists, meanwhile, are trapped, displaced, starved, defamed and targeted due to their work.
Those who have survived this unprecedented massacre of journalists now find themselves without shelter, equipment, medical care or even food, according to a CPJ report. They face the risk of being killed at any moment.
To end the enduring impunity that allows these crimes to continue, RSF has repeatedly referred cases to the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging it to investigate alleged war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza by the Israeli army.
RSF also provides aid to Palestinian journalists on the ground — particularly in Gaza — through partnerships with local organisations such as ARIJ (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism).
This partnership provides Palestinian journalists with psychological and professional support, ensuring the continued publication of high-quality reporting despite the blockade and the risks.
Through this cooperation, RSF reaffirms its commitment to defending independent, rigorous journalism — even under the most extreme conditions.
Once the favored child of the establishment, Greta Thunberg has been dropped by the global elite. A MintPress News study finds that coverage of Thunberg in The New York Times and Washington Post has dwindled from hundreds of articles per year to barely a handful, precisely as she widens her focus from the environment to the capitalist system that is causing climate breakdown, and the Israeli attack on Gaza, which the Swedish activist has labeled a “genocide.”
Greta Thunberg was once a media darling. Organizing a climate strike at her local school when she was just fifteen, she shot to fame and was quickly embraced by the establishment. In 2019, she was invited to the European Union Parliament and received a standing ovation from the politicians and diplomats in attendance.
The headline is written in such a passive, amorphous way that it sounds like the aid deliveries themselves are deadly. Like the bags of flour are picking up assault rifles and firing on desperate Palestinians queuing for food or something.
The sub-headline is no better: “Israel’s troops have repeatedly shot near food distribution sites.”
Oh? They’ve shot “near” food distribution sites, have they? Could their discharging their weapons in close proximity to the aid sites possibly have something to do with the aforementioned deadliness of the aid deliveries? Are we the readers supposed to connect these two pieces of information for ourselves, or are we meant to view them as two separate data points which may or may not have anything to do with one another?
The article itself makes it clear that Israel has admitted that IDF troops fired their weapons “near” people waiting for aid after they failed to respond to “warning shots”, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. But in mainstream publications, the headlines are written by editors, not by the journalists who write the articles. So, they get to frame the story in whatever way suits their propaganda agenda for the majority who never read past the headline.
This was a story that provoked outcry and condemnation throughout the Western world, but look at the lengths the New York Times editor went to in order to frame the IDF’s actions in the most innocent way possible. They were firing into the air. They were firing “to disperse western diplomats”—like that’s a thing. Like diplomats are crows on a cornfield or something. Oh yeah, ya know ya get too many diplomats flockin’ around and ya gotta fire a few rounds to disperse ’em. Just normal stuff.
It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to exonerate Israel and its Western allies of their crimes publicly. The IDF commits a war crime, and suddenly these stuffy mass media editors who’ve never created any art in their lives transform into poets, bending and twisting the English language to come up with lines that read more like Zen koans than reporting on an important news event.
It’s impossible to have too much disdain for these people.
America’s retreat from foreign aid is being felt deeply in Pacific media, where pivotal outlets are being shuttered and journalists work unpaid.
The result is fewer investigations into dubiously motivated politicians, glimpses into conflicts otherwise unseen and a less diverse media in a region which desperately needs it.
“It is a huge disappointment … a senseless waste,” Benar News’ Australian former head of Pacific news Stefan Armbruster said after seeing his outlet go under.
Benar News, In-depth Solomons and Inside PNG are three digital outlets which enjoyed US support but have been hit by President Donald Trump’s about-face on aid.
Benar closed its doors in April after an executive order disestablishing Voice of America, which the United States created during World War II to combat Nazi propaganda.
An offshoot of Radio Free Asia (RFA) focused on Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Benar kept a close eye on abuses in West Papua, massacres and gender-based violence in Papua New Guinea and more.
The Pacific arm quickly became indispensable to many, with a team of reporters and freelancers working in 15 countries on a budget under A$A million.
Coverage of decolonisation
“Our coverage of decolonisation in the Pacific received huge interest, as did our coverage of the lack of women’s representation in parliaments, human rights, media freedom, deep sea mining and more,” Armbruster said.
In-depth Solomons, a Honiara-based digital outlet, is another facing an existential threat despite a proud record of investigative and award-winning reporting.
Last week, it was honoured with a peer-nominated award from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan for a year-long probe into former prime minister Manasseh Sogavare’s property holdings.
“We’re just holding on,” editor and co-founder Ofani Eremae said.
A US-centred think tank continues to pay the wage of one journalist, while others have not drawn a salary since January.
“It has had an impact on our operations. We used to travel out to do stories across the provinces. That has not been done since early this year,” Eremae said.
A private donor came forward after learning of the cuts with a one-off grant that was used for rent to secure the office, he said.
USAID budget axed
Its funding shortfall — like Port Moresby-based outlet Inside PNG — is linked to USAID, the world’s biggest single funder of development assistance, until Trump axed its multi-billion dollar budget.
Much of USAID’s funding was spent on humanitarian causes — such as vaccines, clean water supplies and food security — but some was also earmarked for media in developing nations, with the aim of bolstering fragile democracies.
Inside PNG used its support to build an audience of tens of thousands with incisive reports on PNG politics: not just Port Moresby, but in the regions including independence-seeking province Bougainville that has a long history of conflict.
“The current lack of funding has unfortunately had a dual impact, affecting both our dedicated staff, whom we’re currently unable to pay, and our day-to-day operations,” Inside PNG managing director Kila Wani said.
“We’ve had to let off 80 percent of staff from payroll which is a big hit because we’re not a very big team.
“Logistically, it’s become challenging to carry out our work as we normally would.”
Other media entities in the region have suffered hits, but declined to share their stories.
The latest PFF report listed a string of challenges, notably weak legal protections for free speech, political interference on editorial independence, and a lack of funding underpinning high-quality media, in the region.
The burning question for these outlets — and their audiences — is do other sources of funding exist to fill the gap?
Inside PNG is refocusing energy on attracting new donors, as is In-depth Solomons, which has also turned to crowdfunding.
The Australian and New Zealand governments have also provided targeted support for the media sector across the region, including ABC International Development (ABCID), which has enjoyed a budget increase from Anthony Albanese’s government.
Inside PNG and In-depth Solomons both receive training and content-focused grants from ABCID, which helps, but this does not fund the underpinning costs for a media business or keep on the lights.
Both Eremae, who edited two major newspapers before founding the investigative outlet, and Armbruster, a long-time SBS correspondent, expressed their dismay at the US pivot away from the Pacific.
‘Huge mistake’ by US
“It’s a huge mistake on the part of the US … the world’s leading democracy. The media is one of the pillars of democracy,” Eremae said.
“It is, I believe, in the interests of the US and other democratic countries to give funding to media in countries like the Solomon Islands where we cannot survive due to lack of advertising (budgets).
As a veteran of Pacific reporting, Armbruster said he had witnessed US disinterest in the region contribute to the wider geopolitical struggle for influence.
“The US government was trying to re-establish its presence after vacating the space decades ago. It had promised to re-engage, dedicating funding largely driven by its efforts to counter China, only to now betray those expectations,” he said.
“The US government has senselessly destroyed a highly valued news service in the Pacific. An own goal.”
Ben McKay is an AAP journalist. Republished from National Indigenous Times in Australia.
The Trump White House on Tuesday formally asked Congress to rescind over $9 billion in approved spending, taking aim at lifesaving foreign aid programs as well as funding for U.S. public broadcasting outlets targeted by the president. The $9.4 billion rescission request, expected to be the first of several, is laid out in a memo authored by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell…
It is entirely unsurprising that Israel has yet again been caught out in a lie – a lie that the BBC once again spread far and wide on its news services.
Israel claimed that it had not fired at starving Palestinians queuing on Sunday morning to get food from one of its highly militarised “aid distribution hubs” – a system Israel imposed on Gaza in place of a long-established and successful aid network run by the United Nations.
More than 30 Palestinians are known to have been killed and dozens more injured in the weekend incident.
Israel blamed Hamas fighters for shooting Palestinian civilians, saying they were trying to stop the crowds from taking food boxes. The Israeli military dished up a video, taken by one of its drones, as supposed proof.
The BBC broadcast that video on its main shows, and then did one of its standard “Israel said, the Palestinians said. Who can really know the truth?” reports of the incident.
The BBC should never have taken Israel’s disinformation seriously, not least because Israeli claims are always shown to be lies when subjected to any serious independent scrutiny. The default position should be that Israel is lying until it can demonstrate convincingly that it is not.
