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  • Gessen’s Cancellation Can’t Go Unchallenged

    Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has built an impressive career in US journalism by being a constant thorn in the side of the Russian state. That journalistic campaign entered a new chapter in November when the Russian government issued a warrant for their arrest (Washington Post, 11/27/23; AP, 12/8/23; RFE/RL, 12/8/23; Newmark School of Journalism, 12/11/23).

    Gessen, a staff writer at the New Yorker, gave an interview in which they spoke about well-documented Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (OHCHR, 12/7/22). The Russian government, forever clamping down on negative press of its military invasion of Ukraine, symbolically declared them an outlaw. (Gessen lives in the United States.)

    Masha Gessen

    Masha Gessen (Photo: Clarissa Villondo)

    Gessen has been an annoyance for the Russian government for some time; their book, The Man Without a Face, portrays Russian President Vladimir Putin not as a cunning political genius, but as a simpleton whose ego ruined the country (Washington Post, 4/7/12; Foreign Affairs, 5/1/12). Gessen, who is nonbinary, left Russia a decade ago after covering the country’s hostility toward LGBTQ people led them to fear for their own safety (Business Insider, 8/23/13).

    In the post-2016 shock of Donald Trump’s presidential election, a great deal of US media fell into a trance of believing that Trump’s success could only be explained by Russian electoral sabotage. Gessen, refreshingly, took a different approach. Rather than blame one regime for the electoral outcome, they rightfully put Trump in the context of a global movement of authoritarian backlash toward liberalism. Their pieces linking Trump’s success to the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and Hungary remain essential reading (New York Review of Books, 11/10/16; New Yorker, 3/2/21).

    Critical reporting on Putin and Trump is highly valued, and not controversial, in US media. Putin is an authoritarian, yes, but one not backed by the United States, and is viewed as an enemy. Trump, for most liberal publications, is an abhorrent aberration in an otherwise flawed but democratic political system.

    ‘The ghetto is being liquidated’

    New Yorker: In the Shadow of the Holocaust

    Masha Gessen (New Yorker, 12/9/23): “From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away.”

    But when Gessen turned their lens to Israel, they fell victim to pro-Israel censorship. Their recent essay (New Yorker, 12/9/23) on Holocaust remembrance culture in Germany was a self-fulfilling prophecy: As a result of Gessen’s observation that the language that most accurately describes what is happening in Gaza—”the ghetto is being liquidated”—comes from the Jewish experience during World War II, the Green Party–affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS), which was planning to award Gessen its Hannah Arendt Prize, canceled the event.

    The Guardian (12/14/23) explained:

    The HBS said it objected to and rejected a comparison made by Gessen in a 9 December essay in the New Yorker between Gaza and the Jewish ghettos in Europe.

    In the essay, Gessen, who uses they, criticized Germany’s unequivocal support of Israel, drawing attention to the Bundestag’s 2019 resolution condemning the Israel boycott movement BDS as antisemitic and quoting a Jewish critic of Germany’s politics of Holocaust remembrance as saying memory culture had “gone haywire.”

    In the paragraph the HBS draws attention to, Gessen wrote that “ghetto” would be “the more appropriate term” to describe Gaza, but the word “would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

    The foundation said Gessen was implying that Israel aimed to “liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto,” adding that “this statement is unacceptable to us and we reject it.”

    Chilling censorship regime

    Hannah Arendt

    Hannah Arendt (New Yorker, 12/9/23) called Israel’s Herut party—a forerunner of Likud—”a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Such opinions would likely disqualify her for the Hannah Arendt Prize.

    Germany’s political culture of strong support for Israel, deeply tied to its guilt over the Nazi genocide of Jews, has led to a deeply chilling and severely anti-Palestinian censorship regime. As I have previously reported for FAIR (11/5/21), this culture has even taken a grip in US media.

    There is a special irony in a prize in the name of German Jewish philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt, whose work on the rise of German fascism is essential, being withheld from another Jewish journalist for writing about the rise of authoritarianism.

    Arendt herself, as Gessen’s essay noted, wasn’t afraid to link Zionist extremism with the “N word,” joining other Jewish intellectuals in 1948 (including Albert Einstein) who protested the visit of Israeli politician Menachem Begin to the United States, denouncing Begin’s Herut (Freedom) party as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Haaretz, 12/4/14). It seems likely that Hannah Arendt would also be deemed unworthy to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize.

    The Daily Beast (12/13/23), New York Post (12/14/23), Washington Post (12/14/23) and Literary Hub (12/13/23) covered the issue. But the absurdity of the situation should be shouted from the rooftops of every respectable newspaper.

    Job-costing solidarity

    Gessen, of course, isn’t the only media victim of anti-Palestinian censorship since the outbreak of violence began in October. Reuters (10/21/23) reported that

    Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen said…a Jewish organization in New York City canceled a reading he was due to give on Friday without explanation, a day after he said he signed an open letter condemning Israel’s “indiscriminate violence” against Palestinians in Gaza.

    Two writers were forced out of the New York Times Magazine because of their protests against Israel’s military action in Gaza, as the magazine’s editor “Jake Silverstein said the letter violated the outlet’s policy on public protest” (Democracy Now!, 11/14/23).

    After Artforum editor David Velasco was fired for posting an open letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians, he told the New York Times (10/26/23), “I have no regrets.” He added that he was “disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”

    Jackson Frank, a sports writer for PhillyVoice.com, was fired for tweeting “solidarity with Palestine always” (Guardian, 10/10/23). Michael Eisen lost his job as editor-in-chief of the academic journal eLife after commenting favorably on an Onion (10/13/23) article with the headline “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas” (Science, 10/23/23).

    The absurdity of Gessen, a queer Jew, being punished in the name of Hannah Arendt, also a Jew, by a branch of the German political machine for being too open about the nature of global authoritarianism should be a wake up call for how degraded our discourse on Israel/Palestine has become. But it likely won’t change minds in most media. At least not yet.

    The post Gessen’s Cancellation Can’t Go Unchallenged appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ACTION ALERT: NYT Misrepresents Zionism’s Opponents as Anti-Jewish Bigots

     

    “Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic?” a New York Times article (12/10/23) by Jonathan Weisman asked. Trying to pinpoint the moment when “anti-Zionism crosses from political belief to bigotry,” Weisman suggested there were different kinds of anti-Zionism based on different visions of what Zionism means. But his effort to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable critics of Israel painted principled supporters of equal rights as antisemitic bigots.

    Weisman offered one definition of Zionism—the way it was “once clearly understood”—as “the belief that Jews, who have endured persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land of their ancestors.” To oppose this kind of Zionism “suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews”—which he said to many Jews “is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.” Their argument is:

    Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time and again.

    On the other hand, wrote Weisman, “some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state.” This kind of anti-Zionism merely opposes “an Israeli government bent on settling ever more parts of the West Bank,” land that could serve as “a separate state for the Palestinian people.”

    These two views of Zionism seemed to represent the poles of acceptable and unacceptable anti-Zionism. The piece quoted Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) explaining that “some anti-Zionism” isn’t “used to cloak hatred of Jews”; Nadler stressed, though, that “MOST anti-Zionism—the type that calls for Israel’s destruction, denying its right to exist—is antisemitic.”

    The Nexus Task Force, a group associated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, has a definition of antisemitism that is more tolerant of criticism of Israel than that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, also cited by the Times. But it still insists, Weisman wrote, “that it is antisemitic to reject the right of Jews alone to define themselves as a people and exercise self-determination.”

    Not ‘self-determination’

    NYT: Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic? A Fraught Question for the Moment.

    Jonathan Weisman (New York Times, 12/10/23): “Virulent anti-Zionism and virulent antisemitism ultimately intersect, at a very bad address for the Jews.”

    The phrase “self-determination” is doing a lot of work here. In international relations, it is generally used to mean that the residents of a geographical area inhabited by a distinct group have a right to decide whether or not they want that area to remain part of a larger entity. It’s a right that seems to come and go depending on political allegiances: When Albanians in Kosovo wanted to secede from Serbia, their right to do so was enforced with NATO bombs. If ethnic Russians who wanted to split off from Ukraine got help from Moscow, though, that wasn’t self-determination but a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.

    To call Zionism a belief in Jewish “self-determination,” however, perverts the concept to include moving to a geographic region and forcibly expelling many of the people who already live there, in order to create a situation where members of your group can have a “sovereign homeland” where they “are assured of governing themselves.”

    Ensuring the dominance of a particular ethnic group through forced migration is not usually called “self-determination,” but rather “ethnic cleansing.” This is the older version of Zionism that Weisman seems to suggest can only be opposed by antisemites.

    It’s true that there is another vision of Zionism, unsatisfied with expelling the indigenous residents to the fringes of Israel/Palestine, that insists on incorporating those fringes. Ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has occupied the remaining parts of what was the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, where many refugees from the establishment of Israel were forced to live.

    But because Zionism requires a Jewish state, the people who lived in those occupied territories could not be treated as citizens. Maintaining Israel’s veneer of democracy requires the political fiction that these undesirables are not part of the country that rules them, but instead belong to non-sovereign entities—like the Palestinian National Authority and the Gaza Strip—whose raison d’etre is to provide a rationale for why the bulk of the Palestinian population isn’t allowed to vote in Israeli elections.

    As it happens, this is precisely the strategy that white-ruled South Africa employed to pretend that white supremacy was compatible with democracy; it called the fictitious countries that the nation’s Black majority supposedly belonged to “bantustans.” This and other resemblances to white South Africa are why leading human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem call Israel an apartheid state.

    But both versions of Zionism involve the dismissal of one group’s rights in order to create a polity dominated by another group—a project that can certainly be opposed in either iteration without signifying animosity or prejudice toward anyone. (To be sure, there are antisemites who use “Zionists” as a transparent codeword for Jews. These are generally pretty easy to spot.)

    A smear that needs correction

    NYT: White House Condemns Protest at Israeli Restaurant in Philadelphia

    Weisman relied on this New York Times article (12/4/23), which gives no indication of talking to any protesters, to smear protesters as antisemitic.

    There is much to take issue with in Weisman’s article, but there is one point he makes that really warrants a correction. As an example of straightforward “Jew hatred,” he cites “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions”—and offers as an example that this is what “pro-Palestinian protesters did last week outside an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia.”

    But the protesters at Goldie, a vegan falafel restaurant, weren’t blaming “Jews around the world” for Israel’s assault on Gaza; they were holding Goldie’s owner, Israeli-born Michael Solomonov, responsible, because his restaurants had raised $100,000 for United Hatzalah, a medical organization that supports the Israeli Defense Forces.

    According to the Guardian (12/8/23), which interviewed “protesters and current and former employees at Solomonov’s restaurants,” critics both inside and outside the staff were concerned that Solomonov hosted a fundraiser for prominent pro-Israel politicians, and had “booked and paid for multiple, lavish private dinners…for IDF members preparing to deploy to fight for Israel.” (The New York Times article—12/4/23—that Weisman linked to did not appear to be based on interviews with any protesters, but instead quoted numerous politicians condemning their demonstration.)

    Obviously Solomonov and his critics have different views of his actions. But there is no evidence that protesters were targeting his restaurant simply because he was Jewish, and it’s an irresponsible smear for Weisman to assert that they were.

    ACTION: Please tell the New York Times to correct its false claim that people protesting at a Philadelphia restaurant owned by a prominent supporter of the Israeli Defense Forces were “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions.”

    CONTACT: You can send a message about factual errors to the New York Times at nytnews@nytimes.com. 

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

     

    The post ACTION ALERT: NYT Misrepresents Zionism’s Opponents as Anti-Jewish Bigots appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Richard Wiles & Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media

          CounterSpin231215.mp3

     

    NYT: U.N. Climate Summit Strikes Deal to Transition Away from Fossil Fuels

    New York Times (12/13/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, most importantly—New York Times headlines would suggest—”Strikes Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to endanger everyone with their actions, but also hornswoggle their way into media debate such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires.

    Corporate news media have a lot to answer for here, in terms of public understanding of climate disruption, what needs to happen, why isn’t it happening? Few things call more for an open public conversation about how to best protect all of us. Why can’t we have it? Well, mystery solved: The entities that are to blame for the problem have their hands in the means we would use to debate and conceivably address it.

    Put simply: We cannot have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption within a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies. We know that, and they know that, which is why one of the biggest outputs of polluting corporations is PR—is management of our understanding of what’s going on.

    CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory almost precisely a year ago with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

          CounterSpin231215Wiles.mp3

     

    Also: When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine—at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that this week as well.

          CounterSpin231215Cunningham-Cook.mp3

     

    Climate disruption reality as filtrated through corporate media, this week on CounterSpin.

    Featured image:  Extinction Rebellion climate protest. Photo: VladimirMorozov/AKXmedia

    The post Richard Wiles & Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘”None of Us Are Free Unless All of Us Are Free” Is Not Just a Slogan’

     

    CounterSpin interview with Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace

    Janine Jackson interviewed Jewish Voice for Peace’s Sonya Meyerson-Knox for the December 8, 2023, episode of CounterSpin, about Jewish opposition to Israel’s siege of Gaza. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: Despite the official contention that civilian deaths in the Gaza strip are in keeping with those of other military campaigns, a recent New York Times report acknowledged that, actually, “Israel’s assault is different.”

    NYT: Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace

    New York Times (11/25/23)

    “Even a conservative estimate” of the reported Gaza casualty figures, the Times said, shows that the rate of death during Israel’s assault has “few precedents in this century.”

    Listeners know that the response to the current violence on Gaza—the massive killings and displacement—what response you believe in has to do with your understanding of what’s happening and why. And that depends on who you’re hearing from, who you’re told to believe.

    Who gets to speak is always a key question about US news media coverage of what we call foreign policy, but that doesn’t just mean which officially credentialed policy experts, but which human beings, which communities, get to, not just be quoted, but shape the conversation.

    And now, as always, US corporate media’s insistence that power speaks—and those affected get to comment, maybe—is trying to win the day. But if that insistence is failing, it’s to do with the work of our guest and, I’m sure she would say, many others.

    Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She joins us now by phone from Philadelphia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sonya Meyerson-Knox.

    Sonya Meyerson-Knox: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here.

    JJ: I don’t think New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is himself especially worthy of respectful consideration here. Ten years ago, he was saying, “The Palestinian saga has gotten awfully boring, hasn’t it?” Everyone else in the region is changing; “only the Palestinians remain trapped in ideological amber. How long can the world be expected to keep staring at this 4-million-year-old mosquito?” OK.

    NYT: For America’s Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8

    New York Times (11/7/23)

    But the Times op-ed page is still looked to as a measure of kind of the range of acceptable opinion. So it’s meaningful what Stephens does in this recent piece where he states, “On October 8, Jews woke up to discover who our friends are not.” He cites Jewish Voice for Peace as being used as “Jewish beards”—interesting language—“for aggressive antisemites.” And he essentially suggests that we can maybe dismiss the views of Black Lives Matter, because one of them didn’t immediately denounce Hamas, and we should side-eye academic and corporate diversity efforts, because they’re also sites of antisemitism.

    We’ve seen it elsewhere, this notion that, well, Jewish people put out lawn signs after George Floyd’s murder, so it’s unfair and it’s revealingly biased that all Black people don’t support Israel’s assault on Gaza, and indeed the occupation itself.

    It reflects a sad and cynical view of coalitional social movements as transactional, as favor-trading.  Your work represents a different vision and understanding. Can you talk about that and how you engage, or if you engage, that transactional view of justice movements?

    SM: The thing about Bret Stephens and so much, unfortunately, of the New York Times opinion pages, is that, in fact, they are the ones who I would argue are historical anomalies stuck in amber. What we are seeing yet again, as we have seen so many times in recent history, is that people who are believing in progressive causes, who want the world to be a better place, are already understanding and committed to a vision of the world that is intersectional, where our struggles are absolutely connected.

    The belief that none of us are free unless all of us are free, it’s not just a slogan. It’s absolutely, I think, the only way that any of us are going to have the future that we’re trying to build.

    And so to have the paper of record continually disparage some movements, and I would put Jewish Voice for Peace’s work as anti-Zionist Jews, along with the much, much larger and rapidly growing Palestine solidarity movement globally—to put all of that somehow always on the exception, and to castigate anybody who chooses to stand with an incredibly moral and just cause, simply because one prefers to defend the actions of the State of Israel and a government which is advocating for genocide, is just utterly appalling.

    Reuters: US public support for Israel drops; majority backs a ceasefire, Reuters/Ipsos shows

    Reuters (11/15/23)

    I am astounded every time the New York Times and most of corporate media does this, the way that some causes are allowed to be lifted up and progressive, and other causes are not, not because they’re not presented as cleanly or as well-behaved, but literally because they are pointing out the inconsistencies of US foreign policy, and the extent to which the US government and our elected officials are out of step with what the US population wants.

    Look at all the polls, including the ones that are coming out right now. A majority of US voters, and the vast majority of Democratic voters, are all demanding a lasting ceasefire, and most of them want to see US military aid to the Israeli government conditioned, if not stopped entirely.

    And yet none of that actually appears on the pages of the New York Times. It treats the Palestine movement, and those of us who stand for Palestinian freedom and liberation, as though we are somehow an anomaly, when in fact we are the vastly growing majority.

    JJ: And another thing, I think it also suggests that Jewish Americans have been corrupted, essentially, by “wokeness” or by critical race theory or something. And as I’ve seen you point out elsewhere, that’s a misunderstanding of history. That’s a misunderstanding of the role that Jewish Americans have played in progressive movements, to say that, all of a sudden, folks are critical of the State of Israel.

    SM: Oh, absolutely. As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it. The American Jewish population, let alone the global Jewish population, is not a monolith, and it never was and it never will be.

    FAIR: NYT Ignores Dissent to Convey Image of Jewish Unanimity

    FAIR.org (10/17/23)

    And that’s one of the things I think that makes the Jewish community so strong, is our long cultural and historical understanding of ourselves as a place that values debate and introspection and proving your sources, and then doubting them and challenging them and researching them, and coming back to the discussion and teasing things out, over and over again, along with, and this is especially important to the younger generation, I would argue, that are coming up now as young adults, the idea of social justice, of tikkun olam, repairing the world.

    When I was growing up, as a kid, I thought being Jewish meant that my grandparents were union supporters and Communist activists, and I thought that’s what being Jewish was. And not everyone has that particular background, but so many of us have absolutely been raised to the idea that part of what it means to be a Jew and to practice Judaism, not just once a week or twice a week, but every day, constantly, is this commitment to trying to make the world a better place. And increasingly, like we’re seeing right now, that has to include Palestine, that has to include what’s happening to Palestinians.

    But that, to some extent, has always been the case. Jewish Voice for Peace’s membership ranges from people who are in their first year of college to people who are in their eighties and nineties, and who have been lifelong committed anti-Zionists. And if you look back over the history of progressive movements in the United States, there have always been people as part of them who are also Jewish.

    And so this insistence that all Jews support the actions of the State of Israel, right or wrong, I don’t think it ever existed. That was never the fact. And it’s increasingly not. But it’s only now that we’re even allowed to exist as a group, according to the New York Times. Like, the New York Times spent decades not mentioning our organization’s name, using our quotes, but not attributing us as Jewish Voice for Peace members.

    Mainstream media treats anti-Zionists, and especially Jewish anti-Zionists, as though we’re some tiny little percentage of the population. But at the same time, even as far back as polls from 2012, 25% of US Jews thought that Israel was operating as an apartheid state. That was 2012.

    Again, there’s a need of corporate media to simplify stories down, but then there’s also the intentional silencing of voices. And certainly Palestinians have been continually, appallingly silenced in corporate media. And the next up, I would argue, are the anti-Zionist Jews, who have also been so extensively silenced.

    NY Times: ‘Let Gaza Live’: Calls for Cease-Fire Fill Grand Central Terminal

    New York Times (10/27/23)

    JJ: And just to add to it, I thought it was interesting that Stephens cites Jewish Voice for Peace as having organized, or having helped organize, a “much photographed protest” at Grand Central Terminal. That’s a funny way of dismissing, as merely performative, what is in fact a monumental, incredible, powerful action.

    And I think it reads a little bit as desperate, that intention to dismiss, because things have changed, things are changing, in terms of the relationship of Jewish Americans and Israel. That Grand Central Terminal action was incredibly powerful and moving, and I find it interesting that folks would try to dismiss it by saying people took pictures of it.

    SM: Especially given that that’s one of over 80 actions that JVP has organized or co-sponsored in the past seven weeks. That was certainly one of the most iconic, and was very, of course, intentionally organized in homage to one of ACT UP’s most famous AIDS awareness protests. And, you know, thousands and thousands of people, and then thousands and thousands of people who couldn’t even make it inside, were protesting outside in solidarity.

    Chicago had a thousand Jews protesting in their train station. Every city across the US has seen protests led by Jews calling for ceasefire. They’ve also seen dozens more protests by Palestinians, often together with Jews, calling for ceasefire. But the numbers are not going down. They’re only getting bigger.

    And whether it’s been inside of the halls of Congress, or taking over train stations or taking over bridges, or just outside of the district offices of our members of Congress every other day, week in and week out, demanding that our elected officials actually represent what their voters want.

    We have been on the streets, and we have been organizing. And it’s seven, eight weeks now, and we are not flagging. People call us all the time, saying: “I live in this city. When’s the next action?” Our members are coming to us—because JVP is a grassroots organization that is very much member-led—coming to us, saying: “What about this location? Can we do something for this? How about that?”

    The energy, it’s not flagging, even though seven weeks is a long time in the news cycle. If anything, people are more committed to it.

     

    Sonya Meyerson-Knox of Jewish Voice for Peace

    Sonya Meyerson-Knox: “As US Jews, we know what it means when a government uses genocidal rhetoric and then attacks civilians. We know where that leads.” (image: Zero Hour)

    Of course, the fact of the matter is that the Israeli government is still bombing civilians that are captive in Gaza, and, if anything, that is going to get worse in the coming days. So we are very much aware of the scale of what is at stake, and I think that also drives us, but the numbers are not flagging. The numbers are only growing.

    We know, I think especially as US Jews, we know what it means when a government uses genocidal rhetoric and then attacks civilians. We know where that leads. And that’s, of course, why we are committed to saying, “Never again means never again for anyone,” and that includes Palestinians.

    JJ: And it sounds like a deflection, but it’s not, because one of the worries, of course, of conflating—vigorously conflating, life-alteringly conflating—anti-Zionism with antisemitism, it obscures the real antisemitism that exists, and makes it harder to fight that.

    SM: Oh, absolutely. It’s devastating right now, watching as real antisemitism is absolutely on the rise, because white supremacy is absolutely on the rise, and the number of attacks that we have seen on Muslims and on Palestinians in this country is unequivocally on the rise. The attack on the three Palestinian students in Vermont is atrocious.

    But instead of leading Jewish organizations that claim to work on civil rights actually addressing that, they’re focusing all of their attention on defending the government of the State of Israel, so that it can’t be held accountable for the war crimes it’s committing. It’s incredibly worrisome.

    And as part of the larger movement committed to being anti-racist and defending all of our communities and being in deep relationship with them, we have been saying for a while now that the rise of white nationalism is really, really worrisome, and that the US government has, under certain presidents, certainly embraced it, and under the current president is not doing enough to fight it, just like we’d argue college campuses have platformed white supremacists numerous times, and create incredibly unsafe spaces.

    And one of the results of that is absolutely the rise of this incredibly terrifying, horrific white nationalist movement that certainly uses antisemitism as one of its tools in its toolbox. We can and we will dismantle that, and we do that in solidarity with everybody from the other communities we work with, with our Muslim allies and our Palestinian allies and our Black allies and everybody else that is committed to being in solidarity against white supremacy.

    But we can’t do that nearly as effectively if at the same time we’re being continually accused ourselves of something that we’re not doing. If these organizations that claim to worry about antisemitism really did, then they would stop defending the Israeli government, and protecting it from being held accountable for bombing hospitals, and instead allow us all to focus on what we need to do to dismantle white supremacy, and the antisemitism that white supremacy uses.

    FAIR: ‘We’re Seeing the Result of a 40-Year Assault on the Liberal Mainstream’

    CounterSpin (1/6/17)

    JJ: I would love you to talk about what you’d like to see more or less of from reporting, but I want to just reference, as I do that, an interview that I often refer to with Ellen Schrecker, who is an expert in McCarthyism, who says, there’s an idea that we went through this period and it was difficult, but we all lived through it. We made it through, we made it out the other side.

    And what she says is, you know what? We didn’t all make it through. We didn’t all survive. It’s not only that people lost their jobs and their livelihoods and their friends, but certain coalitions didn’t survive. Certain ideas that were being put into action didn’t survive, and we were set back by that McCarthyism in unknowable ways.

    And I think it’s relevant here. There are costs being made here, not just that people are being fired for having the wrong opinion or for putting something on Facebook, but people are being cowed. People who would’ve marched are not marching, because they see the harms. What would you say to folks who are maybe a little bit scared about the costs of speaking out at this time?

    SM: That’s an incredibly potent point.

    JJ: Right? I come back to it all the time, because—we didn’t all make it. It didn’t all work out fine. And I think it’s a point that’s often lost.

    SM: And of course, I think the only way that we can make sure that all of us make it, right, that all of us come together and all of us are protected, is if we are truly all in this together. The doxxing of students—particularly Palestinian and Muslim students, but also Jewish anti-Zionist students—the doxxing of students is unacceptable, and we have to come together and call that out.

    The response from certain Jewish institutions, legacy institutions in particular, which have silenced and/or fired staff for raising issues about ceasefire, not even necessarily getting into anti-Zionism, all of that has to be called out. And we do it together, and we come out loudly together.

    And one of the things that Jewish Voice for Peace has always been committed to is building the Jewish community and Judaism beyond Zionism. So with our rabbis, and with our Havurah Network, and with all of our chapters, we bring in Jewish ritual, we embrace the teachings of our movement elders, in order to offer alternative Jewish communal spaces, so that if speaking up for Palestine, if demanding a lasting ceasefire, if even articulating that Palestinians deserve just as many as human rights as anyone else, if that is too much for the community that you’re currently in—for your family or for your Jewish community or whatever—there are other communities that are waiting and welcoming and would love to have you with us. And we are growing, and we have the full range of Judaism at our fingertips, and we are building a Judaism that is not dependent or in any way, in fact, related to the actions of the State of Israel.

    And I always think back to something that Mohammed el-Kurd said a few years ago, which was, do you think it’s hard having these conversations at the dinner table? Imagine actually what it’s like living a day in the life of a Palestinian. And I think that’s something that we all have to hold onto as well, that it doesn’t feel great, initially, to initiate these really hard conversations, and we’re here to help, and it’s what we’re being asked to do. And it’s absolutely, I think, the moment to be doing it.

    So Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations that are part of the Palestine solidarity movement, including IfNotNow and others, are offering how to have our conversations, we’re offering the tools, so that when you have these conversations with your friends, and the kid you went to summer camp with, or your kind of grumpy older uncle, you’re not alone in it, and you also know how to do it in a way that we believe leads to everybody actually becoming more informed, more aware and hearing each other.

    Al Jazeera: Palestine advocates decry MSNBC’s cancellation of Mehdi Hasan news show

    Al Jazeera (11/30/23)

    Obviously, we want to see Palestinian narratives centered more. The fact that there was no Palestinian voice on the op-ed pages of any national US paper in the weeks following October 7 was appalling. I’m very concerned about the fact that so much of mainstream TV seems to find it okay to fire their Muslim and Arab anchors and hosts. We just saw that with Mehdi Hasan most recently.

    There’s all sorts of context that’s continually being ignored. Why is the fact that the majority of the population of Palestinians in Gaza are all already refugees—how did that happen? Oh, we don’t need to talk about that; the clock just started on October 7. And of course the clock didn’t start on October 7. It started 75 years earlier, with the Nakba in 1948, at the least.

    But also, and this is something that I fundamentally can’t believe is still happening in mainstream press: Corporate media need to stop repeating the Israeli military’s propaganda and talking points, and treating it as though it were fact. It is not fact.

    The Israeli military, for example, didn’t tell Palestinians in Gaza to flee from North Gaza to South Gaza “because it was worried about their own safety.” It was not worried about Palestinian safety. The Israeli military is bombing civilians daily.

