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Category: the hill

  • Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism

     

    After turning in the draft of an op-ed monologue critical of Israel, journalist Katie Halper was fired from her new post at the Hill TV’s political commentary show Rising (Daily Beast, 10/4/22).  The monologue, known as a “Radar” on Rising, was called “Israel IS an Apartheid State.”

    Katie Halper on Israel: Separate and Unequal

    In documenting Israel’s status as an apartheid state, Kate Halper crossed one of corporate media’s most policed red lines.

    Halper (who has written for FAIR) used CNN’s Jake Tapper (9/21/22) and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s condemnation of applying the term “apartheid” to Israel, and their suggestion that Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib was antisemitic for saying support for Israel was incompatible with progressivism, as a jumping point to examine Israel’s ethnonationalist violence.

    In her commentary, Halper laid out the case that has been made by major human rights organizations like Amnesty International (2/1/22) and Human Rights Watch (4/27/21), and the Israeli human rights group B’tselem (1/12/22), that Israel is in fact an apartheid state. Along with substantial documentation, Halper contributed a personal perspective as well:

    I was born in New York City. My great-grandparents…were from Eastern Europe. I could move to Israel today, buy a house, get a job, travel around with no problem. So could Jake Tapper and Jonathan Greenblatt. But a Palestinian like Rashida Tlaib can’t even visit her family home in what is now Israel.

    The monologue was going to be Halper’s first as a permanent co-host, after having been a contributor for three years. Rising frames itself as a forum where “anti-establishment” or “populist” views from both the left and the right can be freely exchanged and debated. Former co-host Ryan Grim, who personally delivered more than 150 monologues for Rising, noted there is “no approval process” for hosts’ commentaries (Intercept, 9/29/22). Despite this, executives at Hill TV and/or its new parent company Nexstar Media saw Halper’s criticism of Israel as a bridge too far.

    First Halper’s superiors put the commentary under review. Then they told her that it would be nixed altogether, because of a brand-new policy barring opinion pieces on Israel, which even the producer was unaware of. Finally, they fired her (Daily Beast, 10/4/22).

    ‘A systematic effort’

    Halper wasn’t the first journalist silenced for criticizing Israel, and she won’t be the last. In her response to the firing and in subsequent tweets, Halper pointed to several other recent examples:

    • CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill for calling for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” (FAIR.org, 12/11/18).
    • The Guardian’s firing of Nathan J. Robinson for satirically claiming on Twitter that Congress cannot authorize new spending without a portion of it going to Israel (FAIR.org, 2/22/21).
    • AP’s firing of Emily Wilder after she was targeted by a right-wing smear campaign for her pro-Palestinian activism as a college student (Democracy Now!, 5/25/21; FAIR.org, 5/22/21).
    • Journalist Abby Martin being banned from the University of Georgia for refusing to sign a pledge that she would not participate in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel (Mint Press, 2/10/20). (Numerous academics, like Angela Davis and Norman Finkelstein, have also faced retaliation for their critical views of Israel.)
    Twitter: After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for the New York Times...

    Photojournalist Hosam Salem (Twitter, 10/5/22) disclosed being banned by the New York Times for his pro-Palestinian views.

    Just this week, New York Times freelance photojournalist Hosam Salem reported that the Times fired him after the “Israel lobby organization Honest Reporting, which exists to attack the Palestinian narrative in the West” (Mondoweiss, 10/5/22), accused him of antisemitism for voicing support for Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation forces. Salem discussed his firing on Twitter:

    What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity, simply because we cover the human rights violations that the Palestinian people undergo on a daily basis at hands of the Israeli army.

    ‘The best defense is a good offense’

    The firing of journalists like Salem, Wilder and Hill wasn’t in response to their violating any clear policy of their respective outlets. Instead, well-funded pressure groups are able to get pro-Palestinian journalists fired, especially when they can appeal to pro-Israel sympathies in media management.

    In Halper’s case, her firing may be connected to Nexstar Media‘s August 2021 purchase of The Hill, including its TV outlet. Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic (10/1/22) wrote of “signs of a possible tilt in The Hill’s editorial line on Israel”:

    In late August, Nexstar filled the position of deputy managing editor of NewsNation, its cable channel, with Jake Novak, a journalist who spent the preceding year and a half as the media director of the Israeli consulate general in New York….

    Six days before the announcement of his hiring, Novak led a presentation at Bar-Ilan University titled, “Defending Israel Against Media Bias—How to Fight News Media and Social Media Bias Against Israel: The Best Defense Is a Good Offense.” It was an update of a talk he had given in 2016 about defending Israel’s reputation, which the host described as “an absolute master class in public relations and diplomacy.”

    As Marcetic noted, a pro-Israel bias in Nexstar should be of grave concern: Following its purchase of Tribune Media, it is now the largest local broadcast TV owner in the US.

    Lethal censorship

    Graphic depicting the fact that Israeli occupation forces committed 479 violations and crimes against journalists in the first half of 2022.

    For journalists operating in Palestine, censorship takes on violent and deadly forms.

