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Category: Media

  • Hunter’s Indictment Creates Nightmare For Biden In 2024

    America’s Lawyer E78: Hunter Biden has been indicted on felony charges for his failure to pay taxes totaling more than 1 million dollars. These allegations are very serious and they could have a big impact on next year’s election. Insurance companies are working with drug makers to keep the cost of your prescription drugs higher […]

    The post Hunter’s Indictment Creates Nightmare For Biden In 2024 appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Spotting a Media Psyop

    The post Spotting a Media Psyop first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Meta Sics It’s Lawyers On The FTC To Fight Child Privacy Ruling

    Facebook’s parent company Meta wants to sell your child’s data to the highest bidder, and they are prepared to go to court to fight an order that says they aren’t allowed to do that. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Facebook’s […]

    The post Meta Sics It’s Lawyers On The FTC To Fight Child Privacy Ruling appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Crowds, Masses and Movements

    Orientation

    Why study crowds, masses and movements?

    It is tempting to imagine that as socialists we must know a great deal about crowds, masses, and in medieval thought individual meant inseparable, that is indivisible. People were defined as individuals by reference to the groups of which they were members. Group membership defined their very identity as individual units. Farr treats individualism as a product of the Renaissance and Reformation, stressing the emerging traditions of religious, political and economic liberalism. However, unlike Farr, Ivana Markova argues that it was monasticism and chivalry that contributed most towards strengthening the development of individualism in feudal society. Nikolai Berdyaev has pointed out that the individualism of the Renaissance and Humanism brought man to the limit of his ability to withstand the uncertainty and loneliness into which the Renaissance and Humanism threw him.

    With the rise of capitalism, the concept of the individual came to be divorced from its original intrinsic connection with the social community. This tendency can be seen in the work of Hobbes, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In psychology, individualism became connected to the Associationist theory of John Locke and the hedonistic psychology and utilitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Individuals came to be treated in isolation and abstraction. Individualism in its most extreme form is present in social Darwinism in the 1870s in the work of Herbert Spencer who was much more influential in the US than he was in Britain. This individualism continued with pragmatism in the late 19th and 20th centuries and with behaviorism beginning just before World War I.

    The majority of the main issues to which psychology is addressing itself has been concern with the isolated individual rather than the individual as a member of a particular social group. With the aggregate of strangers thrown together in lab experiments this became the setting in which social psychologists explored what social life was supposed to be about. What is missing is the social psychology of real groups that an individual was part of, including occupational groups, church groups or extended families. These are called “reference” groups.

    Reference groups

    So far, the social-individual dialectic has been understood as a group mind (crowd psychology) or a social contract (individualism). The third way to put a frame around the social-individual polarity is to think of society not as a group mind but as a reference group. According to JD Greenwood (What Ever Happened to the Social in Social Psychology) the term “reference group” was introduced by Hymen and then developed in 1951 by Newcombe. An individual’s reference groups were ongoing groups with whom the individual has a commitment and history with and whose norms they are loyal to. They had shared norms and differentiated roles and they met in the same time and place. Social psychologists who represent this school included William McDougall, Omar Sheriff, William Thomas and Solomon Asch. These theorists claim that understanding social life should begin with reference groups with whom the individual has a foundation, not strangers with whom one has no commitment or history.

    Reference groups are contrasted to aggregates of strangers who are thrown together for an experiment. Aggregates are statistical groups. Reference group theory also argued against conceiving of the social life as a mystical social mind hovering above individuals. The early psychologist William McDougall embraced this socially embodied individuality of the communitarians. He thought that the social groups were the source of individuality. McDougall rejected both the social mind theories of group super-individuality and also opposed social aggregate theory. This intrinsic form of group identity was followed by Baldwin, Cooley, Mead and Goffman.

    For crowd or social mind theorists individuals think, feel and act differently in the physical presence of other individuals than they do in physical isolation from other individuals. For collective mind theorists like Le Bon, the mechanism of influence is grounded in hypnosis, imitation and contagion. For reference group theorists, social psychological-states are distinct from individual psychological states but not separate from them. Social life in any concrete case is the mind of an individual in a social group. Historically, in the philosophy reference group, the tradition of the individual as being socially embedded is in the philosophy of Vico and in the idealist philosophy of Hegel, Green and Royce.

    Why was reference group theory lost in the shuffle?

    Greenwood asks why the original form of the social in American psychology was abandoned. He gives two reasons:

    • It became associated with crowd theories about the emergent properties of supra-individual group minds. This was against the beliefs of those committed to empiricism, experimentalism and individualist social psychology.
    • It challenged principles of autonomy and rationality – the moral and political individualism most common in American psychology.

    Demonization of Collective Life

    Interestingly, around the same time individualism was understood in its most extreme form, any kind of group life or collective behavior was treated as if:

    • it was completely separate from the individual; and,
    • it contained all the negative tendencies such as irresponsibility, irrationality, violence and pleasure-seeking animality.

    There was the tendency of some American social psychologists to follow Le Bon and Tarde in equating social behavior with the irrational and emotional behavior of crowds. Le Bon and Tarde completely overlooked and suppressed the altruistic picture of the behavior of collectivities perpetuated by crowd theorists.

    Between the first and second World War the empiricist behaviorism of Floyd Allport argued there is nothing in the social world that is not first in the minds and actions of individuals. Allport maintained that social phenomena can be explained only in terms of psychological phenomena of individuals (opposite of Durkheim). Other behaviorists besides Allport denied that when people come together to create a social world, whatever the result, it is no more than the sum of individual wills. Crowds do not have a nervous system or an introspective faculty.

    The following table is a summary which contrasts the three ways social psychologists have contrasted the nature of the relationship between the individual and society.

     Three Ways to Understand the Relationship Between Society and Individual

    Category of comparison Aggregates

    (Yankeedom)

    		 Reference groups

    (Yankeedom)

    		 Social mind

    (Europe—France, Germany, Italy)
    Definition Populations of individuals that merely have some property in common and do not represent themselves as a social group Members are bound by a history of interaction. Shared forms of cognition, emotion and behavior. They represent themselves as a social group Society as a whole is like a social mindwhich is more than the sum of individuals

     
    Examples of types of groups Demographics of class, race, age groups, gender Class, race, age groups, gender

     

    		 Strangers in crowds
      Strangers in labs
    Time, place displacement Dispersed in space—masses

    Or face to face as strangers

    		 Same time and place or over time

    Organic groups

    		 Same place and same time

    Crowds
    Range of social cognition Public opinion or opinion in focus groups Tradition and group beliefs spread historically Hypnosis, group contagion

     
    What is social learning? Interpersonal learning in face-to-face

    Experimental situations

    		 Intrinsic learning

    by passing on traditions

    		 Imitation

    Regression

     
    Historical origins Social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, Hume Goes back to Herder, Goethe, Hegel Late 19th and Early 20th century crowd psychologists
    Theorists Allport

    Behaviorism

    Lazarsfeld -mass communication, Gallup polls

    		 McDougall,

    Cooley, William Thomas Mead, Sheriff, Asch

     

    		 Le Bon, Levi-Bruhl, Tarde, Wallis, Wundt, Durkheim

     
    Research methods Experimental

    groups

     

    Statistical surveys

     

     

    		 Experimental Local groups—Families, religious or occupational groups

    Professional organizations

     

    Experiments in social psychology may require special adaptation of experimental method

    		 Eye witness accounts
    Typical questions How do different social classes feel about the importance of leisure time?

     

    		 How are Catholic, working class families different from Methodists and Baptists families? How do crowds behave in revolutionary situations?

    Right-Wing Crowd Psychology: Crowds as Super-Minds

    How to understand crowds

    Philosophers of conventional sociology at the end of the 19th century thought that crowds were not a separate or new phenomenon. Rather they were seen as fleeting gatherings outside of social institutions which resulted in temporary chaos between social classes. Émile Durkheim and Marx emphasized reason or class interest to explain why people gathered in crowds to begin with. Liberal politics saw the masses as an epiphenomenon which would pass away as education, technology and a more just distribution of wealth would even things out. Crowds were still equated with the general population and not considered “mobs”. Liberals saw gatherings as no more than a collection of individuals.

    Whether conservative or liberal, mainstream philosophers of sociology were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of themselves. “Crowd” psychologists claimed Darwinian evolution showed that progress was a slow process and any sudden changes based on strikes or armed conflict was a throwback to pre-modern times. Crowds were like Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter. Crowd psychologists perceived crowds in a much more sinister light.

    Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theories such like Durkheim and Marx because they felt they left out the emotions and unconscious motivation of people. If you could not depend on what people intended, then was what is really driving them below the level of consciousness? Crowd psychology was interested in the behavior of crowds, the behavior of leaders and the relationships between them. Crowds were here to stay and the sooner we understand them the better. For crowd psychologists individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. Until the 1960s social psychologists accepted right-wing crowd theory even though it was not based on any research. (Social Psychology, Delamater, Myers, Collett; David Miller Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action). Please see my article for more detail about crowd psychologists. Ruling Class Fears of the Day of Reckoning: Historical Causes for the Biases Against Crowds

    Left-Wing Crowd Theory: Crowds as reference groups

    Up until the 1960s social psychologists continued to examine crowds in an unfavorable light following the thinking of Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. To the extent they tolerated collectivities at all they followed research on mass public opinion. But in the early 1960’s Carl Couch began to have his students study the work of George Rudé on the French Revolution which showed crowds in a more favorable light. Crowds were workers, not criminals, and the behavior of workers was somewhere in between derelict and heroic.

    From collective behavior to collective action

    In 1968 Clark McPhail began to take his students into situations where crowds had assembled and got them to engage in participatory research. Later, in 1997 he took a team of over sixty trained observers to a very large “Stand in the Gap” rally of the Promise Keepers on the National Mall in Washington DC. They used paper, pen, film and videotape to record people’s activities at political as well as sports and religious events. This was something that early crowd theorists never had done. The results challenged all seven of the myths I described in my previous article. The myths are:

    • Irrationality
    • Emotionality
    • Suggestibility – mindless behavior
    • Destructiveness
    • Spontaneity
    • Anonymity
    • Unanimity of purpose

    McPhail tried to indicate this difference by distancing himself from the word “crowds”, calling collectivities “gatherings.”

    McPhail classifies gathering according to their behavioral composition. The most inclusive category is that of prosaic gatherers, where behavior is simple – shoppers at malls, people waiting in lines for rides, at amusements parks, gatherings at store openings and spectators at fires and arrests. Less common are demonstration gathering – political demonstrations, sports rallies and worship services… Even less common …are state ceremonial gatherings such as inaugurations, royal weddings and state funerals. (Intro to Collective Behavior, 43) 

    Meanwhile theorists who studied social movements pointed out that up until now all theories of collectivities saw crowds either acting as solitary individuals or reacting to circumstances outside themselves. For scholars such as Charles Tilley, William Gamson, McAdam and Lipsky, people who considered themselves part of social movements, come into a crowd with a plan. Any major demonstration against a war requires months of planning on the part of the organizers. Secondly, being in a crowd and acting in a crowd is not an end in itself, but a means to gather more people to swell the movement long after the particular crowd disperses. Because of this, movement scholars began to change the name of their study from “collective behavior’ (which is more passive) to “collective action”.

    Within the field of social movements there were two tendencies. “Political process” theory is interested in how people come to frame their discontent into ideas. What is it in the nature of some negative events which makes people put up with them, and what is it about negative events that make them seem abusive? In other words, what events will make people more likely to throw down the gauntlet?

    “Resource mobilization theory” tries to answer the question of how movements succeed through networks of movement organizations. What kind of material resources are necessary and sufficient in order to succeed?

    Right-Wing vs Left-wing Theories of Crowds

    Spontaneous vs planning

    There are roughly six theories on crowd psychology – two conservative, two liberal and two radical. However, for our purposes we will contrast them between conservative and radical theories. Collective behavior theories are conservative because they focus on a crowd’s reaction to events – which are often spontaneous. Collective action theories emphasize what crowds do to initiate activity and these activities often involve planning.

    The difference between crowds and everyday life

    A second major difference between the theories is that conservative collective behavior theories think there are some major qualitative differences between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. They imagine that crowds bring out a degenerative side of people. They would look approvingly at William Golding’s book Lord of the Fliesand and say that is what happens in crowds. Collective action theorists think that there is no qualitative difference between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. Whatever there is that is sinister in human behavior it is just as likely to happen in everyday life.

    How unified are crowds?

    Conservative theories of crowd behavior imagine that the individuality of people melts down in crowds and the crowd is easily unified because people are easily emotionally involved. This is  because crowds exert a hypnotic effect which then spreads like contagion. Theories of collective action argue that the individuality that people have when they enter a crowd stays with them during the events that happen in crowds.  People disagree about actions to be taken and crowds can remain divided. It takes real work and skill for leaders of collective action to unify a crowd.

    Masses vs movements

    Theories of collective behavior are most at home studying masses. Masses are people who are not necessarily located in the same space, but which are happening at the same time. Examples are fads, rumors, urban legends, fashions, crazes and mass hysteria. The most famous case of mass hysteria was Orson Wells’ radio broadcast of Martians having landed.

    Mass behavior doesn’t bring out the best in people. People are shown to be petty, superficial, acquisitive and easily aroused. However, collective action theorists tend to study crowds in more serious circumstances as part of movements. Movements are actions that might take place in present time and space but also at different times and different places. Movements can be cross-cultural and historical. Protests, strikes, work-stoppages and boycotts are inclusive of crowds and yet go beyond them.

    Sports crowds, natural disasters and riots

    Both collective behavior theorists and collective action theorists study sports crowds, natural disasters and riots but come to very different conclusions about them. Collective behavior theorists might focus on hooligans in sporting events and violence both between fans as well as collective frustration resulting from the outcome of a game. When it comes to natural disasters, conservative collective behaviorists will focus on the looting of stores and sexual violence as well as stealing between the victims of disasters. As for riots, conservatives will usually focus on damage to property, the chaos of revolutionary situations and the lack of order. This way of thinking about things is perpetrated by mass-hysteria theory which is based on class fear of the lower classes rather than objective research that has been done.

    Collective action theories shine a more favorable light on sporting crowds, natural disasters and riots and they have the research that backs it up. Collective action theorists will marvel at the amount of spontaneous order that occurs in baseball games when tens of thousands of people take the train to a game, watch and enjoy the game peacefully and take the train home without any police intervention needed.

    As for natural disasters, research clearly shows that natural disasters tend to  bring out the altruistic, pro-social side of people, far more often than they bring out the selfish side. Lastly, collective action contains two pieces of research that must be deeply disturbing to conservative crowd theorists. The first is that the most common instigator of violence in riots are the police. More times than not the presence of police with the threat of coercion and use of force amplifies a tense situation rather than cools it out. The second piece of research shows that riots get results. Though people are endlessly told to vote or to write to your member of Congress, it is after riots that the authorities somehow find the time and money to right wrongs. The Watts riots of 1967 is an example.

