Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Guelph-Humber’s Gregory Shupak about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When a Los Angeles police officer killed a child in a department store, the New York Times ran the story with the headline “Stray Bullet Kills Girl as Officers Fire at Suspect in Los Angeles Store.” A later headline from the Times referred to the ”Officer Whose Bullet Killed a 14-Year-Old Girl.”
That used to be thought of as just newspaper speak, but we can now recognize how that distorted, passive-voice language is a choice that obscures agency and undermines accountability. It’s not just words.
We see that obscuring of agency, and undermining of accountability, writ larger when crimes are committed by governments corporate media favor, against populations they don’t care much about. Here, journalistic language takes on another level of import, because calling those crimes by their name brings on particular legal and political responses. New research from our guest explores that question in Gaza and the West Bank.
Gregory Shupak is a media critic and activist. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone from Toronto. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.
Gregory Shupak: Hi, how are you?
JJ: Well, I’m OK. When Trump declared his plans for Gaza: “You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” and then later he declared that the US would “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it,” if you still have an outrage bone in your body, you may have thought, surely this will be seen as the wildly illegal, immoral move that it is.
How can it be resisted? Who can counter it? What bodies do we have to protect Palestinians in the face of this? All of those would be questions for journalists to pursue, but you can’t challenge something that you won’t name. Which brings us to the research that you’ve just been working on. Tell us about that.
GS: Sure. So this plan that Trump has put forth and stuck to for quite some time—I thought perhaps it would just be one of his many deranged statements that would be later walked back by, if not him, then others in administration, but he keeps pressing on this—it was widely described as ethnic cleansing by people who are positioned to make that assessment. So people like António Guterres of the United Nations, their secretary general, or Navi Pillay, who is another UN official focusing on Palestine. This plan that Trump brought forth was denounced by them and by others, like Human Rights Watch, as ethnic cleansing.
And yet that term has seldom found its way into the coverage. I looked at coverage of the first, just over a week, since Trump’s racist fever dream, and I found that 87% of the articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post did not include the term “ethnic cleansing.” And, in fact, only 26% of the coverage included a term like “ethnic cleansing,” or something similar that captures the violence of what he is proposing. So terms like “forced displacement” or “expel” or “expulsion” or “forced transfer.”
Just automatically, you have a whitewashing of what he’s proposing to do, even in coverage that is critical of it. And that’s really leaving audiences, who’re maybe not terribly well-versed in international law, not in a very strong position to understand just how egregious of a crime it is that Trump is advocating.
JJ: And ethnic cleansing is almost like just a pejorative, as though it had no actual meaning. In fact, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, you found, put it in scare quotes, like it’s an accusation and not a phenomenon.
GS: Exactly. And I talk in my piece about Bret Stephens and a couple of Wall Street Journalpieces that endorsed Trump’s plan. However, I didn’t mention that Stephens had a second piece that addressed Trump’s plan in passing, and he blatantly lied and said that Trump’s plan does not involve forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza. But Trump has been quite clear that that’s exactly what he has in mind. So not only do we have a widespread failure to properly name this plan for ethnic cleansing, we also have quite a few cases of endorsements of what Trump is calling for.
JJ: We know that for many US media—and you illustrated it—US exceptionalism, just the idea that, “Oh, sure, we can do this anywhere in the world,” extends to the point where they don’t even really acknowledge international law. And this is a longstanding problem, where the UN is just kind of meddling in US power, and that sort of thing. But it really comes to the point where they don’t even invoke the idea that there is something called international law.
GS: Yeah, that’s quite important. Only 19% of the coverage of Trump’s proposal for Gaza, if you can even call it that, only 19% include the term “international law,” which is really a key paradigm through which this, and any kind of international armed conflict, needs to be understood. But it’s just not even being presented to the audience as something that they need to think about.
And it put me in mind of Richard Falk and Howard Friel, [who] wrote a book 20 years ago or so, called The Record of the Paper, and it talked about how in coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, international law was totally absent from New York Times editorials that were in various ways endorsing or at least giving credibility to the concept of the attack. And we still see the same pattern with regard to Gaza, as well as the West Bank, where patterns of ethnic cleansing are also unfolding.
