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Category: Propaganda

  • The New Sicarii

    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.

    • After the Altalena, a ship purchased by the renegade Irgun militia and containing fighters and military equipment for the Irgun, arrived in Tel Aviv in June 1948, on David Ben Gurion’s orders, the Haganah sank the ship and killed 16 members of the right-wing Irgun militia.
    • Menachem Begin orchestrated The King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946, which killed 91 people, including 17 Jews.
    • The Jewish underground organization, Lehi, of which Isaac Shamir was known as a member, assassinated British Minister Resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, and United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte.

    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.

    • Brit HaKanaim was a radical religious Jewish underground organization, which operated in Israel between 1950, and 1953. The movement’s ultimate goal ─ establish a state run by Jewish religious law.
    • The Kingdom of Israel group was active in Israel in the 1950s. The group viewed the secularization of Jewish North African immigrants as a direct assault on the religious Jewish way of life and a threat to the ultra-Orthodox community. Members were caught trying to bomb the Israeli Ministry of Education in May 1953.
    • Keshet (1981-1989), an anti-Zionist Haredi group, focused on bombing property without loss of life.
    • Sicarii, an Israeli terrorist group founded in 1989, plotted arson and graffiti attacks on leftist Jewish politicians who proposed rapprochement with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
    • Lehava, an extreme religious minority, closely associated with the political party Otzma Yehudit, which is led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, objects to most personal relationships between Jews and non-Jews and is opposed to Christian presence in Israel.
    • The Revolt terror group, founded in 2011, claims the secular State of Israel has no right to exist; they hope to create a Jewish Kingdom in Israel. Arabs will be killed if they refuse to leave.
    • Gush Emunim (the block of the faithful), an Israeli messianic movement, committed several acts of anti-Arab terror in the West Bank during the 1980s and also planned to blow up the Muslim Dome of the Rock.
    • The Kach movement, founded in the early 1970s by Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish American Defense League, was most known for the action of Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 worshipping Muslims and injured about 150 others in the al-Ibrahimi Mosque (the Cave of the Patriarchs) in Hebron.
    • The Settler movement dispossesses Palestinian land and harms Palestinians with impunity as if they have the right and privilege from a higher authority to commit crimes in any way they want.

    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 October 1965 – March 1966 massacre in Indonesia of hundreds of thousands in the anti-communist purge after Suharto grasped power from Sukarno alluded to the economic and political power that the Chinese residents and communists enjoyed during Sukarno’s regime.
    • The July 1994 Rwandan genocide of the majority Hutus against the minority Tutsi population occurred from Hutu resentment of the Tutsi’s economic and military control.
    • The 2016 brutal attacks on the minority Rohingya people in Myanmar came from the military and the local adjoining Rakhine population. The latter accused the Rohingya of intruding upon their territory and attacks against its people.
    • The WWII Holocaust was driven partly by a Nazi concept of being a racially superior people and defining Jews as an inferior race. Another reason was the Nazi fear that the German Jews had acquired too much economic power, media control, and political influence, and were a significant challenge to the Nazi regime.

    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.

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

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

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

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

    Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:

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

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

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

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

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

    In 2013, Simpson opined:

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

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

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

    World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked

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

    Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy

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

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

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

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

    The BBC headline reporting this story read:

    Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO

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

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

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

    Needless to say, that was not to be.

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

    Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

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

    On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

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

    Author Assal Rad responded:

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

    The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’

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

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

    And:

    Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks

    USA Today’s headline was surreal:

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

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

    More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy

    The standfirst (sub-heading):

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

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

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

    ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104

    Compare also its standfirst:

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

    On 1 March, Associated Press reported:

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

    The following day, a BBC headline read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.

    Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.

    On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:

    The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.

    Brown commented on video footage:

    Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.

    Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.

    “Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”

    Brown added:

    Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”

    Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

    As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

    The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

    The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).

    This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.

    A BBC report on 5 March stated:

    Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.

    Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.

    Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?

    According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:

    After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.

    Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.

    Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:

    “It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.

    ”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.

    ”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”

    CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:

    We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.

    On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:

    UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

    “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

    The UN added of its experts:

    They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.

    “Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.

    None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:

    During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.

    Conclusion

    It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:

    Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows

    Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:

    Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.

    UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.

    The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.

    On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:

    The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)

    See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’

    Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.

    We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)

    With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:

    What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)

    The answer, of course, was oil.

    The post Israel’s “Flour Massacre”: When A Crime Becomes A “Tragedy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I 

    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:

    • The Celtic pagan vs. Christian antiquity in Ireland
    • The Gallic vs. Frankish origins and culture in France
    • The Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman origins of Arthurian cultures in England
    • The Classical Hellenic vs. Byzantine origins in Greece
    • The Islamic-Ottoman vs. Turkic origins in Turkey
    • The Davidic-Solomonic vs. Rabbinic Talmudic traditions of the Golden Age of Israel

    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

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • New Report on Sexual Violence During October 7 Attack Raises Serious Questions About the UN’s Supposed Anti-Israel Bias

    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.

  • NZ news media under fire for ‘bias, propaganda’ in Gaza coverage

    Pacific Media Watch

    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.

    Responses to the Gaza food aid massacre
    Responses to the Gaza food aid massacre . . . “If you’re not hearbroken and furious, you’re not paying attention.” Image: David Robie/APR

    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.”

    Television New Zealand's 1News headquarters in Auckland
    Television New Zealand’s 1News headquarters in Auckland . . . target of a protest yesterday and condemnation today over its Gaza war coverage. Image: APR

    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.

  • The End of Gaza

    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.

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  • Conscious and Unconscionable: The Starving of Gaza

    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.

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Washington Post Bashes Xi Jinping

    In the age of disinformation and artificial information, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post (WaPo) manages to have some credibility. After its February 22 editorial, “Mr. Xi is tanking China’s economy,” Jeff Bezos would be wise to sell the newspaper. If those who lead the Editorial Board make childish mistakes and recite obvious falsehoods, can anyone believe in what they read?

    Before scolding WAPO’s spurious description of Xi’s world, in which none of the charges are backed with proof, permit the presentation of one of the most serious errors in journalism history. Doubtful the WaPo staff will ever recover from this faux pas.  The editorial states:

    China recorded a respectable 5.2 percent economic growth rate last year, but the real rate is lower when adjusted for falling prices. Rather than being an economic juggernaut, China seems likely to be entering a period of deflation, the sorts of conditions that led to Japan’s “lost decade.”

    Having the real rate of growth to go down with deflation is equivalent to having an auto slow down when the gas pedal is more heavily pressed. How many hands, eyeballs, and minds at WAPO did not know that “inflation occurs when nominal GDP is higher than real GDP and deflation happens when real GDP is higher than nominal GDP.”

    Real GDP= Nominal GDP/R
    where: GDP=Gross domestic product
    R=GDP deflator (R<1 during deflation and >1 during inflation)

    ​Examine the opening paragraph:

    For the past decade, Americans have worried increasingly about China, not least because Chinese President Xi Jinping has centralized power, silenced critics, stalled private-sector reforms and taken an increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world

    Saying that Xi Jinping silenced critics, without specifying who and how is meaningless. To gain office, all politicians try to overcome critics. A good politician silences critics. China is different; the government runs on consensus, and when a decision is made, including who will be president, there are no remaining critics.

    Again, without specifying the nature of Xi’s “increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world?” how can his nature be evaluated? Have the Africans, Latinos, Europeans, Eskimos, and most of Asia found Xi combative or does the WaPo editorial board think Washington is the world?

    Instead, Mr. Xi’s China is less free, less prosperous and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course — one not inspired by rivalry with the West or fear of his own people.

    “Mr. Xi’s China is less free.”

    The intentional insult of replacing President Xi with Mr. XI demeans WaPo.
    Western media always considered China devoid of freedom. How can a country be less free when it has always been considered not free? Consider who is setting the criteria and doing the evaluation. If Chinese authorities set the criteria and evaluated freedom in the United States how would they consider freedom of thought in the U.S. after the rise of Trumpism and his cohorts?

    “Less prosperous.”

    GDP is up 60 percent since Xi’s time in office; how could Xi have made China “less prosperous?”

    China GDP (Trillions of US Dollars)

    From Trading Economics

    “and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course.”

    How does anyone know what will happen and what is the different course?” This is speculative speculation, a ridiculous assumption that does not pass the smell test.

    Despite Mr. Xi lifting the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, construction in China has slowed, manufacturing prices have declined and consumer spending has flattened. China’s stock market has lost $6 trillion in value in three years.

    Reciting a decline in manufacturing prices and a flattening of consumer spending, as if they are always negatives, is not clever thinking. If a recession occurred, then they might be a result of an economic decline. No recession has occurred and their relation is due to consumer prices having dropped, maybe due to increased efficiency and productivity. Consumer transactions have increased and the total sales remained static, or did they? Beijing reports contradictory information and data does not indicate a flattening of consumer spending.

    BEIJING, Jan. 21:

    Robust consumption has been thriving and helping to underpin China’s economic recovery, while the country is energetically spurring consumer spending to strengthen one of the pillars needed to support high-quality growth. China’s total retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of the country’s consumption strength, climbed 7.2 percent year on year to reach 47.15 trillion yuan (about 6.63 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2023, an obvious sign of the Chinese people’s growing readiness to purchase.

    China Consumer-spending in CNY hundred million


    As for the stock market, it lost popularity in 2009, long before Xi Jinping gained the presidential office, exhibited a 100 percent increase in a year after he took the helm, and has been static since then. Nothing significant there.

    The last of many spurious remarks

    To reduce the falling birthrate, he prefers exhorting young women to stay home and have more babies as their patriotic duty.

    Another insulting remark to a nation’s president. Falling birthrate is a problem in all advanced nations, and no country seems to have a solution. A mendacious and callous WaPo distorted Xi’s words. At a recent All-China Women’s Federation meeting, President Xi Jinping told the cadres:

    …to “guide women to play their roles in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” and “in establishing good family traditions.” They should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing” among women, so they can “respond to the aging of the population.”

    Big difference between WaPo’s interpretation and the actual spoken words.

    The experts on Xi Jinping China follow up the bashing with tools for him to use, and advice on how Xi can extricate himself and his nation from the damage he caused. Imagined failures solicit imagination of how to cure a patient who is not sick. Noting that, since 1978, except for one year during the COVID-19 epidemic, China had no recessions, while the U.S. suffered a recession every ten years, I doubt the Chinese government needs lectures on how to run their economy. China has a major housing crisis, not much different in scope than the 2008 mortgage crisis in the United States. The latter crisis provoked a huge banking crisis and sent the U.S. into a major recession. China’s housing crisis is now several years old and has not provoked a banking or economic crisis.

    Describing people in a totally negative manner and not reciting known positive characteristics is biased editorializing. Xi has guided China to become the leading world power outdistancing the U.S. in the more important GDP/PPP.

    Gross Domestic Product at Purchasing Power parity ($Trillions)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

    Xi probably was not personally involved and criticizing him for “the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022,” is a subjective appraisal. An objective appraisal mentions his administration’s holding the number of Covid cases to 503,302 and deaths to 5,272 compared to U.S. cases of 111,426,318 and deaths of 1,199,436. Use per capita figures of 90,273 cases/1 million population and 896 deaths/1 million population for China and 333,802 cases/1 million population and 3,582 deaths/1 million population for the United States, and a bright light shines on China’s president.

    The WaPo editorial, “Mr. Xi is tanking China’s economy,” is informative. It informs us that WaPo cannot be trusted. It has an agenda and will distort, lie, do somersaults, and deceive its audience to pursue the agenda.

    When will we be free from China bashing?

    The post The Washington Post Bashes Xi Jinping first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza War: Deceptions, Distortions, Misperceptions

    Responses to the current violence in, and from, Gaza vary as follows.

    • Israeli leaders, much of the Israeli public, and Zionists in the West, thirsting for vengeance, call for genocidal mass murder and/or wholesale ethnic cleansing operations against the people of Gaza.
    • Israel and its Western imperial allies (US et al) evade the actual causes (Palestinian grievances for which peaceful appeals for redress invariably go unanswered); and they condemn all resorts to violent resistance by the long-persecuted Palestinians.
    • Many liberal leftists, evidently obsessive to distance themselves from all US-designated “terrorists” and other alleged enemies of “democracy”, always preface any condemnation of Israeli crimes against the Palestinians with an absolute condemnation of the October 07 attack against Israel by resistance forces in Gaza. Thusly, they purvey a false moral equivalence between the violence of the oppressed and that of their oppressor.
    • A very few partisans of the Palestinian cause have asserted that all Israeli suffering from the October 07 attack by Gaza resistance fighters was deserved, thereby exhibiting a lack of recognition and empathy for the innocent victims thereof. In fact, innocent victims are generally inevitable in war, even in just and necessary wars, but nevertheless deserving of sympathetic recognition.
    • Consistent activists for social justice: condemn the Zionist persecution of the Palestinian people; acknowledge the right of the oppressed to resist, including by violent means when left with no viable alternative; acknowledge obvious faults and mistakes in the resistance forces; and sympathize with all innocent victims, whether deliberately targeted or unavoidably caught in the crossfire.

    Unfortunately, after decades of racist distortions by Zionists and supportive imperial Western states, and given hard-to-avoid reliance upon a dominant and biased Western mainstream media; even consistent supporters of the Palestinian cause sometimes take, as fact, notions which have become generally accepted as “true” (unaware that critical investigation may disprove it).  Consequently, mistakes can occur when there is rush to judgment and publication without questioning and scrutinizing so as to ascertain what are the relevant actual facts.

    ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT.  The current Gaza War can be fully and accurately understood only when placed in the context of Jewish and Palestinian history.

    Defining Palestine.  Prior to the 16th century BCE, the territory on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean was populated by small Canaanite city-states.  In the 10th and 9th centuries BCE, 3 small kingdoms (Israel, Judah, and Philistia) occupied the territory south of the Lebanon.  From the Assyrian conquest (BCE 8th century) until CE 1917 the territory was nearly always under the rule of a succession of tributary empires, the Ottoman being the last of those.  Throughout those centuries, various episodes of oppression and revolt, as well as opportunities in other places, resulted in a large Judean/Jewish diaspora.  After the Roman Empire made trinitarian Christianity the established religion (CE 4th century), the population in Palestine began increasingly to convert (from Judaism, Samaritanism, paganism, other forms of Christianity, et cetera) to the established faith.  Similarly, following conquest by the first Islamic empire, the population gradually began converting to Islam, until it was more than 80% Muslim by mid-19th century.  Imperial Britain, which conquered the country in 1917, was given a League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, specifically defined as the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  Since then, the term “Palestine”, despite Zionist objections (that a larger expanse of land is rightfully theirs or alternatively that there is no such country as Palestine and no such people as “Palestinians”), has generally meant the Mandate territory “from the river to the sea”.

    “Jewish problem”?  European Jews had experienced centuries of persecution (segregation into ghettos, abusive impositions, and pogroms) under medieval Christian European autocracies.  In the late 19th and early 20th   centuries, Jewish activists responded to the most recent pogroms and other persecutions in two opposing ways: whereas anti-racist secularists (liberal democrats and socialists) strove, along with likeminded gentiles, for equal rights for Jews in their home countries; Zionists, defining Jewish presence in gentile countries as a “Jewish problem” [1], embraced a racial conception of Jews and refused to do so [2].  They sought instead to remove Europe’s Jews to colonial settlements in Palestine where they intended to eventually displace the indigenous population in order to establish a “Jewish state” [3].

    Resistance to Judeophobia?  Until the Axis War (1939—45), Zionist organizations routinely colluded with Judeophobe governments (including Nazi Germany) in facilitating Jewish removal (with preference for emigration to Palestine) [4].  Moreover, in the face of extreme persecution in Nazi Germany (1933—39), the Zionist Organization (formed in 1897) discouraged efforts, as at the Évian Conference (1938), to obtain refuges for persecuted European Jews in countries (United States, Canada, Australia, Latin America, et cetera) other than Palestine.

    Jewish-Arab conflict.  Unlike in much of Europe, Palestinian Jews (about 4% of the population in 1880) lived amicably with their Muslim and Christian neighbors until the in-migration of European Zionist colonizers in the early 20th century.  Zionist settlement was sponsored by some European and American Jewish capitalists who provided money for land acquisitions (generally from absentee landlords who owned most of the arable land).  The Zionists then evicted the indigenous Arab tenant farmers thereby violating the traditional rights of the latter.  Moreover, the Zionist sponsoring organization (Jewish Agency) and its landholding body (Jewish National Fund) required that Jewish employers hire only Jews and prohibited the sale of any Jewish-owned land to Arabs.  Such racial discrimination was standard practice within the Zionist settlements; and it quite predictably provoked Palestinian Arab resentment against the Zionist settlers.  [See UNISPAL: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917—1947 (Part I) ~ §§ V and VI].

    Imperialism.  After other colonialist powers had turned down Zionist applications; imperial Britain decided, with its Balfour Declaration (in 1917), to sponsor the Zionist project of establishing a European Jewish colonial settler state in Palestine [5].  Britain visualized said state as developing into a useful protectorate [UNISPAL: The Origins … (Part I) ~ § II] thru which to project British imperial and commercial power over a part of the world in which British capital and empire were already heavily invested (notably in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [now BP Inc.], Shell Oil, and the Suez Canal).

    Democratic governance denied.  Throughout its (1917—48) rule over Palestine, Britain, deferred to the Zionists by refusing to meet its obligations (pursuant to Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant), which required the Mandatory power to respect the wishes of the country’s population and to prepare said country for independence by establishing a democratically-elected representative governing body [UNISPAL: The Origins … (Part I) ~ §§ IV—IX].  Why?  Because such body would undoubtedly have opposed continued moves to transform Palestine into a Zionist nation-state and would have demanded an end to: unconstrained Zionist immigration, Zionist land acquisitions, evictions of Arab tenant farmers, and racially discriminatory employment practices.

