radiofree.asia

Category: Propaganda

  • The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

    It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.

    ― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

    “Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

    Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

    Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

    This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

    Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

    As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

    Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

    “We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

    On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

    This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

    Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

    We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

    This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

    Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

    Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

    You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

    However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

    This has been in the works for a long time.

    Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

    In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

    If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

    In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

    This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

    The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

    The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

    It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

    A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

    Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

    This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

    This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

    It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

    “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

    To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

    All of the distracting, disheartening, disorienting news you are bombarded with daily is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

    “For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.

    So where does that leave us?

    Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

    A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

    If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

    The post The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

    “Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

    Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

    Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

    This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

    Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

    As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

    Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

    “We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

    On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

    This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

    Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

    We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

    This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

    Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

    Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

    You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

    However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

    This has been in the works for a long time.

    Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

    In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

    If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

    In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

    This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

    The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

    The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

    It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

    A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

    This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

    To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

    If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

    The post Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Malcolm Evans: A new low in NZ media’s record of bias over Palestine

    COMMENTARY: By Malcolm Evans

    Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is carefully managed to always reflect a pro-Israel bias.

    Forget the humanity of 120,000 dead and wounded Palestinians and countless others facing famine and disease sheltering in tents or what’s left of destroyed buildings, even internationally recognised terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” are discouraged, along with “slaughter”, “massacre” and “carnage”.

    Though such language restrictions are claimed to be in the interests of “fairness”, an earlier investigation showed that between October 7 and November 14, The Times used the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

    By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.

    This carefully managed use of words is deliberate and insidious and, as Jack Tame’s interview with Israel’s ambassador on last Sunday’s Q&A programme showed, even our most experienced media people are not immune to its effects.

    From his introduction, “establishing” that the genocide taking place in Gaza had its genesis in the October 7 attack by Hamas, and not in the Nakba of 1948, Jack Tame and TVNZ facilitated an almost hour-long presentation of pro-Israel propaganda, justifying its atrocities.

    For its appalling lack of balance, including Tame’s obsequious allowance and nodding agreement with the Israeli ambassador’s thoroughly discredited claims of Hamas atrocities; “beheadings” “necrophilia” and for describing Israelis’ as being “butchered” (five times he used the word) while Palestinians were merely “killed”, this was a new low in our media’s record of bias when it comes to the presentation of the facts about the Palestine/Israel conflict.

    In the very week that we prepare to remember the horrific sacrifices made in previous wars and even as Israel‘s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians brings us closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, that TVNZ should have, pre-recorded and so had time to edit, such a disgraceful presentation is simply appalling — and heads should roll.

    Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Disintegration and Choice

    With regular maintenance stuff lasts longer, but eventually, in spite of every effort, things break down: the washing machine stops washing, the car won’t start, the mobile phone refuses to connect to the internet.

    Socio-economic-political systems also collapse; shaped by an ideology of some kind, they are, like all ‘isms’, limited, and divisive. Looking at The State of the World it is clear that the systems that govern our lives and the modes of living they support are breaking down, fragmenting. The signs are many and varied.

    Autocratic regimes are on the rise and many democratic governments, influenced by right wing extremism, are adopting policies and attitudes more usually associated with autocracies.

    The values and moral codes that have been in place for generations, some unspoken, culturally shared and absorbed, others formally enshrined in international law, are being ignored, discarded or distorted. The ‘Rules Based International Order’, so-called, is made up of a range of laws or conventions, which underpin geo-political engagement:  The UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and UN General Assembly Resolutions among other texts.

    Self righteous hypocritical western politicians routinely refer to the Rule of Law or International Humanitarian Law, particularly when criticising their enemies (Russia, Iran, China etc), not so much when they or their allies act illegally. The double standards of western governments knows no limits and is a major cause of global destabilisation.

    As systems, structures and animating principles disintegrate, extremism and intolerance grow, polarities intensify, the threat of armed conflict and fragmentation expands; fear and uncertainty increases.

    And while the underlying causes remain unchecked, the everyday consequences of disintegration deepen and become more pronounced: the environmental emergency, armed conflict/war, poverty/hunger, displacement of people, social alienation and economic inequality, are some of the major effects. Interconnected complex issues resulting from behaviour and attitudes flowing from The Ideology of Greed, which underpins the socio-political systems and the institutions of control; creaking outdated models that are incapable of creating solutions to the crises, no matter how much they are manipulated.

    Take climate change for example, clearly the greatest challenge facing humanity. Climate change is the consequence of the fossil fuel economy and endless consumerism; overwhelmingly rich western nations consumerism. Along with the wider environmental emergency, climate change is caused by behavior flowing from a reductive view of life that prizes individual happiness above all else; happiness, which is, in fact, nothing more than pleasure, that can be achieved, the advocates preach, through the accumulation of things or experiences.

    This deeply materialistic approach to life, which, far from bringing happiness, actually guarantees discontent, is integral to the socio-economic system. Constant consumption is demanded, and it is consumption, with its insatiable sucking in of energy (and people) and churning out of waste, that is fuelling climate change, has polluted the air, water and soil, and contributed to the creation of societies rife with unhealthy unhappy people.

    Curbing climate change, reducing waste and curtailing pollution requires an economy of sufficiency not excess as we have now. An economy, rooted in social justice and environmental responsibility. A dramatic reduction in consumption is essential – in rich nations at least – and a shift to ethical business practices. All of which is incompatible within the suffocating web of Neo-Liberalism.

    If reducing climate change and saving the planet is not reason enough to change the socio-economic-political order, how about ending war?

    In order for peace to be realised, social justice and freedom must prevail; this means ending all forms of exploitation and discrimination, inequality and injustice. Such sane measures are impossible within a system wedded to money, to competition and greed, and unthinkable while short-term self-interest is the driving factor behind the actions of governments, corporations and many individuals.

    Peace also requires that the Military Industrial Complex and all military alliances, including Nato, be dismantled, again unimaginable within the confines of the current economic order.

    As everything breaks down and frays, including the nervous systems and mental health of many people, the inadequacies of the present structures become increasingly apparent. This includes the existing forms of parliamentary democracy, which is non-representative, particularly within societies that are increasingly diverse.

    If the slide into further chaos, including the possibility of a major war and complete environmental collapse is to be avoided, fundamental change is desperately needed. Both structural change and a change in values and attitudes, which will lead to changes in behaviour. Systemic changes designed with the aim of achieving universally championed principles: peace, social justice, real democracy and freedom.

    People throughout the world are desperate for such changes, the men and women in power, less so. Their resistance comes from the recognition that such a shift would inevitably result in the privilege and power they currently enjoy being swept aside.

    The choice before us is clear: maintain the status quo, continue along the existing path, which is narrowing to a point of greater extremism, intolerance and conflict and suffer, or unite, reject all forms of division and re-imagine society.