Doctors treating the dead and wounded immediately pointed out that their injuries were consistent with Israeli gunfire. The victims had single shots to the head or chest, in line with targeting by Israeli snipers. Others suffered shrapnel wounds from tank shells. Hamas has no tanks.
Now, expert analysis of the video itself – paradoxically confirmed by BBC Verify – shows that the footage was filmed in Khan Younis, far from Rafah, where the Palestinian aid seekers were killed. It is also apparent from the shadows that the video was taken in the evening, not in the morning when the Palestinians in Rafah were shot.
Despite this, the BBC still writes: “The circumstances of this strike are unclear.”
No, it is entirely clear that the Israeli army disseminated lies, and that the BBC lapped up those lies and spread them to its audiences via its main news shows, before tentatively retracting the lies quietly on a live feed on its website.
The reality is that the video doesn’t show Hamas fighters shooting Palestinians to stop them from getting aid. Rather, it shows a criminal Palestinian gang – of the kind Israel has been cultivating and allying with – looting aid so that it can be sold back to Palestinians on the open market, where Israel’s blockade on food has massively inflated prices.
There are no police in Gaza maintaining law and order because Israel kills any Palestinian seen wearing a police uniform.
It was for these very reasons that international aid organisations refused to take part in Israel’s scheme. They understood that it was never about distributing humanitarian aid, as the UN was best placed to do so.
It was not even chiefly about weaponising aid to lure Palestinians into what are effectively Israeli military bases so that soldiers can use biometric data to snatch any Palestinians they want, disappearing them into Israel’s torture camps, as they have been doing.
Rather, it is about giving the appearance of providing food, most of it useless because it is dried staples that need cooking, when there is almost no water or fuel available, while continuing to starve the vast majority of Palestinians. And it is about using the aid hubs as another front for killing Palestinians.
In other words, after taking the aid system out of the UN’s hands, Israel is successfully enfolding the so-called “humanitarian effort” into its genocide.
If that sounds too cynical, mark this. Israel again shot at crowds gathering on Tuesday morning to get aid from one of its “distribution hubs”, killing at least 27 Palestinians and wounding more than 180.
Several witnesses say there was no aid available when they arrived.
There is no way to be too cynical about what Israel is doing. Israel is utterly committed to its genocide, and a genocidal state has no red lines.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary reflected on her years in Fiji as a television journalist and media educator at a Fiji Centre function in Auckland celebrating Fourth Estate values and independence at the weekend.
It was a reunion with former journalism professor David Robie — they had worked together as a team at the University of the South Pacific amid media and political controversy leading up to the George Speight coup in May 2000.
Leary, a former British Council director and lawyer, was the guest speaker at a gathering of human rights activists, development advocates, academics and journalists hosted at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub, the umbrella base for the Fiji Centre and Asia Pacific Media Network.
She said she was delighted to meet “special people in David’s life” and to be speaking to a diverse group sharing “similar values of courage, freedom of expression, truth and tino rangatiratanga”.
“I want to start this talanoa on Friday, 19 May 2000 — 13 years almost to the day of the first recognised military coup in Fiji in 1987 — when failed businessman George Speight tore off his balaclava to reveal his identity.
She pointed out that there had actually been another “coup” 100 years earlier by Ratu Cakobau.
“Speight had seized Parliament holding the elected government at gunpoint, including the politician mother, Lavinia Padarath, of one of my best friends — Anna Padarath.
Hostage-taking report
“Within minutes, the news of the hostage-taking was flashed on Radio Fiji’s 10 am bulletin by a student journalist on secondment there — Tamani Nair. He was a student of David Robie’s.”
Nair had been dispatched to Parliament to find out what was happening and reported from a cassava patch.
“Fiji TV was trashed . . . and transmission pulled for 48 hours.
“The university shut down — including the student radio facilities, and journalism programme website — to avoid a similar fate, but the journalism school was able to keep broadcasting and publishing via a parallel website set up at the University of Technology Sydney.
“The pictures were harrowing, showing street protests turning violent and the barbaric behaviour of Speight’s henchmen towards dissenters.
“Thus began three months of heroic journalism by David’s student team — including through a period of martial law that began 10 days later and saw some of the most restrictive levels of censorship ever experienced in the South Pacific.”
Leary paid tribute to some some of the “brave satire” produced by senior Fiji Times reporters filling the newspaper with “non-news” (such as about haircuts, drinking kava) as an act of defiance.
“My friend Anna Padarath returned from doing her masters in law in Australia on a scholarship to be closer to her Mum, whose hostage days within Parliament Grounds stretched into weeks and then months.
Whanau Community Centre and Hub co-founder Nik Naidu speaking at the Asia Pacific Media Network event at the weekend. Image: Khairiah A. Rahman/APMN
Invisible consequences
“Anna would never return to her studies — one of the many invisible consequences of this profoundly destructive era in Fiji’s complex history.
“Happily, she did go on to carve an incredible career as a women’s rights advocate.”
“Meanwhile David’s so-called ‘barefoot student journalists’ — who snuck into Parliament the back way by bushtrack — were having their stories read and broadcast globally.
“And those too shaken to even put their hands to keyboards on Day 1 emerged as journalism leaders who would go on to win prizes for their coverage.”
Speight was sentenced to life in prison, but was pardoned in 2024.
Taeri MP Ingrid Leary speaking at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub. Image: Nik Naidu/APMN
Leary said that was just one chapter in the remarkable career of David Robie who had been an editor, news director, foreign news editor and freelance writer with a number of different agencies and news organisations — including Agence France-Presse, Rand Daily Mail, The Auckland Star, Insight Magazine, and New Outlook Magazine — “a family member to some, friend to many, mentor to most”.
Reflecting on working with Dr Robie at USP, which she joined as television lecturer from Fiji Television, she said:
“At the time, being a younger person, I thought he was a little bit crazy, because he was communicating with people all around the world when digital media was in its infancy in Fiji, always on email, always getting up on online platforms, and I didn’t appreciate the power of online media at the time.
“And it was incredible to watch.”
Ahead of his time
She said he was an innovator and ahead of his time.
Dr Robie viewed journalism as a tool for empowerment, aiming to provide communities with the information they needed to make informed decisions.
“We all know that David has been a champion of social justice and for decolonisation, and for the values of an independent Fourth Estate.”
She said she appreciated the freedom to develop independent media as an educator, adding that one of her highlights was producing the groundbreaking documentary Maire about Maire Bopp Du Pont, who was a student journalist at USP and advocate for the Pacific community living with HIV/AIDs.
She later became a nuclear-free Pacific parliamentarian in Pape’ete.
Leary presented Dr Robie with a “speaking stick” carved from an apricot tree branch by the husband of a Labour stalwart based in Cromwell — the event doubled as his 80th birthday.
In response, Dr Robie said the occasion was a “golden opportunity” to thank many people who had encouraged and supported him over many years.
Massive upheaval
“We must have done something right,” he said about USP, “because in 2000, the year of George Speight’s coup, our students covered the massive upheaval which made headlines around the world when Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour-led coalition government was held at gunpoint for 56 days.
“The students courageously covered the coup with their website Pacific Journalism Online and their newspaper Wansolwara — “One Ocean”. They won six Ossie Awards – unprecedented for a single university — in Australia that year and a standing ovation.”
He said there was a video on YouTube of their exploits called Frontline Reporters and one of the students, Christine Gounder, wrote an article for a Commonwealth Press Union magazine entitled, “From trainees to professionals. And all it took was a coup”.
Dr Robie said this Fiji experience was still one of the most standout experiences he had had as a journalist and educator.
Along with similar coverage of the 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis by his students at the University of Papua New Guinea.
He made some comments about the 1985 Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap in the Marshall islands and the subsequent bombing by French secret agents in Auckland.
But he added “you can read all about this adventure in my new book” being published in a few weeks.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary (right) with Dr David Robie and his wife Del Abcede at the Fiji Centre function. Image: Camille Nakhid
Biggest 21st century crisis
Dr Robie said the profession of journalism, truth telling and holding power to account, was vitally important to a healthy democracy.
Although media did not succeed in telling people what to think, it did play a vital role in what to think about. However, the media world was undergoing massive change and fragmentation.
“And public trust is declining in the face of fake news and disinformation,” he said
“I think we are at a crossroads in society, both locally and globally. Both journalism and democracy are under an unprecedented threat in my lifetime.
“When more than 230 journalists can be killed in 19 months in Gaza and there is barely a bleep from the global community, there is something savagely wrong.
“The Gazan journalists won the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize collectively last year with the judges saying, “As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”
“The carnage and genocide in Gaza is deeply disturbing, especially the failure of the world to act decisively to stop it. The fact that Israel can kill with impunity at least 54,000 people, mostly women and children, destroy hospitals and starve people to death and crush a people’s right to live is deeply shocking.