    Who is drawn to crowds?

    Collective behavior theorists with their negative view of crowds naturally think that only unsavory troublemakers are drawn to them. They believe these people are emotionally unstable or even criminals. No self-respecting member of the middle or upper-middle class would tolerate being in a crowd for long. Theorists of collective action point out that there is no particular type of group or individual that is drawn to a crowd. It is true that middle and upper-middle class people would more easily separate from crowds by driving a car. Cars and money can bypass traveling on buses and trains. However, the difference is much less extreme than collective behavior theorists make it seem to be. When it comes to natural disasters while poorer people are likely to be trapped in poorly built homes or buildings, upper middle-class people have also been the victims of floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.

    Collectivities and human nature

    Conservative collective behavior theorists imagine that crowds bring out only the worst in people, a selfish, desperate and violent side. Collective action theorists say that crowds tend to bring out more extremes of behavior both for better and for worse. Groups and individuals bring out what is most moderate in people. In crowd situations people can be more extreme: selfish and violent on one hand or more altruistic and heroic on the other.

    Who determines norms?

    Contrary to conservative collective behavior theorists who might say all norms vanish as a person goes from a group to a crowd, moderate, liberal theories of crowds such as emergent norm theories argue that group norms emerge spontaneously as the situation dictates. Collective action theorists argue that in the case of social movements, the leaders initiate norms which are created and imposed by crowd monitors from within the protest movement itself. There may be an expectation from within the movement not to break bank windows or throw rocks. In fact, people who do these things may be labeled FBI agents.

    Are members of crowds rootless or do they already have communities?

    Collective behavior theorists imagine that the only people who join crowds are rootless individuals drawn to a crowd because they lack community. On the contrary, collective action theories say most people come to crowds with friends, families and sometimes with neighbors. People are not desperately seeking a community. They already have one but just want to expand those communities.

    How much monitoring of crowd behavior goes on?

    Liberal crowd theorist Herbert Blumer argued that crowds do not monitor their behavior. His circular reaction theory claimed that emotions feed on each other rather and get stuck in an amplifying groove, creating a snowballing effect. Social interaction theorist Clark McPhail points out from his research that crowds do monitor and interpret what is happening, talk to each other about what is going on and change the direction or movement of the crowd as they go.

    Are crowds rational?

    “No!” say the collective behavior theorists. The size of crowds, their anonymity and lack of continuity makes a crowd act more irrationally because of the noise and emotional euphoria. Collective action theories disagree. Crowds are just as capable of groups and individuals of behaving rationally. Perhaps the best example of this is how orderly and graceful people are at the 5 PM rush hour as they navigate walking towards train stations on foot, weaving in and around others, barely touching them. Another example is how most of the time people assemble and leave going to concerts in an orderly fashion without police presence. Disorderly crowd behavior is the exception to the rule. Newspapers with their slogan “if it bleeds it leads” only point out extremes of crowd behavior. Who ever heard of a news headline, “42,000 People at Yankee Stadium Arrive Home From the Train Station With no Incidence of Violence”?

    Crowds as super-minds vs crowds as reference groups

    Let us return to the three ways the relationship between society and individual can be understood. The perspective of crowds as collective behavior corresponds to crowds as having a super-mind. This is because crowds are understood as deeply irrational, with emotions easily aroused and easily spread (contagion). Crowds consist of suspicious strangers who easily melt down through hypnosis, imitation and regression.

    Crowds as collective action corresponds to crowds as reference groups. Why? Because people in crowds consist of reference occupational groups, religious groups and neighbors from the same region. These folks carry the same values into crowds they had in reference groups. Thus, they bring with them their shared history and values which is not so easily thrown off kilter when they celebrate as part of a crowd in a victory in a sports game or while attending a music concert. They’re sharing norms and differentiated roles which come to the fore in emergency situations such as natural disasters.

    Theoretical perspectives

    The most conservative collective behavior theories are mass hysteria theories which were supported by Orrin Klapp. Mass hysteria theories also harken back to the right-wing crowd theorists  such as Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. More moderate theories are that of Gabriel Tarde, Herbert Blumer and David Park. Liberal theories include Smelser’s value-added theory and Turner and Killian emergent norm theory. Clark McPhail really blew the roof off of conservative and moderate crowd theory with his social interactionist defense of crowds as purposive, focused, creative and for the most part non-violent. Radical crowd theories include the resource mobilization theory of JD McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald. Political process theory of McAdam, Gamson and Lipsky both have their focus on social movements.

    How good is the research?

    All crowd research is not just about the present. Georg Rule opened the door with archival research on the French revolutionary crowds. Charles Tilly did the same thing for the 500 years of European revolutions. Gamson did some ingenious work on social protests about what works and what doesn’t work. There have also been participant observations of religious cults (John Lofland), UFO cults and the current Tea Party movement.

    Unfortunately, theories of collective behavior do not have comparable research methods. They mostly rely on conservative ruling class fears of crowds which shows up in newspaper anecdotes, reports by the authorities such as police reports and eyewitness accounts which are notoriously unreliable. Please see the table below for more vivid comparisons of the two theories.

    Conclusion

    I began this article by posing the question of how to think of the relationship between individual and society. One is in the image of society as a kind of group mind superimposed over society. The second way is to think of society as an aggregate which is no more than the sum of its parts. The most grounded approach is to understand society as reference groups. In the second part of my article, I do a comparison between crowd theories based on crowds as  a super-mind (collective behavior theories) compared to crowds as reference groups (collective action) theories. Crowds as gatherings are like reference groups applied to macro-social psychology.

    Two Perspectives on Crowd Theory

    Collective Behavior Category of Comparison Collective Action
    What collectivities do in reaction to events (spontaneous) Mode of Conduct What collectivities do when they plan events

     
    Qualitative differences

    Collectivities behave in unusual ways

    		 What is the difference between collective behavior and behavior in everyday life? There is no qualitative difference Crowds act normally most of the time

     
    Crowds are easily unified because people  are aroused and these emotions spread like contagion How unified are crowds? They are pluralistic, not unified People disagree and it takes work to unify them
    Rumor, Urban legends

    Fads, fashions, crazes

    Mass hysteria—radio

    UFO landings (War of Worlds)

    Diseases

    		 Examples: Masses Collective action does not usually study mass behavior

    More interested in crowds and social movement
    Sports’ crowds, UFO reports

    Natural disasters—floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes,

    riots

    Social movements, political or spiritual

    		 Examples: Crowds and movements Sports crowds, UFO reports

    Natural disasters

    Protests

    Riots

    Strikes

    Work stoppages

    Boycotts

    Social movements—political or spiritual
    Crowds draw trouble-makers or people who are emotionally unstable or criminals Who is drawn to crowds? There is no type of social group or individual that is drawn to crowds compared to groups

     
    Crowds bring out the worst characteristics in people,

    characteristics that would not show up in the same individuals or groups

    Selfish, desperate violence side

    		 What is the relationship between collectivities and human nature? Crowds bring out the best and worst in people

    Groups bring out what is moderate in people

     

    Selfish, violent, selfless and heroic
    Norms are created spontaneously as the situation unfolds (Emergent norm theory) What determines norms? Norms can be created before events occur
    Strangers, people who are rootless and have no communities Composition of collectivities Families, friends, neighbors
    Blumer’s circular reaction

    Emotions build in a snowballing effect

    		 How much monitoring of behavior goes on? Crowds monitor and interpret what is happening and can change direction
    Size, anonymity and lack of continuity in time makes crowds act more irrationally The place of rationality Crowds are as rational as other social formations.
    Mass hysteria theory (Le Bon

    Tarde, Blumer, Park,

    Klapp)

    Value Added theory (Smelser)

     

    Emergent norm (Turner, and Killian)

    		 Theories Social interactionist

    (McPhail)

     

    Resource Mobilization theory

    (McCarthy and Zald)

     

    Political process theory

    (McAdam, Gamson

    Lipsky)
    Anecdotes (Mackay)

     

    Reports by authorities.

    Newspapers, eye witnesses

    		 Research Archival (Rude – French Revolution)

    Gamson – (social protest)

    Tilly (revolutions
        Participant observation—

    Religious Cults –Moonies (Lofland)

    UFO Cults

    Tea Party

    Film, video, records

    (McPhail)

    • First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post Crowds, Masses and Movements first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara Will Pay You to Watch a Documentary About Factory Farming

    To promote the documentary, The Smell of Money, which highlights the environmental and animal rights issues related to factory farming, actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara have announced they will personally refund the rental cost for the first 500 individuals who pre-order the film on iTunes or Google Play. The Smell of Money is set for digital release on December 12.

    The film focuses on a small rural community in eastern North Carolina adversely affected by the operations of a nearby large-scale pig factory. The film exposes the harmful environmental impact of the factory on the air, water, soil, and local wildlife, as well as its devastating effects on human health. The documentary spotlights the story of Elsie Herring, who waged a nine-year legal battle against pork producer Smithfield Foods over allegations of environmental racism and the negative consequences of the company’s practices on her community.

    VegNews.thesmellofmoneyThe Smell of Money

    Director Shawn Bannon, who previously worked with Mara on A Ghost Story, expressed deep concern about the local residents’ suffering. “Now they can’t grow their own vegetables anymore, they can’t drink their own well water, they can’t even wash their own clothes because they get stained,” Bannon told IndieWire. He emphasized the community’s loss of self-sufficiency and the health challenges they face, including frequent cancer treatments.

    Phoenix and Mara, who share a son, River, age 3, have a history of advocating for environmental and animal rights.

    “We hope once audiences watch this film they are as moved by its important message as we are. Movies like The Smell of Money live or die by word of mouth and we would like to lend our voices and support to help raise awareness. Please share this film with your family, friends, everyone,” they said in a statement.

    The Smell of Money has been shown theatrically over the last year-and-a-half, and will continue to be featured in festivals, impact screenings, and educational settings. But according to the actors, renting a movie costs a lot of money. “Here’s easy access where anybody can watch this movie right away, which is really, really cool. We’re just over the moon about it. It’s very cool of them to do.”

    VegNews.JoaquinRooney

    The documentary, directed and produced by Bannon, written and produced by Jamie Berger, and featuring Kate Mara, David Lowery, Oscar winner Travon Free, Martin Desmond Roe, and DeRay McKesson as executive producers, represents the first project of The Unreasonable, a new production company by Free and Roe.

    The reimbursement offer is available only to U.S. residents with a Venmo account, and is part of a larger effort by the couple to support the film’s message and increase its visibility.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • McCarthy Says Gaetz Is TOAST!

    America’s Lawyer E77: Drugmakers are showering doctors with cash to get them to prescribe the drugs Ozempic and Wegovy for weight loss, even as hazardous side effects are starting to emerge – We’ll bring you the details. Facebook is fighting a federal rule that prevents them from selling the data of minors – more proof […]

    The post McCarthy Says Gaetz Is TOAST! appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

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  • Gaza: The Masks are off

    As the genocide in Gaza resumes, it becomes ever more clear that the Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”, launched by the Palestinian Resistance on October 7, and the events that followed, have not only destroyed the prestige of the Israeli army: they completely unmasked the hypocrisy of the West, who is not only silent but accomplice of the unprecedented massacres perpetrated against a defenseless and trapped civilian population, as well as the duplicity of most of the so-called Western “friends” of Palestine, be they political forces, media, Unions or associations.

    On the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, all the factions of the Palestinian Resistance launched a spectacular air, land and sea offensive that succeeded in breaking the siege of Gaza, seizing numerous enemy bases and liberating, albeit temporarily, localities occupied in 1948 —a first in the history of the conflict. In just a few hours, hundreds of occupation soldiers were killed, and thousands of panic-stricken settlers fled (many on foot into the desert), shattering forever the myth of the so-called “most powerful army in the Middle East” and its supposedly infallible intelligence services: the Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman had not even imagined, neither in their most improbable scenarios nor in their worst nightmares, that such an operation was possible on the part of Hamas. Israel had only prepared for it in the north against Hezbollah, which certainly passed on its expertise to the Palestinian fighters. To date, Israel admits to having suffered 1,200 dead, thousands of wounded and over 200 prisoners. This is already the worst humiliation in the history of the “Zionist entity”, inflicted not by a coalition of national armies but by a militia besieged and suffocated for 16 years in a tiny piece of land, the most heavily guarded territory in the world.

    But it’s not just Israel’s illusion of invincibility that has been shattered: Israel’s allies, namely the leaders and elites of Western countries, have revealed to the world the full extent of their racism, cruelty and hypocrisy, giving their unconditional support to the occupier and its preposterous claim of self-defense (a right denied to the Palestinians, while, according to international law, this right can only be invoked against a State, in this case Israel, and not against a colonized people) and by blaming Hamas for the escalation and all the casualties, including Palestinian deaths, echoing the rhetoric of the Israeli army. Neither the inflammatory statements by Israeli ministers about Palestinian “human animals” or “There are no innocents in Gaza” (not even the million children, a legitimate target for the occupier), nor the white phosphorus, nor the war crimes of depriving over 2 million Palestinians of water, electricity, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid, nor the deliberate targeting of hospitals, ordering staff and patients to evacuate in record time or be killed, nor the massive and deliberate bombardment of residential buildings, which has razed entire neighborhoods to the ground and caused over 20,000 deaths, almost half of them children, and tens of thousands of injuries, nor, to cap it all, the ultimatum given to over a million inhabitants of North Gaza to take refuge in South Gaza within 24 hours (with, in the background, efforts to deport the entire population of Gaza to the Egyptian Sinai), an injunction that amounts to State terrorism, materially impossible to carry out (especially with fuel shortages and devastated roads) and which constitutes a crime against humanity, none of this has moved the “civilized West”, which refuses to condemn the occupier and continues to give it its full political, media and military support, vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council. Europe has even restricted, repressed and upright banned demonstrations in support of Palestine, with France going so far as to ban them altogether and consider it an anti-Semitic act to raise a Palestinian flag. After the first moral decay revealed by the war in Ukraine, where the West shamelessly explained that, unlike those of NATO’s wars in the Middle East, the Ukrainian victims were worthy and should move us because they were “like us” (blond with blue eyes), the last fig leaf covering the hideous, truly satanic face of the West has fallen, and is revealed to the whole world in all its abjectness, giving its blessing to the daily butchery of Palestinian men, women and children in the macabre tune of “We stand with Israel”. Behind the cloak of freedom, democracy, human rights and international law, behind the fine suits, perfume and pretensions of refinement, behind the calls to protect civilians and respect humanitarian international law, the rulers of Western countries revealed the full extent of their barbarity, indifferent if not hilarious in the face of the bloodbath, the bodies of shredded toddlers and suffocated premature babies in Gaza.