JJ: And yet we know they will invoke international law when it suits, when it seems like something that bolsters the US case.
You found, finally, similar issues with coverage of the West Bank, and I think it’s important for folks to understand this is not just a story of Gaza anymore, obviously; this is an expansive story. And when we talk about the West Bank here, as is often the case, you can find an example of an outlet or a journalist who is doing straightforward, informative witnessing, and you can actually use that to contrast with what many powerful, better resourced outlets are doing. And that’s the case in coverage of the West Bank, right? It’s not that everyone is refusing to witness or acknowledge.
GS: No, I think that one of the main problems I see in the way that the events unfolding in the West Bank are being portrayed is that there’s a refusal, you might call it, to connect how each “individual” event or incident connects to others.
So you’ll have reports that’ll say, Israel’s invasion of Jenin refugee camp that has unfolded in recent weeks has largely emptied out the entire area. But the coverage of that fails to situate that in relation to the fact that we are seeing similar types of violence unfolding in other parts of the West Bank that Israel is attacking, particularly the lower West Bank, and that these are part of a longer-term trend towards, as several observers that I cite in the article have pointed out, of ethnic cleansing the territory.
So, for example, I talk about how in October of last year, the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese put forth a report in which she describes escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And she talks about how, since October 7, 2023, at least 18 West Bank communities have been depopulated under the threat of force.
So what she and others have observed is that this is not a matter of, OK, there’s a couple days of fighting, and people go back to their homes when it’s safe. It’s part of a longer-term trajectory whereby it’s becoming difficult, and often impossible, for people in West Bank towns to go back to their homes once Israel drives them out. So not at all unlike what we have seen in Gaza.
Gregory Shupak: “What we’re talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land.”
JJ: But the refusal to connect those dots, and to make it seem as though, oh, a skirmish happened over here today, and oh, a skirmish happened over there yesterday, and not telling the bigger story, is the failure.
GS: Exactly. And as is so often the case with coverage of Palestine, and other issues as well, we get a muddying of the agency of the perpetrators of the violence, right? Everything’s reduced to just “clashes” and “conflict,” rather than efforts to enforce colonial subjugation, and resistance to that. So that kind of power dynamic is completely glossed over, when you get this anodyne language about just conflicts and clashes. There’s no space within that language for communicating that what we’re talking about is driving out the indigenous population so that settlers can take over their land.
Palestine has strongly condemned Fiji’s decision to open a Fiji embassy in Jerusalem, calling it a violation of international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry and the Hamas resistance group that governs the besieged enclave of Gaza issued separate statements, urging the Fiji government to reverse its decision.
According to the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, the Fijian decision is “an act of aggression against the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights”.
The Palestinian group Hamas said in a statement that the decision was “a blatant assault on the rights of our Palestinian people to their land and a clear violation of international law and UN resolutions, which recognise Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory”.
Fiji will become the seventh country to have an embassy in Jerusalem after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, and Paraguay.
Sultan Barakat, a professor at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University, says the release of Palestinian prisoners is a “symbolic win” rather than a victory for the Palestinians, primarily showing the inhumane conditions they live under.
“Israel can capture people in the West Bank and Gaza because they all live in a confinement area under the control of Israel,” he told Al Jazeera.
Dr Barakat discussed the way Palestinians were “arbitrarily rounded up, taken to prison and treated badly” by Israel.
A total of 183 Palestinian prisoners were released today from Israeli jails as part of the exchange for three Israeli hostages under the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.
They included 18 serving life sentences and 54 serving lengthy sentences, as well as 111 detained in Gaza since 7 October 2023.
Barakat stressed that the release of prisoners also “shows the unity of the Palestinians in the face of occupation”.
“The prisoners are not all necessarily Hamas sympathisers — some were at odds with Hamas for a long time,” the academic said.
“But they are united in their refusal of occupation and standing up to Israel,” he added.
Hamas ‘needs to stay in power’
Another academic, Dr Luciano Zaccara, an associate professor at Qatar University’s Gulf Studies Center, told Al Jazeera that Hamas needed to stay in power for the ceasefire agreement to be implemented in full.