“This is the biggest crisis of the 21st century. We see this relentless slaughter go on livestreamed day after day and yet our media and politicians behave as if this is just ‘normal’. It is shameful, horrendous. Have we lost our humanity?
“Gaza has been our test. And we have failed.”
Other speakers included Whānau Hub co-founder Nik Naidu, one of the anti-coup Coalition for Democracy in Fiji (CDF) stalwarts; the Heritage New Zealand’s Antony Phillips; and Multimedia Investments and Evening Report director Selwyn Manning.
Tory leader says the quiet part out loud, admitting that both Israel and Ukraine are fighting for the West
If you have spent the past 20 months wondering why British leaders on both sides of the aisle have barely criticised Israel, even as it slaughtered and starved Gaza’s population of more than two million people, you finally got an answer last week.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said the quiet part out loud. She told Sky: “Israel is fighting a proxy war [in Gaza] on behalf of the UK.”
According to Badenoch, the UK – and presumably in her assessment, other western powers – aren’t just supporting Israel against Hamas. They are willing that fight and helping to direct it. They view that fight as centrally important to their national interests.
This certainly accords with what we have witnessed over more than a year and a half. Both the current Labour government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and its Tory predecessor under Rishi Sunak, have been unwavering in their commitment to send British arms to Israel, while also shipping weapons from the United States and Germany to help with the slaughter.
Both governments used the Royal Air Force base Akrotiri in Cyprus to carry out surveillance flights to aid Israel with locating targets to hit in Gaza. Both allowed British citizens to travel to Israel to take part as soldiers in the Gaza genocide.
And neither government proposed or tried to impose alongside other western states, as happened in other recent “wars”, a no-fly zone over Gaza to stop Israel’s murderous assault, or organised with others to break Israel’s blockade and get aid into the enclave.
In other words, both governments steadfastly maintained their material support for Israel, even if Starmer recently toned down rhetorical support after images of emaciated babies and young children in Gaza – reminiscent of images of Jewish children in Nazi death camps like Auschwitz – shocked the world.
Coded language
If Badenoch is right that the UK is waging a proxy war in Gaza, it means that both British governments are directly responsible for the huge death toll of Palestinian civilians – running into many tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands – from Israel’s saturation bombing.
It also makes it indisputable that the UK is complicit in the current mass starvation of more than two million people there, which is indeed what Badenoch went on to imply in the coded language of political debate.
In reference to Starmer’s recent, and very belated, criticism of Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s entire population, she observed: “What I want to see is Keir Starmer making sure that he is on the right side of British national interest.”
According to Badenoch, Starmer’s implied threat – so far entirely unrealised – to limit the UK’s active collusion in the genocidal starvation of the people of Gaza could harm Britain’s national interests. How exactly?
Her comments should have startled, or at least baffled, Sky interviewer Trevor Phillips. But they passed unremarked.
Badenoch’s “proxy war” statement was also largely ignored by the rest of the British establishment media. Rightwing publications did notice it, but it appeared they were only disturbed by her equating the West’s proxy war in Gaza with the West’s proxy war in Ukraine.
Or as the opposition leader put it: “Israel is fighting a proxy war on behalf of the UK just like Ukraine is on behalf of western Europe against Russia.”
A column in the Spectator, the Tory party’s house journal, criticised her use of “proxy war” to describe Ukraine, but appeared to take the Gaza proxy war reference as read. James Heale, the Spectator’s deputy political editor, wrote: “By inadvertently echoing Russia’s position on Ukraine, Badenoch has handed her opponents another stick with which to beat her.”
The Telegraph, another Tory-leaning newspaper, ran a similarly themed article headlined: “Kremlin seizes on Badenoch’s Ukraine ‘proxy war’ comments.”
Related wars
The lack of a response to her Gaza “proxy war” remark suggests that this sentiment actually informs much thinking in western foreign policy circles, even if she broke the taboo on articulating it publicly.
To reach an answer on why Gaza is viewed as a proxy war – one Britain continues to be deeply invested in, even at the cost of a genocide – one must also understand why Ukraine is seen in similar terms. The two “wars” are more related than they might appear.
Despite the consternation of the Spectator and Telegraph, Badenoch is not the first British leader to point out that the West is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine.
Back in February, one of her predecessors, Boris Johnson, observed of western involvement in the three-year war between Russia and Ukraine: “Let’s face it, we’re waging a proxy war. We’re waging a proxy war. But we’re not giving our proxies [Ukraine] the ability to do the job.”
If anyone should know the truth about Ukraine, it is Johnson. After all, he was prime minister when Moscow invaded its neighbour in February 2022.
He was soon dispatched by Washington to Kyiv, where he appears to have strong-armed President Volodymyr Zelensky into abandoning ceasefire talks that were well advanced and could have led to a resolution.
Offensive frontiers
There are good reasons why Johnson and Badenoch each understand Ukraine as a proxy war.
This weekend Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, echoed them. He told Fox News that Russian president Vladimir Putin was not wrong to see Ukraine as a proxy war, and that the West was acting as aggressor by supplying Kyiv with weapons.
For years, the West had expanded Nato’s offensive frontiers towards Russia, despite Moscow’s explicit warnings that this would cross a red line.
With the West threatening to bring Russia’s neighbour Ukraine into Nato’s military fold, there were only ever likely to be one of two Russian responses. Either Putin would blink first and find Russia boxed in militarily, with Nato missiles – potentially nuclear-tipped – on his doorstep, minutes from Moscow. Or he would react pre-emptively to stop Ukraine’s accession to Nato by invading.
The West believed it had nothing to lose either way. If Russia invaded, Nato would then have the pretext to use Ukraine as a theatre of war to bleed Moscow, both economically with sanctions and militarily by flooding the battlefield with western weapons.
As we now know, Moscow chose to react. And while it has indeed been bleeding heavily, Ukrainian forces and European economies have been haemorrhaging even faster and more heavily.
The problem isn’t so much a lack of weapons – the West has supplied lots of them – as the fact that Ukraine has run out of conscripts willing to be sent into the maw of war.
The West is not, of course, going to send its own soldiers. A proxy war means someone else, in this case Ukrainians, does the fighting – and dying – for you.
Three years on, the conditions for a ceasefire have dramatically changed too. Having spilled so much of its own people’s blood, Russia is much less ready to make compromises, not least over the eastern territories it has conquered and annexed.
We have reached this nadir in Ukraine – one so deep that even US President Donald Trump appears ready to bail out – precisely because Nato, via Johnson, pushed Ukraine to keep fighting an unwinnable war.
Full-spectrum dominance
Nonetheless, there was a geopolitical logic, however twisted, to the West’s actions in Ukraine. Bleeding Russia, a military and economic power, accords with the hawkish priorities of the neoconservative cabals that run western capitals nowadays, whichever party is in charge.
The neoconservatives valorise what used to be called the military-industrial complex. They believe that the West has a civilisational superiority to the rest of the world, and must use its superior arsenal to defeat, or at least contain, any state that refuses to submit.
This is a modern reimagining of the “barbarians at the gate”, or as neoconservatives like to frame it, “a clash of civilisations”. The fall of the West would amount, in their view, to a return to the Dark Ages. We are supposedly in a life-or-death struggle.
In the US, the imperial hub of what we call “the West”, this has justified a massive investment in war industries – or what is referred to as “defence”, because it is an easier sell to domestic publics tired of the endless austerity required to maintain military superiority.
Western capitals profess to act as “global police”, while the rest of the world sees the West more in terms of a sociopathic mafia don. However one frames it, the Pentagon is officially pursuing a doctrine known as US “global full-spectrum dominance”. You must submit – that is, let us control the world’s resources – or pay the price.
In practice, a “foreign policy” like this has necessarily divided the world in two: those in the Godfather’s camp, and those outside it.
If Russia could not be contained and defanged by turning Ukraine into a Nato forward base on Moscow’s doorstep, it had to be dragged by the West into a debilitating proxy war that would neutralise Russia’s ability to ally with China against US global hegemony.
Acts of violence
That is what Badenoch and Johnson meant by the proxy war in Ukraine. But how is Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian civilians through saturation bombing and engineered starvation similarly a proxy war – and one apparently benefitting the UK and the West, as Badenoch argues?
Interestingly, Badenoch offered two not entirely compatible reasons for Israel’s “war” on Gaza.
Initially, she told Sky: “Israel is fighting a war where they want to get 58 hostages who have not been returned. That is what all of this is about … What we need to make sure is that we’re on the side that is going to eradicate Hamas.”
But even “eradicating Hamas” is hard to square with British foreign policy objectives. After all, despite the UK’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organisation, it has never attacked Britain, has said it has no such intention, and is unlikely to ever be in a position to do so.
