Ireland’s recognition of the state of Palestine has been enthusiastically welcomed at home and (mostly) abroad as a positive contribution to the future of Palestine. Needless to say, this development did not take place in a vacuum though, for the most part, it is being presented as if it did.
The scale and endurance of the pro-Palestinian campaigns in Ireland both historically, and specifically in response to the Israeli/US barbarism in Gaza, is probably not given the recognition it deserves. However, the result was dramatic: the Irish government was forced to take a position – a position that successive Irish governments had resolutely refused to entertain.
That is one side of the story. The problem for pro-Palestinian campaigners and supporters is that Ireland is a perfect example of a term not often used these days – Ireland is a banana republic. So much so, that the Irish government does not get out of bed in the morning without first checking with its major ‘partner’ – the United States of America.
This is where internal political considerations clashed with Ireland’s unswerving allegiance to the US. There now was a problem and it had to be solved. So, for our brave leaders in the Irish government, it then became a matter of how to manage this particular problem.
Enter the US State Department. From then on, Ireland stayed firmly within the boundaries allowed – as it always does. And that is what it came down to: what would Ireland be allowed to say or do. The statement provided by the Irish government, here if read carefully, clearly shows what those boundaries are.
It did not stop there: on 28 May, the day the Palestinian flag flew outside Leinster House (Irish Parliament) the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris stated “And Europe could be doing a hell of a lot more, Europe needs to do a lot more in relation to this.” Europe but not the United States of America! Know your boundaries and stick to them – or else.
As reported by Politico:
Dublin was determined to take this step without damaging its typically strong relations with U.S. politicians — particularly Biden’s White House.
Consequently, Irish Department of Foreign Affairs diplomats ensured that their U.S. counterparts in the State Department were speedily briefed on every conversation the Irish had with like-minded European governments — Belgium, Malta, Norway, Slovenia and above all Spain — as they pursued a joint plan to recognize Palestinian statehood, the official said.
This included face-to-face discussions with senior National Security Council officials at the White House in March as part of St. Patrick’s Day-related diplomacy; multiple phone calls between Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, who led the Irish initiative, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and final calls to Washington following the Irish Cabinet’s formal signoff on its decision Tuesday night.
“We couldn’t have been clearer in spelling out our intentions weeks, months in advance to make sure there were no surprises or needless suspicions raised in Washington,” said the Irish official, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Apparently, the US side was quite chuffed with the outcome: “They tried to make enough of a group so that it would make a splash, but in our view, it’s more like a ripple.”
In the end, the Irish statement announcing its intentions quite clearly shows that the Irish position soon emerged as an Irish government/US State Department position or, in short, a US State Department position.
Let’s start with the “hostages”:
“It is long past time for a ceasefire, for the unconditional release of hostages and for unhindered access for humanitarian aid.”
and,
“Let me be clear that Ireland condemns the barbaric massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7th last. Civilians attacked and murdered. Hostages taken in the most brutal and terrifying of circumstances, including a young Israeli-Irish child.
We call again for all hostages to be immediately returned to the arms of their loved ones.”
Harris is referring here to more than one hundred Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Nowhere in his statement does he even refer to the 5,200 Palestinians hostages, including at least 170 children held up to October 6, 2023, nor to the 7,350 more hostages taken by Israel since that date.
Move on to “children”:
“Children are innocent. The children of Israel. The children of Palestine. They deserve peace.”
Look at the order. Yet, the killings are in a different order – 10,651 Palestinians were slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to 7 October 2023, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.
The figures since 7 October are so horrific that they cannot even be accurately counted – on the Palestinian side. That is before we even start to think about starvation and denial of medical and other essential requirements, the destruction of medical facilities, injuries and the unrelenting terror.
Now we get to the “two state solution”:
“It is a statement of unequivocal support for a two-State solution – the only credible path to peace and security for Israel, for Palestine and for their peoples.” (note the order again)
“A two-state solution is the only way out of the generational cycles of violence, retaliation and resentment, where so many wrongs can never make a right.”
It is not for me to determine what is best for the Palestinian people but when the chief enablers of the barbarism against the Palestinian people tell you that there is only one solution – a two state solution – it is legitimate to constructively analyse that position. However, when the Irish government – in unison with the chief enablers of the barbarism – insists that this is the only solution, it becomes an imperative.
The fact is that large numbers of Palestinians have always, and still, oppose the Oslo Accords and the concept of a two state solution. Indeed, a large part of the reason for the successful election of Hamas in Gaza was its opposition to those concepts. Yet, the Irish government and the US government insist this is the ONLY way forward.
However, Ulster says NO! Ooops, I have strayed into that other unresolved statehood issue – the little matter of the British-occupied six counties in the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland.
Sorry, Israel says NO! NEVER! to a two state solution with Netanyahu boasting that “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.”
Despite the clearly stated and unequivocal refusal of Israel to even consider a two state solution, the Irish and US governments insist that it is the ONLY option. So, Ireland has now recognised the state of Palestine but retains the right to tell them what to do in step with the US government telling them what to do: the-two-state-no-other-option option is the only option.
The real irony is that in fighting so hard for Palestinian statehood and sovereignty, the Irish government – as usual – entirely sacrificed its own statehood and sovereignty as it crawled on its belly to the US State Department begging for some understanding for the little pickle it found itself in. The fact is that the Irish government would not dare step one inch outside the well-established boundaries that have been set for it by the US authorities.
Yet, the Irish government is successfully strutting its stuff – virtually unchallenged – about how brave it is, what a wonderful defender of the oppressed it is, what a promoter of peace it is as it crawls back from its ‘consultations’ with the worst offender of all those concepts the world has ever known.
Now that Palestine is sorted, perhaps we could look to seeking statehood and sovereignty for Ireland? The farcical position of the Irish government leading a charge on Palestinian statehood while simultaneously begging forgiveness and understanding from the despots who rule the US (and who think they rule the world) and with an on-going British occupation of part of our country, has not entirely gone unnoticed. One thing is certain, the Irish government will not lead that charge.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law. Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.
In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest. Those regarding the Hamas trio of its leader Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and the organisation’s political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, would have left most Western governments untroubled.
From Khan’s perspective, the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will focus on policies of starvation, the intentional causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, intentional attacks on the Palestinian population, including extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.
The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is not what it claims to be. Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering. The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”
The reaction from the Israeli side was always expected. Netanyahu accused the prosecutor of “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”. He rejected “with disgust the comparison of the prosecutor in The Hague between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas”.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also found “any attempt to draw parallels between these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel – working to fulfil its duty to defend and protect its citizens in adherence to the principles of international law […] outrageous and cannot be accepted by anyone.”
Israel’s staunchest ally, sponsor and likewise self-declared democracy (it is, in fact, a republic created by those suspicious of that system of government), was also there to hold the fort against such legal efforts. US President Joe Biden’s statement on the matter was short and brusque: “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”
The democracy-as-purity theme, one used as a seeming exculpation of all conduct in war, surfaced in the May 21 exchange between Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Was the secretary, inquired Risch, amenable to supporting legislation to combat the ICC “sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent, legitimate, democratic judicial system”? (No consideration was given to the sustained efforts by the Netanyahu government to erode judicial independence in passing legislation to curb the discretion of courts to strike down government decisions.)
The response from Blinken was agreeable to such an aim. There was “no question we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrong-headed decision.” As things stand, a bill is already warming the lawmaking benches with a clear target. Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act would obligate the President to block the entry of ICC officials to the US, revoke any current US visas such officials hold, and prohibit any property transactions taking place in the US. To avoid such measures, the court must cease all cases against “protected persons of the United States and its allies”.
The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer similarly saw the prosecutor’s efforts as a pairing of incongruous parties. “The fact however that the leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas whose declared goal is the extinction of the State of Israel is being mentioned at the same time as the democratically elected representatives of that very State is non-comprehensible.”
From the outset, such statements do two things. The first is to conjure up a false distinction – that of equivalence – something absent in the prosecutor’s application. The acts alleged are relevant to each specified party and are specific to them. The second is a corollary: that democracies do not break international law and certainly not when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, most notably when committed against a certain type of foe. The more savage the enemy, the greater the latitude in excusing vengeful violence. That remains, essentially, the cornerstone of Israel’s defence argument at the International Court of Justice.
Such arguments echo an old trope. The two administrations of George W. Bush spilled much ink in justifying the torture, enforced disappearance and renditions of terror suspects to third countries during its declared Global War on Terror. Lawyers in both the White House and Justice Department gave their professional blessing, adopting an expansive definition of executive power in defiance of international laws and protections. Such sacred documents as the Geneva Conventions could be defied when facing Islamist terrorism.
Lurking beneath such justifications is the snobbery of exceptionalism, the conceit of power. Civilised liberal democracies, when battling the forces of a named barbarism, are to be treated as special cases in the world of international humanitarian law. The ICC prosecutor begs to differ.
The post A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The merging of Zionist propaganda and anti-China hysteria should embarrass its proponents, but apparently there’s a market for this conspiratorial drivel in the “post-truth” era promoted by the far right. They want us to believe the paid foreign agents we should be concerned about are students in $40 tents calling for university divestment, not those working for a foreign-focused lobby with billions of dollars.
Last week National Post columnist John Ivison claimed the Chinese Communist Party was funding the popular uprising against Canada’s role in enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Of course he supplied absolutely no evidence. The front-page article headlined “Chinese links to protests fit pattern” began: “the public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada has already established that China tried to meddle in the last two general election campaigns. But, if a new report into the funding of the anti-Israel movement in North America is to be believed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also linked to the protests that are disrupting cities and campuses across the continent.” Notice the hedging? If it “is to be believed”. In other words, there is absolutely no evidence that he is willing to cite.
On X, I responded, “A well-financed foreign focused lobby has employed every tactic short of assassination to scuttle a popular uprising against genocide in Gaza and Johnny boy claims those who don’t want Canada to enable the slaughter are a Chinese Communist Party front. You are beyond ridiculous.”
Ivison retorted, “What’s wrong, Yves? Are your paymasters unhappy at any scrutiny of their funding of Canada’s legion of useful idiots?” CBC and Globe and Mail commentator Andrew Coyne and former Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein retweeted Ivison’s idiocy to which I responded: “You haven’t a scintilla of evidence I’ve been funded by any foreign, corporate or wealthy interest. You on other hand are paid by a paper set up by Conrad Black and currently owned by a US hedge fund. Are you ashamed of promoting genocide and being such a sycophant of power?”
Since campaigning against Canada’s role in overthrowing Haiti’s elected government 20 years ago, I’ve repeatedly been accused of receiving money from Haitian, Venezuelan, Russian, Iranian and Chinese officials. It’s common to claim that internationalists and anti-imperialists are funded by foreign enemies. In a bid to delegitimize the anti-genocide movement, especially the student divestment encampments, there’s been a burst of these claims recently. In “Hidden hand funds Jew-hating protests, rallies, encampments”, Warren Kinsella makes a mockery of himself. The Toronto Sun commentary concluded, “The rest of us know the truth: the Jew-hating protests, rallies and encampments we are seeing are funded, in whole or in part, by outside interests who do not wish to reveal themselves. They are the hidden hand. But the rest of us will not rest until the hidden hand is exposed.”
The imaginary “hidden hand” versus documented apartheid lobby truth. It’s easy to trace at least part of the mammoth sums the apartheid lobby has used to shape Canadian opinion since all taxpayers subsidize the registered “charities” behind their propaganda. Montreal’s Jewish federation has $2 billion in assets. The other federations have hundreds of millions of dollars more. (The federations receive tens of millions of dollars in government grants and tens of millions more in subsidy through tax receipts they offer to donors).
The federations fund a bevy of genocidal organizations and their official advocacy arm is the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. CIJA has a slew of ties to Israel with its top lobbyist, David Cooper, a long-time press officer at the Israeli Embassy. The Jewish Federations of Canada (JFC) and its United Israel Appeal (UIA) calls “the government of Israel” one of its “key strategic partners … that act as agents in the delivery of programs in Israel.” Between 1991 and 2022 UIA received over $1.5 billion in donations, which largely came from the federations.
At a broader level, Canada’s Jewish Federations have long been formally tied to the Jewish Agency for Israel (Jewish Agency for Palestine until 1948). Its website notes, “Canadian Federations are engaged in unique alliances with the Jewish Agency for Israel” and “founded in 1929, the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) is a primary agent for JFC-UIA in carrying out our mandate.”
The Jewish Agency for Israel effectively became Israel’s government in 1948 with long-time head David Ben-Gurion its first prime minister. Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, Moshe Sharett, subsequently led the Jewish Agency while current Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, stepped down as head of the Jewish Agency to take that position. Today the Jewish Agency for Israel is a parastatal organization that seeks to further Judaize Israel, especially far-flung areas.
No corporate media ever discusses the federations’ formal ties to Israel. Nor do we hear about the huge sums spent on pro-apartheid campaigning in Canada.
But we know one thing for certain: The paid foreign agents for Israel and its genocide aren’t sleeping in $40 tents.
The post Yes, Foreign Agents Try to Shape Your Opinion about Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:
* Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.
* Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.
* For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel’s favour have been true for decades.
* Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.
* Israel has laid waste to Gaza’s entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.
* Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.
* Israel is actively starving Gaza’s population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.
* Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.
* Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.
* And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.
Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Propaganda by omission is a dominant feature of the ‘mainstream’ news media. Indeed, it is a requirement. Rather than serving the public interest by fully exposing the brutal machinations of power, state-corporate media shield Western governments and their allies from scrutiny and focus the public’s attention on the crimes of Official Enemies.
Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is but the latest example. Consider the dearth of media coverage given to the compelling and shocking testimony provided by leading British surgeon, Professor Nick Maynard, who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital.
Maynard left Gaza just before Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on 7 May. He had been operating on Palestinian patients for two weeks and he gave a very disturbing account of what he had observed.
The first topic he highlighted was ‘the direct targeting of healthcare workers’ by the Israeli military, describing how ‘hundreds have been killed’ and ‘hundreds have been abducted’. Maynard had personally worked with one young doctor and one young nurse who had been abducted and held in captivity for 45 days and 60 days, respectively. They both gave him ‘very graphic and stark descriptions of their daily torture at the hands of the Israeli defence force’. He described the experience of hearing their stories as ‘extremely harrowing’.
Maynard had also been to Gaza over Christmas and New Year where he worked at Al-Aqsa hospital. He “spent the whole two weeks operating all the time on major explosive injuries to the abdomen and to the chest. And it was really nonstop.”
His visit was unexpectedly cut short in early January when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ordered the medical staff, along with the hospital’s 600 patients, to evacuate the hospital. A few British newspaper reports that included accounts by Maynard and colleagues were published at the time on the “nightmare” of working in “one of ‘Gaza’s last functioning hospitals” (Daily Mirror, 18 January, 2024), “The single worst thing I’ve seen” (Daily Telegraph, 12 January, 2024), and “British surgeon haunted by Gaza horrors pledges to go back” (The Times, 4 February, 2024).
In March, the Guardian reported that a delegation of American and British doctors had arrived in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration that the Israeli military was systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes. Maynard was quoted, accusing the IDF of committing “appalling atrocities”, although the article did not address these in depth.
He said:
“The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.”
He continued:
“It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”
According to Maynard, Israel’s strategy of targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities is intended to drive the Palestinians from their homes:
“It persuades the local population to leave. If a hospital has been dismantled, if the locals see there is no medical care available and see the disrupted infrastructure, it’s yet another factor that drives them south.” [At that time, Israel had designated the south of Gaza a “safe zone” for Palestinians to seek refuge.]
In an interview with Nick Ferrari of London-based LBC radio on 2 April, Maynard made further shocking revelations. The timing of the interview was linked to the IDF having just destroyed another hospital, Al-Shifa, where Maynard had also previously worked. Around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces.
Maynard told Ferrari:
“Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].”
He added:
“And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.”
Ferrari then asked:
“You believe executed by whom, doctor?”
Maynard:
“By the Israeli Defence Force.
Ferrari:
“Why would they seek to execute surgeons and medical professionals?”
Maynard:
“Well, they’ve been doing it since October the 7th. Over 450 healthcare workers have been killed. Friends of mine that I’ve worked with over the years. Many have been abducted as well, and nothing has been heard of them since. So, there is no doubt in my mind that – I can bear witness to this from my time at Al-Aqsa hospital and from talking to people that there has been direct targeting of the healthcare system in Gaza, direct targeting of hospitals and multiple killings of healthcare workers.”
Maynard also made clear that neither he, nor any of his colleagues, ever saw evidence of Hamas using hospitals or healthcare facilities as bases for their operations, despite numerous Israeli claims to the contrary.
BBC Silence
“Mainstream” media showed minimal interest in this highly credible testimony from a British surgeon on Israel’s deliberate targeting of healthcare workers, including actual execution of surgeons. As far as we can see, there is nothing about Maynard’s testimony exposing these executions on the BBC News website.
An article on the Guardian website on 7 April did cover Maynard’s testimony about targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure, but made no mention of his statement that Palestinian surgeons had been executed by Israeli soldiers. Nor was it mentioned anywhere else in the entirety of the British national press.
The Telegraph carried an interview with Maynard on 12 January in which he said:
“here can be certainly no doubt in my mind from what I’ve recently witnessed that [Israel] are directly targeting healthcare structures with a view to completely disabling the healthcare system in Gaza.”
The Telegraph appears not to have reported Maynard’s subsequent claim that he personally knew surgeons who have since been executed by Israeli soldiers.
On 13 May, International Nurses Day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 500 medical personnel had been killed by Israel since 7 October. Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a paediatric neurologist and co-founder of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, said that the only way Israel could ‘justify’ these killings would be if they see these healthcare workers not as humans, but as “human animals”. As readers may recall, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant infamously described his Palestinian enemies as “human animals”.
Of his most recent trip, Maynard said that:
“the very strong narrative of the patients I was treating over the last two weeks were those with terrible infective complications as a direct result of malnutrition, and this was very stark indeed.”
He gave a graphic insight into the hellish conditions:
“And I operated on many patients in the last two weeks who had awful complications from their abdominal surgery related to inadequate nutrition, and particularly those with [the] abdominal wall breaking down. So, literally their intestines end up hanging outside. And the intestinal repairs that have been carried out to deal with the damage to the bowels leaking, so their bowel contents leaking out from different parts of the abdomen, covering their bodies, covering their beds.”
He drew particular attention to:
“The lack of resources to deal with these inadequate numbers of colostomy bags, wound management devices and nutritional support.”
Maynard explained the consequences for patients:
“They get this vicious cycle of malnutrition, infection, wounds breaking down, more infection, more malnutrition. So, it’s devastating and we will see far more of that over the coming months.”
He gave examples of two young female patients he had treated: Tala who was 16 and Lama who was 18, both of whom had survivable injuries. Tragically, they both died “as a direct result of malnutrition”.
This was yet more shocking and credible testimony from an experienced British consultant surgeon. It should have been headline news across the British press and broadcasting outlets. But searches of the Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, together with Google searches, reveal minimal “mainstream” coverage: one article in the Independent.