    However, one of the most disgusting aspects of this great unveiling is the reaction of the so-called defenders of the Palestinian cause, who, with very rare exceptions, have allowed themselves to be crushed by pro-Israeli propaganda, whether through weakness, cowardice, fear of political-media vindictiveness or a latent racism that only truly sanctifies Jewish lives, deeming the massive killing of Arabs something normal, if not praiseworthy. Ever since October 7, the media, personalities and organizations considered, or even claiming, to be pro-Palestinian competed with zeal in their communiqués condemning the “terrorist attack” by Hamas and its alleged “atrocities” and “war crimes”, presenting Israel de facto in the position of a victim who would only defend itself (admittedly in a “disproportionate” manner, but fundamentally legitimate), without any shred of evidence (it has been revealed that a great many Israeli civilians were killed by their own troops), and in defiance of the most basic facts of the conflict: Gaza has been the victim for at least 16 years of the supreme crime according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, that is the crime of aggression (blockade is an act of war), not to mention regular assassinations, the colonization of the West Bank, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque, all casus belli against which Hamas, the legitimate representative of the people of Gaza, has the legal and moral right to retaliate. The vast majority of the so-called “friends of Palestine” demonstrated their lack of humanity and regard for international law, which enshrines the right of occupied peoples to liberate themselves by all means, including armed struggle.

    Here is a small selection of the shameful and ignominious political, media and trade union statements that have provided unforgivable support and even encouragement for the ongoing massacre in Gaza. All the examples below are taken from France, the self-appointed “Cradle of Human Rights” and allegedly less subservient to Israel’s interest than the US or UK, but the same bias (and much worse) can be found everywhere in the “enlightened West”.

    La France Insoumise

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “La France Insoumise”, or LFI, is France’s main left-wing opposition party, presenting itself as a champion of the rights of minorities (especially Muslims) inside, and of the oppressed peoples outside (especially Palestine). LFI’s initial communiqué on October 7, which caused such a stir in France, was extremely timid. It did not take sides and seemed to consider Israel and Gaza equally to blame: “The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes against a backdrop of intensifying Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian deaths. Our thoughts are with all the victims. The current escalation risks leading to a hellish cycle of violence. France, the European Union and the international community must act without delay to prevent this escalation.” LFI merely called for a “ceasefire” and “the protection of the population”, a “return to the negotiating table” and an active implementation of “UN resolutions”. This statement caused an uproar because it did not explicitly condemn Hamas or use the term “terrorist”, but it must be stressed that it did not condemn Israel either. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s reaction on Twitter was in the same vein (“All the violence unleashed against Israel and Gaza proves only one thing: violence only produces and reproduces itself. Horrified, our thoughts and compassion go out to all the distraught victims of all this”), simply repeating outdated truisms about the “two-state solution” (it is dead and buried, and no power in the world could resurrect it).

    But just as Mélenchon wimped out with the war in Ukraine, condemning Russia as solely responsible for unprovoked aggression and aligning himself totally with NATO, which he had claimed France would leave if he was elected President, LFI quickly gave in to the pack, “condemning the Hamas attack on Israel”, as well as the “massacres”, “abominable acts” and acts of “barbarism” allegedly perpetrated by the Palestinian Resistance (with only the Israeli army’s statements as evidence) and denounced “with the utmost force” its “war crimes aimed at terrorizing civilian populations”, boasting to use the very same words as Israel’s ambassador to the UN. “If our support must be total to the Israeli population, it cannot be unconditional to the Israeli government”, assures Manuel Bompard, coordinator of La France Insoumise. But why would anyone support a largely racist and supremacist people, who have always massively supported the massacres in Gaza? Why should anyone support Netanyahu’s far-right and even fascist government, be it conditionally, instead of just condemning it? Manuel Bompard recognizes Israel’s alleged “right to self-defense” but asks it to be “proportionate”: don’t the Palestinians also have the right to defend themselves, and much more so than the occupier? Hasn’t Hamas, which has caused far fewer Israeli casualties in its whole history than the number of Palestinians regularly massacred by Israel in a matter of days, acted in a “proportionate” manner? This can only be denied if we consider that a Palestinian life is worth less (and x times less) than an Israeli life. And are Hamas’s actions “Resistance”, asks a presenter? LFI bursts into indignation: “Nobody used that expression. It’s a flagrant act of outrageous manipulation, part of the polemics fabricated against LFI.” The NUPES parliamentary group, led by LFI, cowardly joined the minute’s silence for Israeli victims at the National Assembly: LFI claims to have asked for the inclusion of international and Palestinian victims, to no avail, but nevertheless took part in this scandalously one-sided tribute to the “worthy victims”.

    Mélenchon crowned this betrayal of Palestine & Palestinians with a statement condemning Hamas not only for its attack (while admitting that there was as yet no evidence of massacres in the kibbutz, and pretending to ignore the fact that Israeli settlers are notoriously over-armed), but also for its very identity as a politico-religious movement, even though Hamas was elected in democratic elections (Jimmy Carter himself was there and testified to it), and its armed resistance against Israel is overwhelmingly supported by Palestinians and Arab-Muslim populations in general. In recalling his hatred of all theocracies, Mélenchon didn’t even notice the contradiction of not including Israel, a State founded on an amalgam between politics and religion, with a ruling coalition comprising fanatical Talmudists. Mélenchon also stressed that his refusal to use the term “terrorism” was purely from a legal perspective, and because “war crime” is worse than “terrorism”, and would allow Palestine to be dragged to the ICC (sic): “Hamas has unleashed a war operation against Israel. If we want war crimes to be tried and prosecuted, we have to call them by their name. This is possible at the International Criminal Court.” This, then, is LFI’s priority: not to erect a Palestinian state, but to drag the Palestinian Resistance (along with Israeli leaders, as if any White was ever condemned at the ICC) before the courts.

    In short, La France Insoumise has abjectly submitted to the dictates of the pro-Israeli doxa, and has even outbid it, while presenting itself as sensitive to the Palestinian cause, in order to eat at all the racks. LFI only claims a position of dissidence to “keep the votes of the bearded” (and veiled) Muslims, as the odious Dupond-Maserati, Macron’s Justice Minister, put it. LFI’s deep-rooted racist and Islamophobic reflexes are further demonstrated by the disgusting fate it bestowed upon Taha Bouhafs, mercilessly defamed and crushed by the Party because he was an Arab true to his roots.

    Mediapart

    “The images are unbearable”. So begins an article on the front page of the October 10 issue of Mediapart, France’s main online “independent” & opposition media who unveiled so many scandals of Macron’s government. This edition was neither devoted to the Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip, the destruction of hospitals and residential buildings, the use of white phosphorus against densely populated civilian areas (a war crime), nor to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis announced by the deprivation of drinking water, electricity, medicine, gas and fuel imposed on over two million Gazans trapped and with nowhere safe to take refuge, in order to force their deportation to Egypt (a crime against humanity). God forbid. Mediapart was talking about these infamous “Hamas war crimes”. And the “unbearable” images in question were not those of decapitated Palestinian babies, the bodies of infants and children pulled from the rubble of Gaza, the heart-rending farewells of a father, mother or child to loved ones killed in the bombardments, of Palestinians burned (dead or alive) in Gaza and the West Bank, of their lifeless bodies desecrated by acts of mutilation or settlers who completely undress the corpses of Palestinians and film themselves urinating on them, but simply of an Israeli woman captured by Hamas. The article, entitled “Civilian hostages at the hands of Hamas: ‘Unheard of in Israel’s history’”, continues: “In a video shared on the social network X and filmed on Saturday October 7 shortly after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, a woman, displayed like a trophy, lies face down, inert and almost naked, in the back of a pick-up truck. A Palestinian militiaman pulls her hair, another spits on her. Her name is Shani Louk. Her family recognized her by her hair and tattoos.”

    Mediapart clearly adopts the Israeli point of view, speaking of an “Israeli 9/11” and a “bloodbath”, based solely on statements by the Israeli army (even though images showed that Israeli policemen were firing from the Nova rave party, which contradicts the idea of a gratuitous massacre in favor of that of civilians “caught in the crossfire”, not mentioning the reports about Israeli civilians butchered by their own troops from Apache helicopters in the implementation of a “mass Hannibal” directive). And Mediapart spoke of “unbearable images” when the only thing truly “unbearable”, for the Israeli society, is the end of the myth of the Israeli army’s ability to protect its settlers. Moreover, Mediapart insidiously peddles the widely-propagated idea that Shani Louk was raped and executed, 3 days after the images went viral. However, she was already scantily clad during the rave party in the Negev desert, and her family had claimed to have received proof that she was still alive. Still, Mediapart made the choice to echo the rhetoric of the Israeli government by speaking of a “terrorist” attack (a term never used for Israeli crimes, of a much bigger magnitude), propagates the trope of Arabs raping white women and grossly lies by saying that a Hamas fighter spat on her (it’s quite clear from the video in question that it’s a child doing it, which is regrettable, but very different from what is said). Significantly, far-right Marine Le Pen made exactly the same statements in the French National Assembly, and this worthy daughter of her father (Jean-Marie Le Pen was notoriously involved in torture in French Algeria) also retains only this striking image of the “colonist” as prisoner of the “natives”: Mediapart, media of Edwy Plenel (whom Mitterrand described as an agent of the United States), thus followed the footsteps of the French and Israeli far right, giving full credit to the occupation army’s version of events despite the absence of proof and huge record of lies broadcasted by the IDF, and highlighting images that are completely insignificant when compared to the daily life of Palestinians under occupation, with its series of executions, torture, well-documented rapes of Palestinian women prisoners, etc., at a time when Israel is committing its greatest massacre of civilians in Gaza ever. Much later in the article, without any strong epithet or condemnation, it will be mentioned coldly that “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” will be allowed in the Gaza enclave, and that the Israeli Defense Minister has stated “We are fighting animals and we act accordingly”. On this subject, Mediapart refrained from emotionally-charged comments such as those used on the Israeli side (“unbearable”, “Plunged into dread since that fateful Shabbat day”, “traumatic as these are”), showing clearly on which side its heart beats (on the side of “humans”, not “animals”) and where its priorities lie.

    Worse still, Mediapart has also published an article entitled “Massacres in two kibbutzes: ‘They murdered children and the elderly in cold blood’”, presenting as if it were a proven fact the worst atrocities attributed to Hamas, once again based solely on statements by the Israeli army. The following IDF figures are quoted without questioning their statements: “an Israeli army official” (“It’s something more like a pogrom from our grandparents’ time”), “Major General Itai Virov” (“It’s not a war or a battlefield, it’s a massacre”), “Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli army spokesman” (“What’s happening now in Israel is the discovery of the atrocity of massacres committed over two days by Hamas Islamist terrorists, including the carnage at Bee’ri kibbutz. Hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered, torn to pieces and decapitated by men mad with hatred. This was repeated in dozens of places in Israel”), “Yossi Landau, Zaka commander” (“It’s incredible the number of victims we saw, what was done to these families, these children. I’ve been doing this job for thirty-three years and I’ve never seen anything like this”), along with “Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant” (“All those who came to behead, to murder women and Holocaust survivors will be annihilated at the height of our strength and without compromise. What we saw in the cities was a massacre”) and the Israeli (I24News) and Western (CNN) journalists selected by the army for its propaganda, who meekly peddled (then retracted) the story of the 40 beheaded babies (“They shot everyone, they murdered children, babies, old people, everyone, in cold blood.”).

    The conclusion of this article is in the same vein. At the end of the last section, entitled “Pure Evil” (sic), we read:

    “From the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the atrocities committed by Hamas in communities around Gaza, speaking of ‘pure evil’. ‘The brutality of bloodthirsty Hamas reminds us of the most horrific acts of ISIS, he said. This is terrorism which, unfortunately, is not new to the Jewish people. This attack evokes painful memories, the scars of a thousand years of anti-Semitism and genocide’.”

    Never mind that there are no images or videos to back up these assertions, reminiscent of the worst Nazi diatribes. And there is absolutely no mention of the crucial fact that in Israel, relentless military censorship filters out the slightest publication in the media, even in times of “peace”. No doubt is expressed either as to the veracity of these claims, even though the first sentence of the article did indeed state that the kibbutz had been liberated after bitter fighting (“It was only on Monday, after two and a half days of fighting, that Israeli troops were able to regain control of the kibbutz in the locality of Kfar Azza”), without ever mentioning the possibility that some Israelis may have been killed in the exchange of fire or in the Israeli strikes. Many Israeli survivors did claim that their own forces were responsible for the deaths of many settlers, and the Hannibal Doctrine, according to which Israel would rather kill its own citizens than let them fall alive into the hands of Hamas, is well known, and was mentioned in the Mediapart article quoted above (it was referring to the potential targeting by the IDF of Israeli hostages kept in Gaza, not to the October 7 massacres). Thus, trampling on journalistic ethics and disregarding the enormous responsibility placed on the media at such a critical time, Mediapart had no qualms about acting as the spokesperson for the Israeli army as it was preparing to commit an unprecedented massacre in Gaza, peddling lies such as the one about the beheaded babies, which can only contribute to public acceptance of Israel’s “reprisals” against the “pure evil” that needs to be rooted out of Gaza. This hoax was endorsed by Biden in the above speech (he claimed to have seen pictures), but has since been retracted by the White House, which has clarified that no proof was provided, and that Biden had simply repeated the Israeli army’s statements (as he did again for the deadly strike against the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians, attributed by the occupier to an Islamic Jihad rocket, as if the Resistance in Gaza had missiles able to cause such a huge level of destruction). Incidentally, the names of Israeli victims published by Haaretz do not include any babies, but the damage was done. And to this day, Mediapart doesn’t consider it necessary to publish a retraction (any more than it ever repented its despicable slander against Julian Assange). Mediapart has even gone so far as to censor comments questioning the reality of the facts alleged in the article and the irresponsibility of a newspaper to publish them without any verification in such a context, deleting them by the dozen without even taking responsibility for this censorship, which is attributed to the authors of the said comments (the only mention is “This comment has been unpublished by its author”).

    The icing on the cake: these two articles were written by a certain… Rachida El Azzouzi. And to think that some people say that France is racist and that Arabs can’t succeed while staying true to themselves…

    CGT

    The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) is a national trade union center. It is the first of the five major French confederations of trade unions, and is deeply rooted in France’s history of social struggles and international solidarity. Here is how the CGT reacted to the events of October 7:

    “On Saturday October 7, Hamas unleashed an offensive of unprecedented violence, attacking a large number of civilian targets. The CGT condemns this escalation, which bereaves and targets millions of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike, and does a disservice to the Palestinian cause.”

    These are the first words of the communiqué issued by the CGT on October 9, entitled “For a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine!” It is a veritable concentrate of cowardice, lies and ignominy.

    “Unprecedented violence”? But everything Hamas has done, even taking into account the crimes attributed to it without any proof, Israel has been doing far worse for decades! Do Israeli lives count for more than Palestinian lives? Why speak of “unprecedented violence” or “a milestone crossed”, when Palestine is, in the worst case scenario, merely reproducing in a homemade way what the occupation has been doing to it on an industrial scale since 1948?