    There’s so many accusations that are made by Israeli officials, who are then invited onto talkshows and quoted in newspaper articles as though they are speaking facts, when in fact they are saying incredibly horrible, racist, genocidal things, and none of that is called out.

    There’s a level of accuracy and accountability that corporate media seem to not apply to the Israeli military and to the Israeli government, and it is shocking, and high time, we are well overdue for that to no longer be the case.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sonya Meyerson-Knox of Jewish Voice for Peace, online at JewishVoiceForPeace.org. Sonya Meyerson-Knox, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

    SM: Thank you. It was such a pleasure to be here.

    The post ‘”None of Us Are Free Unless All of Us Are Free” Is Not Just a Slogan’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Causing Gaza Blackouts, Israel Benefits from Media Double Standards

     

    As part of its escalating siege and bombing campaign against Palestinians—in which more than 18,000 people have been killed and roughly 1.9 million displaced—Israel has repeatedly disabled internet and phone service throughout Gaza. Israel’s airstrikes and fuel blockades have devastated the region’s communications infrastructure, depriving more than 2 million Gazans of access to lifesaving information, emergency services and contact with those outside their immediate vicinity, while preventing journalists from reporting on the situation. Since the first blackouts occurred shortly after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, residents have suffered multiple outages.

    In recent weeks, Israel-allied media have minimized Israel’s culpability, portraying the shutoffs more as an unforeseeable act of nature than a deliberate act of military aggression.

    Israel as innocent bystander 

    WaPo: No text, no talk. Palestinians plunged into digital darkness in Gaza.

    Washington Post (10/28/23) deploys the passive voice: Who plunged Palestinians into digital darkness?

    News sources have rightfully informed readers of the telecommunications void in Gaza. A headline from the Washington Post (10/28/23) read, “No Text, No Talk: Palestinians Plunged Into Digital Darkness in Gaza.” The following month, an Associated Press (11/16/23) dispatch covering a separate shutoff announced that “Under a Communication Blackout, Gaza’s 2.3 Million People Are Cut Off From Each Other and the World.” But judging by these passive-voice alerts, one would have no idea Israel was involved.

    Additionally, though the Post promptly alluded to the shutoffs as a “tool of war,” the paper waited 10 paragraphs to assign blame to Israel, noting that “Israel knocked out cell towers, cable lines and infrastructure…creating the near-blackout of connectivity.” AP also hedged and buried its mentions of Israel’s responsibility, explaining that a lack of fuel—caused by Israel’s obstruction of fuel deliveries to Gaza, which AP waited two dozen paragraphs to address—paralyzed the region’s internet and phone network.

    To further obscure the cause-and-effect relationship of Israel’s violence and Gaza’s infrastructural ruin, media have presented the two as parallel occurrences. Wired (10/27/23) announced that cables, cell towers and other equipment “have been damaged or destroyed as Israel launched thousands of missiles in response to Hamas.” The New York Times (10/29/23) offered a similar construction: “As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed.” NPR (10/30/23) contributed its own version, stating, “At the same time Israel intensified its assault on Gaza, internet and phone service suddenly dropped.”

    ‘Complete siege’

    These framings are astonishingly charitable to Israel, given the available documentation of its actions. After promising a “complete siege” of Gaza in early October, Israeli officials ordered cuts to electricity, fuel supplies, food and water (Guardian, 10/11/23), amounting to a war crime. On October 10, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed that Israeli airstrikes “targeted several telecommunication installations” in Gaza. Days later, an Israeli Communications Ministry press release listed “an ongoing examination and preparation for the shutting down of cellular communications and internet services to Gaza” in a summary of its operations.

    This aggression is enabled by Israel’s seizure and decades-long weakening of Palestinian communications infrastructure, which has rendered Palestinian networks highly vulnerable to damage. According to the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media:

    Since the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel took complete control of the [Information and Communication Technologies] infrastructure and sector in the West Bank and Gaza, impeding development and blocking the establishment of an independent network, instead making Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli occupation authorities.

    It should come as no surprise, then, that Palestinian telecom companies have attributed the outages to “deliberate actions perpetrated by Israeli authorities.”

    Enemies as sinister masterminds

    NY Times: Iran Blocks Nearly All Internet Access

    The New York Times headline (11/17/19) held Iran responsible for shutting down the internet, which the story called “one of its most draconian attempts to cut off Iranians from each other and the rest of the world.”

    In contrast to their Israel coverage, US and US-allied media waste no time identifying alleged culprits of internet shutdowns in non-allied countries.

    Reporting on protests over rising fuel prices, the New York Times (11/17/19) ran the headline “Iran Blocks Nearly All Internet Access.” The active voice in the story’s lead clearly indicated responsibility: “Iran imposed an almost complete nationwide internet blackout on Sunday,” in order to “cut off Iranians” amid “widespread government unrest.” An adjective elsewhere in the lede—“draconian”—which, though it undoubtedly applies to Israel, is almost unimaginable in corporate media discussions of the 75-year US ally (FAIR.org, 10/20/23, 11/15/23, 11/17/23).

    AP (7/12/21) adopted equally decisive language in a piece scolding Cuba for supposedly blocking social media sites during a protest. The agency insisted that “restricting internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world,” a category under which China and North Korea, too, evidently fell.

    And, months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, media were swift to caution of the occupying force’s ambitions to wrest control of Ukrainian networks. According to Wired (6/15/22), Russia was “Taking Over Ukraine’s Internet” by rerouting Ukraine’s online traffic through “Vladimir Putin’s powerful online censorship machine.” The New York Times (8/9/22) echoed these charges, characterizing the action as “part of a Russian authoritarian playbook that is likely to be replicated further if they take more Ukrainian territory.”

    Defying evidence (or lack thereof)

    Rest of the World: Did Cuba really shut down the internet to quell protests?

    Although critics pointed to from network monitor Kentik as proof that Cuba was shutting down its internet, a Kentik analyst told Rest of the World (7/14/21) that “internet measurement data alone can’t tell the difference” between an intentional shutdown and an overload.

    In many cases, US and Western media’s assertions of enemies’ digital repression lack or contradict evidence. The AP (7/12/21) report on Cuba, for example, called the disruption an instance of a “go-to tactic to suppress dissent.” The agency’s quantitative source was data from NetBlocks, a London-based internet monitoring organization commonly cited in Western reporting on global online access, including that in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 12/4/23).

    But the referenced information didn’t support all of the AP’s claims. The tech-news site Rest of World (7/14/21)—hardly a Castroite publication—found no conclusive proof that the outage was planned. A source from network monitoring company Kentik told the site that the interruption “could either happen deliberately or due to a technical failure,” adding that “internet measurement data alone”—which NetBlocks and Kentik used to gauge online activity in Cuba—“can’t tell the difference.” (The AP also neglected to mention the US’s record of limiting Cuban internet access.)

    In a particularly egregious example, Foreign Policy (2/21/23) accused China of muffling internet service for Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, in what “looks like targeted harassment by Beijing.” This assumption was based on reported incidents in which a Chinese fishing vessel and freighter cut undersea cables on separate occasions. No conspiracy was confirmed; Foreign Policy itself acknowledged that a Taiwanese official “told reporters that there was no indication the incidents were intentional.” Still, this didn’t deter the magazine from trumpeting, “China Is Practicing How to Sever Taiwan’s Internet.”

    Meanwhile, Western media have access to ample evidence that Israel willfully throttles, disables and bombs the communications networks it has usurped—in part to mute those who might challenge its official narratives (Al Jazeera, 11/9/23; NBC News, 11/11/23)—and displaces and kills the people who depend on them.

    And yet those same media contort and trivialize that evidence to obfuscate Israel’s offenses. Apparently, sabotage of essential lines of communication for a beleaguered population doesn’t constitute subjugation—as long as the saboteur is a friend of the right countries.

    The post Causing Gaza Blackouts, Israel Benefits from Media Double Standards appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • NYT Amplifies Outrage Over Imaginary Calls for Genocide

     

    University presidents are under fire from politicians and the media over what is being framed as their waffling over allowing antisemitic speech on their campuses. But it is a concocted outrage that has nothing to do with safeguarding Jewish students, and the New York Times is going along for the ride.

    The uproar concerns an appearance by the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania before the House Education committee, in which Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–NY) grilled them about antisemitism on campus and whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates university codes of conduct.

    NYT: College Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism

    New York Times sources (12/6/23) almost entirely criticized university presidents for giving “lawyerly responses to a tricky question involving free speech.”

    The Times (12/6/23) reported the story under the headline, “College Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism,” with the subhead: “The leaders of Harvard, MIT and Penn appeared to evade questions about whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews.” Reporters Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis began:

    Support for the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT eroded quickly on Wednesday, after they seemed to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?

    Specifically, the reporters wrote, the presidents’ “lawyerly replies”—that it depends on the context of the speech—drew criticism from Jewish leaders as well as Democratic bigwigs, thus framing the ire not as partisan positioning against liberal academia, but a categorical defense of Jewish students against uncaring administrators.

    But there are two big problems with the Times‘ framing: The calls for genocide were imaginary, and the presidents’ answers were not evasive, they were accurate reflections of the constitutional protections of free speech and the scope of university policies on harassment and bullying.

    ‘From the river to the sea’

    As a subsequent Times report explained (12/7/23), Stefanik

    repeatedly tried and failed to get them to agree with her that calls for “intifada” and use of slogans such as “from the river to the sea” were appeals for genocide against Jews that should not be tolerated on campuses.

    First, let’s be clear: Calls for “intifada” or a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” are not the same as calls for genocide. Merriam-Webster defines the Arabic word “intifada” in the context of Palestine to mean “an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

    Conversation: ‘From the river to the sea’ – a Palestinian historian explores the meaning and intent of scrutinized slogan

    Maha Nassar (Conversation, 11/16/23): “The majority of people using the phrase [‘from the river to the sea’] see it as a principled vision of freedom and coexistence.”

    “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a slogan that’s long been used by Palestinians to “represent the vision of a secular democratic state with equality for all,” as University of Arizona Mideast studies professor Maha Nassar (Conversation, 11/16/23) noted.

    The American Jewish Committee describes the phase as “a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers,” saying it calls for the “establishment of a state of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing the state of Israel and its people.” But as Nimer Sultany of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies told Al Jazeera (11/2/23), the word “free” in the slogan refers to “the need for equality for all inhabitants of historic Palestine.”

    As US corporate media outlets seldom remind their audiences, Israel is currently deemed an apartheid state by leading human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem (FAIR.org, 2/3/22).

    Pro-Palestinian protesters on campuses do talk about genocide, however (Ha’aretz, 10/25/23)—to argue that Israel is carrying one out in its assault on Gaza, which has so far killed at least 17,000 people, 70% of them women and children, according to Gazan health officials (Reuters, 12/7/23).

    Announcing the “second stage” of the war against Gaza (Common Dreams, 10/30/23), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible”—a reference to 1 Samuel 15:3: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.”

    A gotcha question

    NYT: The Invention of Elise Stefanik

    Nicholas Confessore (New York Times, 12/31/22): In “one of the most brazen political transformations of the Trump era…Ms. Stefanik remade herself into a fervent Trump apologist…and embraced the conspiracy theories that animate his base.”

    But Stefanik—the chair of the Republican Conference, whom Times reporting by Nicholas Confessore (12/31/22) had earlier depicted as a vacuous opportunist with no real ideology beyond her own advancement—wasn’t asking good-faith questions about antisemitism on campus. She was asking a gotcha question to force the presidents to answer “yes” or “no” about legal and policy matters that in fact required more context. The paper quoted at length her exchange with UPenn president Mary Elizabeth Magill, who has since resigned:

    Ms. Stefanik asked Ms. Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?”

    Ms. Magill replied, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

    Ms. Stefanik pressed the issue: “I am asking, specifically: Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”

    Ms. Magill, a lawyer who joined Penn last year with a pledge to promote campus free speech, replied, “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”

    Ms. Stefanik responded: “So the answer is yes.”

    Ms. Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”

    Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”

    Stefanik was smugly triumphant, and the exchange led to pressure against Magill from the state’s governor (Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/6/23) and calls to resign from the board of UPenn’s business school (Axios, 12/7/23). The school lost a $100 million donation (BBC, 12/8/23).

    After issuing an apology (Wall Street Journal, 12/7/23), Magill resigned (New York Times, 12/9/23). Falling just short of openly declaring a witch hunt against university administrators, Stefanik (Fox News, 12/9/23) replied to the resignation: “One down. Two to go.”

    The New York Post (12/10/23) wasn’t so shy, saying that in response to the supposed leftward nature of higher education society should “starve these schools of funds (alumni giving, government largesse, tuition money) until they have boards and administrations dedicated to righting things.” So much for right-wing opposition to “cancel culture.”

    Context matters

    Daily Beast: Elise Stefanik’s Calculated Demagoguery on Antisemitism and Free Speech

    The Daily Beast‘s Jay Michaelson (12/6/23) sees “the spectacle of a demagogue urging a mob to punish an intellectual for articulately and accurately distinguishing between political speech and bullying.”

    But Magill was correct. Speech is protected; Penn’s policies are about bullying and harassment. So if someone simply uses the phrase “from the river to the sea” or “intifada,” it doesn’t fall under Penn’s policies unless it is accompanied by conduct that can be interpreted as bullying or harassment. As the Daily Beast‘s Jay Michaelson (12/6/23) wrote:

    What about when someone makes a statement in a classroom or a college lecture? If someone insists, in a classroom discussion, that Israel as a country is an illegitimate colonial outpost and should be “wiped off the map”?

    That sounds like a political statement to me, not an act of bullying or intimidation.

    But if a mob marches into a Shabbat service and shouts the same slogan, then that’s clearly harassment and in violation of the policy. Context matters.

    In the Times‘ letters section (12/7/23), one writer said:

    Free speech doesn’t exist only for speech with which you agree, and if it doesn’t cross the bright legal line into literally targeting individuals or inciting violence, punishing it is problematic.

    So yes, as Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, rightly said, context matters as it relates to discipline. But that doesn’t mean there is any ambiguity, any argument, that calls for genocide against Jews aren’t both bigoted and deeply disturbing. They surely are.

    ‘Legally correct’

    It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph that the Times said the university presidents “tried to give lawyerly responses to a tricky question involving free speech, which supporters of academic freedom said were legally correct.”

    This is a sneaky way to hide the reality that, yes, free speech means, hypothetically speaking, defending people’s rights to make atrocious and offensive statements. If Republican lawmakers believe that such a reality is unacceptable, then they should come out and say they are against free speech.

    But the next paragraph is far worse:

    But to many Jewish students, alumni and donors, who had watched campus pro-Palestinian protests with trepidation and fear, the statements by the university presidents failed to meet the political moment by not speaking clearly and forcefully against antisemitism.

    The Times had just noted that all three presidents “said they were appalled by antisemitism and taking action against it on campus. When asked whether they supported the right of Israel to exist, they answered yes, without equivocation.” So the problem is not their clearly stated opposition to antisemitism or support for Israel. It’s their unwillingness to say they’ll discipline those whose speech some find abhorrent.

    Just because people don’t like a protest—even with good reason—doesn’t mean that the protesters should be punished for their speech. Many women might find anti-abortion tabling to be sexist; that doesn’t mean it is outside the bounds of free speech. Would the Zionist version of “from the river to sea”—where Israel includes the Occupied Territories  (Times of Israel, 9/22/23)—be considered so offensive to Palestinian students that students who make them should be punished? Would the Times also have us believe that it should be illegal for pro-police students to have rallies in defense of cops accused of brutality and murder of unarmed Black people?

    ‘Free speech scruples’

    After quoting no fewer than six critics of the presidents, the Times finally found someone to offer a defense of their answers—sort of. Saul and Hartocollis turned to Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, a group more often associated with libertarian pearl-clutching over “cancel culture” (1/31/22). He grudgingly accepted that the administrators were right: “It does depend on context,” he told the Times.

    But Creeley added that he was sad “to see them discover free speech scruples while under fire at a congressional hearing,” and hadn’t come out as advocates for his version of free speech more generally, which sees decisions by publishing companies to not publish certain (right-wing) authors as “book banning.”

    After Creeley’s brief and half-hearted defense, the Times returned to more critics, one of whom demanded that the presidents “resign in disgrace,” and another who was “appalled by the need to state the obvious: Calls for genocide against Jews do not depend on the context.”

    Boosted by conspiracy theories

    Albany Times Union: How Low Ms. Stefanik?

    The Albany Times Union (9/17/21) accused Stefanik of “stoking racial, ethnic, and religious tribalism among voters” by adopting the grievance of the Charlottesville marchers who chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

    Perhaps the Times could have glanced at Stefanik’s own record; she has come under fire for engaging in white nationalist conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” theory (Washington Post, 5/15/22, 5/16/22; NBC, 5/19/22). In fact, Albany’s Times-Union editorial board (9/17/21) blasted her embrace of the far-right theory:

    If there’s anything that needs replacing in this country—and in the Republican party—it’s the hateful rhetoric that Ms. Stefanik and far too many of her colleagues so shamelessly spew.

    This was in response to her ads that said, “President Biden and fellow Democrats are seeking a ‘permanent election insurrection’ by expanding pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants” (Washington Post, 9/16/21).

    In perhaps her weirdest outburst, Stefanik “denounced Democrats who disagreed with her proposals to ease baby formula shortage as ‘usual pedo grifters’” (Daily News, 5/13/22), a nod to the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory that fuels the Trumpian right (Guardian, 8/25/20). Once an obscure backbencher, Stefanik has risen in conservative fame while latching onto conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election being rigged, to the point the point of aligning herself with an anti-Muslim leader of the “stop the steal” movement (WAMC, 8/23/21).

    The Times missed this important context, which would have led a reporter to question if Stefanik’s pointed questioning toward the university presidents was genuinely motivated by a concern for antisemitism or, instead, a kind of projection of her own record.

    A right-wing PR vehicle

    NYT: Questioning University Presidents on Antisemitism, Stefanik Goes Viral

    Annie Karni (New York Times, 2/7/23): “That Ms. Stefanik emerged as the voice of reason in the hearing was a sobering thought for many of her detractors.”

    The whole affair has boosted Stefanik’s currency in right-wing media, especially Fox News (12/6/23, 12/6/23, 12/8/23). In fact, the New York Times (12/7/23) wrote a followup article reporting that the exchange with the three university presidents “went viral, racking up tens of millions of views on social media (the Israeli government even reposted a clip of the hearing).” While Stefanik has had support from the right, Times congressional correspondent Annie Karni wrote that her grilling achieved the “unthinkable” by

    prompting many Democrats and detractors of Mr. Trump to concede that an ideological culture warrior with whom they agree on nothing else was, in this case, right.

    In yet another follow-up piece, the Times (12/10/23) accepted Republican concern about campus antisemitism as fact, without questioning whether mere criticism of Israel was being wrongly branded as antisemitic, or acknowledging that it has actually been the left that has blown the whistle on the rise of white nationalism, antisemitism and xenophobia in conjunction with the political rise of Donald Trump (Washington Post, 10/17/22; Haaretz, 11/8/22). The “potency” of the recent Republican inquisition into free speech on campuses, the Times‘ Nicholas Confessore said, “was underscored by how many Democrats joined the attack.” It was lost on the Times that it was its own misframing of the exchange that lent liberal validation to a far-right GOP leader like Stefanik.

    Of course, Stefanik took to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page (12/7/23) to rebroadcast her congressional spectacle, calling the presidents’ testimony “pathetic” and displaying a “lack of moral clarity.” But it makes sense for a conservative opinion space to act as a right-wing PR vehicle.

    Reporters for an ostensibly liberal paper, meanwhile, should be looking at what is actually being said and what is actually happening. Instead, the Times is fanning the flames of a fake outrage, and it’s already having a dire impact on free speech.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post NYT Amplifies Outrage Over Imaginary Calls for Genocide appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians

     

    Since October 7, the day the escalation in Israel/Palestine began (FAIR.org, 10/13/23), American media outlets have persistently described the fighting as an “Israel-Hamas war.” From October 7 through midday on December 1, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have combined to run 565 pieces that use the phrase “Israel-Hamas war.”

    This paradigm has been a dominant way of covering the violence, even though Israel has been clear from the start that its assault has not been narrowly aimed at Hamas. At the outset of the Israeli onslaught, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23) said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Oxfam later said that such restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to eat—which left 2.2 million people “in urgent need of food”—mean that Israel is deploying a policy wherein “starvation is being used as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians.”

    A day later, Israeli military spokesperson Adm. Daniel Hagari (Guardian, 10/10/23) said that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on the Gaza Strip, and admitted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

    NY Times:Israel-Hamas War: Israel Launches Strikes and Orders Evacuations in Southern Gaza

    The New York Times‘ label (12/2/23) encourages readers to view Israel’s attacks on a population as really being aimed at a distinct group.

    The indiscriminate nature of Israel’s assault is clear. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on November 24 that “over 1.7 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80% of the population, are estimated to be internally displaced.” On November 25, the Swiss-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel had killed 20,031 Palestinians in Gaza, 18,460 of whom (or 92%) were civilians, since October 7.

    Thus, while Israel has openly acknowledged that it is carrying out indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, US media outlets do Israel the favor of presenting its campaign as if it were only aimed at combatants. “Israel-Gaza war” comes closer to capturing the reality that Israel’s offensive is effectively against everyone living in Gaza. Yet “Israel-Gaza war” appears in 265 pieces in the three papers, exactly 300 fewer than the obfuscatory “Israel-Hamas war.”

    Consider also the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor finding that Israel has slaughtered 8,176 children. If 41% of all the Palestinians Israel has killed in the first seven weeks of its rampage have been children, and 8% have been combatants, then it is less an “Israel-Hamas war” than an Israeli war on Palestinian children.

    Characterizing what has happened since October 7 as an “Israel-Hamas war” fails to adequately capture the scope and the character of Israel’s violence. Describing the bloodbath in Palestine this way obscures that grave violence is being visited upon virtually all Palestinians, whatever their political allegiances and whatever their relation to the fighting.

    Cognitive dissonance

     

    NBC: Cut from projects, dropped by agents: How the Israel-Hamas war is dividing Hollywood

    Contrary to the implication of NBC‘s headline (12/2/23), the divide in Hollywood is not between supporters of Israel and Hamas, but over the issue of Palestinian human rights.

    Corporate media have often stuck to the “Israel-Hamas war” approach even when the information the outlets are reporting shows how inadequate it is to conceive of Israel’s attacks in that way. For instance, the New York Times (10/20/23) ran a story about Israel ordering 1.2 million Gaza residents to evacuate their homes, and still classified the evacuation as part of the “Israel-Hamas war.” The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, is estimated to have 30,000–40,000 fighters (Axios, 10/21/23).

    The Wall Street Journal published a short piece (11/6/23) that noted:

    The United Nations said that the Israel-Hamas war has killed the highest number of UN workers in any single conflict. The UN said that over 88 workers in its Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA], the largest humanitarian organization in the Gaza Strip, have been killed since October 7.

    But UNRWA did not itself use the “Israel-Hamas war” narrative in the report to which the Journal referred, instead opting for “escalation in the Gaza Strip.” Indeed, Israel killing UN workers at a rate of almost three each day would seem to fall outside the bounds of an “Israel-Hamas war,” but that’s how the paper categorizes the violence. (“Israel’s war on the UN” falls well outside the bounds of the ideologically permissible in the corporate media.)

    A Washington Post article (11/7/23) titled “Israel’s War in Gaza and the Specter of ‘Genocide’” quoted several experts and political leaders making a credible case that, in the words of Craig Mokhiber, former director of the United Nations’ New York office on human rights, “the term ‘genocide’ needs to be applied” to what Israel is doing in Gaza.

    Nevertheless, the article’s author, Ishaan Tharoor, attributed such statements to “critics of Israel’s offensive against the Islamist group Hamas,” and described the violence as “Israel’s overwhelming campaign against Hamas.” Genocide as defined by the UN requires “the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.” So saying that Israel’s attacks are directed “against Hamas” twice in an article pointing to authorities on genocide invoking the term with reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza ought to generate cognitive dissonance.

    Violence on the West Bank

    BBC: Israel carries out air strike on West Bank city Jenin

    In the first two weeks of fighting, the BBC (10/22/23) reported, Israel killed 89 Palestinians on the West Bank.

    Another problem with classifying the bloodshed of the last seven weeks as an “Israel-Hamas war” is that Israel has also enacted brutal violence and repression on the West Bank, which is governed by  the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’ arch rivals; Hamas is mostly confined to Gaza (Electronic Intifada, 10/28/23).

    Between October 7 and November 26, Israeli forces killed 222 Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israel’s government-backed settlers killed eight more. In that period, Israel has also repeatedly carried out airstrikes in the West Bank, hitting such targets as the Balata refugee camp (Reuters, 11/18/23) and a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp (BBC, 10/22/23).

    Israel has also arrested hundreds of West Bank Palestinians since October 7 (AP, 11/26/23) and attacked a hospital in Jenin, shooting a paramedic while they were inside an ambulance and using military vehicles to block ambulances from entering hospitals.

    It would therefore make more sense to speak of an “Israel-Palestine war” than an “Israel-Hamas war,” but the former has been used in just two articles in my dataset.

    What the media presents as a war between Israel and an armed Palestinian resistance group is in reality an Israeli war on Palestinians’ physical survival, on their food and clean water supplies, on their homes, healthcare, schools, children and places of worship—a war, in other words, on the Palestinians as a people.

    The post ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘The Reality of What It Is to Have an Abortion Has to Be Brought Into Every Story’

    CounterSpin interview with Melissa Gira Grant on abortion access

    Janine Jackson interviewed the New Republic‘s Melissa Gira Grant about abortion access and politics for the December 1, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin231201Grant.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has generated well-grounded fear and confusion: states ginning up their own specific laws and attempting to extend them to other states, politicians and pundits attempting to shift opinion through rhetoric—it’s not a “ban,” it’s a “standard.” And what about “abortion tourism”?

    Abortion Every Day: The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Language War

    Abortion, Every Day (6/29/23)

    Combined with horrific emerging stories of women being forced to labor through dangerous complications, it adds up to an unclear but clearly disturbing situation—and to a crying need for reporting with an overt fealty to human rights, rather than a lazy and cowardly both-sidesing of a shifting terrain.

    Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, from Verso, and of A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America, which is forthcoming from Little, Brown. She’s co-director of the film They Won’t Call It Murder, about police murders in Columbus, Ohio, from Field of Vision. And she joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome to CounterSpin, Melissa Gira Grant.

    Melissa Gira Grant: Thank you so much for having me.

    JJ: I would like to start by situating a story that some listeners will have heard, about a case in Idaho where the mother of a 15-year-old accused the girl’s boyfriend and his mother of taking the girl across state lines to obtain an abortion. Folks may have heard that prosecutors applied trafficking laws here, but that wasn’t quite right.

    But it isn’t that some legislators aren’t trying to criminalize interstate travel for abortions, so we don’t want to miss the forest for the trees. Would you tease out, to the extent that you think it’s meaningful, the bit here about some initial misreporting from the reality of the problem that folks are worrying about?

    Melissa Gira Grant

    Melissa Gira Grant: “The story of the post-Roe world is a very fractured story. There’s no single story.” (photo: Noah Kalina)

    MGG: Sure. I think it starts with just a real sense of urgency, a legitimate sense of urgency. After years, particularly in feminist media, and for folks who’ve been covering abortion rights for a long time, journalists have been hearing from other journalists that, like, “Roe’s not going anywhere, don’t you worry,” this patronizing thing. And isn’t it sad that now we’re in this moment?

    And people who have that expertise are having to deal with this whole national terrain of stories, different things happening in different states to different people. The story of the post-Roe world is a very fractured story. There’s no single story.

    But the biggest fear, I think, is that after the Dobbs decision came down in 2022, there would be an increase in the criminal punishment of people seeking abortions, people having abortions, and people helping people have abortions.

    And that’s what it looks like is going on in this story in Idaho. It looks like when a mother initiated this criminal investigation into her daughter’s boyfriend and the boyfriend’s mother, it seems like what was seen as a problem was not just that they had had a relationship when she was underage, or that she had run away, or something like that; there’s definitely some of that in the background. The problem that’s identified is they took her across state lines for an abortion.