If this had been evidence against “Putin’s Russia” or “Assad’s Syria”, it would have generated huge headlines, in-depth reporting and anguished commentary across all major news media. Once again, we see the insidiously corrupt phenomenon of propaganda by omission.
It is noteworthy that, last November, the BBC News website did feature Maynard, “who’s been travelling to the Gaza Strip and West Bank for more than a decade.” Six months ago, he was once again on “standby to go and work in operating theatres with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians”. With remarkable courage, he told the BBC:
“I think there is fear, apprehension, not knowing what one would find, but I think the other motives for doing so… are so powerful that they outweigh everything else. I consider it a huge privilege to be in a position to help these people who need help more than most of us can possibly understand.”
Now that Maynard has returned from Gaza with horrific accounts, not least of the murder of healthcare workers by the Israeli military, the BBC appears not in the least interested. When we pointed this out via X (formerly Twitter), directly challenging John Neal, editor of BBC News at One, Six and Ten, and Paul Royall, executive editor of the BBC News Channel, the public response was huge. Our social media outreach is routinely suppressed by the deliberately obscure algorithms of Facebook and X. But this particular tweet spread widely by our standards, being shared 740 times at the time of writing. Shamefully, there has been no response from the BBC.
When Genocide Is Merely “War”
In the meantime, BBC News persists in labelling the Gaza genocide as the ‘Israel-Gaza war’. The day after it was reported that almost half a million Palestinians had fled Rafah in the south of Gaza, despite having previously been designated a “safe zone” by Israel, as discussed above, the BBC failed to follow up on the story.
One was presumably supposed to imagine that this huge number of people was no longer in danger: at risk of being bombed or dying under Israeli-imposed hunger, malnutrition and disease.
That same week, the BBC News website had as many as four ‘Live’ feeds running simultaneously. Not one of them focused on the Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza. This is truly remarkable. Has there been a BBC directive from senior management not to give too much attention to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians? Where are the BBC whistleblowers who can let the public know what’s going on inside the corporation?
A vanishingly rare exception appeared on 24 October 2023, when BBC correspondent Rami Ruhayem – a former journalist for the Associated Press, who has worked as a journalist and producer for BBC Arabic and the BBC World Service since 2005 – sent a letter to the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie:
“Dear Tim,
I am writing to raise the gravest possible concerns about the coverage of the BBC, especially on English outlets, of the current fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions.
“It appears to me that information that is highly significant and relevant is either entirely missing or not being given due prominence in coverage.”
The emphasis now is emphatically on “missing”. It seems the global student and other protests have prompted the BBC to attempt to limit public dissent.
By contrast, BBC journalists can be quick to respond when they feel they have been subjected to unjust criticism. On 13 May, we retweeted a clip from Saul Staniforth, a media activist with a large following on X, about Israel banning Al Jazeera. Staniforth had included a quote from Sebastian Usher, a BBC News Middle East analyst:
“Al Jazeera – I think many people, if they DO watch it, WOULD see it as some kind of propaganda.”
We asked:
“And how do you think many people see BBC News?”
Clearly piqued, Usher contacted us the following day to say that his quote had been taken out of context. He said it was a direct response during a live interview to a question on the likely reaction by Israelis to the closing of Al Jazeera. He considered Staniforth’s tweet and our follow-up seriously misleading and the exact opposite of the tenor of his reporting on the issue.
We asked him which words he had used to express solidarity with Al Jazeera, or to speak out for press freedom and free speech. He declined to provide such a statement, saying that as a BBC journalist he was unable to do so in a public forum. Usher added that in his reporting he stressed that Al Jazeera sees its mission as righting what it believes is imbalance on Gaza reporting in international media by giving more space to Palestinian voices and voices on the ground.
We were happy to include the points he had made, which we did via Facebook and X. Usher responded to our very reasonable response with a grudging “Ok”.
It is worth noting that Usher strongly objected to being “quoted out of context” while working for a media organisation clearly trying to suppress public outrage at an ongoing genocide by reducing coverage.
Moreover, the essential observation we made stands: many people at home and abroad regard BBC News as an outlet of western propaganda. Its abject performance during the Gaza genocide – “the Israel-Gaza war”, as the state-mandated broadcaster puts it – is ample proof.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Image: researched/acquired by @tibettruth
These Tibetan children are from Sangri in Lhoka region of occupied Tibet. Here they are displaying paintings upon the theme of; ‘forging a strong sense of Chinese national community’, little wonder they produced such propaganda imagery. But that is function of ‘schools’ established across Tibet’s lands, they are not seeking to educate, but indoctrinate. A calculated program of brainwashing to eliminate any trace of Tibetan cultural and national identity, it is the genocide of a people and their culture.
This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.
[This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.]
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things.
First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a horrifying price for making the Palestinian experience of genocide visible to western audiences over the past seven months.
Israel has killed a tenth of their number – some 100 journalists – as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel’s has been most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.
Second, we must shame the western media – not least the BBC – who have so utterly betrayed their Palestinian colleagues by failing to properly report the destruction of Gaza, or name it as a genocide.
The BBC aired only the briefest coverage of South Africa’s devastating case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January – a case so powerful the court has put Israel on trial for genocide. A fact you would barely know from the BBC’s reporting.
By contrast, the corporation cleared the schedules to present in full Israel’s hollow legal response.
The BBC’s double standards are all the more glaring if we recall how it reported Ukraine, also invaded by a hostile army – Russia’s.
Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv’s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.
BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post – apparently approvingly – a diagram showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.
Two years later, in its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.
It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks – even though those soldiers, unlike Russia’s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.
Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.
But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren’t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.
The same media that celebrated families taking in Ukrainian refugees has willingly conspired in the smearing of those whose only crime is that they wish to stop the slaughter of 15,000-plus Palestinian children in Gaza.
There is apparently nothing heroic about opposing Israel’s genocide, even if opposing Russia’s invasion is still treated as a badge of honour.
The media give politicians a free pass to vilify as an antisemite anyone outraged that UK weapons are being used to help kill, maim and orphan many, many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. That accusation assumes that every Jew supports this slaughter, and erases all those Jews standing alongside us today at this protest.
In the US, police forces are beating and arresting students who have peacefully called on their universities to stop investing in the arming of Israel’s genocide. When the police pulled back at UCLA, it was only to allow pro-Israel thugs to assault the students – again many of them Jews.
A clear war is being waged against the right to protest against a genocide. And in tandem, the media has declared a war on the English language.
The roles of aggressor and victim have been reversed. The BBC accused the students, encamped on university grounds, of “clashing” with pro-Israel groups that invaded the campus to violently attack them.
What explains these glaring inconsistencies, this gigantic failure by a media that’s supposed to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power.
Part of the answer is old-school racism. Ukrainains look like us, as some reporters let slip, and therefore deserve our solidarity. Palestinians, it seems, do not.
But there is another, more important answer. The establishment media isn’t really a watchdog on the abuse of power. It never was. It is a narrative factory, there to create stories that make those abuses of power possible.
State and billionaire-owned media achieve this goal through various sleights of hand.
First, they omit stories that might disrupt the core narrative.
The media’s script is a simple one:
What the West and its allies do is always well-meant, however horrific the outcomes.
And what the West does, however provocative or foolhardy, can never be cited as an explanation for what our “enemies” do.
No cause and no effect. They, whoever we select, are simply savage. They are evil. Theyare out to destroy civilisation. They must be stopped.
Nightly for weeks, I have watched the BBC news. If it were all I relied on, I would barely know that Israel is daily bombing the refugee camps of Rafah that are supposedly a “safe zone”.
Or that Israel continues to engineer a famine by blocking aid, and that Palestinians continue to die of hunger.
Or that the UK has actively assisted the creation of that famine by denying UNRWA funding.
Or that the protests to end the Gaza genocide – painted as terror-supporting and antisemitic – are backed by many, many Jews, some of them here today.
And of course, I would have little idea that Israel’s imprisonment and slaughter of Palestinians did not begin on October 7 with Hamas’ attack.
That’s because the BBC continues to ignore the siege of Gaza as the context for October 7 – just as it and the rest of the media largely ignored the 17-year siege throughout the years Israel was enforcing it.
If I relied on the BBC, I would not understand that what Israel is doing can be neither “retaliation”, nor a “war”. You can’t go to war, or retaliate, against a people whose territory you have been belligerently occupying and stealing for decades.
And when the media can no longer omit, it distracts – through strategies of deflection, misdirection and minimisation.
So when Gaza makes the news, as it rarely does now, it is invariably filtered through other lenses.
The focus is on interminable negotiations, on Israel’s plans for the “day after”, on the agonies of the hostages’ families, on the fears evoked by protest chants, on where to draw the line on free speech.
Anything to avoid addressing a genocide that’s been carried out in broad daylight for seven months.
In their defence, establishment journalists tell us that they have a duty to be impartial. Their critics, they say, do not understand how news operations work.
As a journalist who spent years working in major newsrooms, I can assure you this is a self-serving lie.
Just this week, an interview went viral of the Norway Broadcasting Corporation interviewing Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. Unlike on the BBC, Mencer’s lies did not pass unchallenged.
The Norwegian journalist spent 25 minutes unpicking his falsehoods and deceptions, one by one. It was revelatory to see an Israeli spokesperson’s claims stripped away, layer by layer, until he stood there naked, his lies exposed.
It can be done – if there is a will to do it.
Journalists at the BBC and the rest of the establishment media understand, however implicitly, that their job is to fail. It is to fail to investigate the genocide in Gaza. It is to fail to give voice to the powerless. It is to fail to provide context and aid understanding. It is to fail to show solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza being killed for their journalism.
Rather, the BBC’s role is to protect the political establishment from ever being held to account for their complicity in genocide.
The establishment media’s job is to create the impression of uncertainty, of doubt, of confusion – even when what is happening is crystal clear.
When one day, the World Court finally gets round to issuing a ruling on Israel’s genocide, our politicians and media will claim they could not have known, that they were misled, that they could not see clearly because events were shrouded by the “fog of war”.
Our job is to explode that lie, to deny them an alibi. It is to keep pointing out that the information was there from the start. They knew, if only because we told them.
And one day, if there is any justice, they will stand in the dock – at the Hague – their excuses stripped away.
The post Why the media have failed Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 26, 2024. Photo: Xinhua
A foreboding article was published on April 24. It was pointed out that China had provided a berth to a Russian ship Angara that is purportedly “tied to North Korea-Russia arms transfers.”
Reuters cited Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) – that boasts of itself to be “the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank” – which claims Angara, since August 2023, has transported “thousands of containers believed to contain North Korean munitions,” [italics added] to Russian ports.
Container ships transport containers, and along the way they dock in certain harbors. Until satellite photos have X-ray capability any speculation about what is inside a container will be just that: speculation. Discerning readers will readily pick up on this.
Despite China repeatedly coming out in favor of peace, Reuters, nonetheless, plays up US concerns over perceived support by Beijing for “Moscow’s war” (what Moscow calls a “special military operation”) in Ukraine.
And right on cue, US secretary-of-state Antony Blinken shows up in Beijing echoing a list of US concerns vis-à-vis China.
Blinken had public words for China: “In my meetings with NATO Allies earlier this month and with our G7 partners just last week, I heard that same message: fueling Russia’s defense industrial base not only threatens Ukrainian security; it threatens European security. Beijing cannot achieve better relations with Europe while supporting the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War. As we’ve told China for some time, ensuring transatlantic security is a core US interest. In our discussions today, I made clear that if China does not address this problem, we will.”
It would seem clear that the Taiwan Straits is a core China interest, no? Or is it only US core interests that matter?
Blinken: “I also expressed our concern about the PRC’s unfair trade practices and the potential consequences of industrial overcapacity to global and US markets, especially in a number of key industries that will drive the 21st century economy, like solar panels, electric vehicles, and the batteries that power them. China alone is producing more than 100 percent of global demand for these products, flooding markets, undermining competition, putting at risk livelihoods and businesses around the world.”
It sounds like sour grapes from the US that China’s R&D and manufacturing is out-competing the US. Take, for example, that the US sanctions Huawei while China allows Apple to sell its products unhindered in China. China has hit back at the rhetoric of “overcapacity.”
Blinken complained of “PRC’s dangerous actions in the South China Sea, including against routine Philippine maintenance operations and maritime operations near the Second Thomas Shoal. Freedom of navigation and commerce in these waterways is not only critical to the Philippines, but to the US and to every other nation in the Indo-Pacific and indeed around the world.”
Mentioning freedom of navigation implies that China is preventing such. Why is freedom of navigation in the South China Sea critical to the US? Second Thomas Shoal is a colonial designation otherwise known as Renai Jiao in China. The “routine Philippine maintenance operations and maritime operations” that Blinken speaks of are for a navy landing craft that was intentionally grounded by the Philippines in 1999. Since then, the Philippines has been intermittently resupplying its soldiers stationed there.
Blinken: “I reaffirmed the US’s ‘one China’ policy and stressed the critical importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
How does the US stationing US soldiers on the Chinese territory of Taiwan without approval from Beijing reaffirm the US’s commitment to a one-China policy? The Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 states “the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position.”
Blinken: “I also raised concerns about the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and democratic institutions as well as transnational repression, ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, and a number of individual human rights cases.”
Evidence of human rights abuses in Xinjiang? This is a definitive downplay from the previous allegations of a genocide against Uyghurs. It would be embarrassing to continue to accuse China of a genocide in Xinjiang due to a paucity of bodies which is a sine qua non for such a serious allegation as a genocide; meanwhile the US-armed Israel is blowing up hospitals and schools with ten-of-thousands of confirmed Palestinian civilian bodies. Even if there are human rights abuses in Xinjiang (which should be deplored were there condemnatory evidence), the US would still be morally assailable for its selective outrage.
Blinken: “I encouraged China to use its influence to discourage Iran and its proxies from expanding the conflict in the Middle East, and to press Pyongyang to end its dangerous behavior and engage in dialogue.”
Is the US militarily backing a genocide of Palestinians a “conflict.” Are US military maneuvers in the waters near North Korea “safe behavior”?
Blinken responded to a question: “But now it is absolutely critical that the support that [China’s] providing – not in terms of weapons but components for the defense industrial base – again, things like machine tools, microelectronics, where it is overwhelmingly the number-one supplier to Russia. That’s having a material effect in Ukraine and against Ukraine, but it’s also having a material effect in creating a growing [sic] that Russia poses to countries in Europe and something that has captured their attention in a very intense way.”
Are the ATACMS, Javelins, HIMARS, Leopard tanks, drones, artillery, Patriot missile defense, etc supposed to be absolutely uncritical and have no material effect on the fighting in Ukraine? And who is posing a threat to who? European countries are funding and arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia not vice versa? It sounds perversely Orwellian.
*****
From Biden to Harris to Yellen to Raimondo to Sullivan to Blinken, US officials again and again try to browbeat and put down their Chinese colleagues.
At the opening meeting on 18 March 2021 of the US-China talks in Anchorage, Alaska, the arrogance of Blinken and the US was put on notice by the rebuke of Chinese foreign affairs official Yang Jiechi: “[T]he US does not have the qualification to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” It doesn’t seem to have sunk in for the American side.
The Russia-China relationship is solid. China’s economy is growing strongly. Scores of countries are clamoring to join BRICS+ and dedollarization is well underway. Yet, the US continues to try to bully the world’s largest – and still rapidly growing – economy. This strategy appears to affirm the commonly referred to aphorism about the definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
The post Is US Officialdom Insane? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.
― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit
“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.
Everything becomes entertainment fodder.
As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.
Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.
This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.
Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.
Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”
You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.
However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.
This has been in the works for a long time.
Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.
In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.
If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.
In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”
This is mind-control in its most sinister form.
The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.
The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.
Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.
This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:
“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.
All of the distracting, disheartening, disorienting news you are bombarded with daily is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).
“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.
So where does that leave us?
Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.
A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.
If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.
The post The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.
Everything becomes entertainment fodder.
As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.
Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.
This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.
Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.
Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”
You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.
However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.
This has been in the works for a long time.
Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.
In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.
If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.
In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”
This is mind-control in its most sinister form.
The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.
The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.
This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.
If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
COMMENTARY: By Malcolm Evans
Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is carefully managed to always reflect a pro-Israel bias.
Forget the humanity of 120,000 dead and wounded Palestinians and countless others facing famine and disease sheltering in tents or what’s left of destroyed buildings, even internationally recognised terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” are discouraged, along with “slaughter”, “massacre” and “carnage”.
Though such language restrictions are claimed to be in the interests of “fairness”, an earlier investigation showed that between October 7 and November 14, The Times used the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.
By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.
This carefully managed use of words is deliberate and insidious and, as Jack Tame’s interview with Israel’s ambassador on last Sunday’s Q&A programme showed, even our most experienced media people are not immune to its effects.
Here is our interview with Israel Ambassador, Ran Yaakoby. From this morning’s @NZQandA https://t.co/pSHdxpccre
— Jack Tame (@jacktame) April 20, 2024
From his introduction, “establishing” that the genocide taking place in Gaza had its genesis in the October 7 attack by Hamas, and not in the Nakba of 1948, Jack Tame and TVNZ facilitated an almost hour-long presentation of pro-Israel propaganda, justifying its atrocities.
For its appalling lack of balance, including Tame’s obsequious allowance and nodding agreement with the Israeli ambassador’s thoroughly discredited claims of Hamas atrocities; “beheadings” “necrophilia” and for describing Israelis’ as being “butchered” (five times he used the word) while Palestinians were merely “killed”, this was a new low in our media’s record of bias when it comes to the presentation of the facts about the Palestine/Israel conflict.
In the very week that we prepare to remember the horrific sacrifices made in previous wars and even as Israel‘s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians brings us closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, that TVNZ should have, pre-recorded and so had time to edit, such a disgraceful presentation is simply appalling — and heads should roll.
Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
With regular maintenance stuff lasts longer, but eventually, in spite of every effort, things break down: the washing machine stops washing, the car won’t start, the mobile phone refuses to connect to the internet.
Socio-economic-political systems also collapse; shaped by an ideology of some kind, they are, like all ‘isms’, limited, and divisive. Looking at The State of the World it is clear that the systems that govern our lives and the modes of living they support are breaking down, fragmenting. The signs are many and varied.
Autocratic regimes are on the rise and many democratic governments, influenced by right wing extremism, are adopting policies and attitudes more usually associated with autocracies.
The values and moral codes that have been in place for generations, some unspoken, culturally shared and absorbed, others formally enshrined in international law, are being ignored, discarded or distorted. The ‘Rules Based International Order’, so-called, is made up of a range of laws or conventions, which underpin geo-political engagement: The UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and UN General Assembly Resolutions among other texts.
Self righteous hypocritical western politicians routinely refer to the Rule of Law or International Humanitarian Law, particularly when criticising their enemies (Russia, Iran, China etc), not so much when they or their allies act illegally. The double standards of western governments knows no limits and is a major cause of global destabilisation.