Instead, it is far more likely that Israel’s destruction of Gaza, with visible western collusion, will inflame hotheads into random or misguided acts of violence that cannot be prepared for or stopped – acts of terror similar to the US gunman who recently shot dead two Israeli embassy staff in Washington DC.
That might be reason enough to conclude that the UK ought to distance itself from Israel’s actions as quickly as possible, rather than standing squarely behind Tel Aviv.
It was only when she was pushed by Phillips to explain her position that Badenoch switched trajectory. Apparently it wasn’t just about the hostages. She added: “Who funds Hamas? Iran, an enemy of this country.”
Cornered by her own logic, she then grasped tightly the West’s neoconservative comfort blanket and spoke of a “proxy war”.
‘Bracing’ truth?
Badenoch’s point was not lost on Stephen Pollard, the former editor of the Jewish Chronicle. In a column, he noted of the Sky interview: “Badenoch has a bracing attitude to the truth – she tells it as it is, even if it doesn’t make her popular.”
The “bracing” truth from Badenoch is that Israel is as central to the projection of western power into the oil-rich Middle East as it was more than a century ago, when Britain conceived of Palestine as a “national home for the Jewish people” in place of the native Palestinian population.
From Britain’s perspective, Israel’s war on Gaza, as Badenoch concedes, is not centrally about “eradicating Hamas” or “getting back the hostages” taken during the group’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
Rather, it is about arming Israel to weaken those, like Iran and its regional allies, who refuse to submit to the West’s domination of the Middle East – or in the case of Palestinians, to their own dispossession and erasure.
In that way, arming Israel is seen as no different from arming Ukraine to weaken Russian influence in eastern Europe. It is about containing the West’s geostrategic rivals – or potential partners, were they not viewed exclusively through the prism of western “full-spectrum dominance” – as effectively as Israel has locked Palestinians into prisons and concentration camps in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
This strategy is about averting any danger that one day Russia, China, Iran and others could unite effectively to oust the US and its allies from their heavily fortified hilltop. Alliances like BRICS are seen as a potential vehicle for such an assault on western dominance.
Whatever the rhetoric, western capitals are not chiefly concerned about military or “civilisational” threats. They do not fear being invaded or conquered by their “enemies”. In fact, their reckless behaviours in places like Ukraine make a cataclysmic nuclear confrontation more likely.
What drives western foreign policy is the craving to maintain global economic primacy. And terrorising other states with the West’s superior military might is seen as the only way to ensure such primacy.
There is nothing new about the West’s fears, nor are they partisan. Differences within western establishments are never over whether the West should assert “full-spectrum dominance” around the globe through client states such as Israel and Ukraine. Instead, factional splits emerge over which elements within those client states the West should be allying with the closest.
‘Rogue’ policy
The question of alliances has been particularly fraught in the case of Israel, where the far-right and religious extremist factions in the government have a near-Messianic view of their place and role in the Middle East.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many of those closest to him have been trying for decades to manoeuvre the US into launching an attack on Iran, not least to remove Israel’s main rival in the Middle East and guarantee its nuclear-armed regional primacy in perpetuity.
So far, Netanyahu has found no takers in the White House. But that hasn’t stopped him trying. He is widely reported to be deep in efforts to push Trump into joining an attack on Iran, in the midst of talks between Washington and Tehran.
Over many years, British hawks look like they have been playing their own role in these manoeuvres. In the recent past, at least two ambitious British government ministers on the right have been caught trying to cosy up to the most belligerent elements in the Israeli security establishment.
In 2017, Priti Patel was forced to resign as international development secretary after she was found to have held 12 secret meetings with senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, while supposedly on a family holiday. She had other off-the-books meetingswith Israeli officials in New York and London.
Six years earlier, then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox also had to step down after a series of shadowy meetings with Israeli officials. Fox’s ministry was also known to have drawn updetailed plans for British assistance in the event of a US military strike on Iran, including allowing the Americans to use Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian ocean.
Unnamed government officials told the Guardian at the time that Fox had been pursuing an “alternative” government policy. Former British diplomat Craig Murray was more direct: his sources within government suggested Fox had been conspiring with Israel in a “rogue” foreign policy towards Iran, against Britain’s stated aims.
Crime scene
The West’s behaviours are ideologically driven, not rational or moral. The compulsive, self-sabotaging nature of western support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is no different – though far grosser – than the self-sabotaging nature of its actions in Ukraine.
The West has lost the battle against Russia, but refuses to learn or adapt. And it has spent whatever moral legitimacy it still had left in propping up an Israeli military occupier bent on starving millions of people to death, if they cannot be ethnically cleansed into Egypt first.
Netanyahu has not been the easy-to-sell, cuddly military mascot that Zelensky proved to be in Ukraine.
Support for Kyiv could at least be presented as taking the right side in a clash of civilisations with a barbarous Russia. Support for Israel simply exposes the West’s hypocrisy, its worship of power for its own sake, and its psychopathic instincts.
Support for Israel’s genocide has hollowed out the West’s claim to moral superiority for all but its most deluded devotees. Sadly, those still include most of the western political and media establishments, whose only rationale is to evangelise for the belief system over which they preside, claiming it to be the worthiest in history.
Some, like Starmer, are trying to moderate their rhetoric in a desperate attempt to protect the morally bankrupt system that has invested them with power.
Others, like Badenoch, are still so enthralled by the cult of a superior West that they are blind to how preposterous their rantings sound to anyone no longer rapt in devotion. Rather than distance herself from Israel’s atrocities, she is happy to place herself – and the UK – at the crime scene.
The scales have fallen from western publics’ eyes. Now is the time to hold our leaders fully to account.
To boil it all down (and the speakers here have never yet been found to be wrong about this war, which they have been analyzing ever since 2016): the only way that America and its allied countries can now avoid a total defeat in this war is by directly going to war themselves against Russia. Though that would not start out as being a nuclear war, what would the loser in the conventional war then do? Would it surrender? Or would it instead initiate nuclear war against the side that has won the conventional war (which would then become World War Three)? And why are the stakes in this war (possible annihilation of civilization) not even being discussed in U.S.-and-allied media? Is this the media that would be the media in a democracy, or instead in a dictatorship?
There already are indications that the U.S. and its allies are intensively preparing for WW3. Is this because there is a public demand for these multi-trillion-dollar measures, or is it instead because the individuals who are in control over our governments (and their news-media) want these expenses by their Government? Why are people not pondering these questions? But perhaps the reason is that they’re not being informed that this is even happening. And why aren’t they?
UK and Israel are part of this empire, and at 7:45-20:30 in this video is the U.S.-UK-Israel plan laid out and documented (see especially the map at 17:57) for the completion of their final solution to the Palestinian problem in Gaza. Then, from 29:00 till 34:00 is a truthful description of how the U.S. Government’s ceaseless craving to conquer both Russia and China — and to continue providing the weapons that Israel uses to exterminate Gazans — is increasingly foreclosing any other (any peaceful) paths by which America’s economy can even grow.
U.S.-and-allied major media say that alternative viewpoints are presented by them, but why are THESE alternative viewpoints NOT among the “alternatives” (I would instead call them truths) that they present? Why are these ‘viewpoints’ censored-out by them? How and why is that done? Is this a democracy? Or is it something else?
California public schools are the latest target of Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which is ramping up an investigation into high school sports after a transgender girl qualified for three track and field events at the upcoming state championships.
The DoJ is alleging that the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) allowing transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports could violate Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex.
The New York Times (5/28/25) covered this latest right-wing attack on trans youth in a fashion all too common for the paper (FAIR.org, 5/11/23): devoid of any perspectives from trans individuals.
The second week of May was a busy time for fact-checkers at Union government’s Press Information Bureau (PIB) as it put out 68 fact-checks related to Operation Sindoor. While examining the tweets on PIB Fact Check’s official X handle between May 7 and May 16, Alt News noticed a distinct pattern in their selection of who to fact check and who not. One category that was conspicuous in its almost total absence in PIB’s body of work in this crucial period was falsehoods amplified by the Indian mainstream media.
India announced the launch of Operation Sindoor in the early hours of May 7, targeting nine terror bases in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Tensions escalated quickly into intense cross-border drone and missile strikes, leading to deaths of at least 21 civilians in Jammu and Kashmir in four days. On May 10, India and Pakistan reached an understanding of ceasefire and agreed to stop all firing and military action.