    What makes this unique is that the state in which this happened, Idaho, was the first state after Dobbs to pass a law, creating this crime that never existed before, of abortion trafficking. And it simply means going across state lines to have an abortion. Idaho is almost a zero-access state, but nearby, in Washington and Oregon, you do have the possibility of accessing surgical abortion.

    So that sets the stage here, I think, for a lot of confusion, because this girl’s boyfriend and [his] mother, while it looks like they were criminalized for the act of taking her across state lines for an abortion—or simply being the people who, at her request, took her across state lines for an abortion; it’s not entirely clear—they didn’t use the abortion trafficking law against them. They used an existing statute on kidnapping, but mentioned abortion in the news stories that came out about the case.

    And so it was very easy for people to say: This is the first use of this law, it’s happening. This thing we were really scared about is happening.

    But the reality was a lot more complicated. And we still don’t know all of the facts, but I understand the need to urgently let people know, when the criminalization of abortion is ramping up at the speed that it is.

    It’s not the speed of journalism. Journalism needs to be a lot more slow and deliberate than the speed of a criminal punishment system attacking people for having an abortion.

    JJ: What we don’t want to be lost, it’s not that there’s no reason to fear prosecutors and politicians using laws and charges that maybe don’t specifically mention abortion, but that still are used to criminalize access to abortion. And you’ve written about that a lot. So it is a larger story, it’s not just an anecdote, it’s a real story about the use of laws, including the Mann Act, which a lot of people will think is a blast from the past, to criminalize abortion access?

    New Republic: The Growing Criminalization of Pregnancy

    New Republic (5/5/22)

    MGG: Yeah, this has been going on, even when we had the protections of Roe, you would find examples—groups like Pregnancy Justice and If/When/How, reproductive justice lawyers have done extensive research, going back 20 years or so, looking at how people have been prosecuted for their own abortion, even though abortion was legal where they had that abortion.

    And there’s lots of charges that can be weaponized in this way, charges related to disposal of fetal remains, for example, in several cases. One that I wrote about, in Georgia in 2015, involved a woman who had taken misoprostol, an abortion-inducing drug. When she went to the hospital seeking care, they reported her, and the police arrested her out of her bed, and charged her with malice murder of the fetus.

    She was also charged with using drugs while pregnant. And that’s another common charge that we see, you know, people trying to find ways to punish people for having an abortion, even though, by the letter of the law, they’re not supposed to be able to do that.

    And I think, because this is such a complicated question—there’s no one law that’s being used, right? You can’t just look for everybody who’s been charged with “this” crime. It involves getting into this much more political and nuanced story about what prosecutors do with the law, what they think they can get away with, and that’s different in different places.

    In the Idaho example that we began with, that prosecutor now is out in the press saying, “Oh no, this has nothing to do with the abortion. The abortion has nothing to do with the case.” Who knows if that’s true or not, but it is good for people to know that this incident didn’t need the abortion trafficking law to result in criminal punishment for this abortion. And I think that’s a nuance that just isn’t coming across in most reporting.

    Certainly people who cover the criminal legal system a lot see that all the time. But because that kind of reporting and reporting on abortion are often siloed from one another, we aren’t learning across issues of what it is to deal with a prosecutor in a politicized case, and what power they have with the law that exceeds what many of us might think the law could actually do to us.

    JJ: Absolutely. And you noted it as one of many things calling for an “appreciation of the power of storytelling,” of the way that we present these issues to people. And you make a point that we’ve talked about on CounterSpin, which is, if you just read newspapers, you might think of abortion as, like, there’s two sides. It’s an “issue.” We’re going to see who “wins.” And the reality is so much more complicated.

    And, in fact, reproductive rights advocates and providers have never believed that Roe was enough to truly protect all people’s ability to access abortion. I mean, the Hyde Amendment itself would tell you that. But they also didn’t think the overturning of Roe was going to shut down all of their work. But the main idea presented by a lot of politicians, and by corporate media, is that abortion comes down to electoral politics or Supreme Court rulings. And that’s just always been misleading, hasn’t it, about where this actual fight is?

    MGG: It really says something about mainstream political media’s value of the lives of women, or anyone who has an abortion, how reproductive rights are seen within the broader context of politics in the United States, that this has truly been treated as a separate, special issue that doesn’t have very much to do with people who actually need abortions; it’s mostly about voters, right? Or it’s about the Supreme Court, and what voters think about what’s going to happen at the Supreme Court. It’s about something transactional that has nothing to do with the actual abortion itself.

    Maybe that’s because there’s still places in media where there’s a reluctance to even say the word “abortion.” We have a president who’s reluctant to say the word “abortion.” So the reality of what it is to even have an abortion, what that entails, is something that has to be consciously brought into every story about this.

    Bracey Sherman on YouTube (via Independent)

    YouTube (7/19/22)

    One of the people that I really admire, in how she does this, is Renee Bracey Sherman, who is the co-executive director of a group called We Testify that does abortion storytelling work. That’s how they do their advocacy. And when she testified in Congress earlier this year—or may have been the end of last year, I’m not 100% sure, but sometime since the Dobbs decision came down—in her testimony, she actually verbally gave the instructions for how to use medication for an abortion, how to use misoprostol and mifepristone. So that’s in the congressional record now; that’s on C-SPAN. That is information that could be considered against the law to share in some states. The degree to which information is powerful here, I think isn’t quite fully appreciated.

    And what that also means is that every story kind of feels like people are reinventing the wheel, particularly in mainstream outlets. There has been incredible reporting from outlets like Rewire, formerly RH Reality Check; from outlets like Bitch, which is no longer; outlets like Jezebel, which we’ll see—I think they just got revived today, maybe.

    There’s been incredible reporting under the umbrella of “women’s media” that has gotten to this nuance, and that was really marginalized right up until the moment Roe was a big story in 2022. Or whenever there’s an election, and abortion becomes a story for five minutes.

    So the information is out there; it just needs to become part of the practice, particularly in legacy media, and to realize that this is a story that has implications for people in their day-to-day lives, not just every four years, or when a Supreme Court seat opens up.

    Steve Roberts:

    Rome News-Tribune (11/16/23)

    JJ: Exactly. And I’m just following on from that to say how galled I am by pieces like—OK, this one’s from Steven Roberts. But still, it’s reflective of, I think, a pervasive kind of Beltway media attitude, and it’s a syndicated column, the headline’s “Why the Abortion Issue Matters.”

    All right, so already I read “issue,” so I know that my human rights are, first and foremost, a political football, like an “issue” to be considered. And then in the same breath, there’s the idea that somebody needs to have it explained why it matters. Somebody doesn’t understand why it’s important. But then he goes on to explain that why it matters has to do with what’s damaging to Joe Biden, and whether Trump might be able to finesse a new line on abortion.

    But I guess what maybe bothered me most was that Steve Roberts says that polls show US public opinion is clear and it’s unchanged. Americans want legal abortion, they want access to abortion. And he then says that, since Roe, “abortion remained an abstraction to pro–abortion rights voters. Their rights were protected and their attitude was complacent.”

    Now, I don’t doubt that Steven Roberts had a lot of cocktail parties with some complacent white women. But reporting is not supposed to be, as my mother-in-law used to say, something that happens to or near an editor. You’re supposed to seek out the views of the people who are affected by the things that you’re talking about. And reproductive justice, of course, extends beyond the right to abortion: the right to have a pregnancy, and a child, in a safe, healthy environment.

    It just seems like reporting about abortion has so much to do with who they talk to or who they listen to, and that defines their understanding of what the meaning of access to this right means.

    And I guess I just want to say, you’re a reporter. What would you like to see more or less of in this coverage?

    MGG: One thing that’s maddening about that kind of coverage is it feels like, at its best, when somebody who has that kind of perspective does decide to actually reach outside their small network of friendly sources, and maybe try to contact somebody who works in a clinic, or is a provider, or is involved in some direct way with the provision of abortion, they tend to not treat those people with a lot of respect.

    This comes down to who they listen to and who they believe. The best reporting on abortion comes from people who are not treating their sources like a pump that they can just hit at will and get what they need out of them.

    The stories I was hearing from people who work in clinics, leading up to Dobbs and immediately after—hearing from reporters they had never heard from before, reporters who wanted to come by in two hours and talk to someone who just had an abortion. I mean, just outrageous stuff that I can absolutely hear an editor telling them, like, “Oh, that would be a great idea.” But it is your job to push back and say, “I don’t know. I think that maybe a better time to interview someone about their personal experience of abortion isn’t an hour after they’ve had one when it might be illegal.”

    There hasn’t been a full appreciation of how people’s ability to speak out about this is going to be shaped by who is worried about the legal consequences of abortion. We are disproportionately probably going to see people in states that have legal abortion access, people who might not fully appreciate the criminal risks that they’re having abortions under, which does include a lot of those white cocktail party women, wherever they live.

    It’s a lot, I understand, to ask of the way that news, particularly political news that treats abortion as just an issue that we return to when it’s time to talk about elections or what voters want, but that kind of reporting feels so unnecessary and so out of pace with where we’re at right now.

    We need stories about this gap between the rhetoric of politicians, in places like Texas and Montana, about valuing mothers, showing that that’s not actually playing out in the lives of people in those states, who are having huge maternal mortality rates, who aren’t able to get access to childcare, all of these women that they say they’re going to support because they’re taking abortion away from them, but “don’t worry, we’ll support you when you’re pregnant and parenting.”

    That support is not showing up. It was never that great before this moment, and it’s not great now.

    And those are the people that need more scrutiny. Those are the people who should be held to account. There’s so many attorneys general, there are so many Republican lawmakers, there are so many judges, oh my God, there’s some incredible judges with really consequential abortion cases in front of them right now.

    New Republic: The Judge Who Wants to Drag Us Back to the Victorian Era

    New Republic (9/27/23)

    My favorite/least favorite is Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. He’s in Amarillo, Texas. He gets a lot of cases from the right, because he takes 98 to 99 percent of cases that come to his court. So if you are a conservative who wants a favorable ruling, this is your guy.

    And he has a case before him right now that could result in mifepristone being essentially delisted from the FDA’s approved drug listings, which would mean that it would be much more difficult to get, and there would be legal pathways to it that would be cut off.

    Where is the scrutiny on him? I feel like the frame maybe has to be shifted around now: The story of abortion is about the story of people who are creating harm in the lives of people who now have to fight that much harder to access abortion.

    I think that’s the other thing that’s been lost. Abortions haven’t changed. I mean, there are people who have not been able to have abortions as a result of this, but abortions haven’t stopped. They’ve just become less accessible. And I feel like that nuance is also often lost.

    It’s, again, this binary of pro-choice or anti-abortion, or however it gets bracketed out. But the reality is, no matter what people’s politics of abortion might be, they’re going to need an abortion, or they know someone who needs an abortion, or has had an abortion. And access is really the much more critical question than politics.

    JJ: And I also feel that in your reporting, you’ve worked out or explored the intersectional aspect and the historical aspect that is outside of the frame of the way that a lot of corporate news media are coming to this as, “It’s an electoral politics issue of 2024,” when in fact it’s a deep issue. You’ve connected attacks on women’s reproductive rights to attacks on trans people. There’s a bigger picture going on here, and, just finally, there’s a need for journalism right now.

    MGG: Yeah, I think it’s—I’m trying to think of how I could possibly sum that up.

    JJ: Please. I don’t know. That’s why I asked you.

    New Republic: Conservatives Are Turning to a 150-Year-Old Obscenity Law to Outlaw Abortion

    New Republic (4/12/23)

    MGG: In terms of the history, I love bringing that into my work. I know that that’s certainly not something that everybody can do in their own journalism, but set me up to write about the Comstock Act of 1873, and I will go to town, and I will find a way to bring that into reporting on what’s going on in the present.

    JJ: Because it’s meaningful, right? If you’re trying to explain to people how we got to where we are, I don’t feel like history is outside of reporting. You’re trying to tell people how we got to where we are, and that’s crucial.

    MGG: And it leaves avenues open to opponents of abortion when those aren’t under scrutiny. One of the reasons I’m writing about the Comstock Act right now is there’s this  legal theory emerging on the right, and among anti-abortion groups, that we already have a national abortion ban in the Comstock Act of 1873, which was never fully taken off the books, and did criminalize using the mail system to mail any instrument that could cause an abortion.

    And so they’re testing this out now in places like district courts in Texas. They’re trying to build something that would create precedent, or get it in front of the Supreme Court again, that essentially says we already have this national prohibition on abortion.

    That is not getting the coverage—outside of a couple of legal experts who focus on abortion reproductive rights—that it needs. Because it’s complicated; I get it. But I just can see a story like that, in a year, people describing it as like “the law that no one saw coming.” So we could see it coming if we wanted to.

    JJ: I’m going to end right there. We’ve been speaking with Melissa Gira Grant. You can find her work, primarily at the New Republic, online at TNR.com. Melissa Gira Grant, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    MGG: Thanks for having me.

     

     

    The post ‘The Reality of What It Is to Have an Abortion Has to Be Brought Into Every Story’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace

          CounterSpin231208.mp3

     

    Jewish Voice for Peace protest in Seattle against the Gaza siege, December 2, 2023

    (CC image: Jewish Voice for Peace)

    This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues horrific: The Washington Post is reporting, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed a reported 1,200 people, to more than 17,000.

    In this country, Columbia University has suspended two student groups protesting in support of Palestinian human rights and human beings, though the official message couldn’t specify which policies, exactly, had been violated.

    There are many important and terrible things happening in the world right now—from fossil fuel companies working to undo any democratic restraints on their ability to profit from planetary destruction; to drugmakers who’ve devastated the lives of millions using the legal system to say money, actually, can substitute for accountability; to an upcoming election that is almost too much to think about, and the Beltway press corps acting like it’s just another day.

    But the devastation of Gaza and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it—and the failure of those efforts, as people nevertheless keep speaking up, keep protesting—is the story for today.

    Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. We talk with her this week on CounterSpin.

          CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change.

          CounterSpin231208Banter.mp3

     

    The post Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Corporate Media Reluctant to Report on UAW Victory From Workers’ Perspective

     

    After a historic six weeks on strike, United Auto Workers members ratified new contracts with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (which owns Dodge/Chrysler). Workers are set to receive 25% raises over the life of their contract, cost-of-living allowances tied to inflation, the right to strike over plant closures, and more benefits in their new contract.

    But outlets like the Wall Street Journal (10/30/23), New York Times (11/9/23) and Bloomberg (11/9/23), still struggling to report on labor from a workers’ perspective (see FAIR.org, 9/26/23), instead focused on the economy at large or predictive reporting. Throughout the strike, media seemed interested in any story—how the union will wreck the economy, Musk’s potential countermoves, why the EV transition is doomed—that didn’t focus on bread-and-butter gains for union members.

    Unions vs. the economy

    CBS Detroit: Economic losses exceed $9.3 billion as UAW strike continues

    CBS Detroit (10/23/23) didn’t put the big number in perspective—or acknowledge that its source worked for the companies the UAW was on strike against.

    Bloomberg (11/7/23, 11/9/23) reported that the work stoppage cost the auto industry billions of dollars. Others mourned the revenue loss for car companies, running headlines about the millions or billions lost (Fortune, 11/30/23; CNN, 10/31/23; PBS, 10/24/23).

    Meanwhile, on earnings calls in late October, GM reported that total company revenue was up 5%, to more than $44 billion, boosting profits to $3.6 billion. And Ford assured investors that “our revenue remains strong, up 11%.” As Axios (11/30/23) pointed out, while Stellantis said the labor action cost it $3.2 billion, “it also reported that net revenues so far this year were at $48 billion, up 7% compared to the same quarter in 2022.”

    CBS News Detroit (10/23/23) said that economic losses to the nation as a whole had surpassed $9.3 billion, citing Anderson Economic Group, consultants whose clients include General Motors and Ford, who had previously said that even a 10-day UAW strike could cost the US economy $5.6 billion, a line that was parroted throughout the media (Bloomberg, 9/10/23; New York Times, 9/13/23; Forbes, 9/15/23; see FAIR.org, 9/26/23). Even if the strike had cost the economy $9 billion, for perspective, that’s 1/30th of 1% of the US GDP.

    As more workers continued to join the strike across the country and tentative deals were made, outlets like the Wall Street Journal (10/30/23) bemoaned rising labor costs. It even went as far (10/31/23) as to warn that high wages were “a potential complication for the Federal Reserve’s fight to lower inflation.”

    “Even before the raise they are striking for, Detroit’s unionized auto workers are probably the best paid in the world after factoring in benefits such as healthcare,” said the Journal (10/11/23). “Their employers can afford it for now, but high labor costs box them in strategically.”

    However, at the same time, GM CEO Mary Barra bragged to investors about the company’s profitability in an October 24 earnings call (Motley Fool, 10/24/23). “It’s been clear coming out of Covid that the wages and benefits across the US economy would need to increase because of inflation and other factors,” she added.

    Unions vs. green energy

    NPR: Auto companies are racing to meet an electric future, and transforming the workforce

    “These [electric] vehicles have fewer parts, and making them will eventually require fewer workers,” NPR (10/1/22) reported. But it isn’t necessarily so.

    In its write-up about Biden taking a “victory lap” in the wake of the agreement, Bloomberg (11/7/23) wrote that “the strike put Biden’s pro-union bonafides up against his clean-energy push” for electric vehicles, because “union leaders and workers worried that push would cost them jobs, reduce wages and favor non-unionized companies.”

    A similar piece in the New York Times (11/9/23) said the president made the case for clean energy, even “as many workers fear the president’s climate change agenda could endanger their jobs.” However, later in the same article, reporters Lisa Friedman and Neal Boudette quoted Syracuse University’s David Popp, who studies the economics of technological change, saying that “there doesn’t seem to be a consensus yet on whether” electric vehicles will require fewer workers.

    The reporters also floated as a fact that “it takes fewer than half the laborers to assemble an all-electric vehicle as it does to build a gasoline-powered car.” Similarly, there is no consensus or data to back up this claim.

    So where did it come from? Ford estimated in 2017 that there could be a 30% reduction in labor hours per unit for electric vehicles. In 2019, Morgan Stanley’s analyst Adam Jonas (CNBC, 3/15/19) said tech start-ups like Tesla and Rivian could build electric vehicles at “a 50% reduction in direct labor…or more.”

    Auto executives continue to repeat the line that as EVs have fewer moving parts, they will require less labor. In 2022, Ford president and CEO Jim Farley told reporters, “It takes 40% less labor to make an electric car.” The America First Policy Institute, led by former Trump administration officials and endorsed by Trump himself, put out a widely-cited research report (7/13/23) citing the estimates from Ford themselves in 2017 and Farley’s comments in 2022.

    But according to CNN Business (10/6/23), “Several research reports…found little total difference in the labor hour requirements of EV manufacturing compared to gas-powered cars.” For instance, a recent Carnegie Mellon University study (7/13/22) estimated the EV supply chain could require more labor than gas-powered cars when taking other components, such as batteries, into account.

    As CNN‘s report demonstrated, such information was readily available to journalists during the UAW strike—and dispelling a false talking point would have been a very useful role for journalism to play. But most were content to simply repeat Ford’s talking point, no questions asked.

    Demonizing union leaders

    NYT: New U.A.W. Chief Has a Nonnegotiable Demand: Eat the Rich

    A New York Times profile (10/5/23) described UAW president Shawn Fain as “a confrontational figure who vilifies the automakers while alarming Wall Street.”

    Media have also struggled to understand this new wave of union activism, often lifting up stories of highly educated or “relatively privileged” “salts“—employees who join a workplace with the intent of forming a union. For example, Bloomberg (4/3/23) calls them “the mostly secret ingredient in a once-in-a-generation wave of union organizing.” Others have made efforts to put a spotlight on specific organizers, like Jaz Brizack or Chris Smalls. 

    At the UAW, that spotlight was put on the reformist UAW president Shawn Fain and his team. “Led by Fain and a cohort of outside labor activists, [the UAW leadership] drove a campaign that company executives have called acrimonious and theatrical,” described the Wall Street Journal (11/14/23). The paper also found the time to run nearly 1,000 words (11/7/23) on Fain’s “Eat the Rich” shirt. That article followed a 2,500-word piece (10/30/23) about how “Three Young Activists Who Never Worked in an Auto Factory Helped Deliver Huge Win for the UAW.”

    Fain was elected UAW president earlier this year by less than 500 votes (Labor Notes, 3/3/23), running against a scandal-ridden caucus that had been in power for decades. Fain won after a rule change let union members vote directly for leadership, instead of leaving the choice to chapter officials.

    He brought on a communications expert who worked with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as a lawyer and a former labor journalist who have both worked with the NewsGuild, among other unions. Like the Wall Street Journal article (10/30/23) that painted the UAW’s leadership as outside agitators, others describe him and his team as “adversarial” or “socialist-aligned.”

    However, Fain was elected in the most democratic election of the UAW’s recent history, in a union previously described as having a “legacy of corruption.” Some blame Fain for promising too much to members on the contract, or said his “demands have gone too far,” such as calling for a 32-hour work week at 40 hours of pay for autoworkers. “I want to be clear on this point—I didn’t raise members’ expectations,” Fain rebutted on one of his many Facebook Live posts (10/13/23). “Our broken economy is what’s raising our members’ expectations, and our members are right to be angry.”

     

    The post Corporate Media Reluctant to Report on UAW Victory From Workers’ Perspective appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Press Relayed Israeli Claims of Secret Hospital Base With Insufficient Skepticism

    A cover image of the New York Post (11/16/23) depicted a supposedly shocking find. The headline “Guns Behind the MRI Machine” accompanied a photo of what Israeli troops had allegedly uncovered: Hamas guns at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza.

    On the Post cover were fewer than a dozen AK-47s and matching magazines, as well as a few tactical vests. In its subhead, the Post called this “proof Hamas used hospital as  military base in stunning war crime.”

    Many other media outlets reported Israel’s claims—and accompanying photos and videos the IDF offered as evidence—with little pushback other than Hamas’s denials and an acknowledgment that the outlet could not independently verify the claims. “IDF ‘Found Clear Evidence’ of Hamas Operation out of Al-Shifa Hospital, Says Spokesperson,” was an NBC News headline (11/15/23); Fox News (11/15/23) had “Watch: Israel Finds Weapons, Military Equipment Used by Hamas in Key Gaza Hospital After Raid, IDF Says.”

    Israel’s assault on Al Shifa hospital provoked widespread international outrage, so a great deal hinged on its claim that the hospital was being used as a military base. But there are many reasons to question this display of weaponry, questions that imply that not only did the Israeli military make a weak case, but that some media outlets and pundits were too quick to take this presentation at face value.

    The laws of war

    Israeli Defense Force animation depicting what they claimed was underneath the Al-Shifa hospital.

    Israeli computer animation (YouTube, 10/27/23) depicting what was claimed to be “the main headquarters for Hamas’ terrorist activity” beneath Al Shifa Hospital.

    While civilian infrastructure, and in particular medical infrastructure, are protected under the laws of war, the Israeli government claimed that the hospital’s protection was nullified because Hamas was using it as a military base, using the medical staff and patients as human shields.

    The IDF released a 3D animation (YouTube, 10/27/23) depicting Al Shifa as “the main headquarters for Hamas’ terrorist activity,” with a warren of underground chambers hiding crates of weapons, missiles, barrels and meeting rooms bedecked with Islamic flags.

    The US government supported this line of thinking (ABC News, 11/16/23). The Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/14/23) spelled out the argument:

    The law of war in this case is clear: Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Hamas’s use of Al Shifa for military purposes vitiates the protected status granted to hospitals. Israel is still required to give warning and use means proportionate to the anticipated military advantage, and it has.

    But the law of war is not, in fact, clear in the way the Journal claims. “Even if there is a military facility operating under the hospital, this does not allow Israel to bomb the site,” the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (11/7/23) said in a statement before the hospital raid.

    Even if a hospital were used for “acts harmful to the enemy,” that does not give that enemy “the right to bombard it for two days and completely destroy it,” Mathilde Philip-Gay, an expert in international humanitarian law at France’s Lyon 3 University, told the Guardian (11/17/23).

    “Even if the building loses its special protection, all the people inside retain theirs,” Rutgers Law School international law expert Adil Haque told the Washington Post (11/15/23). “Anything that the attacking force can do to allow the humanitarian functions of that hospital to continue, they’re obligated to do.” The director of the hospital, Mohammad Abu Salmiya, said that 179 patients died while the facility was surrounded by Israeli forces and had to be buried in a mass grave (Al Jazeera, 11/14/23). (Abu Salmiya was later arrested by Israeli forces along with other Palestinian medical personnel—Al Jazeera, 11/11/23.)

    After the raid, viewing the evidence, Human Rights Watch was not at all persuaded. “Hospitals have special protections under international humanitarian law,” said Human Rights Watch UN director Louis Charbonneau (Reuters, 11/16/23):

    Doctors, nurses, ambulances and other hospital staff must be permitted to do their work and patients must be protected. Hospitals only lose those protections if it can be shown that harmful acts have been carried out from the premises. The Israeli government hasn’t provided any evidence of that.

    “The IDF says attacks are justified because Hamas fighters use the hospital as a military command center,” Amnesty International Australia (11/27/23) noted. “But so far, they’ve failed to produce any credible evidence to substantiate this claim.”

    Shrugging off skepticism

    Washington Post: Evidence confirms Israel’s al-Shifa claims, so critics move the goal posts

    The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin (11/20/23) dismissed demands that Israel produce evidence of the “command-and-control center” it said justified its assault on the Al Shifa hospital.

    Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin (11/20/23) shrugged off skepticism of the evidence presented about the hospital, scorning critics who demanded proof that the hospital was a “command center”—which she dismissed as “a generic term without definition and without legal significance.” Rubin insisted: “It was used as a military facility. Period.”

    AP (11/23/23), however, pointed out that it was the Israeli military, not the military’s critics, who had promised evidence that the hospital served as “an elaborate Hamas command-and-control center under the territory’s largest healthcare facility.” After the hospital’s capture, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Euronews (11/17/23) that Al Shifa was not Hamas’s headquarters after all: “Khan Younis, which is in the southern part of Gaza Strip, is the real headquarters of Hamas,” he said.

    Another Post columnist, Kathleen Parker (11/17/23), admitted that details of the military’s find were scarce and that perhaps media shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but then immediately said the photographic release “seems” to vindicate Israel:

    As media teams try to understand what’s happening there, details are few, leaving much room for speculation and/or affirmation of one’s preferred narrative.

    Even so, the video, which has been replayed by dozens of news outlets, seems to confirm what Israel has long claimed that Hamas uses innocent Palestinians as barricades by installing their headquarters and arsenals beneath schools, hospitals and other public institutions in a vast complex of subterranean tunnels.

    About that supposed headquarters beneath the hospital: While Israel showed off images of a “tunnel” under the hospital, Newsweek (11/15/23) pointed out that it’s long been known that the facility had an extensive sub-basement—because it was built by Israel in 1983.

    Catastrophe for hospitals

    Middle East Eye: Israeli forces storm al-Shifa hospital where thousands seek refuge

    Middle East Eye (11/15/23): “While Israel says its military has been conducting a ‘precise and targeted operation’ at Al Shifa, Palestinians at the hospital say civilians trying to flee have been fired upon.”

    Israel’s assault on Gaza has generally been a catastrophe for Gaza hospitals (UN News, 11/13/23; BBC, 11/13/23), and there has been considerable damage to Gaza hospitals in previous Israeli assaults (Guardian, 3/24/09; Newsweek, 7/30/14; Guardian, 5/16/21).

    And the Israeli operation at the hospital was certainly stunning. The Middle East Eye (11/15/23) reported:

    Troops broke through the northern walls of the complex, instead of entering via the main gate to the east, at around 2 am local time on Wednesday, according to local sources and health officials.

    They went building to building inside the large facility, removing doctors, patients and displaced people to the courtyards before interrogating them, Middle East Eye has learned.

    Some people were stripped naked, blindfolded and detained, according to doctors who spoke to Al Jazeera Arabic, one of the few international channels with access to sources within the hospital.

    This isn’t to say media outlets shouldn’t scrutinize what Hamas fighters do in civilian areas, but there is a lack of skepticism in media—especially for television news and tabloids that depend on gripping photography—when it comes to Israel’s presentation of its findings in Gaza that lead to more murkiness.