As systems, structures and animating principles disintegrate, extremism and intolerance grow, polarities intensify, the threat of armed conflict and fragmentation expands; fear and uncertainty increases.
And while the underlying causes remain unchecked, the everyday consequences of disintegration deepen and become more pronounced: the environmental emergency, armed conflict/war, poverty/hunger, displacement of people, social alienation and economic inequality, are some of the major effects. Interconnected complex issues resulting from behaviour and attitudes flowing from The Ideology of Greed, which underpins the socio-political systems and the institutions of control; creaking outdated models that are incapable of creating solutions to the crises, no matter how much they are manipulated.
Take climate change for example, clearly the greatest challenge facing humanity. Climate change is the consequence of the fossil fuel economy and endless consumerism; overwhelmingly rich western nations consumerism. Along with the wider environmental emergency, climate change is caused by behavior flowing from a reductive view of life that prizes individual happiness above all else; happiness, which is, in fact, nothing more than pleasure, that can be achieved, the advocates preach, through the accumulation of things or experiences.
This deeply materialistic approach to life, which, far from bringing happiness, actually guarantees discontent, is integral to the socio-economic system. Constant consumption is demanded, and it is consumption, with its insatiable sucking in of energy (and people) and churning out of waste, that is fuelling climate change, has polluted the air, water and soil, and contributed to the creation of societies rife with unhealthy unhappy people.
Curbing climate change, reducing waste and curtailing pollution requires an economy of sufficiency not excess as we have now. An economy, rooted in social justice and environmental responsibility. A dramatic reduction in consumption is essential – in rich nations at least – and a shift to ethical business practices. All of which is incompatible within the suffocating web of Neo-Liberalism.
If reducing climate change and saving the planet is not reason enough to change the socio-economic-political order, how about ending war?
In order for peace to be realised, social justice and freedom must prevail; this means ending all forms of exploitation and discrimination, inequality and injustice. Such sane measures are impossible within a system wedded to money, to competition and greed, and unthinkable while short-term self-interest is the driving factor behind the actions of governments, corporations and many individuals.
Peace also requires that the Military Industrial Complex and all military alliances, including Nato, be dismantled, again unimaginable within the confines of the current economic order.
As everything breaks down and frays, including the nervous systems and mental health of many people, the inadequacies of the present structures become increasingly apparent. This includes the existing forms of parliamentary democracy, which is non-representative, particularly within societies that are increasingly diverse.
If the slide into further chaos, including the possibility of a major war and complete environmental collapse is to be avoided, fundamental change is desperately needed. Both structural change and a change in values and attitudes, which will lead to changes in behaviour. Systemic changes designed with the aim of achieving universally championed principles: peace, social justice, real democracy and freedom.
People throughout the world are desperate for such changes, the men and women in power, less so. Their resistance comes from the recognition that such a shift would inevitably result in the privilege and power they currently enjoy being swept aside.
The choice before us is clear: maintain the status quo, continue along the existing path, which is narrowing to a point of greater extremism, intolerance and conflict and suffer, or unite, reject all forms of division and re-imagine society.
Humanity has faced such choices many times over long ages, has routinely made the wrong decisions and we are living with the disastrous effects. But now, at this moment in time, the consequences of our collective decisions are far reaching in a way that was not the case in the recent or distant past.
These are extremely uncertain dangerous times. Transitional times for sure, but transitioning to what, to a more extreme, dystopian version of the present, or transitional towards a more just peaceful world?
The post Disintegration and Choice first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In this new episode of New Politics, we explore the pressing concerns impacting Australians today. Starting with the grocery and supermarkets sector, we analyse the interim report from the Food and Grocery Code Review which highlights the significant power imbalance favouring major supermarkets like Coles, Woolworths, and Aldi. We discuss the implications of their unchecked practices on small suppliers and the urgent need for stricter enforcement of the Grocery Code.
We also shed light on Australia’s housing crisis, focusing on the alarming rate of unoccupied housing and the contentious debate over using superannuation for home purchases. Governments have a habit of exacerbating these kinds of issues: first home owner grants were politically popular but made the problem worse, and restrictive policies on local zoning block the supply of new dwellings. We explore the potential repercussions of these policies on the housing market and the broader economy.
The Institute of Public Affairs is an insidious organisation that is the conduit between the Murdoch empire and the Liberal Party and it has inflicted much damage on the social fabric of Australian society—it’s now running a campaign against fact-checking organisations for what it claims is “left-wing bias” and we look at the broader implications for disinformation and political bias in media. The IPA is all for free speech, but only when that freedom is favourable to its political agenda: for everyone else; it’s sit down, shut up and do as you’re told. The true hallmark of modern conservative politics: just keep lying; the public will eventually believe it.
And finally, we address the new culture war and political uproar surrounding the appointment of Sam Mostyn as the new Governor–General, examining the reactions from News Corporation and other conservative political figures.
Song listing:
We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.
The post Lost in the supermarkets, the housing crisis, factchecking the IPA and the war against the new Governor-General appeared first on New Politics.
This post was originally published on New Politics.
After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.
Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.
With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.
But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.
Israel deeply regrets the tragic incident which claimed the lives of seven humanitarian aid workers.
Our hearts go out to their families and to their home countries.
The IDF is conducting a swift and transparent investigation and we will make our findings public.
Israel…
— Benjamin Netanyahu – ?????? ?????? (@netanyahu) April 2, 2024
Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.
In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.
Not this time.
Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”
Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.
When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were“indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?
'It could've been our missiles that killed them.'
@NickFerrariLBC calls for the suspension of arms sales to Israel after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza killed seven aid workers, including three Brits. pic.twitter.com/HK4PfHy2JU— LBC (@LBC) April 3, 2024
Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”
The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.
A salutary equation indeed.
British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.
But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.
British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.
But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.
Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.
They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.
Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.
Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.
But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Israel needed to take firmer action.
The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.
This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the region to protect its volunteers, while Israel formally banned the group from accessing the occupied territories.
Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.
Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.
The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.
With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.
The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.
The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.
That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.
Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.
The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.
The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.
Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.
And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.
This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.
Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.
Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.
The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.
WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.
Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.
Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.
Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.
The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.
Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.
Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.
According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.
Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.
Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.
An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.
Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”
That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.
Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.
Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”
This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.
Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.
If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.
Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.
Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.
Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.
That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.
Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.
Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.
What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.
But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.
The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.
The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.
His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.
Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.
Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.
Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.
Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.
And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.
Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.
Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.
Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.
Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.
Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.
Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.
Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.
The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.
The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.
Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.
Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.
The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.
Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.
Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.
Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.
These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.
The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.
The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.
What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.
Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.
Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.
Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.
Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.
Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.
The BBC and other media outlets keep revisiting the crimes Hamas committed on October 7, but have failed to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens that day, often in grotesque fashion.
My latest article can be read here: https://t.co/MHxdUxRrCV
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 15, 2023
The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.
But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.
It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.
First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October – and those it did not – have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.
The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.
More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.
Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.
All the signs are in place that, once again, Israel is seriously considering a massive ethnic cleansing operation of Palestinians, conducted at lightning speed and with US assistance.
My latest on Gaza: https://t.co/HNzFt6xERK
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 1, 2023
True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.
Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.
And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.
No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves – were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.
The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.
Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.
The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.
The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza.
The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.
The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout – and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.
Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.
The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.
They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.
As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned.
Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”
For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.
The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position.
It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world.
Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.
But for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected.
Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.
With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.
That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.
And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza.
It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media.
Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.
Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders.
One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior US officials too.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims.
Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.
Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.
Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.
When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.
Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.
Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
My latest piece, on how the western media built the case for Israel to commit genocide:https://t.co/AwbVHryfqB
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 20, 2024
Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.”
In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.
The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”.
The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?
The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary.
Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”
The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity.
Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas – particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.
Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.
In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.
The commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those who did die in the house were killed by Israel.
The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”.
These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.
In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.
The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts.
The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?
In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
But the problem runs deeper.
This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years.
Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target.
That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism.
A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.
Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files, showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people.
Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation.
There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.
Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps.
And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide.
Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm.
Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.
The post We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
…What we see at work is not an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs of political life.
— Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, p. 343.
We entered the massive marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and at this date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and off the books to insure that ruling power maintains control over American capitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal control officer or president of the United States. Given that, the spending and consciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befitting a system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity than American voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status of an American empire making more people rich than ever before while making multitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nations is not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economic organism.
As the fading rulers of western capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead of leaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, mass murder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mental condition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking human beings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approaches the worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires of hell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that might make the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblical times when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as ruling wealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political and media servants of rulers do today.
The continuing since 1917 American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a point in the current war using Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hope of winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various of the NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urge broadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists in their fevered minds, said fever having been planted by America since the end of the second world war.
Meanwhile, the center of global anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloody horror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened and expressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948 when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been a haven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would be like Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making all others second class citizens once they took over, changed the language and culture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans ever had.
In only one of thousands of contradictions of logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continue calling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semites commit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western world have their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everything else in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearing an end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changes underway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seem more dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of the imperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-pot dictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other past murderers.
While it seems that the horrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will be the same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans have grown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both parties increase alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or national disorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracy in substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people who are told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economic form of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street are merely getting close to nature.
While political madness depicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned and operated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimes committed by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps and hustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially Congress and the white house, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed by American taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what the world needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in the planning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to pass if Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late. Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil of the two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that does not involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handful become billionaires.
The opening quote is from someone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term not even vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easily understandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, a socialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those same billions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts about people, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjust and work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by ending warfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as our pre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after we clear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx in his own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderous detractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand about why our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.
The post Private Profits vs. Social Prophets first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Summary of Part I
After briefly reviewing the theories of the relationship between religion and nationalism, I find the theories of Anthony Smith, George Mosse and Adrian Hutchinson the most compelling. They all agree that religion provides the propagandistic foundation for nationalism. But I also claim that it is a particular kind of religion, monotheism, that is directly connected to nationalism. Animistic tribal societies and Bronze Age agricultural states did not have the same religious paraphernalia as monotheism, and societies like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamian, China and India were never nationalistic.
The second part of my article focuses on how monotheistic beliefs and dramatization have the same parallels in nationalization processes. The categories include the destruction of intermediary institutions, the commitment to expansion and the importance of both origins and future destiny in history as opposed to mythology. In both nationalism and monotheism founders are mythologized. Both nationalism and monotheism use the arts (painting, music and literature) for altering states of consciousness.
Coming Attractions
In this article we will be discussing the social-psychological and psychological techniques by which both monotheism and nationalism promote loyalty. These include means of transmission (writing as opposed to oral), how social time (holidays) is marked throughout the year as well as individual time (rites of passage). We find that marking geography (territory and cityscapes) is crucial to both monotheism and nationalism. Each demands self-sacrifice, either as religious martyrs or soldiers. Each requires a conversion process. Membership is usually lifetime. Each has processes of exclusion and its members are purified through wars. Membership is sustained over time through fear of being exiled.
Next, I show that both nationalism and monotheism support individualism (as opposed to collectivism) for different reasons. I provide six reasons why each supports individualism. Lastly, I provide two qualifications. First, I pose the question of why the monotheistic religion of Islam is not included. After all, Islam began as a world religion hundreds of years before the rise of nation-states. It would seem to have had plenty of time to connect to the emergence of nation-states around the world. Why didn’t it? Secondly, in the 21st century we have a nation-state that is very powerful (India) that is founded on Hinduism, a polytheistic rather than a monotheistic religion. How do I explain that?
Marking Time: Special Occasions
The ability to recognize patterns is one of the adaptive skills that allowed the human species to survive in competition with other species. We live most of our everyday lives as problem solvers. But at the same time we need to be socialized to rise, metaphorically, from the ground level and examine long-term patterns to assess where we have been and where we are going.
In pagan traditions, sacred patterns involve the changing of the seasons. In Catholicism they include Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days and saints’ days. At the same time, at the micro level, the rites of passage in the life of an individual are linked to spiritual traditions through the sacraments. In Catholicism, the sacraments include baptism at birth, confirmation during adolescence, marriage in adulthood, and the last rites just before death. Further, a Catholic is expected to attend mass at least once a week and to go to confession. Lastly, monotheists – whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim – make pilgrimages. What does this have to do with socialization into nationalism? Like monotheism, nationalism has its special days, including Independence Day, various presidents’ days, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. There are pilgrimages to Washington, DC and trips to Mount Rushmore all of which support nationalism.
Marking Places: Geographies of Loyalty
Socialization takes place in physical spaces. Pagan societies built mounds and temples to spirits or deities. In caste agricultural civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia, physical buildings of monumental proportions made of impenetrable materials had a psychologically intimidating impact that was not lost on those in power. Likewise, Christians, Jews and Muslim elites build churches, synagogues and mosques, not just to pay homage to their deities, but to propagandize the lower classes into following them since they are God’s representatives on earth. Sacred sites are not limited to places of worship. Streets and buildings are named after saints. In the case of nationalism, we have gargantuan state buildings in Washington, streets named after presidents, and monuments at Bunker Hill, the Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock, and Mount Rushmore.
Creating Atmosphere: Literature and Painting
For most “people of the book,” hearing stories from sacred texts like the Bible or the Koran begins at a very young age. This upbringing is strengthened by studying, as with learning the Catholic catechism in grammar school or preparing to read an excerpt from the Old Testament as part of a Jewish bar or bat mitzvah. The most logical parallel to nationalism would be reading or even memorizing the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. However, since this is rarely done, a very important source of nationalistic literature is novels about the American West.
Animistic hunting and gathering societies used cave paintings, amulets and totems) long before monotheists to socialize (Lewis-Williams, 2002) their members. In the case of Catholicism in the 17th century, baroque paintings were epically dramatized to overwhelm the population with monumental scale. Furthermore, music has perhaps been the most compelling of the arts in creating an immediate emotional reaction. Hymns such as “Amazing Grace” help the faithful sing their way into submission.
Nationalist socialization may come about when the population is being exposed to patriotic paintings such as Washington Crossing the Delaware. Music such as the “Star-Spangled Banner”, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, and “God Bless America” are bound to rouse even the most reluctant patriot.
Social Action: Fulfilling Destiny Through Sacrifice
As we have seen, both monotheism and nationalism must use the past in order to justify the present. However, each must also organize in the present by referring to the future. This is done through the expectation of sacrifice of the participants to life itself.
Anthony Smith (2003) points out five instances in which fulfilling destiny through sacrifice is depicted in paintings. In Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s painting Manlius Torquatus Condemning His Son to Death, we see the conflicted determination of a Roman father’s loyalty to the state in executing his own child for disobeying his order to not engage the enemy in combat. Though torn by the clash of the demands of state and family, Torquatus overcomes his paternal feelings and refuses to listen to his son’s appeal, despite fervent pleas for mercy from friends and family. He maintains legal impartiality and values the state’s welfare over his personal interests. His right hand is publicly outstretched in the preservation of justice while his left hand clutches privately at a father’s agonizing heart.
According to Smith, the painting The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, Jacques-Louis David chose the moment when an anguished Brutus, returning home after the execution of his own sons, hears the cries of his wife and the swooning of his eldest daughter as the bodies of his sons are brought to his house. Having driven out the Tarquin and helping to institute the Republic, Brutus was elected consul in 508 BCE only to discover a monarchial plot fostered by his wife’s family and supported by his two sons. He saw it as his duty to suppress all enemies of the republic, including his own sons.
In 1778 Johann Heinrich Füssli was commissioned by the Zurich council to paint Oath on the Rütli, the cornerstone of Swiss unity and independence. This painting depicts three towering figures who represent the three original forest cantons swearing “an oath of everlasting alliance in the Rütli meadow”. Smith argues that it expresses defiance, struggle, unification, and sacrifice for freedom. In its thrusting defiant male figures embody the ideal of willingness to die for the freedom of the nation.
About a century later, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s painting Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII also conveys the ideal of self-sacrifice as struggle in the service of a higher cause. In 1770 Benjamin West painted The Death of General Wolfe, an epic depiction of the British general who was mortally wounded at the height of victory over the French in Quebec in 1759.
Lastly, Smith points out that during the French Revolution:
On the occasion of Marat’s murder in July 1793, art and ritual proceeded hand in hand. Marat’s friend David was immediately urged by the assembly to paint his portrait. Marat’s assassination shows with great veracity the ‘Friend of the People’ dying in his bathtub, with a Christ-like wound in his right lung…
David also had to supervise the lying in state and funeral of his friend. Marat’s corpse was exhibited on a high dais in the Cordeliers Church, above the bath and the packing case, with a smoking incense burner as the only light. The funeral…which lasted six hours took place to the accompaniment of muffled drum-beat and cannon… Girls in white with branches of cypress surrounded it, and they were followed by the entire Convention, the municipal authorities and the people of Paris. (Smith, 237)
These examples show how the political religion of nationalism draws upon Catholic traditions and uses them for national ends in order to evoke a sense of sacred communion with the glorious dead.
Sacrifice Choreographed in Festivals, Monuments and Song
The Napoleonic Wars were a catalyst for the process of cementing a sense of national identity not just among the French but for those societies under attack. French nationalism was answered by a growing German nationalism, which was at first cultural but soon became politicized with the Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The War of Liberation of 1813 and the return of aristocratic regimes after Napoleon’s defeat stimulated collective expressions of national sentiment in the form of festivals and monuments.
Smith informs us that in 1832 the Germans held their first mass festival in the same alleged place where the ancient German tribes had held their meetings. There was a procession to the ruins of the castle ruins in which patriotic songs were sung and people wore ancient German dress. The later 19th century saw greater efforts to invite people into the sacred communion of the nation through mass celebrations. This began with the songs of the volunteers for the armies of the French Revolution.
Dancing and Military Drills
Sustaining nationalist and religious loyalties is not just about getting lost in mystical symbols and myths or engaging in altruistic actions. Building political loyalty to a nation or a religion also involves acting collectively in a very structured way. In his very provocative book, Keeping Together in Time, William McNeill argues that building community involves “muscular bonding”: community dancing, communal work, singing, religious rituals and military drills. In community dancing, moving and singing together tends to dissolve group tensions, reminding community members that they have more in common than they have differences. In the area of work, singing and moving together makes otherwise boring work more creative. The great large-scale architectural projects of ancient civilizations could never have been built without workers singing and moving in sync. McNeill points out that the rise of religious dervish orders at the beginning of the 11th century was so powerful in altering states of consciousness that they came close to being declared heretical.
In addition, McNeill argues that military muscular bonding, specifically close-order drilling, creates altered states. In his book The Pursuit of Power, McNeill concluded that the victory of European armies over non-European armies was largely due to well-drilled troops who were more efficient in battle. Soldiers moved in unison while performing each of the actions needed to load, aim, and fire their guns. The volleys came faster and misfires were fewer when everyone acted in unison and kept time to shouted commands. The result was more ammunition projected at the enemy in less time.
However, it was not only the superiority of weapons or efficiency in using them that made Europeans victorious. Drilled troops created deep social-psychological altered states. McNeill suggests that many veterans report that group effort in battle was the high point of their lives. Just like the boundary loss of whirling dervishes, the individual merges with the platoon.
