Lebanese Media: An Arab Pioneer on Media Silk Road

3 Apr 2022

Source: Al Mayadeen Net

Mohamad Zreik 

“The land of liberties” is a fitting label for Lebanon, a remarkable country that deserves it.

Lebanese Media: An Arab Pioneer on Media Silk Road

The right to free press is revered and guarded in Lebanon. Constitutional freedom of expression in Lebanon is guaranteed under Article 13, which states that all forms of expression are protected “within the bounds imposed by law.” For many people, the most arduous way to freedom is not the path of armed struggle, but rather the path of free and brave speech. “The land of liberties” is a fitting label for Lebanon, a remarkable country that deserves it.

Without the sacrifices of the martyrs, this attribute would not have been part of the Lebanese identity. It’s everything on the altar of the press and the sacredness of the free word. The message of peace and freedom of expression may be carried by Lebanon. Because there is no peace without freedom, the two concepts are intertwined in their connection. Several Lebanese journalists were exonerated from the gallows by the Ottoman Empire during the month of May of the year 1958. Since the killed journalists’ mandate was: “We die free and do not live as slaves or captives of others,” May 6 has been declared a feast day for the martyrs in Lebanon.

The Lebanese press has a rich history of events and phases that have been etched into the minds of the Lebanese. The comments of An-Nahar newspaper, held by Chairman of the Board, Gibran Tueni, who took up his pen and walked out into the streets to remind the world that in Lebanon, freedom of speech and expression are taken by pen and not by gun, are well-remembered by all of us. “We promise by Almighty God, Muslims and Christians, that we will remain together in defense of glorious Lebanon forever and ever,” Gibran Tueni swore to the Lebanese people.

As a result of the vast range of freedoms it enjoys, Lebanon stands out regionally and globally. For example, there are television stations in Lebanon for each and every political party. In addition to the many free internet sites, private newspapers are all examples. Freedom of expression is not constrained by any red lines; as long as it does not infringe on the sacred and national sovereignty, you are free to voice your thoughts. Since Arab countries have rigorous monitoring agencies and stringent laws, Lebanon will remain a milestone in the free Arab media.

An unauthorized political journal, “The News Garden,” was published by Khalil El-Khoury in Beirut on January 1, 1858, and is regarded as “the mother of Arab newspapers.” Count Rashid Al-Dahdah, who published the “Barjis” newspaper in Paris in 1858 and Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq, who published the “Al-Jawa’ib” newspaper in Istanbul in 1861 are just two examples of Lebanese involvement in the publication of Arab newspapers published abroad. According to writer Laila Hamdoun, we find that most of the Arab newspapers were issued by Lebanese intellectuals, for example, the great “Butros al-Bustani” has launched “Nafeer Syria“, Lebanon’s second newspaper, in 1860 in Beirut, appealing for national unity in the wake of the sectarian murders of 1860. The cinema and theatre have also grown popular in Lebanon.

These remarks have been written during my stay in China, the land of civilization, culture, science, and commerce. As a specialist in the “Belt and Road Initiative” that was first introduced in 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, and in order to highlight the Lebanese role in this effort, I decided to link the free Lebanese press in the Arab world to the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims in part at people-to-people exchange and cultural understanding.

Newspapers in Lebanon, media professionals, and authors claim that “our time today is different from prior periods.” People in Lebanon have long had an eye on the West, and they’ve done it through airing Hollywood films, importing anything dubbed, and keeping tabs on political developments in the West. To that end, I urge Lebanese political and media officials, as the stewards of Lebanon’s culture and language, not to cut ties with the West. At the same time, keep in mind that this is China’s golden period and that this great Asian is no less than the Western nations.

Speaking at the 2016 Media Cooperation Forum’s opening ceremony, Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed his country’s Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned that the media is a platform for constructive discourse, the sharing of ideas, and collaboration. Without an active and unbiased role for the media, there is no contact between peoples. Without media, the Belt and Road Initiative’s goal of bridging cultures won’t be able to fulfill its full potential.

As a technologically advanced country, China employs the most up-to-date broadcasting techniques in its media partnership with Lebanon. Co-operation between China and the Arab countries in media has become essential. According to Wang Chen of China’s State Council Information Office, media interactions between Beijing and Beirut are a priority for the country.