The Indian mainstream newsrooms, where hyper-nationalistic rhetoric bordering on jingoism has been the norm for quite some now, went absolutely berserk in these four days of armed conflict. Anchors and self-proclaimed defence experts made outrageous claims such as the destruction of the Karachi port by the Indian Navy, India attacking Islamabad, and even Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif surrendering to Indian forces. On innumerable occasions, they showed unrelated, old visuals in adrenaline-driven prime-time shows, falsely linking them to the ongoing conflict, without any verification.
A detailed study of PIB fact checks from this period by Alt News shows that it chose not to call out media outlets for making false, baseless and misleading claims regarding Operation Sindoor. Out of 68 fact checks shared on its official X handle, only two concerned media outlets.
The PIB fact-check unit was set up in 2019 following the then Vice-President of India, Venkaiah Naidu, expressing concern over the spread of ‘fake news’. The official website does not mention the methodology or scope of PIB’s fact-checking work. The Facebook page states that it debunks misinformation related to government policies and schemes.
The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) on January 17, 2019, uploaded a new draft of amendments to the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which proposed that information identified as ‘fake or false’ by the PIB or any other agency authorized by the Union government be taken down by ‘intermediaries’.
At the time, Alt News had reported on the glaring gaps in PIB’s work in the domain of fact-checking. For instance, we noticed that while PIB had fact-checked misinformation by Opposition leaders such as Rahul Gandhi and activist-turned-TMC MP Saket Gokhale several times, not once did they fact-check a claim by any BJP leader. We also documented how PIB had flagged multiple YouTube channels and videos which were anti-BJP in nature.
Alt News noted a similar pattern during the post-Operation Sindoor India-Pakistan conflict.
The graphic below shows that during the flare-up PIB skipped fact-checking false claims by media houses, while independent outlets (Alt News, Boom Live and WebQoof by The Quint) did debunk misreports by these houses. The yellow column shows whether the media house in question has been fact-checked at least once by either Alt News, Boom Live, or WebQoof. The white column shows whether the media house in question has been fact-checked by PIB.
As readers can see, PIB fact-checked media outlets all but twice.
One of the two was a fact-check of claims about the “temporary closure of services on the Delhi-Mumbai airline route.” The accompanying tweet featured a screenshot from an NDTV news bulletin carrying the same claim, stamped with the word “Fake.”
It is being claimed that there is a temporary closure of services on Delhi-Mumbai airline route.#PIBFactCheck
The Airports Authority of India has extended the temporary closure of 25 segments of Air Traffic Service (ATS) routes within the Delhi &… pic.twitter.com/jdC630a1BA
The second was a quote-tweet of a post by the official handle of the district collector and magistrate of Jaipur, debunking a video shared by Times Now. The channel had claimed that explosions were heard at Jaipur airport. The collector clarified that the claim was false, and PIB amplified the statement.
Jaipur Airport is Safe
Claims are circulating that explosions were heard at #Jaipur Airport.#PIBFactCheck
These claims are FAKE
Here is the clarification from the District Collector & Magistrate, Jaipur
We also noticed something interesting in a tweet by PIB fact check on May 15, in which they pointed out that Union external affairs minister S Jaishankar had been misquoted by “several news channels and social media posts” regarding claims that Chinese satellites had been aiding Pakistan. The tweet included a screengrab of a India Today bulletin, but the channel’s name and logo had been blurred out.
Several news channels and social media posts have claimed that External Affairs Minister @DrSJaishankar stated Chinese satellites helped Pakistan.#PIBFactCheck:
EAM is being misquoted and he has not made this statement
Several X users urged the agency to reveal the name of the outlet. The comparison below clearly establishes that it was India Today. We found several similar graphics, with the same header saying ‘Operation Sindoor’, the same font of text and the same red background on India Today’s YouTube channel.
In contrast, PIB explicitly named the international media outlet Al Jazeera in two recent fact checks. On May 12, it debunked Al Jazeera’s claim that an Indian female pilot was in Pakistani custody. Earlier, on May 10, it called out the outlet again for reporting that 10 explosions had occurred near Srinagar airport following a ceasefire announcement.
Another glaring example of PIB’s selective fact-checking was its focus on viral gaming footage shared as visuals from the war, while ignoring similar misreports by mainstream media. In a thread, PIB asked its readers to be vigilant and not “fall prey to such propaganda posts” of gaming footage being circulated as visuals of war. At the same time, Aaj Tak aired gaming footage claiming it showed missiles being fired from India, which was not fact-checked by PIB.
A Glimpse of What PIB Chose not to Fact-check
On May 9, several mainstream Indian news channels dramatically reported that the Indian Navy had destroyed Karachi port. The coverage was presented as exclusive breaking news, replete with sirens, distant artillery sounds, and dramatic visuals.
Aaj Tak’s Anjana Om Kashyap said on air, “…Karachi par bhi Bharatiya navsena ki bhishan hamla. Yeh saaf bata rahaa ki chaari taraf se-ab hum sagar ke bhi taraf se gherna mein kamyaab ho rahe hai…” (Translation: Shweta, there has been a fierce attack by the Indian Navy on Karachi as well. This clearly shows that we are now succeeding in surrounding them from all sides, including from the sea.) Two visuals were shown on Aaj Tak as the attack on Karachi, and both videos were found by Alt News to be old, unrelated footage.
A similar tone of reporting was adopted by Zee News anchor Ram Mohan Sharma, who said “breaking news” just came in that Karachi port had been destroyed. “Is waqt ek bohot badi khabar mil rahi hai, samundar se Pakistan par ek bada action liya gaya hai… Is waqt ki bohot badi khabar, badi jaanakari iss waqt ki Karachi port tabah kar diya gaya hai! Navsena ne, Navy ne Karachi port ko tabah kar diya hai…” (Translation: We’re getting a major update at this moment. A significant action has been taken against Pakistan from the sea. Breaking news right now, important information coming in… The Karachi port has been destroyed. The Navy, the Indian Navy, has destroyed the Karachi port.)
The Karachi port had been ‘destroyed’ in several other newsrooms on the night of May 9, including India Today, TV9 Bharatvarsh and ABP News. The following morning, around 8:40 am, the Karachi Port Trust issued an official statement calling the Indian media reports “completely false and baseless,” and confirmed that the port was “operating normally and securely.”
The Karachi port claim is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as media misreports go. For instance, Zee News, News18, News18 Bihar Jharkhand, OneIndia and propaganda outlet Sudarshan News all claimed that Islamabad was under attack by the Indian armed forces, which soon turned to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s house being under attack. Zee News even claimed that Sharif had surrendered. However, there is not a single credible source from either country confirming the attacks on Sharif’s house. Nor is there any report or credible information on PM Sharif surrendering.
Several mainstream media outlets, including Republic, CNN News18, ABP News, and Zee News, reported that a Lashkar terrorist named Qari Mohammad Iqbal had been killed during Operation Sindoor. The reports went to the extent of claiming that Iqbal was in hiding in Kotli, Pakistan, one of the locations targeted by the Indian armed forces in the operation. However, Alt News found that Iqbal, a resident of Poonch in Kashmir, was one of the civilians killed during the cross-border shelling by Pakistan. He was a teacher at a local high school in Poonch. Iqbal’s family also issued a statement condemning the blatant misinformation that was amplified by media channels. Our detailed report can be read here.
News outlets Mathrubhumi, DNA, OneIndia and Great Andhra published articles claiming Asim Munir, chief of the army staff, Pakistan, had resigned and was to be replaced by General Sahir Shamshad Mirza. Like the aforementioned examples, there was not a single credible source that affirmed this. Fact-checking outlet BoomLive spoke to Pakistani news outlet Dawn’s deputy editor Zahrah Mazhar who said that there was no indication of Munir’s resignation.
Alongside these, several unverified videos and images were aired by mainstream media outlets. For example, a four-year-old video of Israel’s air defence system, the Iron Dome, was played by news channels with varied claims. Zee News, Times Now Navbharat and others aired the video linking it to the purported Karachi port destruction, while some others, like Aaj Tak, aired the clip claiming it to be visuals from the attack on Jaisalmer.
Again, a video broadcast by ABP Ananda and TV9 Bangla, among others, purportedly showing the situation in Pakistan after a strike by the Indian armed forces turned out to be three-month-old footage from a jet crash site in Philadelphia.
For reasons unknown, PIB Fact Check chose not to debunk any of these, though these falsehoods were consumed by crores of Indian television viewers. When one considers that most of these channels run pro-government propaganda in the name of news round the year, one begins to wonder if there was a method in the madness.