By inadvertently tapping the inherent human emotional response to keeping together in time, military drills helped create obedient, reliable, and effective soldiers with a spirit that not only superseded previous identities – ethnicity, region, religion – but also insulated them from outside attachments. Soldiers could be counted on to obey their officers predictably even when fighting hundreds or thousands of miles away from their home base.
McNeill describes witnessing soldiers marching in step as both awe inspiring and terrifying. No twitches, twists, mutterings nor distractions could be seen or heard in the ranks. On the one hand, soldiers were perfectly composed, calm and moving to music. But on the other hand, they were completely poised to destroy human life or be destroyed by it.
For most of human history, the ruling classes understandably had reservations with arming the lower classes for fear they might recognize their class interests. However, the group experience of altered states that resulted from prolonged drills made soldiers loyal and devoted far beyond any class loyalties. In the 17th century, for poverty-stricken peasant recruits and jobless urbanites recruited from the fringes of an increasingly atomized, commercialized society, the military created a new artificial primary community, providing camaraderie that prevailed in good times and bad, where old-fashioned principles of command and subordination gave meaning and direction to life. It became safe to arm even the poorest classes, pay them a regular wage and expect obedience. In a time of domestic conflict, European soldiers were even willing to fire upon their own social class.
Before the drill, in the standing army of kings, obedience was extracted through fear of punishment. But the coming of the drill created a lively spirit between soldiers that was less prevalent than before. Now, instead of standing armies of subjects to a king, the citizens’ army shared the collective emotional identity of the nation. For soldiers who received regular pay, there was a good reason to not break ranks.
It would be an overstatement to say that drilling caused nationalism. The military revolution occurred hundreds of years before the rise of nationalism, which I said came about at the end of the 18th century. But there is no question that military drills helped sustain nationalism once it appeared. Other military formations such as the cavalry couldn’t create such a solidarity among those fighting.
Conversion and Exile
The last part of socialization to nationalism is the unusual time when a person either joins through conversion or departs in an imposed or self-imposed exile. Typical examples of conversion for monotheists are the moment when Moses was on Mount Sinai or when Saint Paul was on the road to Damascus. The Great Awakenings in the United States in 1725 and 1780, though starting out as Protestant religious revivals, had nationalist implications, according to Wilbur Zelinsky (1988). A nationalist counterpart of conversion is the indoctrination immigrants or refugees receive upon becoming U.S. citizens.
Neither monotheists nor nationalists tolerate rejection lightly. For both, membership is expected to be lifetime. For national states, registration at birth and death is compulsory. What becomes of people who decide to leave? In the case of Catholicism, there is excommunication. In all monotheistic religions, there are attacks for such deviations as apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, inquisitions and witch hunts. Nonbelievers are attacked in religious wars as godless atheists. So too, in nationalism, expatriates are feared, ostracized and shunned. They are considered unworthy, traitorous or treasonous. In the case of political opposition, such people become the targets of CIA spying and assassination attempts. As for countries that oppose the nationalist vision, they are subject to state terror, world wars and torture. Please see my summary table at the end of this article.
Monotheism, Nationalism and Individualism
Both monotheism and nationalism support individualism in the following ways:
I hope to have shown that it is a mistake to think of individualism as either anti-social or a withdrawal from social relations. Individualism does mean a weakening of particular kinds of loyalties: kin group, village, regional or estate. But it also means a connection with a de-sensualized community, made possible by the printing press and newspapers.
While the forces of modernization may have weakened religious beliefs, the doctrines, myths, rituals, and entire architecture of religion (specifically monotheism) were reorganized and used in the name of a secular political religion: nationalism. Beginning in the 19th century, individualists were expected to renounce loyalty to class, ethnicity, and region – not so they could be “free as a bird,” but also to become bound to a new secular community of strangers serving the state. Citizens may gain political rights, but that is far from the end of the story. The socialization into nationalism has been an enormously successful project of the 19th-century ruling classes. Individualists were mobilized to fight and die in wars to prove their patriotism. The reality is now that stateless individuals are not allowed to exist anywhere in the world.
Please see my table at the end of this article.
Qualifications: What About the Place of Islam in Nationalism?
It might have crossed your mind that I did not include Islam in my monotheistic roots of nationalism comparisons. Certainly, Islam is monotheistic. Furthermore, when we look at Islamic fundamentalism, it would seem that surely there is fanatical nationalism at work. But a closer look shows that Islam has a similar internationalism as the Catholics. Being fanatical about your religion so that you will kill and die for it is not necessarily nationalism. Why did Islam not develop a nationalism the way the Jews and the Christians did: There are at least the following reasons:
Qualification: What About the Presence of a Polytheistic Nationalism in India?
It would seem that when we look at the nation-state of India today, it would constitute a clear exception to my argument that only monotheism develops nationalism. Here we have the polytheistic religion of Hinduism as the guiding religion of Modi’s India. How can this be?
The title of my article is the monotheistic roots of nationalism. As we know, the origin of anything (monotheism) does not guarantee destiny (what something becomes in the future). New processes can take place later in time which are independent of their origin. My two previous articles on nationalism only went as far as the beginning of World War I. The events in the 20th century that went beyond the monotheistic roots of nationalism were two World Wars, a depression, fascism and national liberation movements especially after World War II.
In Europe as far back as the Middle Ages there were other political formations long before there were nation-states. There were tribes, city-states, federations, principalities, provinces, kingdoms and empires. With the exception of some empires, all these formations were decentralized. These forms of political organizations continued to exist all over the world even after nation-states emerged. But the effect of political mobilization first in World War I and then World War II, pulverized these earlier formations. The Ottoman and Hapsburg empires did not survive World Wars. Tribes, federations and city-states were too weak to survive two world wars and became hammered into nation-states. It is no accident that at the end of World War I, the new global mediator was the League of Nations not the League of provinces, kingdom or empires. After World War II it was the United Nations that was promoted. After that it is very difficult to have any political standing in world politics without being organized into a nation-state.
In the case of India, revolutionaries had to build up and centralize their states if they were to fight the British. They succeeded. After World War II Indian religions continued to compete – Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism to name three. As India (as many nations in the 20th century) turned politically to the right over the last thirty years it needed a religious justification for its shift. Hinduism, as the oldest Indian religion, was championed. So, in the case of India, Hinduism did not help to form nationalism as Western monotheism helped nationalism. It was a reaction after a political nationalism that had already formed.
Something similar happened in the African liberation movements after World War II. African centralized states had to form in order for those revolutionaries to overthrow the colonizers. This has not been easy for those states as tribal and ethic loyalties in parts of Africa were fierce. Islam proved to be a better unifying force as a world religion than various decentralized pagan magical traditions. In the case of Africa Islam, though itself not a religion that helped nation-states to form prior to the 20th century, became one. Again, we have the case of a religion not being the cause of nationalism but a secondary reaction.
Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism in the Socialization Process From Birth to Death
| Monotheism (Judeo-Christian) | Category of Comparison | Nationalism (United States) |
| Written Scriptures (Bible) interpreted by priests or rabbis | Means of Transmission | Written Constitutions interpreted by courts (judges) |
| Special occasions throughout the year: Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days, saints days | Marking Social time | Special occasions throughout the year: Independence Day, President’s Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day |
| Rites of passage: Baptism, confirmation, marriage, anointing of the sick and last rites | Marking Individual Time | Rites of passage: Cub scouts, boy scouts, girl scouts, draft registration |
| Sunday school, private religious schools | Educational Training | Public school civics classes on American government and history |
| Detached from territory: Cosmopolitan (early prophets) Attached to Territory: Promised land, Zionists-Palestine, Christians-Bethlehem | Marking Geography (territory) | Attached to territory: (Promised land) Swiss Alps, U.S. Western frontier |
| Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Vatican, streets named after saints, religious statues | Marking geography (urban landmarks) | Federal and state buildings, Streets named after presidents, Monuments: Bunker Hill, Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock. Mount Rushmore |
| Pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem, Bethlehem | Marking Geography (movement) | Pilgrimages to Washington DC |
| Sacrifice self (religious martyrs) | Sacrifice | Sacrifice of self in patriotic wars (Tomb of Unknown Soldier) |
| Community dancing rituals | Collective Bodily Orchestration | Military drills |
| Moses on Mount Sinai, St. Paul on the road to Damascus | Conversion | Great Awakening in America (1725), Second Great Awakening (1780), Naturalization ceremony with immigrants and refugees receiving citizenship rights |
| To be free every individual must belong to a religion (no pagans or atheists) | Loyalty and Exclusivity | To be free, every individual must belong to a nation (no nationless individuals) |
| Religious wars | Attitude Towards Nonbelievers | State-to-state wars |
| Usually lifetime | Length of Membership | State membership usually lifelong (compulsory registration of birth, death) |
| Collective solidarity, comfort, propaganda,Violence: Fear, terror, torture, witch trials, inquisitions | Means of Sustaining Membership | Collective solidarity, comfort structure, propaganda,Violence: fear, state terror, assassination, torture |
| Excommunication, religious apostasy, accusations of heresy, blasphemy | Exile | Fear, ostracism, shunning of ex-patriots, accusations of treason |
• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.
Liberal democracy is not what it seems.
It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.
But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?
Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.
What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?
And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.
The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.
The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.
The West is desperately trying to cope. When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.
They are given a name. It is Russia. It is Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. It is China. And right now, it is Hamas.
There must be an enemy. But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry – a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years – that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore. The excuses are hard to swallow.
Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter? Does the West really believe that the attack of 7 October warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?
To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things. First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look. And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.
Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.
To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage – especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.
How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians? After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.
A headline in the New York Times, for example, told readers last month, “Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children”, as if this were a famine in Africa – a natural disaster, or an unexpected humanitarian catastrophe – rather than a policy declared in advance and carefully orchestrated by Israel’s top echelons.
No, NYT, starvation isn't stalking Gaza's children, like some weird, abstract predator. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza's children by blocking aid.
Starvation isn't committing genocide. Israel is. pic.twitter.com/T9hkxUsSRk
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 1, 2024
The Financial Times offered the same perverse framing: “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza”.
But starvation is not an actor in Gaza. Israel is. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children. It renews that policy each day afresh, fully aware of the terrible price being inflicted on the population.
As the head of Medical Aid for Palestinians warned of developments in Gaza: “Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”
Last week Unicef, the United Nations children’s emergency fund, declared that a third of children aged under two in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished. Its executive director, Catherine Russell, was clear: “An immediate humanitarian cease-fire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering.”
Were it really starvation doing the stalking, rather than Israel imposing starvation, the West’s powerlessness would be more understandable. Which is what the media presumably want their readers to infer.
But the West isn’t powerless. It is enabling this crime against humanity – day after day, week after week – by refusing to exert its power to punish Israel, or even to threaten to punish it, for blocking aid.
Not only that, but the US and Europe have helped Israel starve Gaza’s children by denying funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, the main humanitarian lifeline in the enclave.
All of this is obscured – meant to be obscured – by headlines that transfer the agency for starving children to an abstract noun rather than a country with a large, vengeful army.
Such misdirection is everywhere – and it is entirely intentional. It is a playbook being used by every single Western media outlet. It was all too visible when an aid convoy last month reached Gaza City, where levels of Israeli-induced famine are most extreme.
In what has come to be known by Palestinians as the “Flour Massacre”, Israel shot into large crowds desperately trying to get food parcels from a rare aid convoy to feed their starving families. More than 100 Palestinians were killed by the gunfire, or crushed by Israeli tanks or hit by trucks fleeing the scene. Many hundreds more were seriously wounded.
It was an Israeli war crime – shooting on civilians – that came on top of an Israeli crime against humanity – starving two million civilians to death.
The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off. It has been repeated several times, though you would barely know it, given the paucity of coverage.
The depravity of using aid convoys as traps to lure Palestinians to their deaths is almost too much to grasp.
But that is not the reason the headlines that greeted this horrifying incident so uniformly obscured or soft-soaped Israel’s crime.
For any journalist, the headline should have written itself: “Israel accused of killing over 100 as crowd waits for Gaza aid.” Or: “Israel fires into food aid crowd. Hundreds killed and injured”
But that would have accurately transferred agency to Israel – Gaza’s occupier for more than half a century, and its besieger for the last 17 years – in the deaths of those it has been occupying and besieging. Something inconceivable for the Western media.
So the focus had to be shifted elsewhere.
The Guardian’s contortions were particularly spectacular: “Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks”.
The massacre by Israel was disappeared as mysterious “food aid-related deaths”, which in turn became secondary to the Guardian’s focus on the diplomatic fallout.
Readers were steered by the headline into assuming that the true victims were not the hundreds of Palestinians killed and maimed by Israel but the Israeli hostages whose chances of being freed had been “complicated” by “food aid-related deaths”.
The headline on a BBC analysis of the same war crime – now reframed as an author-less “tragedy” – repeated the New York Times’ trick: “Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza”.
Another favourite manoeuvre, again pioneered by the Guardian, was to cloud responsibility for a clear-cut war crime. Its front-page headline read: “More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy”.
Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene. In fact, worse, the crime scene was removed too. Palestinians “died” apparently because of poor aid management. Maybe UNRWA was to blame.
Chaos and confusion became useful refrains for media outlets keener to shroud culpability. The Washington Post declared: “Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame”. CNN took the same line, downgrading a war crime to a “chaotic incident”.
But even these failings were better than the media’s rapidly waning interest as Israel’s massacres of Palestinians seeking aid became routine – and therefore harder to mystify.
A few days after the Flour Massacre, an Israeli air strike on an aid truck in Deir al-Balah killed at least nine Palestinians, while last week more than 20 hungry Palestinians were killed by Israeli helicopter gunfire as they waited for aid.
“Food aid-related” massacres – which had quickly become as normalised as Israel’s invasions of hospitals – no longer merited serious attention. A search suggests the BBC managed to avoid giving significant coverage to either incident online.
Meanwhile, the media has ably assisted Washington in its various deflections from the collaborative crime against humanity of Israel imposing a famine on Gaza compounded by the US and Europe de-funding UNRWA, the only agency that could mitigate that famine.
British and US broadcasters excitedly joined air crews as their militaries flew big-bellied planes over Gaza’s beaches, at great expense, to drop one-off ready-made meals to a few of the starving Palestinians below.
Given that many hundreds of truckloads of aid a day are needed just to stop Gaza sliding deeper into famine, the drops were no more than theatrics. Each delivered at best a solitary truckload of aid – and then only if the palettes didn’t end up falling into the sea, or killing the Palestinians they were meant to benefit.
The operation deserved little more than ridicule.
Instead, dramatic visuals of heroic airmen, interspersed with expressions of concern about the difficulties of addressing the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, usefully distracted viewers’ attention not only from the operations’ futility but from the fact that, were the West really determined to help, it could strong-arm Israel into letting in far more plentiful aid by land at a moment’s notice.
The media were equally swept up by the Biden administration’s second, even more outlandish scheme to help starving Palestinians. The US is to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coast so that aid shipments can be delivered from Cyprus.
The plot holes were gaping. The pier will take two months or more to construct, when the aid is needed now. In Cyprus, as at the land crossings into Gaza, Israel will be in charge of inspections – the main cause of hold-ups.
And if the US now thinks Gaza needs a port, why not also get to work on a more permanent one?
The answer, of course, might remind audiences of the situation before 7 October, when Gaza was under a stifling 17-year siege by Israel – the context for Hamas’ attack that the Western media never quite finds the space to mention.
For decades, Israel has denied Gaza any connections to the outside world it cannot control, including preventing a sea port from being built and bombing the enclave’s only airport way back in 2001, shortly after it was opened.
And yet, at the same time, Israel’s insistence that it no longer occupies Gaza – just because it has done so at arm’s length since 2005 – is accepted unquestioningly in media coverage.
Again, the US has decisive leverage over Israel, its client state, should it decide to exercise it – not least billions in aid and the diplomatic veto it wields so regularly on Israel’s behalf.
The question that needs asking by the media on every piece about “starvation stalking Gaza” is why is the US not using that leverage.
In a typical breathless piece titled “How the US military plans to construct a pier and get food into Gaza”, the BBC ignored the big picture to drill down enthusiastically on the details of “huge logistical” and “security challenges” facing Biden’s project.
The article revisited precedents from disaster relief operations in Somalia and Haiti to the D-Day Normandy landings in the Second World War.
In support of these diversionary tactics, the media have also had to accentuate the atrocities of Hamas’ 7 October attack – and the need to condemn the group at every turn – to contrast those crimes from what might otherwise appear even worse atrocities committed by Israel on the Palestinians.
That has required an unusually large dose of credulousness from journalists who more usually present as hard-bitten sceptics.
Babies being beheaded, or put in ovens, or hung out on clothes lines. No invented outrage by Hamas has been too improbable to have been denied front-page treatment, only to be quietly dropped later when each has turned out to be just as fabricated as it should have sounded to any reporter familiar with the way propagandists exploit the fog of war.
Similarly, the entire Western press corps has studiously ignored months of Israeli media revelations that have gradually shifted responsibility for some of the the most gruesome incidents of 7 October – such as the burning of hundreds of bodies – off Hamas’ shoulders and on to Israel’s.
Though Western media outlets failed to note the significance of his remarks, Israeli spokesman Mark Regev admitted that Israel’s numbering of its dead from 7 October had to be reduced by 200 because many of the badly charred remains turned out to be Hamas fighters.
Testimonies from Israeli commanders and officials show that, blindsided by the Hamas attack, Israeli forces struck out wildly with tank shells and Hellfire missiles, incinerating Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives indiscriminately. The burnt cars piled up as a visual signifier of Hamas’ sadism are, in fact, evidence of, at best, Israel’s incompetence and, at worst, its savagery.
The secret military protocol that directed Israel’s scorched-earth policy on 7 October – the notorious Hannibal procedure to stop any Israeli being taken captive – appears not to have merited mention by either the Guardian or the BBC in their acres of 7 October coverage.
Despite their endless revisiting of the 7 October events, neither has seen fit to report on the growing demands from Israeli families for an investigation into whether their loved ones were killed under Israel’s Hannibal procedure.
Nor have either the BBC or the Guardian reported on the comments of the Israeli military’s ethics chief, Prof Asa Kasher, bewailing the army’s resort to the Hannibal procedure on 7 October as “horrifying” and “unlawful”.
Instead, liberal Western media outlets have repeatedly revisited claims that they have seen evidence – evidence they seem unwilling to share – that Hamas ordered rape to be used systematically by its fighters as a weapon of war. The barely veiled implication is that such depths of depravity explain, and possibly justify, the scale and savagery of Israel’s response.
Note that this claim is quite different from the argument that there may have been instances of rape on 7 October.
That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.
To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.
But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.
Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.
But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.
More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.
The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.
That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.
To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.
But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.
Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.
But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.
More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.
The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.
However, under questioning from the Intercept, a spokesperson for the New York Times readily walked back the paper’s original certainty, conceding instead that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” [emphasis added] Even that appears too strong a conclusion.