China has established a tight relationship with Lebanon through television shows that introduce the Lebanese people to the Chinese culture. As part of its Belt and Road Initiative, China has recently displayed a keen interest in the Arab world. CGTN Arabic and China Arab TV, two Chinese TV stations, have been introduced to the Arab satellites Nilesat and Arabsat, which transmit documentaries and news about China and the Arab world. To keep up with all of CGTN Arabic and China International Radio‘s social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Wechat), separate department staffed by Chinese and Arabs has been established.

A deal was reached in 2016 between Lebanon TV and China’s state television, whereby Lebanon was provided with certain equipment. National News Agency was given a large number of computers and training workshops by the Chinese government in order to facilitate mutual collaboration.

More seminars and training sessions for journalists and more equipment donations are expected from the Chinese government in Lebanon. Media in Lebanon will focus on Chinese matters, invite Chinese specialists and introduce the Lebanese people and Arabs to Chinese news. As China’s influence in Lebanon grows, it’s feasible that Lebanese media outlets may start publishing content in Chinese. Videos, interviews, and information on Lebanon can be used by the Chinese media to educate the Chinese population about the country. China may invite Chinese journalists and press students to visit Lebanon to learn more about the nation and collaborate with Lebanese journalists in order to speed up the reporting of the news.

Ex-Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon Jiang said the media collaboration between China and Lebanon is growing quickly, and he underlined that China is a long-term supporter of both the government and Lebanese media outlets. During the Chinese Spring Festival and Chinese National Day each year, the Chinese Embassy in Lebanon and Lebanon TV work together to broadcast programs in China.

The works of the Chinese Cultural Centre in Beirut (Confucius Institute) should be extended so that it can do other functions, such as translating Chinese films into Arabic. Due to Lebanon’s high cultural value, many Chinese dubbing businesses have shown a desire to cooperate with Chinese media outlets. In order to make Lebanese culture more accessible to the Chinese audience, films from the country will be dubbed. ‘Capernaum’, a film directed by Nadine Labaki, was the first Lebanese film to be dubbed into Chinese. In addition to books and poetry which could enhance cultural exchange.

A plan for successful Chinese-Arab media cooperation is being devised by China, which includes enhancing communication between Chinese and Arab media, establishing a media administrative system that serves the common Chinese-Arab interest, and raising electronic media cooperation.

“Media Silk Road” has emerged in recent years as a term for the media cooperation between Belt and Road Initiative countries. There are four committees that focus on news cooperation, integrated communication, cooperation in program production, and industrial cooperation. The main mission is to promote international peace by fostering cultural exchange between nations. More positive steps are expected to be taken by the international television cooperation community of the Silk Road in order to benefit both Chinese and Arab interests.

As part of the Belt and Road Initiative, the people of participating countries play a significant role in its implementation. As a result, in accordance with the principles of cultural communication and freedom of speech, the media should be a tool to enrich the Arab people’s knowledge about China and the Belt and Road initiative.

Considering Lebanon’s status as a participant of the Belt and Road Initiative, it is expected that Lebanon will play an important role in promoting the initiative in Lebanon and the Arab world. As part of an Arab media strategy for the Belt and Road Initiative, Lebanon might be designated as an authorized media hub in conjunction with the Chinese authorities. There are numerous examples of Sino-Lebanese media and cultural collaboration that have been successful, and this proposed cooperation could be another success.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

Roger Waters interview for RT (Assange and Russia!)

March 04, 2022

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain: In praise of James Douglas Morrison, 20th century poet, dead at 27 half a century ago

July 03, 2021

By Pepe Escobar, exclusively for the Saker Blog

He was like Blake’s tiger, always burning bright and chasing Rimbaud rainbows – just to finish, like Marat, in a bathtub. He was only 27.

Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971 in Paris. Half a century later, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics lavishly celebrates the soul of the poet.

Before he died, Jim had self-published three limited editions of his poetry: The Lords/Notes on Vision (1969), The New Creatures (1969), and An American Prayer (1970).