    Revolt.  Throughout its first nearly two decades of colonial rule, Britain refused any consideration of mostly peaceful appeals and protests for redress of the foregoing Palestinian grievances.  When Palestinians finally lost patience and revolted (1936—39); Britain armed, trained, and used Zionist militias to help put down said revolt with massively murderous violent repression, killing thousands of Palestinian Arabs.  Said militias would be constituted, in 1948, as the Israeli army.

    Partition [UNISPAL: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917—1947 (Part II) ~ §§ I—IV].  The then 57-member United Nations [UN], dominated by mostly European and American states ruled by white and/or Eurocentric* elites, proposed (in 1947) a partition of Palestine (then with a population 32% Jewish and 68% Arab) such that: a “Jewish state” would have 55% of the territory, a Palestinian Arab state would have 42%, and 3% around Jerusalem would be under UN administration.  Moreover, the “Jewish state” was to rule over a huge Arab minority (more than 40% of Palestinian Arabs), while the “Arab state” would have almost no Jews.  Representative democracy was evidently deemed unacceptable where Arabs were the majority, but acceptable where Jews (mostly recent immigrant colonists from Europe) were the majority.  (* Note.  Although most Latin American countries’ populations were majority non-white [indigenous, mestizo, et cetera]; in most of those, the ruling elites belonged to racial groups (white and/or mestizo) which identified with their European ethnic heritage).

    Nakba [UNISPAL: The Origins … (Part II) ~ § V].  The Zionist militias waged a terrorist war of conquest thru which they: massacred peaceful Palestinian villagers, seized and annexed (1947—49) half of the territory allocated by the UN for the Palestinian Arab state, and forcibly expelled over 80% of the Palestinians (directly and/or thru terrorist threat) from territory which came under Israeli control. four Arab states intervened militarily with mostly ill-trained and poorly-equipped military forces in ineffectual defense of the Palestinians.  The Zionist state confiscated: all of the properties of the expelled Palestinians (whom it barred from returning) and nearly 40% of the landholdings of the Palestinians who remained in its territory.  It also subjected the latter to repressive military rule for the next 18 years [6].

    Later conquests.  Israel launched surprise wars of conquest (1956 and 1967).  US pressure forced it to give up its 1956 conquests (Gaza and Sinai) and to abort its planned seizure of the West Bank and parts of Syria and Lebanon.  US acquiescence, in 1967, allowed Israel to seize much the same territories which it had wanted to annex in 1956.  Subsequent Israeli rule (over Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Syria’s Golan, and Lebanon’s Sheba’a Farms) since 1967 has subjected their Arab populations to persistent violations of their human rights, continuing to the present day.

    Subsequent aggressions.  Murderous Israeli aggressions against its neighbors (especially Syria and Lebanon) persist until the present day.  In addition to repeated violations of territory, said aggressions include multiple large-scale military invasions of Lebanon.  These included using a false allegation, of PLO involvement in an assassination attempt on an Israeli ambassador, as pretext for invasion and occupation (1982) of 40% of Lebanon in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to impose a subservient client regime.  Death toll: Arabs (Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians) 14,000 to 19,000 (mostly civilians); Israelis fewer than 400 (mostly soldiers).  Israel made partial withdrawals until 1985, but (despite most Palestinian resistance forces having been removed (in 1982) it occupied a swath of southern Lebanon until persistent armed Lebanese resistance (by Hezbollah, Amal, and units of the Lebanese Army) induced its withdrawal (in 2000).

    Holocaust weaponized.  Ever since the Axis War (1939—45), Zionists and their supporters have manipulated popular sympathy for the Jewish victims of the European holocaust in order to obtain support for Zionism.  They speak as though Jews were nearly the only victims of the deliberate Nazi mass murder (systematic mass killing plus intentional starvation programs in occupied territory and POW camps).  In fact, the actual death toll was more than 17 million (at least 11 million Slavs, some 5.9 million Jews, and probably more than 250,000 Romani).  Zionists and supporters insist that the world must atone for the genocide of the six million Jews by granting them Palestine for a “Jewish state”; but they evade the fact that justice would require any such compensation to be borne by Christian Europe, which perpetrated and/or permitted the genocide, not by the Palestinian Arabs, who had no part in it.

    Antisemitism?  Zionists and their supporters routinely attempt to silence opponents of Zionism and critics of Israeli crimes against humanity by smearing said critics as purveyors of “antisemitism”, the word which Zionists and their allies use exclusively to mean Judeophobia (hatred of Jews), even though the Arab victims of Zionism are also Semitic in language and ancestral origin.  When their critics are Jewish, as many are; Zionists routinely disparage and dismiss them as “self-hating Jews”.  As Zionists obsessively smear their anti-racist critics, they generally give much less attention to actual Judeophobes.  With growing popular opposition to Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, states abetting those crimes have increasingly enacted laws criminalizing free-speech activities in support of said Palestinians.  Those enactments include: prohibitions against boycott and divestment [BDS] participation; and laws defining opposition to Zionism as “antisemitism”, using the Zionist IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition which includes, as “antisemitism”, opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state.

    HAMAS.  Israel, its Western allies, and their mainstream media portray Hamas as a “genocidal” “terrorist” organization.  Relevant actual facts, listed below, mostly go unreported, distorted, or falsified.

    Origin.  Hamas originated (1987) in Palestine as a transformation of Mujama al-Islamiya, which had been formed (1973) as a Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Hamas, unlike the Brotherhood, embraced a Palestinian national liberationist political orientation.

    Governance doctrine.  Like the Brotherhood, Mujama al-Islamiya adhered to a Salafist (patriarchal and theocratic) approach to governance; whereas a majority of Palestinians preferred the progressive secularism of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO].  However, Western alliance and Israeli motivations for condemning Hamas have nothing to do with its Salafist leanings; they are solely on account of its militant resistance to Zionist oppression of the Palestinians.  In fact, Western supporters of Israel make no complaints where autocratic Arab states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar), allied to the West, impose patriarchal and theocratic policies similar to those embraced in Brotherhood doctrine.  It must be noted that Hamas’ doctrine and actual practice (since obtaining governing power) have been inconsistent.  For example, in Gaza, a local faction (along with some rival Islamist groups), has periodically attempted to impose the Brotherhood interpretation of sharia law (including hijab) thru religious coercions and persecutions, in defiance of the contrary policy prescribed by Hamas’ more permissive leadership.  In fact, said leadership (though still embracing widely-held patriarchal views on the role of women) has not decreed any such imposition.

    Palestinian Islamic Jihad [PIJ].  Most commentators make no effort to recognize the differences between PIJ and Hamas.  PIJ (founded 1981) is, unlike Hamas, a purely anti-colonial and anti-imperialist Palestinian national-liberation organization.  Whereas Hamas is a multifaceted (political, religious, and social-welfare) movement; PIJ is strictly an organization of revolutionary activists.  PIJ, in contradistinction to the theocratic faction in Hamas, has no interest in Islamist religious impositions; it is “Islamist” only in that it embraces the Islamic principle of struggle (jihad) against injustice.  As national liberation organizations, Hamas and PIJ, though their doctrinal and strategic visions diverge, largely cooperate in the common struggle against Israeli oppressin.

    Muslim Brotherhood versus PLO.  Gaza (along with the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan, and Lebanon’s Sheba’a Farms) had been, and remain, under repressive Israeli occupation since Israel’s 1967 war of conquest.  From its founding, Mujama al-Islamiya (as a Salafi Islamist organization) competed with the secular PLO for support among Palestinians, and their competition sometimes erupted into violent clashes.  Israel exploited that antagonism by enabling the activities of the Islamist organization as an alternative to the far-more-popular PLO which then represented the militant Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and persecution.

    Intifada [Arabic for “uprising”].  Ongoing Israeli repression (land seizures for illegal settlements, arbitrary detentions, torture of detainees, days-long curfews, indiscriminate killings, deportations, home demolitions, et cetera) provoked a spontaneous mass resistance, the First Intifada (1987—93), which included: strikes, boycotts, mass protests, road-blocks, use of stone-throwing and petrol bombs against Israeli police using violence to suppress protests, and other acts of civil disobedience.  Israeli government ministers responded with calls for wholesale expulsion of the Palestinian population (a policy too extreme to be condoned by Israel’s Western allies in need of credibility with Arab states).  Israel’s indiscriminate intensified repression affected all Palestinians, Islamists and PLO-sympathizers alike.  Some leaders of Mujama al-Islamiya, concerned that inaction would render it irrelevant, decided to join that militant resistance; and they then created “Hamas” (Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement”).  For the first year of the Intifada, there was a near-totally-adhered-to policy (prescribed by a soon-established PLO-influenced local leadership) of refraining from lethal attacks against Israelis.  Nevertheless, Israel responded to the Intifada with its “iron fist” policy including lethal force, ultimately killing 1,087 Palestinians including 240 children. 

    Oslo peace process (1991—93).  When the Fatah-dominated PLO agreed, in the Oslo negotiations, to recognize the “Jewish state” on 78% of Palestine in return for duplicitous promises of negotiations toward the establishment of a Palestinian state in the 22% of Palestine then classified as Israeli-occupied territories; it effectively abandoned the demand for the human rights of all Palestinians throughout Palestine and in the diaspora.  In fact, no Israeli government has ever been willing: to accept a genuinely independent and sovereign Palestinian state in any part of Palestine, or to grant equal rights to Palestinian Arabs in any part of the territory, or to permit the return of Palestinian refugees.  The Oslo agreements produced the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority [PNA] (a quasi-government for the West Bank and Gaza) which has devolved into a corrupted client regime with no effective capacity to prevent: Israeli land grabs (which every Israeli government has actively encouraged since the 1967 conquest), and the many other persecutions of the Palestinians whom it purports to serve.  The Palestinian response to Oslo was divided with Hamas and allies (including PIJ), along with some factions of the PLO, refusing to concede legitimacy to the Zionist state.  Whether we like it or not, Hamas soon thereafter became the leading organized force of the Palestinian resistance (which is why it won all-Palestine legislative elections in 2006).

    Judeophobia?  The US and its principal allies join Israel in branding Hamas as a Jew-hating “genocidal” “terrorist” organization.  It is true that Hamas first Charter (1988), advocating armed struggle to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation, embraced some discredited Judeophobe tropes (Articles 7, 22, 28, 32).  However, pursuant to said Charter, Hamas: (Article 6) “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine [so that] followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned”; and (Article 31) “is guided by Islamic tolerance when dealing with the followers of other religions” (which would include Christianity and Judaism).  Assertions, that Hamas wanted to kill all Jews or kill them because they were Jews, rest upon out-of-context interpretations of references to ancient Islamic quotations pertaining to specific Jewish communities which were then at war with the Muslim community.  Moreover, its revised Charter (2017) drops the aforementioned Judeophobe tropes and clearly states (Article 16) that its fight is against Zionist oppressors and not against Jews in general.  While Hamas believes that all of Palestine ought to be governed by an officially Islamic state; it embraces the Qur’anic obligation (sura 2:62) to respect the rights of peaceful non-Muslims (including resident Jews) to live and prosper in the land as long as they are not oppressing others.

    “Terrorism”.  Until Israeli forces killed more than 20 unarmed Palestinians protesting the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of 29 Muslim worshipers (1994) by an Arab-hating Israeli extremist ; Hamas policy was to avoid targeting Israeli civilians.  Since then, Hamas, like Israel, has permitted its forces to attack any enemy target, civilian or military; whereas the Zionist state, throughout its existence, has routinely engaged in such indiscriminate killings of Palestinians.  Moreover, Hamas has repeatedly offered to end violent attacks upon Israelis conditional upon Israeli reciprocation which has never been forthcoming for very long.  In Israel and its Western enablers: Hamas attacks are always branded as “terrorism”, while far more massive Israeli violence against Palestinians (including unarmed civilians of both sexes and all ages) never is.

    Equating to the Islamic State [IS] or Al Qaeda [AQ].  In 2008, a small group of AQ sympathizers organized in Gaza as Jund Ansar Allah [JAA].  They denounced Hamas: for being “too lenient” by not enforcing Sharia law, and for being “no different than a secular nationalist state”.  JAA also executed violent attacks (including bombings) against those Gazans whom they deemed to be in violation of Islamist morality, and they declared an “Islamic Emirate” in Gaza.  Hamas then took forceful action to suppress said JAA.  Hamas has likewise opposed other Salafi-jihadist Gazan groups which embrace AQ or IS.  Whereas AQ and IS oppose democratic elections and pragmatic political compromises, Hamas embraces them.  Whereas the former make war on alleged apostates and infidels and condemn Hamas for its tolerance; Hamas, in accordance with the Qur’an, embraces (though some local supporters have sometimes acted otherwise) an acceptance of respectful religious diversity.  Despite the actual facts, Israel and its apologists persist in propagating lies to equate Hamas with Al Qaeda et al.

    Democracy.  Hamas surprised Israel and the US by fairly winning Palestinian legislative elections (2006 Jan) and thereby obtaining the right to lead the PNA.  Obstruction by Israel and the West has prevented any subsequent Palestinian election.  Israel and its Western allies responded to the 2006 election outcome by demanding that Hamas abandon its commitment to fundamental Palestinian human rights by legitimizing Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing.  That demand was designed to produce a Hamas refusal, so that said refusal could then be used as pretext for acts designed to cripple Hamas efforts to govern.  The US then pressured PNA President Abbas (of Fatah) to dismiss the fairly elected Hamas administration in defiance of the will of the Palestinian electorate.  The Hamas Prime Minister (Ismail Haniyeh) attempted to overcome the hostility by asking Fatah to participate in a unity government (which Fatah refused), and by inducing Hamas ministers to formally resign their memberships in Hamas, all to no avail.  Moreover, Abbas, under US pressure, provoked a power struggle (in Gaza) over control of security services in a move to undermine and marginalize the Hamas administration.  The resulting violent conflict ended: with Hamas firmly in control in Gaza; and with Fatah in partial control in the West Bank, most of which was and is under Israeli military rule.

    Peace proposals.  Hamas, has repeatedly (since 2006) proposed peace thru hudna (Islamic decade-long renewable truce resolving issues upon which current agreement can be obtained while negotiating upon remaining issues in effort to reach a final peace agreement).  Hamas’ proposed truce terms would include provisional acceptance by Hamas of Israel as an existential current reality, in return for a Palestinian state in the occupied territories with East Jerusalem as its capital (same as PLO except that Hamas would not concede legitimacy to the ethnic cleansings of 1948 and 1967 nor to the racial supremacist and apartheid character of the Zionist state).  Hamas would continue to seek eventual acceptance by Israel of all Palestinian civil and human rights (the effect of which would be to end its apartheid, its ethnic cleansing, its other persecutions, and its continuation as a “Jewish state”).  Israel, making Hamas’ refusal to give de jure recognition of the racist apartheid “Jewish state” as its pretext, has consistently refused to negotiate toward any peace agreement.

    GAZA.  Since the end of the Second Intifada (2005), Hamas has repeatedly sought and, when possible, entered ceasefire agreements with Israel.  In fact, since seeking a role in government, Hamas evidently took seriously its obligation to serve the people of Palestine.  Other resistance groups, often in defiance of Hamas, have sometimes committed small-scale violations of ceasefires, generally in response to Israeli violence.  Whereas Hamas has striven to preserve said ceasefires, Israel has repeatedly perpetrated major violations thereby provoking resumption of violent conflict.

     Israeli response to 2006 election outcome.  Israel and all significant Palestinian resistance factions (including Hamas) had agreed (2005 Feb and Mar) to a ceasefire under which the resistance would cease violent attacks upon Israelis on condition that Israel cease military operations against said resistance organizations.  Despite Hamas having respected said ceasefire agreement, Israel responded to Hamas electoral victory (2006 Jan) by imposing, upon Gaza, a suffocating economic blockade (an act of war as well as an act of collective punishment which is illegal under international law).  Said blockade ultimately included denial of access to 1/3 of Gaza’s already limited arable land and 85% of its fishing areas.  Moreover, Israel blatantly violated the ceasefire by assassinating (2006 June) the Hamas-appointed security chief (Jamal Abu Samhadana).  Hamas responded by resuming attacks against Israel, which then commenced its “Operation Summer Rains” bombing of Gaza.  Death toll: 416 (mostly noncombatant) Gaza Palestinians and 11 Israelis.

    “Cast Lead”.  A mediated 6-month ceasefire ended (2008 Nov 04) with an Israeli raid which killed several Palestinians in Gaza.  Resistance organizations responded with rocket fire into Israel.  Israel then commenced “Operation Cast Lead”, bombing Gaza in December and invading in January.  Israeli war crimes included using Palestinian children as human shields and use of white phosphorus weapons with indifference to its horrific injuries to civilians (both being war crimes under international law).  Amnesty International and other independent investigators found no substantiation for Israeli allegations that Hamas: made a practice of using civilians as human shields, or used healthcare facilities as bases for military operations.  Death toll: 1,400 Palestinians (85% non-combatants), 13 Israelis.

    “Returning Echo”.  Israel not only refused to lift its suffocating economic siege of Gaza, it assassinated (2012 Mar 09, by airstrike) the secretary-general (Zohair al-Qaisi) of the Popular Resistance Committees (then the 3rd largest armed resistance group in Gaza) thereby provoking retaliatory rocket attacks by resistance groups in Gaza.  Israel then commenced its “Operation Returning Echo” (consisting of additional murderous airstrikes).  Death toll: 28 Palestinians, no Israelis.

    “Pillar of defense”.  Repeated Israeli attacks (from 2012 July) upon Palestinian fishermen, farmers, and other civilians provoked some additional clashes.  Hamas and PIJ proposed (Nov 12) discussions to establish a ceasefire.  Two days later, Israel assassinated the Hamas military chief (Ahmed Jabari) in Gaza thereby provoking an escalation of attacks from both sides.  Israeli forces followed with “Operation Pillar of Defense”, a massive bombardment striking some 1,500 sites in Gaza (including residential apartment buildings).  Death toll: 174 Palestinians (60% noncombatants) and 6 Israelis.

