Current Events: What should the world think when a majority of the people in a country support a Genocidal regime?

Current Events: What should the world think when a majority of the people in a country support a Genocidal regime?

    Saturday, May 04, 2024   No comments

How should a nation whose majority support extremists be treated?

It depends.

If such a country is a non-Western nation-state, then that will make the entire country a terrorist country and genociding them by a “civilized” state will be acceptable.

If such a country is a “Western” nation-state, the will of the majority is sacred. That is what seems to be the implication of the extraordinary admission by head of the US State Department, Anthony Blinken.

US State Secretary Anthony Blinken said on 4 May that the genocidal actions undertaken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza are "a reflection of where a large majority of Israelis are in this moment.”

“This is a complicated government. It’s a balancing act when you have a coalition. And if you’re just looking at the politics of it, that’s something that he has to factor in,” Blinken said at an event in Arizona.

"What’s important to understand is that much of what [Netanyahu is] doing is not simply a reflection of his politics or his policies; it’s actually a reflection of where a large majority of Israelis are in this moment,” the top US diplomat said.

Last month, a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute revealed that three-quarters of Jewish Israelis support Netanyahu's much-anticipated ground invasion of Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah, where about 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering after being violently displaced from their homes.

Surveys conducted over recent months have shown a similar trend despite growing pressure to see Netanyahu removed from office.

In January, opinion polls showed that Israelis overwhelmingly agreed that “the best way” to obtain the release of captives held inside Gaza was “military pressure” against Hamas, falling in line with the same rhetoric Netanyahu and his war chief have been repeating daily since 7 October.

Polls have also shown a stern objection to delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza, even if the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is “replaced.”

The problem of seeing a majority electing demonstrably authoritarian, supremacist bigots is the true test of the limits and flaws of democracy. In the past, when such processes happened in non-Western  nation-states, it is often blamed on corruption and processes being flawed. Turkey, for example, over 4 decades voted for a conservative party and a conservative leader. The West dismissed these elections, because they simply thought of all Turkish people as backward, incapable of embracing "true democracy". 

However, with rise of extremist politicians through democratic processes, the West is now facing a moment of truth about democracy. In the past, when democracy did not represent any problems at home, Western leaders used it abroad as a political instrument to intimidate and subjugate other nations.

Media Matters: Elon Musk, owner of "X", suspends the account of Mandela's grandson

Media Matters: Elon Musk, owner of "X", suspends the account of Mandela's grandson

    Saturday, April 27, 2024   No comments

 In a total tone-deafness, and lack of awareness of the symbolism and reality, the former white settler in South Africa and self-declared free speech absolutist, Elon Musk, suspended the account of the nephew of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s freedom icon, without even burdening himself with an explanation—although the reasons are obvious.

Social Communication Platform X (formerly Twitter), Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela account, grandson of the late President of South Africa Nelson Mandela، After his statements in support of the "International Fleet of Freedom", which is to be sailed from Turkey within days, to break the siege on Gaza Strip.

Mandela had arrived in Istanbul at the beginning of the week to attend the fifth conference of the Jerusalem International Parliamentary Forum, and to support preparations for the International Freedom Fleet in Istanbul.

 Mandela attended the press conference of the International Freedom Fleet, which is made up of NGOs from 12 countries last week, before expressing his support for the fleet and breaking the siege on Gaza, through several publications on the platform "X".

US Government: Infants were placed in the oven and cooked alive

US Government: Infants were placed in the oven and cooked alive

    Friday, April 26, 2024   No comments

When the president of the United States, Biden,  amplified the fake story of 40 babies beheaded by Hamas, some excused his actions by claiming that he was duped by Israel intelligence to ascertain his unwavering support for the war Israel intended to unleash. 

With another US government official making a similar and even more shocking allegation, amplifying another fake story, that excuse becomes untenable.  

The third in line in the order of succession in the US government, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Johnson, on the same "trusted" news outlet that propagated the beheadings, CNN, repeated a story that was first made by some Israel person, Eli Beer, speaking at the Republican group’s summit in Las Vegas on October 28, that were later debunked by more than one investigative reports. Johnson, on that basis, claimed that Hamas "placed infants in the oven and cooked them alive". 