    Humanity has faced such choices many times over long ages, has routinely made the wrong decisions and we are living with the disastrous effects. But now, at this moment in time, the consequences of our collective decisions are far reaching in a way that was not the case in the recent or distant past.

    These are extremely uncertain dangerous times. Transitional times for sure, but transitioning to what, to a more extreme, dystopian version of the present, or transitional towards a more just peaceful world?

    The post Disintegration and Choice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lost in the supermarkets, the housing crisis, factchecking the IPA and the war against the new Governor-General

    In this new episode of New Politics, we explore the pressing concerns impacting Australians today. Starting with the grocery and supermarkets sector, we analyse the interim report from the Food and Grocery Code Review which highlights the significant power imbalance favouring major supermarkets like Coles, Woolworths, and Aldi. We discuss the implications of their unchecked practices on small suppliers and the urgent need for stricter enforcement of the Grocery Code.

    We also shed light on Australia’s housing crisis, focusing on the alarming rate of unoccupied housing and the contentious debate over using superannuation for home purchases. Governments have a habit of exacerbating these kinds of issues: first home owner grants were politically popular but made the problem worse, and restrictive policies on local zoning block the supply of new dwellings. We explore the potential repercussions of these policies on the housing market and the broader economy.

    The Institute of Public Affairs is an insidious organisation that is the conduit between the Murdoch empire and the Liberal Party and it has inflicted much damage on the social fabric of Australian society—it’s now running a campaign against fact-checking organisations for what it claims is “left-wing bias” and we look at the broader implications for disinformation and political bias in media. The IPA is all for free speech, but only when that freedom is favourable to its political agenda: for everyone else; it’s sit down, shut up and do as you’re told. The true hallmark of modern conservative politics: just keep lying; the public will eventually believe it.

    And finally, we address the new culture war and political uproar surrounding the appointment of Sam Mostyn as the new Governor–General, examining the reactions from News Corporation and other conservative political figures.

    Song listing:

    1. ‘House We Used To Live In’, The Smithereens.
    2. ‘The Last Goodbye’, Odesza.
    3. ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot (remix).
    4. ‘Praise You’, Fat Boy Slim.

    Music interludes:

    Support independent journalism

    We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.

    SUPPORT NEW POLITICS!

    The post Lost in the supermarkets, the housing crisis, factchecking the IPA and the war against the new Governor-General appeared first on New Politics.

    This post was originally published on New Politics.

  • Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza

    After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

    Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.

    Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.

    With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.

    But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.

    Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.

    In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.

    Not this time.

    “This has to stop”

    Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”

    Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.

    When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were“indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?

    Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”

    The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.

    A salutary equation indeed.

    British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.

    But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.

    Israel’s playbook

    British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.

    But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

    Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.

    Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.

    They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.

    Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.

    Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.

    Gaza isolated

    But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

    Israel needed to take firmer action.

    The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.

    This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the region to protect its volunteers, while Israel formally banned the group from accessing the occupied territories.

    Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.

    Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.

    The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.

    With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.

    The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.

    The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.

    Western complicity

    That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.

    Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.

    The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.

    The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.

    Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.

    And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.

    This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.

    Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.

    Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.

    The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.

    WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.

    Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.

    Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.

    Life and death lottery

    Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.

    The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.

    Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.

    Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.

    According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.

    Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.

    Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.

    An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

    As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.

    Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”

    That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.

    Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.

    Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”

    This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.

    Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.

    If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.

    Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.

    Reporting stifled

    Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.

    Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.

    That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.

    Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.

    Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.

    What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.

    But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.

    The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.

    The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.

    His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.

    Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.

    Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.

    Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.

    Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.

    Rulebook torn up

    And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.

    Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.

    Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.

    Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.

    Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.

    Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.

    Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.

    Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.

    The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.

    The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.

    Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.

    Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.

    The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how

    For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.

    Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.

    Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.

    Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.

    These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.

    The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.

    The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.

    What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.

    Whitewashing genocide

    Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.

    Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.

    Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.

    Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.

    Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.

    The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.

    But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

    Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.

    It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.

    First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October – and those it did not – have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.

    The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.

    More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.

    A colonial arrogance

    Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.

    True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.

    Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.

    And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.

    No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves – were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.

    The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.

    Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.

    The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.

    The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza.

    Suicide mission

    The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.

    The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout – and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.

    Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.

    The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.

    They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.

    As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned.

    Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”

    For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.

    The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position.

    It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world.

    Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.

    Loss of focus

    But for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected.

    Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.

    With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.

    That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.

    And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza.

    It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media.

    Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.

    Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders.

    One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior US officials too.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims.

    Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.

    Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.

    Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.

    When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.

    Fabricating atrocities 

    Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.

    Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.

    Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.”

    In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.

    The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”.

    The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?

    The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary.

    Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”

    The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity.

    ‘Hannibal directive’

    Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas – particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.

    Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.

    In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.

    The commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those who did die in the house were killed by Israel.

    The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”.

    These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.

    In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.

    Woeful imbalance

    The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts.

    The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?

    In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

    But the problem runs deeper.

    This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years.

    Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target.

    That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism.

    A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.

    Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files, showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people.

    Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation.

    There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.

    Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps.

    And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide.

    Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm.

    Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.

    The post We were lied into the Gaza genocide; Al Jazeera has shown us how first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Private Profits vs. Social Prophets

    …What we see at work is not an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs of political life.

    — Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, p. 343.

    We entered the massive marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and at this date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and off the books to insure that ruling power maintains control over American capitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal control officer or president of the United States. Given that, the spending and consciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befitting a system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity than American voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status of an American empire making more people rich than ever before while making multitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nations is not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economic organism.

    As the fading rulers of western capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead of leaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, mass murder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mental condition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking human beings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approaches the worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires of hell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that might make the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblical times when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as ruling wealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political and media servants of rulers do today.

    The continuing since 1917 American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a point in the current war using Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hope of winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various of the NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urge broadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists in their fevered minds, said fever having been planted by America since the end of the second world war.

    Meanwhile, the center of global anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloody horror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened and expressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948 when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been a haven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would be like Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making all others second class citizens once they took over, changed the language and culture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans ever had.

    In only one of thousands of contradictions of logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continue calling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semites commit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western world have their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everything else in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearing an end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changes underway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seem more dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of the imperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-pot dictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other past murderers.

    While it seems that the horrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will be the same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans have grown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both parties increase alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or national disorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracy in substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people who are told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economic form of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street are merely getting close to nature.

    While political madness depicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned and operated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimes committed by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps and hustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially Congress and the white house, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed by American taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what the world needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in the planning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to pass if Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late. Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil of the two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that does not involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handful become billionaires.

    The opening quote is from someone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term not even vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easily understandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, a socialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those same billions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts about people, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjust and work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by ending warfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as our pre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after we clear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx in his own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderous detractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand about why our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.