“How are you going to reconstruct Gaza without Hamas? How are you going to make this deal complied [with] if Hamas is not there?” he questioned.
Dr Zaccara also said Israel seemed to have no plan on what to do in Gaza after the war.
“There was never a plan,” he said, adding that Israel did not want Hamas or the Palestinian Authority in the enclave running the administration.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, quoting a security source, reported that the Red Cross had expressed “outrage” at how the Israel Prison Service handled the Palestinian prisoners being released from Ketziot Prison.
Ha’aretz said the Red Cross alleged that the prisoners were led handcuffed with their hands above their heads and bracelets with the inscription “Eternity does not forget”.
The newspaper quoted the Israel Prison Service spokesman as saying that “the prison warders are dealing with the worst of Israel’s enemies, and until the last moment on Israeli soil, they will be treated under prison-like rule.
“We will not compromise on the security of our people.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
As survivors in Gaza begin to return to their homes during the first ceasefire in over a year, we speak to Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Drop Site News about the future of those who have been displaced. As Palestinians are “returning to a devastated landscape … determined not to leave their land” in defiance of “plans of ethnic cleansing that have dated back to the 1950s for Israel,” President Trump told reporters that he wants to “clean out” Gaza, suggesting that Palestinian Arabs should be ethnically cleansed into Egypt and Jordan. Both countries have “rejected this, and they’ve done so since the beginning of this genocidal assault,” says Kouddous.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Longer range/endurance UAVs make a different to the tyranny of distance when it comes down to ISR. For full situational awareness, governments and their armed forces are electing to perform intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions across international waters and borders with uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV), and this is most evident in the Asia Pacific […]
More than 1,000 reporters, editors and administrative staff from state-controlled Vietnamese broadcasters, including Voice of Vietnam’s VTC Digital Television, lost their jobs on Wednesday as the channels were taken off the air, state media reported.
VTC’s 13 channels, along with others unconnected to Voice of Vietnam such as People’s Television and Vietnam News Agency Television, stopped broadcasting on the morning of Jan. 15. National Assembly Television had already shut down on Jan. 1. While regional broadcasters are still on air, the goal is to make Vietnam Television the country’s only channel.
The closures are part of a plan by the Communist Party’s top decision making body the Politburo to streamline the political system and cut costs as outlined in Resolution 18, which aims to eliminate overlap in government enterprises and reduce the number of civil servants by a fifth.
VTC Digital Television was established in 2004 and became a non-business unit under the Ministry of Information and Communications in 2014. The following year, it was merged into the state Voice of Vietnam news agency.
VTC, Vietnam’s second most-watched station behind Vietnam Television, broadcast nationwide, disseminating party propaganda.
One staff member, who worked for VTC for 20 years, told Radio Free Asia she and her colleagues were shocked and confused by its abrupt closure.
“They don’t know where to go and what to do,” said the woman, who didn’t want to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. “Employees haven’t been informed about any [compensation] policies. Any decision should consider workers’ interests.”
“ We have dedicated many years to the job, are financially independent, and are not paid by the state budget. Why do they shut down our channels so abruptly without a proper roadmap?”
A man transports equipment being removed from the VTC Digital Television office building in Hanoi on Jan. 15, 2025.(Nhac Nguyen/AFP)
Administrative staff described the closure of VTC as “destructive,” wasting millions of dollars of machinery and equipment – state assets now idle.
Ho Chi Minh City-based independent journalist Nam Viet said he wouldn’t miss the propaganda channels, often considered the “lifeblood of the government.”
“Quite a few reporters have taken to social media to lament and regret that they have dedicated many years [to the state]. Now they’re being forced out but their sharing is more ironic than pity-inducing, because they have been the henchmen of a propaganda system that is nothing to be proud of … not journalists who dared to speak up for people’s suffering and fight for justice.”
Academic Nguyen Hoang Anh, who has worked on programs for VTC and other broadcasters, said relying on a single channel would likely lead to many important issues being overlooked.
“Shutting down VTC will scale down the dissemination of information and leave viewers with fewer choices,” she said, adding that Vietnam Television mainly focuses on politics, whereas VTC covered social issues such as women’s rights and education.