    Research assistance: Pai Liu, Keating Zelenke

    The post Press Relayed Israeli Claims of Secret Hospital Base With Insufficient Skepticism appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Melissa Gira Grant on Abortion Rights & Politics

     

          CounterSpin231201.mp3

     

    This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or undo democratic processes when those processes accurately reflect the public desire to protect reproductive rights. Methods include “challenging election results, refusing to bring state laws into line with voter-backed changes, moving to strip state courts of their power to consider abortion-related laws, and challenging the citizen-led ballot initiative process itself.”

    So there is a way to cover abortion access as a political issue without reducing it to one. But too many outlets seem to have trouble shaking the framing of abortion as a “controversy,” or as posing problems for this or that politician, rather than presenting it as a matter of basic human rights that majorities in this country have long supported, and centering in their coverage the people who are being affected by its creeping criminalization.

    Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic, and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and of the forthcoming A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America. She’s been reporting on abortion for years, and joins us this week to talk about it.

          CounterSpin231201Grant.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of marriage and ideology.

          CounterSpin231201banter.mp3

     

    The post Melissa Gira Grant on Abortion Rights & Politics appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • WaPo Tells Women: If You Want Marriage, Compromise With Misogyny 

     

    Washington Post: If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage

    The Washington Post (11/22/23) insists that young people’s political “mismatch means that someone will need to compromise”—and it’s not hard to figure out who that “someone” is supposed to be.

    The Washington Post editorial board (11/22/23) has its knickers in a twist over marriage. “If Attitudes Don’t Shift, a Political Dating Mismatch Will Threaten Marriage,” it recently warned. The Post lamented the increase in political polarization because it portends “the collapse of American marriage.”

    You see, the Post has identified a “growing ideological divide” between single young men and women, with far more women identifying as liberal—a gap that’s “particularly pronounced among Gen Z white people,” the Post board takes care to point out.

    When you add this to a 2021 survey of college students that found “71% of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views,” the Post says, you find yourself with a “mismatch [that] means that someone will need to compromise.” And since it’s the Democrats who say they won’t date Republicans, that would mean the young liberal women are the ones who need to do the compromising.

    Oh sure, they could just decide not to marry—but then they’ll be even unhappier than those in politically mixed couples, the Post warns, hyperlinking to the Institute for Family Studies as its source for that statement.

    In fact, the right-wing Institute for Family Studies lurks throughout the editorial, along with its senior fellow Brad Wilcox, who was involved in discredited anti-same-sex marriage research that was influential in that political battle a decade ago. Together, the Post references or links to them three separate times in its editorial. (The IFS argument about marriage happiness is flawed too, by the way.)

    Ginning up a story

    Washington Post: Political ideology of Americans who are young and single

    When you look at the Post‘s chart (11/22/23), every time either of the darker lines crosses its lighter counterpart, that’s young men and women switching places as the gender with more conservatives or liberals in it—a frequent phenomenon that disproves the thesis of the editorial it accompanies.

    Looking at the chart in the article, you see the political identification numbers the Post is so worried about bounce around a great deal. If you look at the data from the 2021 survey of political identification instead of 2022, you find that young men and women were much more closely aligned that year—with a 5-point gender gap in identifying as either liberal or conservative, as opposed to a 9-point gap the following year.

    The editorial notes that “since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016,” the percentage of young women identifying as liberal “has shot up,” while “young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.” But two years ago—after Trump had been out of office for a year—young men were much readier to identify as liberal than they were in either 2016 or 2022. The real lesson seems to be not that there are “Trump-era divisions between single men and women,” but that young people’s political beliefs—at least as expressed to pollsters—tend to fluctuate quite a bit.

    In fact, the editorial’s assumption that liberal women are going to have trouble matching up with conservative men doesn’t hold up to a quick glance at the chart. In five of the last 11 times the survey has been taken—going back to 2002—the percentage of young liberal men either matched or exceeded the number of young liberal women, and young conservative women outnumbered or equaled their male counterparts the same number of times. So unless the Post has a crystal ball that tells them that 2022 marked the start of a new era, it’s ginning up a story out of nothing.

    ‘Culture of seeking sameness’

    WaPo: For universities, the less said about controversial issues, the better

    The Post (11/10/23) urged universities to keep silent about issues like “institutional and structural racism” and reproductive freedom—as if such things had no bearing on the ability of students to take part in education.

    But the number-fudging has a purpose: to chastise people—primarily young, female liberals—for being so political and uncompromising. The Post writes:

    Unfortunately, Americans have not equipped themselves to discuss, debate and reason across these divides. Americans have increasingly sorted themselves according to ideological orientation.

    “Americans” are a diverse lot, though. The reason that “Americans” can’t “reason across these divides” is because one side of the divide has firmly committed itself to a different reality that permits no reasoning, even criminalizing the expression of ideas it disagrees with. The board makes clear, though, that those are not the Americans it’s most worried about:

    They are working, living and socializing with people who think the same things they do. Particularly on college campuses, a culture of seeking sameness has set up young Americans for disappointment.

    This is the academic version of corporate media’s perennial “move to the right” advice. (Tellingly, the hyperlink goes to another Post editorial—11/10/23—advising universities to shut up about issues like “institutional and structural racism” and reproductive freedom.) Yet it’s “particularly on college campuses”—and not, say, evangelical churches or the military—where young people have a “culture of seeking sameness,” and need to open themselves to other, more right-wing ideas:

    They expect people to share their own convictions and commitments. But people’s insight and understanding about the world often come from considering alternative perspectives that may at first seem odd or offensive.

    What’s “odd or offensive” to a young liberal woman surely includes things like the “outright misogyny” the Post acknowledges is popular among some “boys and young men.” Yet instead of centering its solutions on things like combating such misogyny in our culture, the Post would rather ask women to suck it up and kindly consider those perspectives.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

    The post WaPo Tells Women: If You Want Marriage, Compromise With Misogyny  appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’

    CounterSpin interview with Mark Weisbrot on Javier Milei

    Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot about Argentine President-elect Javier Milei for the November 24, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin231124Weisbrot.mp3

     

    Fox: Javier Milei crushes Argentine left, becomes world's first libertarian head of state

    Fox News (11/19/23)

    Janine Jackson: Many people are hearing the name Javier Milei for the first time about now. Milei has just been elected president of Argentina—56% to 44% are the numbers we’re hearing right now—over the country’s economic minister, Sergio Massa.

    Fox News trumpeted, “Javier Milei crushes Argentine Left, Becomes World’s First Libertarian Head of State.” Donald Trump announced that Milei would “truly make Argentina great again,” and Elon Musk declared, “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.” That reception gives you some indication of where this is going, and what it could mean.

    Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He’s author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy, and co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mark Weisbrot.

    Mark Weisbrot: Thanks, Janine. Great to be here.

    JJ: Lest there be a lot of mystery: To start with, Javier Milei carried around a chainsaw as a prop on the campaign trail, and that was about “cutting public spending.” And he described the state as a “pedophile in a kindergarten.” And don’t think he’s done, because he went on to say “the state is a pedophile in a kindergarten with the children chained up and bathed in Vaseline.”

    It reminds me of Duterte saying he’d be “happy to slaughter” 3 million drug addicts in the Philippines, and of course it reminds folks of Trump and his current pledge to “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of this country” (and that’s just from this week).

    It’s histrionic. We have politicians saying things you hear supervillains in the movies say. And I guess the concern is that they will be underestimated as merely colorful and over the top, and not considered in terms of the actual real-world things that they want to do and are capable of.

    So there, that’s my setup. What are the material things that listeners need to know about Javier Milei and his election?

    CEPR: Argentina Election: “No one so extremist on economic issues has been elected president of a South American country,” Says CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot

    CEPR (11/17/23)

    MW: Well, the material craziness of Milei is an important part of the story. And as you mentioned, or hinted at, by the examples you gave, the media have been comparing him to Trump, and he likes it. And so it is part of that phenomenon, which we could talk about for hours, of crazy people getting elected in situations and ways in which they wouldn’t in the past. And, of course, that’s the big anthropological sociological question, is how does this happen?

    But I won’t get into that. What I’d rather talk about is what his craziness means. I think that’s more interesting to your audience as well.

    And so his craziness is partly a coherent extreme-right libertarian view. He says, “Every time the state intervenes, it’s a violent action that harms the right to private property, and in the end limits our freedom.” And he applies this to fixing the problem of hunger, fixing the problem of poverty or employment. So he’s really as extreme as you get in that right-wing libertarian set of ideas.

    Reuters: Argentina's Milei says shutting central bank 'non-negotiable'

    Reuters (11/24/23)

    So the question is, in terms of policy, what does that mean? First, he wants to abolish the central bank, which of course would be a disaster, and almost no economist would support even thinking like that. And he wants to also dollarize the economy, which would probably also be a disaster; most economists would say that. They don’t even have the reserves for that at this point, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.

    So he has big things he would get rid of. He would get rid of some ministries. And certainly the chainsaw, a symbol. A guy walks around in a Batman costume with chainsaws, and he got elected president. He wants to cut public spending at least 15%, has no attachment whatsoever to anything like public education, healthcare and everything. So he would cut anything he can, and the economy would probably go into recession, almost certainly. And who knows where it would stop.

    JJ: He seems to have a definition of “socialism,” and this is what I feel like US media are going to pick up on, because, as you and I both know, they will have a lot of quotes from him, and they will have quotes from some people who disagree with him, but I don’t think they’re going to dig deep into the rhetoric. And so he talks about everything that happened from previous administrations in Argentina as “socialism,” and, I mean, how do we unpack that?

    MW: Yeah, that’s right. Argentina “has embraced socialist ideas for the last hundred years.” Of course, that’s crazy too.

    I don’t know what he’ll actually be able to do. That’s the first thing. He has only 39 seats out of 257 in the Lower House, and 8 out of 72 in the Senate.

    Now he does have a party aligned with him, that was the president from 2015 to ’19. And that was Macri. And that’s how he got elected, partly, because Macri and his party supported him; these are right-wing people, but they’re not as crazy as him.

    So it’s not clear what he’ll get done. This is going to be what we’ll see.

    You have to remember too that the government that he’s succeeding, the Peronists, they have a real movement, and they’ve gotten in the streets before when terrible things have happened; in 2001, four presidents resigned within less than two weeks, at the end of 2001. And that was because of protest.

    NYT: Who Is to Blame for Argentina’s Economic Crisis?

    New York Times (8/19/19)

    I think this is maybe where to start the story, because you guys focus on what the media are missing or getting wrong. And I think we really should start, I think, with what you don’t see in the media.

    You don’t see, for example, that in these last 20 years, the Peronists actually did very well. They first came to power with Néstor Kirchner in 2003. And you had, in the 12 years that followed, before Macri, you had a 71% decline in poverty, 81% decline in extreme poverty, and GDP, or income per person, grew by 42%, which, I compared it to Mexico, it’s three times as fast.

    So this was a very successful set of policies, but I haven’t seen that in any of the coverage. I wrote it in a New York Times op-ed a couple of years ago, but you don’t really see that part of the story.

    And that’s unfortunate, because people need to know that. And of course it’s partly because people don’t know that—the Argentine media is no better than here, the major media—that somebody like this could get elected.

    And, of course, what happened in this story, the other part of the story, I think, that’s really—well, first let’s start with the depression from 1998 to 2002. That was caused, overwhelmingly, by the IMF. And you can go back to the New York Times and read that, actually; at the time, they actually reported the IMF role.

    So that was a huge part of the story. Because as you know, as most of your listeners know, the IMF is primarily dominated by decision-making by the US Treasury Department.

    And then, of course, you had the Kirchners and the Peronists, and you had this long period where they did very well. And Macri himself—that was the president from 2015 to ’19—he wouldn’t have gotten to power, actually, if it weren’t for more things that came from the United States. And I can tell you that as well, depending on how much time you have.

    JJ: Please do; I think folks want to know where the US role is here.

    NYT: How Hedge Funds Held Argentina for Ransom

    New York Times (4/1/16)

    MW: Yeah, I think it’s really important, actually, for people here to know, because this was such a big thing. I mean, Argentina is obviously one of the largest economies in South America. And during this period, in the first decade of the 21st century, it wasn’t just Argentina that had this great rebound. Latin America as a whole reduced poverty from 44% to 28%, after having two decades of increasing poverty before that; that was 2003 to ’13, is the decade I’m looking at. That was a decade in which the majority of the hemisphere was governed by left governments for the first time ever.

    And then the United States, of course, played this role, which we’ll focus right now on Argentina, in trying to get rid of all of them, and making their lives difficult so that they would be ousted, a number of them by coup d’etat.

    So what happened in Argentina? They had to default to the IMF, in 2003, and the IMF backed down, and they defaulted on their private debt, right before they actually defaulted to the IMF, but the IMF rolled over the debt. So they had a big fight with the IMF and the private creditors, just to stabilize the economy. But they did that successfully, and they grew.

    And then in 2014, a New York judge decided that Argentina should not be able to pay its creditors, over 70% of its creditors, the ones who had accepted the restructured debt. And this was Thomas Griesa, a New York judge, and he did this on behalf of the vulture funds. These were funds that bought up the debt when it was very cheap in the early 2000s, and wanted to collect the full value of it.

    CEPR's Mark Weisbrot

    Mark Weisbrot: “The whole mess that got this guy elected was really created by the Macri government and that IMF agreement.”

    So he was trying to force the Argentine government to pay these US vulture funds. And he was doing it by cutting off the Argentines’ ability to pay all other creditors, until they would pay the vultures. And so that is part of what hurt the Argentina economy in 2014.

    And just to show you how political this was, in 2016, the same judge, Griesa, actually wrote an opinion where he lifted the injunction on paying this debt, that is, he reversed the decision, and he said he did it because, and this is an exact quote from him, “Put simply. President Macri’s election changed everything.” OK?

    So that’s partly how we got Macri, was him harming the Argentine economy right before that, and then, of course, reversing that tremendous harm as soon as Macri was elected. So there you go. There’s a big change. And it leads to another big change in Macri’s term because, OK, so Macri gets elected because of action that came from the US, and there are other actions as well, which I’ll describe.

    But then Macri goes and gets—and this is because of Trump’s influence on the IMF that it happened—the largest loan that the IMF ever gave to anybody, any country in the world, $57 billion in 2018. And the conditions on that loan were terrible. And they forced the economy into recession. And then, of course, when things started to go sour—which they did right away, because the big loan that they got just financed capital flight out of the country, and, of course, that led to all kinds of problems—the IMF doubled down and had more austerity, both fiscal policy and monetary policy. And so things got worse.

    And that actually leads you, really, to the situation you have today. That’s what created it: The economy, the 140% inflation that you have now, the whole mess that got this guy elected, was really created by the Macri government and that IMF agreement, and also other measures that the US took to deprive Argentina of dollars before Macri came to power as well.

    WaPo: Argentina set for sharp right turn as Trump-like radical wins presidency

    Washington Post (11/19/19)

    JJ: When you hear about having to make vulture funds whole, and the impact that has, I’m thinking Puerto Rico; I know that there’s lots of other places in the world that are coming to people’s mind. But then when you set that situation, so now I’m reading the Washington Post, which is trying to explain why did Milei get elected, and it’s saying:

    Voters in this nation of 46 million demanded a drastic change from a government that has sent the peso tumbling, inflation skyrocketing and more than 40% of the population into poverty.

    So they’re saying, well, Milei’s against this, the poverty and the problems that they’re having; he’s coming before the people and saying, “I’m going to shake that up.” And I don’t think, at least in this explanation, I’m not getting anything of the longer term history that you’re giving me. I’m getting, things were bad, Milei’s there to fix them, right?

    MW: Yeah. Although, I mean, I don’t think the media here like Milei. It’s just like Trump. It’s this irony that you have in a lot of these situations, where the media don’t like these people because they’re too extreme. The US didn’t even want Bolsonaro, for example, in Brazil, who, by the way, was one of the first calls, a video call, that Milei made when he won this election. The mainstream consensus here is that these guys are too crazy, but they still do help them win.

    JJ: Exactly….

    MW: This is a paradox that probably you all can figure out better than me.

    Vox: How young Argentines helped put a far-right libertarian into power

    Vox (11/20/23)

    JJ: I can’t. But you know what, you see the interviews, and we’re seeing them now, and folks who are listening will be seeing them, folks on the street in Argentina saying: “Well, there’s just too much inflation. There’s too much corruption.” Very sort of Trump-voter things of, “Well, I don’t like his social ideas, but his economic plans make sense.”

    People want change. And I think that we can acknowledge that people want change. And then folks come along and say, you know what I am? I’m different. I represent change.

    But where media don’t, to my mind, exercise their role is, well, why do people want change? And what does that have to do with the failure of existing systems, including economic systems? Instead, media just say, “I guess people just deep down want a kind of fascistic guy.” Even if they’re opposed, they still don’t dig deep enough, to my mind, into why folks were willing to do this Hail Mary play.

    MW: Yeah, and I think part of the media story is that most people in Argentina, as well as your audience, don’t know this historical record. I mean, imagine if all the voters knew that in the past 20 years, you had the majority of that time when the Peronists were in power, the numbers that I just told you; people did quite well in terms of reducing poverty enormously. And the real wage growth was 34% under the Kirchners, for example, over that period. And all these things happened, and increased spending on cash transfer programs, everything. And they did extremely well.

    Some people remember it, and that’s why they still got 44% of the vote, but not everybody is old enough, or even would necessarily understand the whole situation, not having seen it in print, or heard it on radio or television.

    Al Jazeera: Young Argentinians want change. Many see Javier Milei as their best option

    Al Jazeera (11/18/23)

    And so, yeah, it’s easy for this guy to come in here, he’s almost literally a clown, and even though probably a lot of people, even, who voted for him think his ideas are crazy, or that he’s crazy, you see quotes like that in the press: “Yeah, he’s crazy, but I’m voting for him anyway.” But they don’t have a way of seeing that there actually have been successful alternatives.

    And if we can go into the economics a little bit, I think part of the problem here is that the IMF loan is huge, and they have to pay that back. And of course they got some debt relief on the private debt, but the IMF doesn’t give any; they postponed the payment some, but it’s still going to come due. And, of course, you have capital flight because of that situation.

    And you have a situation where you have what’s called an inflation depreciation spiral. So if confidence in the currency is undermined by a variety of things, including the inflation itself, and including the debt problems that the IMF left them with, and then pretty soon it’s going to be the anticipated and real policies of the IMF that are going to cause capital to flee the country, as they did in 2018.

    So all of these things: What happens is capital flees the country, and that causes the currency to depreciate. And when the currency depreciates, then the price of all imports goes up, and then that causes more inflation, and then the increased inflation causes the currency to depreciate more.

    And that’s why it was so hard for this latest government before Milei to resolve this problem, because it’s a self-perpetuating spiral, something you don’t want to get into. And, of course, there are ways, it is possible, but again, that’s a very hard problem. And that was a result of the policies that came in overwhelmingly with the Macri government, and the IMF agreement that he followed.

    And you know, he even said it at one point, I don’t have the exact quote, but it was something like, “I did everything that I agreed to in this agreement, and the economy went down the toilet.” So even he realized that.

    But again, you’re not seeing that in the public discussion. All you saw up to the election is, the party in power must be responsible for what’s happening and they have to go. And then you see this guy Milei come in with really crazed ideas, and nobody even cares so much how crazy they are, it’s just different. That’s kind of how Trump won as well.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mark Weisbrot; he’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find their research and analysis online at CEPR.net. Mark Weisbrot, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    MW: Thank you.

    The post Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Worship of the Holy Framers Offers Us Nothing to Deal With the Problems We Have Today’

     

    CounterSpin interview with Scott Burris on US v. Rahimi

    Janine Jackson interviewed Temple Law School’s Scott Burris about United States v. Rahimi for the October 17, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin231117Burris.mp3

     

    CBS: Supreme Court gun case could reverse protections for domestic violence survivors. One woman has a message for the justices.

    CBS News (11/7/23)

    Janine Jackson: This week, the Supreme Court heard the case United States v. Rahimi, which asked whether existing law that prohibits the possession of firearms by persons subject to certain domestic violence restraining orders violates the Second Amendment.

    Media headlines were appropriately enough focused on domestic violence, and what it might mean if the Court decided that those who repeatedly assault and threaten to shoot women, as did Zackey Rahimi, or who fire shots in the air when their friend’s credit card is denied at Whataburger, as did Zackey Rahimi, should perhaps be denied further access to guns. An appeals court, the infamous Fifth Circuit, had struck down the law because they said they couldn’t find evidence of the Founding Fathers talking about that sort of thing.

    Well, past the headlines, virtually all media accounts recognized that whatever is decided in Rahimi, that way of thinking about the law and its application is a problem.

    We’re joined now by Scott Burris. He’s professor at Temple Law School and Temple School of Public Health, and he directs the Center for Public Health Law Research. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Scott Burris.

    Scott Burris: Good day!

    JJ: As reporting has acknowledged, you can’t make sense of Rahimi without talking about Bruen, or New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, decided in 2022. And I want to ask you to explain what happened there that is shaping events now, but I want to frame it a little bit. Because you address gun violence as a matter of public health—appropriately to my mind, but not necessarily the most common framework, and I think there’s even a bias against researching it that way. But what did Bruen do, and especially in terms of our ability to address gun violence as a public health concern?

    Politico: Clarence Thomas Created a Confusing New Rule That’s Gutting Gun Laws

    Politico (7/28/23)

    SB: You might say that Bruen represents the reason why Clarence Thomas has stayed on the Supreme Court for all these years, waiting for the majority to change, because in Bruen, he finally gets to do I think what he as a jurisprude has long wanted to do, and that is to put originalism, or a version of originalism, at the center of constitutional interpretation. He wants us to ask, well, what did the Framers think of this particular problem, and what would they have thought of this particular legal solution? And assuming he could figure the answer out to either of those questions, which he feels quite confident judges can, that’s the standard we use to see whether that regulation today should be allowed to stand.

    JJ: So, I mean, is that as dumb as it sounds? The Constitution doesn’t say anything about domestic violence, so, oops!

    SB: If you go back and ask the Framers, what do they think about a guy shooting off an automatic pistol at a Whataburger after he’s had trouble with his credit card and then gets into a car crash, they literally would not understand what you were talking about. None of those things existed.

    And, of course, as a group of half slave-owning, pretty much all wealthy white men in 1789, domestic violence was not a concept that would have had any meaning to them, even if they could associate it with anything that was going on in their time.

    So if we want to control the modern risks of guns, and the many ways those risks ripple out through society, through various forms of violence, and also of course suicide and so on, “we are limited to what the Framers would have decided was bad and what solutions they would have picked” is limiting us to a very few regulations.

    And that is in part the goal. One of the things that originalism does, like the companion doctrine of the Clear Statement Rule in administrative law that the Court has adopted, is to make it very difficult to pass laws or issue regulations that deal with modern problems.

    It’s meant to do that in the belief, I suppose, if I’m being charitable, that somehow the modern regulatory state that grew up with the modern world has somehow perverted or polluted the core idea of the United States as it was articulated by the Framers in the 18th century. That’s the nice way to think about why this is happening.

    The other context you might put this in is the 50-year war of industry and the right to hobble government and to free business from regulation, no matter how necessary and no matter how sensible.

    Regulatory Review: One Year On, Bruen Really Is As Bad As It Reads

    Regulatory Review (8/2/23)

    JJ: And it seems opportunistic, in the sense that the Constitution or the Framers didn’t say that corporations’ political spending was the same thing as free speech, but somehow it’s OK to interpret that for a modern era. You said, it’s “historicism, not history.” There’s something meaningful there, right?

    SB: I always try and be fair, like the way I’d want a Supreme Court justice to act. So we have to say that there is no perfect way of interpreting a legal text. If you interpret from history, whether you’re talking about legislative intent in a statute, or the Framers’ intent in the Constitution, you’re going to be making a kind of guess, and one hopes that you make that guess as thoughtfully and carefully and in as unbiased a way as possible.

    If you are trying to make good public policy, if you’re balancing interests, as the style that dominated in the 20th century would do, you’re trying to say, well, what would the spirit of the Constitution dictate today, given these new kinds of problems? But there again, too, you are trying to decide what’s best, based on your best judgment.

    I think that the big difference between the historical, if we can call it that, approach of Bruen, and the traditional, or modern tradition of balancing tests is that in the balancing tests we are talking about facts. How many people get killed by guns? How do those gun deaths happen? What are ways to reduce the risk of guns, or of preventing people who are dangerous from getting guns? What evidence do we have? You can be very transparent, and you can try and base your analysis on facts.

    The problem with trying to imagine what was going through the Framers’ mind in the 1790s, and to reconstruct a sort of history of regulation, is, first of all, what went on in their mind is purely a guess, it can never really be a fact, to the extent that they never said anything about the problems that we’re talking about, and didn’t know they would exist.

    And the second problem is sort of a scientific problem, which is that there’s just so much we don’t know about old law. And to understand those old laws, what they were meant to do, how they were made, in what context they were developed and how they were understood in their context, is a lot more complicated than the Court lets on.

    The Court has a kind of law clerk version of history, which is, well, I’ll go back in the law library to the deepest basement, to the dustiest shelf and pick out the oldest tome, and I’ll read what’s there, and then I’ll know the history. But we really don’t know what those words meant at the time.

    And of course then you have the problem that is playing out in Rahimi, which is, well, what’s alike and what’s not alike? If you have a law in Massachusetts that allows people to confiscate the swords of duelers in 1650 on the grounds that they’re dangerous, does that mean that you can uphold the law that takes the gun away from somebody in the 21st century? That makes courts do something they don’t know how to do, and that they’re clearly not doing well, and that I think a lot of them don’t like to do, which is pretend that they’re historians, find examples in the past, and then try and understand what those examples mean for the future.

    JJ: I appreciate your wanting to be careful, but it’s in aid of something; it’s in aid of a particular interpretation of past laws. And I say, again, the Constitution didn’t say corporations’ money is speech. And yet in that case, the Court is able to say, well, but yeah, but they probably would have meant this. And then in this case they say, oh, well I don’t see the words written there, so we can’t possibly say it.

    New Republic: Clarence Thomas’s Cherry-Picked Originalism on Affirmative Action

    New Republic (7/21/23)

    SB: The great example of that problem of willful or unconsciously biased interpretation is that the Court in Bruen wanted to say that the law has to be the law that would be acceptable in 1789, because great constitutional principles don’t change. But we have to understand, in applying those principles, that the technology of guns has changed a lot. So we can recognize that there are lots of differences in guns.

    The Court says, yeah, we accept that guns are more dangerous; that’s just technology. But we don’t accept that somehow the Framers would change their minds about guns because of those technological changes. So it’s a very selective view of what changes they’re willing to acknowledge and which not.

    And all judges are subject to the risk that they will put their preferences ahead of a strict interpretation of the law, that their preferences will shape their interpretation, and ideally judges create rules that limit that. They create rules that require explicit factual support, and they try and create concepts that will hold them back from just imposing their will.

    But if a judge really just wants to impose their will, which I sort of think is the attitude of the conservative or the Republican side of the Supreme Court, they just use the rules as however is necessary to get the outcomes that they want.

    And this particular rule, the historical test is just perfect for that, because it’s just simply not falsifiable. Your view of history, my view of history, unless you say something absurd, like “the Framers rode fighter planes, so we know they like heavy artillery,” you can’t be falsified. If you read that Bruen case, they point to all sorts of laws and they say, well, look at this law and look at that law, and that law said this and that law said that, so therefore today…. And they get their conclusion.

    JJ: I’m in advance reading my email, “OK, these laws were made at a time when women weren’t really people, when people of color weren’t really people. And somehow we’re to say that, still, the laws that were made at that time about citizens are still the same things that we should look to the letter of them to abide by.”

    SB: It’s a kind of religious approach to history and the Constitution. The underlying rationale for saying it should be as the Framers said is that they were somehow given special insights, special wisdom, and they were able to not only solve all the major problems of their own day, but somehow write a document that would always be the right answer for all the conditions of the future.

    And that’s obviously absurd as a matter of fact. They were just a bunch of fellas, often quite imperfect, as we should be willing to admit, who made a document that was full of imperfections that we’re still paying for today. The acceptance of slavery, the idea that 500,000 people in a small state should have the same Senate weight as 20 million people from a big state.