    The post Private Profits vs. Social Prophets first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part II

    Summary of Part I 

    After briefly reviewing the theories of the relationship between religion and nationalism, I find the theories of Anthony Smith, George Mosse and Adrian Hutchinson the most compelling. They all agree that religion provides the propagandistic foundation for nationalism. But I also claim that it is a particular kind of religion, monotheism, that is directly connected to nationalism. Animistic tribal societies and Bronze Age agricultural states did not have the same religious paraphernalia as monotheism, and societies like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamian, China and India were never nationalistic.

    The second part of my article focuses on how monotheistic beliefs and dramatization have the same parallels in nationalization processes. The categories include the destruction of intermediary institutions, the commitment to expansion and the importance of both origins and future destiny in history as opposed to mythology. In both nationalism and monotheism founders are mythologized. Both nationalism and monotheism use the arts (painting, music and literature) for altering states of consciousness.

    Coming Attractions

    In this article we will be discussing the social-psychological and psychological techniques by which both monotheism and nationalism promote loyalty. These include means of transmission (writing as opposed to oral), how social time (holidays) is marked throughout the year as well as individual time (rites of passage). We find that marking geography (territory and cityscapes) is crucial to both monotheism and nationalism. Each demands self-sacrifice, either as religious martyrs or soldiers. Each requires a conversion process. Membership is usually lifetime. Each has processes of exclusion and its members are purified through wars. Membership is sustained over time through fear of being exiled.

    Next, I show that both nationalism and monotheism support individualism (as opposed to collectivism) for different reasons. I provide six reasons why each supports individualism. Lastly, I provide two qualifications. First, I pose the question of why the monotheistic religion of Islam is not included. After all, Islam began as a world religion hundreds of years before the rise of nation-states. It would seem to have had plenty of time to connect to the emergence of nation-states around the world. Why didn’t it? Secondly, in the 21st century we have a nation-state that is very powerful (India) that is founded on Hinduism, a polytheistic rather than a monotheistic religion. How do I explain that?

    Marking Time: Special Occasions 

    The ability to recognize patterns is one of the adaptive skills that allowed the human species to survive in competition with other species. We live most of our everyday lives as problem solvers. But at the same time we need to be socialized to rise, metaphorically, from the ground level and examine long-term patterns to assess where we have been and where we are going.

    In pagan traditions, sacred patterns involve the changing of the seasons. In Catholicism they include Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days and saints’ days. At the same time, at the micro level, the rites of passage in the life of an individual are linked to spiritual traditions through the sacraments. In Catholicism, the sacraments include baptism at birth, confirmation during adolescence, marriage in adulthood, and the last rites just before death. Further, a Catholic is expected to attend mass at least once a week and to go to confession. Lastly, monotheists – whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim – make pilgrimages. What does this have to do with socialization into nationalism? Like monotheism, nationalism has its special days, including Independence Day, various presidents’ days, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. There are pilgrimages to Washington, DC and trips to Mount Rushmore all of which support nationalism.

    Marking Places: Geographies of Loyalty

    Socialization takes place in physical spaces. Pagan societies built mounds and temples to spirits or deities. In caste agricultural civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia, physical buildings of monumental proportions made of impenetrable materials had a psychologically intimidating impact that was not lost on those in power. Likewise, Christians, Jews and Muslim elites build churches, synagogues and mosques, not just to pay homage to their deities, but to propagandize the lower classes into following them since they are God’s representatives on earth. Sacred sites are not limited to places of worship. Streets and buildings are named after saints. In the case of nationalism, we have gargantuan state buildings in Washington, streets named after presidents, and monuments at Bunker Hill, the Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock, and Mount Rushmore.

    Creating Atmosphere: Literature and Painting

    For most “people of the book,” hearing stories from sacred texts like the Bible or the Koran begins at a very young age. This upbringing is strengthened by studying, as with learning the Catholic catechism in grammar school or preparing to read an excerpt from the Old Testament as part of a Jewish bar or bat mitzvah. The most logical parallel to nationalism would be reading or even memorizing the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. However, since this is rarely done, a very important source of nationalistic literature is novels about the American West.

    Animistic hunting and gathering societies used cave paintings, amulets and totems) long before monotheists to socialize (Lewis-Williams, 2002) their members. In the case of Catholicism in the 17th century, baroque paintings were epically dramatized to overwhelm the population with monumental scale. Furthermore, music has perhaps been the most compelling of the arts in creating an immediate emotional reaction. Hymns such as “Amazing Grace” help the faithful sing their way into submission.

    Nationalist socialization may come about when the population is being exposed to patriotic paintings such as Washington Crossing the Delaware. Music such as the “Star-Spangled Banner”, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, and “God Bless America” are bound to rouse even the most reluctant patriot.

    Social Action: Fulfilling Destiny Through Sacrifice

    As we have seen, both monotheism and nationalism must use the past in order to justify the present. However, each must also organize in the present by referring to the future. This is done through the expectation of sacrifice of the participants to life itself.

    Anthony Smith (2003) points out five instances in which fulfilling destiny through sacrifice is depicted in paintings.  In Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s painting Manlius Torquatus Condemning His Son to Death, we see the conflicted determination of a Roman father’s loyalty to the state in executing his own child for disobeying his order to not engage the enemy in combat. Though torn by the clash of the demands of state and family, Torquatus overcomes his paternal feelings and refuses to listen to his son’s appeal, despite fervent pleas for mercy from friends and family. He maintains legal impartiality and values the state’s welfare over his personal interests. His right hand is publicly outstretched in the preservation of justice while his left hand clutches privately at a father’s agonizing heart.

    According to Smith, the painting The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, Jacques-Louis David chose the moment when an anguished Brutus, returning home after the execution of his own sons, hears the cries of his wife and the swooning of his eldest daughter as the bodies of his sons are brought to his house. Having driven out the Tarquin and helping to institute the Republic, Brutus was elected consul in 508 BCE only to discover a monarchial plot fostered by his wife’s family and supported by his two sons. He saw it as his duty to suppress all enemies of the republic, including his own sons.

    In 1778 Johann Heinrich Füssli was commissioned by the Zurich council to paint Oath on the Rütli, the cornerstone of Swiss unity and independence. This painting depicts three towering figures who represent the three original forest cantons swearing “an oath of everlasting alliance in the Rütli meadow”. Smith argues that it expresses defiance, struggle, unification, and sacrifice for freedom. In its thrusting defiant male figures embody the ideal of willingness to die for the freedom of the nation.

    About a century later, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s painting Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII also conveys the ideal of self-sacrifice as struggle in the service of a higher cause. In 1770 Benjamin West painted The Death of General Wolfe, an epic depiction of the British general who was mortally wounded at the height of victory over the French in Quebec in 1759.