Even as the Indian mainstream channels drew flak from the international media for incessantly putting out false information during the conflict, BJP platformed Sushant Sinha, the consulting editor of Times Now NavBharat, to justify the blatant lies. In a video tweeted from the official X handle of BJP, Sinha slammed the ‘propaganda’ by those who called out misreports by the mainstream media. The falsehoods should be acceptable in national interest, Sinha observed, repeatedly referring to those who exposed outrageous falsehoods peddled by the media as a ‘two-rupee ecosystem’. With each passing minute in the 9-minute monologue, Sinha’s desperate defence of fake news, though fervent, became more and more bizarre. The ‘consulting editor’ went to the length of saying that when a ‘breaking news’ would come in, if the anchor would be live on air, he would have no time to verify it. Even if it turned out to be false, asking counter questions was an ‘anti-national’ agenda’, he declared.
New York, May 30, 2025—A punishing spate of laws targeting foreign-funded media will dramatically curb Georgia’s independent voices and force many news outlets to shutter or shift their business operations, say Georgian journalists and press freedom advocates.
Georgia’s populist ruling Georgian Dream party has pushed through its new Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)—called an “exact copy” of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act— granting the state authority to criminally prosecute media outlets, NGOs, and individuals for failing to register as a “foreign agent.”
Yet the way thelaw is written, “they can use it against anyone,” warned Mariam Nikuradze, executive director of the independent Georgia-based regional news outlet OC Media. Nikuradze said the increasingly authoritarian Georgian Dream party has weaponized uncertainty over how the law will be enforced to “create this environment [of fear]” and force compliance from outlets that refused to register under the country’s 2024 foreign agent law.
“They may arrest some people, as an example, to terrorize,” Nikuradze said.
Taking effect May 31, Georgia’s second ‘foreign agent’ law comes amid two separatebillspassed in April that would restrict foreign funding crucial to large swathes of the country’s independent newsrooms. Nikuradze said that with these laws Georgian Dream is making it “almost impossible to exist as a media or rights group.”“Everything that is happening right now is leading towards the final goal of making these organizations disappear,” Nikuradze said, “just like it happened in Azerbaijan, Russia or Belarus, where there are no organizations on the ground, they go into exile or just shut down.”
An intensifying crackdown on Western influence
A Georgian parliament stripped of its opposition passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) on April 1, as well as a bill banning foreign funding of broadcasters. Georgian Dream deputies hastily approved drafted amendments requiring government approval for foreign grants on April 16, which many believe will be used to block grants to critical Georgian media. In each case, Georgian Dream loyalist President Mikheil Kavelashvili, ratified each of the bills on the same day they were passed.
While Georgia’s existing 2024 foreign agent law remains unimplemented amid widespread refusal by media and nonprofits to register, legal expertsargue that the criminal sanctions and “catch-all” provisions in Georgia Dream’s FARA law will likely be applied punitively because they are not subject to the same legal safeguards as in the U.S. Registration under the law offers little safety since FARA can penalize not only non-registration but also registrants’ alleged omissions and false statements with up to five years in prison.
Ignoring the new law is a risk many media workers will not take, said Lia Chakhunashvili, executive director of independent trade group Georgian Charter for Journalistic Ethics.
“If we don’t want to register—and none of us want to register—our understanding is that we should stop all donor-funded activities before May 31,” she told CPJ. “We will work as volunteers as long as we can. That I can do. But I cannot take any money from any donor past May 30, because I don’t want to go to jail.”
Over the past year, the Georgia Dream party has steadily escalated rhetorical attacks against the West and international donors, as well as donor-funded civil society groups and media, accusing them of attempting to overthrow the government. The party has faced months of protests over alleged fraud in October 2024 elections and its apparent reversal of the country’s bid to join the European Union.
FARA also comes as the Trump administration’s USAID cuts have left regional media facing what Georgia-based journalists have called an “extinction-level event.”
“Georgian media was highly reliant on support from USAID for many years,” via the global development and education organization IREX, which was the country’s most substantial media donor, Chakhunashvili said. She added that although the EU has promised to step in, “nothing can replace USAID funding.”
‘Locking all the doors’
Georgian Dream has enthusiastically embraced the Trump administration claims that USAID serves to “destabilize” nations, citing this as a reason to restrict foreign funding.
“The worldwide USAID scandal … has made it obvious that we should fully reclaim our country,” said Georgia Dream parliamentary leader Mamuka Mdinaradze as he unveiled the bills restricting foreign funding in February.To be “on the safe side,” Georgia Dream passed amendments giving the government explicit control over grants Chakhunashvili said. Similarly, she said the party moved quickly to prohibit broadcasters from receiving foreign funding after the EU pledged to redirect government aid to civil society and the media, fearing that European donors might start to fund oppositional broadcasters who are increasingly struggling financially.
“They are trying to put as many locks on the doors as possible. Even if it’s not necessary, they are readying the locks,” Chakhunashvili said.
Amid the new restrictions, the Georgian Charter for Journalistic Ethics expects some donors will “leave the country altogether,” Chakhunashvili said, explaining that applying for government approval for each grant adds a layer of difficulty amid increased government hostility towards donors and security fears for grantees under the new foreign agent law.
“Already now, money is not enough for our needs, and I expect that this will shrink even further what is available,” Chakhunashvili said.
Fighting for survival
Following the passage of Georgia’s 2024 foreign agent law, some media moved their financial operations abroad to sidestep the law’s restrictions. But many argue that under FARA’s more restrictive clauses, any payments from abroad to journalists inside Georgia would fall under the new law; however, it remains unclear how it will be applied.
Some Georgian media outlets are preparing for a “tectonic shift” in their operating model, said Nata Koridze, managing editor for independent news site Civil.ge.
“We have to change and become profit organizations, instead of nonprofit,” said Koridze, adding that independent media will have to “cut in many directions and not be able to maintain the same number of staff.”
Digital advertising in Georgia is limited by a small market and readers are not accustomed to paying for online news, said Koridze, who announced her departure from Civil.ge May 27, following the arrest of her husband, a prominent opposition leader.
Meanwhile, OC Media, Nikuradze’s outlet, has pioneered efforts in crowdfunding and now covers around 10 percent of its operating costs through membership. “Everybody is still trying to find ways to survive,” Nikuradze told CPJ, adding that her outlet is also experimenting with other options such as advertising and sponsored content. Other media, including major oppositional broadcasters TV Pirveli and Formula TV, are seeking donations via a unified platform, with varying results.
Ultimately, not all of Georgia’s media outlets will be able to endure with fewer resources to go around, Nikuradze said.
“There will probably only be a few organizations who will survive this, due to different reasons,” she said. “Unfortunately, there will be some that will be shutting down.”
The pro-government alliance achieved a sweeping victory in Venezuela’s May 25 elections, while a fractured opposition suffered losses. Western media distorted the results – spinning low turnout claims, ignoring the role of illegal US sanctions, and offering selective sympathy to elite opposition figures.
At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.
The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic for this was the birthplace of former President Hugo Chávez; and especially so, because the winner was Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother.
Journalists have been targeted, detained and tortured by the Israeli military in Gaza — and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has now taken a new approach towards bringing justice these crimes.
The Paris-based global media freedom NGO has submitted multiple formal requests to the International Criminal Court (ICC) asking that Palestinian journalists who are victims of Israeli war crimes in Gaza be allowed to participate as such in international judicial proceedings.
If granted this status, these journalists would be able to present the ICC with the direct and personal harm they have suffered at the hands of Israeli forces, reports RSF.
RSF has filed four complaints with the ICC concerning war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza and recently joined director Sepideh Farsi at the Cannes Film Festival to pay tribute to Fatma Hassoun, a photojournalist killed by the Israeli army after it was revealed she was featured in the documentary film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.
After filing the four complaints with the ICC concerning war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza since October 2023, RSF is resolutely continuing its efforts to bring the issue before international justice.
The NGO has submitted several victim participation forms to the ICC so that Gazan journalists can participate in the legal process as recognised victims, not just as witnesses.
Being officially recognised as victims is a first step toward justice, truth, and reparations — and it is an essential step toward protecting press freedom and journalistic integrity in conflict zones.
Nearly 200 journalists killed
Since October 2023, Israeli armed forces have killed nearly 200 journalists in Gaza — the Gaza Media Office says more than 215 journalists have been killed — at least 44 of whom were targeted because of their work, according to RSF data.
Not only are foreign journalists barred from entering the blockaded Palestinian territory, but local reporters have watched their homes and newsrooms be destroyed by Israeli airstrikes and have been constantly displaced amid a devastating humanitarian crisis.
“The right of victims to participate in the ICC investigation is a crucial mechanism that will finally allow for the recognition of the immense harm suffered by Palestinian journalists working in Gaza, who are the target of an unprecedented and systematic crackdown,” said Clémence Witt, a lawyer at the Paris and Barcelona Bars, and Jeanne Sulzer, a lawyer at the Paris Bar and member of the ICC’s list of counsel.