    “Protective Edge”.  Hamas and Israel agreed to a mediated ceasefire (2012 Nov 21).  Israel violated that ceasefire the very next day, killing a Palestinian farmer and wounding 19 other Gazans.  A week later Israeli forces opened fire on a peaceful Palestinian fishing boat.  On Nov 30, Israeli soldiers killed another man in Gaza.  On Dec 01, Palestinian Islamic Jihad warned that it would respond militarily to any further Israeli violations.  In the first 3 months of the ceasefire, Israeli firing into Gaza killed 4 and wounded another 91; and there were 13 armed Israeli incursions into Gaza and some 30 attacks on Gazan fishermen.  These attacks provoked rocket attacks from Gaza by PIJ and other resistance groups, attacks which Israel then used as pretext for further attacks and intensification of the blockade.  Despite all of that, Hamas complied with the ceasefire agreement and acted, with some success, to minimize attacks by other resistance groups.  After PNA President Abbas agreed to include Hamas in a unity government (formed 2014 June 02), Israel (opposed to any unified Palestinian leadership) acted to destroy it.  Specifically, Israel stepped up its attacks upon Palestinians, thereby provoking more rocket launches from Gaza.  Ultimately, Hamas, unable to persuade armed resistance forces to desist from retaliatory rocket attacks against Israel, abandoned (in early July) the already-ineffective ceasefire.  Israel then responded (2014 July 08) with its (“Operation Protective Edge”) ground invasion and bombing of Gaza.  Death toll: 2,300 Gazans (65% civilian) and 73 Israelis (all but 5 being soldiers).

    “Guardian of the Walls”.  Multiple Israeli provocations (2021 Apr and May) in Jerusalem (including: ethnic-cleansing confiscations of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem [in violation of international law], unimpeded settler violence, police harassment of Palestinian residents, and police invasions and denials of Muslim access at the Al Aqsa Mosque) provoked Hamas and PIJ rocket fire into Israel.  Israel responded (2021 May 16—21) with a bombardment of Gaza (“Operation Guardian of the Walls”).  Death toll: 256 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.  72,000 Gazans were displaced by the Israeli bombing.

    “Al-Aqsa Flood”.  Hamas and PIJ had demonstrated a willingness to establish and maintain truces (long-term and short-term) with the Zionist state.  Israel, however, evidently expected, despite ceasefires in effect, to have impunity as it perpetrated attacks, including assassinations, upon Palestinian resistance organizations.  Then, when resistance organizations responded with counter-attacks; Israel subjected Gaza to grossly disproportionate violence.  Moreover, the current extreme racist Israeli government had increased its persecutions and violations of Palestinian human rights: impunity for settler attacks upon West Bank Palestinians, stepped up grabs of land and water-rights, dispossessions and expulsions, arbitrary detentions, increased killings of unarmed Palestinians, blockings of Muslim access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, continued assassinations of resistance leaders, et cetera.  Finally, Hamas responded with its “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” (2023 Oct 07) against Israeli forces in areas around Gaza.

    ATROCITIES?  The nature of warfare is such that, it would be unrealistic to presume that none of the October 07 Gaza fighters (some of whom were not affiliated with either Hamas or PIJ) committed excesses in violation of Hamas’ rules of engagement or in the heat of the moment.  That said, lurid sensationalized allegations of mass atrocities by those Gaza fighters are fundamentally false (refuted below and in the noted sources).

    Numbers and identities.  “1,400” “innocent” Israelis murdered (October 07) by Hamas?  In fact, around 200 of the dead were apparently Gazan resistance fighters; and the actual number of Israeli dead as acknowledged by Israel has been revised down to “around 1,200”.  Moreover, of the 1,133 identified and listed by Israel, 369 (32%) were soldiers, police, and other armed security personnel (most of whom were enforcing the Gaza blockade and/or had offensive or supportive roles in Israeli attacks upon Palestinians in Gaza).  Further, more than 421 (another 37%) of the 764 listed as “civilians” were of the age (20 to 40) at which most Israelis are obligated to be military reservists, and some of those were killed (often while resisting capture) at kibbutz[es] (which are constituted as militarized settlements).

    Killed by whom?  A great many of the Israeli civilian dead were killed: in crossfire, others (including many of the dead at the music festival) by indiscriminate Israeli air attacks failing to distinguish Israelis from Gazan resistance fighters, and some deliberately by Israeli forces to prevent their becoming captives in Gaza.

    Decapitated babies?  Israeli babies and toddlers decapitated by Hamas fighters?  Absolutely false allegation, subsequently retracted.

    Rape?  We are asked to believe that Hamas and PIJ fighters, in difficult combat against Israeli armed forces, diverted their attention in order to amuse themselves by raping and murdering Israeli women, despite: that their essential objective was to bring as many captives as possible back to Gaza, and that such conduct would violate the Qur’an[’s] rules mandating humane treatment of captives.  Israel refuses: to provide real evidence or to permit any independent investigation of this allegation.  Moreover, accusers misuse photos and videos of scantily dressed woman captives as “evidence”, despite that some (including many participants at the music festival) were undoubtedly thusly clothed when captured.  Israel evidently is using said allegations of mass sexual abuse as a defamatory racist portrayal of Palestinians so as to excuse the very real atrocities currently being perpetrated by Israel against the people of Gaza.  Meanwhile, captives released by Hamas generally report having been treated humanely.

    Dehumanization and genocidal intent!  In their propaganda war, Israel and its Western allies evade the injustices perpetrated by the Zionist state and falsely portray Palestinian resistance fighters as genocidal Jew-hating extremists.  In actual fact, it is Israeli leaders and their Western apologists who routinely dehumanize and express genocidal intentions (including for ethnic cleansing and mass murder), not only against those who fight, but against an entire victimized population.  Some examples.

    • Soon-to-be-appointed Israeli Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, endorsed (2015 summer) an Israeli writer’s statement asserting: that Israel is in a war, “not against terror”, but “a war between two peoples”, the “enemy” being “the entire Palestinian people”; that Palestinian children are “snakes”; and that “the mothers” also should die to prevent their raising more “little snakes”.
    • Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his guidance for Israeli action in the current outbreak of violence, twice referenced (Oct 28 & Nov 03) a biblical passage (about the Israelite war against the people of Amalek) which states “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings”.
    • Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted (October 12) “Its an entire nation … that is responsible [for October 07].
    • Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated (Oct 09) that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. … We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”.
    • Minister of Heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, posted (November 01) “The north of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes”.
    • Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, ‘tweeted’ (October 07) “we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
    • Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter, stated (November 11) “[w]e are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba”.
    • Former Head of the Israeli National Security Council, Major General Giora Eiland, said (October 07) “The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave. If Egypt and other countries prefer that these people will perish in Gaza, this is their choice.” He later asserted (November 06) that there should be no distinction between Hamas combatants and Palestinian civilians, saying: “‘They’ are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population”.
    • One former Knesset member called for all Palestinians in Gaza to be killed saying: “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed”.
    • South Africa’s indictment lists several additional such comments by additional Israeli leaders.
    • When a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers assaulted three Palestinians in the West Bank (October 12); the three were beaten, stripped naked, bound, tortured, and urinated upon. Such abuse was nothing new.  During the First Intifada (1987—93), this kind of humiliation by Israeli forces was routine.  Men would be threatened with the rape of their wives or sisters; women would be threatened with sexual violence.
    • In response to Al-Aqsa Flood, multiple US political leaders have urged genocide against Gaza: US Senator Lindsey Graham urged (Oct 10 on Fox News) “level the place”; US Senator Marco Rubio wrote on social media (October 09) “Israel must respond disproportionately”; US Republican Presidential Candidate Nikki Haley (October 7 or 8 on Fox News) urged Israel to “finish them”, the Palestinians. Although US President Biden and his aides have not made such extreme public statements, his actual policy has been to abet those genocidal actions.

    Israel’s “Arab problem”.  Despite Netanyahu’s denial, Israel’s policy vis-à-vis Palestinians (whether in Israel, in the West Bank, or in Gaza) is to make their conditions as oppressive as possible (within the limits to which its Western allies will acquiesce) so that said Palestinians will out migrate to other countries.  That is in accordance with Zionist prescriptions from the time of Herzl (1890s) [7], to solve the “Arab problem” thru “population transfer” (that is ethnic cleansing).

    Media bias.  In the first days after October 07, the Western mainstream media focused almost exclusively upon grieving Israelis.  It was only after the killings, destruction, and extreme suffering in Gaza became so unavoidably blatant and massive that it began reporting on that.  The racist anti-Palestinian bias of the Western mainstream media is exemplified by its response to reports of the 3 Hamas-captured Israeli men (shirtless, hands raised, holding a white flag of truce, and speaking Hebrew) nevertheless killed (Dec 15) by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers.  That was treated as a horrific tragedy, but there was no thought to question how, with Israeli soldiers acting thusly with captured Israelis, do they act toward unarmed Palestinians.

    Biden’s humanitarian concerns.  US President Biden (along with most Congressional Democrats) expresses lip-service concern regarding Israel’s mass murder of tens of thousands of Gaza Palestinians (no more than 3% of whom could be armed resistance fighters).  Biden could force a stop to it by supporting deployment of neutral UN peace-keepers into appropriate locations in Gaza, with US guarantees of their safety, to protect: hospitals, schools, desalination plants, sewage treatment facilities, humanitarian aid shipments, food and water dispensers, and UNRWA relief operations.  It is highly likely that Hamas et al would welcome the introduction of such humanitarian intervenors as long as they are truly neutral.  Meanwhile, for Israel to attack them would put it in armed conflict with the US (and its allies) upon which it is extremely dependent.  Instead of intervening in any real way to save lives in Gaza, Biden (along with most of Congress) shows his true colors by sending munitions to Israel, by demanding billions of dollars for more no-strings military aid to the Zionist state, and by vetoing near-unanimous UN demands for a ceasefire.

    CONCLUSIONS. 

    The conflict.  The Zionists (seeking to build and expand their racist colonial settler state) and their imperial Western allies (serving the selfish interests of their war industries and other profit-producing commercial entities with interests in the region) have subjected the Palestinian Arabs to a century of systematic subjugation and persecutions.  The Zionists’ ultimate applicable objective is to eliminate the threat to Zionist Jewish supremacy by removing most of the indigenous Palestinian population: thru expulsion and mass murder whenever they can find pretext acceptable to Western allies, and by making life so difficult for Palestinians that they will choose to out migrate.  Systematic oppression always provokes resistance by the oppressed (including violent resistance when peaceful appeals prove futile), and Palestinians are no exception.  The Zionist state has always responded to that resistance (even peaceful protests) with repressive violence, attempting to bludgeon the Palestinians into passive acceptance of their Zionist-intended fate.  That fate: to be treated as subhuman, to be massacred, to be permanently expelled from their homeland, to be robbed of their property, to be denied their right to equal civil rights and democratic self-government, and (for those allowed at least temporarily to remain in Palestine) to be exploited as cheap labor to perform work which Israelis choose to avoid.

    End.  This conflict and the inevitable resulting violence will not end until: Israel has eliminated nearly the entire remaining Palestinian population; or its Western abettors have been compelled (by organized popular pressure) to cease enabling it (enabling: thru funding and arming the Zionist state, thru preventing Israel from being held accountable for its crimes, and by refusing to intervene in support of the victimized Palestinian population).

    NOTED SOURCES (those which lack URL’s).

    [1] Sachar⸰ Howard M [Zionist American historian]: A History of Israel (© 1979, Knopf) ~ pp 10—17 ♦ ISBN 0-394-73679-6.

    [2] Brenner⸰ Lenni [American social-justice writer/activist]: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (© 1983, Lawrence Hill Books) ~ pp 22—25, 29—32 ♦ ISBN 0-7099-0628-5.

    [3] Morris⸰ Benny [Zionist Israeli historian]: 1948 – A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (© 2008, Yale University Press) ~ pp 3—4, 18—19 ♦ ISBN 978-0-300-12696-9.

    [4] Brenner⸰: ~ chapters 5, 6, 7, 12.

    [5] Sachar⸰: ~ pp 96—109.

    [6] Sachar⸰: ~ pp 386—389.

    [7] same as [3].

    The post Gaza War: Deceptions, Distortions, Misperceptions first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • State of US Journalism Is “Worst I’ve Ever Seen It,” Says Sarah Kendzior

    “The public domain is being purchased, and it is being purchased in order for it to be destroyed,” says journalist Sarah Kendzior. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kendzior and host Kelly Hayes discuss the decline of journalism in the U.S. and how we can resist the erosion of our shared history, our values and our shared reality. Music by Son Monarcas & Pulsed Note: This a rush transcript and…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The News

    The post The News first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Elite Fear Of The Public: Ukraine, Gaza and Assange

    It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.

    After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:

    reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.

    (Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)

    Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:

    ‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’

    (Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)

    In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.

    Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.

    We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:

    Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.

    We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’

    The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.

    None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.

    None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:

    Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.

    (Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)

    Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:

    does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.

    For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:

    Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.

    Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:

    In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.

    Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:

    A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.

    Scarr continued:

    Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.

    What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.

    You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.

    Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:

    In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)

    For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:

    These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.

    Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.

    Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”

    Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:

    What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?

    Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.

    On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:

    This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.

    Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.

    The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.

    To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:

    jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.

    Oborne expanded:

    As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.

    The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.

    He continued:

    It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)

    Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:

    British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.

    By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.

    The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.

    Establishment Alarm At Public Protest

    In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:

    The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

    A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:

    Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.

    Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.

    It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.

    In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.

    On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:

    As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.

    He added:

    The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.

    Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:

    Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.

    ‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.

    A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.

    Sinclair observed that:

    This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.

    Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth

    One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).

    The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.

    Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’

    She added:

    Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.

    Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:

    Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.

    They added:

    By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.

    Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.

    Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.

    The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:

    one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.

    In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’

    The song observes movingly:

    Shouts and battle cries, from every part
    I can see those tears, every one is true

    It concludes on an uplifting note:

    Then a peace of mind fell over me —
    In these troubled times, I still can see
    We can use the stars, to guide the way
    It is not that far, the one fine —

    One fine day

    That one fine day is still within our reach.

    The post Elite Fear Of The Public: Ukraine, Gaza and Assange first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Elite Fear Of The Public: Ukraine, Gaza and Assange

    It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.

    After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:

    reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.

    (Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)

    Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:

    ‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’

    (Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)

    In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.

    Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.

    We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:

    Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.

    We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’

    The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.

    None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.

    None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:

    Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.

    (Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)

    Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:

    does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.

    For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:

    Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.

    Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:

    In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.

    Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:

    A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.

    Scarr continued:

    Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.

    What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.

    You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.

    Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:

    In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)

    For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:

    These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.

    Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.

    Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”

    Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:

    What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?

    Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.

    On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:

    This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.

    Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.

    The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.

    To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:

    jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.

    Oborne expanded:

    As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.

    The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.

    He continued:

    It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)

    Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:

    British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.

    By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.

    The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.

    Establishment Alarm At Public Protest

    In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:

    The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

    A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:

    Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.

    Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.

    It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.

    In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.

    On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:

    As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.

    He added:

    The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.

    Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:

    Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.

    ‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.

    A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.

    Sinclair observed that:

    This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.

    Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth

    One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).

    The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.

    Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’

    She added:

    Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.

    Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:

    Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.

    They added:

    By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.

    Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.

    Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.

    The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:

    one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.

    In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’

    The song observes movingly:

    Shouts and battle cries, from every part
    I can see those tears, every one is true

    It concludes on an uplifting note:

    Then a peace of mind fell over me —
    In these troubled times, I still can see
    We can use the stars, to guide the way
    It is not that far, the one fine —

    One fine day

    That one fine day is still within our reach.

    The post Elite Fear Of The Public: Ukraine, Gaza and Assange first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • War with China

    Don’t want to spoil your weekend, but the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has picked Foreign Policy (FP) magazine’s article, How Primed for War Is China, as a top commentary. AEI states: “The likelihood of war with China may be the single-most important question in international affairs today.

    FP knows how to start an article and capture attention ─ start with words that startle the audience.

    If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II. How worried should we be?

    Not worried about war at all. I am concerned that FP and AEI circulations of fabrications may lead to China deciding it’s had enough of the trashing, cash in its treasury holdings that finance U.S. trade debt (already started), use reserves to purchase huge chunks of United States assets, diminish its hefty agricultural imports from Yankee farms, and enforce its ban of exports of rare earth extraction and separation technologies  (China produces 60 percent of the world’s rare earth materials and processes nearly 90 percent). In short, we should worry that by not cooperating with China, the Red Dragon may decide to no longer bother with Washington’s inanities and use its overwhelming industrial power, with which the U.S. cannot compete, to sink the U.S. economy.

    Another question comes to mind. “What will a war with China resemble?”

    Will the U.S. military load ships in Los Angeles with soldiers and ship them across the Pacific to land on the shores of China? Things have changed since May 1840, when the British fleet proceeded up the Pearl River estuary to Canton and occupied the city. I doubt another D-day landing will be possible.

    Will the U.S. Air Force pound the Chinese mainland into submission? Will a nation, knowing that China will retaliate, permit the U.S. to launch aircraft from its soil? Hardly likely.

    Will it be a nuclear war? Mutual mass destructions are not advisable.
    Could be a cyber war, but who cares if computers get hurt?

    To buttress its rash assumption, FP introduces an assortment of unproven and ambiguous statements, passed off as facts.

    Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades.
    China is abetting Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine and massing forces on the Sino-Indian border.
    Beijing now outspends every other country in Asia combined.

    By FP’s admission, which appears later in the article, it was about time China started building (not massing) its military forces. FP states that with “a pathetic air force and navy prior to the 2000s, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have amounted to a ‘million-man swim.’” China had a weak military and, with Washington rattling the saber, it was wise to strengthen armed might.

    Notice that unlike the U.S., which is aiding and abetting in the genocide of the Palestinian people by assisting Israel, FP only accuses China of abetting Russia in brutalization. Score a big one for China. FP is confused. On December 20, 2022, Times (of London) scare headlined: Indian army (not Chinese) masses on Chinese border after soldiers clash. It is possible that Beijing sent 100 soldiers (mass number) to reinforce those who had fought the small skirmish with Indian troops.