    Lastly, Smith points out that during the French Revolution:

    On the occasion of Marat’s murder in July 1793, art and ritual proceeded hand in hand. Marat’s friend David was immediately urged by the assembly to paint his portrait. Marat’s assassination shows with great veracity the ‘Friend of the People’ dying in his bathtub, with a Christ-like wound in his right lung…

    David also had to supervise the lying in state and funeral of his friend. Marat’s corpse was exhibited on a high dais in the Cordeliers Church, above the bath and the packing case, with a smoking incense burner as the only light. The funeral…which lasted six hours took place to the accompaniment of muffled drum-beat and cannon… Girls in white with branches of cypress surrounded it, and they were followed by the entire Convention, the municipal authorities and the people of Paris. (Smith, 237)

    These examples show how the political religion of nationalism draws upon Catholic traditions and uses them for national ends in order to evoke a sense of sacred communion with the glorious dead.

    Sacrifice Choreographed in Festivals, Monuments and Song

    The Napoleonic Wars were a catalyst for the process of cementing a sense of national identity not just among the French but for those societies under attack. French nationalism was answered by a growing German nationalism, which was at first cultural but soon became politicized with the Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The War of Liberation of 1813 and the return of aristocratic regimes after Napoleon’s defeat stimulated collective expressions of national sentiment in the form of festivals and monuments.

    Smith informs us that in 1832 the Germans held their first mass festival in the same alleged place where the ancient German tribes had held their meetings. There was a procession to the ruins of the castle ruins in which patriotic songs were sung and people wore ancient German dress. The later 19th century saw greater efforts to invite people into the sacred communion of the nation through mass celebrations. This began with the songs of the volunteers for the armies of the French Revolution.

    Dancing and Military Drills

    Sustaining nationalist and religious loyalties is not just about getting lost in mystical symbols and myths or engaging in altruistic actions. Building political loyalty to a nation or a religion also involves acting collectively in a very structured way. In his very provocative book, Keeping Together in Time, William McNeill argues that building community involves “muscular bonding”: community dancing, communal work, singing, religious rituals and military drills. In community dancing, moving and singing together tends to dissolve group tensions, reminding community members that they have more in common than they have differences. In the area of work, singing and moving together makes otherwise boring work more creative. The great large-scale architectural projects of ancient civilizations could never have been built without workers singing and moving in sync. McNeill points out that the rise of religious dervish orders at the beginning of the 11th century was so powerful in altering states of consciousness that they came close to being declared heretical.

    In addition, McNeill argues that military muscular bonding, specifically close-order drilling, creates altered states. In his book The Pursuit of Power, McNeill concluded that the victory of European armies over non-European armies was largely due to well-drilled troops who were more efficient in battle. Soldiers moved in unison while performing each of the actions needed to load, aim, and fire their guns. The volleys came faster and misfires were fewer when everyone acted in unison and kept time to shouted commands. The result was more ammunition projected at the enemy in less time.

    However, it was not only the superiority of weapons or efficiency in using them that made Europeans victorious. Drilled troops created deep social-psychological altered states. McNeill suggests that many veterans report that group effort in battle was the high point of their lives. Just like the boundary loss of whirling dervishes, the individual merges with the platoon.

    By inadvertently tapping the inherent human emotional response to keeping together in time, military drills helped create obedient, reliable, and effective soldiers with a spirit that not only superseded previous identities – ethnicity, region, religion – but also insulated them from outside attachments. Soldiers could be counted on to obey their officers predictably even when fighting hundreds or thousands of miles away from their home base.

    McNeill describes witnessing soldiers marching in step as both awe inspiring and terrifying. No twitches, twists, mutterings nor distractions could be seen or heard in the ranks. On the one hand, soldiers were perfectly composed, calm and moving to music. But on the other hand, they were completely poised to destroy human life or be destroyed by it.

    For most of human history, the ruling classes understandably had reservations with arming the lower classes for fear they might recognize their class interests. However, the group experience of altered states that resulted from prolonged drills made soldiers loyal and devoted far beyond any class loyalties. In the 17th century, for poverty-stricken peasant recruits and jobless urbanites recruited from the fringes of an increasingly atomized, commercialized society, the military created a new artificial primary community, providing camaraderie that prevailed in good times and bad, where old-fashioned principles of command and subordination gave meaning and direction to life. It became safe to arm even the poorest classes, pay them a regular wage and expect obedience. In a time of domestic conflict, European soldiers were even willing to fire upon their own social class.

    Before the drill, in the standing army of kings, obedience was extracted through fear of punishment. But the coming of the drill created a lively spirit between soldiers that was less prevalent than before. Now, instead of standing armies of subjects to a king, the citizens’ army shared the collective emotional identity of the nation. For soldiers who received regular pay, there was a good reason to not break ranks.

    It would be an overstatement to say that drilling caused nationalism. The military revolution occurred hundreds of years before the rise of nationalism, which I said came about at the end of the 18th century. But there is no question that military drills helped sustain nationalism once it appeared. Other military formations such as the cavalry couldn’t create such a solidarity among those fighting.

    Conversion and Exile

    The last part of socialization to nationalism is the unusual time when a person either joins through conversion or departs in an imposed or self-imposed exile. Typical examples of conversion for monotheists are the moment when Moses was on Mount Sinai or when Saint Paul was on the road to Damascus. The Great Awakenings in the United States in 1725 and 1780, though starting out as Protestant religious revivals, had nationalist implications, according to Wilbur Zelinsky (1988). A nationalist counterpart of conversion is the indoctrination immigrants or refugees receive upon becoming U.S. citizens.

    Neither monotheists nor nationalists tolerate rejection lightly. For both, membership is expected to be lifetime. For national states, registration at birth and death is compulsory. What becomes of people who decide to leave? In the case of Catholicism, there is excommunication. In all monotheistic religions, there are attacks for such deviations as apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, inquisitions and witch hunts. Nonbelievers are attacked in religious wars as godless atheists. So too, in nationalism, expatriates are feared, ostracized and shunned. They are considered unworthy, traitorous or treasonous. In the case of political opposition, such people become the targets of CIA spying and assassination attempts. As for countries that oppose the nationalist vision, they are subject to state terror, world wars and torture. Please see my summary table at the end of this article.

    Monotheism, Nationalism and Individualism

    Both monotheism and nationalism support individualism in the following ways:

    • Each focuses the attention of the individual on a single source of loyalty in the objective world: in the case of nationalism it is the nation, and in the case of monotheism it is a single deity.
    • Each marginalizes and undermines intermediate loyalties between the individual and the single, ultimate source. In the case of monotheism, it is earth spirits, ancestor spirits, totems or gods and goddesses. Similarly, nationalism demands that citizens subordinate regional, class, ethnic and even religious loyalties in favor of the state. The individual must have one and only one loyalty: the state. So with religion, the second commandment of the Bible reads, “I am the Lord Thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. This not only applies to religion, but also holds as an expectation that the state demands of its citizens. Both nationalism and monotheism are large-scale emulsifiers that hold together and paper over class or religious conflicts, which monotheists and nationalists tell us will grow and spread otherwise.
    • Each replaces customs and community traditions with written laws. In the case of nationalism, it is the constitution; in the case of monotheism, it is the sacred text of the Bible or the Koran.
    • The relationship between the individual and the nation or the religion is presented as a freely chosen association or a covenant. In the case of monotheism, individuals are proclaimed to have free will, with the choice for whether to obey God. In the case of the nation, individuals are free to renounce their citizenship and go elsewhere.
    • Each binds strangers together as opposed to kin groups, clans or neighborhoods.
    • Both have extremely violent ideologies. Monotheism has been responsible for more deaths than any other group membership. After the military revolution in the 17th century, nationalistic wars at the end of the 19th century (and, of course, the 20th century) show that the state has been at least as violent.