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
After spending more than two years drafting a plan to manage and protect the nation’s old-growth forests as they endure the ravages of climate change, the Biden administration has abruptly abandoned the effort.
That decision by the U.S. Forest Service to shelve the National Old Growth Amendment ends, for now, any goal of creating a cohesive federal approach to managing the oldest trees on the 193 million acres of land it manages nationwide. Such steps will instead be taken at the local level, agency chief Randy Moore said.
“There is strong support for, and an expectation of us, to continue to conserve these forests based on the best available scientific information,” he wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to regional foresters and forest directors announcing the move. “There was also feedback that there are important place-based differences that we will need to understand in order to conserve old growth forests so they are resilient and can persist into the future, using key place-based best available scientific information based on ecological conditions on the ground.”
President Biden launched a wide-ranging effort to bolster climate resilience in the nation’s forests in an executive orderhe issued on Earth Day in April, 2022. In complying with the order, the Forest Service sought to bring consistency to the protection of mature and old-growth trees in the 154 forests, 20 grasslands, and other lands it manages. Such a change was warranted because the agency defines “old growth” differently in each region of the country depending on the characteristics of the local forest, but generally speaking they are at least 100 years old.
Much of the nation’s remaining ancient forests are found in places like Alaska, where some of the trees in the Tongass National Forest are more than 800 years old, and California. In the East, much old-growth is concentrated in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina. All told, old-growth forests cover about 24 million acres of the land the Forest Service manages, while mature forests cover about 67 million.
The plan would have limited logging in old-growth forests with some exceptions allowed to reduce fire risk. The Forest Service spent months gathering public comment for the proposal, which the Associated Press said was to be finalized any day now. Many scientists and advocates worried the amendment would have codified loopholes that allow logging in old-growth forests. On the other side, Republican legislators, who according to the AP introduced legislation to block any rule, and timber industry representatives argued that logging is critical to many state economies and they deserved more input into, and control over, forest management. Such criticism contributed to the decision to scuttle the plan, the AP reported.
Ron Daines, the Republican senator from Montana, issued a statement calling the Forest Service decision “a victory for commonsense local management of our forests” and said “Montana’s old growth forests are already protected by each individual forest plan, so this proposal would have simply delayed work to protect them from wildfire, which is the number one threat facing our old growth forests.”
Political disagreements over old growth conservation are not new. Jim Furnish, a former deputy director of the Forest Service who retired in 2002, said that the Forest Service has become more responsive to calls for old growth protection over the years. In the 1950s and ’60s, “they typically looked at old growth for us as the place to get the maximum quantity of wood for the highest value,” Furnish said. The debate over conservation of the spotted owl, and the 2001 Roadless Rule, helped paved the way for more dedicated protection of virgin forest, and the creation of “new” old growth through the conservation of mature second-growth forests.
Ultimately, Furnish said, the Forest Service’s failure to move quickly after Biden issued his executive order doomed the amendment. Under the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to review and potentially overturn regulations issued by federal agencies, the new Republican-controlled Congress could have killed any new regulation within 60 days, precluding any future efforts to adopt such an amendment.
Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the plan’s death may be for the best, as old-growth protection can continue at the local level under current regulations while leaving room for future protections.
“Probably for the next few years it’s going to be a project-by-project fight, wherever the Forest Service chooses a logging project,” he said. “Advocates and conservation groups are going to be looking closely at any old growth that might be in those projects and fighting to protect them.”
An international pressure group is calling on governments and financial institutions to reconsider funding a plan to help Vietnam transition from fossil fuels to clean energy while it jails climate activists.
The Just Energy Transition Partnership, or JETP, was unveiled two years ago by Vietnam and the International Partners Group, comprising the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Japan and Canada.
The partners committed to provide US$15.5 billion in loans, along with technical assistance to support the elimination of fossil fuels. Under the plan, Vietnam has obtained $2.75 billion so far in concessional loans from international financial institutions, according to the Coalition for Human Rights in Development, a grouping of more than 100 non-governmental organizations from over 50 countries.
But Vietnam has also cracked down on environmental activists, as it does on almost anyone who questions the authority of the ruling Communist Party, invariably for spurious reasons, government critics say.