    I mean, these are bad ideas. They have become bad ideas as times have changed, and a sensible society will recognize that we have to adapt the core concepts of liberty and divided government and federalism for a very different era, and we have to be open. It’s not easy, but we have to be open to the discussion of how that document has to change and how the interpretation has to change, or application has to change, to face these modern dilemmas.

    That is not ever going to be easy, and it’s always going to be controversial, but at least it’s making an effort to adapt to reality. The problem with the historical analysis and the sort of worship of the holy Framers is that it offers us nothing today to deal with the problems we have to deal with today. And it allows a sort of group of high priests to tell us, by reading the entrails or burning a sheep on the altar, what the law should be, because they have access to the mind of those saintly, dear departed Framers.

    JJ: I want to ask you, do you still face resistance to the very idea of thinking about gun violence in terms of public health? I know that public health is your thing, and I know about the Dickey Amendment; we’re supposed to not research gun violence as a question of public health; it’s not supposed to be in that category. Talk a little bit about that question, of even talking about gun violence as a public health issue, and do you think that thinking has shifted on that?

    Temple University's Scott Burris

    Scott Burris: “Trying to call gun violence a public health matter is perceived on the other side as just another trick to get the guns out of our hands.”

    SB: There is occasionally a political fight. In fact it’s an ongoing political fight over what we should call a public health issue, because of the belief that if you call it a public health issue, that makes us more likely to be willing to do something about it.

    The fact is, you don’t have to call it a public health issue, you just have to say it’s a behavior or a set of behaviors and objects that are responsible for [48,000] deaths a year—half of them suicides—and that society needs, if it can, to reduce the number of deaths, the same way that we try to reduce the deaths from cars.

    In fact, since the Heller case, since it became out of the question to talk about banning firearms entirely, I think it makes a lot of sense to treat guns like cars. People love their cars, and cars do a lot of good, but they also do a lot of damage. They damage the environment, they get involved in crashes, they run people over, they blow up, whatever cars do.

    And we are all perfectly happy with the idea that the government should try and regulate cars and their use to reduce traffic deaths. And, in fact, until the last couple of years, when probably cell phones have tilted things up, we’ve had a steady, really a triumphant decline in car-related deaths over 25, 30 years, over 50 years, really, since Ralph Nader in the early ’70s.

    Guns are the same. There’s no question now of taking them away, getting them out of society. People like their guns; they enjoy their guns. Some people get benefits from guns. That shouldn’t be something we’re so hysterical about anymore after Heller; we should be turning our attention to the question of how we make them safer, how we make sure that people who are dangerous to themselves or others can’t easily get at them.

    I mean, we cut traffic deaths in half, more than half, through regulation. Wouldn’t it be great to have a world in which we had cut gun deaths by that amount, that we had 25,000 a year? It’d be nice not to think of that as a political question.

    But the trouble with the situation now is that trying to call gun violence a public health matter is perceived on the other side as just another trick to get the guns out of our hands. The whole paranoia about the jack-booted thugs from government coming to take away your guns, or the woke liberals trying to take away your guns, the whole working people up to such an extent, into a fantasy world of polarized gun zero sum game really gets in the way.

    I mean, nobody who’s working in public health has any illusions that guns are going away, and are not at all trying to take away people’s guns in some broad sense. What they’re trying to do is, as we did in auto safety, do everything we can at every stage—from the design of the weapon, through the storage of the weapon, through the use of the weapon, through the ability to get access to the weapon, to the ammunition in the weapon, to where the weapon can be carried—to reduce the death toll. And that ought to be a cooperative effort, informed by research, and without this incredible court interference, such that there’s no room left in the legislature to deal with guns.

    JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Scott Burris. He’s professor at Temple Law School and Temple School of Public Health. He’s also director of the Center for Public Health Law Research. You can find his piece for Regulatory Review, “One Year On, Bruen Really Is as Bad as It Reads,” online at TheRegReview.org. Scott Burris, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    SB: Thank you very much.

    The post ‘Worship of the Holy Framers Offers Us Nothing to Deal With the Problems We Have Today’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet

     

    Politico: Nazi-linked veteran received ovation during Zelenskyy’s Canada visit

    Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota (Politico, 9/24/23) said of the SS veteran, “He’s a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”

    Media coverage of the Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation in September for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian who fought for the Nazis in World War II, has included egregious Holocaust revisionism.

    On September 22, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the Canadian parliament, Canada’s then–Speaker of the House Anthony Rota introduced Hunka:

    We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.

    Rota went on to call Hunka “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service” (Politico, 9/24/23). Parliamentarians of all political parties gave Hunka two standing ovations, and Zelenskyy raised his fist to salute the man (Sky News, 9/26/23).

    Then the New York–based Forward (9/24/23) pointed out that Hunka had fought for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division, of the SS. (The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, “Protection Squadron,” was the military wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.)

    ‘A complicated past’

    CBC: Speaker's honouring of former Nazi soldier reveals a complicated past, say historians

    “You have to tread softly on these issues,” said the main expert used by the CBC (9/28/23) to discuss the topic of Ukraine and Nazism.

    Covering the subsequent controversy, the CBC (9/28/23) ran the headline, “Speaker’s Honoring of Former Nazi Soldier Reveals a Complicated Past, Say Historians.” In the context of the Holocaust, “complicated” functions as a hand-waving euphemism that gets in the way of holding perpetrators accountable: If a decision is “complicated,” it’s understandable, even if it’s wrong.

    Digital reporter/editor Jonathan Migneault, who wrote the piece, soft-pedaled the Galicia Division in other ways too. He said that some of the Ukrainians who joined it did so “for ideological reasons, in opposition to the Soviet Union, in hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state.”

    That’s quite a whitewashing of the ideological package that goes with signing up for the SS, leaving out that this vision for an “independent Ukrainian state” included the extermination of Jewish, LGBTQ, Roma and Polish minorities. As far as the “hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state” alibi, the Per Anders Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that “there is no overt indication that the unit [of Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits] in any way was dedicated to Ukrainian statehood, let alone independence.”

    ‘Caught between Hitler and Stalin’

    Toronto Star: House Speaker pays price for ignorance — meanwhile Ukraine still needs weapons

    Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) mocked Poland for wanting to extradite Hunka, whose unit massacred Poles during World War II, because “Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism.”

    Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) also used the word “complicated” to diminish Nazi atrocities, and mock the Polish government’s interest in having Hunka extradited for war crimes:

    Funny, they’ve had 73 years to ask Canada for him. It’s almost as if Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism but that’s crazy talk….

    Rota should have understood how complicated history is, how, post-Holodomor, a Ukrainian caught between Hitler and Stalin made a fatal choice.

    We can hate Hunka for that now. I do.

    But would every Canadian MP have made immaculate choices inside Stalin’s “Bloodlands” in 1943? Of course you and I would have been heroic, joined the White Rose movement, been executed for our troubles. But everyone?

    Mallick refers to Ukraine as “Stalin’s ‘Bloodlands,’” citing the Holodomor, the 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians, as well as millions in other parts of the USSR. Yet her link takes readers to a review of the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which—its own flaws notwithstanding (Jacobin, 9/9/14)—discusses the killings in Ukraine and elsewhere by Stalin and, on a significantly more egregious scale, Hitler. Acknowledging that the phrase she’s borrowing refers to both Soviet crimes and the Nazis’ genocides would have made the choice of joining the Nazis seem rather less sympathetic.

    Meanwhile, Mallick’s baffling comments about Poland erase the Nazis’ systematic killing of Polish people. Polish history has indeed been marred by horrific antisemitism, with many Polish people complicit in the Holocaust, as she glibly references; this does not erase the fact that the Nazis also murdered 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, or negate Poland’s desire to see their killers brought to justice. As Lev Golinkin (Forward, 9/24/23) pointed out, the Galicia Division that Hunka belonged to

    was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ “willingness to slaughter Poles.” Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.

    The non-Nazi SS

    Politico: Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi

    Keir Giles (Politico, 10/2/23) advances the argument that joining the SS and swearing “absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler” doesn’t make you a Nazi.

    An old cliché uses the analogy of gradually boiling a frog to explain how fascism takes hold in societies, but readers of Keir Giles’ intervention (Politico, 10/2/23) will feel like they are eyes-deep in a bubbling cauldron.

    Giles, who said the relevant history is “complicated” four times and “complex” twice, wrote an article entitled “Fighting Against the USSR Didn’t Necessarily Make You a Nazi.” That’s a dubious claim in a piece focused on World War II, when the Soviet Union was the main force fighting Nazi Germany, and thus fighting the Soviets made you at least an ally of Nazis.

    More to the point, the unit Hunka belonged to was a formal division of the SS, trained and armed by Nazi Germany (Forward, 9/27/23), which “fought exclusively to serve Nazi aims” (National Post, 9/25/23).

    Giles, however, opened by writing:

    Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.

    And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.

    Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth….

    In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front.

    Setting aside that Giles omits “and butchering innocent people” when he describes Waffen-SS activities as “fighting Soviet forces,” his suggestion that calling Hunka a Nazi is a “lie” does not withstand even minimal scrutiny. For instance, Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that, from August 29, 1943, onward, Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits were sworn in with the following oath:

    I swear before God this holy oath, that in the battle against Bolshevism, I will give absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler, and as a brave soldier I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath.

    Vowing “absolute obedience” to Hitler, and swearing that you’re willing to die for him, makes you as root and branch a Nazi as Rudolf Hess or Hermann Göring.

    ‘Simple narratives’

    Himmler inspecting Galicia Division troops

    SS commander Heinrich Himmler inspecting troops from the Galicia Division.

    After drawing these bogus distinctions between the Nazis and their units, Giles moved on to genocide denial:

    The idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide….

    Repeated exhaustive investigations—including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities—led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.

    Giles doesn’t name any investigations by British or Soviet officials, so it’s unclear what he’s talking about on those points, but he’s lying about Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Tribunals did not specifically address the Galicia Division (Guardian, 9/25/23), but found that the combat branch of which they were a part, the Waffen-SS, “was a criminal organization”:

    In dealing with the SS, the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS, including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopfverbaende, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS.

    Giles asserted that “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes’ are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp”—but everybody in the SS was, quite literally, guilty of war crimes.

    Heavily censored report

    Ottawa Citizen: Liberal government called on to release still-secret documents on Nazi war criminals living in Canada

    The Ottawa Citizen (9/27/23), citing B’nai Brith, reported that “the Canadian government’s approach to Nazi war criminals had been marked with ‘intentional harboring of known Nazi war criminals.’”

    The Canadian investigation Giles refers to is a 1986 Canadian government report that claims that membership in the Galicia Division did not in and of itself constitute a war crime. This conclusion is highly suspect when read against the Nuremberg tribunal’s judgment, and the report also has to be understood in the broader context of Canadian state investigations into Nazis in the country. As the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese (9/27/23) explained:

    The federal government has withheld a second part of a 1986 government commission report about Nazis who settled in Canada. In addition, it has heavily censored another 1986 report examining how Nazis were able to get into Canada. More than 600 pages of that document, obtained by this newspaper and other organizations through the Access to Information law, have been censored.

    Neither Giles nor any other member of the public knows what the Canadian government is hiding about its investigation, or why it’s concealing this information, so it’s disingenuous for him to present the fraction of the government’s conclusions to which he has access as if it is the final word on the Galicia Division or anything else.

    As to Giles’ jaw-dropping complaint that people are “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide,” the Nuremberg Trial concluded that the SS carried out

    persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program, and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners.

    Perhaps the public is “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide” because the SS carried out genocide.

    As disconcerting as it is that authors like Giles are writing fascist propaganda—and that Mallick veers perilously close to the same—it’s even more alarming that editors at outlets like the Star, CBC and Politico deem such intellectually and morally bankrupt material worthy of publication.

    The post Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei

     

          CounterSpin231124.mp3

     

    WaPo: Argentina set for sharp right turn as Trump-like radical wins presidency

    Washington Post (11/19/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won over fear. For many Argentines, the bigger risk was more of the same.”

    But if you want to dig down into the roots of that “same,” the economic and historic conditions that drove that deep dissatisfaction, US news media will be less helpful to you there. Milei is not a landslide popular president, and thoughtful, critical information and conversation could help clarify peoples’ problems and their sources, such that voters—in Argentina and elsewhere—might not be left to believe that the only way forward is a man wielding a literal chainsaw.

    We’ll learn about Javier Milei and what led to his election from Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy.

          CounterSpin231124Weisbrot.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FAIR’s recent study on the Sunday shows’ Gaza guests.

          CounterSpin231124Banter.mp3

     

    The post Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech

     

    MMFA: As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content

    Media Matters for America (11/16/23): “We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X.”

    He wasn’t bluffing.

    After threatening to sue liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America (CNBC, 11/18/23), Twitter’s principal owner Elon Musk did just that, arguing in papers filed in a Texas court that the group “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” the social media platform, causing major advertisers to pull back (BBC, 11/20/23).

    The world’s richest human was responding to an MMFA report (11/16/23) about Twitter—which Musk has rebranded as X since purchasing the once publicly traded company—and its promotion of far-right, antisemitic content. It said that while “Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” the social media network has been “placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”

    BBC: Elon Musk's X sues Media Matters over antisemitism analysis

    Elon Musk (BBC, 11/20/23) promised a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against anyone “who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”

    The report came just as the world stood in shock of Musk’s latest outburst of antisemitism: Just before the lawsuit was filed, he “publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among white supremacists: that Jewish communities push ‘hatred against whites’” (CNN, 11/17/23). This received widespread condemnation, including from the White House (Reuters, 11/17/23).

    A few weeks earlier, the South African–born billionaire had endorsed the “white genocide” conspiracy theory (Mediaite, 10/27/23), a central myth of white supremacy: “They absolutely want your extinction,” he replied to a Twitter user who claimed that the melting down of a statue of Robert E. Lee was proof that “many seek our extinction.” The reported exodus of advertisers from Twitter in such a brief time span has been enormous (AP, 11/18/23).

    The AP (11/20/23) reported that Twitter’s lawsuit claims MMFA “manipulated algorithms on the platform to create images of advertisers’ paid posts next to racist, incendiary content,” and that the lawsuit states that the instances of hateful content near such advertisements were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare.” (By “manufactured,” Musk means that MMFA got its results by following far-right accounts on Twitter as well as the accounts of Twitter‘s major advertisers.)

    Antisemitic vitriol

    NYT: Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find

    New York Times (12/2/22): Researchers said “they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.”

    It isn’t a secret that antisemitic vitriol has increased on the site under Musk’s management (New York Times, 12/2/22; Washington Post, 3/20/23; Vice, 5/18/23). What’s different now is that the MMFA report and the anger toward his last outburst happened as he is losing the business he desperately needs, as the brand has been rapidly tanking since he spent $44 billion to acquire it (Fortune, 5/30/23).

    The case was filed in Texas, although Twitter is based in California and MMFA is in Washington, DC. Musk’s choice of venue has everything to do with his right-wing politics and nothing to do with compliance with the law. Fast Company (11/21/23) wrote:

    The case has been assigned to District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee whose previous rulings include blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and declaring a Texas law banning people ages 18 to 20 from carrying handguns in public was unconstitutional.

    Also, by filing in the state, the case can be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has backed several conservative figures who claim they’ve been censored in the past.

    MMFA is nevertheless confident that it will win the case; in a statement published by CNBC (11/18/23) before Musk’s suit was filed, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone declared:

    Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate. Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win.

    Defamation cases are difficult for the plaintiff to win, especially in the case of someone like Musk, a public figure, who must prove that even false statements against them were intentional lies or made with “reckless disregard for the truth.” Legal experts cited by CNN (11/21/23) characterized the lawsuit as “weak” and “bogus.”

    That doesn’t mean that legal fees, hours of working on the case and sleepless nights won’t impact MMFA’s work. In a case like this, a Goliath like Musk doesn’t need to win in court to hamper a David like MMFA, which reports an annual revenue of about $19 million and total assets of $26 million. That’s pennies in comparison to Musk, whose net worth is valued at nearly $200 billion (CBS News, 10/31/23). Mounting legal bills for oligarchs like Musk are as significant as a McDonald’s hamburger.

    Rallying call for right

    NY Post: Elon Musk yet again pulls back the veil to reveal the machinery of the liberal censorship complex

    In the topsy-turvy world of the New York Post (11/21/23), billionaires who sue critics of hate speech are champions of free speech.

    The suit is also a rallying call for the right, as former Fox News host Megyn Kelly (New York Post, 11/20/23) and the Federalist (11/21/23) are cheerleading the legal action. Greg Gutfeld of Fox News (11/21/23) welcomed the lawsuit, calling MMFA a “hard-left smear machine.” The New York Post editorial board (11/21/23), using Freudian projection, said the suit was a reaction to the liberal determination to “bring down Elon Musk for championing free speech.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who fought to overturn the 2020 presidential election (Austin American-Statesman, 5/25/22), said he was opening an investigation into MMFA (The Hill, 11/21/23).

    Musk—who is hostile to organized labor (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 12/5/22), who has promoted anti-trans hate on Twitter (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/13/22; Business Insider, 1/2/23; The Nation, 6/23/23) and who backed Republicans in last year’s midterm elections (Politico, 11/7/22)—has become a darling of the right. A billionaire boss with socially conservative views, he has amped up the mythology that social media networks are somehow rigged against the right (Vox, 12/9/22; New York, 12/10/22; Daily Beast, 4/6/23; CNN, 6/6/23), and that his takeover of Twitter will lead to more balance.

    What has resulted since his takeover is an unrelenting campaign of censorship. El País (5/24/23) reported that since his takeover, the platform “has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments,” and has shown a particular interest in censoring critics of India’s right-wing regime (Intercept, 3/28/23). It has silenced left-wing voices at the behest of “far-right internet trolls” (Intercept, 11/29/22). And in order to silence criticism of Israel–an impulse that is not incompatible with antisemitism–Musk has threatened to suspend users who use the word “decolonization” or the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a reference to the original borders of historic Palestine before the proposed partition and Israel’s eventual founding (Mother Jones, 11/18/23). Journalists on the social media beat have been banned (CNN, 12/17/22; Daily Beast, 4/19/23).

    Sinister forces

    Media Matters: Elon Musk praises antisemitic replacement theory that motivated a mass shooting as “the actual truth”

    Media Matters (11/15/23): Musk has reinstated known white nationalists and antisemites on the platform” and “amplified conspiracy theories that were used to push antisemitism.”

    MMFA was founded in 2004—in the midst of the “War on Terror” fervor of the George W. Bush years—by former right-wing journalist turned liberal consultant David Brock, who launched it to keep an eye on the rising influence of conservative news and talk shows (New York Times, 5/3/04). Its ongoing criticism of both Musk and corporate media like Fox News (Rolling Stone, 7/28/19) makes it the perfect target for the right. In the paranoid fantasyland of US conservatism, MMFA sits alongside George Soros, Black Lives Matter and Antifa as sinister forces who are out to undermine traditional social hierarchies.

    And one can understand why Musk has a personal interest in going after MMFA, as the group (10/5/23, 11/13/23, 11/15/23) has focused on his politics and his administration of the website since he took it over.

    I have written for several years about the right’s attempt to use the courts and legislatures to destroy press freedom to suppress reporting and opinions the rich and powerful don’t like (FAIR.org, 3/26/21, 5/25/22, 11/2/22, 3/1/23). The lawsuit sends a warning to reporters and advocates that can be easily interpreted: Musk isn’t just interested in taking over one social media network, but also drowning out the voices of anyone who challenges him. The point of this lawsuit is to intimidate anyone who speaks out against antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry.

    For those of us who care deeply about free speech and a free press, let’s hope this lawsuit is swiftly tossed out.

    The post Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • The Dystopian AI Future Some Fear Is the Present-Day Reality Others Live

     

    NYT: A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn

    The New York Times (5/30/23) directs attention toward a hypothetical future AI apocalypse, rather than towards present-day AI’s entrenchment of contemporary oppression.

    It’s almost impossible to escape reports on artificial intelligence (AI) in today’s media. Whether you’re reading the news or watching a movie, you are likely to encounter some form of warning or buzz about AI.

    The recent release of ChatGPT, in particular, led to an explosion of excitement and anxiety about AI. News outlets reported that many prominent AI technologists themselves were sounding the alarm about the dangers of their own field. Frankenstein’s proverbial monster had been unleashed, and the scientist was now afraid of his creation.

    The speculative fears they expressed were centered on an existential crisis for humanity (New York Times, 5/30/23), based on the threat of AI technology evolving into a hazard akin to viral pandemics and nuclear weaponry. Yet at the same time, other coverage celebrated AI’s supposedly superior intelligence and touted it as a remarkable human accomplishment with amazing potential (CJR, 5/26/23).

    Overall, these news outlets often miss the broader context and scope of the threats of AI, and as such, are also limited in presenting the types of solutions we ought to be exploring. As we collectively struggle to make sense of the AI hype and panic, I offer a pause: a moment to contextualize the current mainstream narratives of fear and fascination, and grapple with our long-term relationship with technology and our humanity.

    Profit as innovation’s muse

    So what type of fear is our current AI media frenzy actually highlighting? Some people’s dystopian fears for the future are in fact the dystopian histories and contemporary realities of many other people. Are we truly concerned about all of humanity, or simply paying more attention now that white-collar and elite livelihoods and lives are at stake?

    We are currently in a time when a disproportionate percentage of wealth is hoarded by the super rich (Oxfam International, 1/16/23), most of whom benefit from and bolster the technology industry. Although the age-old saying is that “necessity is the mother of invention,” in a capitalist framework, profit—not human need—is innovation’s muse. As such, it should not be so surprising that human beings and humanity are at risk from these very same technological developments.

    Activists and scholars, particularly women and people of color, have long been sounding the alarm about the harmful impacts of AI and automation. However, media largely overlooked their warnings about social injustice and technology—namely, the ways technology replicates dominant, oppressive structures in more efficient and broad-reaching ways.

    Cathy O’Neil in 2016 highlighted the discriminatory ways AI is being used in the criminal justice system, school systems and other institutional practices, such that those with the least socio-political power are subjected to even more punitive treatments. For instance, police departments use algorithms to identify “hot spots” with high arrest rates in order to target them for more policing. But arrest rates are not the same as crime rates; they reflect long-standing racial biases in policing, which means such algorithms reinforce those racial biases under the guise of science.

    Wired: Calling Out Bias Hidden in Facial-Recognition Technology

    Wired (10/15/19): Joy Buolamwini “learned how facial recognition is used in law enforcement, where error-prone algorithms could have grave consequences.”

    Joy Buolamwini built on her own personal experience to uncover how deeply biased AI algorithms are, based on the data they’re fed and the narrow demographic of designers who create them. Her work demonstrated AI’s inability to recognize let alone distinguish between dark-skinned faces, and the harmful consequences of deploying this technology as a surveillance tool, especially for Black and Brown people, ranging from everyday inconveniences to wrongful arrests.

    Buolamwini has worked to garner attention from media and policymakers in order to push for more transparency and caution with the use of AI. Yet recent reports on the existential crisis of AI do not mention her work, nor those of her peers, which highlight the very real and existing crises resulting from the use of AI in social systems.

    Timnit Gebru, who was ousted from Google in a very public manner, led research that long predicted the risks of large language models such as those employed in tools like ChatGPT. These risks include environmental impacts of AI infrastructure, financial barriers to entry that limit who can shape these tools, embedded discrimination leading to disproportionate harms for minoritized social identities, reinforced extremist ideologies stemming from the indiscriminate grabbing of all Internet data as training information, and the inherent problems owing to the inability to distinguish between fact and machine fabrication. In spite of how many of these same risks are now being echoed by AI elites, Gebru’s work is scarcely cited.

    Although stories of AI injustice might be new in the context of technology, they are not novel within the historical context of settler colonialism. As long as our society continues to privilege the white hetero-patriarchy, technology implemented within this framework will largely reinforce and exacerbate existing systemic injustices in ever more efficient and catastrophic ways.

    If we truly want to explore pathways to resolve AI’s existential threat, perhaps we should begin by learning from the wisdom of those who already know the devastating impacts of AI technology—precisely the voices that are marginalized by elite media.

    Improving the social context

    Conversation: News coverage of artificial intelligence reflects business and government hype — not critical voices

    Conversation ( 4/19/23): “News media closely reflect business and government interests in AI by praising its future capabilities and under-reporting the power dynamics behind these interests.”

    Instead, those media turn mostly to AI industry leaders, computer scientists and government officials (Conversation, 4/19/23). Those experts offer a few administrative solutions to our AI crisis, including regulatory measures (New York Times, 5/30/23), government/leadership action (BBC, 5/30/23) and limits on the use of AI (NPR, 6/1/23). While these top-down approaches might stem the tide of AI, they do not address the underlying systemic issues that render technology yet another tool of destruction that disproportionately ravages communities who live on the margins of power in society.

    We cannot afford to focus on mitigating future threats without also attending to the very real, present-day problems that cause so much human suffering. To effectively change the outcomes of our technology, we need to improve the social context in which these tools are deployed.

    A key avenue technologists are exploring to resolve the AI crisis is “AI alignment.” For example, OpenAI reports that their alignment research “aims to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and follow human intent.”

    However, existing AI infrastructure is not value-neutral. On the contrary, automation mirrors capitalist values of speed, productivity and efficiency. So any meaningful AI alignment effort will also require the dismantling of this exploitative framework, in order to optimize for human well-being instead of returns on investments.

    Collaboration over dominion

    What type of system might we imagine into being such that our technology serves our collective humanity? We could begin by heeding the wisdom of those who have lived through and/or deeply studied oppression encoded in our technological infrastructure.

    SSIR: Disrupting the Gospel of Tech Solutionism to Build Tech Justice

    Greta Byrum & Ruha Benjamin (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6/16/22): “Those who have been excluded, harmed, exposed, and oppressed by technology understand better than anyone how things could go wrong.”

    Ruha Benjamin introduced the idea of the “New Jim Code,” to illustrate how our technological infrastructure reinforces existing inequities under the guises of “objectivity,” “innovation,” and “benevolence.” While the technology may be new, the stereotypes and discriminations continue to align with well-established white supremacist value systems. She encourages us to “demand a slower and more socially conscious innovation,” one that prioritizes “equity over efficiency, [and] social good over market imperatives.”

    Audrey Watters (Hack Education, 11/28/19) pushes us to question dominant narratives about technology, and to not simply accept the tech hype and propaganda that equate progress with technology alone. She elucidates how these stories are rarely based solely on facts but also on speculative fantasies motivated by economic power, and reminds us that “we needn’t give up the future to the corporate elites” (Hack Education, 3/8/22).

    Safiya Noble (UCLA Magazine, 2/22/21) unveils how the disproportionate influence of internet technology corporations cause harm through co-opting public goods for private profits. To counter these forces, she proposes “strengthening libraries, universities, schools, public media, public health and public information institutions.”

    These scholars identify the slow and messy work we must collectively engage in to create the conditions for our technology to mirror collaboration over domination, connection over separation, and trust over suspicion. If we are to heed their wisdom, we need media that views AI as more than just the purview of technologists, and also engages the voices of activists, citizens and scholars. Media coverage should also contextualize these technologies, not as neutral but as mechanisms operating within a historical and social framework.

    Now, more than ever before, we bear witness to the human misery resulting from extractive and exploitative economic and political global structures, which have long been veiled beneath a veneer of “technological progress.” We must feel compelled to not just gloss over these truths as though we can doom scroll our way out, but collectively struggle for the freedom futures we need—not governed by fear, but fueled by hope.

    Featured Image: “Robot Zombie Apocalypse” by Nicholas Mastello

     

    The post The Dystopian AI Future Some Fear Is the Present-Day Reality Others Live appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Sunday’s Gaza Guests Linked to Military Industry, Pro-Israel Funding

     

    As the Israel/Gaza crisis continues unabated, eliciting massive protests around the world, US media offer a strikingly narrow debate. On the Sunday political news shows, which are both agenda-setting and reflect what corporate media view as the most important perspectives on the most important stories, the guests invited to speak on Gaza skew strongly toward US politicians—especially those with strong financial influence by the military industrial complex and pro-Israel advocates. The resulting conversations leave little room for dissent from a pro-war stance.

    FAIR looked at four weeks of Sunday shows covering the current conflagration in Gaza, October 15 through November 5, during which time the topic occupied a significant portion of political talk show coverage.