    I hope to have shown that it is a mistake to think of individualism as either anti-social or a withdrawal from social relations. Individualism does mean a weakening of particular kinds of loyalties: kin group, village, regional or estate. But it also means a connection with a de-sensualized community, made possible by the printing press and newspapers.

    While the forces of modernization may have weakened religious beliefs, the doctrines, myths, rituals, and entire architecture of religion (specifically monotheism) were reorganized and used in the name of a secular political religion: nationalism. Beginning in the 19th century, individualists were expected to renounce loyalty to class, ethnicity, and region – not so they could be “free as a bird,” but also to become bound to a new secular community of strangers serving the state. Citizens may gain political rights, but that is far from the end of the story. The socialization into nationalism has been an enormously successful project of the 19th-century ruling classes. Individualists were mobilized to fight and die in wars to prove their patriotism. The reality is now that stateless individuals are not allowed to exist anywhere in the world.

    Please see my table at the end of this article.

    Qualifications: What About the Place of Islam in Nationalism? 

    It might have crossed your mind that I did not include Islam in my monotheistic roots of nationalism comparisons. Certainly, Islam is monotheistic. Furthermore, when we look at Islamic fundamentalism, it would seem that surely there is fanatical nationalism at work. But a closer look shows that Islam has a similar internationalism as the Catholics. Being fanatical about your religion so that you will kill and die for it is not necessarily nationalism. Why did Islam not develop a nationalism the way the Jews and the Christians did: There are at least the following reasons:

    • Western nationalism was inseparable from the development of industry.While Islam went through a “merchant capital” phase of capitalism, they never initiated an industrialization process that capitalism did in the West. Industrialization is very important in pulverizing intermediate loyalties which is crucial to the emergence of nationalism.
    • Nationalism in the West was not built by one country at a time. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 created a system of states that became the foundation for nationalism at the end of the 18th century. There was no system of states that existed in West Asia at the time. Predominantly what existed were sprawling tribes, kingdoms or empires, not nation-states.
    • In the 19th and 20th  century, Islam has become a religion of the oppressed. European nation-states were not fighting against imperialism when they arose in England, France, the United States and Holland. Their development was not shackled by fighting defensive wars. West Asian nationalism could not develop autonomously, but as a reaction to being colonized

    Qualification: What About the Presence of a Polytheistic Nationalism in India? 

    It would seem that when we look at the nation-state of India today, it would constitute a clear exception to my argument that only monotheism develops nationalism. Here we have the polytheistic religion of Hinduism as the guiding religion of Modi’s India. How can this be?

    The title of my article is the monotheistic roots of nationalism. As we know, the origin of anything (monotheism) does not guarantee destiny (what something becomes in the future). New processes can take place later in time which are independent of their origin. My two previous articles on nationalism only went as far as the beginning of World War I. The events in the 20th century that went beyond the monotheistic roots of nationalism were two World Wars, a depression, fascism and national liberation movements especially after World War II.

    In Europe as far back as the Middle Ages there were other political formations long before there were nation-states. There were tribes, city-states, federations, principalities, provinces, kingdoms and empires. With the exception of some empires, all these formations were decentralized. These forms of political organizations continued to exist all over the world even after nation-states emerged. But the effect of political mobilization first in World War I and then World War II, pulverized these earlier formations. The Ottoman and Hapsburg empires did not survive World Wars. Tribes, federations and city-states were too weak to survive two world wars and became hammered into nation-states. It is no accident that at the end of World War I, the new global mediator was the League of Nations not the League of provinces, kingdom or empires. After World War II it was the United Nations that was promoted. After that it is very difficult to have any political standing in world politics without being organized into a nation-state.

    In the case of India, revolutionaries had to build up and centralize their states if they were to fight the British. They succeeded. After World War II Indian religions continued to compete – Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism to name three. As India (as many nations in the 20th century) turned politically to the right over the last thirty years it needed a religious justification for its shift. Hinduism, as the oldest Indian religion, was championed. So, in the case of India, Hinduism did not help to form nationalism as Western monotheism helped nationalism. It was a reaction after a political nationalism that had already formed.

    Something similar happened in the African liberation movements after World War II. African centralized states had to form in order for those revolutionaries to overthrow the colonizers. This has not been easy for those states as tribal and ethic loyalties in parts of Africa were fierce. Islam proved to be a better unifying force as a world religion than various decentralized pagan magical traditions. In the case of Africa Islam, though itself not a religion that helped nation-states to form prior to the 20th century, became one. Again, we have the case of a religion not being the cause of nationalism but a secondary reaction.

    Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism in the Socialization Process From Birth to Death

    Monotheism (Judeo-Christian) Category of Comparison Nationalism (United States)
    Written Scriptures (Bible) interpreted by priests or rabbis Means of Transmission Written Constitutions interpreted by courts (judges)
    Special occasions throughout the year: Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days, saints days Marking Social time Special occasions throughout the year: Independence Day, President’s Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day
    Rites of passage: Baptism, confirmation, marriage, anointing of the sick and last rites Marking Individual Time  Rites of passage: Cub scouts, boy scouts, girl scouts, draft registration
    Sunday school, private religious schools Educational Training Public school civics classes on American government and history
    Detached from territory: Cosmopolitan (early prophets) Attached to Territory: Promised land, Zionists-Palestine, Christians-Bethlehem Marking Geography (territory) Attached to territory: (Promised land) Swiss Alps, U.S. Western frontier
    Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Vatican, streets named after saints, religious statues Marking geography (urban landmarks) Federal and state buildings, Streets named after presidents, Monuments: Bunker Hill, Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock. Mount Rushmore
    Pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem, Bethlehem Marking Geography (movement) Pilgrimages to Washington DC
    Sacrifice self (religious martyrs) Sacrifice Sacrifice of self in patriotic wars (Tomb of Unknown Soldier)
    Community dancing rituals Collective Bodily Orchestration Military drills
    Moses on Mount Sinai, St. Paul on the road to Damascus Conversion Great Awakening in America (1725), Second Great Awakening (1780), Naturalization ceremony with immigrants and refugees receiving citizenship rights
    To be free every individual must belong to a religion (no pagans or atheists) Loyalty and Exclusivity To be free, every individual must belong to a nation (no nationless individuals)
    Religious wars Attitude Towards Nonbelievers State-to-state wars
    Usually lifetime Length of Membership State membership usually lifelong (compulsory registration of birth, death)
    Collective solidarity, comfort, propaganda,Violence: Fear, terror, torture, witch trials, inquisitions Means of Sustaining Membership Collective solidarity, comfort structure, propaganda,Violence: fear, state terror, assassination, torture
    Excommunication, religious apostasy, accusations of heresy, blasphemy Exile Fear, ostracism, shunning of ex-patriots, accusations of treason

    • First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part II first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza

    The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.