“The Vietnamese government has been criminalizing environmental and climate leaders on false charges,” the rights coalition said in a report released last month and posted on social media platform X on Dec. 16.
“Although the resulting Just Energy Transition Partnership agreement includes references to the importance of holding consultations and ensuring broad social consensus, the authorities have targeted climate and environmental leaders who were conducting legitimate policy and advocacy work around the just transition, and the need to phase out coal and scale-up renewable energy alternatives,” the group said.
It cited environmentalists Dang Dinh Bach, Nguy Thi Khanh, Hoang Thi Minh Hong, Mai Phan Loi and Bach Hung Duong who were convicted of “tax evasion” and sentenced to terms of as much as five years in prison.
It also mentioned Ngo Thi To Nhien, who was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for “appropriating documents.” Nhien was executive director of the Vietnam Initiative for Energy Transition Social Enterprise, which worked with Vietnamese authorities, foreign governments and corporations to try to reform the energy sector and accelerate its transition to carbon neutrality.
The JETP says that in order for a transition to clean energy to be just and equitable “regular consultation is required, including with media, NGOs and other stakeholders to ensure broad social consensus.”
The Coalition for Human Rights in Development argues that Hanoi’s imprisonment of activists sends a different message.
“The criminalization of these six environmental and climate leaders, along with broader civic space restrictions, indicate that it is not safe for local human rights defenders and community members to meaningfully participate, seek information, or raise concerns about just energy transition plans,” it said.
Radio Free Asia emailed Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking for comment on the statement but did not receive a response by time of publication.
The 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize laureate Diane Wilson said she agreed that international financiers needed to think again about providing funds to Vietnam.
“As a grassroots environmental activist in the United States and a fourth-generation fisherman in the Gulf of Texas, I support the coalition in urging international partners and donors to reconsider their plans to support the communist regime in its clean energy transition,” Wilson said.
Thuc Quyen, a German-Vietnamese activist, said the Vietnamese government should improve its human rights record, protect the environment, and fight corruption in order to receive international attention and assistance.
“Vietnam needs to release Dang Dinh Bach and other environmental activists, and establish minimum standards that protect civil space, protect fundamental human rights and transparency, and respect independent oversight,” she told RFA.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.
Closing out the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam’s on Dec. 1, General Secretary To Lam and allies announced a sweeping set of proposals to streamline the Vietnamese government, legislature, ruling party apparatus.
If enacted, it would be the most sweeping changes that the Vietnamese government system has seen in decades, involving ministerial restructuring, the elimination of parliamentary committees, the shuttering of government offices and party committees, and some consolidation within the state-owned media, educational and research sectors.
At the government level, five of 21 ministries will be eliminated through mergers and closures.
The Ministry of Finance will absorb the Ministry of Planning and Investment, while the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Construction will merge, and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment will merge with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The Ministry of Information and Communications will merge with the Ministry of Science and Technology, while the Ministry of Labor, Invalids, and Social Affairs will be dissolved with individual components parceled out to other ministries.
Three central-level government agencies will be dissolved. The Ministry of Finance and the State Bank will assume the responsibilities of the State Capital Management Committee and the National Financial Supervisory Commission.
Lam is making his mark
The Religious Affairs Committee and Ethnic Minority Affairs Committees will merge.
Other consolidation will occur within the state education and research sectors and broadcast media. Even ministries that are not affected by the restructuring will be required to streamline their own activities.
The National Assembly will eliminate four committees and one agency that reside beneath the legislature’s Standing Committee.
The proposal calls for the merger of the Economic and Finance Committees, the Social and Culture Committees, and the Judicial and Legal Committees, with the complete dissolution of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
A matter of concern is that the Legislative Research Institute, which was modeled on the U.S. Congressional Research Service to provide technical expertise on legislation, will be eliminated altogether.
Within the CPV, the Central Propaganda and Education Committee will merge with the Central Mass Mobilization Committee, while the External Relations Committee will be dissolved, with its functions transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Vietnam’s President Luong Cuong, left, and General Secretary of the Communist Party To Lam, walk to the National Assembly in Hanoi, Vietnam, Oct. 21, 2024.