Holes in the Times’ reporting quickly proved so glaring that its popular daily podcast pulled the plug on an episode dedicated to the story after its own fact check.
The rookie reporter assigned to the task, Anat Schwartz, has admitted that despite scouring the relevant institutions in Israel – from medical institutions to rape crisis centres – she found no one who could confirm a single example of sexual assault that day. She was also unable to find any forensic corroboration.
She later told a podcast with Israel’s Channel 12 that she viewed the lack of evidence to be proof of “a conspiracy of silence”.
Instead, Schwartz’s reporting relied on a handful of testimonies from witnesses whose other easily disprovable assertions should have called into question their credibility. Worse, their accounts of instances of sexual assault failed to tally with the known facts.
One paramedic, for example, claimed two teenage girls had been raped and killed at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. When it became clear nobody fitted the description there, he changed the crime scene to Kibbutz Beeri. None of the dead there fitted the description either.
Nonetheless, Schwartz believed she finally had her story. She told Channel 12: “One person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random.”
Schwartz got further confirmation from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organisation, whose officials were already known to have fabricated Hamas atrocities on 7 October, including the various claims of depraved acts against babies.
Interestingly, though the main claims of Hamas rape have focused on the Nova music festival attacked by Hamas, Schwartz was initially sceptical – and for good reason – that it was the site of any sexual violence.
As Israeli reporting has revealed, the festival quickly turned into a battlefield, with Israeli security guards and Hamas exchanging gunfire and Israeli attack helicopters circling overhead firing at anything that moved.
Schwartz concluded: “Everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place. How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like – it is impossible. Either you hide, or you – or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”
But Schwartz dropped her scepticism as soon as Raz Cohen, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, agreed to speak to her. He had already claimed in earlier interviews a few days after 7 October that he had witnessed multiple rapes at Nova, including corpses being raped.
But when he spoke to Schwartz he could only recall one incident – a horrific attack that involved raping a woman and then knifing her to death. Undermining the New York Times’ central claim, he attributed the rape not to Hamas but to five civilians, Palestinians who poured into Israel after Hamas fighters broke through the fence around Gaza.
Notably, Schwartz admitted to Channel 12 that none of the other four people hiding in the bush with Cohen saw the attack. “Everyone else is looking in a different direction,” she said.
And yet in the Times’ story, Cohen’s account is corroborated by Shoam Gueta, a friend who has since deployed to Gaza where, as the Intercept notes, he has been posting videos of himself rummaging through destroyed Palestinian homes.
Another witness, identified only as Sapir, is quoted by Schwartz as witnessing a woman being raped at Nova at the same time as her breast is amputated with a box cutter. That account became central to the Guardian’s follow-up report in January.
Yet, no forensic evidence has been produced to support this account.
But the most damning criticism of the Times’ reporting came from the family of Gal Abdush, the headline victim in the “Screams without Words” story. Her parents and brother accused the New York Times of inventing the story that she had been raped at the Nova festival.
Moments before she was killed by a grenade, Abdush had messaged her family and made no mention of a rape or even a direct attack on her group. The family had heard no suggestion that rape was a factor in Abdush’s death.
A woman who had given the paper access to photos and video of Abdush taken that day said Schwartz had pressured her to do so on the grounds it would help “Israeli hasbara” – a term meaning propaganda designed to sway foreign audiences.
Schwartz cited the Israeli welfare ministry as claiming there were four survivors of sexual assault from 7 October, though no more details have been forthcoming from the ministry.
Back in early December, before the Times story, Israeli officials promised they had “gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas”. None of those testimonies has materialised.
None ever will, according to Schwartz’s conversation with Channel 12. “There is nothing. There was no collection of evidence from the scene,” she said.
Nonetheless, Israeli officials continue to use the reports by the New York Times, the Guardian and others to try to bully major human rights bodies into agreeing that Hamas used sexual violence systematically.
Which may explain why the media eagerly seized on the chance to resurrect its threadbare narrative when UN official Pramila Patten, its special representative on sexual violence in conflict, echoed some of their discredited claims in a report published this month.
The media happily ignored the fact that Patten had no investigative mandate and that she heads what is in effect an advocacy group inside the UN. While Israel has obstructed UN bodies that do have such investigative powers, it welcomed Patten, presumably on the assumption that she would be more pliable.
In fact, she did little more than repeat the same unevidenced claims from Israel that formed the basis of the Times and Guardian’s discredited reporting.
Even so, Patten included important caveats in the small print of her report that the media were keen to overlook.
At a press conference, she reiterated that she had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.
She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she conceded it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on 7 October was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.
All of that was ignored by the media. In typical fashion, a Guardian article on her report asserted wrongly in its headline: “UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages”.
Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.
As the US Jewish scholar Normal Finkelstein has pointed out, Patten also relied on open-source material: 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence. Or as Patten phrased it: “No tangible indications of rape could be identified.”
She admitted she had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and had not met a single survivor of rape or sexual assault.
And she noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”.
If anything has been found to be systematic, it is the failings in the Western media’s coverage of a plausible genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Last week a computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives, even as the death-toll ratio showed that 30 times as many Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza than Hamas had killed Israelis on 7 October.
The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.
In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.
A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.
Faced with a plausible case of genocide – one being televised for months on end – even the liberal elements of the Western media have shown they have no serious commitment to the liberal democratic values they are supposedly there to uphold.
They are not a watchdog on power, either the power of the Israeli military or Western states colluding in Israel’s slaughter. Rather the media are central to making the collusion possible. They are there to disguise and whitewash it, to make it look acceptable.
Indeed, the truth is that, without that help, Israel’s allies would long ago have been shamed into action, into stopping the slaughter and starvation. The Western media’s hands are stained in Gaza’s blood.
• First published in Declassified UK
The post How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
On December 31, 2021 the interview that I recorded with Joe Rogan went live and the internet went crazy. This is old news, as is the fact that both Neil Young and a favorite artist of my youth, Joni Mitchell, pulled their music collections from the Spotify catalog – due to the “misinformation” that was spread during that show. Of course, nothing I said on that show was misinformation. Over the past two years – what was said during the interview has been validated again and again.
This week, major main-stream-media outlets report that Neil Young has decided to put his music back on Spotify – good for him, I suppose. Article after article in legacy media is covering his return, all indicating that he left in protest of “misinformation”, but never mentioning the Joe Rogan/Malone episode or discussing what the claimed “misinformation” actually consisted of. And not a single article from any conservative media outlet pushing back against the approved legacy media narrative. No one has asked me for an interview on this topic. Seems like that might be relevant, don’t you think, as I was the one evidently spreading the “misinformation” ?
For me, I am still banned or shadow banned on many platforms – including a permanent ban on Linked-in. State sponsored media still has no interest in reporting on facts surrounding the pandemic lock-downs, masks, vaccine safety, a corrupted vaccine pre-clinical and clinical trials process, adverse events associated with the jab, the corruption of academic journals – including capture by the WEF. The fact is that the world went crazy and transnational corporations used that season of madness to increase profits and market share.
That particular episode (#1757) is almost impossible to find on the googleweb or on the spotify search engine. However, in response to the widespread censorship efforts a transcript was entered into the congressional record.
People have asked me again and again, when is “Joe” going to have you back on. Of course, Joe Rogan never asked me back on his show. He basically ghosted me after that episode. I guess it was to be expected, the blow back from Spotify must have been huge. But still – it was (and is) kind of weird. And now Rogan has done another deal and cut himself loose of the Spotify exclusivity.
As of February this year, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is no longer exclusive to Spotify. The host signed a new multi-year deal, believed to be worth $250m (£196m), that allows the podcast to be distributed by other platforms including Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music.
— The Guardian: “Neil Young to return music to Spotify as he attacks ‘disinformation’ across streaming services”
So, here I am – still standing. Still strong. Still banned from main-stream-media. My very name has been made toxic on Facebook. Thousands of essays on Substack, and none can be found via Google search engines. Permanently banned on Linked In. Gaslight, defamed, stereotyped and slandered by both legacy media and a wide range of professional on-line trolls and malcontents who post lies daily. Wikipedia still promotes a variety of lies about me, but at least it is more accurate than it once was.
Not once has Neil Young or Joni Mitchell ever reached out to discuss their concerns. Not that I expected them to. The once-rebels have turned into the status-quo. No better than their fathers or mothers or big government.
Will mainstream State-sponsored media ever change their spots and do some real reporting? It appears not. The deep state, including President Trump, just doubles down on the “safe and effective” false narrative, despite all the evidence to the contrary. This saddens me. An opportunity lost for the science and government to evolve and learn from these public policy mistakes, which have caused a huge amount of suffering and unnecessary loss of life.
Now the World Health Organization thinks that it should rule the world – with its new pandemic treaty and amended International Health Regulations to lead the way to its version of a better future for the world – a totalitarian technofascist future. The New World Order is not a conspiracy theory – international law will take control of the world and is now the top dog. Controlling the regulatory capture that is occurring may not be doable in my lifetime. Scary thought.
All “we” can do is continue to fight. To fight the increasing regulatory burden that is placed upon us each and every day. To fight for our rights to be free. The right to privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms and all our other rights are more critical than ever.
I am strong. I am still standing. Let’s stand together and fight to make America free again.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
There is no escape — the world identifies Jews with genocide of the Palestinian people and will not allow the Zionists to continue to play victim. Israel calls itself a Jewish state and millions of Jews throughout the world voice praises for that state. Having foreign Jews acquiesce to the slaughter of innocents generates additional animosity to the already despised Zionists. The Jews face a hostile world.
This hostility is not unique. Throughout ancient history, and buried from general knowledge, Jewish tribes were involved in horrific wars, suffered wrath and generated wrath, and lived a blood-soaked history that injured others and caused themselves to be decimated. Self-destructive forces have been prevalent throughout Jewish history and brought tragedy to Jewish populations. The Zionists are the heirs to the original Sicarii, assuming the role of uniting Jews to self-destruction and destruction of others. A specific element in the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people, which is absent in other genocides, shows the world the existence of the Sicarii in contemporary Israel and sends an alert to take strong action to prevent the destruction the Sicarii have planned for the people of the Levant. Jews, euphoric about gaining a slice of the universe for themselves, have been unaware of the horrors committed upon others and upon them. A world awakened too late to the genocide of the Palestinian people remains unaware of the horrors still to come.
Some regard them as the first political terrorists and writting the narrative on terrorism. Rejecting other landscapes but their narrow view of the world, they believed their inner might could defeat the invincible Romans. They killed co-religionists who refused to continue the battle. By using concealed daggers to dispatch their foes, the assassins acquired the name Sicarii ─ a suicide-prone sect that took fellow Jews with them to death.
The Sicarii played a principal role in provoking the Roman onslaught against the Jewish population in Jerusalem and the eventual destruction of the city. Their characteristics — victimhood, no compromise, use of daggers to resolve issues, generating hate, and creating victims
History tells us that populations never learn from history and proceed to commit the same mistakes. The Jews have followed this principle; Sicarii have been prevalent throughout Jewish history and brought tragedy to Jewish populations.
After Nebuchadnezzar II conquered and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C., and a substantial number of Hebrews exiled to Babylon, these Hebrews were involved in a massacre. Not supported by historical documents, the Jewish feast of Purim celebrates an escape from death, from being marked for extinction by Haman, an advisor to Persian Emperor Xerxes. Many Jews refuse to recite the Megilla, the Book of Esther, that tells a dark part of the story, the Jewish massacre of 75,000 Persians, including Haman’s children.
This ancient history is obscure and unproven. Here is an excerpt from A critical evaluation of causalities of the genocide in Esther 3:8–15: Lawlessness and revolt of the Jewish diaspora community, (Temba T. Rugwiji Sep 28, 2022, HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies.)
Examined from a security and defence perspective, Haman’s position should be given its merit because the Jews disobeyed the Persian laws and did not show respect to the Persian authorities. The study employs a narrative approach to argue that the Jewish diaspora community orchestrated the genocide by disobeying the Persian laws. It is further argued that Haman had correctly foreseen it coming and confided with Emperor Xerxes. The study will also discuss Haman as a strategist who speculated a possible Jewish revolt, which was confirmed by the massacre of 75 000 people including Haman’s children (9:1–10).
Roman crushing of the Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem in 67 AD did not stop Jewish rebellions in Roman territories. Thirty-eight years later, Jewish tribes in Crete, Cyrenaica (modern-day eastern Libya), Cyprus, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean took advantage of Roman struggles with other nations to start the Kitos war. According to Roman history, the war “spiraled out of control resulting in a widespread slaughter of Roman citizens and others by the Jewish rebels. The rebellions were finally crushed by Roman legionary forces, chiefly by the Roman general Luseis Quietus, whose name gave the conflict its title.”
The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the Cyrene massacres:
By this outbreak, Libya was depopulated to such an extent that a few years later new colonies had to be established there.
Under the leadership of one Artemion, the Cypriot Jews participated in the great uprising against the Romans under Trajan, and they are reported to have massacred 240,000 Greeks (From Dio Cassius, lxviii. 32, and evidently greatly exaggerated). A small Roman army was dispatched to the island, soon reconquering the capital. After the revolt had been fully defeated, laws were created forbidding any Jews to live on the island.
Wars undertaken with no possibility of permanent victory assured destruction of Jewish populations. More puzzling is that these wars occurred during times when history indicates the Jews were relatively accepted and free to practice their religion in the Empire.
PBS describes the life of Jews in Rome.
Jews had lived in Rome since the second century BC. Julius Caesar and Augustus supported laws that allowed Jews protection to worship as they chose. Synagogues were classified as colleges to get around Roman laws banning secret societies and the temples were allowed to collect the yearly tax paid by all Jewish men for temple maintenance. There had been upsets: Jews had been banished from Rome in 139 BC, again in 19 AD and during the reign of Claudius. However, they were soon allowed to return and continue their independent existence under Roman law.
Fighting and losing two wars against impossible odds was not sufficiently punishing. Simon Bar Kokhba, a proclaimed Messiah, commandeered another revolt against the Roman Empire during the years 132-136 AD. The revolt temporarily succeeded in establishing an independent state in parts of Judea for two years until the Roman army overcame the rebellion. Result: The Romans barred Jews from Jerusalem, except for Tisah B’av, a fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Jerusalem Temples. Sicarii among the Jews continued for centuries with false Messiahs and troubling figures who defied authority in losing causes.
Contemporary Sicarii
The underground war fought by Jewish militias against the British Mandate exposed more Sicarii.
During the last 70 years, more disturbing and violent acts against Jews have been committed by a variety of Jewish groups, considered religious terrorist organizations in Israel.
The Zionists are the most violent and despicable Sicarii in the history of the Jews. They do not permit the deceased from the Holocaust tragedy to rest and use the Holocaust victims in multiple agendas —a money-making industry of books, films, and plays, reparations for victimization, special advantages by gaining sympathy, and, for the post-1967 Zionists, a means to rationalize their oppression of the Palestinian people. For the new Zionists, the world is a sewer of anti-Semitism waiting to commit another Holocaust on the Jewish people and only a strong and united Israel can escape the catastrophe, a prophecy they seem only too eager to make happen.
In popularizing the Holocaust for their purposes, Zionism found a way to convince the world to agree with their principal agendas —incorporation of all Palestine as a Jewish state and elimination of the indigenous people from their ancestral homes. On the way to accomplishing the aims, the Zionists reduced those who died in the WWII catastrophe to unwilling accomplices in the Zionist committed genocide and revealed the sinister motives that continually publicized the Holocaust. Media support and publication of Zionist propaganda have enraged the world against perceived Jewish control of media sources and are responsible for criticisms of the Jewish community.
Eighty years after the event, the Holocaust is publicized with another film —The Zone of Interest, a fictitious story of Rudolf Höss, German Commandant of the Auschwitz Camp, and his family, doing their daily chores in their home close to the concentration camp. With no historical value and no entertainment value, who, other than those that get their jollies from hearing people scream, would be interested in this lugubrious and sinister nightmare? Admittedly, I have not seen the film and will not see it. Usually, a drama has a protagonist and the audience sympathizes with the protagonist. I wonder who is the protagonist in this film and how will the protagonist gain sympathy.
Supplicant PBS Nightly News spent 10m minutes discussing the film as a possible Academy Award winner. Time to investigate the nomination process. I looked but could not find the phrase, “This is a paid advertisement,” paid by we know who.
Note: At the Academy Award ceremony, the film’s director, Jonathan Glazer, spoke against the memory of the Holocaust being used to justify Israel’s war in Gaza. However, the film was prepared and finished much before the latest atrocities on the Gazans and does serve to justify, in many minds, Israel’s attack on the Gazans. Glazer was caught in the realization of having released the film at the wrong time and revealed it could have a sinister purpose.
Because the sought attachment is localized to the events during the Holocaust occurrence, Zionism has no proven attachment to the WWII Holocaust. Looking back and examining the role Zionism played in shaping the thoughts and motives of those who engineered the genocide leads to another discussion and other conclusions. The question asked, “Did Zionism play a role in causing the WWII Holocaust may be wrongly worded. The preferred wording is, “If there were no Zionism, would there have been no Holocaust? That question will be explored in a future article.
The most distressing approval of Zionism is that Zionist Israel, descendants of those murdered by Nazis, displays characteristics similar to the Nazi state. No question, it is obvious for anyone to observe.
The most specific comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany result from its constant wars and policies that insinuate Israel as a repressive and militaristic nation. Similar to Nazi Germany, Israel combines a virulent nationalism with militarism and a nation purified for a selected ethnicity
Irredentism
Annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession drove the Third Reich. Israel’s irredentism regains mythical lands and joins a single folk in these lands.
Military adventures
The Third Reich fought continuous wars for about eight years. Israel has fought continuously for 65 years
Using overwhelming military force to subdue powerless antagonists
The Nazis and its Panzer troops went full attack against all opponents, regardless of their strength. Israel uses a strategy that minimizes its casualties, and despite its claim of being a humane army, has always attacked with pulverizing force with kill ratios of tens to one and having civilians constitute a large proportion of casualties
Racist laws
Although the term ‘right of return’ refers to a principle of international law and gives any person the right to return or re-enter his/her country of origin, the Israeli ‘right of return’ only permits foreign Jews to gain citizenship in a country that is not of their origin, and does not permit immigration of non-Jews, such as Palestinian refugees. Because marriages must be performed by a rabbi, a Jew cannot marry a non-Jew within the boundaries of Israel, similar to a Nuremberg Law that prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans. Laws and actions favor the Jewish majority and impede the Arab minority. Few Palestinian Israelis can rent housing or buy property in West Jerusalem and purchase property in Israel; immigrant Jews can acquire property but are not allowed to sell the property to Arab citizens; few, if any Arabs, have been able to purchase government-sponsored housing, and a separation of ethnicities results in the separation of their activities, recreation centers, schools, and education.
Severe repression in occupied territories
Comparison of the German occupation during the West European “peace years,” from the fall of France until the United States entered the war, which was before the construction of the labor camps and mass killings, with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, shows the repressions have similar intensity.