    We identified 57 guest appearances across ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation, CNN‘s State of the Union, NBC‘s Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday, with 41 unique guests. (Some guests appeared more than once).

    Of the 57 appearances, 48 were from the US. While representatives of the Israeli government or military appeared five times—and on every outlet except NBC—only once did a Palestinian guest appear: senior Fatah member Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, on CBS (11/5/23).

    Twenty-eight guests had partisan affiliations: 10 Democrats (making 18 appearances), 19 Republicans (making 25 appearances) and one Independent (Sen. Bernie Sanders, appearing once). The abundance of Republicans may have been related to the concurrent drama over the speaker of the House, which several guests were also asked about.

    Three guests represented international humanitarian organizations: Philippe Lazzarini, UN Relief and Works Agency commissioner-general (CBS, 10/22/23); Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross (CBS, 10/29/23); and Cindy McCain, director of the World Food Program (and widow of former Republican Sen. John McCain—ABC, 10/22/23). NBC, CNN and Fox featured no such organizations during the four weeks studied.

    No scholars, activists or international law or human rights experts appeared, nor did any civil society leaders from either Israel or Palestine.

    Under the influence

    Eleven of the 34 US guests, accounting for 13 appearances, had significant ties to the military industrial complex. These include five former senior military officials, five current or former board members or advisors to a military industry company, and four members of Congress who count one or more “defense industries” as top-20 contributing industries to their 2024 campaigns, according to the OpenSecrets database. (Some guests had multiple ties; see chart.)

    At least 19 more US guests have taken money from military industry political action committees (PACs) during their political careers; of the 23 elected officials for whom data was available, only Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Rep. Jason Crow (D–Colo.) showed no military industry PAC funding during their political careers. (These three politicians generally reject corporate PAC money.)

    Eighteen of the US guests, who were featured 23 times with repeat appearances, had significant direct ties to pro-Israel funding. (“Significant” we defined as “pro-Israel” being a top-20 contributing industry to their 2024 campaigns, according to OpenSecrets; or, for GOP presidential candidates, receiving prominent financial support from pro-Israel donors; see Ha’aretz, 8/16/23.)

    The pro-Israel lobby includes influential groups like J Street, Democratic Majority for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition, but has been overwhelmingly dominated by the hard-line American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), particularly since its 2021 decision to launch its own PAC and super PAC. AIPAC’s current stated priority is “building and sustaining congressional support for Israel’s fight to permanently dismantle Hamas.”

    US Guests With Significant Military and Pro-Israel Ties

    Pro-Israel PACs and individuals poured more than $30 million into the 2022 election cycle, roughly two-thirds to Democrats and a third to Republicans.

    Those numbers—and the numbers used to calculate top-20 industries—don’t include super PAC money, which is much harder to track. The AIPAC super PAC, called the United Democracy Project, dumped over $26 million into several 2022 Democratic primaries to defeat progressive candidates it deemed “anti-Israel” (Jewish Currents, 11/15/22), making it the highest-spending nonpartisan super PAC that election cycle. AIPAC has long wielded outsize influence in Washington, even prior to making direct campaign donations (see, e.g., Intercept, 2/11/19).

    FAIR (10/17/23, 11/6/23) has pointed out that, despite media coverage suggesting otherwise, the Jewish response to the current war is not united in support of the Israeli government’s actions or goals. Even the pro-Israel lobby is not monolithic in its general approach nor in its current response. J Street—which has criticized AIPAC’s support for MAGA insurrectionists, and its attack ads associating progressive Democrats with terrorism—is a notable outlier against the official Israeli stance, as the liberal lobbying group has called for humanitarian pauses that Israel has fiercely resisted. But AIPAC has condemned calls for a ceasefire and pushed for congressional funding for further military assistance to Israel; similarly, the Republican Jewish Coalition sharply criticized Biden for “call[ing] for Israeli restraint” in Gaza.

    AIPAC’s super PAC and Democratic Majority for Israel have already launched six-figure ad campaigns against Democratic and Republican lawmakers who voted against a pro-Israel House resolution (Jewish Insider, 11/5/23).

    ‘Bounce the rubble’

    Sen. Tom Cotton on Fox News

    Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) on Fox News Sunday (10/15/23)

    The guests on the Sunday shows leaned heavily towards full support of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. On Fox News Sunday (10/15/23), for instance, Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) announced:

    As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas. Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend. If women and children die in Gaza, it will be because Hamas is using them as human shields, because they’re not currently allowing them to evacuate as Israel has asked them to do so. Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas.

    Fox anchor Shannon Bream made no attempt to challenge Cotton’s shocking argument, which is not supported by international law. Cotton was the top beneficiary of a major shift in pro-Israel campaign contributions from Democratic to Republican candidates in 2014, launching his Senate career as one of the chamber’s staunchest Israel hawks (Mondoweiss, 3/12/15; New York Times, 4/4/15).

    CNN: Will the Lessons of US Response to 9/11 Guide Israel?

    Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) on CNN’s State of the Union (10/22/23)

    Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.), who appeared on both CNN (10/22/23) and CBS (10/22/23), long received steadfast support from pro-Israel funders, and gave that support right back (CNN, 10/22/23):

    I think that, No. 1, people need to recognize that what’s happening in terms of the conditions in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas…. Israel must take whatever action they need to take to defend themselves. And the United States should not be in the business of telling them to stop, to slow down. They have got to defend themselves. And that means they have got to defeat Hamas.

    At that point, more than 4,650 people had been killed in Gaza, including over 1,870 children.

    Democrats were generally more restrained, but unwavering in their support for Israel and a military solution. Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.), with strong financial backing from both the military industry and pro-Israel funding, told Fox (10/22/23):

    Israel has to win the broader fight against Hamas. It is a military campaign, anyone who says there’s no military solution to this, I think the military is a huge part of it.

    Sen. Jack Reed (D–R.I.), who finds all three “defense industries” among his top 10 contributors, argued (Fox, 11/5/23) that “what Israel is doing, appropriately so, is targeting Hamas to degrade it and then destroy it.” He also urged that

    what they have to do, not only for the complying with the rule of law, but also winning the battle of minds and hearts, is to do it in such a way as that they minimize the harm to civilians.

    By November 5, the Gaza death toll was nearly 10,000, including at least 4,000 children, rendering absurd the claim that Israel was merely targeting Hamas. By comparison, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is not known for its regard for civilian life, killed at least 500 children in 18 months of war (RFE/RL, 8/13/23).

    Few calls for military restraint

    These voices give a very narrow perspective on the conflict in Gaza, one that is not at all representative of the US public or international opinion. A Data for Progress poll (10/20/23) found that 66% of likely US voters agree that “the US should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.” International leaders and hundreds of human rights groups around the world have called for a ceasefire, yet US media give the idea little space for discussion (FAIR.org, 10/24/23).

    CBS: Husam Zomlot

    Ambassador Husam Zomlot (CBS‘s Face the Nation, 11/5/23), the only Palestinian to appear on any Sunday show during the study period

    Out of the 57 appearances, only two were with guests who both had publicly called for a ceasefire and voiced that in their interview (once prompted by an anchor question, once unprompted). Representative Jayapal was asked specifically about her call for a ceasefire, which she reaffirmed (NBC, 10/29/23). Palestinian ambassador Zomlot (CBS, 11/5/23) made an even more forceful call for a ceasefire, arguing that

    this whole talk about humanitarian pauses is simply irresponsible. Pauses of crimes against humanity. So, you are going to pause for six hours killing our children, and then resume killing the children? I mean, this doesn’t stand even international law.

    CBS host Margaret Brennan repeatedly pressed Zomlot to condemn the Hamas attacks; no outlet asked any of their Israeli guests to condemn the Israeli killings of Palestinian civilians.

    Moreover, only five of the 57 guest appearances involved a question about a ceasefire (CBS, 10/22/23; NBC, 10/29/23; ABC, 11/5/23; CBS, 11/5/23; CNN, 11/5/23). Aside from Jayapal, none of the others asked supported a ceasefire. In his appearance, Bernie Sanders (CNN, 11/5/23) argued that “we have got to stop the bombing now,” and that in considering an emergency military assistance package for Israel, “it’s terribly important…to say to Israel, you want this money, you got to change your military strategy.” But when pressed about a ceasefire, he responded:

    I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel.

    The three representatives of international organizations provided perspective on the civilian suffering in Gaza and the desperate need for humanitarian aid, and Lazzarini and Mardini appealed for the protection of civilian infrastructure like hospitals, though none mentioned a ceasefire.

    None of the many human rights groups or other experts on international law who might have offered a perspective contrary to guests’ repeated assertions that Israel was not responsible for civilian deaths in Gaza were invited to speak.

    The Sunday shows aim to set agendas, both across media and in Washington. By boosting politicians with serious conflicts of interest on both Israel and war, those networks stack the deck in favor of endless war.

    Research assistance: Keating Zelenke

    The post Sunday’s Gaza Guests Linked to Military Industry, Pro-Israel Funding appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘You Cannot Preach on Human Rights When You Are Not Doing Enough at Home’ – CounterSpin interview with Jamil Dakwar on the US and human rights

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU’s Jamil Dakwar about human rights and the United States for the November 10, 2023,  episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin231110Dakwar.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: As US officials and pundits appear to consider which babies are really civilians and which interpretation of law allows for their murder, you can almost imagine them thinking that the world is watching, waiting to learn: What do these smart people think about geopolitics? What will they decide?”

    When certainly, what a huge number of people are thinking, around the world and in this country, is: Where do they get off? What allows so many US professional talking–type people, in 2023, to imagine that they are the city on the hill?

    The belief in US exceptionalism—the idea that this country alone can and should serve as international arbiter, not because of a massive military and a readiness to use it, but because of the impenetrable moral high ground earned by a commitment to democratic principles—well, that belief is price of admission to the “serious people” foreign policy conversations in the US press.

    So something like the recent report from the UN Human Rights Committee, that assesses the US the same way it would assess any other country on human rights issues, lands in corporate US news media like a message from Mars.

    Joining us now with a differing context is Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jamil Dakwar.

    Jamil Dakwar: Thank you for having me on.

    JJ: This assessment from the UN Human Rights Committee can be read as particularly meaningful at the moment, as the United States asserts, both openly and covertly, its power in the Middle East. But the report is about

    many things, both international and here in the United States. I know that people are not going to see a lot—if any—of media coverage on this report. So what is the report, and then what’s in it that we should acknowledge?

    JD: The report that was released last Friday, November 3, is the result or outcome of a review that happened last month, on the 17 and 18 of October, by the UN Human Rights Committee. This is a committee of independent experts, of about 18 members, that come from different parts of the world, and they are in charge of monitoring the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

    This treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—or the ICCPR, as it’s commonly referred to—was one of the first international human rights treaties that the United States ratified in the early 1990s, right after the end of the Cold War, when the United States was showing that, look, we are, as you said, we are the city on the hill. We are the beacon of freedom of democracy and human rights for all other countries, and we are going to be committed to these things by signing on and ratifying this treaty.

    The ratification of the ICCPR, 12/11/1978. UN Audiovisual Library of International Law.

    However, that was 30 years ago, and we have this report, which was issued by the independent experts of the UN Human Rights Committee, based on reviewing the United States Periodic Report that was submitted in 2021, that essentially concluded that the US has so much more work to do. It has fallen behind, and it’s actually an outlier in many areas when it comes to civil and political rights, and particularly with regard to marginalized communities.

    This is a really damning report. This is a report that—a review happens every eight or nine years. The last time this happened was in 2014, during the Obama administration. The United States’ report itself, to the committee, was submitted in the last five days of the Trump administration, and the Biden administration showed up before the committee.

    Although they attempted to show some of the work and some of the important steps that they took in order to address some of the backsliding on human rights that happened in the last eight years, the committee was not convinced. And in specific terms, it went one by one, and in the report, which I hope you can post it also on your website, is a very long document that covers a massive amount of issues, from Indigenous rights to reproductive rights, to voting rights, to issues related to free speech and assembly rights, use of force. The criminal legal system was also analyzed in the report, looking at specific extreme sentences and punishment, like death by incarceration, for example, and many, many other issues that, really, it’s hard to enumerate in just a short interview.

    But the bottom line is, this was another wake-up call for the United States, that you really cannot claim the moral high ground. You cannot preach to other countries on human rights when you are not doing enough here at home in your own backyard.

    And I think civil society organizations that participated in the review—and we had over 140 of them from the United States, all the way from the colonial territories of Guam to Puerto Rico, to Alaska, Hawaii, to different parts of the United States—and the civil society organizations have made it clear that they are not going to accept the same talking points or the same formulations that government officials from the State Department, from the White House, from the Justice Department have put forward to the committee.

    They are inadequate. More needs to be done. And that’s something that I think was echoed by the recommendations that were made in the report of the Human Rights Committee.

    JJ: I do think that a lot of folks will actually find it jarring to hear the term “human rights” applied in a US domestic context. Human rights is something that other countries have violations of, and the idea of looking at missing and murdered Indigenous girls, at the death penalty, at asylum policy, at solitary confinement, looking at those as human rights issues, I think is just difficult for many people.

    And I don’t want it to get lost; there is a call to action. There are calls to action suggested by the report. So what are they saying should actually happen right now?

    JD: First, the committee said, we are not happy and we’re not satisfied with the way that the United States has been implementing—or rather, failing to implement—the treaty at the state, local and federal level. So they first expressed that concern, and they also said that we don’t accept the reservations that the United States has entered when the US ratified it.

    But more importantly, they said the United States doesn’t have a human rights infrastructure to implement international human rights obligations. And they called, as a matter of a priority, to establish a national human rights institution—which many countries around the world, including the closest US Western allies, have—where this body would be in charge of implementing and monitoring and helping the United States uphold its international human rights obligations and commitments at the federal, state and local level.

    We don’t have such a body. In fact, we don’t have any monitoring body which relates to human rights, and therefore this was one of the first and, I think, a prominent recommendation that is in the report.

    The committee also made significant detailed recommendations, going through the list from, as you said, Indigenous rights issues related to sacred sites and tribal lands, or land where there was not adequate consultations with Indigenous communities—and asked them to uphold the principle of free prior and informed consent, which is a universal principle accepted by many countries around the world when it comes to intrusion and violating the rights of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the extraction and development industry.

    The other area that was very prominent was in the area of gender equality and reproductive rights, where the committee also noted and called for significant changes in the way that the United States government is upholding its international human rights obligations with relation to protecting women’s right to choose and women’s right to their own body, to domestic violence, and the fact that this is an endemic that has really reached the highest proportion.

    ACLU (Photo by Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto via AP)

    It also addressed the issue of migration and rights of immigrants, including in immigration detention facilities, the fact that many people are losing their right to seek asylum, something that we’ve seen deteriorating even under the Biden administration.

    It called on the United States to look at the impact of the climate crisis on human rights in the United States, something that usually is not looked at as a matter of human rights, rather as a matter of environmental rights, or only as a matter of a climate crisis separate from human rights.

    It also called on the US to address voting rights as a really urgent issue, where we know, and the committee noted, the gerrymandering and redistricting that was happening around the country, the suppression of voter rights, particularly of minority and marginalized communities.

    So all of those are in the report. They are calling on the United States within three years to submit a progress report on what [steps] will be taken in order to address issues of immigration, reproductive rights and voting rights. And then, in eight years, the US will be up for another review.

    Of course, the US shouldn’t be waiting for eight years to start working on its own record. I think that’s where our role as civil society organizations, to hold our government accountable, to make sure that they are doing what they should do, what they should have done yesterday or years ago and in an urgent manner.

    Jamil Dakwar (image: Witness to Guantanamo)

    Jamil Dakwar: “There is an organized, orchestrated attack to delegitimize the human rights movement in different ways… The lack of concerted effort to do human rights education in the United States is clear.” (image: Witness to Guantanamo)

    Because it’s really impacted not only people in the United States. Some of the policies impact millions of people who reside outside the United States, particularly with regard to US massive surveillance policies. The impact of the United States’ policies of foreign assistance, as we know, impacts the rights of people who live outside the United States, including people who are still held at places like Guantánamo Bay, where the committee expressed deep concern that the Guantánamo Bay detention facility is still open and the kangaroo courts of military commissions are still hearing accusations and capital charges against some of the individuals held there.

    So the call for action is clear. I think now it’s up to the US government at all levels to take that seriously, and I think for us as civil society organizations and the media to hold the government accountable as to the progress that should be made in the next few years, in terms of where the US will find itself. Is it going to really live up to this self-defined title of a global leader on human rights and champion of universal human rights? Or it’s going to continue to be only talk, and no action that will follow.

    JJ: I just did want to add, finally, that just because corporate news media deal in crudeness doesn’t mean that people aren’t capable of holding ambiguity, of both seeing that their government has undeserved power and also caring about the way that that power is deployed.

    And I guess one of the things I’m maddest about is the way that corporate media conflate what they call “US interests” with those of the American people. And I know that people are deeper than that, are smarter than that. And so media are not just underserving us, but erasing many of us, and the complexity and the depth of understanding that we’re capable of having when it comes to the US role in the world.

    JD: Absolutely. I think that is an important distinction to be made. And I think that based on polling, most people in the United States understand the importance of human rights, actually understand also the importance of the role of international human rights bodies, including the bodies like the UN Human Rights Committee and the role of the United Nations.

    And yet there is an organized, orchestrated attack to delegitimize the human rights movement in different ways. The lack of any concerted effort to do human rights education in the United States is clear, and there’s the whole movement to do censorship in the classroom, to block the ability of students to learn about history such as slavery or genocide of Indigenous peoples, or about the rights of the LGBTQ community, and so on.

    So there’s a serious organized, ideologically driven movement against any progress that this country has made over the years, and I think that there is a responsibility for all people in this country to take that seriously, meaning to push back against those efforts.

    And I think the UN human rights bodies really can do much in order to really flag the concerns and the urgency and the disparities and the gaps between international human rights norms and standards and US policies and practices. And it’s really up to the people to organize and to do what they need to do in order to hold their government officials accountable.

    And there is some work happening at the state and local level. When we were in Geneva last month, we had the head of the Missouri Human Rights Commission, Alisa Warren, who is also the president of IAOHRA, the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies, that is coordinating the work of state and local human rights commissions. These agencies told the US government, “You should support us, you should provide incentives and guide us and help us do this work on the state and local level.”

    And so there’s so much energy, there’s so much out there that needs to be done, and I think there’s only a hope that there should be the right political capital spent on this, rather than spent on other issues, or distorting the ideals of human rights and the notion that these really start at the very local community level.

    And if we don’t do that now, it will be too late, because this is going to impact the way our future generation of people living in this country will be having a much worse situation, in terms of their ability to enjoy all of their human rights, not just civil and political rights, as this particular treaty was on, but also social, economic, cultural rights, which are the other part where the United States is falling behind in recognizing and respecting as a matter of constitutional framework, as a matter of law, as a matter of  decent treatment of all human beings.

    JJ: Thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Jamil Dakwar. He’s director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Thank you again, Jamil Dakwar, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    JD: Thank you for this opportunity.

     

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  • For Cable News, a Palestinian Life Is Not the Same as an Israeli Life

     

    Overflowing morgues. Packed hospitals. City blocks reduced to rubble.

    In response to Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Israel has unleashed mass destruction on Gaza. Into a region the size of Las Vegas, with a population of 2.1 million, nearly half children, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of bombs, the equivalent of nearly two Hiroshimas. It has killed journalists and doctors, wiped out dozens of members of a single family, massacred fleeing Palestinians, and even bombed a densely populated northern refugee camp. Repeatedly.

    As UNICEF spokesperson James Elder recently put it, “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.”

    In its initial attack on Israel, Hamas killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240 more. By the end of October, less than four weeks later, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza had reached a wholly disproportionate 8,805 people. (Since then, the number has surpassed 11,000.)

    This run-up in the death count was so rapid that prominent voices resorted to outright denialism. John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesperson, labeled the Gaza Health Ministry, which is responsible for tallying the Palestinian dead, “a front for Hamas” (Fox, 10/27/23). (The ministry actually answers to the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority—Reuters, 11/6/23.)

    And President Joe Biden, much to Fox’s delight (10/25/23), declared: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed…. I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

    A Washington Post factcheck (11/1/23) diplomatically described this statement as an example of “excessive skepticism”:

    The State Department has regularly cited ministry statistics without caveats in its annual human rights reports. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which tracks deaths in the conflict, has found the ministry’s numbers to be reliable after conducting its own investigation. “Past experience indicated that tolls were reported with high accuracy,” an OCHA official told the Fact Checker.

    Some deaths count more

    For cable news, however, determining the precise number of Palestinian dead may not be all that relevant. Because for them, an important principle comes first: Some numbers don’t count as much as others. Whereas around seven times as many Palestinians died as Israelis during October, Palestinian victims appear to have received significantly less coverage on cable TV.

    A slew of searches on the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, which scours transcripts from MSNBC, CNN and Fox News to determine the frequency with which given words and phrases are mentioned on cable news, bears this out. Here’s the breakdown of the screen time awarded to various search terms related to Israeli and Palestinian deaths over the course of October 2023 (see note 1):

    "Israeli(s) (were) killed" vs "Palestinian(s) (were) killed"

    "Israeli death(s)" or "dead Israeli(s)" vs "Palestinian death(s)" or "dead Palestinian(s)"

    "Killed/Dead/Died in Israel" vs "Killed/Dead/Died in Gaza"

    "Killed by Hamas" vs "Killed by Israel/Israeli(s)"

    In each instance above, coverage of Israeli victims outpaced coverage of Palestinian victims, often to a significant degree.

    Even if they had reached numeric parity, that would still have translated to about seven times the mentions of Israeli deaths per dead Israeli compared to Palestinian deaths per dead Palestinian.

    In their seminal study on media bias Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky make a distinction between worthy and unworthy victims. As far as the US media is concerned, the worthy include citizens of the US and allied nations, as well as people killed by state enemies. The unworthy include those killed by the US government and its friends.

    Herman and Chomsky argue that we can expect the worthy and unworthy to be treated far differently by US media. The former will be the recipients of sympathy and support. The latter will be further victimized by neglect and perhaps even disdain.

    It’s not hard to see who the media considers worthy in Israel and Palestine.

    Unnewsworthy war crimes

    Victims aren’t the only ones who receive different treatment according to group status. So do victimizers. Consider, for example, how often war crimes are covered when they are committed by Hamas versus when they are committed by the Israeli military.

    One war crime Hamas is often accused of is the use of civilians as “human shields.” As the Guardian (10/30/23) has reported:

    Anecdotal and other evidence does suggest that Hamas and other factions have used civilian objects, including hospitals and schools. Guardian journalists in 2014 encountered armed men inside one hospital, and sightings of senior Hamas leaders inside the Shifa hospital have been documented.

    However, the same article continues:

    Making the issue more complicated…is the nature of Gaza and conflict there. As the territory consists mostly of an extremely dense urban environment, it is perhaps not surprising that Hamas operates in civilian areas.

    International law also makes clear that even if an armed force is improperly using civilian objects to shield itself, its opponent is still required to protect civilians from disproportionate harm.

    And it’s worth noting, as the Progressive (6/17/21) has, but the Guardian article unfortunately does not, that

    detailed investigations following the 2008–2009 and 2014 conflicts [between Israel and Hamas] by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Council and others have failed to find a single documented case of any civilian deaths caused by Hamas using human shields.

    For its part, Israel has been accused of the use of white phosphorus in Gaza, a violation of international law. And its “indiscriminate military attacks” on Gaza have been described by United Nations experts as “collective punishment,” amounting to “a war crime.”

    Yet coverage of these Israeli war crimes doesn’t even come close to coverage of “human shields.”

    "Human shields" vs "White phosphorus" vs "Collective punishment"

    While “human shield(s)” got an estimated 907 mentions throughout October, “collective punishment” got only 140, and “white phosphorus” a mere 30.

    Distracting from context

    The difference in media’s treatment of a friendly victimizer—one that may cause more death and destruction, but is a longstanding close ally of the United States—and of an official state enemy doesn’t stop there.

    On top of downplaying the friendly victimizer’s current war crimes, the media are also happy to distract from a context in which the friendly victimizer has been oppressing a population for years. In this particular case, Israel has illegally occupied Palestinian land since 1967, and has enacted “ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination.” It has subjected Gaza to an illegal air, land and sea blockade since 2007. And it has imposed a system of apartheid on the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, as documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem.

    Cable coverage of this context can’t exactly be described as extensive. Shows in which “Hamas” was mentioned near “terrorism” or “terrorist(s),” in fact, outnumbered shows that mentioned “Israel” near “apartheid,” “occupation,” “blockade” or “settlement(s)” more than 3-to-1 during the month of October. (See note 2.)

    "Hamas" and "terrorism, terrorist(s)" vs "Israel" and "occupation, apartheid, blockade, settlement(s)"

    Put simply, coverage of Israel’s long-standing oppression of the Palestinian people doesn’t appear to come anywhere close to coverage of Hamas’s terrorist acts. Context is swept under the rug. An enemy’s crimes are displayed indignantly on the mantel.

    This sort of coverage does not contribute to creating a population capable of thinking critically about violent conflict. Instead, its main purpose seems to be to stir up hatred for a state enemy, and blind support for a state ally. All a viewer has to remember are two simple principles:

    1. The suffering of our allies matters. The suffering of our enemies? Not so much.
    2. The crimes of our enemies matter. The crimes of our allies? Not so much.

    Methodology notes

    1. The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer provides estimates of screen time based on the number of mentions of search terms in the transcripts of cable shows. A time interval is assigned to each mention of a search term—by default and in the searches used for this article, this time interval is equal to one second. The time intervals for a given search term are then filtered for commercials, and for overlap with other time intervals for that same search term, to prevent overcounting. The number given for screen time is the sum of the time intervals after this processing. Since each mention of a search term is set to register as a one-second time interval, the figure for screen time in seconds is equivalent to number of mentions, which is the measure used in these graphs. These results are not without limitations, however, since the Analyzer does not filter for commercials with 100% precision, and CC captions can contain errors. For more details on the Analyzer, consult the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer website.
    2.  The Analyzer tallies the number of full shows, the vast majority of which clock in at around one hour in length, during which search terms are mentioned. Due to methodological issues, it’s difficult to get a precise picture of coverage when more complicated searches are fed into the Analyzer. A count of shows in which the search terms are mentioned near each other is therefore a cleaner way of estimating the extent of coverage than a measure of “number of mentions” of search terms. The searches used earlier in this piece, by contrast, were simple enough to avoid the methodological issues associated with more complicated searches. Thus, a count of mentions could be used to provide a more fine-grained estimate of the extent of coverage in those cases.

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  • Scott Burris on US v. Rahimi

     

          CounterSpin231117.mp3

     

    Time: Supreme Court to Decide Whether Some Domestic Abusers Can Have Guns

    Time (11/6/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because he had some history of mental illness. FAIR’s Olivia Riggio wrote about how that storyline not only gets the relationship wrong—mental illness is not a predictor of gun violence, except in terms of suicide, but also underserves and even endangers those with mental illness, with at least one presidential candidate calling for a return to involuntary commitment.  What isn’t served is the public conversation around reducing gun violence.

    The Supreme Court has just heard the case US v. Rahimi, which is specifically about whether those under domestic violence restraining orders should have access to guns. Most media did better than Time magazine’s thumbnail of Rahimi as pitting “the safety of domestic violence victims against the nation’s broad Second Amendment rights”—because, as our guest explains, Rahimi is much more about whether this Court’s conservative majority will be able to use their special brand of backwards-looking to determine this country’s future.

    Scott Burris is a professor at Temple Law School and the School of Public Health, and he directs Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research. We hear from him this week on the case.

          CounterSpin231117Burris.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Gaza crisis, and at McCarthyism.

          CounterSpin231117Banter.mp3

     

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    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • ‘A True Believer in Heinous Ideas’ – CounterSpin interview with Matt Gertz on Mike Johnson

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about new House Speaker Mike Johnson for the November 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin231110Gertz.mp3

     

    Medium: Mr. Speaker, There’s No Such Thing as a “Bible-Believing” Christian

    Medium (11/4/23)

    Janine Jackson: The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, describes himself as a “Bible-believing Christian,” though theologians are coming forward to say “go pick up a Bible” is not really a coherent spiritual worldview. Johnson claims he has zero assets and no bank account because he’s “a man of modest means,” though financial analysts are saying that actually suggests something rather shadier. And then there’s when he said new US funding for Israel would be balanced out by “pay-fors” in the budget.