    The dishonorable manner in which “authoritative” commentators present their arguments bothers me They frame all reporting to suit agendas and satisfy their audiences. It shows in the sentence, “Beijing now outspends every other country in Asia combined,” making it seem that China is doing something unusual and must be doing it for nefarious reasons. The “objective” FT commentators omit significant details of their argument.

    • Except for India, China has a population almost equal to all of the Asian nations that need a strong military force.
    • China has a GDP almost equal to the GDP of all the Asian nations that need a strong military force. Besides,
    • Unlike other Asian nations, China has a GDP that can afford a stronger military force.
    • China borders 14 countries and already has had small wars with a few of them — Russia, India, and Vietnam — and friction with others in the area.
    • Unlike other Asian nations, China faces constant U.S. threats.

    The historical graphs on military buildup describe the “military buildup” differently.
    Note: Watch the scales in the left graph, some from the right, others from the left.
    • In proportion to GDP, Chinese military expenditures have remained constant.
    • In proportion to GDP, Chinese military expenditures are the least of the surveyed nations.
    • The U.S. already had a superior fighting force when China started its buildup and the U.S. is still spending three times that of China.

    The sentence, “Personalist dictatorships are more than twice as likely to start wars as democracies or autocracies in which power is held in many hands,” intrigued me. Making a controversial statement without backup data is not credible. Apparently, FP does not have a demanding customer base. Nor is the statement true; the United States, the world’s foremost democracy has fought wars almost every year in its existence, and big ones. Two thriving democracies, Great Britain and France have been involved in great wars. Who and where are the personalist dictators involved in wars?

    What reasons does China have for going to war? FP cites four factors.

    These four factors—insecure borders, a competitive military balance, negative expectations, and dictatorship—help explain China’s historical use of force, and they have ominous implications today.

    Insecure borders? Some frictions, but presently well contained. Who is going to war over a bunch of rocks in the ocean and fishing rights? The parties may hurl invectives, throw stones, or use water cannons, like teenagers at beach parties. No cannons with munitions, that’s for sure,

    FP claims that because the military balance in Asia has shifted to China that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. FP does not realize what China realizes ─ it will also suffer losses in a war and its military balance is a defensive strategy.

    The negative expectations mean that as “China’s short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening — a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past.” Nations, revisionist and non-revisionist, and mostly the former, have waged wars during times of severe economic decline — depression, lost markets, depleted resources, and ultra-high unemployment. A “darkening economic outlook” — couched words ─ is far, far from a depression, not unusual for any country and certainly not for China, which has had almost uninterrupted growth for 40 years. Darkening economic growth for China is welcome growth for most nations.

    “China turned into a personalist dictatorship (more dubious and couched words) is of the sort especially prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars.” A previous paragraph contested this argument. Add to the refutation the observation that several American presidents have declared small wars without permission of Congress and large wars based on false information. Spanish-American War (sinking of the ship, The Maine), Vietnam War (North Vietnam attacked U.S. warships in Tonkin Bay Resolution), and Iraq War (Iraq had weapons of mass destruction) are a few examples.

    When in doubt, bring in Taiwan, which FP does.

    In short, the United States must wield a credible ability to defend Taiwan and, at the same time, offer a credible pledge that it aims to prevent either side from unilaterally changing the status quo.

    My subjective opinion is that if Chinese troops slipped into Taiwan overnight and recaptured the province, the Taiwanese in the countryside would hardly notice. Urban dwellers may sense something different and wouldn’t be bothered — government officials would be Chinese, police would be Chinese, everyone would be speaking Mandarin, all signs and media would be in Mandarin, all foods would be Chinese, Taiwanese would see no change in their TV preferences, and Chinese would fly back and forth between Taiwan and the mainland. One big difference ─ no American military advisors and no signs of Yankee go home.

    FP concludes with an inspiring message.

    A powerful but troubled China is heading in a bad direction. It will take all the strength and sobriety the United States and its friends can muster to prevent a slide into war.

    The sentence begs word changes.

    A powerful but troubled America is heading in a bad direction. It will take all the strength and sobriety China and its friends can muster to prevent America from pushing China into war.

    The reason the revised sentence has more legs is that capitalist nations have waged wars during times of severe economic decline — depression, lost markets, depleted resources, and ultra-high unemployment — in efforts to regain markets and resources. Unable to overcome the competition, war has previously happened and can happen again.

    I have a suspicion that the authors of the article own a factory that produces nuclear bomb shelters. Can anyone confirm?

    The post War with China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences

    There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.

    That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.

    The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”

    However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now.

    Once the death in a Russian prison of the Western backed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was announced on Friday, February 16, 2024, it was immediately followed by a cascade of anti-Russia pronouncements whose aim was to not only continue the demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin but to serve other purposes as well.

    With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.

    Shortly after, Zelensky, performing his puppet routine while coincidently appearing at the Munich Security Conference – on Saturday, February 17, a day after Navalny’s death was announced – with Navalny’s then widow, said it was “obvious” that Putin had killed Navalny, while Biden pushed for more money for Ukraine’s doomed war against Russia, a U.S./NATO war created by the U.S. from the start with its aggressive military push to Russia’s borders and its 2015 Ukrainian coup d’état that ousted the pro-Russian leader, setting the stage for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022. That Putin told Carlson these obvious facts, while slyly mentioning to Carlson that he understood that Carlson once tried to join the CIA, is now for most people in the West history lost behind the headlines, if it ever were anything more.

    All this happened while Russia pushed through Ukraine’s defenses and took the city of Avdeevka, which had long been contested. With each day that passes, it is obvious that Biden’s Ukraine war strategy is that of a desperate politician on the ropes and that Putin has completely outfoxed the American desperados and their NATO European stooges. The MSM prefer to suggest otherwise, that hope is just around the corner if we send billions more dollars and weapons, and if with the help of our British friends, we take the war further into Russian territory and risk a nuclear confrontation. But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.

    Much of the rest of the world has seen through the risible MSM headlines used to delude the public that Russia is the great threat to world peace and stability. Like the previous Russia-gate lies, this ongoing one, coinciding with Navalny’s death, is timed to divert the public’s attention from key ongoing matters.

    Tomorrow and Wednesday, Julian Assange will have his final appeal in a British court to prevent his extradition to the United States. Biden wants this journalist prosecuted for doing the job that the MSM have failed to do: Exposing the facts about the ruthless U.S. killing machine. But the bruhaha about Navalny has rendered the absolute hypocrisy over the torture and imprisonment of the innocent and brave Assange secondary and “inconsequential.” As intended, this has now become an afterthought as the mainstream media’s Russia-obsessed headlines flow uninterruptedly. The New York Times, the key propaganda organ for the Biden administration and the deep-state, reports just today that “The gravity of President Putin’s threats is now dawning on Europe” and “Navalny’s Widow Promises to Carry on Opposition Leader’s Work.”  These are typical Times’ rants.  As is its Magazine article headline from yesterday “Marilyn Robinson [the writer and friend of Barack Obama] Considers Biden a Gift of God.”

    I don’t think the Palestinians would agree, but then too, their slaughter by Israel with U.S. assistance – more than 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone have been killed so far – and the coming IDF invasion of Rafah, have also been pushed to the back pages or to nowhere by the propaganda about Navalny and Russia.

    I won’t mention the Russian election in mid-March that might possibly factor into all this since we all will be dutifully and timely told that the evil killer Putin is a dictator, ignorant, ruthless – add your own adjectives – and is no doubt trying to rig the fair-and-square U.S. November presidential election – for someone, just as he did in 2016.

    Nor mention The NY Times article of February 17 by David Sanger and Julian Barnes that the “U.S Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space.”

    Everyone knows that the Russians are coming to get us, as they always have. They probably killed JFK, right?

    It’s easy to follow along as this propaganda eruption circles the Internet like painted ponies on a carousel. There will be no time to stop and think, to pause; to ask what the hell is going on? The ponies will dip and bob and make you dizzy.

    For more corroboration of these matters, read the political analyst Gilbert Doctorow’s astute piece on how the Turkish broadcaster TRT World refused to post the interview that they did with him. Doctorow claims British intelligence killed Navalny. For some reason this should not be broached, according to TRT.

    Whether Doctorow is right or not, only a very dimwitted person would think that Putin would have Navalny killed. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. Yet the MSM and their government overlords consider most people very stupid and so are trying to blitz them with obvious propaganda through commission and omission. We have heard this story before.

    The post Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Delete the Smear Jagmeet, Tell Truth and Help Palestinians

    Jagmeet Singh’s refusal to delete a smear against internationalist, social justice, minded protesters encourages Israel’s genocide. Over 6,000 individuals have requested the NDP leader remove his anti-Palestinian slander, but Singh seems too scared of the fascistic, supremacist, genocide lobby to do what is right.

    In a bid to deter Israel from slaughtering the 1.5 million Palestinians cloistered in Rafah thousands joined an emergency march in Toronto Monday evening. During the four-hour long march “Spiderman for Palestine” and another individual climbed atop scaffolding in front of a (closed) entrance to Mount Sinai Hospital to waive a Palestinian flag as they did at numerous other spots.

    In response Canada’s genocide apparatus whipped up faux outrage that a public institution with Jewish roots was targeted. As he’s done in the past, Singh followed the apartheid lobby in smearing justice minded activists, claiming the march “targeted” the Toronto institution “because of its ties to the Jewish community.” But Singh’s statement is baseless, as is detailed in this article and this interview with a member of the Jews Against Genocide coalition.

    Apparently, it doesn’t matter how many Palestinian children Israel kills. Singh remains committed to taking his cues from Canadian groups promoting the slaughter. It doesn’t matter how many Palestinian hospitals the apartheid lobby enables Israel to destroy. Singh acts like they are troubled by a Spider-Man costumed flag waiver outside a closed hospital entrance. Under the cover of opposing “antisemitism”, Singh continues to promote genocidal anti-Palestinianism.

    Singh’s smear has, unsurprisingly, been cited by right wingers and Israeli nationalists to justify more racism and killing. In the National Post Chris Selley cited Singh’s endorsement of the Mount Sinai libel. So did the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs after Canada’s Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia Amira Elghawaby questioned the Mount Sinai hoax. In a post calling for her ouster, CIJA cited Singh’s post echoing their baseless claim about the hospital. If CIJA’s attacks on Elghawaby lead to a bout of Islamophobia Singh will be partly to blame. Singh’s smear also contributed to an alleged hate crime with an individual calling the Toronto police to threaten to kill protesters for targeting the hospital.

    Singh’s Mount Sinai libel illustrates the remarkable disconnect between the popular uprising and parliamentary social democracy. Over the past 20 weeks there have been hundreds of mass protests across the country yet I’m only aware of one MP attending a Palestine protest. NDP MP Matthew Green spoke during a march in Toronto on November 12. (Conversely, the PM, Deputy PM, ministers and MPs have attended far smaller and less numerous pro-genocide rallies.)

    One reason MPs have not attended the demonstrations is out of a concern for being smeared (Green was forced to release a statement defending himself after speaking in Toronto). By besmirching Monday’s anti-genocide march Singh is making it even more difficult for MPs to attend protests (presumably he has privately warned NDP MPs against attending). The dearth of political participation reduces media coverage and the impact of the protests. It also enables the increasing criminalization of the protests. It’s no coincidence that after the remarkable smear against Monday’s demonstration the Toronto police threatened $10 000 fines to anyone leading chants on the moving truck at the front of Saturday’s march.

    In Vancouver the city’s police department released a statement prior to Saturday’s demonstration calling on protesters not to obstruct hospitals. In effect, the smear (somewhat contradictorily) is being broadened into the notion that the anti-genocide marches are “targeting” hospitals.

    (A prominent genocide campaigner in Vancouver, Bob Mackin, posted the police statement with a note that the city’s St Paul’s hospital — which has Catholic roots but may have Jewish staff — is 1.3km from the announced starting point of the march. He followed that up with a post noting the protesters passed the central intersection of Burrard and Robson, meaning “The VPD request to avoid impeding routes used to access the hospital fell upon deaf ears.”)

    According to social media company’s data, 2.4 million viewed Singh’s anti-genocide smear on X. That is far more interaction than his usual posts with the comments and quote tweets overwhelmingly hostile. In addition, as mentioned above, 6,000 individuals have emailed Singh requesting he delete his post.

    His lack of action demonstrates how much he, and other politicians, fear the apartheid lobby’s reaction. Removing his post would draw into question their big “antisemitism” lie tactic. It would help disable the power of the lie to intimidate.

    Millions of Canadians oppose the smears based on lies and the justifications for genocide that go along with them and would cheer Singh deleting the post. He should embrace the truth and do what’s right.

    Please take a minute to email Singh and all the NDP MPs to demand he remove his anti-Palestinian post.

    The post Delete the Smear Jagmeet, Tell Truth and Help Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • They’re Lying about Alexei Navalny “Putin’s Enemy”

    Was Alexei Navalny really Putin’s main opponent? Was he poisoned by the Russian government who then killed him in prison? Was he even popular in Russia? Well, no to all of those things and we show you what the West will not tell you while they mourn their favorite media darling.

    The post They’re Lying about Alexei Navalny “Putin’s Enemy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Absence of Evidence: Israel’s Case Against UNRWA

    Statistics are often given lanky legs that take their user far.  But how they are used, and how they are received, is striking.  The current figure of 27,500 dead is a blighting, grotesque fact.  But as they are Palestinians, the issue is less significant to certain parties than, say, 140 Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.

    As with much in the noisy clatter of Middle Eastern violence, the value attributed to numbers alters in the shade of ideology and self-interest.  Massacres become acts of self-defence; acts of self-defence become unconscionable inflictions of murder.  It also follows that an organisation of 30,000 employees, working in the field of humanitarianism, aid and salvation, can be plastered as terrorist sponsors for having 12 individuals in their service allegedly involved in a murderous assault on Israel on October 7, 2023.  Despite the relative smallness of this figure, the entire organisation itself becomes a target.

    What, then, of the evidence?  The state of Israel was initially adamant that 12 such individuals in UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) had participated in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, sharing the details on January 29 with several media outlets.  The accusations were made via a thin dossier amounting to no more than six pages.  Little by way of evidence was supplied, though Israel was content to make further claims that almost 10% of the agency’s staff had ties to Hamas.  As UN Crisis Group expert Daniel Forti writes, “Thus far, Israel has not provided evidence in writing to the UN to substantiate its allegations.”

    For a gaggle of Western states and donors, that hardly mattered.  The mere mention of the Satanic Twelve had made their way into public and political consciousness, and something had to be done about it.  Funding to the aid body was swiftly suspended by the United States, Germany, the European Union, Sweden, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.  The organisation was smeared and threatened with functional incapacity and prospective oblivion, an outcome that would also, inevitably, doom Palestinians.  Unchallenged accusations that the agency had long been a Hamas front – an article of faith among Israeli nationalists – were bandied about with abandon.

    The United Nations, for its part, was unusually fleet footed in responding to the dossier.  Contracts were terminated.  Inquiries were announced, along with promises of stern self-examination, purging and cleansing.  On February 5, the UN Secretary General António Guterres announced that an independent panel had been created with the specific purpose of assessing “whether the agency is doing everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they are made.”  The panel will be chaired by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, who will work alongside a Scandinavian complement of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Sweden, the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

    With the setting up of such heavy machinery, the picture started getting foggier.  Then a smiting report from the British news outlet Channel 4 took issue with the scanty material supplied in the document.  As the network’s Lindsey Hilsum stated, “We got hold of Israel’s dossier against UNRWA – why did the donors including the UK withdraw funding on such flimsy unproven allegations before an investigation?”

    Channel 4 goes on to reveal that the dossier “contains no evidence to support Israel’s explosive new claim other than stating, ‘From intelligence information, documents, and identity cards seized during the course of the fighting, it is now possible to flag around 190 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihadi terrorist operatives who serve as UNRWA employees.  More than 10 UNRWA staffers took part in the events of October 7.”

    Even the usually less than critical CNN network reported that it had “not seen the intelligence that underlies the summary of allegations”, going on to mention that the summary did “not provide evidence to support its claims.”

    When Ophir Falk, an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked by CNN anchor Anna Coren to provide evidence of the claims, he refused to do so.  When asked why the alleged culprits had not been arrested, he merely replied that “the first step is for them to be fired”.

    Outlets such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were less than concerned by the gaping lacunae and skimpiness of Israel’s case.  Instead, the latter could even go so far as to claim that the dossier provided “the most detailed look yet at the widespread links between the UNRWA employees and militants.”  The ABC World News Tonight was clumsy enough to suggest that the UN had “not denied the claims”, implying a veneer of veracity.

    Now, other countries are finding absence of evidence from the Israeli side more than awkward.  Australia’s Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, had to also admit that she had not been furnished with much in the way of evidence.  “We have spoken to the Israelis and we have asked for further evidence,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7.30.  When asked why she did not ask UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini about the subject, she simply reiterated the point that she had asked the Israelis directly and was not aware if Lazzarini had evidence.  “He may, I don’t know what he has.”

    With trademark oiliness, Wong countered that the allegations were what mattered.  “I think it is clear from UNRWA’s own actions that they regard these allegations as serious.”  They had done so by “terminating the employment of a number of employees and putting in place an inquiry – in fact, there are two inquiries.”  Effectively, the agency was to be punished for its own enterprising efforts to investigate the claims, leaving the accusers free to level whatever charges they saw fit.

    In the meantime, Lazzarini has been scrambling to fill the funding void, making visits to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait.  The dying and starvation in Gaza continue with the prospect of even more horror as Israel’s armed forces prepare their offensive on Rafah.  A fine thing, then, to see donor countries for UNRWA, some of whom continue funding Israel’s military efforts, to moralise about terrorists and the agency.

    The post Absence of Evidence: Israel’s Case Against UNRWA first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The “Reality” around Us is Constructed by Liars: “Journalists are War Criminals”

    Albert Einstein argued,

    [P]rivate capital tends to become concentrated in few hands”, resulting in “an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society.

    Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education).

    It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. [May 1949 edition of socialist magazine Monthly Review]

    Thomas Jefferson wrote of Newspapers Lies:

    Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time;… General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn of the great facts, and the details are all false.1

    Chronologically,

    – vested interests journalism made the killing, capturing, transporting and slavery of Africans acceptable in colonial times and during the early United States of America.