    Liberal democracy is not what it seems.

    It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.

    But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?

    Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.

    What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?

    And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.

    The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.

    The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.

    Depravity on show

    The West is desperately trying to cope. When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.

    They are given a name. It is Russia. It is Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. It is China. And right now, it is Hamas.

    There must be an enemy. But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry – a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years – that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore. The excuses are hard to swallow.

    Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter? Does the West really believe that the attack of 7 October warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?

    To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things. First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look. And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.

    Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.

    Starved by Israel

    To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage – especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.

    How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians? After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.

    A headline in the New York Times, for example, told readers last month, “Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children”, as if this were a famine in Africa – a natural disaster, or an unexpected humanitarian catastrophe – rather than a policy declared in advance and carefully orchestrated by Israel’s top echelons.

    The Financial Times offered the same perverse framing: “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza”.

    But starvation is not an actor in Gaza. Israel is. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children. It renews that policy each day afresh, fully aware of the terrible price being inflicted on the population.

    As the head of Medical Aid for Palestinians warned of developments in Gaza: “Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”

    Last week Unicef, the United Nations children’s emergency fund, declared that a third of children aged under two in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished. Its executive director, Catherine Russell, was clear: “An immediate humanitarian cease-fire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering.”

    Were it really starvation doing the stalking, rather than Israel imposing starvation, the West’s powerlessness would be more understandable. Which is what the media presumably want their readers to infer.

    But the West isn’t powerless. It is enabling this crime against humanity – day after day, week after week – by refusing to exert its power to punish Israel, or even to threaten to punish it, for blocking aid.

    Not only that, but the US and Europe have helped Israel starve Gaza’s children by denying funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, the main humanitarian lifeline in the enclave.

    All of this is obscured – meant to be obscured – by headlines that transfer the agency for starving children to an abstract noun rather than a country with a large, vengeful army.

    Attack on aid convoy

    Such misdirection is everywhere – and it is entirely intentional. It is a playbook being used by every single Western media outlet. It was all too visible when an aid convoy last month reached Gaza City, where levels of Israeli-induced famine are most extreme.

    In what has come to be known by Palestinians as the “Flour Massacre”, Israel shot into large crowds desperately trying to get food parcels from a rare aid convoy to feed their starving families. More than 100 Palestinians were killed by the gunfire, or crushed by Israeli tanks or hit by trucks fleeing the scene. Many hundreds more were seriously wounded.

    It was an Israeli war crime – shooting on civilians – that came on top of an Israeli crime against humanity – starving two million civilians to death.

    The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off. It has been repeated several times, though you would barely know it, given the paucity of coverage.

    The depravity of using aid convoys as traps to lure Palestinians to their deaths is almost too much to grasp.

    But that is not the reason the headlines that greeted this horrifying incident so uniformly obscured or soft-soaped Israel’s crime.

    For any journalist, the headline should have written itself: “Israel accused of killing over 100 as crowd waits for Gaza aid.” Or: “Israel fires into food aid crowd. Hundreds killed and injured”

    But that would have accurately transferred agency to Israel – Gaza’s occupier for more than half a century, and its besieger for the last 17 years – in the deaths of those it has been occupying and besieging. Something inconceivable for the Western media.

    So the focus had to be shifted elsewhere.

    BBC contortions

    The Guardian’s contortions were particularly spectacular: “Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks”.

    The massacre by Israel was disappeared as mysterious “food aid-related deaths”, which in turn became secondary to the Guardian’s focus on the diplomatic fallout.

    Readers were steered by the headline into assuming that the true victims were not the hundreds of Palestinians killed and maimed by Israel but the Israeli hostages whose chances of being freed had been “complicated” by “food aid-related deaths”.

    The headline on a BBC analysis of the same war crime – now reframed as an author-less “tragedy” – repeated the New York Times’ trick: “Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza”.

    Another favourite manoeuvre, again pioneered by the Guardian, was to cloud responsibility for a clear-cut war crime. Its front-page headline read: “More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy”.

    Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene. In fact, worse, the crime scene was removed too. Palestinians “died” apparently because of poor aid management. Maybe UNRWA was to blame.

    Chaos and confusion became useful refrains for media outlets keener to shroud culpability. The Washington Post declared: “Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame”. CNN took the same line, downgrading a war crime to a “chaotic incident”.

    But even these failings were better than the media’s rapidly waning interest as Israel’s massacres of Palestinians seeking aid became routine – and therefore harder to mystify.

    A few days after the Flour Massacre, an Israeli air strike on an aid truck in Deir al-Balah killed at least nine Palestinians, while last week more than 20 hungry Palestinians were killed by Israeli helicopter gunfire as they waited for aid.

    “Food aid-related” massacres – which had quickly become as normalised as Israel’s invasions of hospitals – no longer merited serious attention. A search suggests the BBC managed to avoid giving significant coverage to either incident online.

    Food-drop theatrics

    Meanwhile, the media has ably assisted Washington in its various deflections from the collaborative crime against humanity of Israel imposing a famine on Gaza compounded by the US and Europe de-funding UNRWA, the only agency that could mitigate that famine.

    British and US broadcasters excitedly joined air crews as their militaries flew big-bellied planes over Gaza’s beaches, at great expense, to drop one-off ready-made meals to a few of the starving Palestinians below.

    Given that many hundreds of truckloads of aid a day are needed just to stop Gaza sliding deeper into famine, the drops were no more than theatrics. Each delivered at best a solitary truckload of aid – and then only if the palettes didn’t end up falling into the sea, or killing the Palestinians they were meant to benefit.

    The operation deserved little more than ridicule.

    Instead, dramatic visuals of heroic airmen, interspersed with expressions of concern about the difficulties of addressing the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, usefully distracted viewers’ attention not only from the operations’ futility but from the fact that, were the West really determined to help, it could strong-arm Israel into letting in far more plentiful aid by land at a moment’s notice.

    The media were equally swept up by the Biden administration’s second, even more outlandish scheme to help starving Palestinians. The US is to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coast so that aid shipments can be delivered from Cyprus.

    The plot holes were gaping. The pier will take two months or more to construct, when the aid is needed now. In Cyprus, as at the land crossings into Gaza, Israel will be in charge of inspections – the main cause of hold-ups.

    And if the US now thinks Gaza needs a port, why not also get to work on a more permanent one?