Killing of opposition and punitive measures after an attack.
The Nazis used punitive measures and collective punishment to terrorize captive people and diminish resistance. Israel has done the same. The Nazis had Lidice, a village they destroyed after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi leader in Bohemia and Moravia. In a 1953 retaliation for a Palestinian guerrilla incursion into Israel that killed several Israeli civilians, the Israeli military raided the West Bank village of Qibya, killed 67 Palestinians, and destroyed 56 houses. Palestine has been victim to tens of mini-Lidicies ─ destruction of areas and houses due to accusations of being the homes of suicide bombers.
Kristallnacht
The Jews in Nazi Germany had Kristallnacht, a day when Jewish shops and synagogues were attacked after a youth of Jewish faith assassinated a German official in Paris. Constant attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza signify that almost every night in Palestine is Kristallnacht.
Ethnic cleansing
The Nazis had plans to rearrange populations and place German populations in the most fertile areas. After the 1948 and 1967 wars, Israel destroyed 412 Palestinian villages and eventually created 1.2 million refugees who were refused return to their homes.
Propaganda
The Israel propaganda machine exceeds that of the Nazis due to its international reach, churning out each day books, films, and articles that extend memories of the Holocaust, references to anti-Semitism, and the greatness of little Israel that needs support as it fights against the world’s evils. An army of several hundreds of thousands of Israeli supporters, including Israeli-planted “emigrants” to the United States and Germany, invade civic life and institutions throughout the Western world.
Genocide
Israel’s policies have paved a route to destruction of the Palestinian people. Hopelessness, despair, immobility, lack of redress for the loss of their lands, economic insecurity, and constant attacks against their persona and livelihood drive the Palestinians to a difficult existence.
In a letter, published in The New York Times, August 23, 2014, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network called for a full economic, cultural, and academic boycott of Israel. They wrote, “We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.” Of the 327 signatories, 40 survived the Holocaust and the other 287 were descendants of Holocaust survivors or victims.
Not touched upon and most disturbing is the unique feature of the genocide of the Palestinians. Previous genocides had majority groups contesting minority groups they sensed had seized power and were crushing them.
The genocide of the Palestinian people does not have the identifying characteristic of a majority fearing the power of the minority; just the opposite, in this case, a small minority usurped the power from a larger majority. This characteristic sets the Palestinian genocide apart from other genocides, brings it to a new dimension, and modifies the accepted thrust of the Zionist mission.
Perceived as a means to rescue the Jewish people from repression and domination, little of which existed at that time in the emancipated Western world, the Zionists were Jews who could not integrate with others. They were not rejected; they rejected integration and created a spurious universe of being victims of anti-Semitism and being leaders with moral superiority. Driven by the same philosophy that describes Nazism, the development of Zionism within their created state of Israel returned the population to the atavistic remnants of a contrived ancient kingdom and resurrection of its Sicarii element, which is similar to that of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — violent, shared collective that rejects the others, state and religion bound together, strict interpretation of religious writings, and cleaning the land of infidels. The settler movement and Lehava, together with the political party Otzma Yehudit, which is led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, have told the world of their objections to close personal relationships between Jews and non-Jews and their opposition to Christian presence in Israel. The genocide of the Palestinian people reflects those beliefs; it is not because they are Palestinians, it is because they are not Jews. An innocent word languishes while Itamar Ben-Gvir and his cohorts tell everyone that after they cleanse the occupied areas of the Palestinians, they will eventually cleanse Israel of all non-Jews and demolish all Christian and Muslim institutions and symbols.
The lethal combination of a state with Nazi ideology and Sicarii leadership cannot be allowed another day. The world must continue and continue, without faltering, to organize all its power and subdue these transgressions on justice, normality, peace, and stability. The Jewish people who supported this tyranny are the greatest enemy of their own and have placed themselves in the position of the most hated, now and forever. The strong reaction to Israel’s present genocidal operations should not diminish but grow and grow until the Zionist Sicarii are defeated. U.S. President Joe Biden highlighted the difficulty in achieving that defeat. In the most uproarious and ignorant statement uttered by a U.S. chief executive, Joe Biden said, “No Jew anywhere is safe without Israel.”
Every Jew, including me, knows that Biden’s phrase is ridiculous; I never felt even the slightest threat or danger and don’t know anyone who has. Israel has shown that “no Jew anywhere is safe with Israel.” Nobody is talking about demolishing Israel; they are talking about apartheid Israel demolishing itself and taking the Jews with it. There is no threat to apartheid Israel’s existence. There is a threat to Palestinian existence ─ two separate issues.
Joe Biden, another Sicarii with a dagger in his sleeve, is a threat to the United States people he does not serve and, by serving the dictates of AIPAC, a threat to all Jews No Jew is safe with Joe Biden as president and with an Israel that is shaped by Nazi doctrines and led by Sicarii followers. MAAJSA — Make Americans and Jews Safe Again.
The post The New Sicarii first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.
Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:
My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)
Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:
The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.
But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:
The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.
I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.
Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.
In 2013, Simpson opined:
The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…
Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.
Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:
World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked
Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:
Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy
Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:
Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…
The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.
Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.
The BBC headline reporting this story read:
Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO
Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.
Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:
If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.
Needless to say, that was not to be.
On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:
Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:
Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.
On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:
As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals
Author Assal Rad responded:
Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.
The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’
What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:
Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid
And:
Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks
USA Today’s headline was surreal:
112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers
On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:
More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy
The standfirst (sub-heading):
Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush
Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.
It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:
ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104
Compare also its standfirst:
ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries
On 1 March, Associated Press reported:
The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)
The following day, a BBC headline read:
Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza
A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:
After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)
The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:
They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.
And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.
It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.
Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.
On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:
The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.
Brown commented on video footage:
Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.
Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.
“Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”
Brown added:
Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”
Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?
As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:
The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).
The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).
This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.
A BBC report on 5 March stated:
Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.
Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.
Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?
According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:
After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.
Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.
Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:
“It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.
”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.
”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”
CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:
We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.
On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:
UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
“Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”
The UN added of its experts:
They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.
“Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.
None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:
During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.
Conclusion
It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:
Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows
Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:
Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.
The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.
On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:
The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)
See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’
Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.
We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)
With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:
What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)
The answer, of course, was oil.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replace each other? Do they amplify each other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, secular ideology that replaces religious systems. According to Kedourie, nationalism is a new doctrine of political change first argued for by Immanuel Kant and carried out by German Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century. In this early work, nationalism was the spiritual child of the Enlightenment, and by this I mean that nationalism and religion are conceived of as opposites. While religion supports hierarchy, otherworldliness, and divine control, nationalism, according to Kedourie, emphasizes more horizontal relationships, worldliness, and human self-emancipation. Where religion supports superstition, nationalism supports reason. Where religion thrives among the ignorant, nationalism supports education. For Enlightenment notions of nationalism, nationalism draws no sustenance from religion at all.
Modern theorists of nationalism such as Eric Hobsbawm and John Breuilly (1993), share much of this position. For these scholars, secular institutions and concepts such as the state or social classes occupy center stage, while ethnicity and religious tradition are accorded secondary status. For Liah Greenfeld (1992), religion served as a lubricator of English national consciousness until national consciousness replaced it.
Conor Cruise O’Brien (1999), Adrian Hastings (1997), and George Mosse (1975) have added sacred texts, prophets, and priests to the list of commonalities between nationalism and religion. Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) argues that just as sacrifice is important to religion, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the equivalent translation for the nation. Just as religion has its rituals of religious conversion, nations have citizenship rites in which immigrants sing a national anthem rather than religious hymns. Just as members of a religious community are encouraged to love the stranger, members of a nation will never know, meet, or even hear about most of their fellow members.
Anthony Smith (1998) argues that nationalism used and secularized the myths, liturgies, and doctrines of sacred traditions and was able to command the identities of individualists not only over ethnic, regional, and class loyalties, but even over religion itself. What Smith wants to do is conceive of the nation as a sacred communion, one that focuses on the cultural resources of ethnic symbolism, memory, myth, values, and their expression in texts, artifacts, scriptures, chronicles, epics, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, and crafts. Smith’s greatest source of inspiration was George Mosse (1975), who discussed civic religion of the masses in Germany.
My article will help us understand not only which social institutions command people’s loyalty, but how they accomplished this. It is not enough for states to promise to intervene in disputes and coordinate the distribution and production of goods, although this is important. Individualists must also bond emotionally with each other through symbols, songs, initiations, and rituals in support of nationalism. In this effort, the state does not have to reinvent the wheel. There was one social institution which, prior to the emergence of absolutist states, was also trans-local and trans-regional. Interestingly, this institution also required its members to give up their kin, ethnic identity, and regional identity in order to become full members. That institution was religion.
Civic Religion In The French Revolution
During the great calling of the Estates-General in 1789, Abbé Sieyès contended that the rights of the nation had been usurped by the nobility. He wanted a “nation-state” to end the aristocratic rule of regional privileges, along with intermediate institutions and corporate bodies that came between the individual and the state. By 1793 the revolution swept away regional bodies, resulting in a centralized regime with no parallel in the history of Western Europe.
Understood from a secular view, the state was seen as a sole and absolute sovereign, directing and advancing the process of secularization by limiting ecclesiastical power. Religion was totally subordinate to the state. A new national community was to be based on reason and nature without reference to the customs of the past. It did not appeal to ethnic or linguistic commonalities, but to a centralized education. The nation was envisaged politically as calling for unity as well as liberty and equality. The idea of democracy was strong, coming from the working classes. These classes wanted to push for popular sovereignty, not national representation.
On the surface, French nationalism was secular, political, scientific, and anti-clerical. The beheading of the king during the French Revolution deprived France of its divine protector. This left an increasingly autonomous sphere for humanity to construct an earthlier protector: the nation-state. Reinforced by the horrors of religious wars, patriotism was seen as a counter to religious strife and appealed to an increasing number of people, both educated and uneducated. Patriotism was the sacred communion of the people in arms. If the nation simply replaced religion with a more enlightened view, there would be no need for religion’s rituals and techniques. But this was not what happened.
If we examine the process of how the state commands loyalty, we find the state uses many of the same devices as religion. After the revolution in France, the calendar was changed to undermine the Catholic church. The state tried to regulate and dramatize the key events in the life of individual—birth, baptism, marriage and death. French revolutionaries invented the symbols that formed the tricolor flags and invented a national anthem, La Marseillaise. The paintings of Delacroix and Vermeer supported the revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a new belief system, a kind of national catechism. By 1791 the French constitution had become a promise of faith. The tablets of the Declaration of Rights were carried around in procession as if they were commandments. Another symbol was the patriotic altar that was erected spontaneously in many villages and communes. Civic festivities included resistance to the king in the form of the famous “Tennis Court Oath,” (Serment du Jeu de Paume) along with revolutionary theater. The revolution, through its clubs, festivals, and newspapers, was indirectly responsible for the spread of a national language. Abstract concepts such as fatherland, reason, and liberty became deified and worshipped as goddesses. All the paraphernalia of the new religion appeared: dogmas, festivals, rituals, mythology, saints, and shrines. Nationalism has become the secular religion of the modern world, where the nation is now God.
In his book, Nationalism: a Religion (1960), Carlton Hayes says that:
Nationalism, like any religion, calls into play not simply the will of the intellect, but the imagination, the emotions. The intellect constructs a speculative theology or mythology of nationalism. The imagination builds an unseen world around the eternal past and the everlasting future of one’s nationality. The emotions arouse a joy and an ecstasy in the contemplation of the national god who is all good and all protecting. (pages 143–144)
For Hayes, nationalism is large-scale tribalism. Modern national identity appears in Western Europe at a time when all intermediate bonds of society were collapsing due to the industrial revolution and religion was losing its grip on its populations. What occurs is a reorganizing of religious elements to create a social emulsifier that pulverizes what is left of intermediate organization while creating a false unity. This unity papers over the economic instabilities of capitalism as well as the class and race conflicts that it ushers in.
How Monotheism Differs From Animism and Polytheism
Anthony Smith is not simply saying that religion itself is the foundation of nationalism. He claims that the monotheism of Jews and Christians forms a bedrock for European nationalism. However, Smith does not account for why animistic and polytheistic religious traditions are not instrumental in producing nationalism. What are the sacred differences between magical traditions of tribal people and monotheists—the high magical traditions of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Aztecs, and Incas on one side, and Jews and Christians on the other? We need to understand these religious differences so we can make a tighter connection between monotheism and nationalism.
The five parts to a monotheistic covenant vs polytheism and animism
The following discussion draws from my book, From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, along with the work of Anthony Smith. According to Smith (2003), the foundation for the relationship between a monotheistic people and its God is a covenant. A covenant is a perceived voluntary, contractual sacred relationship between a culture and its sacred presences. This contractual relationship is one of the many differences that separates monotheism from polytheism and animism. Polytheistic and animistic cultures perceive a necessary, organic connection between themselves and the rest of the biophysical world, and this connection extends to invisible entities. The monotheistic Jews were the first people to imagine their spiritual relationships as a voluntary contract.
The first part of a covenant agreement is that God has chosen a group of people over all other groups for a particular purpose. This implies that God is a teleological architect with a plan for the world and simply needs executioners. Polytheistic and animistic people imagine their sacred presence as a plurality of powers that cooperate, compete, and negotiate a cosmic outcome having some combination of rhythm and novelty rather than a guiding plan. Like Jews and Christians, pagan people saw themselves as superior to other cultures (ethnocentrism), but this is not usually connected up to any sense of them having been elected for a particular purpose by those sacred presences.
Still another side of this contract is that people have to consent to join in the agreement. There has to be choice. This choice implies that the elected culture could get along well enough even if they refused God’s offer. For polytheistic and animistic people, spiritual presences are the life blood of their communities. There are no debates, negotiations, qualifications, or haggling with sacred presences as to whether or what kind of a relationship will exist. There relations are already and always the case.
The second part of a covenant is the announcement of a promise of prosperity and power for the chosen people as part of the bargain if they behave themselves. In polytheistic and animistic societies, the gods make no promises. Some people are born into ecological settings that are bountiful while others are born into austere conditions. Why this has happened has more to do with the success or failure of magical practices than it has to do with spiritual kindness or cruelty on the part of the gods.
The third part of a covenant is the prospect of spreading good fortune to other lands. This is part of a wider missionary ideal of bringing light to other societies so that the blind can see. It is a small and natural step to affirm that the possession of might—the second part of the covenant (economic prosperity and military power)—is evidence that one is morally right. We know that the ancient Judaists sought to convert the Edomites though conquest. On the other hand, while it is certainly true that animistic and polytheistic people fight wars over land or resources, these are not religious wars waged by proselytizers.
The fourth part of a covenant is a sacred law. This is given to people in the form of commandments about how to live, implying that the natural way people live needs improvement. In polytheistic societies, how people act was not subject to any sort of a plan for great reform on the part of the deity. In polytheistic states, the gods and goddesses engaged in the same behavior as human beings, but on a larger scale. There was no obedience expected based on a sacred text.
The fifth part of a covenant is the importance of human history. Whatever privileges the chosen people have received from God can be revoked if they fail to fulfill their part of the bargain. The arena in which “tests” take place is human history, in the chosen people’s relationship with other groups. For the animistic and polytheistic, cultural history is enmeshed with the evolutionary movement of the rocks, rivers, mountains, plants, and animals. There is no separate human history. Please see Table 1 which summarizes these differences.
Animistic and polytheism rituals vs monotheistic ceremonies
Lastly, in polytheistic societies, sacred dramas enacted in magical circles and temples were rituals. This means they were understood as not just symbolic, representational gestures of a reality that people wished to see in the future. Rather, they were dramatic actions believed to be real embodiments of that reality in the present. In the elite phase of monotheism, rituals were looked upon with suspicion because people became superstitiously attached to the ritual and thought their rituals could compel God to act. In From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, I coined the word ceremony to describe sacred dramas that were more passive and less likely to create altered states of consciousness, intended to show deference and worship to a deity who was not subject to magical incantations. In contrast, a religious ceremony, at least among middle and upper-middle class, is more passive. The priest or pastor does most of the work while the congregation supports what the priest or pastor is doing.
Table 1 Monotheism vs Animism and Polytheism
| Judeo-Christian Monotheism | Type of Sacred System | Animism, polytheism |
| Contract between two free parties (covenant) | Type of connection between a culture and sacred powers | Organic bond between two interdependent powers |
| A culture is chosen. Ethnocentrism with a spiritual justification. | Is a culture “elected?” | Ethnocentrism without any spiritual justification |
| Yes. Promise and deliverance of land, prosperity, and power | Is there a promise of abundance? | No. What abundance exists comes from magical rituals upon ecological settings |
| Missionary ideal to bring light to others (religious wars and proselytizers) | Expansion or provincial? | Fight wars and expand for land or sexual and material resources, but they do not fight over spiritual beliefs. |
| Obedience to a law, typically written texts, for purposes of reforming humanity | Expectations of humanity | Altered states using imagination and the senses, transmitted orally with no purpose for reforming humanity |
| Holy and all good —qualitatively different from humanity | Qualities of sacred beings | Gods and goddesses are the same as humanity, except on a larger scale |
| Human history is important as the arena in which people will be blessed or punished | Place of history | Human history is less important. More important is an extension of the ecological relationship with plants and animals |
| Ceremony—symbolic, representational gestures that show deference | Dramatization | Ritual—real attempts to compel the spirits |
Common Elements Found In Monotheism And Nationalism
Elite monotheism vs. popular monotheism
Just as we saw in my previous article Nationalism as the Religion of Modernity that there was elite nationalism and mass nationalism, there was also an elite monotheism and popular monotheism. In the early Iron Age, (1000 BCE to 200 CE) elite monotheism was an intellectual reaction of the prophets and upper classes to what they perceived as the degenerate superstition of polytheism and animism among their fellow Jews as well as of the agricultural states of West and East Asia. These qualities included a close identification of people with animals and plants, particularly through the use of the arts—music, dance, mask making—to create altered states of consciousness using imagination, sensory saturation, and trance states.
In some cultures, this pagan magic was used by state officials, such as priests and priestesses such as the Canaanites and the Babylonians. The first monotheists were reformers and outsiders to pagan magic. In societies where monotheism acquired state power, as when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity had to appeal to the lower classes. It had to bring back some of the magical ways that it had first rejected. To overcome the huge gap between the transcendental power of a God who had no human qualities and human beings, intermediaries such as saints, the Virgin Mary, and angels were brought in. Something similar also occurred in India when the Buddhism of the merchants acquired more influence among the lower classes.
Loyalty to one God; loyalty to one nation requires pulverizing intermediaries
All sacred systems have to answer the question of whether the sacred source of all they know is singular or plural. Monotheistic religions break with the pluralistic polytheism and animism in pagan societies and assert that there is one God. It is not a matter of having a single God who subordinates other gods. This is not good enough. The very existence of other gods is intolerable. Any conflicting loyalties are viewed as pagan idolatry.