    –   corrupted journalists drummed up hate against Indigenous peoples and the later desire for war and the pillage of Mexico.

    • Hearst newspapers’ journalists convinced enough Americas to war on Spain, Cuba and the Filipinos
    • journalists working for President Wilson’s established Committee on Public Information created a public desire for entering the First World War.

    –  journalists made U.S. corporations arming of Hitler’s poor Nazi Germany acceptable as a ‘bulwark’ against Communist Soviet Russia.2

    –  Julius Streicher, Nazi newspaper publisher was convicted of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials and was executed by hanging on October 16, 1946

    • cooperating journalists made a U.S. genocidal war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia appear necessary as was war in Korea before, and neo-colonial U.S. wars in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East thereafter.
    • Journalists reported non-existent popular demonstrations fired upon in Libya, which the UN had cited for its higher standard of living than 9 European countries. Journalists hail US/NATO bombing and terrorist army, slander Gaddafi – did not cover a near million Libyans wildly demonstrating in support of their wealthy and democratic Green Book Arab Socialist government.3

    –  All mainstream journalists ridiculed Gaddafi’s wonderful address to the UN General Assembly in which he, as no one had done before, described how the UN has sanctified US-NATO invasions and bombings in falsification of its charter from its very beginning, and labeled the UN Security Council correctly, a ‘council of terror.’

    • The CIA currently maintains a network of journalists around the world, who influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda, and provide direct access to a large amount of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”4

    WAR BY MEDIA

    At London’s Trafalgar Square, on October 8, 2011 during the U.S. U.K. genocide in Iraq, Australian editor, publisher, activist and founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange spoke encouragingly about how “peace can be started by truth”:

    “. . . and that is something I want to talk about. What can we do with our values, what can we do at all in relation to this (Iraq) war? Because the reality is Margaret Thatcher had it right; there is no society any more. What there is is a transnational security elite that is busy carving up the world using your tax money.

    To combat that elite we must not petition; we must take it over.

    We must form our own networks of strength and mutual value which can challenge those strengths and self-interested values of the warmongers in this country and in others that have formed hand in hand an alliance to take money from the United States, from every NATO country, from Australia and launder it through Afghanistan, launder it through Iraq, lander it through Somalia , launder it through Yemen, launder it through Pakistan and wash that money in peoples blood.

    I don’t need to tell you the depravity of war, you are all too familiar with its images, with the refugees of war, with information that we have revealed showing the everyday squalor and barbarity of war.

    Information such as the individual deaths of over 130,000 people in Iraq. Individual deaths that were kept secret by the US military who denied that they ever counted the deaths of civilians.

    “Wars Can Be Undone!”

    Instead I want to tell you what I think is the way that wars come to be and that wars can be undone.

        “Wars Are a Result of Lies.”

    In democracies, or the pseudo-democracies that we are evolving into, wars are a result of lies. The Vietnam War and the push for US involvement was the result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident . . . a lie. The Iraq War famously is the result of lies. Wars in Somalia are a result of lies. The Second World War and the German invasion of Poland was the result of carefully constructed lies.

                “Average death count attributed to each journalist?”

    That is war by media. Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press, what is the average death count attributed to each journalist?

    When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries then who are the war criminals? 

                            “Journalists Are War Criminals!”

    It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals. And while one might think that that should lead us to a state of despair, that the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars, is constructed by people who are close to those that they are meant to be policing, it should lead us also to an optimistic understanding because if wars can be started by lies, truth can be started, peace can be started by truth. So that is our task and it is your task, go and get the truth, get into the ballpark and get the ball and give it to us and we’ll spread it all over the world.” [War By Media: “Journalists Are War Criminals,” Julian Assange “The Reality That Is Constructed Around Us Is Constructed By Liars.” Celia Farber, The Truth Barrier, Oct. 10, 2023]

    Julian Assange spoke succinctly about those media journalists who read us selected, bent and twisted news to disinform, blind or trick the public to support, accept or ignore ongoing atrocity wars even when massive amount of lives are being taken.

    Gaza as a flagrant example:

    First, 

    a Description of  An Ongoing Unmitigated Glaringly Obvious Horrific Criminal Unbearably Cruel Genocide in Gaza and the October 7 Lethal Hamas Attack (Julian Assange said “truth can be started, peace can be started by truth.”)

    Is followed by

    The Reconstructed ‘Reality’ of Gaza Reconstructed by Western Media’ Wars Enabling Liars as ‘Acceptable,’ ‘Excusable,’ and/or a ‘Reasonable and ‘Proportionate’ ‘Necessary’ Defensive Reaction,’ and Not Seen as Genocide. Also a ‘Reconstructed October 7 ‘Reality’

    (“Wars Are a Result of Lies,”  and wars kept going by lies)

    First,

    A basic reality never mentioned in Western media is that Israel has been killing its own imprisoned Palestinians, imprisoned in its generations long, UN declared illegal, military occupation, while international law regarding military occupation has the occupying power responsible for the well being of its militarily occupied population. Also, Israel’s settling half a million Israelis in occupied Palestinian territory displacing the local population contravenes fundamental rules of international humanitarian law.

    Since October 7, In Israeli militarily occupied and blockaded Gaza, more than 27,000 Palestinians,5 mostly women and children, have already been killed by Israeli Air Force bombings with U.S. supplied warplanes and bombs. Over 66,000 have been wounded,[8] Thirty percent of the homes and buildings in the cities of Gaza have been destroyed completely or in part, and thousands are believed to be still buried in the ruble.  According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), of the thousands of maimed and crippled children, hundreds have suffered amputations of limbs, many without anaesthesia. Since October 7, Israeli attacks have killed 11,500 children in the Gaza Strip.6 Thousands more are missing under the rubble, most of them presumed dead.

    This grim toll means that one Palestinian child is killed every 15 minutes, or that about one child out of every 100 in Gaza has perished, leading the UN to say that the Gaza Strip is a “graveyard for children.”

    Half a million residents are starving with very little food and water and no electricity and most humanitarian aid blocked from being imported.[New York Times Jan. 31] Tens of thousands trying to escape the indiscriminate bombings have been forced into intensely crowded together refuge with little toilet facilities now rampant with disease. Report: Israel burns down hundreds of homes in Gaza:

    Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports it has obtained exclusive information saying that Israeli army commanders have been ordering their troops to destroy unoccupied Gaza homes. The commanders have been doing this without obtaining proper legal approval, the report says. “After the structure is set on fire along with everything inside it, it is allowed to burn out until it is rendered useless,” Haaretz wrote. The newspaper cited three Israeli army officials who have been “spearheading” Gaza operations, who confirmed that this is common practice.7 The UN Court of Justice is still hearing the great amount of evidence of Israeli committed genocide. US State Dept said “not seeing acts of genocide” in Gaza.8 Some Israeli leaders and rabbis have engaged in genocidal talk praised ethnic cleansing operations, one minister suggesting nuclear bombing of Gaza. Western media keeps quoting Isreal’s right to defend itself. All the above mentioned death, suffering and destruction is continually excused by Isreal to be necessary because Israel must kill Hamas to defend itself from future Hamas attack.9 Western media never questions why Israel could not just defend itself with it vast arsenal of U.S. supplied weapons instead of claiming It has had to kill 10,000 children among more than 27,000 Palestinians in order protect Israel from Hamas (an acronym of its official name), the Islamic Resistance Movement, an elected Palestinian Sunni Islamist political and military organisation governing the Gaza Strip of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

    The Oct. 7  Hamas Attack

    It has been widely reported that at the end of a Jewish holiday on October 7, hundreds of Hamas fighters, and other militants, broke through Gaza’s militarised border, crossed into Israel by land, air and sea and reportedly (with some amount of documentation), killed civilians in the streets, in their homes and at an outdoor rave party.

    Israel’s latest official estimated death toll of soldiers and civilians during the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion is 1,200.10

    UN Secretary General Guterres stated on October 25.

    It was important to acknowledge that the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify those appalling attacks, and those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.

    Hamas issued on Jan. 21, an 18-page document explaining its official explanation for why it launched its attack on Israel October 7, saying that it was aimed at stopping the expansion of West Bank settlements and bringing an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

    In its report titled “Our Narrative” Hamas, which is also the elected government of Gaza, said it wanted to “clarify” the background and dynamics of its surprise attack. The group said that avoiding harming civilians “is a religious and moral commitment” by fighters of Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. “If there was any case of targeting civilians; it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.” Hamas said in the report. “Many Israelis were killed by the Israeli army and police due to their confusion.” [19] Hamas’ describes its October 7th goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages in order to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges. To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.

    Western media journalists keep citing the hostages Palestinian Hamas is holding as one of the reasons for war. But the thousands of Palestinians are currently in Israeli prisons are never mentioned. And how many of them are children? First the figure mentioned was 7,000, a month later 9,000. (Since 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, it has arrested an estimated one million Palestinians, the United Nations reported last summer. One in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged under the 1,600 military orders that control every aspect of the lives of Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation. That incarceration rate doubles for Palestinian men — two in every five have been arrested.)

    Forces of five other militant groups, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Al-Azsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Omar Al-Qasim Forces, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Mujahideen Brigades also invaded on Oct. 7, and three groups – PIJ, the Mujahideen Brigades and Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades – claim to have seized Israeli hostages, alongside Hamas, on that day.Hamas says its October 7 attacks in southern Israel were a “necessary step” against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. But the Islamist group admitted in its 16-page report justifying the attack that “some faults happened” due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza.” The Palestinian source said through the memorandum, Hamas was sending a message to the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Hamas should not be judged solely by the events of October 7 without examining Israel’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza over the past decades.

    Hamas pointed to the historical origins of the conflict, saying “the battle of the Palestinian people against occupation and colonialism did not start on October 7, but started 105 years ago, including 30 years of British colonialism and 75 years of Zionist occupation.”

    The group said it wanted to “hold the Israeli occupation legally accountable” for the suffering it had inflicted on the Palestinian people. Hamas said the attack was “to confront all Israeli conspiracies against the Palestinian people.” The militant group urged “the immediate halt of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, the crimes and ethnic cleansing committed against the entire Gaza population.”

    The group blames Israeli helicopters for killing “many” of the 364 civilians massacred at the Nova music festival, saying that Hamas “had no prior knowledge of it.” The document alleges hypocrisy on the part of those who would accept civilian casualties as collateral damage in Gaza while condemning Hamas’s actions during its massacres on October 7.

    The document calls for an investigation by the International Criminal Court to look at “the broader context” of the October 7 attack as part of the “struggle against colonialism, as a “national liberation and resistance movement.” The document refers to several clauses in Hamas’s updated charter from 2017, alleging that the conflict is not with the Jews, but rather with Zionism. The section condemns “what the Jews were exposed to by Nazi Germany and praises Muslim nations for having provided Jews a “safe haven” for centuries.

    The document says that Hamas receives their legitimacy from the “Palestinian right to self-defence, liberation and self-determination,” claiming that according to “all norms, divine religions and international laws,” as well as the Geneva convention, parties are granted the right to resist when facing “the longest and brutalist colonial occupation,” as well as “massacres” and “oppression.”

    Calls on all countries around the world to back “Palestinian resistance” and support the Palestinians’ “struggle for liberation.” Calls on its allies to “support… the Palestinian resistance,” to charge Israel with crimes, to mobilise against “Israeli aggression” on Gaza, and to stop governments from providing further aid or arms to Israel.

    “Israel has destroyed our ability to create a Palestinian state by accelerating the settlement enterprise,” Hamas said, blaming the United Nations for failing to stop the process. “Were we supposed to continue waiting and relying on the helpless UN institutions?” the document asked. The organisation claimed that the Gaza had “been turned into the world’s largest open-air prison” and that the war “was necessary to end the blockade.

    And it said it rejected any international and Israeli efforts to decide Gaza’s post-war future. “We stress that the Palestinian people have the capacity to decide their future and to arrange their internal affairs,” the report said, adding that “no party in the world” had the right to decide on their behalf.

    Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in many of the killings attributed to Hamas. A police investigation shows Israeli Apache helicopters opened fire on attendees of the Nova music festival during the 7 October Hamas attack. [25] Israeli resent investigations have found that a large fraction of the bodies recovered had been charred beyond all recognition. Since the Hamas fighters had only been carrying rifles, Kalashnikov rifles and other small arms, all those victims must have been killed by explosive tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Indeed, newly released video footage revealed that hundreds of Israeli cars had been incinerated by such munitions, suggesting that many if not most of the Israelis killed fleeing the dance festival had probably died at the hands of trigger-happy Apache pilots.

    At Kampala, Uganda, on Jan 17, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres addressing a summit of the Group of 77 (G-77) and China, with more than 130 countries– the largest grouping of the global South, representing 80 per cent of the planet’s population, denounced Israel for the “heartbreaking” deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and called it unacceptable to resist statehood for the Palestinian people.[Reuters]

    (Julian Assange said “truth can be started, peace can be started by truth.”)

    Now

    The Reconstructed ‘Reality’ of Gaza Reconstructed by Western Media’ Wars Enabling Liars to portray the annihilation in Gaza as ‘Acceptable,’ ‘Excusable,’ and/or a ‘Reasonable and ‘Proportionate’ ‘Necessary’ Defensive Reaction,’ and Not Seen as Genocide. 

    (“,wars can be started by lies,” – then kept going by lies)

    Hamas “beheading 40 babies” – headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. U.S. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies,” and that “Israeli women were raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.”

    This is journalism that projects thinking the wholesale destruction  of Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.

    Hamas is pictured as bloodthirsty savages. Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.

    An Israeli first responder to the October 7 terror attack has claimed that Hamas terrorists roasted a baby in an oven in shocking video testimony. Asher Moskowitz, of the United Hatzalah first responder group, published a video of himself speaking to a camera, delivering his witness account.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even describing in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.Then their executioners sat down and had a meal.” Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.

    Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims being obstructed by Israel go unreported.

    Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about October 7. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.”

    In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,200 Israelis and abduction of over 200 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders. In the US, Senator Lindsey Graham called for the wholesale destruction of Gaza.

    Worldwide reaching colonial media journalism will not report the truth that Israel admits Apache helicopters fired on their own civilians running from the Supernova music festival – even when Tel Aviv Ynet reports it to Israelis.11

    Western media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place.

    “Israel has the right to defend itself!” Israel has the right to defend itself!” Each and every time Western media conglomerates consider it necessary to report the number of thousands killed in Gaza, media journalists repeat words to the effect that this is “a response to October 7 attack by Hamas — considered a terrorist group by the United States and European Union.” Hamas is a terrorist group!

    Blacking 0ut from Unfavourable News Indicting U.S. led West

    This section regarding criminal journalism’s reconstructed “reality” of Gaza and Hamas is perforce quite short, brief because simply not reporting reality is the most major crime in Western entertainment/news conglomerate journalism in hiding 90% of reality. Never mentioning for example, the reality of the immense and deadly suffering of the Palestinians, which is the motive for the very existence of the Hamas militant group. Recently, many news hours have been begun simply covering other world and local events to the exclusion of any mention of the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza

    In Conclusion

    White supremacy colonisers always getting away with mass

    murder both in real time and for generations thereafter has been for some time the accomplishment of the war investor controlled CIA overseen journalists of giant entertainment/news conglomerates, which have been allowed to usurp the use of public owned broadcasting frequencies. This is a government collaboration with war investors, which can and must be challenged, at the same time as taking down the credibility of the war enabling journalists of criminal mainstream media.

    Fortunately, there is declining trust in mainstream news outlets, pushing people toward alternative online sources and social media for information.

    Do journalists feel the shame when they pass on deceptive info? Yes, of course some do on occasion, and there is always a segment of the citizenry of varying size that feels responsible for the crimes of its government.

    The more info the public has makes it more difficult to pursue policies of war on innocent populations, so the public is a threat that needs to be countered. So whenever an invasion is planned, a  huge public relations campaign goes into gear.12

    An Advisory Based on Julian Assange’s Counsel

    “So that is our task and it is your task, go and get the truth, get into the ballpark and get the ball and give it to us and we’ll spread it all over the world.”

    Countering the CIA-overseen giant entertainment/news/information conglomerates wars enabling deceptive journalism with truth can be more effective than attacking the wars ordering high government officials, both those elected and those appointed, who in reality must take orders form the ‘deep state’ Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex ‘deep pocket’ war investors.13

    Julian Assange has brought to our attention the pleasant-looking evening news anchor who captivates TV audiences with alternating joviality and gravitas, asking whether they should be seen as insidiously evil as they generate support for horrific suffering, death, maiming and destruction.

    Assange seems to have tasked us to awaken a critical number of decent but unwary citizens to the realisation that a trusted prime time personality of theirs is in fact a war criminal?