    There are a number of questions about Mike Johnson, which is not at all the same as calling the person third in line for the presidency, as did CNN, a “blank slate.”

    Our next guest has been tracking the right and its influence for many years now. Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.

    Matt Gertz: Thanks for having me.

    JJ: I want to ask you about this “offset Israel aid with IRS cuts” thing, but first, Mike Johnson himself: He’s not a babe in the woods with no defining characteristics. What should we know about where he’s been and what he’s done?

    MG: I think Mike Johnson is a sort of House back-bencher who’s been promoted quite swiftly to one of the most powerful positions in Washington. And so I think everyone has been struggling to figure out what he’s all about and how to define him.

    Rolling Stone: Inside the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Anti-LGBTQ Org Where Mike Johnson Spent Almost a Decade

    Rolling Stone (10/29/23)

    That said, I think it’s quite clear that he comes out of the social conservative part of the GOP. He was, for a long time, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is an anti-LGTBQ hate group. He is a fierce opponent of abortion rights, and his legislative record reflects both of those.

    In addition, I think we might want to consider him as the sort of “dog who caught the car” here. He became speaker after a long struggle in which Republicans found themselves unable to find someone who could unite the party. Everyone basically got exhausted and put him forward and made him the speaker.

    But Mike Johnson is someone who has never done any of the functions that the job requires. He has never served as the chief communicator for House Republicans. He has never needed to count votes to pass bills. He has never raised large sums of money, as the position also requires. He’s never run a large staff.

    And so I think what we’ve been seeing, certainly in the early going here, is that he is really struggling to handle the core functions of the job. We’re seeing budget bills that are getting pulled from the floor, votes that the Republicans are losing that they’re not supposed to…. He’s really just not managing the party in the way you would expect from someone in that position.

    CNN: New speaker of the House Mike Johnson once wrote in support of the criminalization of gay sex

    CNN (10/27/23)

    JJ: And then if we look at what he has actually said and stood for—I mean, his ability to do the job, such as it is, is one thing, but he is a person. He has a record, and part of his record is homophobia, as you’ve said, but it’s not just garden variety. He calls same-sex marriage equality a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy.” That’s not normal language. “It’s a bizarre choice,” he says, “to be gay.” But media talk about that as though it’s his eye color. That’s like a thing that he thinks: He hates gay people. Isn’t that actually a disqualification from making laws for the US public?

    And then, also, he’s an election 2020 denier. He’s a climate change denier. There are things that we do know about him that should inform our understanding of his actions.

    MG: That’s exactly right. He is very much a creature of the far-right fringe of the Republican Party, and someone who, if he gets his way and is able to pass legislation that he has previously supported—things like a national version of Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, nationwide abortion bans—would be extremely dangerous.

    And I don’t think the mainstream press has done quite a good enough job of making that clear to the public. Now, on the one hand, they’re struggling just to figure out what this is all about, but you really need to do your job and get those basic details out into the public.

    JJ: Yeah, I just saw a headline that was something like, “Most US Voters Don’t Have an Opinion on Mike Johnson.” I’m like, well, yeah, they don’t know him. And that would be where reporting would come in. And for CNN to call him a “blank slate,” I think that’s very telling. There’s work for journalists to do there, and to not do it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be done.

    Media Matters: Steve Bannon: Rep. Mike Johnson was “one of the intellectual architects of pushing back on the stolen election”

    Media Matters (10/25/23)

    MG: I don’t usually quote Steve Bannon, but I think it’s worth pointing out here that he describes Mike Johnson as “one of the intellectual architects of pushing back on the stolen election,” and “by far the most conservative speaker in the history of the country.”

    I think with January 6, his role there is very telling. He was the architect of the brief that congressional Republicans filed in support of Texas’s bid to throw out electoral votes in key states, and basically have Trump declared president. He was doing that at Trump’s request, he has said.

    And of course that lawsuit went nowhere, which did not keep him from continuing to say that he was going to fight against the “stolen election” through January 6, and then vote to not count electoral votes after the insurrection happened. So he’s clearly a true believer in these heinous ideas.

    But there was an initial push from reporters to get him on the record on January 6. In his first press conference, he was asked about it, and the result was the Republicans around him booed, and he simply moved on to the next question. The next reporter in line did not say, “You should just answer the question you were just asked,” but moved on to something else. And he’s basically been able to dodge that ever since.

    JJ: I did want to give a little time here to talk about this offset thing, not just because of what it tells us about Mike Johnson, but because so many media seemed to swallow and regurgitate what was a fairly obviously nonsensical idea. And just like with the election denial, it’s like you can say, “Well, it came to naught, so let’s not consider it,” but you have to consider it, because it’s important to tell us the way these people are thinking.

    So tell us about this idea that Johnson put forward, that we’re going to speed forward aid for Israel, but it’s not going to cost taxpayers anything, because we’re going to balance it out.

    Media Matters: Major national outlets adopt House GOP spin to protect rich tax cheats

    Media Matters (10/31/23)

    MG: His claim was that there would be pay-fors in the budget to pay for this aid; we’re not just printing money to send it overseas. He said to Sean Hannity, “We’re going to find the cuts elsewhere to do that.” But when House Republicans released their bill, it paired $14.3 billion for Israel with $14.3 billion in cuts for the IRS, from the IRS funding that was passed last year in the Inflation Reduction Act.

    The problem, of course, is that the money used to increase the budget of the IRS is actually beneficial to the budget, because it gets more money out of wealthy taxpayers who have been cheating on their taxes. So the Congressional Budget Office ends up looking into it and finds that actually it’s going to blow a huge hole in the deficit, rather than paying for it.

    Unfortunately, a lot of journalists swallowed this altogether, and just reported that the aid would be paid for by cutting from the IRS. Some of them did a little bit better and pointed out, deep in the article, that actually the offset, so to speak, was going to be worse for the deficits. And some did, to their credit, actually explain that this wasn’t the case.

    It was an early test whether the press would be willing to regurgitate false claims from Mike Johnson, and I don’t think we could say by any means that they passed it.

    JJ: All right, we’ll end it there, but not forever. We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters. Thank you so much, Matt Gertz, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    MG: Thank you.

     

     

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  • Smearing Photojournalists as Hamas Collaborators Gets Them Added to a Hit List

     

    HonestReporting: Featured Broken Borders: AP & Reuters Pictures of Hamas Atrocities Raise Ethical Questions

    HonestReporting (11/8/23) presented photojournalists taking photos of combat—something photographers have been doing since there was photography—as though it were a grave breach of journalistic ethics.

    During Israeli military offensives in the Occupied Territories, it is common for the Israeli government and its supporters to claim media are biased in favor the Palestinians, often by invoking that there is “no moral equivalence” between the Israeli government and Palestinian militant organizations like Hamas (American Jewish Committee, 10/17/23). Akin to Alex Jones falsely smearing grieving parents of school shooting victims as “crisis actors,” pro-Israel advocates sometimes dismiss media images of Palestinian suffering as staged fakery they call “Pallywood” (France24, 10/27/23).

    Now Israeli government officials are accusing major news media of coordinating with Hamas, essentially painting Palestinian stringers as terrorist operatives. At least one Israeli official threatened to “eliminate” anyone involved in the October 7 attacks, and indicated that some journalists were included included on that list.

    The pro-Israel media advocacy organization HonestReporting (11/8/23) raised questions about the presence of AP, Reuters, New York Times and CNN photographers near the sites Hamas attacked in southern Israel on October 7:

    What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and the New York Times, notify these outlets?

    ‘No different than terrorists’

    NY Post: Netanyahu slams Hamas-linked journos used by CNN, NYT, Reuters and AP who were at Oct. 7 massacre

    The New York Post (11/9/23) described Hassan Eslaiah (pictured) and three other freelance photographers as having been “accused…of being inside the Hamas attack”—as though reporting on violence were the same as taking part in it.

    Israeli officials are taking the group’s words seriously, going hard against these news agencies and individual Palestinian stringers. These accusations were featured throughout the corporate media.

    The Financial Times (11/10/23) reported that Benny Gantz, who has held numerous Israeli military and ministerial roles, said “journalists found to have known about the massacre, and [who] still chose to stand as idle bystanders while children were slaughtered, are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such.” Knesset member Danny Danon (Twitter, 11/9/23), Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, said that Israel would “eliminate all participants of the October 7 massacre,” adding that “the ‘photojournalists’ who took part in recording the assault will be added to that list.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called these journalists “accomplices in crimes against humanity” (New York Post, 11/9/23).

    Politico (11/9/23) reported that Israel’s “Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi accused the foreign media of employing contributors who were tipped off on the Hamas attacks.” It added that Nitzan Chen, director of Israel’s government press office, had asked the four media outlets “for clarifications regarding the behavior” of their photographers.

    ‘Mobilized by Hamas’

    NYT: Israel Accuses Freelance Photographers of Advance Knowledge of Oct. 7 Attack

    By making Israel’s charge the headline, the New York Times (11/9/23) gave credence to the idea that covering violence was itself a violent act.

    The affair was covered in many other outlets, including the New York Times (11/9/23), The Hill (11/9/23), Newsweek (11/9/23) and the Daily Beast (11/9/23). The Jerusalem Post (11/10/23) took the government and watchdog’s allegations as fact and said in an editorial:

    These so-called photojournalists made no effort to stop or distance themselves from the barbaric events. On the contrary: They were mobilized by the Hamas terrorists to glorify their acts, help promote their terrorism and spread fear among their enemies—Israel and the West. In this way, too, Hamas recalls ISIS, which deliberately recorded its beheadings and other barbaric murders.

    In a statement, Reuters (11/9/23) “categorically denies that it had prior knowledge of the attack or that we embedded journalists with Hamas on October 7.” Al Jazeera (11/9/23) reported that “AP also rejected allegations that its newsroom had prior knowledge of the attacks”; the agency said in a statement that the

    first pictures AP received from any freelancer show they were taken more than an hour after the attacks began…. No AP staff were at the border at the time of the attacks, nor did any AP staffer cross the border at any time.

    Neither HonestReporting nor Israeli officials raising a stink about this have provided any evidence of unethical behavior by these media outlets or their stringers (Reuters, 11/11/23). HonestReporting has shrouded its rhetoric with the disclaimer of “just asking questions.” The AP (11/9/23) reported that “Gil Hoffman, executive director of HonestReporting and a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, admitted…the group had no evidence to back up” its suggestion that the photographers had “prior coordination with the terrorists.” Hoffman “said he was satisfied with subsequent explanations from several of these journalists that they did not know.”

    Nevertheless, CNN and the AP stopped working with Hassan Eslaiah, one of the freelancers mentioned in the HonestReporting report, who in fact “got extra emphasis in the HonestReporting story, which resurfaced a several-years-old photo of him posing with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar,” according to the Washington Post (11/9/23).

    Deadly time for journalists

    UPI: Committee to Protect Journalists says 39 journalists killed in Israel-Gaza war

    Citing the Committee to Protect Journalists, UPI (11/8/23) reported that the “month since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas has been the deadliest for journalists since it began gathering data in 1992.”

    Any journalist who read HonestReporting’s questions had to smirk a bit. Journalists all over the world are tipped off by all sorts of sources to get somewhere at a certain time, with the undetailed promise of some hot footage. This is just the nature of the job, and doesn’t mean that a journalist’s relationship with a source is the same as working together on a common message.

    I have already written at FAIR (10/19/23) that Israel’s killings of journalists in Gaza, combined with legal attempts to silence media critics within Israel, are a threat to the public’s ability to know about the nature of the ongoing violence, which is financed with US tax dollars. The Committee to Protect Journalists (11/15/23) said that 42 journalists have been killed in the month since fighting broke out, making that period “the deadliest for journalists since it began gathering data in 1992” (UPI, 11/8/23).

    Now Israeli officials have insinuated that if you are too physically close to a Palestinian fighter and get a good photo in the process, their government may consider you an enemy combatant. That is another chilling escalation of a troubling trend in Israel’s relationship with the press.

    Information stranglehold

    NBC: Palestinian journalists in Israel say they face intimidation and harassment

    Palestinian “reporters from at least three news outlets said they were questioned or assaulted by Israeli police,” NBC (11/11/23) reported.

    It’s all part of the Israeli government’s attempt to keep a tight stranglehold on information coming out in the press. Recently, the government used the tried and true method of embedding journalists within military units; in exchange for on-the-ground access, the military gets to review the footage journalists’ obtain (New Arab, 11/8/23). Israel also moved to criminalize the “consumption of terrorist materials” (Al Jazeera, 11/8/23) and to shut down media deemed a threat to national security (International Federation of Journalists, 10/20/23). NBC (11/11/23) reported that the Israeli government has “cracked down on broadcasts, reports and social media posts that” are deemed “a threat to national security or in support of terror organizations since Hamas’ October 7 assault.”

    As the Israeli publication +972 (9/18/23) pointed out, before the outbreak of the current war, Israeli government censorship had actually declined, but it still found that in 2022, the

    Israeli military censor blocked the publication of 159 articles across various Israeli media outlets, and censored parts of a further 990. In all, the military prevented information from being made public an average of three times a day—on top of the chilling effect that the very existence of censorship imposes on independent journalism that seeks to uncover government failings.

    While Israel likes to think of itself as a bastion of Western enlightenment in a sea of backward nations, this anti-media trend in the country makes it more like its neighbors than its supporters would like to believe.

    In the case of the death of famous British correspondent Marie Colvin, a judge ruled that she was intentionally targeted by the Assad regime for giving a voice to opposition factions (BBC, 1/31/19). Egypt frequently detains journalists for the supposed crime of collaboration with subversive organizations and foreign powers (Reporters Without Borders, 6/30/23). The rate of the Turkish government’s jailing of journalists has accelerated (Voice of America, 12/15/22), and last year the government “detained 11 journalists affiliated with pro-Kurdish media for their alleged links to Kurdish militants” (AP, 10/25/22).

    This is the club Israel belongs to. And such hostility toward the free press makes it harder for journalists to deliver clear, fair reporting about the Middle East conflict. And that’s the point. The insinuation that media organizations who report freely on the Israel/Palestine conflict are anti-Zionist agents is meant to keep the situation shrouded in haze.

    The post Smearing Photojournalists as Hamas Collaborators Gets Them Added to a Hit List appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Blaming Mass Shootings on Mental Illness Doesn’t Address Either Issue

     

    Photo of Robert Card released by police

    A photo of Robert Card released by police.

    Since a gunman went on a rampage in Lewistown, Maine, killing 16 people, we’ve learned a few things about the shooter, Robert Card, who was found with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound after a two-day manhunt. A member of the Army Reserve, Card had recently been committed to a mental health facility after he reported hearing voices and threatened to shoot up the National Guard base in Saco, Maine.

    Card’s mental health history has been central to reporting that laid out the lead-up to the deadliest mass shooting in the US this year. Questions of how Card was able to have access to guns, given his psychiatric hospitalization and documented concerns of family and soldiers in his reserve unit, drove much of the coverage. Lax gun laws that allow people like Card to slip through the cracks warrant interrogation, but the reality is that most mass shooters don’t have a mental health history like Card’s, nor is a record of mental illness a good predictor of gun violence.

    Card’s ability to carry out this tragedy is a symptom of the gun violence crisis in the US, but the presence of his mental illness is not representative of the issue. In the vast majority of cases of mass violence, mental illness is not considered a primary factor. Attempting to rationalize the horrors of a mass shooting by emphasizing the perpetrator’s mental state does very little to address the larger issue at best, and leads to dangerous mental health stigma at worst.

    A ‘textbook case’?

    The New York Times piece “The Signs Were All There. Why Did No One Stop the Maine Shooter?” (11/2/23) referred to Card having a “textbook set” of warning signs, including that he was “hearing voices.”

    CNN: The Maine gunman was a ‘textbook case’ for a state law designed to remove firearms from people like him. Why didn’t it work?

    Robert Card might be the “textbook case” of someone Maine’s law was aimed at (CNN, 11/5/23), but he’s not the textbook case of a mass shooter.

    “The Maine Gunman Was a ‘Textbook Case’ for a State Law Designed to Remove Firearms From People Like Him. Why Didn’t It Work?” read a CNN headline (11/5/23).

    “Even to the most untrained eye, Card is the literal textbook example of a person who shouldn’t be allowed to have access to firearms,” a New York Post editorial  (10/26/23) declared.

    These pieces refer to Maine’s “yellow-flag” laws, which gun control advocates consider watered-down versions of red-flag laws. Also known as extreme-risk laws, red-flat laws allow the loved ones of a person in crisis or law enforcement to petition a court for an order that temporarily prevents the person from accessing guns. Yellow-flag laws require several procedural steps, including a mental health evaluation, before a gun can be removed from someone’s possession. Red-flag laws don’t require mental health evaluations.

    It needs to be made clear: While Card’s mental illness might make him a “textbook example” of someone who should not have had access to a gun, it does not make him a “textbook example” of a shooter. A large majority of firearm deaths involving mental illness are suicides. These pieces did not make that distinction. (Gun suicides outnumber gun murders overall, but by a narrower margin.)

    A tiny minority

    FBI: A Study of the Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States

    FBI (6/18): “In light of the very high lifetime prevalence of the symptoms of mental illness among the US population, formally diagnosed mental illness is a not a very specific predictor of violence of any type.”

    So while a critique of the weak gun laws that allowed Card access to firearms is warranted, harping on his mental illness doesn’t add much context to the larger epidemic of mass shootings in the US. Mental illness exists all around the world, after all, but only one country accounted for 73% of the mass shootings that occurred in the developed world between 1998 and 2019. And removing guns from everyone who displayed similar symptoms to Card is not likely to decrease mass shootings by a significant amount.

    An FBI study that monitored pre-attack behaviors of mass shooters between 2000 and 2013 found that 25% of them had diagnosed mental illnesses (which includes non-psychotic conditions, such as depression and substance abuse). This is not far off from the 23% of US adults who experienced mental illness in 2021, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Only 5% of the shooters in the FBI study had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.

    And a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily assert a causal relationship. In most cases, the relationship between the violent act and mental illness is incidental (Columbia Psychiatry, 7/6/22).

    In a piece for the American Association of Medical Colleges (1/26/23), John Rozel and Jeffrey Swanson cited a 2018 study that found that less than 5% of mass shooters had any record of a gun-disqualifying mental health adjudication, like involuntary hospitalization:

    Indeed, if serious mental illnesses suddenly disappeared, violence would decrease by only about 4%. More than 90% of violent incidents, including homicides, would still occur.

    They added, “The real story—and the real need—regarding mental illness and violence is suicide.”

    The real red flag

    MSNBC: Maine Shooting Suspect Was Sent by Military Unit for Psychiatric Treatment

    Contrary to the implication of MSNBC‘s headline (10/26/23), “psychiatric treatment” is not a helpful criterion for identifying mass shooters.

    Card’s family’s concern for his mental health was central to corporate media reporting, including a segment on MSNBC‘s Chris Jansing Reports (10/26/23) and an NBC piece (10/26/23) that described Card’s family and colleagues recalling him hearing voices. A CBS News Boston piece (10/26/23) that outlined a number of facts authorities knew about Card when he was on the run headlined his mental illness: “What We Know About Lewiston, Maine, Shooting Suspect Robert Card and His Mental Health History.”

    “Even as [Card] was confronted and hospitalized and had a sheriff’s deputy come knocking, nothing went far enough,” the New York Times article (11/2/23) read.

    “Cops Were Warned About Maine Gunman’s Declining Mental Health in May,” reported the Daily Beast (10/30/23).

    A New York Post report (10/31/23) was headlined “Maine Mass Shooter Robert Card Claimed Voices in His Head Were Calling Him a ‘Pedophile.’”

    Eclipsing the why

    Boston Globe: Scapegoating mental illness is ineffective in preventing mass shootings

    Kris Brown (Boston Globe, 10/30/23): “By irresponsibly promoting myths that link mental illness with dangerousness, officials perpetuate stigmas that only continue to hurt people suffering from such illness.”

    The obsession with Card’s mental health eclipses why stronger risk-based gun restrictions—like red-flag laws—are so effective. In an opinion piece for the Boston Globe (10/30/23), Kris Brown, the president of gun violence prevention group Brady, points out:

    Importantly, these laws were intentionally designed, in their initial recommendation by the Consortium for Risk Based Firearm Policy, to avoid reliance on mental health diagnoses, and instead to focus on the behaviors that best indicate potential future violence.

    As NBC (8/6/19) reported in 2019, mental illness is not a significant risk factor in mass shootings—but a record of violent and risky behavior is. Card’s spoken threats and access to guns were statistically much more indicative of the risk he posed to the public than the mental illness that dominated the headlines.

    Involuntary commitment and stigma

    The stigma caused by this type of reporting is palpable. Following the massacre, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy took to Twitter (10/26/23), painting with dangerously broad and wantonly vague strokes:

    We must remove these violent, psychiatrically deranged people from their communities and be willing to involuntarily commit them.

    NY Post: Maine needs red flag laws and better ways to commit the mentally ill like Robert Card

    The New York Post (10/26/23) defined the issue as “making sure the mentally ill or unstable can’t access guns.”

    Unsurprisingly, the New York Post editorial board (10/26/23) was also a fan of involuntary commitment, suggesting that Maine needs red-flag laws—and “better ways to commit the mentally ill.”

    The Post editorial made the solution seem simple:

    The state must intervene by making sure the sick person’s getting the treatment they need, and keeping them totally isolated from any and all guns. Imagine if cops, prosecutors and mental health workers had acted swiftly to put Card back in a mental hospital and not let him leave.

    Advocating for more mental health hospitalization requires an understanding of what’s wrong with mental healthcare in the first place. What, exactly, is the “treatment they need”? Is it available? Are psychiatric hospitals adequately staffed and funded? Is the staff trained enough to manage patients’ conditions and keep everyone safe? Does the patient have insurance, or sufficient funds to pay for treatment? How does stigma from communities, politicians and media serve as a barrier to effective treatment?

    The New York Times piece’s subheading (11/2/23) said, “Shortcomings in mental health treatment, weak laws and a reluctance to threaten personal liberties can derail even concerted attempts to thwart mass shootings.” But the text of the article hardly addressed the former. It stated:

    The system to treat people who resist getting help on their own is geared toward acute, not long-term, problems. Involuntary stays require an imminent threat of harm and generally last from 72 hours to two weeks.

    Suggesting that involuntary commitment can prevent mass violence without engaging in meaningful discussion about barriers to effective mental health treatment—and the trauma inadequate mental health treatment can cause—is lazy.

    In response to Ramaswamy’s ill-informed and stigmatizing tweet, journalist Ana Marie Cox (MSNBC, 10/26/23) highlighted another crucial point: 97% of mass shooters are men, and the majority of those men are white. Involuntary commitment has already been on the rise, but white men remain significantly underrepresented in involuntarily  committed populations.

    ‘That unstable neighbor’

    St Louis Post Dispatch: Unstable people shouldn't have guns. (Or legislative power, for that matter.)

    The St. Louis Post Dispatch (11/2/23) snarks that bad lawmaking is “a clear sign of mental instability.”

    A St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial (11/2/23) that advocated for tighter gun laws also used vague and stigmatizing language that villainized “unstable” people. While first discussing red-flag laws that should keep guns out of the hands of those who display signs of mental illness, the piece later sarcastically accused legislators who refuse to pass gun control measures of “mental instability”:

    These are the same lawmakers who (talk about a clear sign of mental instability) defeated a measure this year that would merely have specified that children aren’t allowed to carry guns around in public. On firearms, these folks are immune to common sense and beyond convincing.

    The piece ended:

    Fully 60% of Missourians favor the modest, rational step of keeping guns from the mentally ill, according to a St. Louis University/YouGov poll this year. Yet the only way they will ever achieve that imperative is by sending a saner delegation to Jefferson City. Until then, you’ll just have to keep an eye out for that unstable neighbor.

    The righteous call for stricter gun laws is obscured by the facetious conflation of mental illness with violence, political corruption and the need to be locked up. Statistically, the bigger reason to “keep an eye out for that unstable neighbor” with a gun is because of the risk of suicide—not mass violence.

    Public stigma—including branding mentally ill people as dangerous—leads to worsening symptoms and reduced likelihood of receiving treatment. It can also lead to discrimination by employers, the healthcare system and the law (American Psychiatric Association, 8/20).

    Locking people like Card in mental health facilities doesn’t automatically cure them. And considering mentally ill people are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence, it certainly does not adequately address the mass shooting crisis in this country.

    The post Blaming Mass Shootings on Mental Illness Doesn’t Address Either Issue appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • NYT Runs Interference for IDF as It Bombs Jabalia Refugee Camp

     

    NYT: Photos show an explosion has caused heavy damage in Gaza’s Jabaliya neighborhood.

    A New York Times headline (10/31/23) erases both the perpetrators and the victims of an Israeli air attack that killed hundreds of Palestinians.

    Israeli bombs rained down on the Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza on Halloween, leveling housing units and killing and wounding hundreds of Palestinians, mostly women and children. The high-powered bombs left a huge crater surrounded by ruined buildings, along with stunned, wounded civilians frantically trying to find loved ones still alive under the rubble. With an estimated 116,000 people living on half a square mile, the Jabalia camp is one of the most densely populated places on earth.

    The hashtag #400Palestinians (indicating number of dead and wounded) was trending on Twitter in the morning, and users reposted footage from the scene, linked to alternative news sources, drew attention to international condemnation, expressed grief and outrage, called it a massacre and demanded the International Criminal Court intervene. Al Jazeera (10/31/23) aired live footage of the rescue operations, and its anchor interviewed doctors and analysts.

    On social media, the suffering could seem overwhelming, especially when children were pulled from rubble, some dead, some still alive. Some users relied on scripture, calling the destruction biblical.

    The New York Times (10/31/23) ran this headline on its Morning Update page: “Photos Show an Explosion Has Caused Heavy Damage in Gaza’s Jabalia Neighborhood.”

    The Times piece continued with the pretense of knowing nothing about the “explosion” other than what could be seen from pictures: “Photographs taken on Tuesday showed at least one large crater and significant damage to buildings at the Jabalia neighborhood.” The use of “neighborhood” distorted every aspect of the target area: its size, density, significance and degree of damage.

    The article went to lengths to convey that the “explosion” was so mysterious that it required time-delayed visual confirmation for verification: “There was no crater in the area of the explosion on Monday, according to a satellite image of the camp by the private company Planet Labs.” The sentence was so absurd in context that it sat like a ghoulish product placement for the business/surveillance company.

    Pro-genocide tropes

    Times of Israel: COGAT chief addresses Gazans: ‘You wanted hell, you will get hell’

    Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, the Israeli official responsible for implementing government policy on the occupied West Bank, declared that “human animals must be treated as such.” (Times of Israel, 10/10/23).

    The Times‘ pro-genocide tropes have become recognizable over the three weeks that the paper has “reported” on the systematic killing of civilians in the Gaza Strip. There is the familiar discrediting of Gaza’s health ministry, with the Times saying it is “controlled by Hamas” before referencing its information, that “the damage was the result of an attack by Israel that killed and wounded ‘hundreds’ of people.” The Times continues to cast more doubt by claiming the information “could not be immediately verified,” seemingly justifying this by saying “a spokesman for Israel’s military said it was looking into the reports.”

    Human Rights Watch (10/27/23) has stated that the figures released by the Gaza health ministry are reliable.

    In the middle of Israel’s open and admitted bombing campaign of Gaza, with the stated goals of turning it into hell and a “city of tents,” where else could such an explosion have originated? Is it possible to bomb such a small, crowded place and not kill hundreds of civilians and bury them alive in the rubble? As UCLA professor Saree Makdisi (10/25/23) understood:

    At any moment, without warning, at any time of the day or night, any apartment building in the densely populated Gaza Strip can be struck by an Israeli bomb or missile. Some of the stricken buildings simply collapse into layers of concrete pancakes, the dead and the living alike entombed in the shattered ruins.

    ‘What appeared to be bodies’

    Daily Beast: Rep. Cory Mills Claims Some Dead Palestinians Are ‘Paid Actors’

    The Daily Beast (11/4/23) spells out the Alex Jones–like perspective that the New York Times implicitly takes seriously in Gaza.