    So it’s “Hamas escalation” that targets “millions of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike”. Israeli civilians come first, of course, given the highly unequal exchange rate between Jewish and Arab lives, but even the Palestinian victims would not be targeted by the occupation’s aviation and artillery, but by Hamas itself?! It is pure Israeli rhetoric to state so bluntly that Hamas is responsible for all the deaths in Gaza, be it via the myth of “self-defense”, “human shields” or other such outrageous lies.

    Finally, from the comfort of its offices in the Paris region, the CGT has the unheard-of arrogance to decree what serves or “does a disservice to the Palestinian cause”, demonstrating a mentality imbued with colonial smugness and haughtiness.

    The final paragraph of the CGT’s confederal communiqué restates a few facts that should have been the starting (and only) point:

    “The Israeli government, dominated by the far right, openly conducts a policy of apartheid and inexorably pursues the colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in defiance of all international decisions, closing the door more and more to any peace process, while Benyamin Netanyahu calls for the razing of the cities of Gaza.

    The CGT recalls that the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, in a report published on Tuesday June 7, clearly condemns Israel’s policy on the situation: ‘The conclusions and recommendations related to the root causes of this conflict point overwhelmingly to Israel, which we analyze as an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying another’.”

    The CGT, which blamed Hamas for this “escalation” and its consequences throughout its communiqué, is therefore in total contradiction. But it’s not the demand for coherence, or morality, that takes precedence, but rather the demand to “howl with the wolves” and condemn Hamas.

    On October 18, the CGT issued a new communiqué entitled “Stop the bloodbath in Gaza immediately”. Despite this encouraging title, its content is just as distressing as that of the previous communiqué, if not more so. It begins as follows:

    “For the past 10 days, the people of Gaza have been subjected to terrible strikes in retaliation [sic] for the acts of terror perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. The CGT has unambiguously condemned this policy of making things worse, which does a disservice to the Palestinian cause. It is not surprising that Hamas should make this type of choice, as it has been violating women’s rights and multiplying arbitrary arrests for almost 20 years in Gaza, imposing a double penalty on the enclave, which has been held under an outrageous blockade by Israel since 2007.”

    While the population of Gaza had been pounded and genocided for over 10 days, with thousands dead, tens of thousands wounded and hundreds of thousands displaced, the CGT devoted its entire opening tirade to condemning Hamas, with only the word “outrageous” condemning Israel for its blockade at the very end of the paragraph. The same accusatory inversion is at work, via a reversal of chronology that places Gaza in the position of aggressor rather than victim (in a way legitimizing reprisals), with “terrible strikes” on one side and “acts of terror” on the other (accusing Israel of terrorism is out of the question, even when they threaten 1 million inhabitants with annihilation if they don’t evacuate northern Gaza at once). The “policy of making things worse” is not that of Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has left the Palestinian population with no other choice but armed struggle, but that of Hamas, which moreover “violates women’s rights”: is this a reference to the wearing of the veil, a notorious sign of backwardness for the CGTists, even when it is freely worn? All that’s missing is a reference to the rights of the non-existent LGBTI+ community in Gaza to complete the picture (on November 8, the CGT did choose a LGBT flag to call for a demonstration for a ceasefire in Gaza…). And we find once again this major concern of the CGT for what serves and disserves the Palestinian cause, which is one of the priorities of their Montreuil offices: as we read at the end of the communiqué, “The CGT is currently working to build the widest possible arc of forces in favor of an immediate ceasefire and a just and lasting peace for this region of the world.” Under such conditions, the people of Gaza are truly ungrateful for having launched the October 7 offensive, which threatens to scupper the plans for a just and lasting peace skilfully matured, between two packs of beer, by the CGT Union’s experts. All the Palestinians had to do was wait a few more decades and the job was done, what the hell…

    But the worst is yet to come. A few paragraphs later, we read:

    “The CGT demands that France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, immediately mobilize the resources of its diplomacy to obtain an immediate ceasefire and prevent the announced annihilation of northern Gaza by a large-scale land, sea and air offensive. The CGT also demands that everything possible be done to help the civilian population. The generosity and exceptional measures (including temporary protection) rightly implemented to help Ukrainians fleeing the war must also be extended to the Palestinians!”

    Not only is there no explicit condemnation of this crime against humanity in the making, namely the deportation of the population of Gaza to the south and then to the Egyptian Sinai desert, but after a timid request that France should “prevent” it, the CGT calls for this deportation to be facilitated by the reception of the expelled Palestinian populations, in the same way that the Ukrainian populations were massively welcomed in Western countries following Russia’s intervention.

    The CGT, which yesterday supported the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) —at a time where the risk was not an indictment for “apology for terrorism”, but indeed “terrorism” and “high treason”, with the death penalty not been abolished yet—, has changed: today, its General Secretary Sophie Binet denounces Hamas as “terrorist” (she had also supported the banning of the abaya dress in schools…). These positions demonstrate once again that, despite cosmetic differences, the CGT is aligned with NATO policy and that of Western capitals, a position that has only been confirmed since it left the World Federation of Trade Unions (composed of Southern countries) in 1995.

    To put the finishing touches to this sad picture of solidarity with Palestine in France, it should be pointed out that French associations, even Muslim and pro-Palestinian ones such as the AFPS (France Palestine Solidarity Association, whose first press release was very respectable), also threw stones at Hamas. The UJFP (French Jewish Union for Peace) at first issued some very good statements, but eventually gave in to the anti-Hamas mob. Many rallies where only calling for a ceasefire, with the majority of speakers competing in their zeal to condemn “Hamas atrocities” as if it all started from there.

    Why did this happen?

    Over and above the overtly Zionist political and media pressure and its unbearable bludgeoning of the Israeli narrative, as well as the very real judicial threats of charges of apology for terrorism (the New Anticapitalist Party has been indicted for “apology of terror” because of its initial exemplary press release, later retracted, along with two CGT members for their local communiqués or tweets), which may explain the blindness and/or cowardice of all these voices, we must remember that the issues at work in occupied Palestine largely overlap with those of the history of colonialism. In particular, we need to remember the ambiguous position of so-called left-wing or progressive Western forces in the face of national liberation struggles against their own countries. An extract from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the earth, dedicated to the Algerian War, expresses all that needs to be said about the “support” of LFI, Mediapart, the CGT and so many others for the Palestinian cause:

    “The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But, all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left scolds them: ‘You’re going too far; we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them, the French Leftists might as well shove it up their a**es. Once their war began, they saw this hard truth: that every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out of them; they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant favoured treatment to no one.

    There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power. The more far-seeing among us will be, in the last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot help seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that these less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of humanity. Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest Western souls are racist. (…)

    This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters; have no fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge.”

    Yes, this half-hearted support for Palestine of the Western Left is all about racism (and even Islamophobia). The martyrdom of the Palestinian population, which has been going on for decades, has never moved “our worthiest Western souls” as much as the Gaza uprising against the soldiers and settlers, even though the violence of Hamas and the number of Israeli victims are far less than what the occupier regularly inflicts on the Arab population. The West shed more tears on the fake story of 40 decapitated Israeli babies than on tens of premature Palestinian infants suffocated to death by Israel in Al-Shifa Hospital: the mere illusion of a Jewish death is worse, so much worse than the real, actual and horrendous death of thousands of Palestinian children, as if they were meant to die before they come of age. As for “taking the plunge” and supporting the Palestinian Resistance, it’s likely that our “worthiest souls” will never do so, given our indifference to the massacre of almost ten thousand children, a single strike against a hospital resulting in over 500 civilian casualties, the assault on hospitals, the imminent risk of death hanging over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trapped and deprived of drinking water, food, electricity, fuel and medicine, and the specter of a mass exodus, which have not shaken our conviction that any declaration of “support” for Palestine must begin with a condemnation of the “war crimes” of Hamas, the “terrorist” organization that is “holding hostage” the people of Gaza (no matter how much this contradicts the facts, it gives a clear conscience).

    Norman Finkelstein, son of Auschwitz and Warsaw Ghetto survivors and a world authority on the Palestinian question, contextualized and commented on these positions, and affirmed genuine support for the Palestinian struggle. Such a courageous stance is so rare that it is worth quoting at length:

    “My parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto up until the uprising in April 1943. The uprising in the ghetto is normally regarded as a heroic chapter, or the only heroic chapter during the Nazi extermination. And when the anniversary came around, probably around 20 or 30 years ago, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, she interviewed my mother about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And my mother was very – let’s just put it this way – she was very skeptical of all the praise that was being heaped on it. She said, number one, we were all destined to die, so there’s no great heroism in trying to resist when there was no other option available, we were going to be deported and exterminated. Number two, she said that the resistance was vastly exaggerated, which in fact was true. It was a very minuscule resistance to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw at the time. And so I saw that Amy Goodman, her face began to drop because my mother was diminishing what was supposed to be a heroic chapter or the only heroic chapter during that horrific sequence of events. So my mother said, excuse me, Amy asked her, “was there anything positive from what happened?” And I remember my mother commenting, first she talked about the ingenuity, the ingenuity of the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. And she described how they had no implements. They developed this very complex catacombs – what were called “bunkers” in the ghetto – using their bare hands. And I remember her use of that word ingenuity. And then when I saw or witnessed or read about the ingenuity of the people of Hamas, the most surveilled place on God’s earth. Every nook and cranny of Gaza is under 10,000 different Israeli surveillance technologies. And yet they managed, amidst all this, to block all of the surveillance and conduct this operation — I pay tribute to that ingenuity! I pay tribute to the resistance of a people with literally, or almost literally, their having figured out a way to resist this concentration camp imposed on them or overcome it…

    And I have the same sense of wonderment – I am still totally baffled – that Hamas figured out a way to tribute the human ingenuity and that spirit of resistance, and all the powers that each individual can summon forth in that struggle for resistance to defeat a very formidable or impose a defeat, even if it turns out not to be longstanding, to impose a momentary defeat on those racist supremacists and Übermenschen who just don’t believe the Arabs are clever enough, smart enough, have enough ingenuity to prevail.

    As to the question of the civilians and the civilian deaths, I don’t know what happened. I’ll patiently listen and I will as fairly as I can parse the evidence as it becomes available. I’m not gonna put a “but,” I’m not gonna put a “however,” I’m just gonna state the facts. Number one, I was rereading the other day Karl Marx’s Civil War in France, and that describes the period when the Parisian workers come to power in Paris, form a commune, and the government, the official government, was assassinating prisoners of war, hostages. and it became so brutal that the Communards, as they were called, they took about 50 or 60 hostages. The government wouldn’t relent, it wouldn’t relent, and the Communards killed the hostages.

    Karl Marx defended it. He defended it. He said “it was a matter of… They were being treated with such contempt, the Communards.” The Communards were begging for a way to peacefully resolve this. They asked for one of their leaders, Blanqui, to be returned to them, and the government wouldn’t. You know, John Brown, he didn’t have a clean record. When he was in a battle in Kansas over a place called Osawatome, he killed hostages. He did. And when he was hung, it was very hard to find a person to defend him. Actually, I recently learned from reading something by Cornel West, one of the few people who spoke on his behalf was Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, which I wasn’t aware of. But he killed hostages, and he was hung and very few rose to his defense, but before you knew it, the Civil War came along. And, one of the marching songs in the Civil War was “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” History’s judgment can be very different than the momentary judgment.

    It is so appalling, it’s not just the despiriting, it’s so appalling, the reaction of all of these cowards and careerists and scum who use their microphones called Twitter to just denounce the Hamas attack. Most of the Hamas militants, probably the ones who broke through the fence, it’s their first time out of Gaza because you assume they’re mostly in their 20s. The blockade has gone on now for 18 years. They grew up in a concentration camp. They want to be free. One of the natures of the current technology is they get to see on the screen all these people walking free. They want to be free. They joined Hamas, they volunteered. Yes, by international law, they constitute combatants. Do I think they’re legitimate targets because they’re combatants? You’ll never convince me. You will never convince me.

    I know what the law says. I know what I’m legally obliged to say. I know what as a scholar or reported scholar I’m supposed to say. But, are you going to convince me a person who grew up in a concentration camp and wants to breathe free air, is – to use the language of international law – a legitimate target, I can’t do it. I cannot. Now, people are going to say, “you’re a hypocrite, you say you uphold international law, you know the fundamental principle of international law is the principle of distinction. Now you’re contradicting yourself.” Yeah, I’ll admit it. I don’t think legal formulas can capture every situation. And I don’t believe a child who was born into a concentration camp is a legitimate target. If he, in this case, it is he, if he wants to be free. I can’t see it.

    Now, how far are they allowed to go in order to break out of that camp? How far are they allowed to go? I think that’s a legitimate question. But here I’ll give you an example. In 1996, the International Court of Justice was asked to deliver what’s called an advisory opinion. The question put to the court was this, is the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal under international law? Is the use or the threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal under international law? Now, as all of you know, the fundamental principle of the laws of war is the distinction between civilians and combatants, between civilian sites, a military base, and so forth. So insofar as nuclear weapons by their inherent nature are unable to distinguish between civilians and combatants, civilian sites and military sites, insofar as they inherently can’t do that, the question obviously arises, are they legal under international law?

    So there was a huge Supreme Court I.C.J. deliberation on this question, and their conclusion was that under almost all circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons was illegal under international law for the reasons just stated. However, the court said there’s one area where we can’t decide. And the area where we can’t decide, the court said, was what if the survival of a state was at stake? Namely, what if a country faced the prospect that an attack would come at the price of the disintegration of the state? And the I.C.J. said, well, maybe if a state, its survival was at stake, maybe the use of nuclear weapons might be justified. Now bear in mind, the I.C.J. did not deliberate on the survival of a people. It deliberated on the survival of a state. And so I say, if the International Court of Justice – the highest judicial body in the world – couldn’t decide whether you have the right to use nuclear weapons to defend the survival of your state, then I would say you clearly have the right to use armed force in order to protect the survival of your people. So, by current international law standards, I find it very hard to condemn the Palestinians, whatever they did. I find it very hard.

    When I see the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Ilhan Omars, the Bernie Sanders, when they “condemn” the revolt of the inmates in the concentration camp. “Israel has the right to defend itself when the inmates breach the walls of the camp.” I spit on them. They nauseate me. But unfortunately, you can count on the fingers of one hand – and even less than the fingers in one hand – the number of people who showed any heart, any soul, any compassion for the God-forsaken people of Gaza.”