The Health Care Committee will likewise be dissolved with its authorities split between the Ministry of Health and the Organization Commission.
The new central-level committee will be established to oversee other central agencies, the judiciary, including the Supreme People’s Procuracy and the Supreme People’s Court.
Lam is clearly trying to make his mark just five months after being elected CPV general secretary.
Cumbersome bureaucracy
While his predecessor Nguyen Phu Trong sought to legitimize the party in the eyes of an increasingly disgusted and apathetic public through his “Blazing Furnace” anti-corruption campaign, Lam seeks to legitimize the party through rapid economic growth.
An impediment to performance-based legitimacy is Vietnam’s cumbersome bureaucracy.
In his speech to the Central Committee, Lam reiterated that “In parallel, administrative reforms must be accelerated to create the most favorable conditions for citizens and businesses, which will contribute to improving the living standards of the people.”
Trong was a career ideologue, who spent much of his 13 years rebuilding the party apparatus in order to serve as a check on technocrats.
Lam is charting a completely different path, seeking to do away with some key communist party offices, and trying to streamline the “dual-hatted” system whereby every government and military organization has both a civil executive and a parallel party leadership structure.
The one place where this dual hat system will not be touched is the military: The party always controls the gun.
Lam knows that the country is entering into a “new revolutionary era” with significant challenges.
Labor productivity is slipping and while Vietnam attracted $36 billion in pledged foreign investment in 2024, it remains an assembler. There is an insufficient production ecosystem in the country.
There is a reason that Vietnam’s trade deficit with China is almost the same as its surplus with the United States: Vietnamese exports are made from imported components. Lam is acutely aware of the dangers of being caught in the middle income trap.
Rising star Hung
The man behind all of this is Le Minh Hung, a rising star within the Communist Party and a key ally of Lam, who oversaw his recent promotion to the Politburo.
Hung was the governor of the state bank of Vietnam, the youngest man to hold that position.
Vietnam’s State Bank Governor Le Minh Hung is seen in Hanoi, Vietnam May 31, 2017.
He is currently in charge of the CPV’s Organization Commission, which is in charge of all personnel issues, a key assignment ahead of the 14th Congress.
Hung’s father was the former Minister of Public Security and in that role a mentor to Lam during his rise through the security bureaucracy.
And this shakeup was orchestrated by the CPV Secretariat, which Lam has stacked with his allies.
Lam’s big plan appears to have the backing of the majority of the Central Committee. Editorials in state-owned media have endorsed the proposal, striking notes of urgency. But clearly not everyone in the party is on board.
Normally, we see very little change or policy implementation in the year preceding a CPV Congress.
That Lam is willing to push this is a strong indication that he is confident of the Central Committee’s faith in his leadership. He is much less of an ideologue, and more of a state-led capitalist authoritarian.
The ambitious move also speaks to Lam’s personal confidence that he will be elected to a full term at the 14th Congress in early 2026.
Empowering technocrats
Lam has called on all party organizations to complete their internal review and draft guidelines for reform by the end of the year.
The reports will be studied in mid February, and submitted by the steering committee to the Politburo in early March ahead of the next Central Committee Plenum scheduled for mid March.
But that also means no government body will be working until at least March 2025.
There is not just efficiency at play with the government and party reorganization. This is clearly a way to get rid of some dead wood and neutralize some rivals.
But more importantly, the reorganization can be seen as a way for Lam to empower close allies and true technocrats.
It is believed that the head of the Central Committee’s External Relations Committee, Le Hoai Trung, who sits on the CPV Secretariat and is a close advisor to Lam, will become the next foreign minister.
Hung is clearly being set up for a key economic position. While many had seen him being groomed for the prime ministership, the consolidation will turn the Ministry of Finance into a super-ministry, which he would be well poised to lead.
After Trong’s war against technocrats, Lam is empowering them, aware that they are needed to take Vietnam to its next stage of development.
A clear winner in this is the Ministry of Public Security, which not only came out unscathed, but with some additional autonomy.
But while this reorganization may look good to foreign investors, Vietnamese citizens don’t see how the reforms will impact or improve their day-to-day interactions with the government. Shouldn’t they be the primary beneficiaries?
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.