Now, finally, we may have access to his complete writings, including the screenplay for his 50-minute experimental film, HWY, shot in Godard’s cinema verité style in the spring and summer of 1969 in L.A. and the Mojave desert, with Jim playing a hitchhiker. Old-school petrol heads will savor Jim on the wheel of his 1967 Shelby GT 500 Mustang in this HD clip from a film inspired by HWY.

The Collected Works feel like a collar of magic jade fragments, complete with handwritten pages in notebooks, crossed out words, underlines, the whole perhaps similar to the ‘Plan for Book’ Jim once sketched.

The overwhelming majority of us baby boomers belong to the “die young, stay pretty, leave a beautiful corpse” generation. Following our own road maps, prone to trial and error, we did live all the roads of excess; but unlike Blake’s dictum, we may not have reached the palace of wisdom. We never cease to be amazed that unlike Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, Otis Redding, we are survivors at best.

For so many of us then in our teens, from 1967 to 1971 the Doors were impregnated in our body and soul. Jim was the psychedelic Dyonisus, his excessive alter egos – Lizard King, Mr. Mojo Risin’- propelling him over and over again towards the next ride in the infinite highway.

Before he metastasized into instant legend, Jim was what Hunter Thompson would immortalize in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which came out in 1971: “A man on the move, and just sick enough, to be totally confident”.

Now the poetry oozing out of the freestyle soundscapes weaved by Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek, or HWY as a sort of prelude to L.A. Woman (“cops and cars / the topless bars / never saw a woman / so alone”) may be relieved as a prequel to what was about to vanish, poignantly evoked by Thomas Pynchon in Inherent Vice, the Greatest Hippie Detective Novel – or Raymond Chandler on LSD:

The Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness… how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness, and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.

And all the children are insane

Any Top Ten list of 20^th Century Poetry in the Anglo-American sphere would necessarily include Yeats’s The Second Coming, Eliot’s

The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos. From the mid-century beats, comes Ginsberg’s Howl. Afterwards it’s Dylan land – from

Ballad of a Thin Man, Desolation Row and Visions of Johanna to the total dilaceration in Blood on the Tracks (Tangled Up in Blue, Simple Twist of Fate).

And then, there’s Jim Morrison’s The End – the closing track of

The Doors, recorded in August 66, released in January 1967, six months before the Summer of Love.

It was my dear friend Quantum Bird – not even born when Morrison died – who led me to a re-appreciation of The End in the Western canon, prompted by a Morrison epigraph I used in a column on NATO.

Striking images emerge like rocks out of the Morrison river, like “the streets are fields that never die”, in The Crystal Ship, or “speak in secret alphabets”, in Soul Kitchen.

Strange Days could not be more contemporary: “Strange days have found us / strange days have tracked us down / they’re going to destroy / our casual joys / we shall go on playing / or find a new town”.

Yet we could only guess what shore Morrison’s Crystal Ship was heading for, the words – “be-fore / you / slip / in-to / un-consciousness” – coiling like a snake, barely whispered. The journey could be anything: Chandler’s Big Sleep, an overdose of heroin, a ghastly murder, suicide, even a suicide pact.

Morrison was usually Blake on steroids, rewriting “some are born to sweet delight / some are born to endless night” in his own way. The End is a journey through the corridors of the endless night (“the killer awoke before dawn / he put his boots on / he took a face from the ancient gallery / and he walked on down the hall”). No wonder Coppola carefully chose it for the opening of Apocalypse Now – or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam, where the Empire was lost “in a Roman wilderness of pain / and all the children are insane”.

Ride the snake

In 1966, when he wrote The End, two years before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, it’s as if Morrison had already intuited that as a poet laboring at the apex of Empire, life would become necessarily unbearable.

LSD + Rimbaud + insights in Navajo land only amplified his aesthetic and philosophical illuminations. The End includes references to “every element of systemic collapse”, as Quantum Bird remarked, from imperial arrogance to cultural collapse, from wokeism to loss of control of the empire’s own internal space, from dystopic propaganda to the sense of total bewilderment facing a dying ethos. Woke soldiers are about to be reprogrammed as serial killers.

Morrison had his vision way before the Summer of Love, way before Woodstock (summer of 1969), way before the Stones at Altamont (winter of 1969) – the official end of peace and love.