  

USA, alone, again, voting against a resolution that would have recognized Palestine as full member of the UN

USA, alone, again, voting against a resolution that would have recognized Palestine as full member of the UN

    Friday, April 19, 2024   No comments

The representative of Palestine was giving his moving speech, before voting on a resolution that opens the door to granting the State of Palestine full membership in the United Nations. During his speech, Mansour said, “Our Palestinian people have not lost their humanity yet. Our people in Gaza are searching for the remains of life. Gaza is pride, Gaza is dignity,” and here he was overcome with tears, so he remained silent for a while.

Then he continued, saying, “The Palestinian people, in all centers of their existence, want life and cling to it like all other peoples on earth.” Here, the session chairwoman began wiping her tears with her hand and nodded her head to confirm her support for Riyad Mansour’s words and her support for the demands of the Palestinian people.

Mansour concluded his intervention by saying, “Our Palestinian people yearn for freedom and a decent life. They will not disappear and will not disappear. They have never been redundant, so either do justice to them or blow them up.” [inSifuh aw-ansifuh]. Reacting to the speech, the president of the UNSC was shown clearing tearing and shaking her head.

Meanwhile, after the speech, the US representative voted to deny Palestine its wish to join the community of nations, with full membership in the UN.

Washington used its veto power to prevent the issuance of the resolution, and the session chairperson said that 12 countries voted to adopt the draft resolution, while two countries abstained from voting, and one country opposed. She added, “The draft resolution was not adopted due to the presence of a negative vote issued by a permanent member of the Security Council,” referring to the United States.

Palestinian Presidency: Washington’s policy encourages a war of extermination against us

For its part, the Palestinian presidency condemned the United States' use of its veto power to prevent Palestine from obtaining full membership in the United Nations, describing the behavior as "an assault that pushes the Middle East toward the abyss."

Reacting to the US veto, Palestinian, and some other countries, expressed anger, disappointment.

The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement that the American policy “represents a blatant assault on international law and an encouragement to continue the genocidal war against the Palestinian people, which pushes the region more than ever before to the brink of abyss.”

The statement added that the “veto” in the Security Council “reveals the contradictions of American policy,” noting that it claims to “support the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” but at the same time it “prevents the implementation of this solution.”

The Palestinian presidency's statement stressed that "the world is united behind the values of truth, justice, freedom and peace that the Palestinian cause represents."

Russia: A desperate attempt to change the course of history

In his speech, after voting on the resolution, Russia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, said that the United States used its veto power against the proposed resolution regarding full membership of Palestine in the organization, "in a desperate attempt to change the inevitable course of history."

Nebenzia stressed that the results of the vote in the Council “speak for themselves, as Washington was practically in complete isolation,” saying that history “will not forgive the United States for its actions,” stressing that “it is shameful for the United States to face this challenge to the international will.”

China's permanent representative to the Security Council, Fu Song, said, “The failure of this measure represents a sad day,” and he also described the American “veto” as “extremely disappointing.”

Among the positions supporting Palestine, Ireland's Foreign Minister, Michael Martin, expressed his feeling of "disappointment with the result of the vote," affirming his country's support for Palestine's membership in the United Nations, and saying that "the time has come for it to take its rightful place among the countries of the world."

Deputy Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations, Nathalie Broadhurst, said that her country supported the draft resolution, thanking Algeria for proposing the resolution, and explaining that her country supports raising Palestine’s status in the United Nations and accepting it as a full member.

New York Times tells its journalists which words to use when covering the war on Gaza

New York Times tells its journalists which words to use when covering the war on Gaza

    Tuesday, April 16, 2024   No comments

According to a leaked memo, The New York Times restricts its journalists from covering the war on Gaza. The New York Times has instructed journalists covering the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territories” when describing the Palestinian territories, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. American.

According to the site, the New York Times memo also directs journalists not to use the word Palestine except in very rare cases, and to stay away from the term “refugee camps” to describe the places to which Palestinians have historically been displaced within the Gaza Strip, who fled from other parts of Palestine during the Arab-Israeli wars. Previous.

It is noteworthy that the United Nations recognizes the areas to which Palestinians were displaced as camps housing hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo, written by New York Times Standards Editor Susan Wesling, international editor Philip Ban, and others, provides guidance on some of the terms and other issues that have imposed themselves on the scene since the start of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip last October.