    Getting fired is hardly the worst form of retribution experienced by journalists who expose Israeli crimes. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reports 479 violations and crimes against Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces and settlers in just the first half of 2022. These include two killings, 35 shootings, and numerous assaults and arrests. On Wednesday, two Palestinian journalists were shot by Israeli occupying forces while covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank (Al Jazeera, 10/5/22). Over 50 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since 2001, including Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was an American citizen (Vox, 5/13/22; FAIR.org, 5/20/22, 7/2/22).

    Washington’s supply of weapons and aid to Israel is critical to Israel’s capacity to uphold apartheid (Al Jazeera, 6/4/21; Belfer Center, 2/7/17), so maintaining a positive opinion of Israel in the US public is of extreme importance to Israel. By censoring critical journalists like Katie Halper, US corporate media are thus playing a key role in supporting a system that has seen journalists killed, assaulted and detained in Israel/Palestine.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the The Hill at https://thehill.com/contact/ or on Twitter: @HillTVLive. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Efforts To Groom Us For War With China Are Getting More Forceful

    If you thought western mass media have been brazenly pushy with their anti-China propaganda, wait til you see The Hill’s appalling new opinion piece titled “America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan“.

    “China’s massive investment in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may show China is preparing to fundamentally change the status quo and preparing for possible war with the United States over Taiwan,” the piece begins. “To deter China, the United States must rapidly build up its forces in the Pacific, continue to strengthen military alliances in the region to ensure access to bases in time of conflict, and accelerate deliveries of purchased military equipment to Taiwan.”

    The article goes on to narrate about Taiwan’s importance on the global chessboard and why we should all expect a full-scale invasion by Beijing quite soon, casually discusses a direct military conflict between two nuclear-armed nations like it’s no big deal, and calls on the Biden administration to “articulate to the American people why Taiwan’s defense is critical to the United States.”

    Then at the very bottom of the article you get to the part that really matters: the information about the author.

    “David Sauer is a retired senior CIA officer who served as chief of station and deputy chief of station in multiple overseas command positions in East Asia and South Asia.”

    Ahh, okay.

    The CIA used to have to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media.

    Apparently this “retired” senior CIA officer has been spending his “retirement” churning out war propaganda articles for The Hill with titles like “The US cannot allow China to think it will abandon Taiwan” and “The next US president has a tall order: Keeping China in check“, as well as acting as an expert source for virulent anti-China propaganda rag The Epoch Times.

    Would you like to know what this big brave warrior looks like? Would you like to see a picture of this mighty hero who has no fear of leading us all into a third world war?

    Here he is:

    Now that’s the face of a man who’d be first to volunteer for duty on the front lines in defense of what he believes in. You look at that man and can’t help but imagine him charging into Taipei bleeding red white and blue firing an M4 carbine for freedom and democracy. He’s not just talking about sending our sons and daughters into this war, no siree.

    Why is it that all the worst warmongering narrative managers are always weird-looking little nerds who plainly wouldn’t know how to hold their own dicks, much less a gun? Were they bullied so bad in school that they just have to act out their pent-up aggression by helping to incinerate families in the global south over crude oil or something? What the hell is wrong with these freaks?

    Anyone who supports the idea of the US and its allies entering into a third world war against a nuclear-armed nation to determine who governs an island off the Chinese mainland is an enemy of humanity. Such a war could easily kill tens of millions of people if engaged with full commitment, which could turn into billions at any time if it went nuclear. I hope Beijing never launches an unprovoked attack on Taiwan (unlikely), and I hope the US doesn’t provoke it into doing so (far more likely), but if all this brinkmanship spins out of control and that does indeed happen then entering into such a war to stop it would benefit nobody but a few sociopaths in Washington, Langley and Arlington. And quite possibly not even them.

    Contrary to what propagandists like Sauer keep implying, the US is not even treaty-bound to defend Taiwan militarily and hasn’t been since 1979 when the only such treaty was annulled during Washington’s campaign to coax Beijing away from the Soviet Union. Yet because of their steadily escalating propaganda campaign, for the first time ever a majority of Americans surveyed on whether they’d support going to war with China over Taiwan now reportedly say yes. 

    At best all these manipulations are geared toward manufacturing consent for pouring vastly increased military resources into the US empire’s ongoing pivot to Asia, which just by itself will necessarily include myriad provocations against the Chinese government which can easily escalate into war at any time. These people are playing games with the lives of every living organism on this planet, and they are suffering no consequences for doing so.

    And now Moscow and Beijing are moving further into a military partnership that seems to be getting closer by the year in response to aggressions from the US and its client states, which, I dunno, I’m no historian but maybe might be cause for alarm when you’ve got world powers splitting into two increasingly hostile global alliances. Could that lead to something bad? It seems like maybe that could lead to something bad.

    Cornered animals are dangerous, especially ones with fangs and claws. Dying empires are dangerous, especially ones with nuclear weapons. We’re being aggressively propagandized into consenting to insanely dangerous agendas geared toward maintaining US unipolar hegemony in defiance of the natural movement we are seeing toward a multipolar world. We are seeing signs everywhere that the drivers of empire are preparing to do some very, very crazy things in order to stop that movement and maintain their dominance. The fact that they are still ramping up their propaganda campaign is concerning, to say the least.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.