    ENDNOTES

    The post The “Reality” around Us is Constructed by Liars: “Journalists are War Criminals” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    In a 14 June 1807 letter to John Norvell. The Founders’ Constitution, Volume 5, Amendment I (Speech and Press), Document 29, The University of Chicago Press.
    2    Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Antony Cyril Sutton British-American writer, researcher, economist, and Stanford U. professor.
    3    There exists not one photo or video of a peaceful protest (CNN reported peaceful protests being fired upon by Libyan soldiers and police.) “There Was No Libyan Peaceful Protest, Just Murderous Gangs and Nic Robertson,” Information Clearing House, June 20, 2011 .  Long time Italian Prime Minister says Libyans love Gaddafi as Italians P. Nearly one million Libyans, out of a total population of six million, wildly demonstrated in favor of their nation’s government with a mile long green flag while listening to Gaddafi’s voice even as NATO warplanes were bombing nearby in Tripoli.
    4    “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times.
    5    Reports Gaza Ministry of Health and UN
    6    Aljazeera, Feb. 2.
    7    Report: “Israel burns down hundreds of homes in Gaza” Aljazeera, Feb. 1.
    8    US ‘not seeing acts of genocide’ in Gaza, State Dept says, Reuters, Jan. 3, 2024
    10    Israel-Hamas War Israel Lowers Oct. 7 Death Toll Estimate to 1,200, New York Times, Nov 10, 2023.
    11    Israeli Apache helicopters killed own soldiers, civilians on …New footage corroborates previous reports that say the Israeli military is responsible for many of the Israeli casualties.
    12    See “The War You Don’t See,” John Pilger Documentary, YouTube.
    13    The awful crimes against humanity ordered by President Eisenhower in Laos, Guatemala, Congo and other places indicate that the president was under the thumb of the Military Industrial Complex he warned of on the day he left office.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Jeremy Scahill on Israel’s “Deliberate Propaganda Campaign”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Jeremy Scahill: Israel Has Waged a “Deliberate Propaganda Campaign” to Justify Brutal Gaza Assault

    Seg2 scahilisraelgantz

    The United States and more than a dozen other countries quickly moved to suspend funding to UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, a vital lifeline for millions of people in Gaza, shortly after Israel accused a handful of the agency’s staff of taking part in the Hamas attack on October 7. But the U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 obtained the intelligence dossier on UNRWA that Israel shared with allied countries, and found “no evidence to support its explosive new claim.” The Financial Times and Sky News also reviewed the materials and came to the same conclusion. Israel’s claims about UNRWA are just the latest example of what journalist Jeremy Scahill says is a “deliberate propaganda campaign” to justify its brutal assault on Gaza. “This is one of the most epic frauds in modern history, reminiscent of the lies told to explain and justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq,” says Scahill, senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Darién Gaps and Injun Country

    A recent X post from Tucker Carlson featured biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse) to talk about the US immigration crisis after a visit to the Darién Gap. The gap is a jungle in the Panamanian isthmus where the Pan American Highway is interrupted on its way to South America. There, at the incitement of weblogger and US Special Forces officer Michael Yon, Weinstein went to see the immigration camps and learn how people from all over the world are trekking to the Rio Bravo border to enter the US.

    His detailed description was rational and cautious, yet it raised a specter which was clearly alarming. Weinstein described the conditions and the character of two camps that he saw. One fit the description of a classic refugee camp. It was visibly managed by a number of NGOs as well as US government agencies. The other appeared to be full of Chinese. He was able to talk to numerous migrants in the first camp but was unable to enter the one which appeared to be Chinese.

    The “Chinese” camp seemed to be full of military age young men who when addressed outside the camp were reluctant to talk.

    After discussing the discrepancies, Carlson asked if he had any explanation. Weinstein was exceptionally cautious and only uttered hypotheses. However, the direction implied the possibility that China was sending men to the US behind the migrant screen.

    Then Weinstein shifted to the possible relation between a Chinese contingent and Covid with the mRNA injections that the US government (along with nearly all Western governments) forced on much of the population. Although Weinstein was very explicit that his hypotheses were not facts and that he did not know if there was any relationship to verify, the discussion proceeded to cover possible motives and objectives of both policies supported by the US regime.

    The speculation is provocative and not to be easily dismissed. Nonetheless, it also revealed how little many people seem to understand about how covert operations can work. Michael Yon can be recognized as a special operations professional. While popular imagination continues to portray these men as mere super soldiers, the reality is that Special Forces are the armed cadres of the CIA and other covert action (state terrorism) agencies. A quick look at Yon’s website shows him as a super-soldier or soldier of fortune who has been a dedicated operator in all the CIA managed wars of the past three decades. That alone ought to raise suspicions about his coverage and why he was so interested to show a biologist and popular podcaster the frontier of what are undoubtedly covert operations. Weinstein was taken into Yon’s confidence much like the journalist character in John Wayne’s notorious The Green Berets film, promoting the war against Vietnam.

    Allowing that Weinstein reported what he honestly saw, the question remains whether he saw what he was supposed to see. That returns us to the question “why Chinese?” The ensuing discussion raised legitimate questions about connections between US immigration policy and the Covid War. However before considering them it is necessary to return to the first camp. Weinstein named several organisations supporting the migrant camp. He identified USG agencies and the UN agency IOM. What he either did not know or did not recognise is that the International Organization for Migration is run by the US national security bureaucrat Amy Pope.1There is general confusion about how the UN and its specialized agencies are run. The WHO is essentially an arm of the Gates Foundation and the international pharmaceuticals (pharmaments) cartel. It would not be unreasonable to suppose Ms Pope assures that the IOM complies with the policies set by those who rule the US. Weinstein’s conclusion is that such policies as those articulated by the Biden administration reflect corruption on a global scale. However that does not answer the question who benefits from those policies and how?

    To return to the compulsory mass injection, especially of the military and other health and safety services, Weinstein and Carlson both expressed their bewilderment and shock that the compulsion was so rigorous in what might be called the public services sector. Then more speculation returned to COVID and mRNA injections and what these were doing to people in the US. Consensus prevailed that this was biological weaponry deployed. While there is no reason to doubt that assertion, the next step was to repeat the half truth that China was the source of the raw material both for the pathogen and for the injections since the latter were based on the former. Neither Weinstein nor Carlson could recall that the actual origin was Eco-Health Alliance, a cutout for US bioweapons development and Ralph Baric at UNC-Chapel Hill, the principal investigator commissioned for the DoD gain of function (weapons) development. Weinstein is probably not savvy enough to understand how cut-outs work or the details of false flag operations. Carlson probably does know but rarely if ever discusses such details. The accuracy of the media depictions of COVID in China were accepted as debunked. Yet the sources of that “information” were not examined. Thus, Chinese authorship was implied.

    While discussing the implications of the migration crisis + “Chinese”, the hypothesis was aired that both the managed “uncontrolled” migration and the covid/mRNA weapons aimed to weaken the US from within. This might serve the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by mass infiltration of potentially militarized immigrants who would then create the conditions most favorable to alleged Chinese expansionism. This it was suggested might be due to China having essentially bought the US government. This hypothesis has been peppered by regular reports of bribes paid to inter alia the Biden family by Chinese interests.

    Striking in the discussion is the absence of two considerations: a) the complex of US anti-China war propaganda which naturally compromises any reporting about China in the West as a whole and b) the interests of the Western oligarchy in redesigning the West as a neo-feudal regime. Leave that eyesore, the CIA-founded WEF, aside for a moment. There are purely national phenomena which provide a far more efficient explanation.

    As a matter of record Mr Gates is now the largest private owner of farm land in the US. There is no indication that he has stopped buying. Since the 2008 mortgage crisis, the hedge funds like Black Rock have become the largest owners of rental property (residential and commercial). This feat was accomplished by the massive derivatives fraud that forced millions of mortgagees to forfeit their real property. The economic devastation continued this process. Sane economists, of which Michael Hudson is one of the few, have charted this conversion of home ownership to rental tenancy and its acceleration. The Anglo-American finance oligarchy is aggressively pursuing through the banking, tax and monetary system an unparalleled expropriation of rank and file Americans.

    During the mass incarceration, I wrote several times that COVID was political-economic warfare using biological agents and financial terror. My argument, then and now, was that this is atomic grade social engineering. In the worst case — for the oligarchy — this neutralization of the country’s majority was a clearing of the decks for open world war. Masses who might, under pressure of extermination — especially in the military and armed citizenry — actually rebel and mutiny leading to an October scenario. However, there is another scenario compatible with the history of North American conquest. In the 19th century, the tiny oligarchy was incapable of fulfilling its manifest destiny by stealing the whole continent. So bonded labor and massive immigration were used to take and hold everything between the Allegheny and the Pacific. Poor immigrants were granted the freedom to fight and die in battle against the indigenous population. Afterwards the land won was handed to railroads, finance, miners and ranchers. Successive economic crises bankrupted smallholders regularly. They abandoned their homes and moved westward. “Indians” and Chinese-bonded labor kept those settlers busy while the usual suspects seized all the land and loot, selling it back to successive suckers. Forced displacement was fundamental to the business model that “won the West”. Even to this day, the oligarchy represented in Washington understates the use of biological agents to eradicate the indigenous peoples. Few 19th century immigrants admit how they were used to enrich East Coast elites. Perhaps that is the policy followed today, the one at home which bears examination. The immigrants are driven by plane and on foot from the South. Meanwhile, mRNA injections provided the same comfort as smallpox-treated blankets.

    ENDNOTE

    It is after all just a hypothesis, but with tradition.

    The post Darién Gaps and Injun Country first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    IOM mission statement
    Harnessing the Power of Migration

    Comprehensive solutions to the world’s biggest challenges – from poverty and inequality to climate change, and conflict – are all inextricably linked to migration. IOM knows that migration has the power to transform the lives of individuals, their families, their communities and societies for the better. It is clear that the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be reached without safe, orderly and regular migration. For this reason, our vision is: to deliver on the promise of migration, while supporting the world’s most vulnerable.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Offensive Nihilism and Oligarchic Narcissism

    When I was a child my grandfather, whom I knew as a man who had driven cars for the rich and conversed with the famous in his youth, once told me “making money is easy — if that is all you want to do”. As an eight-year-old that sounded very profound although at the time it made little sense to me. Personally I must confess, money has really meant very little to me. I worked as a youth to earn pocket money so I could go to restaurants or buy books. However I never had that sense of thrift that fills the Puritan with such pride or disdain for others. Money was largely absent from my youth so that its presence or absence made no discernible impact on my daily life. Thus my grandfather‘s words remained obscure until my middle age.

    It was then that I had sufficient experience to reflect on the conduct of my fellow humans. One of the questions which arose in my studies did not pertain directly to money. I saw first that the jobs I thought I wanted were all badly paid and yet the applications were very competitive. This too seemed a kernel of wisdom that escaped me. One of my academic sojourns took me through the canon of pre-1990s women’s studies. For those who are too young or amnesiac to recall, this was still the debate about the social-political-economic construction of gender roles in the humanist tradition of which Simone de Beauvoir was a part (see The Second Sex). One of the key observations about these roles was the extent to which the social organisation of labour (not erotic stimulation) placed women in labour-intensive roles within the family and society that freed men of property (what once was called the ruling class) to concentrate almost entirely (aside from bowel movements that could not be delegated) on the exercise of power. Illustrative was the fact that anyone who has to feed and nurture children, cook, clean, launder etc. has very little time to control much beyond the threshold of the home. In other words the labour process and division of labour were critical not only for the control of the family but for those thus freed of menial tasks to spend every waking minute dominating the rest of the world. It was then that I found a model for interpreting what my grandfather told me.

    As I have said, my organizational experience has been varied. I have been able to observe at close quarters the behaviour of people from the shop floor and street pavement to the bridge or boardroom. There even a casual observer can see and hear – with due attention – that there are different types in every organisation but every organisation has the same types.
    There are those who work at the tasks assigned. There are those who organise and supply those who work. Then there are those who do very little other than “be” in the organisation. Finally there are those whose only true interest is the exercise of power in whatever form available. The latter are the same character type as those my grandfather denoted for whom making money is easy.

    What unites theses two is benevolently described as single-mindedness. Within very limited circumstances the sheer determination of these people can be harnessed. However those circumstances may be compared to those of the mythical “peaceful atom”. Atomic power for electricity generation was conceived as a cover for the permanent bomb economy. Praised as a triumph of technology, it is demonstrably the most expensive means of boiling water yet invented. Aside from the toxicity and waste disposal issues, the fact remains that the turbine or other engineering needed to use all the plant’s steam generating capacity has not been developed and never will be. The only net benefits the atomic fission reactors have ever delivered are to those for whom making money or exercising power is thus made easy: unregulated private utilities (one could look back to Bonneville Power bankruptcies in Washington State) and the armed forces (propulsion and annihilation).

    An honest study of power would deal with the material conditions of its accumulation, including the division of labour. This is where rational analysis would show quickly how irrational those who belong to the power or money seeking cults are. However “rational” in the established study of politics and international relations means something quite different. Instead the rationalist – wherever affiliated – ought to be called an apologist, except that he does not apologize. Instead he is proud that he knows no shame.

    The obsession with accumulation of money or power is simplification of the highest degree. Since nothing else counts no other factors are actually relevant. No results can be contemplated beyond accumulation or dissipation. Such personalities are in need of guidance since the world is not naturally a source of profit or power.

    We may have read that in societies preceding those in which we live or imagine based on documents attributed to an inaccessible past, that the leaders sought oracles before or after action. They offered sacrifices – frequently burnt – to obtain the translation of the real world into their unidimensional perspectives. That is what the academic – especially the realist – scholar or consultant does. Within the division of labour the establishment scholar has a sacerdotal role to play. His scholarship is realistic only in the sense that it translates data about the world in which the rulers imagine they live into language of obsessive-compulsive behaviour.

    The astute priest knows the beliefs and dogmas he must profess and teach. He knows that if the king will eat meat on a day it is forbidden then a duck must become a species of fish. If the realist scholar is to serve his faith and his psychopathic patrons then he must translate the potentate’s violence and avarice into virtues. When the War Department in the US was renamed this was partly justified by the consolidation of the cabinet departments. (War was the Army alone.) However the act of Congress was designed to create the bureaucratic conditions for perpetual and covert war. The same legislation created the CIA. The Defense Department became the central instrument of US domestic and foreign policy. As not only George Kennan and Thomas Friedman acknowledged, the US economy and hence the machine for only making money and only exercising power could not run without translating everything into “war” or “profit”. As the DuPonts could easily testify after the Great War there was nothing, absolutely nothing, more profitable than war. (see my review of Behind the Nylon Curtain)

    The realist, unlike Machiavelli whose language was clear, thrives by selling his oracles in the forum or as a hawker in the remotest (now electronic) venues. The development of the atomic bomb to annihilate the Soviet Union, after failure of the West’s intervention to stop the revolution and the failure of their man Adolph to do the job later, was decorated in unrealistic stories. Actually outright lies were constructed. While the realists preached the Soviet threat in public they knew that the West’s Hitler-led devastation would require at least twenty years for the USSR to repair. The realists know that the official US strategy from the end of the Second World War was “first strike” and the renamed War Departments had to arm for two strikes against the Soviet Union. If the Tsar Bomba did nothing else it made some of the less obsessive among the psychopathic elite doubt the advantages of nuclear attack. This was the real meaning of deterrence: the US was deterred from following the nihilistic atomic strategy for which the Manhattan Project – staffed with some of the most reactionary anti-communists available – was founded. When New China developed its own weapons, the deterrent value increased. Mao was supposed to have said that even if the US unleashed an atomic war every fifth survivor would be Chinese. That had at least some deterrent effect at Groton or on Eton’s playing fields.

    Today, when some wonder (and others appear to praise) about the treatyless “rules based” order their uncertainty or discontent is generally directed at all those who do not comply with that order. Others moan that the United Nations is so ineffective. Altogether the wailing avoids the historical reality of the imperial regime initiated in 1913. That reality was the “great class war” aka the Great War or WWI after its continuation had ended in 1945. Eric Blair (George Orwell) was not prophetic. He was a true realist. He described the really existing empire that was established and unfolding. He knew nothing about the Soviet Union. The religion was Engsoc – British fascism or Anglo-national socialism. Orwell’s Party was the distillation of Anglo-Puritan moralism and its crusading fanaticism, to be intensified in all the white dominions. Behind those crusaders or in their hearts was the nihilistic obsession with power and submission for their own sake. He could not name them because the very fusion of state and corporate power which the Anglo-American Empire perfected became an exoskeleton sustaining power as if without the personality of the potentate. In order to distract from this reality a body of scholars was actively recruited and promoted whose descriptions of so-called totalitarianism or authoritarianism erased the essence of the new form which thirty years of war had perfected. In doing so, these often cited writers and speakers squeezed political theory out of toothpaste tubes and polished the smiles of those who triggered, waged and prolonged the slaughter, plunder and pillage into anonymity. Were these merely academic debates in modern monasteries we could regard them as arcane. However those critical years began a continuing deception about the true sources of the power that ended humanism and turned the short 20th century into the start of a millennium of perpetual war.

    How would the realist scholar explain this? What rational basis could such a society have? This is no speculative question. Such a society already prevails but not for the priests of academy. They cannot find the society in which the vast majority of us live. Their brethren have no idea about the economy they pretend to study either. The economist sees monopoly and piracy as “imperfect competition” just as Samuelson told us all. The political scientist sees only imperfect democracy where voting and public assets are entirely owned and controlled by cartels immune even from modest citizen scrutiny. The biologist revels in the destruction of humanity through genetic engineering just like his brothers who created the atomic bomb at the same time. These realists all at the cutting edge of their fields stand ready and willing to push humanity into the precipice their nihilism has created.

    It is all so easy to destroy human life, if that’s all you want to do.

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  • Israel’s most outrageous propaganda ad yet


    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • NY Times LIED About October 7th R@pe Story!

    The New York Times recently published a piece describing the horrible rape and murder of an Israeli woman who attended the Nova Music Festival that came under attack by Hamas. Except, as her family insisted after the article ran, there is no evidence that the woman was raped and the Times misled family members about the substance of the story.

    Jimmy, along with Due Dissidence host Russell Dobular and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger, discuss why the Times would insist on lying about the case and whether such propaganda demonstrates that Israel is losing the media war over Gaza.

    The post NY Times LIED About October 7th R@pe Story! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why the Guardian’s “Hamas Mass Rape” Story doesn’t Pass the Sniff Test

    The Guardian has just published the latest in the western media’s endless cycle of stories claiming Hamas committed “systematic, mass rape” on October 7. Its article is headlined: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.

    The biggest problem with these stories isn’t just the continuing absence of any meaningful evidence for “systematic” rape; or Israel’s long track record of lying to justify state terrorism; or Israel’s refusal to cooperate with independent investigators; or the racist, anti-Arab tropes that pass for sophisticated analysis in western circles.

    It is simply the outrageous improbability of so many of the evidence-poor rape stories being advanced.

    The Guardian recycles a supposed eyewitness account of a group of Hamas fighters taking turns to rape a woman at the Nova festival on October 7, then cutting off her breast to play a football-like game with it at the side of the road.