Just as monotheism insists on loyalty to one God, so nationalism insists on loyalty to one nation. Claiming national citizenship in more than one country is looked upon with suspicion. Additionally, within the nation, loyalty to the nation-state must come before other collective identities such as class, ethnic, kinship, or regional groupings. To be charged with disloyalty to the nation is a far more serious offence than disloyalty to things such as a working-class heritage, an Italian background, or having come from the East Coast. In the case of both monotheism and nationalism, intermediaries between the individual and the centralized authorities must be destroyed or marginalized.
Loyalty to strangers in the brotherhood of man; loyalty to strangers as fellow citizens
The earth-spirits, totems, and gods of polytheistic cultures are sensuous and earthy. In tribal societies, they are part of a network among kin groups in which everyone knows everyone else. The monotheistic God is, on the contrary, abstract, and the community He supervises is an expansive non-kin group of strangers. Just as monotheism insists that people give up their ties to local kin groups and their regional loyalties, so the nation-state insists that people imagine that their loyalty should be to strangers, most of whom they will never meet. The universal brotherhood of man in religion becomes the loyalty of citizens to other citizens within the state. In monotheism, the only way an individual can be free is to belong to a religion (pagans or atheists are barely tolerated). In the case of a nation-state, to be free the individual must belong to a nation. One cannot tolerate individuals with no national loyalty.
Many inventions and historical institutions facilitate one’s identifying with a nation. The invention of the printing press and the birth of reading and writing helped build relationships among strangers beyond the village. Newspapers and journals gave people a more abstract sense of national news, and they were able to receive this news on a regular basis. The invention of the railroad, electricity, and the telegraph expanded and concentrated transportation and communication.
The problem for nationalists is that all these inventions can also be used to cross borders and create competing loyalties outside the nation-state. Increasing overseas trade brought in goods from foreign lands and built invisible, unconscious relations with outside producers. In the 19th century, another connection between strangers began with the international division of labor between workers of a colonial power and workers exploited on the periphery.
Religious contract of equality before God; constitutional contract of equal citizenship
In polytheistic high magical societies, it was only the upper classes who were thought to have a religious afterlife. If a slave were to have an afterlife at all, it was to be as a servant to the elite. Monotheism democratized the afterlife, claiming that every individual, as part of God’s covenant agreement, had to be judged before God equally. So too, nationalism in the 18th century imagined national life as a social contract among free citizens, all of whom were equal in the eyes of the law and the courts of the nation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, popular nationalism included the right to vote in elections.
Monotheistic and nationalist history as mythology
According to Anthony Smith, the history that religions construct is not the same as what the professional historians aspire to do. For example, historians ask open-ended questions for which they do not have answers. They accept the unknown as part of the discipline and accept that an unknown question may never be answered. In contrast, accounts of religious history are not welcoming to open-ended questions. Rather, they ask rhetorical questions for which they have predictable answers. Those believers or non-believers who ask open-ended questions are taught that the question is a mystery that will only be revealed through some mystical experience or in the afterlife. Further insistence in asking open-ended questions is viewed as blasphemy or a sign of heresy.
So too, nationalist renditions of history most often share a mythological conception of history as well. The history books of any nation generally try to paper over actual struggle between classes, enslavement, colonization, and torture that litters its history. Members of a culture that have built nationalist histories like to present themselves as being in complete agreement about the where and when of their myths. But, in fact, myths compete with each other and are often stimulated by class differences within the nation. Smith (2003) gives the following examples:
Nationalist history is sanitized, polished, and presented as the deeds of noble heroes. This mythology is intensified by the way the founders of religion and the nation are treated. It is rare that Moses, Christ, or Mohammad, in addition to their good qualities, are treated as flesh and blood individuals with weaknesses, pettiness, and oversights. So too, in the United States, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are treated like Moses or Christ, having charismatic powers (Zelinsky, 1998). Just as religion attacks open-ended, critical questions of heresy, so nationalists tar and feather citizens as unpatriotic when they question national stories and try to present a revisionist history.
Written records and artifacts comprise the building materials for historians. Myths are often treated as untrustworthy and are interpreted sociologically or psychologically for their “real meaning”. Historians might say that myths tend to oversimplify, exaggerate, and act as comforting devices rather than describe events that actually occurred. Collective memories are treated by historians as untrustworthy because, just as individuals have selective memory, so can whole cultures. However, for both monotheism and nationalist histories, the search for records and artifacts tends to be used to support the memories and myths that cultures already believe.
Further, what makes nationalist histories and monotheism different from the work of professional historians is the direction of history. All national histories have a cyclical shape. They begin with a golden age and are followed by a period of disaster or degradation and, after much struggle, a period of redemption. First, there is a selection of a communal age that is deemed to be heroic or creative. There is praise for famous kings, warriors, holy men, revolutionaries, or poets. Second, there is a fall from grace, whether it be a natural disaster, a fall into materialism, or external conquest. Third, there is a yearning to restore the lost communal dignity and nobility. In order to return to the golden age, they must emulate the deeds and morals of its past epoch. For Christianity, the golden age consists of the story of Adam and Eve. For the Hebrews, it is the Old Testament with Moses in the wilderness. In the United States, it is the time of pioneers, frontiersman, cowboys, and Western expansion. These are mythic archetypes that are endlessly recycled today in the names of banks, television commercials, television programs, and movies.
Contrary to both nationalism and monotheism renditions, among professional historians, whether there is a shape to human history is controversial. Some 18th and 19th century historians also saw history as having a linear time direction. The movement from beginning to end was categorized as progress. This means that things are gradually getting better for human beings as we progress through history in the areas of technology, economics, political institutions, and morals. However, after two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, this position has fallen into disfavor among most historians.
The Function of the golden ages
Smith identifies four functions of the golden ages. The first is to provide a sense of continuity between the present and past. Golden ages do this either through the presentation of a cyclic mythical story or through an archaeologist’s geological discovery of a long-lost vernacular language, a sacred book, or artifact. Second, the golden age grounds nationalist culture with an identity in the flux of historical change. Third, a golden age provides a community with temporal roots, a time for beginnings and endings. Lastly, golden ages give expression and sanction to a quest for authenticity. It provides models for the nation’s true identity, stripped of cultural mixing, corruption, and decline.
Creating altered states of consciousness
Everyday life is composed of small conflicts and problems that most often require neither a sense of adventure nor a great deal of social solidarity to resolve. But extraordinary life circumstances require both risk-taking and group support. Whether the sacred tradition is magical, religious, or nationalistic, it appeals to the big picture and requires the adventure and support that goes with it.
In tribal societies, rituals before war or harsh rites of passage induce altered states of consciousness, which are memorable because they require both courage and dependability. Popular monotheistic states of consciousness invite speaking in tongues, devotional emotional appeal, and the promise of being taken care of in exchange for obedience. In nationalistic settings such as recruiting offices, prospective soldiers are promised they will be taken care of by a strict military discipline while having great adventures in other parts of the world. Like monotheism, nationalism appeals to the petty side of humanity. Participants are told they are an elite group, superior to other nations. Once inside the military, boot camp becomes the arena in which individual will is broken. New recruits are taught to be dependent on authority and to not question things.
Altered states can be created by either sensory saturation or sensory deprivation. A great example of sensory saturation to create an altered state is the Catholic mass. Here we have the bombardment of vision (stained glass windows), sound (loud organ music), smell (strong incense), taste (the holy communion), and touch (gesturing with the sign of the cross). Sensory deprivation in a monotheistic setting includes fasting, prayer, or meditation. Sensory deprivation in nationalistic settings is at boot camp and on the battlefield of war itself.
Sensory saturation occurs in nationalistic settings at addresses by prominent politicians, such as the presidential state of the union addresses, in congressional meetings, at political rallies, and during primaries. Presidential debates and elections are actually throwbacks to rituals and ceremonies. Those diehards of electoral politics who attend these rituals are at least as taken away by the props as were participants in a tribal magical ceremony. In Yankeedom, the setting includes the Great Seal of the United States hanging above the event, along with the American flag, a solemn pledge of allegiance, a rendition of “God Bless America,” and a military parade.
Attachment vs. detachment to land
As Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) and others have pointed out, tribal societies’ sense of physical setting contains a psychic element, where rocks and rivers are not physical things separated from our psychological states, but rather they have a psychic field before we even interact with them. When we interact with them, they deepen our own memories, dreams, and emotional life. This sense of attachment was not attachment to a nation, but a kind of group loyalty to the ecological setting of trees, mountains, and rivers. Tuan refers to this as attachment to “places.”
With the rise of monotheism, and later commerce in city-states, physical nature as a psychic, sacred place is undermined by a geographical conception of “space” as being purely physical and secular. Correspondingly, outside of churches, much of Christianity saw natural geography either as a temptress—a lush and tropical jungle—or as a wasteland.
The relationship between monotheism and territorial attachment is conflicted. On the one hand, elite monotheists depreciate the importance of territorial attachment as an expression of pagans whom Christians feel are enslaved to the land. The prophets promote a kind of cosmopolitanism. Yet on the other hand, the more fundamentalist sects in popular monotheism insist on locating the actual birthplace of the religion and making it the scene of pilgrimages—Muslims go to Mecca, Christians to Bethlehem—or even a permanent occupation as with Zionist Jews in Palestine. In a way, on a more complex level, the rise of a nation’s sense of loyalty based on geography is a kind of return to pagan attachments to place.
Promised lands of the past: the Swiss Alps
We need to make a distinction between the promised land as an ancestral homeland (the past) and the promised land as a land of destination (the future). During the late Renaissance, the Alps were becoming a source of interest for artists like Dürer, Bruegel, and da Vinci as a vortex of the great powers of nature (Tuan, 1977). Naturalist Conrad Gessner climbed Mount Pilatus in 1555 to lay to rest stories about evil spirits in the mountains, and he raved about the clarity of mountain water. But the link between the Alps and the national identity of the Swiss was made only by 18th-century Enlighteners. They championed the primitive virtue of simple Alpine rustics. A century ago, Ernest Bovet, professor at Zurich University, wrote that Swiss independence was born in the mountains:
A mysterious force has kept us together for 600 years and has given us our democratic institutions. A good spirit watches our liberty. A spirit fills our souls, directs our actions and creates a hymn on the one ideal out of our different languages. It is the spirit that blows from the summits, the genius of the Alps and glaciers. (Tuan, 1977, page 161)
In his play William Tell, Friedrich Schiller links the origins of the Swiss confederation to the purity of the Alpine landscape.
Promised lands of the past: Anglo-Saxons
For the Anglo-Saxons who had traveled across the waters to Britain, the analogy with Israel’s election was established by the time of King Alfred and his successors before the 10th century. The parallel between the Exodus of the Israelites and the journey of the Saxons across the seas from Denmark and Germany to Britain was already present, according to Anthony Smith, in Bede’s work as long ago as 730 CE.
It was the Anglican Church that, supported by the monarchy, advanced providential interpretations of Anglo-Saxon history. England was imagined, in biblical terms, an island nation under God in the manner of ancient Israel. The Germanic invasions of Britain were understood as divine punishment. The invasions of Anglo-Saxon land were compared to the assaults of the Assyrians upon the Jews.
According to Adrian Hastings (1997), the Norman Conquest did little to diminish the sense of English nationhood, except that the French language replaces Anglo-Saxon languages among the elites for almost two hundred years. It was only towards the end of the 13th century and into the 14th century that a more aggressive and widespread English national sentiment appeared in a series of wars conducted by Edward I against Wales, Scotland, and later France. Nationalism was also fueled by the rise of English literature in the age of Chaucer and the use of English in the administration and the courts.
During the 17th century, Cromwell’s New Model Army and the English Civil War against Catholic influence deepened the connection between the English people and their feeling of being chosen. In fact, men going into battle for Cromwell’s New Model Army were inspired by hymns and songs from the Old Testament. Myths of the English Protestant election was carried over into the constitutional settlement after 1689. Hans Kohn (2005) also claims that the Puritan myth of missionary election became deeply entrenched in subsequent English nationalism. Christopher Hill (1964) points out that Milton’s writings contain frequent assertion of the English having been chosen. This is carried over into colonial attitudes of cultural superiority and paternalism overseas.
Promised lands of the future: Yankeedom and the Dutch
For the Puritan settlers in America, who fled the Restoration and experienced a perilous exodus in crossing the seas, it was easy to create in their imaginations an “American Israel,” or a “New American Jerusalem.” Though conditions were difficult at first, the scale and abundance of the continent held promise for many immigrants. American Puritans’ ideal of the “City on the Hill” was originally confined to small settlements and towns. From the early 19th century on, the promised-land concept came to include expansion across the United States. As the Western frontier expanded and indigenous populations dwindled from disease or conquest, the belief in a providential and manifest destiny was extended. This is exemplified in the epic paintings of Thomas Cole, Edwin Church, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran and Sanford Gifford that glorify the majesty of the West. Anthony Smith (2003) points out that the relationship of sublime landscape to nationalism was not unique to the United States.
Even more than the British, the Dutch returned to the Old Testament—the idea of themselves as the chosen people and the children of Israel—to build their national and colonial identity. At first the Dutch strove for their rights to their land in their struggle with Spain. But then it was used later in the story of the Dutch Afrikaners who colonized South Africa.
The Great Trek of Dutch-speaking farmers from the British-ruled Cape Colony occurred 1834–1838. The wandering of the Boers from British oppression to freedom in a promised land was interpreted as deliverance of Israelites from Egypt. The Dutch saw themselves as a later-day version of the Puritans—the prototypical Israelites, fleeing a British pharaoh. But the Dutch were also taking the land of the Zulus. In the Battle of Blood River, the badly outnumbered Boer farmers linked ox wagons in a circle and held off an army of three thousand Zulus. A few had taken a vow that if God would deliver them from their enemies, they would honor Him on that date, and so the Battle of Blood River was celebrated annually.
The covenant and the Great Trek amplified later Boer drives for purity through separation from all other peoples:
The genealogy of Ham…legitimated the servitude of non-white heathen to the Judaeo Christian children of Shem. Just as the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua had commanded the Israelites to drive out the idolatrous peoples of Canaan… their descendants believed they were destined to take the lands of heathen natives and expel or rule over them. (Smith, Chosen Peoples, page 81)
To be “the elect” was to justify land conquest.
Using the theme of the promised land as both a past and a future for the nation is powerfully described at the hundred-year anniversary commemoration of the Afrikaner Great Trek. Daniel Malan, a chief instigator in the Dutch Reformed Church, said the following in his speech:
You stand here upon the boundary of two centuries. Behind you, rest your eyes upon the year 1838 as upon a high, outstanding mountain top, dominating everything in the blue distance. Before you, upon the yet untrodden Path of South Africa, lies the year 2038, equally far off and hazy. Behind you, lie the tracks of the Voortrekker wagons, deeply and ineradicably etched upon the wide outstretched plains, and across the grinning dragon-tooth mountain ranges of our country’s history. Over those unknown regions which stretch broadly before you there will also be treks of the Ox Wagon. They will be your Ox Wagons. You and your children will make history. (Smith, 2003)
Smith concludes, from these and many other examples, that no amount of manipulation by elites of myths and biblical texts could have mobilized and transplanted such large numbers unless these myths and texts were rooted in sacred beliefs of ethnic election. He shows that these beliefs were deeply rooted in the history of everyone in the ethnic group, not just the elite. Modern theorists of the nation separate nature from the history of cultures and separate the human psyche—emotion, memory, inspiration—from the landscape, but, according to Smith, they simply cannot explain this kind of attraction to nationalism.
From mission of the chosen people to Manifest Destiny
Earlier we said that what separates monotheism from polytheism is the expansionary, missionary zeal of monotheism. This tendency was also characteristic of many nation-building projects throughout history. Both monotheism and nationalism wish to expand. There is an exclusive commitment to either one religion or one nation; yet once that exclusive commitment is made, the religion or nation sometimes advocates for expansion around the world. Table 2 below shows a summary of the commonalities between monotheism and nationalism.
Table 2 Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism: Beliefs and Dramatization
| Monotheism Judeo-Christian | Category of Comparison | Nationalism (United States) |
| A sacred system prevalent stratified state societies with possible developing empires in which a single, abstract and transcendental deity presides over “chosen people” via a contract or covenant | Definition | A secular system which exists in capitalist societies in which a single nation claims territory regulated by a state. It is an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of three characteristics: autonomy, unity, and identity |
| Destroys gods and goddesses, ancestors, spirits, totems, and earth spirits | Destruction of intermediaries | Destroys loyalty to kin groups, regions, religion, and social class |
| Singular: “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me” (Idolatry) | Sacred Source | Singular: One nation— “Thou shalt not have other nations before me” |
| Covenant: contract of equality of participants before God as opposed to class or status differences in access to God. | Type of binding to source | Constitutional: contract of equality as citizens as opposed to class and status differences |
| Chosen people | Status in relation to other groups | Chosen people (American Exceptionalism) |
| Lighting up the world; opening a blind eye (missionary work) | Expansion | Manifest destiny, making the world safe for democracy, and flooding colonized countries with commodities |
| Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories. Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history. | Importance of history | Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories. Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history. |
| Golden ages: Adam and Eve, Old Testament and wilderness | Importance of origins | Golden ages: Founding of Jamestown, taming the western wilderness with pioneers, frontiersman, and cowboys |
| Strangers united in the brotherhood of man | Composition of community | Strangers united as citizens of the nation. |
| Moses, Christ | Founders mythologized | Washington, Jefferson, Franklin |
| Ceremonies: going to mass, speaking in tongues, dancing in the aisles, blessing one’s self, crucifix | Ceremonies; symbolic reality; giving thanks | Presidential elections, rallies, Great Seal of the United States, military parades, pledging allegiance, flag |
| Sensory deprivation: prayer, fasting, meditation Sensory saturation: Catholic Mass (stain glass windows, organ music, incense, Holy communion) | Methods of altering states of consciousness | Sensory deprivation: boot camp, fighting in a war. Sensory saturation: singing the national anthem, flag waving, hot dogs, apple pie |
| Religious paintings: Gothic Cathedrals, Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo), The Last Supper (Da Vinci) | Paintings | Patriotic paintings: Washington Crossing the Delaware, redemptive Western landscapes (Remington, Moran) |
| Liturgical hymn books: “Amazing Grace,” Christmas music | Music | “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” “Battle Hymn of Republic |
| Catechism | Literature | Novels about the American West |
• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
The post The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A United Nations (UN) report recently emerged making damning claims of sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. But not all is as it seems. The report has some glaring epistemological problems, all of which seem to serve the Israeli narrative that its genocide in Gaza is somehow justified. Moreover, the report fits within a wider modus operandi on the part of the world’s preeminent international institution. A more comprehensive examination of the history of the UN’s role in the conflict in Palestine reveals its supposed pro-Palestinian bias is not as clearcut as it’s commonly presented. Indeed, there is evidence that the UN has, if anything, been more a tool of Israel than the other way round.