While the document is presented as a blueprint for maintaining journalistic principles of objectivity when dealing with the war on Gaza, several New York Times journalists told The Intercept that some of its contents provide evidence of the newspaper adopting the Israeli narrative.

The website quoted a source in the New York Times newsroom - who requested anonymity for fear of being held accountable - saying that the matter “seems professional and logical if you do not have knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but if you do know, it will be clear how much it identifies with the Israeli narrative.” ".

The Intercept noted that the guidelines were first distributed to New York Times journalists last November, and were updated regularly over the following months.

On March 14, demonstrators supporting the Palestinian cause stormed the building of the New York Times newspaper in protest against its bias towards Israel in the ongoing war on the Gaza Strip. This is the second storming, as pro-Palestinian demonstrators had previously occupied the newspaper’s lobby on November 11, demanding an immediate cessation. Because of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, they accused the newspaper of bias towards Israel in its coverage of the war on the Gaza Strip.

The deliberate use of key words and adjectives by Western media, and all media outlets for that matter, is and established fact. 

The language used by the media became a reflexive way of describing the events. CNN consistently describes the Oct. 7 attack as "brutal" and "terrorist, but uses no adjectives to describe Israel's retaliation, for example.

Western media will add the adjective “brutal” when talking about Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, but will use “war in Gaza” without attributing who is waging the war and what kind of war it is, which is brutal, destructive, and genocidal according to NGOs, many governments’ officials, and the International Court of Justice.

During the same time period, Western media used the phrase "Hamas' brutal" at least 554,000 times; whereas the "war in Gaza" was mentioned 33,900,000 times without any adjectives or qualifications despite the heavy loss of life and structures--a war that was described by independent observers, including the same media outlets who use this biased language, as unprecedented in the number and size of weapons dropped in the densely populated area just in in the first three weeks.

...

News media platforms’ use of guidelines, algorithms of sort, to create an acceptable narrative for their audience, financiers, shareholders, or governments is no secret nor is it practiced by limited, marginal media platforms. Journalism is a profession that teaches people who work in the field how to use words the same way a soldier is trained to use weapons.

Many people who believe in the need for free press to inform the public thought that the best model is the creation of media platforms that are not beholden to anyone. They thought a structure where a media outlet is guaranteed funding from the government with full and complete editorial independence is the way to go. This is the model of the British BBC and the American NPR. However, a close examination of the editorial policies and practices would reveal that even this model is still controlled by politics, ideology, or leadership still. The recent revelation about NPR is a good lesson in understanding the synergy between politics and journalism. Here is some reporting about the struggles inthe NPR organization.

 

In the letter published on Free Press, NPR’s senior business editor Uri Berliner claimed Americans no longer trust NPR – which is partly publicly funded – because of its lack of “viewpoint diversity” and its embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Berliner wrote that “an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America”. He acknowledged that NPR’s audience had always tilted left, but was now no longer able to make any claim to ideological neutrality.

In the piece on Free Press, a site run by Bari Weiss, a former opinion editor at the New York Times, Berliner noted that in 2011 the public broadcaster’s audience identified as 26% conservative, 23% as middle of the road and 37% liberal. Last year it identified as 11% very or somewhat conservative, 21% as middle of the road, and 67% very or somewhat liberal.

 

Media Review: Bearing False Witness--New York Times, Western Media

Media Review: Bearing False Witness--New York Times, Western Media

    Thursday, February 29, 2024   No comments

Journalism (mass communication) is the fourth branch of government. As to how much power this fourth branch of government has, that depends on the circumstances and events being covered. During war times, this fourth branch of government is as powerful as the armed forces, the most potent state instrument in the hand of the first branch of government. That is because a war cannot be won without a powerful narrative that justify it and motivate soldiers to fight in it.

In the wars involving majority-Muslim countries and when covering events involving Muslims in genral, Western media often skips the due diligence protocols and releases questionable stories as long as such stories fit the narrative needed for winning the war or not release critical information that may prevent winning the war.

News media is not about breaking news. It is about how to cover breaking news, about which images to use, which headlines to blast across pages, and which words to string together an artful way that make sure that the news is narrated deliberately and purposefully. This characterization of the journalism as practiced in the West, and the rest of the world by extension, is not just a theory, it is factual “reporting” pun intended, about the code of the profession as practiced by the premiere news outlets, including the New York Times, the BBC, and the CNN.