    We are supposed to believe this happened when we also know – from facts provided by the Israeli media – that Hamas stumbled on to the Nova festival totally unprepared and on their way to what they assumed would be a major confrontation with the Israeli military at a nearby army base; that its fighters were quickly confronted by paramilitary Israeli police who engaged them in gun battles; and that Israeli Apache helicopters, with little intelligence to work on, were firing Hellfire missiles at anything that moved, based on the “Hannibal directive” to prevent hostage-taking at all costs.

    Does any of that add up? Did Hamas’ most disciplined elite fighters – training for years and knowing that this might be their their only, brief moment to take on the Israeli army in a near-fair fight or drag hostages back to Gaza for a prisoner swap before the Israeli military used its air power to overwhelm them – really take time out to indulge in a sick game involving a woman’s breast?

    How is it that no one – the Guardian reporter, her section editors, the paper’s editors – stopped for a moment and thought “Is this really plausible?” and “Am I being played to advance a nefarious agenda?” – in this case, genocide. Or did they simply recite in their minds – as Israel knew they would – “Believe women!”, especially if they are confirming a racist assumption that Arab men are blood-thirsty, sex-obsessed primitives.

    In fact, the Zaka volunteers who are being heavily relied on in this Guardian “report” are Jewish religious extremist men, also with a proven record of lying: they came up with the complete fabrication of “40 beheaded babies”, when no babies were beheaded. Two infants are recorded dying that day.

    The woman leading the “Hamas mass rape” campaign – now an academic – is a former spokesperson for the Israeli military. Their job, as any honest reporter will tell you, is to lie to journalists to excuse Israel’s incessant war crimes.

    What we now know – from multiple credible Israeli sources – is that Israel killed lots of its own civilians on October 7. Ynet, Israel’s biggest media outlet, has just published an investigation in Hebrew showing that Hamas successfully took out Israel’s all-seeing drone “eyes” over Gaza that day, leaving the Israeli military blind about what was happening. Panicked, Israeli commanders invoked the Hannibal directive, allowing those in the field to order tanks and helicopters to fire at anything that moved.

    It was Israel that incinerated the hundreds of cars trying to flee the Nova festival, killing potentially hundreds of the 1,140 Israelis that died that day, as well as Hamas fighters. It was an Israeli tank that incinerated 13 Israeli civilians, and 40 Hamas fighters, holed up in a house in Kibbutz Be’eri by blasting a shell through its front wall.

    Israel, of course, wants no one, least of all the western media, talking about any of that. What it needs instead is anything that will help to distract from its crimes against its citizens and justify its committing of genocide against the people of Gaza. So it has every reason to serve up the “Hamas mass rape” story, feeding what it rightly assumes are the Islamophobic prejudices of most Israeli Jews and western reporters.

    Journalists at the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of the establishment media are paid to play their role in regurgitating these lies to advance western foreign policy goals. You are not. So please hold on to your humanity – and refuse to play along with Israel and the media’s racist disinformation campaign.

    I have written previously about the media’s peddling of deceptions about October 7. You can find those articles at these links:

    The post Why the Guardian’s “Hamas Mass Rape” Story doesn’t Pass the Sniff Test first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cancelling the journalist: Furore over ABC’s coverage of Israel war on Gaza

    By Binoy Kampmark

    The Age has revealed the dismissal of ABC broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson.

    The official reason for Lattouf’s dismissal was ordinary: she shared a post by Human Rights Watch about Israel “using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza”, calling it “a war crime”.

    It also noted the express intention of Israeli officials to pursue this strategy. Actions were also documented: the deliberate blocking of food, water and fuel “while wilfully obstructing the entry of aid”.

    Sacked ABC presenter Antoinette Lattouf
    Sacked ABC presenter Antoinette Lattouf . . . bringing wrongful dismissal case. Image: GL

    Lattouf shared it after management directed staff not to post on “matters of controversy”.

    Prior to The Age revelations, much had been made of Lattouf’s fill-in role as a radio presenter — which was intended for five shows.

    The Australian, owned by News Corp, had issues with Lattouf’s statements on various online platforms. It found it strange in December that she was appointed “despite her very public anti-Israel stance”.

    She was accused of denying that some protesters had called for Jews to be gassed outside the Sydney Opera House on October 7. She also dared to accuse the Israeli Defence Forces of committing rape.

    ‘Lot of people really upset’
    It was considered odd that she discussed food and water shortages in Gaza and “an advertising campaign showing corpses reminiscent of being wrapped in Muslim burial cloths”. That “left a lot of people really upset’,” The Australian said.

    ABC managing director David Anderson
    ABC managing director David Anderson . . . denied “any external pressure, whether it be an advocacy group or lobby group, a political party, or commercial entity’. Image: Green Left

    If war is hell, Lattouf was evidently not allowed to go into quite so much detail about it — at least concerning the fate of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli war machine.

    What has also come to light is that the ABC’s managers were not targeting Lattouf on their own. Pressure had been exercised from outside the media organisation.

    According to The Age, WhatsApp messages by a group called “Lawyers for Israel” had been sent to the ABC as part of a coordinated campaign.

    Sydney property lawyer Nicky Stein told members of that group to contact the federal Minister for Communications asking “how Antoinette is hosting the morning ABC Sydney show” the day Lattouf was sacked.

    They said employing Lattouff breached Clause 4 of the ABC code of practice on “impartiality”.

    Stein went on to insist that: “It’s important ABC hears from not just individuals in the community but specifically from lawyers so they feel there is an actual legal threat.”

    No ‘generic’ response
    She goes on to say that a “proper” rather than “generic” response was expected “by COB [close of business] today or I would look to engage senior counsel”.

    Did such threats have any basis? Even Stein admits: “There is probably no actionable offence against the ABC but I didn’t say I would be taking one — just investigating one. I have said that they should be terminating her employment immediately.”

    It was designed to attract attention from ABC chairperson Ita Buttrose, and it did.

    ABC political reporter Nour Haydar
    ABC political reporter Nour Haydar . . . resigned last week citing concern about the ABC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Image: Green Left

    Robert Goot, deputy president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and part of the same group, boasted of information he had received that Lattouf would be “gone from morning radio from Friday” because of her “anti-Israeli” stance.

    There has been something of a journalistic exodus from the ABC of late.

    Nour Haydar, a political reporter in the ABC’s Parliament House bureau and another journalist of Lebanese descent, resigned on January 12 citing concern about the ABC’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

    There had been, for instance, the creation of a “Gaza advisory panel” at the behest of ABC news director Justin Stevens, ostensibly to improve coverage.

    Journalists need to ‘take a stand’ over the Gaza carnage after latest killings

    Must not ‘take sides’
    “Accuracy and impartiality are core to the service we offer audiences,” Stevens told staff. “We must stay independent and not ‘take sides’.”

    This pointless assertion can only ever be a threat because it acts as an injunction on staff and a judgment against sources that do not favour the line, however credible they might be.

    What proves acceptable, a condition that seems to have paralysed the ABC, is to never say that Israel massacres, commits war crimes and brings about conditions approximating genocide.

    Little wonder then that coverage of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice does not get top billing on the ABC.

    Palestinians and Palestinian militias, however, can always be described as savages, rapists and baby slayers. Throw in fanaticism and Islam and you have the complete package ready for transmission.

    Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the mainstream media of most Western countries, as the late Robert Fisk pointed out, repeatedly asserts these divisions.

    After her resignation, Haydar told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Commitment to diversity in the media cannot be skin deep.  Culturally diverse staff should be respected and supported even when they challenge the status quo.”

    Sharing divisive topics
    Haydar’s argument about cultural diversity should not obscure the broader problem facing the ABC: policing the way opinions and material on war, and any other divisive topic, is shared with the public.

    The issue goes less to cultural diversity than permitted intellectual breadth.

    Lattouf, for her part, is pursuing remedies through the Fair Work Commission and seeking funding through a GoFundMe page, steered by Lauren Dubois.

    “We stand with Antoinette and support the rights of workers to be able to share news that expresses an opinion or reinforces a fact, without fear of retribution.”

    Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, expressed his displeasure at Lattouf’s treatment, suggesting the ABC had erred.

    ABC’s senior management, via a statement from Anderson, preferred the route of craven denial. He rejected “any claim that it has been influenced by any external pressure, whether it be an advocacy group or lobby group, a political party, or commercial entity”.

    Dr Binoy Kampmark is a senior lecturer in global studies at RMIT University, Melbourne. This article was first published by Green Left Magazine and is republished here with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Cancelling the journalist: Furore over ABC’s coverage of Israel war on Gaza

    By Binoy Kampmark

    The Age has revealed the dismissal of ABC broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson.

    The official reason for Lattouf’s dismissal was ordinary: she shared a post by Human Rights Watch about Israel “using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza”, calling it “a war crime”.

    It also noted the express intention of Israeli officials to pursue this strategy. Actions were also documented: the deliberate blocking of food, water and fuel “while wilfully obstructing the entry of aid”.

    Sacked ABC presenter Antoinette Lattouf
    Sacked ABC presenter Antoinette Lattouf . . . bringing wrongful dismissal case. Image: GL

    Lattouf shared it after management directed staff not to post on “matters of controversy”.

    Prior to The Age revelations, much had been made of Lattouf’s fill-in role as a radio presenter — which was intended for five shows.

    The Australian, owned by News Corp, had issues with Lattouf’s statements on various online platforms. It found it strange in December that she was appointed “despite her very public anti-Israel stance”.

    She was accused of denying that some protesters had called for Jews to be gassed outside the Sydney Opera House on October 7. She also dared to accuse the Israeli Defence Forces of committing rape.

    ‘Lot of people really upset’
    It was considered odd that she discussed food and water shortages in Gaza and “an advertising campaign showing corpses reminiscent of being wrapped in Muslim burial cloths”. That “left a lot of people really upset’,” The Australian said.

    ABC managing director David Anderson
    ABC managing director David Anderson . . . denied “any external pressure, whether it be an advocacy group or lobby group, a political party, or commercial entity’. Image: Green Left

    If war is hell, Lattouf was evidently not allowed to go into quite so much detail about it — at least concerning the fate of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli war machine.

    What has also come to light is that the ABC’s managers were not targeting Lattouf on their own. Pressure had been exercised from outside the media organisation.

    According to The Age, WhatsApp messages by a group called “Lawyers for Israel” had been sent to the ABC as part of a coordinated campaign.

    Sydney property lawyer Nicky Stein told members of that group to contact the federal Minister for Communications asking “how Antoinette is hosting the morning ABC Sydney show” the day Lattouf was sacked.

    They said employing Lattouff breached Clause 4 of the ABC code of practice on “impartiality”.

    Stein went on to insist that: “It’s important ABC hears from not just individuals in the community but specifically from lawyers so they feel there is an actual legal threat.”

    No ‘generic’ response
    She goes on to say that a “proper” rather than “generic” response was expected “by COB [close of business] today or I would look to engage senior counsel”.

    Did such threats have any basis? Even Stein admits: “There is probably no actionable offence against the ABC but I didn’t say I would be taking one — just investigating one. I have said that they should be terminating her employment immediately.”

    It was designed to attract attention from ABC chairperson Ita Buttrose, and it did.

    ABC political reporter Nour Haydar
    ABC political reporter Nour Haydar . . . resigned last week citing concern about the ABC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Image: Green Left

    Robert Goot, deputy president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and part of the same group, boasted of information he had received that Lattouf would be “gone from morning radio from Friday” because of her “anti-Israeli” stance.

    There has been something of a journalistic exodus from the ABC of late.

    Nour Haydar, a political reporter in the ABC’s Parliament House bureau and another journalist of Lebanese descent, resigned on January 12 citing concern about the ABC’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

    There had been, for instance, the creation of a “Gaza advisory panel” at the behest of ABC news director Justin Stevens, ostensibly to improve coverage.

    Journalists need to ‘take a stand’ over the Gaza carnage after latest killings

    Must not ‘take sides’
    “Accuracy and impartiality are core to the service we offer audiences,” Stevens told staff. “We must stay independent and not ‘take sides’.”

    This pointless assertion can only ever be a threat because it acts as an injunction on staff and a judgment against sources that do not favour the line, however credible they might be.

    What proves acceptable, a condition that seems to have paralysed the ABC, is to never say that Israel massacres, commits war crimes and brings about conditions approximating genocide.

    Little wonder then that coverage of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice does not get top billing on the ABC.

    Palestinians and Palestinian militias, however, can always be described as savages, rapists and baby slayers. Throw in fanaticism and Islam and you have the complete package ready for transmission.

    Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the mainstream media of most Western countries, as the late Robert Fisk pointed out, repeatedly asserts these divisions.

    After her resignation, Haydar told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Commitment to diversity in the media cannot be skin deep.  Culturally diverse staff should be respected and supported even when they challenge the status quo.”

    Sharing divisive topics
    Haydar’s argument about cultural diversity should not obscure the broader problem facing the ABC: policing the way opinions and material on war, and any other divisive topic, is shared with the public.

    The issue goes less to cultural diversity than permitted intellectual breadth.

    Lattouf, for her part, is pursuing remedies through the Fair Work Commission and seeking funding through a GoFundMe page, steered by Lauren Dubois.

    “We stand with Antoinette and support the rights of workers to be able to share news that expresses an opinion or reinforces a fact, without fear of retribution.”

    Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, expressed his displeasure at Lattouf’s treatment, suggesting the ABC had erred.

    ABC’s senior management, via a statement from Anderson, preferred the route of craven denial. He rejected “any claim that it has been influenced by any external pressure, whether it be an advocacy group or lobby group, a political party, or commercial entity”.

    Dr Binoy Kampmark is a senior lecturer in global studies at RMIT University, Melbourne. This article was first published by Green Left Magazine and is republished here with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gaza: A Brutal Demonstration Of “Western Values”

    I find Westerners in general, and Europeans in particular, extremely indoctrinated and obsessed with perceptions of their own uniqueness. Many see themselves as chosen people, after going through a one-sided education and after relying on their media outlets, without studying alternative sources.

    — André Vltchek, Soviet-born US political writer, 1963-2020.

    On 20 March 2006, on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall declared on the Six O’Clock News:

    ‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’

    The supposed ‘justification’ claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair was the ‘serious and current threat’ posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The BBC’s false notion of ‘balance’ was to present ‘disastrous miscalculation’ as the counterargument. In fact, as we detailed at the time in media alerts and in our books, the invasion was considered by many legal experts to be a ‘war of aggression’, the ‘supreme international crime’ as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials.

    But such a view is deemed too extreme for respectable BBC discourse. Even today, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg glibly notes:

    Labour nerves still jangle over what went so terribly wrong in Iraq, even after all these years.

    The implication, endlessly channelled by the BBC, is that a ‘disastrous miscalculation’ occurred, rather than an international war crime leading to the deaths of over one million Iraqis; a crime for which no western leader, or their media cheerleaders, has ever been tried in court. That outcome, in any serious responsible society, would have been more fitting than mere ‘jangling nerves’ among politicians.

    But such narrative control is an endemic feature of state-corporate media, wrongly labelled ‘mainstream’. It is a fundamental requirement of political journalists and editors that they magically transform the crimes of ‘our’ governments into ‘miscalculations’, ‘mistakes’ or ‘misguided’ attempts to do good. This transformation is a power-serving alchemy turning the base metal of brutal realpolitik into the gold of benign intention, all for public consumption.

    Noam Chomsky succinctly explained the ideological underpinning of ‘mainstream’ news coverage:

    In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that “we are good” – “we” being the government, on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one. “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.

    — Chomsky, Interventions, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p. 101.

    It does not matter how frequently, or how horrifically, this benevolent claim is violated by Western countries, journalists can be relied upon to perform the necessary whitewashing: the Gulf War in 1990-91, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq sanctions from 1990-2003, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the destruction of Libya in 2011, the US-sponsored toppling of the Ukrainian government in 2014, US-Nato air strikes against Syria, participation in the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, and now the attacks on ‘Iran-backed’ Houthi rebels. (Of course, convention decrees that the Houthi are always described as ‘Iran-backed’, whereas Israeli forces are not routinely labelled ‘US-backed’.)

    The list goes on and on. You might well ask: at what point do supposedly astute, well-informed, senior editors and political correspondents simply stop regurgitating government propaganda; even start challenging it? How much blood has to be spilled, how many lives lost, how much vital infrastructure – homes, hospitals, power plants – destroyed by ‘our’ weaponry, with ‘our’ diplomatic, political and economic support?

    But, of course, serious media challenge of elite power is highly unlikely. ‘Successful’ media professionals are fed through an industrial filter system that rewards steady adherence to state-approved narratives. As Chomsky once so memorably told a discombobulated Andrew Marr:

    I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.’

    Misleading The Public Is State Policy

    In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, has laid bare the motivations and reality of British foreign policy. Ethical concerns and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observed:

    a basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.

    — Curtis, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, Vintage, London, 2004, p. 3.

    He added:

    in every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.

    — Ibid., p. 3.

    This is especially true when it comes to Western terrorism. But what exactly is terrorism? The definition from a US army manual is:

    The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.

    — Chomsky, ‘The new war against terror’, talk given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 18 October 2001.

    By this definition, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States, supported by its ‘special relationship’ ally, the UK. Curtis wrote:

    The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.

    — Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, Vintage, London, 2003, p. 94.

    The US-UK-supported genocidal attacks by Israel on the people of Gaza, now extending to over 100 days, have made it ever more difficult for politicians and managers of public perception to maintain the myth of western benevolence and a ‘global rules-based order’.

    The Financial Times reported last October:

    Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned.

    The FT article continued:

    “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost…Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

    The senior G7 diplomat added:

    What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility. The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?

    Why indeed.

    Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, observed recently that:

    I think this notion of international rules is very comfortable for some people to use when it suits them but they don’t believe in international rules when it doesn’t suit them. Because they don’t apply international rules or law equally in all circumstances.

    She added:

    You can’t say because Ukraine has been invaded, suddenly sovereignty is important, but it was never important for Palestine.

    To put it bluntly, the notion of the West upholding a rules-based international system is a blood-drenched myth.