    It is interesting to note that all these betrayals of the Palestinian cause are taking place at a time when, in the eyes of Western opinion, steeped in centuries of prejudice about the “superiority of the White man” and decades of Hollywood propaganda about the presumed supremacy of American armies and their allies, Gaza is about to be annihilated, its population about to undergo a mass and definitive deportation, and the Palestinian cause is about to breathe its last. We can only imagine the chorus of howls, cries and vociferations that will emanate from the capitals of the “civilized West” on the day when the forces of the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah…) enter the stage for the Great War of the Liberation of Palestine, which will inevitably end with the exodus of 6 million Zionist settlers to Europe and America, on the model of the end of French Algeria. On that day, which is much closer than most people imagine, the deafening silence in the face of the imminent total ethnic cleansing of the more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and the completion of that of the three million Palestinians in the West Bank, will be replaced by a thunder of enraged and impotent recriminations, threats of war and perhaps Armageddon if Israel is not saved. But at the end, when Palestine and its allies are victorious and settlers are forced to leave, all the hate speech about immigrants and the need to “remigrate” them whence they came from will turn into a bitter rivalry to welcome Jewish “refugees” expelled from the former State of Israel, as we saw during the war in Ukraine.

    In a way, this situation is to be welcomed. It’s just as well that the masks are coming off. The Palestinian cause is too sacred for cowards, opportunists and hypocrites to claim to be among its defenders during the struggle, and to pretend to have worked for it, after the destruction of Israel, with their declarations of “support”. It is necessary that impostors be expunged from the ranks of the true defenders of the Palestinian cause, and that only its sincere supporters remain. This is perhaps the last condition for its Liberation.

    The post Gaza: The Masks are off first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Elon Musk & Media Matters Set To Battle In Court

    Elon Musk’s X – formerly known as Twitter – has filed a lawsuit against Media Matters over a report the group put out claiming that major advertisers were having their ads show up next to anti-semitic content. Musk claims that Media Matters manipulated the algorithm to make that happen. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript […]

    The post Elon Musk & Media Matters Set To Battle In Court appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Nine editors double down in ‘tense’ war on Gaza editorial ban meeting

    By Cam Wilson in Sydney

    A senior Nine staff journalist has resigned and readers are angrily cancelling their newspaper subscriptions as Sydney Morning Herald and Age editors defend a decision to ban staff who signed a letter protesting about Australian media’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict from covering the war.

    The fallout continues from a last Friday afternoon announcement in response to the open letter addressed to Australian newsrooms that called on them to “support ethical reporting on Israel and Palestine”.

    The petition, which had more than 100 signatures from journalists, including some from Nine’s mastheads, advocated covering credible allegations of war crimes and disclosing whether staff had taken sponsored trips to the region.

    Editors for Nine’s metro papers SMH, The Age, Brisbane Times and WAToday — comprising executive editor Tory Maguire, SMH editor Bevan Shields, Age editor Patrick Elligett and SMH national editor David King — reacted by saying they would remove any staff who signed the letter from reporting or producing content related to the war.

    The Australian journalists' open letter
    Part of the Australian journalists’ open letter . . . claims that the “devastating” Israeli bombing of Gaza and the media blockade “threatened newsgathering and media freedom in an unprecedented fashion”. Image: MEAA

    Following the letter, the editors organised an in-person meeting on Tuesday morning and invited Nine’s signatories to the open letter along with the mastheads’ house committee members of journalist union Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).

    According to five staff who spoke to Crikey on the condition of anonymity, little was known about the meeting prior to it being held. Initially, some staff were concerned the meeting would be about further repercussions for the letter’s signatories while others wondered if the editors were planning on softening their stance.

    What became clear soon into the 90-minute meeting was that the editors had no intention of backing down. Multiple staff described them as “doubling down” in a “tense” meeting.

    ‘Mostly defensiveness’
    “I would say the vibe was a lot of open discussion but mostly defensiveness from the editors,” one staff member told Crikey.

    Editors stressed that their decision to sideline staff who had signed the letter was motivated by a desire to protect their mastheads’ reputations from a perception of bias.

    They argued that the bans — while saying they were hesitant to use the word “ban” to describe them — were not punitive and were set to last as long as the conflict does.

    A point of contention was the “hypocrisy” of treating staff as potentially biased for signed the letter about media coverage, while not applying that same standard to staff who have attended sponsored trips to Israel. (Crikey reported earlier this week that Maguire, Shields, Elligett and King have all made such trips.)

    When one editor raised that a hypothetical reader coming across a Nine journalist’s name on the open letter would affect their perception of the paper, a staff member asked why it would not be the same for someone who had been on a trip, especially given that they were not required to disclose it.

    While saying that going on a junket “years ago” would not affect a journalist’s coverage, editors singled out two journalists in the newsroom for having gone on trips — one supported by a movie studio and the other by environmental advocacy group Greenpeace — and whether they would need to disclose this.

    In both cases, these journalists, who declined to comment to Crikey, had disclosed the relationship as part of their coverage.

    “They [the editors] tried to make comparisons that weren’t really comparisons,” one journalist said.

    ‘Punished’ over backgrounds
    Staff also used the meeting to raise concerns about what management was doing to retain diverse staff, describing feeling as being “punished” for their own backgrounds.

    Maguire, Shields, Elligett and King did not respond to questions from Crikey about the meeting, including asking what Nine’s leadership was doing to retain diverse staff. A Nine spokesperson responded with a general statement instead.

    “The editorial leaders are in constant communication with a vast range of newsroom staff, representing all perspectives, and will continue to encourage open dialogue on all issues, including this one,” they said in an emailed statement.

    Shortly after the meeting on Wednesday afternoon, 17-year Age veteran and environment reporter Miki Perkins posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) that she was resigning from her role.

    “I have made the decision that it’s time to seek broader horizons and I will be leaving,” she wrote.

    Perkins, who hopes to stay working in journalism, was one of the journalists singled out in the meeting and had been assisting in circulating the open letter to journalists. She did not mention the meeting but Age staff believe that Nine management’s handling of the matter was the final straw.

    Angry comments
    Meanwhile, Nine’s Slack channel #feedback-smh-website, which automatically posts responses to a feedback survey, has been filled with angry comments from current and former readers who took issue with the editors’ response to the letter.

    One metro paper journalist said that the last time they had seen such directed reader feedback was during the backlash to SMH‘s outing of Rebel Wilson.

    “My family has been a subscriber to the Age consistently for around 100 years — but this is too far. Please end my subscription immediately,” wrote one respondent.

    “Vale Herald. You shall be missed,” wrote another.

    Cam Wilson is a journalist for the independent Crikey website in Australia. Republished by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A Mass Exodus Of D.C. Politicians: What The Hell

    America’s Lawyer E76: Members of Congress are heading for the exits in numbers we haven’t seen before, and most of them say that the dysfunction in the House is simply too much to deal with. Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, alleging that the group deceptively manipulated algorithms to make it look […]

    The post A Mass Exodus Of D.C. Politicians: What The Hell appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • IFJ condemns deputy PM’s comments as threat to NZ press freedom

    Pacific Media Watch

    Journalists and media workers have criticised comments made by Aotearoa New Zealand’s newly-elected Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters — who claimed that a 2020 Labour government media funding initiative constituted “bribery” — as a threat to media freedom.

    The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reports that it has joined its union affiliate, E Tū, in strongly disputing Peters’s comments, and urging the minister and other politicians to uphold New Zealand’s “proud tradition of press freedom”.

    Peters has repeatedly accused reporters of receiving bribes and engaging in corrupt practices.

    Peters’ remarks relate to the participation of several media outlets, public broadcasters, and media initiatives in the Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF), a media support programme established in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic.

    Speaking to journalists covering the first cabinet meeting of New Zealand’s new government on November 28, Peters asked journalists what they “had to sign before they get the money”, criticising the media professionals present for their perceived lack of transparency.

    That same day, Peters claimed he was “at war” with the mainstream media, reports the IFJ.

    On November 27, Peters accused the state-owned broadcasters Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and Television New Zealand (TVNZ) of accepting bribery, questioning their editorial independence and calling the funding initiative indefensible.

    On November 24, Peters criticised media covering the new coalition’s signing ceremony for failing to give enough media coverage before the election, calling the journalists “mathematical morons”.

    Avoided reporters’ questions
    Since the release of the final election results on November 3, Peters has avoided questions from political reporters.

    Peters is the only coalition leader to have not engaged with political reporters since the results were confirmed.

    The PIJF was designed to address the dramatic ad revenue drop-off in 2020. The fund provided NZ$55 million (US$34 million) from 2021 and 2023 and was designed to support local news initiatives, specific projects, trainings, and public interest media.

    On November 23, Peters, alongside the conservative National Party leader Christopher Luxon, who is now Prime Minister, and the libertarian ACT party, announced the formation of New Zealand’s sixth National-led government, following elections in October.

    The E Tū said in a statement: “By spreading misinformation and supporting conspiracy theories, Mr Peters is placing journalists at risk. We urge Mr Peters, as well as other senior politicians and public figures, to support and protect our independent media, not attack it.

    “While journalists strongly reject Mr Peters’ claims, we will all continue to cover him, New Zealand First, and all parties in an unbiased way.

    “The media has an important role to play in a democracy, holding politicians to account and acting as a watchdog for the community.

    “Our journalists’ daily work helps support and protect an environment of free debate and wide-ranging input, and we hope and trust all our political leaders’ efforts do, too.”

    The IFJ said:“Peters’ ‘war’ on journalism is deeply concerning, especially from the deputy leader of a democratic nation.

    “Misinformation spread by a senior political leader can validate dangerous conspiracy theories, and can endanger journalists and media workers. The IFJ strongly urges New Zealand’s senior politicians to uphold press freedom.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Trump Calls for Government to Punish MSNBC Over Reporting on Him He Doesn’t Like

    Former President Donald Trump demanded on his social media platform earlier this week that the government shut down MSNBC News over the network’s criticism of his statements. Trump’s Truth Social post wrongly claimed that the network is broadcast over the air, thus warranting the government regulation he sought. But the channel is actually a cable news station, and therefore not subject to rules…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Corporate Media Eulogize Kissinger as a Statesman Instead of a War Criminal

    For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang true. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. The media establishment kept swooning over one of the worst war criminals in modern history. After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that had followed him ever since his years with…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ahluwalia reappointed as USP’s VC in spite of protests, strike threat

    By Vijay Narayan in Suva

    The University of the South Pacific Council has reappointed Professor Pal Ahluwalia as vice-chancellor and president amid two days of staff protests.

    The council says it has also heard from staff representatives and urged the unions and management to work collaboratively in the interest of the university.

    The meeting was chaired by the acting pro-chancellor and chair of council and the New Zealand government representative, emeritus Professor Pat Walsh, in place of the pro-chancellor and chair of council Dr Hilda Heine, who is away from university business.

    In a statement released by USP, Professor Walsh welcomed the reappointment of the vice-chancellor and expressed his and the council’s endorsement of Professor Ahluwalia’s performance.

    Professor Ahluwalia thanked the vouncil for its continued support, saying he looked forward to serving the university and the region.

    The council noted reports from the pro-chancellor and the vice-chancellor and president on activities undertaken since their last report to council.

    Professor Pal Ahluwalia said the university was delivering its priorities successfully against the backdrop of declining enrolment numbers and financial constraints.

    Updated on finances
    The council was updated on the finances of the university and noted the ongoing challenges USP continues to face.

    The council adopted the proposed annual plan for 2024 and noted the financial strategies for the coming year.

    It also approved the financial plan for 2024 and adopted the audited financial statements for the half-year ended 30 June 2023.

    The council further noted the impact and risks associated with the financial challenges being faced by the university largely due to the decline in student numbers.

    The management outlined its strategies for mitigating the challenges ahead.

    The council also approved a report by the University Senate and instituted new programmes in Pacific TAFE.

    In addition, the council endorsed a proposed scoping study to establish a Pacific Centre of Excellence for Deep Ocean Science and a report will be presented at the next council meeting to be held in Vanuatu in 2024.

    Unions want VC out
    Meanwhile, The Fiji Times reported yesterday in a front page report that staff unions said they wanted Professor Pal Ahluwalia out.

    During a protest on Monday and yesterday, more than 130 members turned up dressed in black with placards listing their grievances against the USP management.

    Staff also questioned why a paper outlining their grievances was not included in the council’s meeting agenda.

    Association of the University of the South Pacific Staff (AUSPS) president Elizabeth Fong said staff had supported the university in its greatest time of need.

    Now, they are asking for recompense and recognition in terms of a “fairer and just” salary adjustment.

    A statement from USP management said they were still negotiating some terms with staff unions.

    However, news reports yesterday said the unions were now planning strike action.

    Vijay Narayan is news director of Fijivillage News. Republished with permission.

    University of the South Pacific protesting in black
    University of the South Pacific staff protesting in black with placards calling for “fair pay” and for vice-chancellor Professor Ahluwalia to resign. Image: Association of USP Staff (AUSPS)

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • USP strike on the cards after council blocks staff papers in pay row

    By Apenisa Waqairadovu in Suva

    The Association of the University of the South Pacific Staff (AUSPS) will now make necessary submissions to go on a strike.

    This comes after AUSPS president Elizabeth Read Fong confirmed that the USP Council had denied staff papers to be presented in this week’s USP Council meeting.

    Fong said this meant there would be no pay adjustments, among other things they had asked for.

    She said that the next step would be to take industrial action, and they will give 21 days’ notice prior to the planned action.

    She added that they would decide on the date of the protest for maximum impact.

    AUSPS president Elizabeth Read Fong
    AUSPS president Elizabeth Read Fong . . . date to be chosen for a strike with maximum impact. Image: FBC News

    The staff braved the wet conditions today to carry out a second day of peaceful protest outside the meeting venue of the USP Council.

    Pal Ahluwalia ABC 060221
    USP vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia . . . staff want him to step aside or be removed. Image: USP screenshot

    Fong said staff still wanted vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia to step down or be removed from his role.

    The meeting will conclude later today.

    Apenisa Waqairadovu is a FBC News multimedia journalist.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Former broadcast minister defends NZ journalism fund, state-funded media independence

    RNZ News

    Former broadcasting minister Willie Jackson has defended Aotearoa New Zealand’s public interest journalism fund that his government started during the covid-19 pandemic, after the new deputy prime minister characterised it as “bribery”.

    Speaking to media on Monday after his swearing in, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters accused state-funded media organisations of a lack of independence from the previous Labour government.

    Peters was asked how quickly he expected government departments to take action on removing te reo Māori from their names.

    “Well, we’ll see the speed at which TVNZ and RNZ — which are taxpayer owned — understand this new message. We’ll see whether these people, both the media and journalists — are they independent?,” he said.

    “Well, isn’t that fascinating, I’ve never seen evidence of that in the last three years.” he said.

    He then laughed, and said “you can’t defend $55 million of bribery, cannot defend $55 million of bribery. Get it very clear”.

    That last remark was a reference to the Public Interest Journalism Fund, a three-year $55m contestable fund for journalists initially set up to shore up public interest media during the covid-19 pandemic, which was wound up in July.

    Media jobs, development funded
    This included funding for 219 jobs and 22 industry development projects. Political coverage was exempted from eligibility to benefit from it. The fund was administered by NZ On Air.

    Jackson, who became broadcasting minister in the Labour government two years after the fund was set up, said it was for media around the country, not just state-funded organisations.