    The answer, of course, might remind audiences of the situation before 7 October, when Gaza was under a stifling 17-year siege by Israel – the context for Hamas’ attack that the Western media never quite finds the space to mention.

    For decades, Israel has denied Gaza any connections to the outside world it cannot control, including preventing a sea port from being built and bombing the enclave’s only airport way back in 2001, shortly after it was opened.

    And yet, at the same time, Israel’s insistence that it no longer occupies Gaza – just because it has done so at arm’s length since 2005 – is accepted unquestioningly in media coverage.

    Again, the US has decisive leverage over Israel, its client state, should it decide to exercise it – not least billions in aid and the diplomatic veto it wields so regularly on Israel’s behalf.

    The question that needs asking by the media on every piece about “starvation stalking Gaza” is why is the US not using that leverage.

    In a typical breathless piece titled “How the US military plans to construct a pier and get food into Gaza”, the BBC ignored the big picture to drill down enthusiastically on the details of “huge logistical” and “security challenges” facing Biden’s project.

    The article revisited precedents from disaster relief operations in Somalia and Haiti to the D-Day Normandy landings in the Second World War.

    Credulous journalists

    In support of these diversionary tactics, the media have also had to accentuate the atrocities of Hamas’ 7 October attack – and the need to condemn the group at every turn – to contrast those crimes from what might otherwise appear even worse atrocities committed by Israel on the Palestinians.

    That has required an unusually large dose of credulousness from journalists who more usually present as hard-bitten sceptics.

    Babies being beheaded, or put in ovens, or hung out on clothes lines. No invented outrage by Hamas has been too improbable to have been denied front-page treatment, only to be quietly dropped later when each has turned out to be just as fabricated as it should have sounded to any reporter familiar with the way propagandists exploit the fog of war.

    Similarly, the entire Western press corps has studiously ignored months of Israeli media revelations that have gradually shifted responsibility for some of the the most gruesome incidents of 7 October – such as the burning of hundreds of bodies – off Hamas’ shoulders and on to Israel’s.

    Though Western media outlets failed to note the significance of his remarks, Israeli spokesman Mark Regev admitted that Israel’s numbering of its dead from 7 October had to be reduced by 200 because many of the badly charred remains turned out to be Hamas fighters.

    Testimonies from Israeli commanders and officials show that, blindsided by the Hamas attack, Israeli forces struck out wildly with tank shells and Hellfire missiles, incinerating Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives indiscriminately. The burnt cars piled up as a visual signifier of Hamas’ sadism are, in fact, evidence of, at best, Israel’s incompetence and, at worst, its savagery.

    The secret military protocol that directed Israel’s scorched-earth policy on 7 October – the notorious Hannibal procedure to stop any Israeli being taken captive – appears not to have merited mention by either the Guardian or the BBC in their acres of 7 October coverage.

    Despite their endless revisiting of the 7 October events, neither has seen fit to report on the growing demands from Israeli families for an investigation into whether their loved ones were killed under Israel’s Hannibal procedure.

    Nor have either the BBC or the Guardian reported on the comments of the Israeli military’s ethics chief, Prof Asa Kasher, bewailing the army’s resort to the Hannibal procedure on 7 October as “horrifying” and “unlawful”.

    Claims of bestiality

    Instead, liberal Western media outlets have repeatedly revisited claims that they have seen evidence – evidence they seem unwilling to share – that Hamas ordered rape to be used systematically by its fighters as a weapon of war. The barely veiled implication is that such depths of depravity explain, and possibly justify, the scale and savagery of Israel’s response.

    Note that this claim is quite different from the argument that there may have been instances of rape on 7 October.

    That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.

    To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.

    But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.

    Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.

    But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.

    More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.

    ‘Conspiracy of silence’

    The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.

    That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.

    To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.

    But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.

    Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.

    But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.

    More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.

    ‘Conspiracy of silence’

    The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.

    However, under questioning from the Intercept, a spokesperson for the New York Times readily walked back the paper’s original certainty, conceding instead that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” [emphasis added] Even that appears too strong a conclusion.

    Holes in the Times’ reporting quickly proved so glaring that its popular daily podcast pulled the plug on an episode dedicated to the story after its own fact check.

    The rookie reporter assigned to the task, Anat Schwartz, has admitted that despite scouring the relevant institutions in Israel – from medical institutions to rape crisis centres – she found no one who could confirm a single example of sexual assault that day. She was also unable to find any forensic corroboration.

    She later told a podcast with Israel’s Channel 12 that she viewed the lack of evidence to be proof of “a conspiracy of silence”.

    Instead, Schwartz’s reporting relied on a handful of testimonies from witnesses whose other easily disprovable assertions should have called into question their credibility. Worse, their accounts of instances of sexual assault failed to tally with the known facts.

    One paramedic, for example, claimed two teenage girls had been raped and killed at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. When it became clear nobody fitted the description there, he changed the crime scene to Kibbutz Beeri. None of the dead there fitted the description either.

    Nonetheless, Schwartz believed she finally had her story. She told Channel 12: “One person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random.”

    Schwartz got further confirmation from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organisation, whose officials were already known to have fabricated Hamas atrocities on 7 October, including the various claims of depraved acts against babies.

    No forensic evidence

    Interestingly, though the main claims of Hamas rape have focused on the Nova music festival attacked by Hamas, Schwartz was initially sceptical – and for good reason – that it was the site of any sexual violence.

    As Israeli reporting has revealed, the festival quickly turned into a battlefield, with Israeli security guards and Hamas exchanging gunfire and Israeli attack helicopters circling overhead firing at anything that moved.

    Schwartz concluded: “Everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place. How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like – it is impossible. Either you hide, or you – or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”

    But Schwartz dropped her scepticism as soon as Raz Cohen, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, agreed to speak to her. He had already claimed in earlier interviews a few days after 7 October that he had witnessed multiple rapes at Nova, including corpses being raped.

    But when he spoke to Schwartz he could only recall one incident – a horrific attack that involved raping a woman and then knifing her to death. Undermining the New York Times’ central claim, he attributed the rape not to Hamas but to five civilians, Palestinians who poured into Israel after Hamas fighters broke through the fence around Gaza.

    Notably, Schwartz admitted to Channel 12 that none of the other four people hiding in the bush with Cohen saw the attack. “Everyone else is looking in a different direction,” she said.

    And yet in the Times’ story, Cohen’s account is corroborated by Shoam Gueta, a friend who has since deployed to Gaza where, as the Intercept notes, he has been posting videos of himself rummaging through destroyed Palestinian homes.

    Another witness, identified only as Sapir, is quoted by Schwartz as witnessing a woman being raped at Nova at the same time as her breast is amputated with a box cutter. That account became central to the Guardian’s follow-up report in January.

    Yet, no forensic evidence has been produced to support this account.

    But the most damning criticism of the Times’ reporting came from the family of Gal Abdush, the headline victim in the “Screams without Words” story. Her parents and brother accused the New York Times of inventing the story that she had been raped at the Nova festival.