    Gaza – A War ‘To Save Western Civilisation’

    Last week, South Africa presented a detailed 84-page submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – essentially the UN’s global law court – arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The case was brought under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

    The South African legal team showed ample evidence of Israeli genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as the stated intention to commit genocide, indicated in public statements by numerous senior Israeli political and military leaders. On 28 October last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech in which he compared the Palestinians to the Biblical people of Amalek. In the first Book of Samuel, God commanded King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel:

    Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.

    We could find no reference to Netanyahu’s genocidal comparison of the Palestinians to the Amalekites on the BBC News website.

    Around 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October last year, including over 10,300 children and 7,100 women. There may be another 7,000 buried under the rubble. In other words, over 70 per cent of those killed are women and children. Around four per cent of Gaza’s population has either been killed, wounded or is missing under rubble.

    According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, by the end of 2023, 1.9 million people – nearly 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza – had been internally displaced under Israel’s attacks. These include many families who have been displaced multiple times, forcibly and repeatedly moved to try to flee Israel’s bombardment. But, as the UN has warned, there is no safe place in Gaza. Oxfam reported that Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, exceeding the daily death toll of any other major 21st century conflict. Many more lives are at risk from hunger, disease and cold, warned Oxfam.

    As of 30 December, about 65,000 residential units in Gaza had been destroyed or made uninhabitable and over 290,000 housing units had been damaged, meaning that over half a million people will have no home to return to. Thirty out of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals are not functioning, and the remaining six are only partially functioning.

    Jonathan Cook noted that the West is now standing in the dock alongside Israel at the ICJ:

    Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.

    Cook pointed out that it is significant that South Africa has brought the case of genocide against Israel. Both countries ‘bear the trauma of Europe’s long history of racial supremacism, but each has drawn precisely opposite lessons.’ As Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, said:

    We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

    Israel’s most brutal assault in Gaza’s history is a continuation of its long war of oppression against the Palestinians. Israeli president Isaac Herzog described the genocidal attacks on Gaza as a war ‘to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilisation.’ As the political writer Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, Herzog was right; but not in the way he intended. She explained:

    The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of western values, and is itself a perfect embodiment of western values. Not the western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at.

    Johnstone continued:

    For centuries western civilization has depended heavily on war, genocide, theft, colonialism and imperialism, which it has justified using narratives premised on religion, racism and ethnic supremacy — all of which we are seeing play out in the incineration of Gaza today.

    She added:

    What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school.

    A BBC News report on the ICJ proceedings was titled, with fake balance, ‘South Africa’s genocide case against Israel: Both sides play heavy on emotion in ICJ hearing’. This was a distortion of the truth: the South African case was presented with dignity, clarity and forensic detail. As the BBC conceded deep in its report, it was Israel who made a strong appeal to emotions, displaying the images of 132 missing Israelis – most of them still being held hostage in Gaza. But, as Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, noted of Israel’s legal case:

    Its repeated invocation of Hamas’s horrible 7 October attack and alleged genocidal aspirations are irrelevant because atrocities by one side do not justify genocide by another. Its argument of self-defence is beside the point because a legitimate defence does not allow genocide.

    BBC News marked one hundred days of the current phase of the Israel-Palestine crisis with a classic example of propaganda bias. The BBC website headlined a major 3,000-word piece on the October 7 attacks. Underneath, there was a tiny link to a one-minute video of footage from Gaza that clearly underplayed the level of destruction. This is called BBC ‘impartiality’.

    True to form, Washington is doing its utmost to protect Israel. During a press briefing, US national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters:

    South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel is “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.

    Interviewed by Andrew Napolitano, a former judge and law professor, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University responded to Kirby’s dismissive remark:

    I just wish there were grown-ups in power. Grown-ups who are responsible, who are honest, who are decent, who would read an 84-page detailed complaint and give a serious answer, rather than a one-sentence smack-off like that.

    He added:

    I wish, at the same time, that the White House press corps would follow up more seriously. Actually, if I remember correctly, that question started with a few words, “Just a quick one”. And then the question was asked and Kirby responded in this utterly disgusting way when the most important issue on the planet is in front of him, and couldn’t do more than one dismissive, phony and false statement. But then there’s no follow-up [by the journalists at the press briefing]. Then they move on to the next topic. And the next topic.

    Sachs continued:

    Why don’t the journalists do their job, rather than feeding us the propaganda from the White House? They should be questioning the propaganda. That’s why I was grateful for today’s [ICJ] court proceedings because there were hours to put forward the evidence. There is a detailed legal complaint. There are dozens of countries that have supported this. But the US government is all spin, all propaganda, and all attempt at narrative control.

    This is, of course, standard behaviour for the world’s major perpetrator of terrorism.

    The Language Of Genocide

    Media academics have analysed Israel-Palestine coverage and found that Palestinian perspectives are given ‘far less time and legitimacy’ than Israeli views in the British media. Last month, Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the highly-respected 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. Philo and Berry 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).

    But more importantly:

    The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.

    Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, once observed that what is routinely missing from BBC coverage is that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land:

    demeans and degrades people: not just the killing and the destruction, but the humiliation, the attempt to crush the human spirit and remove the identity; not just the bullet in the brain and the tank through the door, but the faeces Israel’s soldiers rub on the plundered ministry walls, the trashed kindergarten; the barriers to a people’s work, prayers and hopes.

    Emre Azizlerli, a former senior BBC producer, said recently via X (formerly Twitter):

    I worked there for over 20 years. Internal boards determine who gets promoted by a panel of the applicant’s superiors. The political likes and dislikes of those at the very top easily trickle down in this chain mechanism all the way down to how producers behave, since everyone wants to please their boss to move ahead.

    No wonder that a Morning Star tribute to the late John Pilger, who reported on Palestine over many years, noted that his death ‘leaves a void’, adding:

    There are few investigative journalists of his courage or integrity. And designedly so. From the censorship of “hostile” voices across the internet to the outrageous incarceration of Julian Assange, every effort is being made to stamp out independent journalism.

    Throughout his career, Pilger drew attention to the role of the media as ‘an appendage of established power’. Addressing a conference last March, organised by the Morning Star, he called for:

    urgent debate and activism around the issue of the media… the media was rarely a friend of working people, but there were spaces for independent journalists in the mainstream.

    He continued:

    My own career is testament to that. Until a few years ago I worked in mainstream newspapers — in later years the Guardian mainly — but the Guardian like the others is now closed to independent thinking and honest journalism… we need to understand that the media is now fully integrated into an extremist state, and that working people must look elsewhere — to the Morning Star, yes, and to oases on the internet where good journalism flourishes.

    Pilger often cast a sceptical eye on those whom we are supposed to regard as the best journalists working in the major news media. They are nevertheless performing a propaganda role by demarcating the permissible limits of reporting. For example:

    BBC reporter, Jeremy Bowen, who talks about a war between Israel and Hamas. Bowen knows that’s wrong. It’s an attack on an occupied people by the occupier, Israel, backed by great powers.

    State-corporate journalism – BBC News is a prime example – is far removed from the mythical notion of reporting the truth to the public. As the playwright John McGrath once wrote:

    The gentlemen at the head of the powerful opinion-forming corporations do not wish to have their articulate mediation of reality disturbed by a group of people going around with a different story, seeing events from a different perspective, even selecting different information. Still less do they wish to have the population at large emerging from their mental retreat – the inner exile of the powerless and alienated – and demanding a share of power, of control, of freedom.’

    — McGrath, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, Nick Hern Books, 1981, pp. 89-90.

    We should all reject the output of ‘the powerful opinion-forming corporations’ and look elsewhere, to those internet oases of real journalism, in order to understand the world and to radically change it for the better.

    The post Gaza: A Brutal Demonstration Of “Western Values” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Western Racism laid the Foundations for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

    It should surprise no one that the prize-match fight for the rule of international law has pitted Israel and South Africa against each other at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

    The world is split between those who have crafted a self-serving global and regional order that guarantees them impunity whatever their crimes, and those who pay the price for that arrangement.

    Now the long-time victims are fighting back at the so-called World Court.

    Last week, each side presented its arguments for and against whether Israel has implemented a genocidal policy in Gaza over the past three months.

    South Africa’s case should be open and shut. So far Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has damaged or destroyed more than 60 percent of the population’s homes. It has bombed the tiny “safe zones” to which it has ordered some two million Palestinians to flee. It has exposed them to starvation and lethal disease by cutting off aid and water.

    Meanwhile, senior Israeli political and military officials have openly and repeatedly expressed genocidal intent, as South Africa’s submission so carefully documents.

    Back in September, before Hamas’ break-out from the Gaza prison on 7 October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had shown the United Nations a map of his aspiration for what he termed “the New Middle East”. The Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank were gone, replaced by Israel.

    Despite the mass of evidence against Israel, it could take years for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to reach a definitive verdict – by which time, if things carry on as they are, there may be no meaningful Palestinian population left to protect.

    South Africa has therefore also urgently requested an interim order effectively requiring Israel to stop its attack.

    Opposing corners

    The peoples of Israel and South Africa still carry the wounds of the crimes of systematic European racism: in Israel’s case, the Holocaust in which the Nazis and their collaborators exterminated six million Jews; and in South Africa’s, the white apartheid regime that was imposed on the black population for decades by a colonising white minority.

    They are in opposite corners because each drew a different lesson from their respective traumatic historical legacies.

    Israel raised its citizens to believe that Jews must join the racist, oppressor nations, adopting a “might makes right” approach to neighbouring states. A self-declared Jewish state sees the region as a zero-sum battleground in which domination and brutality win the day.

    It was inevitable that Israel would eventually spawn, in Hamas and groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, armed opponents who view their conflict with Israel in a similar light.

    South Africa, by contrast, has aspired to carry the mantel of “moral beacon” nation, that western states so readily ascribe to their top-dog, nuclear-armed Middle Eastern client state, Israel.

    South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, famously observed in 1997: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

    Israel and apartheid South Africa were close diplomatic and military allies until apartheid’s fall 30 years ago. Mandela understood that the ideological foundations of Zionism and apartheid were built on a similar racial supremacist logic.

    He was once cast as a terrorist villain for opposing South Africa’s apartheid rulers, much as Palestinian leaders are by Israel today.

    Jackboot of colonialism

    It should also not surprise us that lined up in Israel’s corner is most of the West – led by Washington and Germany, the country that instigated the Holocaust. Berlin asked last Friday to be considered a third party in Israel’s defence at The Hague.

    Meanwhile, South Africa’s case is backed by much of what is called the “developing world”, which has long felt the jackboot of western colonialism – and racism – on its face.

    Notably, Namibia was incensed by Germany’s support for Israel at the court, given that at the outset of the 20th century, the colonial German regime in south-west Africa herded many tens of thousands of Namibians into death camps, developing the blueprint for the genocide of Jews and Roma it would later refine in the Holocaust.

    The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, stated: “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”

    The panel of judges – 17 of them in total – do not exist in some rarified bubble of legal abstraction. Intense political pressures in this polarised fight will bear down on them.

    As former UK ambassador Craig Murray, who attended the two days of hearings, observed: most of the judges looked as if they “really did not want to be in the court”.

    ‘Nobody will stop us’

    The reality is that, whichever way the majority in the court swings in its decision, the crushing power of the West to get its way will shape what happens next.

    If most of the judges find it plausible that there is a risk Israel is committing genocide and insist on some sort of interim ceasefire until it can make a definitive ruling, Washington will block enforcement through its veto at the UN Security Council.

    Expect the US, as well as Europe, to work harder than ever to undermine international law and its supporting institutions. Imputations of antisemitism on the part of the judges who back South Africa’s case – and the states to which they belong – will be liberally spread around.

    Already Israel has accused South Africa of a “blood libel”, suggesting its motives at the ICJ are driven by antisemitism. In his address to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli foreign ministry argued that South Africa was acting as a legal surrogate for Hamas.

    The US has implied much the same by calling South Africa’s meticulous amassing of evidence “meritless”.

    On Saturday, in a speech littered with deceptions, Netanyahu vowed to ignore the court’s ruling if it was not to Israel’s liking. “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anybody else,” he said.

    On the other hand, if the ICJ rules at this stage anything less than that there is a plausible case for genocide, Israel and the Biden administration will seize on the verdict to mischaracterise Israel’s assault on Gaza as receiving a clean bill of health from the World Court.

    That will be a lie. The judges are being asked only to rule on the matter of genocide, the gravest of the crimes against humanity, where the evidential bar is set very high indeed.

    In an international legal system in which nation-states are accorded far more rights than ordinary people, the priority is giving states the freedom to wage wars in which civilians are likely to pay the heaviest price. The gargantuan profits of the West’s military-industrial complex depend on this intentional lacuna in the so-called “rules of war”.

    If the court finds – whether for political or legal reasons – that South Africa has failed to make a plausible case, it will not absolve Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indisputably, it is carrying out both.

    Foot dragging

    Nonetheless, any reticence on the part of the ICJ will be duly noted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), its heavily compromised sister court. Its job is not to adjudicate between states like the World Court but to gather evidence for the prosecution of individuals who order or carry out war crimes.

    It is currently gathering evidence to decide whether to investigate Israeli and Hamas officials over the events of the past three months.

    But for years, the same court has been dragging its feet on prosecuting Israeli officials over war crimes that long predate the current assault on Gaza, such as Israel’s decades of building illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, and Israel’s 17-year siege of Gaza – the rarely mentioned context for Hamas’ break-out on 7 October.

    The ICC similarly baulked at prosecuting US and British officials over the war crimes their states carried out in invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq.

    That followed an intimidation campaign from Washington, which imposed sanctions on the court’s two most senior officials, including freezing their US assets, blocking their international financial transactions and denying them and their families entry to the US.

    Terror campaign

    Israel’s central argument against genocide last week was that it is defending itself after it was attacked on 7 October, and that the real genocide is being carried out by Hamas against Israel.

    Such a claim should be roundly dismissed by the World Court. Israel has no right to defend its decades-long occupation and siege of Gaza, the background to the events of 7 October. And it cannot claim it is targeting a few thousand Hamas fighters when it is bombing, displacing and starving Gaza’s entire civilian population.

    Even if Israel’s military campaign is not intended to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza, as all statements by the Israeli cabinet and military officials indicate, it is nonetheless still directed primarily at civilians.

    On the most charitable reading, given the facts, Palestinian civilians are being bombed and killed en masse to cause terror. They are being ethnically cleansed to depopulate Gaza. And they are being subjected to a horrifying form of collective punishment in Israel’s “complete siege” that denies them food, water and power – leading to starvation and exposure to lethal disease – to weaken their will to resist their occupation and seek liberation from absolute Israeli control.

    If all of this is the only way Israel can “eradicate Hamas” – its stated goal – then it reveals something Israel and its western patrons would rather we all ignore: that Hamas is so deeply embedded in Gaza precisely because its implacable resistance looks like the only reasonable response to a Palestinian population ever more suffocated by the tightening chokehold of oppression Israel has inflicted on Gaza for decades.

    Israel’s weeks of carpet bombing have left Gaza uninhabitable for the vast majority of the population, who have no homes to return to and little in the way of functioning infrastructure. Without massive and constant aid, which Israel is blocking, they will gradually die of dehydration, famine, cold and disease.

    In these circumstances, Israel’s actual defence against genocide is an entirely conditional one: it is not committing genocide only if it has correctly estimated that sufficient pressure will mount on Egypt that it feels compelled – or bullied – into opening its border with Gaza and allowing the population to escape.

    If Cairo refuses, and Israel does not change course, the people of Gaza are doomed. In a rightly ordered world, a claim of reckless indifference as to whether the Palestinians of Gaza die from conditions Israel has created should be no defence against genocide.

    War business as usual

    The difficulty for the World Court is that it is on trial as much as Israel – and will lose whichever way it rules. Legal facts and the court’s credibility are in direct conflict with western strategic priorities and war industry profits.

    The risk is the judges may feel the safest course is to “split the difference”.

    They may exonerate Israel of genocide based on a technicality, while insisting it do more of what it isn’t doing at all: protecting the “humanitarian needs” of Gaza’s people.

    Israel dangled just such a technicality before the judges last week like a juicy carrot. Its lawyers argued that, because Israel had not responded to the genocide case made by South Africa at the time of its filing, there was no dispute between the two states. The World Court, Israel suggested, therefore lacked jurisdiction because its role is to settle such disputes.

    If accepted, it would mean, as former ambassador Murray noted, that, absurdly, states could be exonerated of genocide simply by refusing to engage with their accusers.

    Aeyal Gross, a professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, told the Haaretz newspaper he expected the court to reject any limitations on Israel’s military operations. It would focus instead on humanitarian measures to ease the plight of Gaza’s population.

    He also noted that Israel would insist it was already complying – and carry on as before.

    The one sticking point, Gross suggested, would be a demand from the World Court that Israel allow international investigators access to the enclave to assess whether war crimes had been committed.

    It is precisely this kind of “war business as usual” that will discredit the court – and the international humanitarian law it is supposed to uphold.

    Vacuum of leadership

    As ever, it is not the West that the world can look to for meaningful leadership on the gravest crises it faces or for efforts to de-escalate conflict.

    The only actors showing any inclination to put into practice the moral obligation that should fall to states to intervene to stop genocide are the “terrorists”.

    Hezbollah in Lebanon is putting pressure on Israel by incrementally building a second front in the north, while the Houthis in Yemen are improvising their own form of economic sanctions on international shipping passing through the Red Sea.

    The US and Britain responded at the weekend with air strikes on Yemen, turning up the heat even higher and threatening to tip the region into a wider war.

    With its own investments in the Suez Canal threatened, China, unlike the West, seems desperate to cool things down. Beijing proposed this week an Israel-Palestine peace conference involving a much wider circle of states.

    The goal is to loosen Washington’s malevolent stranglehold on pretend “peace-making” and bind all the parties to a commitment to create a Palestinian state.

    The West’s narrative is that anyone outside its club – from South Africa and China to Hezbollah and the Houthis – is the enemy, threatening Washington’s “rules-based order”.

    But it is that very order that looks increasingly self-serving and discredited – and the foundation for a genocide being inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza in broad daylight.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Western Racism laid the Foundations for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.