    The use of another photograph allowed the Times to diminish the horrors of what was happening on the ground. The Times expected its readers to believe that the premier “paper of record” and preeminent information source had no knowledge of the scene, and had to rely on wire service photographs:

    A later photograph published by Reuters showed a Red Crescent ambulance on a street and more than 30 white sheets wrapped around what appeared to be bodies laid on the ground.

    What else could they be—mannequins or sandbags made to look like victims of airstrikes? The implication’s logic was later openly asserted by Rep. Cory Mills (R–Fla.)  in a conspiracy-laced allegation that dead Palestinians were actually “paid actors” pretending to be killed (Daily Beast, 11/4/23).

    Compare this to the words of the Al Jazeera correspondent describing the scene (Twitter, 10/31/23): “The massacre is huge. Peoples’ limbs are scattered around everywhere.”

    Journalists’ families wiped out

    While the New York Times constructed its report from an office building, Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been dying on the ground to bear witness to the slaughter. CounterPunch (10/27/23) offered a glimpse into the soul-deadening yet essential work of journalists reporting from Gaza, as they capture

    pictures in real time of the airstrikes and their victims, entire families wiped out in a flash. They tell us about the difficulties of survival for those who do not die, people trying desperately to access food, water and some energy.

    “I want to die with my family,” one Palestinian journalist told CounterPunch in a text.

    Al Jazeera: Family of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief killed in Israeli air raid

    Al Jazeera (10/25/23): “Their home was targeted in the Nuseirat camp in the center of Gaza, where they had sought refuge after being displaced by the initial bombardment in their neighborhood, following [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s call for all civilians to move south.”

    The family of Al Jazeera‘s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, was wiped out by an Israeli airstrike that hit the house where his wife, daughter and son were living in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza. They were killed immediately (Al Jazeera, 10/25/23).

    Media obfuscation continued on CNN (11/3/23) when another Israeli bomb hit the home of Mohammad Abu Hattab, killing the Palestine TV journalist and 11 members of his family. Thirty minutes before the blast, the slain journalist had been reporting live outside of Gaza’s Nasser hospital. Even with access to the moving video report of his death, the network refused to simply identify this explosion as an Israeli airstrike, instead writing: “CNN could not independently confirm the source of the blast,” and the “Palestinian Authority–run television network” offered “no evidence” for what “it described as an Israeli airstrike.” And the all-too-familiar “Israeli military had no immediate comment on the incident.”

    Questioning the “Palestinian Authority–run television” reporting on the Israeli killing of yet another Palestinian journalist is absurd, and sounds it under such conditions. As FAIR (10/19/23) revealed, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has charged the Israeli military with demolishing or severely damaging the homes of dozens of journalists along with 48 press centers. On-the-ground reporters continue to document the killing, even in the face of the Committee to Protect Journalists (11/7/23) announcing that with 39 media workers killed, it has been the “deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.” Their work has allowed global publics to gasp in horror and demand an immediate ceasefire to stop the killing. But media have systematically stifled these voices (FAIR.org, 10/24/23).

    Killing in the dark

    Killing and discrediting reporters, Palestinian news stations and the health ministry’s documentation of death was not enough. On October 27, four days before the Jabalia massacre, Israel cut off all electronic communications to Gaza during that bloody assault. In “Is Gaza Burning?,” subtitled “The Scourging of Gaza: Diary of a Genocidal War,” Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch, 10/28/23) wrote:

    The lights were shot out. The internet unplugged. The phone lines down. The power shut off. Gaza was alone under bombardment, some of the heaviest of the war so far… The missiles and tanks and commandos came in, but no words or images got out.

    The only illumination was Gaza burning. The killing of civilians was hidden in the dark of night so that Israeli war crimes could not be documented in real time.

    ‘We are watching genocide live’

    Common Dreams: Gaza Death Toll Climbs as Israeli Bombing Leaves Jabalia Refugee Camp 'Completely Destroyed'

    “These buildings house hundreds of citizens,” said a spokesperson for Gaza’s interior ministry (Common Dreams, 10/31/23). “The occupation’s air force destroyed this district with six US-made bombs.”

    Independent media, without the budgets and resources of the wealthy, prestigious New York Times, but less invested in the Israeli genocide, reported on the scene of the Jabalia massacre, citing human responses, not talking points. Common Dreams (10/31/23) ran the headline “Gaza Death Toll Climbs as Israeli Bombing Leaves Jabalia Refugee Camp ‘Completely Destroyed.’” It quoted Ahmad al-Kahlout, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Interior Ministry:

    “These buildings house hundreds of citizens. The occupation’s air force destroyed this district with six US-made bombs,” said al-Kahlout. “It is the latest massacre caused by Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip.”

    Common Dreams writer Bret Wilkins also referred to Aicha Elbasri, a researcher at the Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies, who told Al Jazeera that “what we are watching today is one of the darkest hours of our time.” She added, “We are watching genocide live.”

    But the Times (10/31/23) was mouthing a directive from Benjamin Netanyahu himself: “Israel’s military has repeatedly warned civilians to leave northern Gaza and head to the south of the enclave,” followed by: “But it has also conducted bombings in the south.” The two sentences sit side by side, with the unpleasant disconnect left unaddressed.

    Israelis have justified killing civilians because they haven’t left northern Gaza, where the Jabalia Camp is located. It has also claimed that Hamas is preventing civilians from moving. Yet it has been no secret, documented by aid agencies, that the Israelis have targeted those in transit, an action itself  that constitutes a war crime under Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions, and then bombed their convoys.

    The failure to “move to the south” ruse to justify civilian slaughter was called out by Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch. Roth identified Israeli human rights violations and became the target of pro-Israel advocates for his efforts. Roth tweeted (10/31/23):

    Netanyahu blames Hamas for “preventing [civilians] from leaving the areas of conflict” as if any civilian death is its fault. No! Hamas may prevent some from leaving, but many cannot or choose not to go. Israel still has a legal duty to avoid killing them.

    BBC reporting mirrored NYT

    The failure to identify Israel as culpable for the Jabalia bombings was caught by California State University professor Asad Abukhalil (Twitter, 10/31/23), who recognized the same strategy being employed by the BBC (10/31/23), which reported, “Israel confirms it carried out deadly airstrike on Gaza refugee camp, and says it killed a senior Hamas commander.”

    Abukhalil (Twitter, 10/31/23) observed: “So until Israel confirmed it, you were referring to it as a mysterious ‘explosion.’ You had no idea what happened.”

    The same word “explosion” looks suspiciously as if both outlets were reading from the same Israeli missive. Notice also that Israel is only identified by the BBC when accompanied by the justifying claim that a “senior Hamas commander” was killed.

    ‘This is the tragedy of war’ 

    CNN: IDF Confirms Airstrike Hit Gaza's Largest Refugee Camp

    Deliberately bombing innocent civilians is “the tragedy of war,” Israeli military spokesperson Richard Hecht told CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer (10/31/23).

    CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer trended on Twitter on Halloween when a clip of his interview with an Israeli military spokesperson led to an interchange that exposed Israel’s unvarnished determination to kill civilians. The interchange was posted by Justin Baragona (Twitter, 10/31/23), senior media reporter for the Daily Beast:

    Blitzer: You knew that there were innocent civilians in that refugee camp, right?

    IDF spox: This is the tragedy of war. We told them to move south.

    Blitzer: So you decided to drop the bomb anyway.

    IDF spox: We’re doing everything we can to minimize civilian deaths.

    Documentary filmmaker Dan Cohen (Twitter, 10/31/23) observed:

    Even Wolf Blitzer, a former AIPAC employee and Jerusalem Post reporter, can’t figure out how to defend the slaughter of 400 Palestinians in a single attack.

    Nathan Robinson, editor of  Current Affairs, observed Blitzer’s response to the callous disregard for human life:

    Wolf Blitzer is very pro-Israel, in fact used to be the editor of an AIPAC newsletter. It tells you something that Blitzer sounds totally incredulous, disbelieving, and horrified by the IDF’s spokesman’s explanation for bombing a refugee camp.

    Blitzer’s push-back was a surprising divergence from CNN’s general reporting. Two weeks earlier, CNN featured an Israeli soldier openly admitting that civilians were his target (“the war is not just with Hamas, the war [is] with all the civilians”), but it went unscrutinized (Electronic Intifada, 10/15/23).

    How to cover war crimes 

    BBC: Gaza Health Ministry: Over 8,000 Have Been Killed

    Yousef Munayyer (BBC, 10/29/23): “It’s clear…that the way this is being conducted is nowhere in line with international law.”

    When the BBC (10/29/23) spoke to Yousef Munayyer, head of the Israel Palestine Program at the Arab Center Washington DC, he was forced to remind the network anchor how to engage in factual war reporting. The anchor led with breaking news that Biden and Netanyahu were just on the phone, and “the message seems to be yet again…absolute support for the military action as long as it is in line with international law. What do you make of that twin message?”

    After calling it disingenuous, Yousef Munayyer said, “It’s clear to anybody who has eyes and can see what’s happening in Gaza that the way this is being conducted is nowhere in line with international law.” Munayyer identified the attacks as “collective punishment,” and argued that the “rate of killing civilians on the ground cannot in any way be considered in line with international law.”

    Here the anchor interrupted to complain that he had just spoken to the Israeli ambassador in the studio, and he said they were conducting their operations within international law. A now-frustrated Yousef Munayyer responded:

    I don’t expect the Israeli ambassador to come on the BBC and say yes, we are engaging in war crimes. I expect that the journalist would push back with the facts that are observable, and ask them how they can justify the war crimes that they are committing.

    Joy Reid breaks rank

    MSNBC: Mideast Conflict Divides the World

    Joy Reid (MSNBC, 10/31/23): “How does bombing hospitals, churches, mosques and UN schools constitute self-defense?”

    MSNBC  anchor Joy Reid (10/31/23) laid out the twisted US/Israeli logic of justification, as it was becoming impossible for many any longer to spin genocide as “defensive,” or justified by killing “a senior Hamas commander.” Over pictures of Gaza in ruins, Reid asked questions unfamiliar to other US TV anchors:

    How does bombing a densely populated land-strip filled 50% with children constitute self-defense? How does bombing hospitals, churches, mosques and UN schools constitute self-defense?

    Well, you say, if Hamas fighters are hiding in the hospital, using the civilians as human shields—OK, let’s say they are. Are you arguing that flattening the hospital and killing newborns in their incubators, and their moms…the doctors, nurses, and just the women and kids hiding in the hospital…that’s not a war crime? Because you would be wrong, according to international law.

    The Atlantic (10/27/23) also asserted that “the Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others — is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed.” But as Caitlin Johnstone (10/31/23) pointed out:

    One need only look at the fact that nearly 70% of the people killed in these airstrikes have been women and children to see immediately that Israel is doing nothing to minimize the number of civilians killed.

    The charity Save the Children (10/29/23) said that “the number of children reported killed in Gaza in just three weeks has surpassed the annual number of children killed across the world’s conflict zones since 2019.”

    Mounting proof of war crimes

    Amnesty: Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza

    “Amnesty International [10/20/23] has documented unlawful Israeli attacks, including indiscriminate attacks, which caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes.”

    Over the course of the attacks on Gaza, the UN, relief agencies and human rights organizations have been documenting Israeli war crimes. Amnesty International (10/20/23) has compiled “Damning Evidence of War Crimes as Israeli Attacks Wipe Out Entire Families in Gaza.” A brief prepared by the Center for Constitutional Rights (Consortium News, 10/27/23) argues that “the United States—and US citizens, including and up to the president—can be held responsible for their role in furthering genocide.”

    Inter Press Service (10/25/23) reported that the widespread use of US weapons that killed thousands of civilians in Gaza “has triggered accusations of war crimes against the United States.” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was quoted:

    The American people never signed up to help Israel commit war crimes against defenseless civilians with taxpayer funded bombs and artillery.

    By November 12, Israel had killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 4,600 of them children  (Washington Post, 11/13/23); 1.6 million people have been displaced (UNRWA, 11/13/23). UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Gaza has become a “graveyard for children” (Reuters, 11/7/23). The New York Times, and other news outlets, have employed a lexicon that diminishes, denies, obscures and justifies Israeli war crimes. But no matter how many times corporate media repeat Israeli and US propaganda claims that Israeli violence is defensive, or directed at Hamas, or that Hamas is to blame, or that they are following the rules of war, or working to minimize civilian casualty, that does not make it so.

    The post NYT Runs Interference for IDF as It Bombs Jabalia Refugee Camp appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • ‘Free Speech’ Fans Call for Censoring TikTok as Chinese Plot to Make Israel Look Bad

     

    Free Press: Why Do Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok.

    “A free press for free people” boldly champions the censorship of dangerous foreign ideas (Free Press, 11/1/23).

    Axios (10/31/23) reported that in a two-week period, TikTok saw “nearly four times the number of views to TikTok posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine globally compared to posts using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael.” As a result, the conservative outrage machine kicked into high gear.

    Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wisc.), who serves on the House select committee investigating China’s Communist Party, took to the web publication Free Press (11/1/23) to sound the alarm: TikTok’s Chinese ownership meant that a dangerous foreign power was using social media to sway public opinion against Israel. His solution was clear: It’s “time for Congress to take action. Time to ban TikTok.”

    This is interesting for a few reasons, but chief among them is that the Free Press was started by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, one of a handful of conservative journalists who banded together to assert the federal government exerted too much control on Twitter before it was acquired by Elon Musk (NPR, 12/14/22). The company’s liberal corporate governance, they asserted, had suppressed conservative ideas (Washington Post, 12/13/22).

    Weiss even signed the Westminster Declaration, a vow to protect “free speech”: “Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices,” it said. These “large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Now the Free Press fears the internet is too free, and should be cleansed of ideas deemed hurtful to the Israeli government.

    Censorship by the wrong people

    Gallagher said that “TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z, and about six in ten Americans are hooked on the app before their 17th birthday.” This is worrisome, he said, because TikTok “is controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

    This brings Gallagher, and other GOP lawmakers, to the conclusion that the US must ban TikTok. “We are ceding the ability to censor Americans’ speech to a foreign adversary,” he said–suggesting that censorship isn’t altogether wrong, it’s just wrong when committed by an undesirable entity. He pointed out that “for a century, the Federal Communications Commission has blocked concentrated foreign ownership of radio and television assets on national security grounds.”

    This indicates that Gallagher, in the name of anti-Communism, doesn’t think the market should decide which media consumers can access. Instead, this must be highly regulated by a powerful federal agency. So much for his commitment to “get big government out of the way.”

    ‘Massively manipulating’

    NBC: Critics renew calls for a TikTok ban, claiming platform has an anti-Israel bias

    Critics call for banning TikTok because users are getting the “wrong information,” thus “undercutting support for Israel among young Americans,” which is “contrary to US foreign policy interests” (NBC, 11/1/23).

    He’s hardly alone. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.), who once blasted (10/20/20) what she saw as censorship against conservative voices at Facebook and Twitter, called for a ban (NBC, 11/1/23), saying “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) concurred,  saying in a statement, “For quite some time, I have been warning that Communist China is capable of using TikTok’s algorithm to manipulate and influence Americans.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) wants a ban (UPI, 11/7/23), and the New York Post editorial board (11/6/23) approvingly cited Gallagher’s Free Press piece.

    Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who has called for punitive action against Harvard University students who made pro-Palestine statements (Wall Street Journal, 10/11/23; Business Insider, 11/5/23), “said TikTok should ‘probably be banned’ for ‘massively manipulating public opinion’ in favor of Hamas and stoking anti-Israel animus,” the New York Post (11/1/23) reported.

    CNN (11/5/23) also insinuated that TikTok is skewing public opinion and reported that the Biden administration is monitoring the situation, saying the president’s aides “are also warily monitoring developments like how the Chinese government-controlled TikTok algorithm just happens to be prioritizing anti-Israel content.”

    If this freakout about TikTok seems selective, that’s because it is. Since Musk took over Twitter, hate speech and antisemitism have run amok on the platform (Washington Post, 3/20/23; LA Times, 4/27/23), but congressional Republicans and their journalistic allies on the social media beat aren’t clamoring for an intervention into the mogul’s extremist influence on US discourse.

    Republicans have been looking to ban TikTok, howling about its Chinese ownership, since the Trump administration, but the call became all the more real when the state of Montana banned the app completely (FAIR.org, 5/25/23). TikTok is banned on US government devices (CBS, 3/1/23); in liberal New York City, the same is true for city government devices (NPR, 8/17/23). Given all that, the concept that the Republican-held House could push to ban TikTok completely, on the grounds that it allows too much criticism of Israel, is no laughing matter.

    Media moral panics

    WaPo: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

    Facebook‘s parent company paid a PR firm to promote the view that “TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is No. 1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

    Some of this vitriol toward TikTok is purely cynical. The Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that “Facebook parent company Meta,” a major competitor to TikTok, worked with “one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.”

    But the history of US politics has been defined by periodic moral panics about the subversion of American values through media. The Grant administration took tight control of the US Postal Service out of fear that sexual content circulated through the mail was degrading the nation’s moral core.

    The advent of film spawned local and state censorship boards throughout the country, starting with Chicago in 1907. The Supreme Court held in 1915 that film was “a business pure and simple,” and thus not protected by the First Amendment—a decision not reversed until 1952. In the mid–20th century, anti-Communist zealots in the House of Representatives persecuted numerous Hollywood writers and actors, based on the suspicion that they were indoctrinating the American public with socialist ideas through the movies.

    In the 1980s, Tipper Gore, wife of then-Sen. Al Gore (D–Tenn.), started a campaign that forced record labels to put warning stickers on albums with “explicit lyrics” (New York Times, 1/4/88).

    They must be brainwashed

    WaPo: TikTok was slammed for its pro-Palestinian hashtags. But it’s not alone.

    The Washington Post (11/13/23) noted that “young Americans have consistently shown support for Palestinians in Pew Research surveys, including a poll in 2014, four years before TikTok launched in the United States.”

    The current rhetoric against TikTok is not only a hypocritical attack on free speech, it’s an insinuation that the only reason people could be critical of Israel is manipulation by a foreign government. There’s no way people from all walks of life could simply be horrified by what’s happening in Gaza; those devilish Chinese Communists must be warping their minds.

    In fact, the Washington Post (11/13/23) found that TikTok was not even unique among social networks for the gap between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel support in public posts. It said:

    But Facebook and Instagram, TikTok’s US-based rivals, show a remarkably similar gap, their data show. On Facebook, the #freepalestine hashtag is found on more than 11 million posts—39 times more than those with #standwithisrael. On Instagram, the pro-Palestinian hashtag is found on 6 million posts, 26 times more than the pro-Israel hashtag.

    Any move by elected officials to ban TikTok should be taken seriously; it’s not just about the app’s videos about terrible first dates and secret menu items. Free speech is a principle. When so-called defenders of free speech advocate censorship because they find certain political ideas too dangerous, be very worried.

    Featured image: Screenshots of Israel/Palestine content on TikTok.

    The post ‘Free Speech’ Fans Call for Censoring TikTok as Chinese Plot to Make Israel Look Bad appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Jamil Dakwar on US & Human Rights, Matt Gertz on Mike Johnson

     

          CounterSpin231110.mp3

     

    Truthout: UN Report Details Rampant US Human Rights Violations at Home and Abroad

    Truthout (11/9/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic.

    The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, the narrative covers global and at-home violations.

    Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU.

          CounterSpin231110Dakwar.mp3

     

    Rep. Mike Johnson

    House Speaker Mike Johnson (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

    Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s true as far as it goes, but isn’t it also a kind of admission of failure for a press corps that really should be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency—like maybe his idea that some of the people he’s nominally representing should just burn in Hell?

    Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, will give us some things to consider as we see coverage of Mike Johnson unfold.

          CounterSpin231110Gertz.mp3

     

    The post Jamil Dakwar on US & Human Rights, Matt Gertz on Mike Johnson appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Conflating Jewish and Pro-Israel Is Wrong and Misleading

     

    Pew: U.S. Jews have widely differing views on Israel

    This Pew report (5/21/21) should not come as a surprise to US journalists.

    As protests erupt worldwide against Israel’s ferocious bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, which has claimed the lives of more than 10,000 Palestinians (Reuters, 11/6/23), US media ponder how all of this impacts Jewish people. Sadly, the way this is often framed completely mischaracterizes Jewish opinion and the pro-Israel movement, falsely acting as if Jewish opinion is unquestionably unified in support of Israeli military attacks and in opposition to Palestinian rights.

    One might think corporate media might have learned better by now. The New York Times (10/27/23) reported on a massive “never again for anyone” protest at Grand Central Terminal headed by Jewish Voice for Peace. Descendants of Holocaust survivors were arrested for protesting military aid to Israel at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s house (Business Insider, 10/14/23). More than 300 activists were arrested in Washington, DC, while calling for a ceasefire in a Capitol Hill protest organized by JVP and IfNotNow, another Jewish peace group (USA Today, 10/19/23).

    CNN (10/23/23) reported, “Thousands more Jewish Americans continue to gather in protests across the United States, calling on President Joe Biden and other elected officials to rein in Israel.” Among those Jewish-led protests was one outside the Los Angeles home of Vice President Kamala Harris (LA Times, 10/19/23).

    None of this should be surprising, as a Pew Research (5/21/21) survey “found that Jewish Americans—much like the US public overall—also hold widely differing views on Israel and its political leadership.” Younger Jews in particular are often sharply critical of Israel; a poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute (7/13/21) found that 38% of US Jews under 40 agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 33% believed it was committing genocide against Palestinians.

    Binary framing

    NYT: Reaction to Hamas Attack Leaves Some Jews in Hollywood Feeling Unmoored

    “Jewish writers reacted with horror to the guild’s refusal to condemn the attacks on Israel,” the New York Times reported (10/29/23)—although there were also Jewish writers on the board that made that decision.

    Yet binary media framing persists. In the early days of the current Israel/Palestine violence, FAIR (10/17/23) criticized a New York Times (10/13/23) that depicted Jewish New Yorkers as united in putting aside their political differences with the Israeli government in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel—ignoring the Jewish groups that were mobilizing against a military assault on Gaza.

    More recently, the New York Times (10/29/23) reported on an internal spat within the Writers Guild of America over its initial reluctance to issue a statement about the Hamas attack.  The paper characterized the affair as “Jewish writers” rebelling against the union’s leadership, even though some of its board members, like Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Hey Alma, 3/16/20), Justin Halpern (Reddit, 2/25/20; Tablet, 5/28/13) and Molly Nussbaum (Substack, 5/27/23), also identify as Jewish.

    The Times got sillier when it ran a story (11/3/23) by Jeremy Peters headlined “Jewish Viewers Find a Refuge in Fox News,” in which the paper explained that “Fox News has wrapped itself in the Israeli flag in the weeks since the Hamas attack.” Admitting that “there are no specific metrics available on the religious affiliation of Fox’s audience since” the Hamas attacks, the paper said that “ratings data from major metropolitan areas with large Jewish populations, including New York, Miami and Los Angeles, show a spike in viewership that outpaces its rivals.”

    The paper also noted that Jewish patrons of Manhattan’s Second Avenue Deli warmly embraced a visit by the crew of the Fox News show Fox & Friends. With all due respect to the wonderful menu at the storied institution, its clientele is hardly the beginning and end of Jewish opinion.

    And at the very end of the story, Peters acknowledges that Fox coverage of the recent violence in Israel is similar to the hardline support for the Bush administration the network exhibited after 9/11. So the takeaway isn’t that Fox is popular to Jews specifically, but popular among those who support US policy in the Middle East. But the Times chose to frame it around Jewish opinion, specifically.

    An AP story (10/15/23) on recent college campus protests said, “Many Jewish students and their allies, some with family and friends in Israel, have demanded bold reckonings and strong condemnation” after the Hamas attacks. Meanwhile, “some Muslim students have joined with allies to call for a recognition of decades of suffering by Palestinians in Gaza, plus condemnation of the response by Israel.”

    This paints a false dichotomy. The fact is, people of all faiths, and those without religion or any ancestral connection to the region, exist in all corners of the great Middle Eastern debate.

    ‘Open call for eradication’

    WaPo: Colleges braced for antisemitism and violence. It’s happening.

    “Jewish students hear ‘the river to the sea’ as an open call for the eradication of Israel,” the Washington Post (10/31/23) reported—not mentioning that Jewish anti-war protesters use this slogan as well (Common Dreams, 10/27/23).

    A Washington Post report (10/31/23) on the Jewish response to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses stated, as a factual observation, that “Jewish students hear ‘the river to the sea’ as an open call for the eradication of Israel, a haunting proposition given the legacy of the Holocaust that led to Israel’s creation.”

    There are a few problems here. One, it is hardly established that the American Jewish student body is monolithic on this issue. College groups that support Palestinian rights often include Jews; in fact, FAIR (5/22/23) reported how a Jewish staffer at the AP was forced out of her job because of her past pro-Palestinian advocacy in college. Two, the phrase “the river to the sea” is often mischaracterized, as it refers to a one-state solution, not anyone’s deportation.

    However, to back up this assertion, the Post quotes Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League, saying that while “there’s nothing wrong with advocating for a Palestinian state,” there is also “nothing wrong with advocating for a two-state solution.” However, he says, “there’s something profoundly wrong with advocating for a final solution.”

    The “final solution” is a reference to the Jewish Holocaust, or Shoah. But many Jews and non-Jews alike advocate for a one-state solution where all people have rights, regardless of their religion or ethnicity. It is intellectually dishonest for the Post to quote a pro-Israel partisan to assert that the choice for Jews is between a two-state solution and Auschwitz.

    For example, in the post-Brexit economy, the idea of Irish reunification is becoming more and more real (Guardian, 10/6/22). Yet no one would seriously characterize the Republic of Ireland absorbing the North as a Protestant genocide. Nor were white residents of South Africa exterminated or forced to emigrate when their country turned to a democratic one-person-one-vote system.

    ‘Have you considered converting?’

    Daily News: Rep. Ritchie Torres slams and doubles down on Israel critics as fighting rages

    Rep. Ritchie Torres framed the Israel/Palestine story as a conflict between “humanity” and “inhumanity” (Daily News, 10/9/23).

    Media’s love affair with Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres and his outspoken pro-Israel position is also telling. New York’s tabloids have given Torres’ attacks on critics of Israeli policy top coverage (Daily News, 10/9/23; New York Post, 10/11/23, 10/14/23, 10/15/23). But a recent interview with Torres in Politico (10/27/23), painting the non-Jewish Democrat as one of Israel’s biggest cheerleaders in Congress, truly exposes some key misunderstandings about Jewish politics and Israel.

    For example, the first question in the back-and-forth with writer Jeff Coltin acknowledged that Torres has Jews in his district. But that’s also true of the Democratic Socialists of America–backed Jamaal Bowman, who represents the neighboring district; he also boasts support from the Jewish community (Forward, 10/19/23), though he is a constant target of pro-Israel PACs (Jewish Insider, 8/9/23).

    Then Coltin asks Torres, “Have you considered converting to Judaism,”  to which Torres answers no. But what kind of question is that? Zionism is just not synonymous with Judaism or Jewishness. In fact, Israel has increasingly looked for support from evangelical Christians for support (Brookings Institution, 5/26/21; Jerusalem Post, 9/3/23; New York Times, 10/15/23).

    Coltin also takes Torres at face value when the Bronx lawmaker said that his “belief in Israel as a Jewish state is based not on religion, but history,” because “there’s a long and ugly history of antisemitism.” He never ponders if Torres’ fervor is at all related to his history of fundraising with AIPAC and other Israel supporters; the Open Secrets website lists “pro-Israel” as the third-largest source of funds for Torres’ 2022 campaign, behind only Securities & Investment and Real Estate.

    FAIR (11/5/21) has previously reported that when Politico was acquired by the German media group Axel Springer, the new owner included support for Israel’s “right to exist” as one of the ideological principles employees must endorse.

    Media organizations are well within their rights to portray debates about Israel’s assault on Gaza and the Hamas attack on southern Israel as having high emotional intensity, where passion often overtakes cold analysis. But they shouldn’t give us a muddled vision of Jewish politics—or anyone’s politics, for that matter.

    Featured image: New York Times photo (10/27/23) of a Jewish Voice for Peace protest at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal (photo: Bing Guan).

    The post Conflating Jewish and Pro-Israel Is Wrong and Misleading appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.