Jonathan Dagher, head of the RSF Middle East desk, said: “It is time for justice for Gaza’s journalists to be served. The Israeli army’s ongoing crimes against them must end.
“RSF will tirelessly continue demanding justice and reparations. This new process in the ICC investigation is an integral part of this combat, and allowing journalists to participate as victims is essential to moving forward.
“They should be able to testify to the extreme violence targeting Gaza’s press. This is a new step toward holding the Israeli military and its leaders accountable for the crimes committed with impunity on Palestinian territory.”
When I despairingly contemplate the horrors and cruelty that Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to, I sometimes try to put this in the context of where I live.
I live on the Kāpiti Coast in the lower North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Geographically it is around the same size as Gaza. Both have coastlines running their full lengths. But, whereas the population of Gaza is a cramped two million, Kāpiti’s is a mere 56,000.
The Gaza Strip . . . 2 million people living in a cramped outdoor prison about the same size as Kāpiti. Map: politicalbytes.blog
I find it incomprehensible to visualise what it would be like if what is presently happening in Gaza occurred here.
The only similarities between them are coastlines and land mass. One is an outdoor prison while the other’s outdoors is peaceful.
New Zealand and Palestine state recognition Currently Palestine has observer status at the United Nations General Assembly. In May last year, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of Palestine being granted full membership of the United Nations.
To its credit, New Zealand was among 143 countries that supported the resolution. Nine, including the United States as the strongest backer of Israeli genocide outside Israel, voted against.
However, despite this massive majority, such is the undemocratic structure of the UN that it only requires US opposition in the Security Council to veto the democratic vote.
Notwithstanding New Zealand’s support for Palestine broadening its role in the General Assembly and its support for the two-state solution, the government does not officially recognise Palestine.
While its position on recognition is consistent with that of the genocide-supporting United States, it is inconsistent with the over 75 percent of UN member states who, in March 2025, recognised Palestine as a sovereign state (by 147 of the 193 member states).
NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon . . . his government should “correct this obscenity” of not recognising Palestinians’ right to have a sovereign nation. Image: RNZ/politicalbytes.blog/
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government does have the opportunity to correct this obscenity as Palestine recognition will soon be voted on again by the General Assembly.
In this context it is helpful to put the Hamas-led attack on Israel in its full historical perspective and to consider the reasons justifying the Israeli genocide that followed.
7 October 2023 and genocide justification The origin of the horrific genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the associated increased persecution, including killings, of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank (of the River Jordan) was not the attack by Hamas and several other militant Palestinian groups on 7 October 2023.
This attack was on a small Israeli town less than 2 km north of the border. An estimated 1,195 Israelis and visitors were killed.
The genocidal response of the Israeli government that followed this attack can only be justified by three factors:
The Judaism or ancient Jewishness of Palestine in Biblical times overrides the much larger Palestinian population in Mandate Palestine prior to formation of Israel in 1948;
The right of Israelis to self-determination overrides the right of Palestinians to self-determination; and
The value of Israeli lives overrides the value Palestinian lives.
The first factor is the key. The second and third factors are consequential. In order to better appreciate their context, it is first necessary to understand the Nakba.
Understanding the Nakba Rather than the October 2023 attack, the origin of the subsequent genocide goes back more than 70 years to the collective trauma of Palestinians caused by what they call the Nakba (the Disaster).
The foundation year of the Nakba was in 1948, but this was a central feature of the ethnic cleansing that was kicked off between 1947 and 1949.
During this period Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.
The Nakba – the Palestinian collective trauma in 1948 that started ethnic cleansing by Zionist paramilitary forces. Image: David Robie/APR
During the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or forced to flee. Initially this was through Zionist paramilitaries.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in May this repression was picked up by its military. Massacres, biological warfare (by poisoning village wells) and either complete destruction or depopulation of Palestinian-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods (which were then given Hebrew names) followed
By the end of the Nakba, 78 percent of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel.
Genocide to speed up ethnic cleansing Ethnic cleansing was unsuccessfully pursued, with the support of the United Kingdom and France, in the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. More successful was the Six Day War of 1967, which included the military and political occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Throughout this period ethnic cleansing was not characterised by genocide. That is, it was not the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying them.
Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began in May 1948 and has accelerated to genocide in 2023. Image: politicalbytes.blog
In fact, the acceptance of a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine) under the ill-fated Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995 put a temporary constraint on the expansion of ethnic cleansing.
Since its creation in 1948, Israel, along with South Africa the same year (until 1994), has been an apartheid state. I discussed this in an earlier Political Bytes post (15 March 2025), When apartheid met Zionism.
However, while sharing the racism, discrimination, brutal violence, repression and massacres inherent in apartheid, it was not characterised by genocide in South Africa; nor was it in Israel for most of its existence until the current escalation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Following 7 October 2023, genocide has become the dominant tool in the ethnic cleansing tool kit. More recently this has included accelerating starvation and the bombing of tents of Gaza Palestinians.
The magnitude of this genocide is discussed further below.
The Biblical claim Zionism is a movement that sought to establish a Jewish nation in Palestine. It was established as a political organisation as late as 1897. It was only some time after this that Zionism became the most influential ideology among Jews generally.
Despite its prevalence, however, there are many Jews who oppose Zionism and play leading roles in the international protests against the genocide in Gaza.
Zionist ideology is based on a view of Palestine in the time of Jesus Christ. Image: politicalbytes.blog
Based on Zionist ideology, the justification for replacing Mandate Palestine with the state of Israel rests on a Biblical argument for the right of Jews to retake their “homeland”. This justification goes back to the time of that charismatic carpenter and prophet Jesus Christ.
The population of Palestine in Jesus’ day was about 500,000 to 600,000 (a little bigger than both greater Wellington and similar to that of Jerusalem today). About 18,000 of these residents were clergy, priests and Levites (a distinct male group within Jewish communities).
Jerusalem itself in biblical times, with a population of 55,000, was a diverse city and pilgrimage centre. It was also home to numerous Diaspora Jewish communities.
In fact, during the 7th century BC at least eight nations were settled within Palestine. In addition to Judaeans, they included Arameans, Samaritans, Phoenicians and Philistines.
A breakdown based on religious faiths (Jews, Christians and Muslims) provides a useful insight into how Palestine has evolved since the time of Jesus. Jews were the majority until the 4th century AD.
By the fifth century they had been supplanted by Christians and then from the 12th century to 1947 Muslims were the largest group. As earlier as the 12th century Arabic had become the dominant language. It should be noted that many Christians were Arabs.
Adding to this evolving diversity of ethnicity is the fact that during this time Palestine had been ruled by four empires — Roman, Persian, Ottoman and British.
Prior to 1948 the population of the region known as Mandate Palestine approximately corresponded to the combined Israel and Palestine today. Throughout its history it has varied in both size and ethnic composition.
The Ottoman census of 1878 provides an indicative demographic profile of its three districts that approximated what became Mandatory Palestine after the end of World War 1.
Group
Population
Percentage
Muslim citizens
403,795
86–87%
Christian citizens
43,659
9%
Jewish citizens
15,011
3%
Jewish (foreign-born)
Est. 5–10,000
1–2%
Total
Up to 472,465
100.0%
In 1882, the Ottoman Empire revealed that the estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine represented just 0.3 percent of the world’s Jewish population.
The self-determination claim Based on religion the estimated population of Palestine in 1922 was 78 percent Muslim, 11 percent Jewish, and 10 percent Christian.
By 1945 this composition had changed to 58 percent Muslim, 33 percent Jewish and 8 percent Christian. The reason for this shift was the success of the Zionist campaigning for Jews to migrate to Palestine which was accelerated by the Jewish holocaust.
By 15 May 1948, the total population of the state of Israel was 805,900, of which 649,600 (80.6 percent) were Jews with Palestinians being 156,000 (19.4 percent). This turnaround was primarily due to the devastating impact of the Nakba.
Today Israel’s population is over 9.5 million of which over 77 percent are Jewish and more than 20 percent are Palestinian. The latter’s absolute growth is attributable to Israel’s subsequent geographic expansion, particularly in 1967, and a higher birth rate.
Palestine today (parts of West Bank under Israeli occupation). Map: politicalbytes.blog
The current population of the Palestinian Territories, including Gaza, is more than 5.5 million. Compare this with the following brief sample of much smaller self-determination countries — Slovenia (2.2 million), Timor-Leste (1.4 million), and Tonga (104,000).
The population size of the Palestinian Territories is more than half that of Israel. Closer to home it is a little higher than New Zealand.
The only reason why Palestinians continue to be denied the right to self-determination is the Zionist ideological claim linked to the biblical time of Jesus Christ and its consequential strategy of ethnic cleansing.