    Moments before she was killed by a grenade, Abdush had messaged her family and made no mention of a rape or even a direct attack on her group. The family had heard no suggestion that rape was a factor in Abdush’s death.

    A woman who had given the paper access to photos and video of Abdush taken that day said Schwartz had pressured her to do so on the grounds it would help “Israeli hasbara” – a term meaning propaganda designed to sway foreign audiences.

    Schwartz cited the Israeli welfare ministry as claiming there were four survivors of sexual assault from 7 October, though no more details have been forthcoming from the ministry.

    Back in early December, before the Times story, Israeli officials promised they had “gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas”. None of those testimonies has materialised.

    None ever will, according to Schwartz’s conversation with Channel 12. “There is nothing. There was no collection of evidence from the scene,” she said.

    Nonetheless, Israeli officials continue to use the reports by the New York Times, the Guardian and others to try to bully major human rights bodies into agreeing that Hamas used sexual violence systematically.

    Which may explain why the media eagerly seized on the chance to resurrect its threadbare narrative when UN official Pramila Patten, its special representative on sexual violence in conflict, echoed some of their discredited claims in a report published this month.

    The media happily ignored the fact that Patten had no investigative mandate and that she heads what is in effect an advocacy group inside the UN. While Israel has obstructed UN bodies that do have such investigative powers, it welcomed Patten, presumably on the assumption that she would be more pliable.

    In fact, she did little more than repeat the same unevidenced claims from Israel that formed the basis of the Times and Guardian’s discredited reporting.

    Statements retracted

    Even so, Patten included important caveats in the small print of her report that the media were keen to overlook.

    At a press conference, she reiterated that she had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.

    She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she conceded it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on 7 October was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.

    All of that was ignored by the media. In typical fashion, a Guardian article on her report asserted wrongly in its headline: “UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages”.

    Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.

    As the US Jewish scholar Normal Finkelstein has pointed out, Patten also relied on open-source material: 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence. Or as Patten phrased it: “No tangible indications of rape could be identified.”

    She admitted she had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and had not met a single survivor of rape or sexual assault.

    And she noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”.

    Collusion in genocide

    If anything has been found to be systematic, it is the failings in the Western media’s coverage of a plausible genocide unfolding in Gaza.

    Last week a computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives, even as the death-toll ratio showed that 30 times as many Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza than Hamas had killed Israelis on 7 October.

    The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.

    In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.

    A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.

    Faced with a plausible case of genocide – one being televised for months on end – even the liberal elements of the Western media have shown they have no serious commitment to the liberal democratic values they are supposedly there to uphold.

    They are not a watchdog on power, either the power of the Israeli military or Western states colluding in Israel’s slaughter. Rather the media are central to making the collusion possible. They are there to disguise and whitewash it, to make it look acceptable.

    Indeed, the truth is that, without that help, Israel’s allies would long ago have been shamed into action, into stopping the slaughter and starvation. The Western media’s hands are stained in Gaza’s blood.

    • First published in Declassified UK

    The post How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both”

    On December 31, 2021 the interview that I recorded with Joe Rogan went live and the internet went crazy. This is old news, as is the fact that both Neil Young and a favorite artist of my youth, Joni Mitchell, pulled their music collections from the Spotify catalog – due to the “misinformation” that was spread during that show. Of course, nothing I said on that show was misinformation. Over the past two years – what was said during the interview has been validated again and again.

    This week, major main-stream-media outlets report that Neil Young has decided to put his music back on Spotify – good for him, I suppose. Article after article in legacy media is covering his return, all indicating that he left in protest of “misinformation”, but never mentioning the Joe Rogan/Malone episode or discussing what the claimed “misinformation” actually consisted of. And not a single article from any conservative media outlet pushing back against the approved legacy media narrative. No one has asked me for an interview on this topic. Seems like that might be relevant, don’t you think, as I was the one evidently spreading the “misinformation” ?

    For me, I am still banned or shadow banned on many platforms – including a permanent ban on Linked-in. State sponsored media still has no interest in reporting on facts surrounding the pandemic lock-downs, masks, vaccine safety, a corrupted vaccine pre-clinical and clinical trials process, adverse events associated with the jab, the corruption of academic journals – including capture by the WEF. The fact is that the world went crazy and transnational corporations used that season of madness to increase profits and market share.

    That particular episode (#1757) is almost impossible to find on the googleweb or on the spotify search engine. However, in response to the widespread censorship efforts a transcript was entered into the congressional record.

    People have asked me again and again, when is “Joe” going to have you back on. Of course, Joe Rogan never asked me back on his show. He basically ghosted me after that episode. I guess it was to be expected, the blow back from Spotify must have been huge. But still – it was (and is) kind of weird. And now Rogan has done another deal and cut himself loose of the Spotify exclusivity.

    As of February this year, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is no longer exclusive to Spotify. The host signed a new multi-year deal, believed to be worth $250m (£196m), that allows the podcast to be distributed by other platforms including Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music.

    — The Guardian: “Neil Young to return music to Spotify as he attacks ‘disinformation’ across streaming services”

    So, here I am – still standing. Still strong. Still banned from main-stream-media. My very name has been made toxic on Facebook. Thousands of essays on Substack, and none can be found via Google search engines. Permanently banned on Linked In. Gaslight, defamed, stereotyped and slandered by both legacy media and a wide range of professional on-line trolls and malcontents who post lies daily. Wikipedia still promotes a variety of lies about me, but at least it is more accurate than it once was.

    Not once has Neil Young or Joni Mitchell ever reached out to discuss their concerns. Not that I expected them to. The once-rebels have turned into the status-quo. No better than their fathers or mothers or big government.

    Will mainstream State-sponsored media ever change their spots and do some real reporting? It appears not. The deep state, including President Trump, just doubles down on the “safe and effective” false narrative, despite all the evidence to the contrary. This saddens me. An opportunity lost for the science and government to evolve and learn from these public policy mistakes, which have caused a huge amount of suffering and unnecessary loss of life.

    Now the World Health Organization thinks that it should rule the world – with its new pandemic treaty and amended International Health Regulations to lead the way to its version of a better future for the world – a totalitarian technofascist future. The New World Order is not a conspiracy theory – international law will take control of the world and is now the top dog. Controlling the regulatory capture that is occurring may not be doable in my lifetime. Scary thought.

    All “we” can do is continue to fight. To fight the increasing regulatory burden that is placed upon us each and every day. To fight for our rights to be free. The right to privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms and all our other rights are more critical than ever.

    I am strong. I am still standing. Let’s stand together and fight to make America free again.

  • Read also: “The Onus on Those Who Accuse Others of Mis/Disinformation“
    • The post “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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

    The post The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    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.

    The post The End of Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

    The post Conscious and Unconscionable: The Starving of Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    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.