    “It was introduced during covid because it was a disastrous time in terms of media and we were pressured by good people out there to say, ‘hey, you support financial institutions so how about supporting local media that’s struggling’.”

    It was aimed at supporting New Zealand media to keep producing public interest stories, he said and was “not just for RNZ and for TVNZ”.

    “What you saw was a great investment in support of media outlets, Māori, Pasifika, regional [outlets] … Gisborne Herald, Otago Daily Times, Asburton Guardian, they got support and an opportunity to rebuild, reset.

    “I’m very proud of what we did.”

    Influence denied
    He denied the then Labour government had any influence over the media as a result.

    “The rules are very clear, we can’t interfere, we can’t intervene . . .  You guys have to have your own independence.”

    RNZ’s charter requires the broadcaster to be independent, including providing “reliable, independent, and freely accessible news and information”.

    While the organisation is funded by the government, by law no ministers of the Crown or person acting on their behalf may give direction to RNZ relating to programming, newsgathering or presentation, or standards, and cannot have staff removed.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Cities Like Portland Are Spending Staggering Amounts on Police PR Budgets

    Over the past few years, Portland, Oregon, like several other United States metro areas, has seen a substantial rise in gun violence. Since 2019, statistics show an increase in the homicide rate, non-fatal gun violence crime and other auxiliary metrics used to measure public safety. But as policy makers and advocates debate solutions to this violence, Portland police have scaled up their efforts…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘All talk and no action’ say USP protesters calling for fair pay

    RNZ Pacific

    University of the South Pacific (USP) staff gathered outside the Japan-Pacific ICT Centre today to protest over better pay and conditions as well as calling for the removal of the regional institution’s vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia.

    The university’s main decision making body, the USP Council, is meeting at the Laucala campus this week.

    Aggrieved employees of the university showed up in black, holding placards calling for “fair pay” and for Professor Ahluwalia to resign.

    The staff are unhappy after the USP pro-chancellor chair of council Dr Hilda Heine did not include a staff paper on the agenda of the meeting today, according to local media reports.

    “The Association of USP Staff (AUSPS) president Elizabeth Fong said the paper included a submission on staff salary adjustment and a recommendation to recruit a new Vice Chancellor who is originally from the region,” according to Fiji One News report.

    USP staff call for a new vice-chancellor
    USP staff are calling for a “fair pay” deal and for the university to recruit a new vice-chancellor who is originally from the Pacific region. Image: Association of USP Staff (AUSPS)

    FBC News reports that the staff are calling for the “non-renewal Ahluwalia’s contract, claiming that he is no longer fit for the role” and that the vice-chancellor’s position to be advertised.

    “Fong claims the VC is all talk and no action,” it reported.

    The state broadcaster is reporting that USP staff want a 11 percent increase in pay and not the four percent they have received recently.

    “We have staff shortages, vacancies which means people have doubled up and tripled up on their responsibilities. This is about keeping USP serving the region, serving its people,” Fong was quoted by FBC News as saying.

    ‘We remain hopeful’ — USP
    In a statement to RNZ Pacific, USP said its management “continues to work with the staff unions regarding their grievances” since they were raised earlier in the year.

    “Through its meeting with AUSPS, the USP management has resolved some of the matters raised in the log of claims while discussion continued on the remaining issues.”

    The university said that in October 2022, all USP staff received salary increments and the second increase kicked in in January 2023.

    “Staff also received a bonus in the middle of the year (2023). Negotiations are continuing, and provisions have been made for another salary increase next year, subject to the Council approving our 2024 budget.”

    The USP said the chair of the USP Council approved the council agenda, “and the USP management does not have a say in the matter”.

    “As stated several times previously, the vice-chancellor’s relocation is decided by the council.

    “The institution, as always, supports union rights and acknowledges that a peaceful protest is within its ambit.

    “However, we remain hopeful that through USP management, we can continue to have discussions with the AUSPS about their grievances and follow proper channels to meet their demands until an amicable solution is reached,” it said.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • PNG’s Masiu warns USP journalism students to defend free press

    By Monika Singh in Suva

    Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of any vibrant democracy and society’s collective responsibility to safeguard and protect it, says Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Information and Communication Technology Timothy Masiu.

    Masiu was chief guest at the 2023 University of the South Pacific Journalism Student Awards function held in Suva on Friday evening.

    “The USP Journalism Awards not only recognises excellence in reporting, but also the commitment to ethical journalism, unbiased storytelling, and the pursuit of truth,” said Masiu.

    “In an era where information flows abundantly, the responsibility of journalists to uphold these principles has never been more critical.”

    USP cheque presentation
    PINA president Kora Nou (left), PNG’s Minister for Information and Communication Technology Timothy Masiu and USP head of the journalism programme Dr Shailendra Singh during the cheque presentation. Image: Wansolwara News/USP

    While recognising the hard work and dedication put in by the student journalists in their stories, Masiu took the time to acknowledge the challenges that journalists face in the pursuit of truth.

    “Today, we recognise the hard work, dedication, and exemplary storytelling that have emerged from the vibrant and diverse community of journalists who have made their mark within USP.”

    This year 16 students from the USP journalism programme were recognised for their outstanding achievements in journalism.

    Sponsorship media
    The awards this year were sponsored by the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC), The Fiji Times, Islands Business, FijiLive and Sports World.

    “The journalists we celebrate today have embraced this responsibility with vigour, showcasing the power of words and the impact they can have on shaping our world,” said Masiu.

    Being a former journalist himself, Masiu said the role of journalism as the Fourth Estate could not be understated — “the role of journalism is pivotal in our society, serving as the watchdog, the voice of the voiceless, and the bridge that connects communities”.

    Masiu thanked the journalism school faculty heads and mentors who have guided these aspiring journalists for their dedication in nurturing the next generation of storytellers.

    “Your influence goes beyond the classroom; it shapes the future of journalism in the Pacific and beyond,” he said.

    The event included presentation of a $10,000 cheque by the PNG government to the USP journalism programme as part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the USP School of Journalism and the PNG National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) on June 19, 2023.

    The minister described the collaboration as a testament to recognition that the exchange of knowledge, resources, and expertise was essential in nurturing the next generation of journalists who would shape the narrative of the Pacific region.

    Shared training vision
    Signifying more than just a formal agreement, he said the MoU represented a shared vision for the future of journalism training and mentoring in the Pacific.

    “Through this collaboration, students will have the opportunity to engage with seasoned professionals, gaining insights into the ever-evolving landscape of journalism,” he said.

    “I request that the USP School of Journalism or wider USP will have appropriate programmes to upskill or re-train our deserving NBC staff who are non-journalists.”

    Journalism head Associate Professor Dr Shailendra Singh acknowledged the support from the PNG government for the USP Journalism Program.

    Speaking about the USP Journalism Awards, Dr Singh said these were the longest running and most consistent journalism awards in the Pacific in any category.

    He paid tribute to the founder of the awards in 1999, former USP journalism head Professor David Robie, adding that he wished that journalism awards would be revived in Fiji and the region.

    “Journalists carry out a crucial function — sometimes it’s a thankless task. Our best journalists should be recognised and helped in their work,” said Dr Singh.

    Winners of the 2023 USP Journalism Awards
    Winners of the 2023 USP Journalism Awards with PNG’s Minister for Information and Communication Technology Timothy Masiu (seated centre), flanked by PINA president Kora Nou on his left and journalism programme head Associate Professor Shailendra Singh in Suva on Friday. Image: Wansolwara News

    Winners of the 2023 USP Journalism Awards:

    • Most Promising First-Year student: Riya Bhagwan
    • Best News Reporting: Aralai Vosayaco and Nikhil Kumar
    • Best Radio Student: Josepheen Tarianga
    • Best Television Students: Nishat Kanti and Maretta Putri
    • Best Sports Reporting: Sera Navuga
    • Best Feature Reporting: Prerna Priyanka and Viliame Tawanakoro
    • Best Regional Reporting: Lorima Dalituicama
    • Best Online Reporting: Brittany Nawaqatabu
    • Most Outstanding Journalism Student of the Year: Yukta Chand and Viliame Tawanakoro

    Awards sponsored by the Journalism Students Association:

    • Wansolwara Outstanding Reporting Award: Ema Ganivatu
    • Best Inclusive Award, Best Editorial Team, and Best Professional Award: Nikhil Kumar
    • Team player Award: Ivy Mallam
    • Students Choice Award: Andrew Naidu
    • Outstanding Social Service to USP Community: Rhea Kumar

    Monika Singh is a reporter for Wansolwara, the online and print publication of the USP Journalism Programme. Republished in partnership with Wansolwara.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • RNZ broadcaster Kim Hill’s bows out from Saturday Mornings after 21 years

    RNZ News

    After 21 years, Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill has hosted Saturday Morning for the final time.

    In the final hour of the show on Saturday, the beloved broadcaster chatted to long-time colleague Bryan Crump about some of her favourite songs.

    Like many former Saturday Morning guests, Kim found it difficult to select just a handful of songs for the regular segment “Playing Favourites”.

    “Because I love so much music,” she told Bryan.

    Born Fiona Anderson Hill in Shropshire, UK, the broadcaster who was to become known as Kim Hill moved with her family to Ōtorohanga at 15.

    “I was a posh white kid and I didnt know one end of a basketball from the other.”

    As a teenager in the North Island town, she enjoyed sunbathing in a mixture of olive oil and vinegar, eating feijoas and sneaking out with her new friend Colleen Mcleod who happened to live downstairs.

    “I would go out my door, having said goodnight to my parents, and I would go down to Colleen’s house and we would go out on the town. We’d go round with boys in V8s, around the Tron.”

    ‘Mad Men’ parenting
    In those days, the parenting on offer was “very sort of Mad Men“, Kim says.

    “My father had a shotgun that he once greeted me at the door with when a boy dropped me off. That was his idea of humour. Honestly, I’ve never seen anybody go so white.”

    While picking raspberries with Colleen in Tapawera one summer, Fiona decided to change her name to ‘Kim’ and Colleen changed hers to ‘Lee’.

    Yet after Kim’s family moved to another town, she lost touch with the “staunch” friend she describes as “my protector and my coming-of-age facilitator”.

    “If she’s out there and anybody knows Colleen Mcleod, born Ōtorohanga, brother called ‘Sniggs’, she needs to be told how important she was to me, she was massive.”

    Kim Hill and Walter the dog.
    Kim Hill and Walter the dog. Image: RNZ
    Morning Report presenters Geoff Robinson and Kim Hill
    Morning Report presenters Geoff Robinson and Kim Hill, early 1990s. Image RNZ/Sound Archives NZ
    Maggie Barry and Kim Hill,1987.
    Maggie Barry and Kim Hill, 1987. Image: The Dominion Post Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library. Ref EP/1987/4785

    After high school, Kim worked at various jobs including a Christchurch massage lounge, which she knows sounds “very dodgy” but wasn’t.

    “They had little curtained cubicles and I would have known if something untoward was going on. Nothing untoward ever went on, strange as that sounds.”

    Key programmes
    After completing a post-grad journalism course at Canterbury University, Kim first joined RNZ in 1985, later presenting key programmes, including Nine to Noon and Morning Report.

    Her punchy and penetrating interviewing style has not been without critics, she says.

    The British writer Tony Parsons, who hung up on Kim during an interview before saying “You’ve got your head up your arse”, and New Zealand journalist Karl du Fresne, who once called her “dominatrix”, come to mind.

    “[du Fresne] hated me because I hadn’t given a very nice interview with [former Australian prime minister] John Howard and also I say ‘filum’ [an Irish pronunciation of the ‘film’] … Because he criticised me saying ‘filum’, I’ve never been able to stop in case he thinks he’s won.

    “So I do it all the time now.”

    Her favourite interviewees include the late New Zealand scientist Paul Callaghan who she describes as a “genius”. (Kim spoke to Paul Callaghan in 2009 and 2014.)

    “He knew so much but he was still awestruck by it . . . He was not fazed by not understanding. It fascinated him that things were so complex and he was able to make them so simple.”

    North Carolina musician and author John Darnielle of the indie rock band Mountain Goats is another of her favourites: “He’s so clever and a very good writer … I love him.”

    More RNZ work
    In 2024, Kim Hill will continue to do some work for RNZ, chief executive Paul Thompson recently told Checkpoint.

    She concluded her final Saturday Morning show with the following message:

    “I am very very grateful to Radio New Zealand and to the producers and to the listeners. I have been privileged and enriched by doing this programme. It’s been absolutely wonderful.

    “This is my happy place — Saturday mornings in the studio, hearing from people who are enjoying it. And I’m not dying. I’ll be around doing something in the future. Thank you all so much. Thank you.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


    Behind the Mic with Kim Hill. Video: RNZ

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Investigation Targets Epstein Enabling Billionaires & Pentagon Ramps Up Pro US Propaganda

    Billionaires from Google, Hyatt Hotels, and venture capital firms have all been hit with subpoenas as part of a lawsuit looking at how JP Morgan helped Jeffrey Epstein for years and years. Also, the Pentagon has restarted their propaganda department – and that isn’t hyperbole. Last year, the federal government ramped up their production of […]

    The post Investigation Targets Epstein Enabling Billionaires & Pentagon Ramps Up Pro US Propaganda appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Behind the war on Gaza – how Israel profits globally from repression

    REVIEW: By David Robie

    Just months before the outbreak of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza after the deadly assault on southern Israel by Hamas resistance fighters, Australian investigative journalist and researcher Anthony Loewenstein published an extraordinarily timely book, The Palestine Laboratory.

    In it he warned that a worst-case scenario — “long feared but never realised, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security”.

    Or the claimed fig leaf of “self defence”, the obscene justification offered by beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his two-month war of vengeance, death and destruction unleashed upon the people of Palestine, both in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank that has killed at least 14,850 Gazans — the majority of them women and children — and more than 218 West Bank Palestinians.

    As Loewenstein had warned in his 265-page exposé on the Israeli armaments and surveillance industry and how the Zionist nation “exports the technology of occupation around the world”, a catastrophic war could trigger an overwhelming argument within Israel that Palestinians were “undermining the state’s integrity”.

    That catastrophe has indeed arrived. But in the process as part of growing worldwide protests in support of an immediate ceasefire and calls for a “free Palestine” long-term solution, Israel has exposed itself as a cruel, ruthless and morally corrupt state prepared to slaughter women and children, attack hospital and medical workers, kill journalists and shun international norms of military conflict to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, the elected government of Gaza.

    Author Antony Loewenstein
    Author Antony Loewenstein . . . Gaza is the most most devastating conflict in eight decades since the Second World War. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Interviewed by Al Jazeera today after a four-day temporary truce between Israel and Hamas took effect, author Loewenstein described the conflict as “apocalyptic” and the most devastating in almost 80 years since the Second World War.

    He also blamed the death and destruction on Western countries that had allowed the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to “get away with things that no other country could because of total global impunity”.

    ‘Genocide Joe’
    The United States, led by a feeble and increasingly lame duck President Joe Biden – “genocide Joe”, as some US protesters have branded him — and several Western countries have lost credibility over any debate about global human rights.

