Category: Corporate Media

Counterpunch: “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza”

Helen Benedict has posted a good story at Counterpunch magazine investigating the student protests launched against the Gaza genocide.

The article is titled “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza.” I include a brief excerpt below:

. . . Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.

Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)

As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.

Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent. . . 

You can read the entire article here.

Everything the Corporate Media is Telling Us About Campus Protests is Wrong

Journalist, editorialist and former lawyer, Briahna Joy Gray, explains the motivations and concerns of the campus protests now sweeping the world.

Guess what. The truth about student protesters has nothing to do with the anti-demonstration messaging coming from the corporate media and the political class.

“Words are not violence; Zionism is.”

Some Call It Censorship; I Call It Anti-Arab Racism

Krystal Ball at Breaking Point news offers a penetrating look at anti-Palestinian media bias.

The way in which people and events are described in news reports tells us a lot about the prejudices, likes and dislikes of news producers and reporters.

In western media Jews and the state of Israel are generally covered very positively. Whereas, Palestinians and the victims of Israel’s aggression in Gaza are portrayed rather negatively.

Check out the evidence offered below. It’s titled “Study Reveals How Media Whitewashes Genocide”:

 

Check Out “If Americans Knew” for Information About Events in Palestine/Gaza

“If Americans Knew” is an independent newsite that provides the news coverage on Palestine/Israel that you will never see on mainstream, corporate media. I read it regularly.

For example, here is a recent story with an accompanying video posted on X.

It reminds us of the long-running peaceful, non-violent marches that occurred in Gaza for several years prior to the attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

The message reads:

Before the Hamas attack, media didn’t tell you about the thousands in #Gaza protesting non-violently every week from March 2018 through December 2019, Israeli snipers picking them off one by one…
Watch the video here.

Craig Murray: There are key moments in societal breakdown, and this is one.

Massive anti-war demonstrations have erupted around the world, sparked by Israel’s genocidal attacks against the Palestinian people, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

Several days ago, half-a-million people (!) marched through London calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Similar marches have occurred throughout the USA, in India, Pakistan, the UK, and many other countries.

Yet, the political elites in these countries continue to control the propagandistic news media while ignoring the protests of the common people.

Craig Murray has a good story critiquing the disparate, undemocratic actions that keep the people’s voices muted, ensuring that worldwide calls for peace go ignored.

The article at Consortium News is titled “Something has Snapped.” Below is an excerpt:

There seems to be a presumption that the general population harbour the same Zionist assumptions which the journalists are paid to promote. Well, we don’t.

It feels like something has snapped, not only in Palestine but in the U.K. and much of Europe, where the process of alienation between the governed and the ruling classes has been accelerated.

Democracy has been failing in the West for a while . . . 

There are key moments in societal breakdown, and this is one.

Read the entire article here.

Palestinian Journalist Suspended from Twitter without Explanation

Twitter suspensions have been in the news lately. But I am sure that most people have never heard about the suspension of Said Arikat, a reporter for the Palestinian publication, Al-Quds newspaper.

Journalist Said Arikat

Arikat is a veteran journalist who has covered the US State Department for the past 20-years.

He was suspended without explanation, but his removal is very much in keeping with the anti-Palestinian bias of US mainstream media.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that he is the latest victim of the pro-Zionist, Israel lobby in this country —  a collection of organizations that work hard to hide Israel’s human rights abuses and silence Palestinian voices.

The story is by Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss. It’s titled “Twitter Suspends Palestinian Journalist Arikat, and media response — silence.”

Below is an excerpt:

In yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there is no outcry over Twitter’s arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, longtime D.C. correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper.

It was big news when Elon Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of at least nine tech journalists last week (over alleged dox-ing) and then reinstated them this week after Twitter users demanded as much.

But in yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there has been scarcely any attention given to the arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, a fixture at the State Department briefings as the longtime Washington correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper, a Palestinian publication.

Arikat said he woke up on December 3 to read a notice from Twitter that his account had been “permanently suspended after careful review”. No reason was given; and despite the assurance that he could appeal the suspension if he thought the decision was wrong, Twitter has not responded to numerous letters Arikat has sent the media giant.

The only reason for Arikat’s suspension would seem to be that he is Palestinian and speaks up for Palestinians. His case has elicited no concern in the press. Let alone efforts to discover the pretext for the action.

Al-Quds is clearly being targeted as a Palestinian source. Today there is news that Facebook has shut down the official page of the Al-Quds newspaper.

Read the entire article here.