Shocking accusations swiftly weaponized by Israel
The UN released the report on March 4, almost six months after the surprise October 7 attack when members of Hamas’ paramilitary wing breached the Gaza border. Co-authored by its special envoy on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, the document claims there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence during the attack. Patten gave a statement in which she said that this took place in “at least three locations” including “the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”
The following day, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, publicly condemned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for supposedly failing to respond in an adequate manner. Specifically, he criticized Guterres for failing to immediately call for a UN Security Council meeting about the report’s findings. However, as multiple media outlets have pointed out, Guterres does not have the authority to convene a General Assembly meeting. A UN spokesperson responded that “in no way, shape, or form did the secretary-general do anything to keep the report ‘quiet.’” She added that Katz’s announcement was made a matter of hours before a press conference about the report’s contents was scheduled to be held.
Recalling UN ambassador and launching ‘hasbara’ propaganda campaign
Israel has also withdrawn its ambassador to the UN, claiming that the organization’s leadership is attempting to “silence” the allegations. Katz said in a statement: “”I [have] ordered our ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, to return to Israel for immediate consultations regarding the attempt to keep quiet the serious UN report on the mass rapes committed by Hamas and its helpers on Oct. 7.”
Nonetheless, there are already signs that the Israeli government is seizing on the report as part of its ongoing propaganda campaign to deflect criticism from its committal of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. On March 7, the Jerusalem Post reported that Katz, “has directed all embassies within the State of Israel to begin a large-scale hasbara (public diplomacy) campaign immediately… in light of the findings of the UN report on sexual violence in the Hamas massacre on October 7.”
An inversion of the Israeli narrative about the UN
The development represents an inversion of what Israel and Western media commonly characterize as the usual dynamic between the UN and the various parties to the conflict in Palestine. According to this narrative, the UN has a viciously anti-Israel agenda and consistently singles out Israel for criticism. Indeed, hardline Zionists have long complained that the UN is “biased” or even prejudiced against Israel, which often goes alongside the usual conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
One US-based Israel supporter even set up an NGO called “UN Watch,” which according to its executive director “holds the UN to account” for its supposed anti-Israel bias. Indeed, we will presumably soon hear an Israeli narrative that presents the fact that the UN has produced such a report in spite of such a bias as the most definitive proof possible that its findings are correct. But a deeper investigation shows that the report is, in fact, deeply flawed in both its methods and conclusions.
A compendium of unverified anecdotes and repetition of Israeli lies
It has already emerged, for instance, that the team of UN personnel who produced the report did not conduct their own research. Tellingly, press reports have also revealed that they did not even meet with any survivors of sexual violence that allegedly took place on October 7. Rather, they relied to a large extent on anecdotal and unverified reports from institutions in Israel. According to CNN, the UN team met with a total of 33 Israeli institutions. One of these was a “search and rescue” organization that has previously been accused of spreading misinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack. This same organization, for example, had earlier claimed that it found a pregnant woman who had been stabbed in the stomach in an apparent attack on her fetus, which turned out to be unverified.
Foreign Policy magazine pointed out that the report furthermore “did not attribute the sexual violence to any specific armed group.” In other words, even if the allegations are true, they could have been committed by Palestinians (or, indeed, non-Palestinians) who were not affiliated with Hamas or any other Palestinian paramilitary organization. Foreign Policy added that “the U.N. team behind the report had not been tasked with an investigative mission” and that “[s]uch attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process.”
A similar story plays out at the New York Times
The report was released in the same week that it emerged that significant sections of a New York Times article published in December of last year, which contained similar claims, were in fact false. The story, titled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.,” claimed that members of the Be’eri kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza border had been raped by Hamas assailants during the course of the October 7 attack.
But The Intercept reported on March 7 that at least two of the three women “were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” according to a spokesperson of the kibbutz. The Intercept article adds that some of the initial reports about sexual violence came from an anonymous paramedic who had been connected to the international media by a representative of the Israeli government (which, of course, makes this person’s testimony highly suspect). It also states that the kibbutz spokesperson herself “disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets.”
Not an isolated incident, but the latest chapter in a long history
Neither the UN report nor the erroneous New York Times article would be the first cases of Western institutions or its corporate-owned media spreading misinformation on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, there is a long history of The New York Times specifically taking orders from the Israeli government and its NGO proxies in the Israel lobby. In 2014, for example, the Times deliberately failed to report on the arrest of a Palestinian journalist by Israeli authorities because Israel had ordered it to do so. In 2022, the Times fired a Palestinian photographer on its staff at the behest of the pro-Israel NGO Honest Reporting.
Even when there is no direct evidence of Israeli intervention, leadership of mainstream corporate media across the West seem to have an almost automatic tendency to sideline, silence and/or fire any of its staff who fail to toe the pro-Israel line. In 2018, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for making a pro-Palestinian remark at a UN meeting held on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Washington-based publication The Hill sacked Katie Halper in 2022 after she described Israel as an apartheid state (a charge that has become mainstream even within Israel). And the UK’s Guardian newspaper fired Nathan J. Robinson in 2021 after he posted a satirical comment about the US’s military funding to Israel on social media.
Countless resolutions but never any concrete sanction
As for the UN, though there have been many resolutions condemning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, the organization has seldom imposed any concrete punitive measures against the country in response. Indeed, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the reason why the UN keeps issuing so many resolutions condemning Israel is because Israel (with the encouragement of its backers in Washington) simply ignores them and continues to violate Palestinian human rights and international law.
In any case, it is the UN General Assembly, rather than the UN’s leadership or staff, that usually issues these condemnations. The UN General Assembly is made up of representatives of governments around the world and so is more representative of global public opinion than the UN’s internal bureaucracy. In any case, General Assembly resolutions can be vetoed by permanent members of the UN Security Council. Since one of those permanent members is the United States (whose number one ally is Israel), it always vetoes any resolution that condemns Israel anyway.
UN staff slammed by leadership when critical of Israel
Even when UN officials themselves criticize Israel, they sometimes do so only to get silenced or sidelined by the UN’s hierarchy. For instance, international relations scholar at Princeton University Richard Falk served for decades as a UN expert on the conflict in Palestine. Yet his work has often been thwarted by figures within the UN leadership and administration.
In 2017, for example, Falk published a report on Israel’s human rights violations through the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA). The head of UNESCWA, Rima Khalaf, said that the report represented the first time that any UN report has “clearly and frankly conclude[d] that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.”
The fact that Israel is practicing apartheid in the occupied territories is so obvious that former US president Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, have said so. Even some figures from Israel’s own political, military, intelligence, and legal elite have said so too. Yet in spite of this, Secretary General António Guterres demanded that Khalaf withdraw Falk’s report.
Legitimizing the two-state charade while deplatforming the one-state alternative
Another way that the UN subtly serves the Israeli narrative is its elevation of a two-state solution as the best, and indeed only, means of resolving the conflict. Every resolution passed by the UN General Assembly calling for a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is predicated on one Israeli state and one Palestinian state divided by the borders that existed prior to the June 1967 war. This would deliver to Israel 78% of the land that made up historic Palestine while leaving the Palestinians with the remaining 22%. In addition to giving the two sides a completely unfair share of the land (especially considering the rough parity in population numbers), this division would also reward the Zionist landgrab and subsequent ethnic cleansing that took place in the latter half of the 1940s.
The traditional solution that was proffered by all Palestinian nationalist parties before the 1993 Oslo accord, meanwhile, (that is, a single, secular, non-sectarian democratic state with equal rights for all encompassing the whole of historic Palestine) has been systematically suppressed and deplatformed by the UN’s leadership. Former official Craig Mokhiber was essentially forced to resign for reasons of conscience before publicly voicing his support for the rival one-state solution – again highlighting how the UN hierarchy sidelines those who it considers too pro-Palestinian.
In a public letter published just as he resigned, Mokhiber stated that the two-state solution has become an “open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.” During a media interview shortly after he added: “When people [who work at the UN] are not talking from official talking points, you hear increasingly about a one-state solution.”
The two-state smokescreen
This deliberate deplatforming of the one-state solution and narrow focus on its two-state rival serves an important purpose for Israel. Though Israel opposes even the resolutions in favor of two states (presumably because they insist that such a settlement should be based on internationally recognized borders), it nonetheless benefits from the elevation of the two-state solution. This is because it creates a convenient smokescreen for Israel to deliberately stall on making peace while continuing to displace Palestinians in the West Bank, establish settlements in their place, and build infrastructure for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers – all of which is illegal under international law.
Israel does this as part of a duplicitous sleight of hand in which it publicly proclaims support for a two-state solution while simultaneously itself creating a situation on the ground that makes that solution impossible. It does this for the simple reason that the goal of Zionism from the outset has been the establishment of a Jewish-majority state encompassing all of historic Palestine with the Palestinians ethnically cleansed out of it. As political scientist Rosalind Petchesky puts it in A Land With A People, “the settler colonial project to ‘de-Arabise Palestine’ and bring all of historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust.”
Time to rethink the role of the UN
Given the UN’s role in providing cover for the continuation of this process all while posturing as the primary locomotive toward peace, it is high time that Palestinians and their supporters stop looking up to it as a source of truth and meaningful condemnation of Israel’s human rights violations. Clearly, there is growing evidence that the supposed anti-Israel bias of the UN is a myth concocted to benefit Israel. Evidently, if there’s any bias at the world’s preeminent international institution, it is against the Palestinians rather than the other way round.
The post New Report on Sexual Violence During October 7 Attack Raises Serious Questions About the UN’s Supposed Anti-Israel Bias first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New Zealand news media came under fire at today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland calling for an immediate ceasefire in the war in Gaza with speakers condemning what they said was pro-Israeli “bias” and “propaganda”.
About 500 protesters waved Palestinian flags and many placards declaring “If you’re not heartbroken and furious, you’re not paying attention – stop the genocide”, “Killing kids is not self-defence” and “Western ‘civility, democracy, humanity, morality’ – bitch, where?”.
They gave Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government a grilling for the “weak” response to Israel atrocities.
Many speakers were angry over the massacre of starving Palestinians when Israeli military forces opened fire on a crowd seeking aid in the central Gaza City area on Thursday with latest Gaza Health Ministry reports indicating that at least 115 Gazans had been killed with 760 wounded.
The overall death toll is now 30,228 Palestinians killed and 71,377 wounded in Gaza since the war began on October 7.
The UN Human Rights office called for a swift and independent probe into the food aid shootings, saying “at least 14 “similar attacks had occurred since mid-January.
The Biden administration has announced a plan with Jordan to airdrop aid into Gaza but former USAID director Dave Harden has criticised the move as “ineffectual” for the huge humanitarian need of Gaza.
Airdrops ‘symbol of failure’
“Airdrops are a symbol of massive failure,” he told Al Jazeera.
The bodies of three more Palestinians killed in the food aid slaughter were recovered.
The New Zealand media were condemned for relying on “flawed” media coverage and journalists embedded with the Israeli military.
“The New Zealand media ‘scalps’ information to create public perceptions rather than informing the public of the facts so that we can come to the conclusion that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide,” Neil Scott, secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Network (PSNA), told the crowd.
PSNA’s Neil Scott addressing the Palestine solidarity crowd today. Video: APR
“What Israel is doing in Palestine is apartheid, what Israel is doing in Palestine is occupation – each of those three, plus way more, are crimes against humanity.
“And what is the New Zealand media doing and saying about this?”
“Nothing,” shouted many in the crowd.
“Nada,” continued Scott.
‘Puppies are cute’
“Puppies? Puppies are cute. We’ll get those on TV.
“Genocide. Apartheid. Occupation. Crimes against humanity. Don’t give us news.”
Scott led a deputation of protesters to the headquarters of Television New Zealand yesterday, citing many examples of misinformation of lack of fair and “truthful” coverage.
But management declined to speak to the protesters and the 1News team failed to cover the protest over TVNZ’s coverage of the war on Gaza.
Criticisms have been mounting worldwide against Western news media coverage, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, the staunchest supporters of Israel and the source of most of NZ’s global news services, including the Middle East.
CNN ‘climate of hostility’
Yesterday, the investigative website Intercept reported how CNN media staff, including the celebrated international news anchor Christiane Amanpour, had confronted network executives over what they claimed as stories about the war on Gaza being changed and a “climate of hostility” towards Arab journalists.
According to a leaked internal recording, Amanpour told management that the CNN policy was causing “real distress” over “changing copy” and ”double standards”.
Meanwhile, one of some 50 protests across New Zealand today – in Christchurch – was disrupted by a group of counter-demonstrators supporting Israel who performed a haka at the Bridge of Remembrance.
The group from the Freedoms and Rights Coalition – linked to the Destiny Church – waved Israeli flags and chanted “go back to Israel”. The pro-Palestinian supporters yelled “shame on them” and carried on with their regular weekly march to Cathedral Square.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
I feel like I’m watching the film Don’t Look Up. We all know that the comet is headed straight toward us, but our society paralyzes itself with self-interest, corruption and politics until the avoidable inevitable happens.
Israel’s genocide is proceeding according to plan, and it looks like we won’t have to wait long for its accomplishment. In return for $10 billion, Egypt will accept the stampeding masses of desperate, starving and terrified Palestinians after a false flag atrocity that will be blamed on Hamas, including demolition of part of the razor-wire-festooned border wall through which the mostly women and children will be driven, by bombs raining from the skies and relentless bullets from the muzzles of Israel’s valiant young soldiers, creating a path of corpses and pieces of corpses.
Of course, Egypt was lying about creating a camp for 60,000 refugees only. That particular camp will hold 100,000 or more, and a gulag of camps is being built to hold a total of perhaps up to 2 million. The fix is in. Netanyahu and Biden will bathe in rivers of blood. Will the world stop it from happening? I see no sign that it will. All of the reaction has been in the form of words. Words from the International Court of Justice. Words from the United Nations. Words from even the rest of us, marching in the streets, confronting Tony Blinken outside his home, and similar vocal utterances. Only the Palestinian resistance, Yemen, Hezbollah and the other resistance groups are taking real action.
When will it happen? How much time do we still have to make a difference? My guess is a few weeks at most, maybe a month. The Gaza Flotilla, which was only intended to deliver its humanitarian cargo to Egypt, to be trucked into Gaza, will probably arrive too late to distribute its aid anywhere other than to the Palestinian population driven into the Egyptian Sinai, not the remnants in Gaza.
Then what? A lot of hand wringing and condemnations. More words. Netanyahu will be triumphant even if he is reviled internationally. By his own people, he will be lauded for “doing what needed to be done” and to hell with the rest of the world, who are all antisemites, anyway.
Will Biden be so reviled that he won’t run for a second term? I suspect that this has already been part of the script for weeks or months, perhaps longer. He will be tainted, so that his successor will not be. And who will that be? Hillary Clinton, of course. She and her Democrats will try to so handicap Trump, legally and otherwise, that she will win. But she underestimates the revulsion that the American public bears for her. I think she will fail again, unless Trump meets a violent end, and perhaps not even then. From there, I hesitate to predict the consequences. Or perhaps Biden won’t be tainted enough in the minds of the American public, thanks to the official Ministry of Information, AKA the obsequious corporate media. The result will be the same, in any case.
The post The End of Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip. One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services.
In its case against Israel, South Africa argued, citing various grounds, that Israel’s purposeful denial of humanitarian aid to Palestinians could fall within the UN Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
A month has elapsed since the ICJ order, after which Israel was meant to report back on compliance. But, as Amnesty International reports, Israel continues “to disregard its obligation as the occupying power to ensure the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are met.”
The organisation’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Heba Morayef, gives a lashing summary of that conduct. “Not only has Israel created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, but it is also displaying callous indifference to the fate of Gaza’s population by creating conditions which the ICJ has said placed them at imminent risk of genocide.” Israel, Morayef continues to state, had “woefully failed to provide for Gazans’ basic needs” and had “been blocking and impeding the passage of sufficient aid into the Gaza strip, in particular to the north which is virtually inaccessible, in a clear show of contempt for the ICJ ruling and in flagrant violation of its obligation to prevent genocide.”
The humanitarian accounting on this score is grim. Since the ICJ order, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza has precipitously declined. Within three weeks, it had fallen by a third: an average of 146 a day were coming in three weeks prior; afterwards, the numbers had fallen to about 105. Prior to the October 7 assault by Hamas, approximately 500 trucks were entering the strip on a daily basis.
The criminally paltry aid to the besieged Palestinians is even too much for some Israeli protest groups which have formed with one single issue in mind: preventing any aid from being sent into Gaza. As a result, closures have taken place at Kerem Shalom due to protests and clashes with security forces.
Their support base may seem to be small and peppered by affiliates from the Israeli Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but an Israeli Democracy Institute poll conducted in February found that 68% of Jewish respondents opposed the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza. Rachel Touitou of Tzav 9, a group formed in December with that express purpose in mind, stated her reasoning as such: “You cannot expect the country to fight its enemy and feed it at the same time.”
Hardly subtle, but usefully illustrative of the attitude best reflected by the blood curdling words of Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, who declared during the campaign that his country’s armed forces were “fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” in depriving them of electricity, food and fuel.
In December 2023, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding, among other things, that the warring parties “allow and facilitate the use of all available routes to and throughout the entire Gaza Strip, including border crossings”. Direct routes were also to be prioritised. To date, Israel has refused to permit aid through other crossings.
In February, the Global Nutrition Cluster reported that “the nutrition situation of women and children in Gaza is worsening everywhere, but especially in Northern Gaza where 1 in 6 children are acutely malnourished and an estimated 3% face the most severe form of wasting and require immediate treatment.”
The organisation’s report makes ugly reading. Over 90% of children between 6 to 23 months along with pregnant and breastfeeding women face “severe food poverty”, with the food supplied being “of the lowest nutritional value and from two or fewer food groups.” At least 90% of children under the age of 5 are burdened with one or more infectious diseases, while 70% have suffered from diarrhoea over the previous two weeks. Safe and clean water, already a problem during the 16-year blockade, is now in even shorter supply, with 81% of households having access to less than one litre per person per day.
Reduced to such conditions of monumental and raw desperation, hellish scenes of Palestinians swarming around aid convoys were bound to manifest. On February 29, Gaza City witnessed one such instance, along with a lethal response from Israeli troops. In the ensuing violence, some 112 people were killed, adding to a Palestinian death toll that has already passed 30,000. While admitting to opening fire on the crowd, the IDF did not miss a chance to paint their victims as disorderly savages, with “dozens” being “killed and injured from pushing, trampling and being run over by the trucks.” The acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, Dr. Mohammed Salha, in noting the admission of some 161 wounded patients, suggested that gun fire had played its relevant role, given that most of those admitted suffered from gunshot wounds.
If Israel’s intention had been to demonstrate some good will in averting any insinuation that genocide was taking place, let alone a systematic policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian population, little evidence of it has been shown. If anything, the suspicions voiced by South Africa and other critics aghast at the sheer ferocity of the campaign are starting to seem utter plausible in their horror.
The post Conscious and Unconscionable: The Starving of Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.