    As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says, the US and the West have enabled the ethnic cleansing and displayed a double standard by condemning Hamas for its atrocities on October 7 while giving Israel a blank cheque for its crimes against humanity and war crimes in both Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

    The Israeli-Palestinian captives exchange deal
    The Israeli-Palestinian captives exchange deal mediated by Qatar. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    In fact, as Erdoğan has increasingly condemned the Zionists, he has branded Israel as a “terror state” and says that Israeli leaders should be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

    It has also been disturbing that President Biden has publicly repeated Israeli lies in the conflict and Western media has often disseminated these falsehoods.

    Media analysts say there is systemic “bias in favour of Israel” which is “irreparably damaging” the credibility of some news agencies and outlets considered “mainstream” in the eyes of Arabs and others.

    Loewenstein warned in his book before the conflict began that “an Israeli operation might be undertaken to ensure a mass exodus, with the prospect of Palestinians returning to their homes a remote possibility” (p. 211).

    Many critics fear the bottom line for Israel’s war on Palestine, is not just the elimination of Hamas — which was elected the government of Gaza in 2006 — but the destruction of the enclave’s infrastructure, hence the savage assault on 25 of the Strip’s 32 hospitals (including the Indonesian Hospital) and bombing of 49 percent of the housing for 2.3 million people.

    Loewenstein reports:

    “In a 2016 poll conducted by [the] Pew Research Centre, nearly half of Israeli Jews supported the transfer or expulsion of Arabs. And some 60 percent of Israeli Jews backed complete separation from Arabs, according to a study in 2022 by the Israeli Democracy Institute. The majority of Israeli Jews polled online in 2022 supported the expulsion of people accused of disloyalty to the state, a policy advocated by popular far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir (p. 211).

    Dangerous escalation
    Loewenstein saw the reelection in November 2022 of Netanyahu as Prime Minister and as head of the most right-wing coalition in the Israel’s history as ushering in a dangerous escalation of existential threats facing Palestinians.

    The author cites liberal Israeli columnist and journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz reminding his readers of “an uncomfortable truth” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Levy wrote that the long-held Israeli belief that military power “was all that matters to stay alive , was a lie” (p. 206). Levy wrote”

    “The lesson Israel should be learning from Ukraine is the opposite. Military power is not enough, it is impossible to survive alone, we need true international support, which can’t be bought just be developing drones and drop bombs.”

    Levy argued that the “age of the Jewish state paralysing the world when it cries “anti-semitism” was coming to a close.

    The daily television scenes — especially on Al Jazeera and TRT World News, arguably offering the most balanced, comprehensive and nuanced coverage of the massacres — have borne witness to the rogue status of Israel.

    Nizar Sadawi of Turkey's TRT World News
    Nizar Sadawi of Turkey’s TRT World News, one of the few Arabic speaking and courageous journalists working at great risk for a world news service. Image: TRT screenshot APR

    Turkey’s President Erdoğan has been one of the strongest critics of Netanyahu’s war machine, warning that Israel’s leaders will be made accountable for their war crimes.

    His condemnation has been paralleled by multiple petitions and actions seeking International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against Israeli leaders, including an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.

    Toxic laboratory
    According to Loewenstein, Israel’s “Palestine laboratory” and its toxic ideology thrives on global disruption and violence. As he says:

    “The worsening climate crisis will benefit Israel’s defence sector in a future where nation-states do not respond with active measures to reduce the impacts of surging temperatures but instead ghetto-ise themselves, Israeli-style. What this means in practice is higher walls and tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases (p. 207).”

    By 2025, Loewenstein points out, the border surveillance industrial complex is estimated to become worth US$68 billion, and Israeli companies such as Elbeit Systems are “guaranteed to be among the main beneficiaries.”

    Three years ago Israel spent $US22 billion on its military and was is 12th biggest military supplier in the world with sales of more than $US345 million.

    The potency of Palestine as a laboratory for methods of controlling “unwanted people” and a separation of populations is the primary focus of Loewenstein’s book. The many case studies of Israeli apartheid with corporations showcasing and profiting from the suppression and persecution of Palestinians are featured.

    The book is divided into seven chapters, with a conclusion, headed “Selling weapons to anybody who wants them,” “September 11 was good for business,” “Preventing an outbreak of peace,” “Selling Israeli occupation to the world,” “The enduring appeal of Israeli domination,” “Israel mass surveillance in the brain of your phone,” and “Social media companies don’t like Palestinians.”

    How Israel has such influence over Silicon Valley — along with many Western governments — is “both obvious and ominous for the future of marginalised groups, because it is not just the Jewish state that has discovered the Achilles heel of big tech”.

    ‘Real harm’ against minorities
    Examples cited by Loewenstein include India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully demanding that Facebook remove posts critical of his government’s handling of the covid pandemic of 2020, and evidence of Facebook posts causing “real harm against minorities” in Myanmar and Russia as well as India and Palestine.

    The company’s global policy team argued that they risked having the platform shutdown completely if they did not comply with government requests. Profits before human rights.

    Loewenstein refers to social media calls for genocide against the Muslim minority having “moved from the fringes to the mainstream”. Condemning this, Loewenstein remarks: “Leaving these comments up, which routinely happens, is deeply irresponsible” (p. 197).

    He argues that his book is a warning that “despotism has never been so easily shareable with compact technology”. He explains:

    “The ethnonationalist ideas behind it are appealing to millions of people because democratic leaders have failed to deliver. A Pew Research Centre survey across 34 countries in 2020 found only 44 percent of those polled were content with democracy, while 52 percent were not. Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers, Israel is the ultimate model and goal” (p. 16).

    The September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington “turbocharged Israel’s defence sector and internationalised the war on terror that the Jewish state had been fighting for decades” (p. 49).

    Grief for one of the 48 journalists killed by Israel
    Grief for one of the 48 journalists killed by Israel during the seven weeks of bombardment. Image: RSF screenshot

    War against journalists
    Along with health workers (200 killed and the total climbing), journalists have suffering a heavy price for reporting Israel’s relentless bombardment with at least 48 dead (including media workers in Lebanon, the death toll has topped 60).

    The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters without Borders has accused Israel of seeking to “eradicate journalism in Gaza” by refusing to heed calls to protect media workers.

    “The situation is dire for Palestinian journalists trapped in the enclave, where ten have been killed in the past three days, bringing the total media death toll in Gaza since the start of the war to 48. The past weekend was the deadliest for the media since the war between Israel and Hamas began.”

    RSF also said Gaza from north to south had “become a cemetery for journalists”.

    Of the 10 journalists killed between November 18-20, at least three were killed in the course of their work or because of it. They were: Hassouna Sleem, director of the Palestinian online news agency Quds News, and freelance photo-journalist Sary Mansour who were killed during an Israeli assault on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 18.

    According to RSF, they had received an online death threat in connection with their work 24 hours prior to them being killed.

    Journalist Bilal Jadallah was killed by an Israeli strike that hit his car directly as he was trying to evacuate from Gaza City via the district of Zeitoun on the morning of November 19.

    He was a prominent figure within the Palestinian media community and held several positions including chair of the board of Press House-Palestine, an organisation supporting independent media and journalists in Gaza.

    Global protests have been growing with demands in many countries for a complete Gaza ceasefire
    Global protests have been growing with demands in many countries for a complete ceasefire to the attack on Gaza. Image: TRT screenshot APR

    Killed with family members
    Most of the journalists were killed with family members when Israeli strikes hit their homes, reports RSF.

    It is offensive that British and US news media should refer to Hamas “terrorists” in their news bulletins, regardless of the fact that the US and UK governments have declared them as such.

    As a former journalist with British and French news agencies for several years, I wonder what has happened to the maxim that had applied since the post-Second World War anticolonialism struggles — one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Thus “neutral” descriptions were generally used.

    As President Erdoğan, has already pointed out, Hamas are nationalists fighting against 75 years of Zionist Israeli colonialism and apartheid. Palestine is the occupied territory; Israel is the illegal occupier.

    Loewenstein argues in his book that Israel has sold so much defence equipment and surveillance technologies, such as the phone-hacking tool Pegasus, that it had hoped to “insulate itself” from any political backlash to its endless occupation.

    However, the tide has turned with several countries such as South Africa and Turkey closing Israeli embassies and recalling their diplomats and as demonstrated by the UN General Assembly’s overwhelming vote last month for an immediate humanitarian truce.

    There is a shift in global opinion in response to the massive price that the Palestinian people have been paying for Israeli apartheid and repression for 75 years. While Iran has long been portrayed by the West as a threat to regional peace, the relentless and ruthless bombardment of the Gaza Strip for seven weeks has demonstrated to the world that Israel is actually the threat.

    However, Israel is on the wrong side of history. Whatever it does, the Palestinians will remain defiant and resilient.

    Palestine will become a free, sovereign state. It is essential that international community pressure ensures that this happens for a just and lasting peace.

    • The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, by Antony Loewenstein. Scribe Publications, 2023. Reviewer Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • For Crazed Pro-Israel Crowd even Trudeau is an Antisemite

    “Justin Trudeau is and always has been an antisemite”, according to Canada’s former ambassador to Israel. While Vivian Bercovici has staked out an extreme position, other commentators have expressed some variation of this perspective since the PM expressed opposition to killing of babies.

    In a statement in which he repeatedly condemned Hamas and failed to explicitly call for a ceasefire, Trudeau told the press “we’re hearing the testimonies of doctors, family members, survivors, kids who’ve lost their parents. The world is witnessing this — the killing of women and children, of babies. This has to stop.”

    In response to the prime minister’s comment former Liberal MP and current CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center Michael Levitt posted to X, “The scathing remarks also landed here at home, where Jews like me, reeling from weeks of surging antisemitism, got the message loud and clear, and will worry that they have the potential to further fan the flames of Jew-hatred that we are facing.” In an interview with CBC Levitt reiterated the point, claiming the prime minister’s comments “further fuel antisemitism and lashing out at Jews in Canada.”

    In an article headlined “Trudeau’s Israel tirade hands Canada’s anti-Semites a propaganda victory” Toronto Sun columnist Laurie Goldstein echoed this line of reasoning. He argued that “Trudeau handed anti-Semites in Canada a new club to beat Jews over the head with by blaming Israel alone for the conduct of the war in Gaza — with theatrical pauses for effect — before he even mentioned Hamas.”

    Former Conservative senator, United Jewish Appeal (UJA) Toronto Board Chair and now head of UJA’s Committee to combat Antisemitism, Linda Frum blamed Trudeau for a purported bomb threat at a private Jewish school (which holds “IDF days”). Above a statement noting “Toronto’s largest Jewish school TanenbaumCHAT was evacuated today due to threats made against the school”, Frum posted, “A few days ago PM Trudeau falsely accused Israel of deliberately killing babies. You can draw a straight line from there to here ….”

    (In the real world, Trudeau has enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Alongside dispatching Canadian special forces there and flying 30 Israeli reservists to the country, Trudeau’s government has called for “eliminating” Hamas, supported Israel’s “right to defend itself” and visited to encourage Israeli violence. At the same time Ottawa has refused to halt arms exports, prevent illegal recruitment for the IDF or stop Canadian charities from unlawfully assisting Israel’s military, as detailed in a recent notice of intention to prosecute the PM for aiding and abetting Israel’s war crimes.)

    The argument that criticizing Israel for killing babies equates to attacking Canadian Jews is enabled by Zionist groups linking Canadian Jewry to Israel. Claiming to represent Montreal’s 90,000 Jews, Federation CJA recently launched a campaign to send cards to “our” Israeli soldiers. “Make cards for our brave IDF soldiers”, explains a section on their site that includes a financial appeal for Israel. Card writers are told to drop their messages of support for the IDF off at Beth Tikvah Synagogue and Federation CJA’s office. The Jewish federations in Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere are also fundraising for Israel and promoting the IDF.

    If told Israeli soldiers are “ours” then criticism of the IDF can easily appear like an attack on Montréal Jews. But the Israeli military is slaughtering children.

    The advocacy agent of Canada’s Jewish Federations, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), was set up partly to further conflate Jews with Israel. A decade ago, the Tanenbaums, Schwartz/Reisman and other wealthy hard-line apartheid promoters created CIJA to replace the Canadian Jewish Congress and Canada Israel Committee. They removed Canada from the name but left Israel in it partly to further blur the distinction between Canadian Jewry and Israel.

    If your principal concern is promoting Israel, perhaps it is politically sensible to minimize the distinction between Israel and Judaism. By doing so you increase the pressure on Canadian Jews to back Israel. Simultaneously, it frames opposition to Israeli violence and apartheid as anti-Jewish.

    But destroying the meaning of “antisemitism” cannot possibly be good for the average Canadian Jew. When a former Canadian ambassador openly calls the prime minister an “antisemite” for opposing the killing of babies the pro-Israel-no-matter-what crowd really have lost their minds.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Killing the Story

    The ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza has been described as the deadliest period for journalists. 53% of all journalists killed by Israel between 2000-2023 were killed during Israel’s current assault on Gaza. Journalists in Gaza are finding it more difficult to report Israeli atrocities due to prolonged periods of communication blackouts. With 48 media facilities in Gaza hit or destroyed, Israel is committing a genocide under a complete media blackout.

     

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Genocide is Israel’s Strategy

    Israel is losing the battle. They cannot afford to remain fully mobilized this long, even with unlimited US financial support. It is estimated that despite limited commercial flights, more than a quarter million Israelis have left the country. This is also the number that have evacuated settlements in both the south, in a large radius around Gaza, and in a wide ribbon along the northern border with Lebanon.

    Israel is not used to this, and despite its sophisticated military equipment, it depends upon concluding its combat quickly and overwhelmingly. The problem is that it can’t. Hamas is too well dug in, and Hezbollah is too strong. Both have their own sophisticated equipment, despite an absence of navy and air force. Their strategy has been to make air and naval forces largely useless against them by means of a vast and well equipped underground network of reinforced, sealed and well defended tunnels. Their strategy is attrition: to draw out the conflict longer than Israelis are willing or able to endure.

    It appears to be effective. Israelis are taking casualties at a rate to which they are not accustomed. This is making them slower and more cautious, except in the air, and it is disrupting civilian life to an unprecedented extent. The resistance forces of the Palestinians and their allies have planned for a confrontation of unlimited duration, while Israel plans only short, massive attacks designed for a quick, decisive victory, which in this case is illusive.

    This is the main reason they have chosen genocide as a tactic. They reason that massive, horrible deaths of vulnerable civil Palestinians, mainly women and children, will force Hamas, Hezbollah and their allies to take risks and expose themselves. But genocide is not working. And when it doesn’t, Israel’s answer is to use more genocide.

    Gaza is largely without food, medicine, electricity, fuel or potable water. Israel is trying to force a panicking population to leave or die. If they leave, it is to the Sinai, never to return to their own country. That suits Israel, but not Egypt, which has arrayed a solid row of tanks and other equipment along the border to prevent being forced to admit the Palestinian population.