After (and during) the US illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, not only did the New York Times withheld information about the US torture programs for more than a year and half, but the paper methodically refused to use the word “torture” to describe the programs when writing about them as reported by Colin Kalmbachera in 2018. It was not until 2014 that the New York Times decided to “use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information,” when ordered by NYT’s executive editor, Dean Baquet. The withholding of evidence of torture programs is likely to have continued longer if it were not for Wikileaks data dump that brought that information to the public. A person involved in Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is sought by the US government on espionage charges. In 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, stated that “while the US Government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity.”

During this ongoing war in Gaza, we are now learning that news stories that may have facilitated and justified the “plausible genocide” committed by the state of Israel, as found by the International Court of Justice in its provisional injunctions in the case brought by South Africa, these stories were fake stories, and many were based on secret government agents.

The New York Times is facing an ethical dilemma that was behind the launch of an internal investigation and review of the author of the article “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Used Sexual Violence as a Weapon on October 7,” which was published on December 28 by Israeli journalist Anat Schwartz. The investigation began after the newspaper found that Schwartz had liked posts on social media platforms calling on Israel to execute Palestinians and turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse.”

Anat Schwartz wrote a total of seven articles for the New York Times, all of which except one, focus on the sexual violence against women angle that captured the mind of the Western public at the beginning of the war are what gave cover to the rage of the Israeli killing machine that has been going on for months. All seven stories are still published here, nytimes.com/by/anat-schwartz, as of this writing.

The “independent” Israeli journalist, who began working with the American newspaper after the operation of October 7, 2023, is being reviewed by the newspaper because she liked posts on social media that showed support for the genocide committed by Israeli forces, including posts that called for the transformation of Gaza to a “slaughterhouse” and promoting the lie of “40 headless children.” The New York Times’ social media policy prohibits its journalists from expressing partisan opinions or endorsing political views.

During her work at the newspaper, Schwartz’s reporting focused on highlighting “Israel” as a victim, especially writing fabrications about sexual violence that she claims was committed by Palestinians. It also supported publications that said

Westerners should be “afraid” and should believe that “Hamas” is like ISIS. Schwartz’s work has faced internal criticism, leading to the removal of an episode of The Daily podcast related to the original story. Schwartz quickly deactivated her account on the X platform for a short period to remove the posts she liked after users noticed them. But the matter had already turned into a scandal and the newspaper’s management was forced to take action.

Anat Schwartz was not a reporter or journalist before last October 7. She is a filmmaker who was suddenly hired by the New York Times last October. More evidence has emerged online that Schwartz also served in Israeli military intelligence. Her assistant in writing two of the articles was her nephew, Adam Sella. As the scandal escalated, one of the main media outlets in Israel, Ynet, wrote about Anat Schwartz, quoting Israeli sources who feared that the New York Times’ move against Schwartz would affect the Israeli narrative, and that the Israeli government was pressuring the American newspaper to conceal these facts.

The first person to discover that Schwartz liked racist posts calling for the extermination of the people of Gaza was an account on the X platform called zei_squirrel on the 24th of February. Then, the Internet began investigating Schwartz’s background and searching for any of her digital traces on the web. It was  revealed that she has been working at the “Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation” since 2021, and continued her work while writing the fabrications published by the New York Times.  This means that the New York Times was aware of all these matters, but decided to rely on a film director, and a former soldier in Israeli intelligence, to write propaganda content that the paper published as reliable, vetted information.

Now, the New York Times is claiming that it is investigating Schwartz, not for the content it published, but for violating the newspaper’s rules regarding how to appear on social media platforms.

The bias does not stop there. Western media was fully saturated with newsstories after the Israeli government presented a made-for-drama show about the sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. The New York Times alone published six stories on the matter by the same individual reporter. However, when two independent UN bodies produced evidence documenting sexual violence committed against Palestinian women and girls at the hands of Israeli officers, Western media outlets ignore it or provide little coverage of it. The complicity of Western media in genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity is what enables these crimes to happen and continue to happen.

Adapted from The Way Western Media Whitewashes Illegal Invasions And Torture And Enables Genocide