Broadcasting from Baku, Azerbaijan, on the final official day of this year’s finance-themed United Nations climate summit, we look at how climate justice activists are outraged at how little money is being offered by the most polluting nations to countries most severely affected by climate change. We speak with Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, and Claudio Angelo, head of international policy at the Brazilian Observatório do Clima (Climate Observatory), who describe the latest text as “a great swindle” and “totally unacceptable.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
India is poised to further expand its defense budget over the next decade to sustain readiness for a potential two-front conflict with regional adversaries China and Pakistan, while enhancing its regional and global stature. Total defense spending, inclusive of pensions, is projected to reach $415.9 billion from 2025 to 2029, marking a compound annual growth […]
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
Western media’s human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.
Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.
A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
With just days to go before the November 5 presidential election, fears are growing that Republicans intend to interfere with the official results in order to install Donald Trump as president. At Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said he had a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson that would have a “big impact” on the outcome, though neither he nor Johnson elaborated on what that entailed. Elie Mystal, the justice correspondent for The Nation, says the secret is almost certainly a plan to force a contingent election, whereby no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College and the president is instead chosen by the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a slim majority. Mystal notes that even if Democrats challenge such an outcome, the case would still end up before a Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority that is likely to side with Trump.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky used a speech before the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday to forcefully reject China and Brazil’s renewed push for a peace plan for Russia and Ukraine, questioning their “true” motivations in making the proposal.
In his speech at the opening of the assembly on Tuesday, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva said Brazil and China wished to revive their six-point proposal to end the conflict, which was originally released in May. The two countries are reportedly set to host an event on the plan in New York on Friday with at least 20 other countries.
But Zelensky said the only acceptable peace plan was for Russia to withdraw its forces from his country and end the invasion, in line with the U.N. Charter’s principles of independence and territorial integrity.
“If someone in the world seeks alternatives to any of these points or tries to ignore any of them, it likely means they themselves want to do a part of what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing,” Zelensky said, slamming China and Brazil for suggesting a brokered peace.
“When the Chinese-Brazilian duo tries to grow into a choir of voices – with someone in Europe, with someone in Africa – saying something alternative to a full and just peace, the question arises: What is the true interest?” he said. “You will not boost your power at Ukraine’s expense.”
Zelensky previously rejected the Chinese-Brazilian plan as “destructive” given that it would require Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, which the Ukrainian president said would be tantamount to defeat.
Questionable source
It’s not the first time questions have been raised about China and Brazil’s motivations in pushing for a negotiated peace.
China has been repeatedly accused by the United States of materially aiding Putin’s war effort, with officials in Washington going as far as to say the invasion would not be sustainable without Beijing’s help.
Outside commentators have suggested that China is closely watching the situation between Russia and Ukraine given its own aspirations to invade Taiwan, which it similarly regards as a renegade province.
Chinese officials have rejected the claims, defended China’s right to continue trading with Russia and said Washington is the only power sending munitions into the conflict through its support for Ukraine.
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin meets with China’s President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) member states leaders’ summit in Astana on July 3, 2024. (Sergei GUNEYEV / POOL / AFP)
Brazil’s president, meanwhile, has also been accused of being too close with Putin, with whom he regularly speaks by telephone.
During his campaign to return to the Brazilian presidency, Lula called Zelensky “a bit weird.” He also accused him of not wanting to negotiate with Putin so the conflict could be prolonged and the former television star could spend more time in the global media speaking about it.
Further irking Zelensky, in April Lula also said that there was “no use” in talking about “who is right” or “who is wrong” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and that all that mattered was finding a peaceful outcome.
In his speech Wednesday, Zelensky said Putin was trying to use Russia’s power to return to a period of colonialism, and that previous victims of the practice should be the most outspoken critics.
“The world has already been through colonial wars and conspiracies of great powers at the expense of those who are smaller,” he said. “Every country – including China, Brazil, European nations, African nations, the Middle East – all understand why this must remain in the past.”
“Ukrainians will never accept – will never accept – why anyone in the world believes that such a brutal colonial past, which suits no one today can be imposed on Ukraine now instead of a normal, peaceful life.”
Edited by Joshua Lipes.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.