    This is why Israel is resorting to bombing hospitals, schools, mosques and even the few churches of the tiny Christian community that opened their doors to their Muslim brothers and sisters seeking refuge. The Israeli strategy seems to be that when pictures of gaunt living skeletons of children and mounds of corpses begin to be estimated in the hundreds of thousands, or more, the fighters will become desperate and/or the international community will compel Egypt to open its doors.

    The strategy could backfire. The international community could become so horrified that no amount of hasbara [friendly media] will cover such epic crimes. Instead, their staunchest allies may be forced to abandon them, and other powers may enter the fray on the side of the Palestinians. At that point, the consequences become unpredictable. Demonstrations by the millions are already beginning to occur around the globe. At least one prominent voice in Israel has suggested the nuclear option.

    The call for a ceasefire is becoming louder, but Israel sees that as a Palestinian win, and the Palestinian factions have little stomach for returning to the status quo ante, which means little more than confinement to destitute concentration camps or “reservations”. Caring people from around the globe are beginning to mobilize near the conflict zone, to try to, at minimum, allow the resumption of humanitarian aid, fuel, electricity and water to the besieged, starving, sick, parched and dying people of Gaza.

    This is just the beginning. Things could change very quickly, for good or bad.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • George Santos Squirmed His Way Out Of Prison Sentence & Meta Makes Moves To Block News Article Posts

    It looks like George Santos will not be spending any time in prison in Brazil thanks to an agreement he’s reached with authorities in the country. But his problems here at home still remain. Also, Facebook’s parent company META is threatening to remove News articles from the Facebook feeds of users in California if the […]

    The post George Santos Squirmed His Way Out Of Prison Sentence & Meta Makes Moves To Block News Article Posts appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • Latest Poll Finds Distrust In Mass Media Has Never Been Higher

    The number of Americans who say that they have NO trust AT ALL in mass media has hit an all-time high, while the number of Americans who say that they trust the media is at an all-time low. The mass media of today has absolutely no credibility, and they don’t seem to care, either. Mike Papantonio & Farron […]

    The post Latest Poll Finds Distrust In Mass Media Has Never Been Higher appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire Network.

  • The Veganuary Campaign Celebrates 10 Years With a Documentary

    In January 2023, Veganuary counted more than 706,600 participants from every country in the world (except for North Korea and Vatican City)—successfully breaking its own sign-up record. The campaign, which supports people to go vegan for January, has been running since 2013 when it counted 3,000 sign-ups. The number might be dwarfed by Veganuary’s 2023 figures, but it was still far more than founders Jane Land and Matthew Glover expected to reach in their first year. Now, the striking success of the campaign is being acknowledged on film. It’ll Never Catch On: The Veganuary Story is set to premiere at the Plant-Based World Expo Europe in London this month.

    The new Veganuary film

    The new short film, which is just over 20 minutes, features the founders, Land and Glover, and several special guests, including Chris Packham and Evanna Lynch, all of whom discuss the overwhelming success and influence of Veganuary. 

    “[Veganuary] has given veganism a positive brand makeover,” Lynch, who played Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter franchise and has long been a vocal advocate for the vegan movement, says in the trailer for the film. “We need to change,” Packham adds, referring to the impact that the global meat-heavy food system has on the planet. 

    VegNews.EvannaLynch.VeganuaryVeganuary

    Packham himself can speak to the effectiveness of the Veganuary campaign—he signed up in 2019 and has been vegan ever since. “We know the world is eating too much meat, and we know that we as individuals have to do something about it,” he wrote for the Guardian in February 2019, after completing his first vegan month. “So I was one of the record 250,000 people who signed up to Veganuary this year.”

    “I’ve learned a lot over the last month,” he added. “Years ago, I was accidentally given a vegan meal on an aircraft and it was terrible. But I’ve found it a complete untruth that vegan food is tasteless. I’ve discovered so many new flavorsome foods: vegan pies, tofu sausages, and some fantastic chocolate. Vegan cheese might not satisfy a cheese connoisseur, but it’s fine for a decent cheese sandwich.”

    He’s right that the plant-based market is consistently growing and improving. In fact, by 2025, the global industry is predicted to reach a value of more than $77 billion.

    Other high-profile British Veganuary participants, including TV presenter Jasmine Harman, actor Kellie Bright, and author Jane Fallon, also feature in the documentary. They are also accompanied by spokespeople for some of the UK’s biggest retail and fast-food brands, like Asda and Burger King. Both have launched significant vegan ranges in the last year to cater to the growing British demand for more animal-free foods, which has undoubtedly been partly stoked by the success of the Veganuary campaign.

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    Veganuary in the US

    While many of the guests in the new film are from England, where Veganuary was founded, the campaign’s reach is global. In the US, celebrity supporters include Billie Eilish, Joaquin Phoenix, Emily Deschanel, Mayim Bialik, and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. Internationally renowned British musician Paul McCartney is also a fan.

    “I’ve been vegetarian for over 40 years and have stayed with it because I believe that every meat-free meal is a win for animals and the planet,” he says in a statement on the Veganuary website. “This is why I started Meat Free Monday with my daughters Mary and Stella, and it’s also why I support Veganuary. We’re all trying to make the world a bit better, so why not sign up, take part, give it a go, and see how you feel? It could be the best thing you did.”

    According to Veganuary, 2023’s campaign saw sign-ups from all 50 US states, including 400 US businesses like Beyond Meat, Pacifica, and Sweet Earth. This year American corporate participation was up 75 percent from 2022. 

    “The impact our food choices have on the planet is getting harder to ignore, and it’s very inspiring to see so many people around the world starting the new year by taking action. American attitudes towards veganism are changing,” Veganuary’s US director Wendy Matthews said in a statement.

    A growing body of research suggests that Americans are becoming more curious about plant-based living. According to Alliance for Science, around one in 10 Americans say they don’t eat meat. And even more are embracing a flexitarian approach. One study from 2022 noted that more than half of young Americans are starting to eat more plant-based products.

    “Veganuary’s just-give-it-a-go-for-a-month-and-see-what-you-think approach has undoubtedly played an instrumental role in this shift, offering a non-judgmental way for businesses and individuals alike to explore a transition towards plant-based,” Matthews added.

    For more on Veganuary, click here. To watch the trailer for the new film, click here.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • 7 Substacks to Subscribe to Now: Climate Crisis, Vegan Food, and Sustainable Living

    These days, social media is all about speed. While the amount of time many of us spend scrolling on apps like Instagram, TikTok, and X is significant (around two hours and 30 minutes per day), the amount of content we consume in that time is substantial. In fact, some research suggests that the average person scrolls through around 13.2 meters of content every single day. That’s about three miles of content every year. And while some of that will be helpful, informative, or entertaining, some of it, let’s be honest, is trash. We all know it, and yet, we keep scrolling. But if you’re looking to cut through the noise of all the Reels, TikToks, and hot takes on X with more thoughtful, intentional content, Substack might be the social media platform for you.

    jump to the list

    What is Substack?

    Founded in 2017, Substack has taken a few years to pick up speed, but it’s rising in popularity now, largely for its community-driven, slower-paced content. Reminiscent of the blogger days and popular with journalists and authors, Substack allows for longer-form content, in the form of blog posts and newsletters. It’s free and easy to use, but it also offers creators a way to make money, through newsletter subscriptions, which also gives users a new way to financially support the writers they care about. 

    Like every other social media platform, Substack provides a home for all different types of content. Whatever your interests are, you’ll be able to find a Substack for you.

    7 Substacks on climate, vegan food, and sustainable living

    Here, we’ve compiled some of the best options for climate, vegan food, and sustainability content, so you can stay up to date with the issues that matter to you in a mindful, informative way that’s totally doom scroll-free.

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    1 Heated

    Run by Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson, Heated is dedicated to providing Substack users with independent climate journalism. Focused on industries like big meat and fossil fuels, it provides original, impassioned analyses of the biggest issues that contribute to the climate crisis. As the description notes, Heated is “for people who are p*ssed off about the climate crisis.”
    Check it out

    VegNews.grandcanyon.chasingnaturesubstackBryan Pfeiffer/Substack

    2 Chasing Nature

    Suppose you love nature documentaries (think David Attenborough’s back catalog). In that case, you’ll love Chasing Nature, a Substack written by field biologist and journalist Bryan Pfeiffer and devoted to fascinating stories about the world of insects, birds, plants, and much more. “Chasing Nature is for birders and botanists, for backyard and armchair naturalists, for thinkers and wanderers, for anyone who seeks refuge in wild nature, human nature, and the force of ideas expressed in short essays,” he notes.
    Check it out

    VegNews.sustainablebaddiecollage.sustainablebaddieSustainable Baddie

    3 Sustainable Baddie

    If you want to learn how to keep away from plastic, “stay susty,” and keep it fashionable and low-cost at the same time, you need Sustainable Baddie’s Substack in your life. The newsletter is all about making eco-friendly living (and dressing) as easy and as joyful as possible. It’s not about perfection either, but about doing what we can with what we have. “Sustainability can sometimes be scary,” Sustainable Baddie says. “However, we can’t forget that we’re all fighting for a livable, joyful future. So why not start the joy today?”
    Check it out

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    4 Distilled

    If you’re feeling confused about the climate crisis and the problems and solutions that lay before us, Distilled is a great resource to tap into. Written by clean energy expert and journalist Michael Thomas, this Substack (as the name implies) is designed to distill all of the long, complicated, confusing information “into short (and hopefully) engaging stories.”
    Check it out

    VegNews.laurenkretzerchoppingveg.plantmagicsubstackPlant Magic

    5 Plant Magic

    Founded by vegan chef, recipe developer, and culinary nutritionist Lauren Kretzer, Plant Magic is devoted to bringing you the power of plants every week in the form of recipe inspiration, nutritional information, and even book recommendations. “Often, cooking becomes drudgery—a means to an end,” Kretzer says. “If we start to think more consciously about where our food came from, eating seasonally, and ultimately, how it makes us feel, the act of putting together a meal can be meditative and deeply fulfilling.”
    Check it out

    VegNews.theplatscriptionheader.theplantscriptionsubstackThe Plantscription

    6 The Plantscription

    Plants can be healing—take it from a doctor. This newsletter and podcast, run by writer and board-certified pediatrician Yami Cazola-Lancaster, is dedicated to “lifestyle medicine” and teaching all about the many benefits that may come from living a whole foods, plant-based lifestyle. As Cazola-Lancaster notes, it’s a “place for veggies, wellbeing, and fun.”
    Check it out

    VegNews.turmericricesoup.tovegetableswithlovesubstackTo Vegetables, With Love

    7 To Vegetables, With Love

    The clue is in the name, but this Substack by James Beard Foundation finalist Hetty Lui McKinnon is a love letter to vegetables and all of their delicious potential. Expect to learn how to make an array of flavor-packed, unique, nutritious dishes, all inspired by McKinnon’s Cantonese heritage, as well as her upbringing in the West. They’re not all vegan, though, so make sure to read ingredient lists carefully first and make swaps where needed. “I think about vegetables a lot,” McKinnon says. “I think about new ways of using them, to show their versatility, their adaptability, their spirit. This is a space for me to share exclusive new recipes, musings, and news. It is a playground for my community to connect over our mutual love of veg.”
    Check it out

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Why Joaquin Phoenix Wants You To Talk About This Movie With Everyone You Know

    “A beautiful sunny day, and all of a sudden, you’re starting to feel droplets coming down,” says Elsie Herring in the new documentary The Smell of Money. Herring is a resident of Duplin County, NC, and the droplets she’s referring to are not rain, but hog waste. 

    North Carolina is one of the top pork producers in the US, but its factory farms are, quite literally, suffocating surrounding communities. According to the documentary, it is one of the only states in the US where it is legal for factory farms to spray untreated hog waste into the air. 

    “It stinks. It’s forced on us,” continues Herring, who is one of the central figures of The Smell of Money, which is directed by Shawn Bannon, produced by Jamie Berger, executive produced by Kate Mara, and supported by Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix. “It burns your nostrils, makes your eyes water, and you start slobbering and your nose starts running,” Herring adds.

    VegNews.thesmellofmoneystill.thesmellofmoneyThe Smell of Money

    The film explores the legal battle between Herring’s community and Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork companies in the US. Its central theme is environmental racism; most of the people who live in Duplin County are people of color, and many families have lived in the region since the end of slavery. For them, the pollution is more than just disgusting—it’s deadly.

    In 2021, one study evaluated the impact of farm pollution in states like North Carolina and concluded that it contributes to nearly 18,000 deaths a year in the US. Most of that is due to ammonia, which builds up in the air from the huge amounts of pig waste in the area. According to The Smell of Money, more than 10 million pigs are crowded into concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in North Carolina, and together, they create around 10 billion gallons of waste.

    In high amounts, ammonia (a colorless gas) can irritate or burn the skin and even “damage the lungs or cause death,” reports the Centers for Disease Control.

    Joaquin Phoenix: ‘Please talk about the film’

    Alongside Rooney, Phoenix recently attended a screening of the documentary in Los Angeles, where he urged people to spread the word about The Smell of Money and its message.

    “Please talk about the film,” he says in a clip posted to X by the fan account @jphoenixupdates. “Talk to your friends and family. I don’t know anything about social media, whatever that is, do that. Please talk about the film.” 

    The Smell of Money was released in 2022; it’s now screening in theaters across the US and Canada, and will likely be available to stream soon, too. “Movies like this, I think you know, kind of live or die based on word of mouth,” said Phoenix, who, despite being an Academy Award-winning actor, regularly devotes his time to activism. 

    Together with fiancée Rooney, he also produced The End of Medicine—a documentary that aims to raise awareness of the link between factory farming and existential health threats, including zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance.

    VegNews.thesmellofmoneyThe Smell of Money

    Travon Free, another executive producer on The Smell of Money, also desperately wants people to talk about and understand what’s going on in North Carolina. Speaking with the Guardian recently, he said, “This is one of those things that’s very easily fixable if people just pay attention. That was why it was so enraging to see the film for the first time. It’s not complicated.”

    The problem, he says, is that the issue is so easy to ignore. Smithfield Foods’ products line grocery store shelves all over the US, but research suggests that most of the consumers who buy them don’t know what it took to get them there. In fact, one survey commissioned by NGO Madre Brava earlier this year revealed that more than 90 percent of Americans know “very little or nothing at all about industrial meat production.”

    “It’s not in your face,” said Free. “It’s not in the news. It’s not being thrust at you in any meaningful way all the time. It’s easy to ignore it. Black people suffer from environmental injustice all over this country, right?”

    “It only matters to who it matters to,” he continues. “It’s a microcosm of what we experience at a macro level with things like climate change. It’s also a fault of the human condition. You only care about what’s causing you immediate pain, most of the time.”

    Find out more about The Smell of Money, and when it’s screening near you, here.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.