Telling the Truth About Israel Can Get You Fired. Just Ask Katie Halper.

Katie Halper is an independent journalist and political commentator. Until last week, Ms. Halper was a visiting host on the news program The Hill.

That is, she WAS a regular guest on the show until she was summarily fired for reading her editorial spot explaining the details of Israeli apartheid.

Yes, Israel IS an apartheid state. It has always been an apartheid state, since day one. There is NO non-apartheid phase in Israel’s history because Israel was founded as a Jewish supremacist state.

If this is new information to you, then I encourage you to read my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).

But the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist public relations machine works very hard to hide this fact from the rest of the world.

They have been working particularly hard in recent years since Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all published their own reports extensively cataloguing the ins-and-outs of Israel’s comprehensive, systemic, apartheid regime.

I will let Ms. Halper explain it all for you:

“The US Could Have Prevented This War,” by Caitlin Johnstone

Naturally, the American media continue to pump out false information about the origins and continuation of the war in Ukraine.

Remembering and reminding people of recent history does not make anyone a “Putin-puppet.” In fact, such facile and feeble accusations are a principle indicator that the accuser, without anything more substantive to say, is actually another US government stooge furthering the American party line.

Below is an excerpt from a recent post by the Australian journalist/blogger Caitlin Johnstone. She nails all the relevant issues with precision and accuracy.

Everything she says and documents has been maligned by one US news outlet or another as “Russian propaganda.” That, my friends, is a lie.

But, then, lies are a mainstay of all propaganda, including American propaganda, which is being manufactured fast and furious by the corporate media these days.

A few members of the Nazi Azov battalion which is now part of the Ukrainian military. They have successfully battled the Russian-Ukrainian population of the eastern Donbas region to a standstill. Much of the destruction presented by American media as the result of Russian actions is actually the work of these Russia hating neo-Nazis, who have always been violent ethic-nationalists fighting for a “pure” Ukraine.

The article is entitled “The US Could Have Prevented This War Just by Protecting Kyiv From Nazis.” I encourage you to click on the title above, read the entire article including the highlighted links for background and source information.

Here is the excerpt:

As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.

To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy war for many years.

With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.

When he was asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:

I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.

I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.

When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:

In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and was “prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.”

But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.

“No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”

US Pentagon Says that There is No Evidence that Russia is Intentionally Targeting Civilians

At Consortium News Joe Lauria describes the ongoing battle that has broken out between the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress over America’s military posture towards Russia.

The Pentagon. photo by Joe Lauria

Guess which agency is fighting the hardest to avoid an all-out war with the nuclear-armed Russian Bear — yep, the military guys at the Pentagon.

Because, as crazy as they may be at times, those military professionals know stuff.

They know about the consequences of nuclear war.

Below is an excerpt from Lauria’s article titled “Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War with Russia.”

To summarize its conclusion — don’t believe the official, mainstream narrative about Russia’s actions in Ukraine. No, Russia is not losing. No, Russia is not targeting civilians. No, Russia is not currently planning to flatten Ukraine.

Below is an excerpt (emphasis is mine):

. . . But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”

A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”

The article says:

“As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). …

A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.

‘I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,’ says the DIA analyst. ‘But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.’”

A second retired U.S. Air Force officer says:

“I’m frustrated by the current narrative—that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, that it is demolishing cities, and that Putin doesn’t care. Such a distorted view stands in the way of finding an end before true disaster hits or the war spreads to the rest of Europe. I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so. In fact, I’d say that Russian could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to.”

These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible. . . 

Read the entire article here.

On US Censorship and Our Arming of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

Yes, the US government engages in censorship just like the Russians. But, of course, the US corporate media will never admit to such things.

Of course, anti-war voices have been censored for a long time in this country. That’s why all of my favorite journalists work for independent news outlets and are never heard from on the major networks.

However, recently the censorship has become worse. Now independent reporting is being attacked wherever it appears. The video below offers two stories in one. First, independent journalist Abby Martin describes the erasure from the internet of the video archive from her old show “Breaking the Set” on RT television.

If you don’t think our government censors the news, listen to her story. She is not the only one who has experienced it recently.

Secondly, Aaron Mate discusses the role of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion in the Ukrainian national guard, as well as the influence of Nazi politicians in the Ukrainian government.

But, of course, the average American has no idea that we are supplying military weapons to a government that arms Nazis without hesitation. That’s because of CENSORSHIP.

Mate’s report on Ukrainian Nazis begins at the 20 minute mark.

Martin begins to tell her story of censorship at the 29 minute mark.