If it was not for the opposition of the United States, then this right would not have been denied. It has been this opposition that has enabled Israel’s strategy.
Comparative value of Palestinian lives The use of genocide as the latest means of achieving ethnic cleansing highlights how Palestinian lives are valued compared with Israeli lives.
While not of the same magnitude appropriated comparisons have been made with the horrific ethnic cleansing of Jews through the means of the holocaust by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Per capita the scale of the magnitude gap is reduced considerably.
Since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (and confirmed by the World Health Organisation) more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed. Of those killed over 16,500 were children. Compare this with less than 2000 Israelis killed.
Further, at least 310 UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) team members have been killed along with over 200 journalists and media workers. Add to this around 1400 healthcare workers including doctors and nurses.
What also can’t be forgotten is the increasing Israeli ethnic cleansing on the occupied West Bank. Around 950 Palestinians, including around 200 children, have also been killed during this same period.
Time for New Zealand to recognise Palestine The above discussion is in the context of the three justifications for supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians strategy that goes back to 1948 and which, since October 2023, is being accelerated by genocide.
First, it requires the conviction that the theology of Judaism in Palestine in the biblical times following the birth of Jesus Christ trumps both the significantly changing demography from the 5th century at least to the mid-20th century and the numerical predominance of Arabs in Mandate Palestine;
Second, and consequentially, it requires the conviction that while Israelis are entitled to self-determination, Palestinians are not; and
Finally, it requires that Israeli lives are much more valuable than Palestinian lives. In fact, the latter have no value at all.
Unless the government, including Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, shares these convictions (especially the “here and now” second and third) then it should do the right thing first by unequivocally saying so, and then by recognising the right of Palestine to be an independent state.
Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.
The pro-government alliance achieved a sweeping victory in Venezuela’s May 25 elections, while a fractured opposition suffered losses. Western media distorted the results – spinning low turnout claims, ignoring the role of illegal US sanctions, and offering selective sympathy to elite opposition figures.
Opposition fractures, pro-government consolidates
At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.
The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic, for this was the birthplace of former President Hugo Chávez, and especially so, because the winner was Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother.
Likewise, the Chavista alliance swept the National Assembly, securing 253 out of 285 seats. Notable exceptions were the election of opposition leaders Henrique Capriles and Henri Falcón, both of whom are former presidential candidates.
The New York Timesreported the same outcomes but spun it as the “results [rather than the vote]…stripped the opposition of some of the last few positions it held,” inferring fraud.
However, this election outcome was not unexpected, as the opposition was not only divided but also had a significant portion opting to boycott the vote. The pro-government forces enjoyed a unified effort, an efficient electoral machine, and grassroots support, especially from the communal movement.
“After 32 elections, amidst blockades, criminal sanctions, fascism and violence,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro affirmed, “today we showed that the Bolivarian Revolution is stronger than ever.”
Opposition self-implodes
The headline from Le Mondespun the voting thus: “Venezuela holds divisive new elections.” Contrary to what the headline suggests, the divisiveness was not the government’s doing, but due to the opposition’s perennial internecine warfare.
While the pro-government Great Patriotic Pole alliance around the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) “works in unison,” according to opposition leader Henrique Capriles, the electoral opposition is divided into three warring camps. They, in turn, were surrounded by a circular firing squad of the far-right abstentionists, calling for a vote boycott.
The abstentionists were assembled around Maria Corina Machado. She had been pardoned for her involvement in the short-lived 2002 US-backed coup but was subsequently disqualified from running for office for constitutional offenses. Following Washington’s lead, which has not recognized a Venezuelan presidential election as legitimate since 2012, the far-right opposition rejected electoral means for achieving regime change and has even pleaded in effect for US military intervention.
Machado’s faction, which claimed that Edmund González Urrutia won the 2024 presidential election, does not recognize their country’s constitutional authority. Consequently, when summoned by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, they refused to present evidence of their victory, thereby removing any legal basis for their claimed victory to be accepted. Machado maintained that voting only “legitimizes” the government, bitterly calling those participating in the democratic process “scorpions.”
Machado spent the election in self-imposed hiding. She further dug herself into a hole, after urging even harsher punishing US sanctions on her own people, by appearing to support Trump’s sending of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador.
El Paissympathized with her as “driven by the strength of the pain of being a mother who has been separated from her three children.” The WaPodescribed the middle-aged divorcé from one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela as a “courageous leader” whose “three children are exiled abroad.” In fact, her adult children live comfortably in the US and Colombia.
To this manufactured sympathy for the privileged, Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor asks, “Where are the defenders of the human rights of Venezuelans?” She excoriates the collective West for its selective concern for human rights, emphasizing the neglect of Venezuelans’ rights amid external pressures and US sanctions.
The disputed Essequibo
The headline for The New York Times’sreport spun the elections with: “Venezuela is holding an election for another country’s land.” This refers to the elections for governor and legislators in Essequibo (Guayana Esequiba in Spanish), which is, in fact, a disputed land.
For nearly two centuries, Venezuelans have considered that region part of their country, having wrested it from Spanish colonialists in 1835. In the questionable Paris Arbitral Award, with the US representing Venezuela, the Essequibo was handed over to the UK in 1899 (then colonial British Guiana and now the independent nation of Guyana). Ever since, it has been contested territory.
In 1962, Venezuela formally revived its claim at the UN, asserting that the 1899 award was null and void. Not surprisingly, the Times sides with Guyana, or more precisely with what they report as “Exxon Mobil’s multibillion-dollar investments” plus “military ties with the US.”
This first-time vote for political representation in the Essequibo is seen by Venezuelans across their political spectrum as an important step to assert their claim. It follows a referendum in 2023, which affirmed popular support for the Essequibo as part of their national territory. The actual voting was held in the neighboring Bolivar state.
On cue, the western-aligned press criticized the vote on the Essequibo as a “cynical ploy” by the Maduro administration to divert attention from other pressing problems. Meanwhile, they obscure the increasing US military penetration in neighboring Guyana and in the wider region.
Yet even the NYT had to admit: “Claims to the Essequibo region are deeply ingrained among many Venezuelans… [and even] María Corina Machado, the most prominent opposition leader, visited the area by canoe in 2013 to advance Venezuela’s claim.” Venezuelan journalist Jésus Rodríguez Espinoza (pers. comm.) described the vote as “an exercise in national sovereignty.”
Illegal sanctions – the elephant in the room
A WaPo opinion piece claims, “that the actual root cause of poverty has been a lack of democracy and freedom,” as if the US and its allies have not imposed sanctions deliberately designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy. These “unilateral coercive measures,” condemned by the UN, are illegal under international law because they constitute collective punishment.
But the fact that Venezuelans had to vote while being subjected to illegal coercion is completely ignored by the corporate press. That is, the existence of sanctions is recognized, but instead of exposing their illegal and coercive essence, the press normalizes them. The story untold by the press is the courage of the Venezuelan people who continue to support their government under such adverse conditions.
Disparaging the election
Washington and its aligned press cannot question the popular sweep for the Socialist Party’s alliance in Venezuela, because it is so obvious. Nonetheless, they disparage the mandate. The chorus of criticism alleges the fraudulent nature of previous elections, although it is a geopolitical reality that Washington considers any popular vote against its designated candidates illegitimate.
For this particular election, these State Department stenographers focused on the supposedly low turnout. In fact, the turnout was typical for a non-presidential election contest and fell within the same percentage range as US midterm elections.
Moreover, the pro-government slate actually garnered more votes than it had in the previous regional elections. The Chavista core of older, working class women remains solid.
When Elvis Amoroso, president of Venezuela’s authority (CNE), qualified the turnout percentages to apply to “active voters,” he meant those in-country. Due to the large number of recent out-migrations, a significant number are registered but cannot vote because they are abroad.
What was notably low was the voting for the highly divided opposition, with major factions calling for a boycott. Further, the opposition had been discredited by revelations that some had received and misused hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID. More than ever, the inept opposition has exposed itself in a negative light to the broad electorate.
The overwhelming sentiment on the street in Venezuela is for an end to partisan conflict and for continuing the slow economic recovery. Challenges ahead include inflationary winds, a rising unofficial dollar exchange rate, and, above all, the animus of the Trump administration, which is currently in internal debate over whether to try to deal the Bolivarian Revolution a quick or a slow death. Either way, destabilization efforts continue.
To which Socialist Party leader and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said: “No one can stop our people. Not sanctions, nor blockades, nor persecution – because when a people decide to be free, no one can stop them.”
This claim is 
The Airports Authority of India has extended the temporary closure of 25 segments of Air Traffic Service (ATS) routes within the Delhi &… 
Jaipur Airport is Safe 
EAM is being misquoted and he has not made this statement