When the Empire collapses “in a desperate land” – look at the tawdry, farcical Afghanistan remix, happening right now – there’s “no safety or surprise”. It’s “the end of laughter and soft lies / the end of nights we tried to die.”

The end of everything that stands.

I’ll leave you now mentally riding a Mustang in the desert, down on the infinite highway and – in geopolitical synchronicity – riding the snake.

Julian Assange – held under psychological torture in Belmarsh by the lords of the Empire for the crime of committing journalism – is 50 years old today.  Julian Assange was born the day Jim Morrison died.

Dance on fire. If you dare.

Palestinian women journalists speak out against ‘deliberate’ attacks by PA forces

Palestinian Authority forces have violently assaulted women reporting on protests in Ramallah

A recent protest in Ramallah, where Palestinian Authority forces have been targeting women journalists including Najlaa Zaitoun, photographed here (Supplied)

By Aziza Nofal in RamallahPublished date: 2 July 2021 14:49 UTC | Last update: 2 days 1 hour ago

For several days now, Palestinian journalist Najlaa Zaitoun has been trying to convince her children, 11-year-old Haytham and 8-year-old Zein, to leave the house. 

‘A person wearing plain clothes threatened me, to my face, that he would rape me, and then defame my reputation’

– Najlaa Zaitoun, journalist

“I’m afraid the person who beat you will come and beat me,” Zein said to her, as she urged them to keep up their training at the sports club they usually go to every day. 

On 26 June, the 35-year-old was assaulted by plainclothes security forces while she was covering protests called following the death of popular Palestinian activist Nizar Banat while in Palestinian Security Forces custody two days earlier. 

The security forces chased Zaitoun, seized her phone, which she was using to film the protest, and violently attacked her with a truncheon. She was also threatened with rape.

“A person wearing plain clothes threatened me, to my face, that he would rape me, and then defame my reputation,” she tells Middle East Eye.

Bruises Najlaa Zaitoun sustained while covering the protests can be seen on her arm (Supplied)

Zaitoun has been living in a state of fear ever since and the violent beating she received has left visible marks on her body.

“I don’t feel safe, not even in my own home,” she says. Since the attack, Zaitoun has been staying at her parents’ house. 

Meanwhile, the assault on the journalist has moved online, with a smear campaign targeting her on social media accounts affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and accusing her of being the “one who attacked the security forces.” 

Targeted attacks

The attack on Zaitoun is one of several instances of violence against women journalists in the course of their work covering the protests. The incidents indicate that Palestinian security forces are specifically targeting women journalists, as reflected in the escalating levels of hostility and violence towars them compared to their male counterparts.

Attacks on women journalists have included physical violence, as was the case with Zaitoun and four others; confiscation of electronic devices used to cover the events; intimidation and harassment; chasing journalists in the street; arrest attempts and a ban on reporting. 

The assaults have continued even after the protests were over, with many female journalists receiving veiled threats that they will be discredited and defamed.

Saja al-Alamy is one of those attacked while reporting on the protests. On 24 June, Alamy was subjected to several attempts by security forces to prevent her from doing her job, and had to show her Palestinian Journalists Syndicate membership card each time. 

‘My press armour helped the perpetrators to identify me as a journalist, and attack me’, Saja Alamy says (Supplied)

Two days later, expecting journalist to go on being obstructed, Alamy wore her bulletproof press body armour and affixed her press card on the back of her phone, which she was using to film the events. 

None of this stopped her from being attacked. Instead, she believes the measures did her more harm than good.

“My press armour helped the perpetrators to identify me as a journalist, and attack me,” she says, adding that she was only able to escape the scene after she had taken off her press vest and concealed her identity as a journalist.

“There was a direct attack on us. One of the security officers in plainclothes was pointing at my female journalist colleague and me, asking his partner to take a photo of us so that he can identify us later,” she says.

Security forces had first attacked a group of journalists, including Alamy, with tear gas, but upon noticing her filming an attack on protesters, she was directly targeted. Alamy resisted the officers’ violent attempt to confiscate her phone, and refused to hand it over. She then managed to flee the scene to a nearby building and hide in a women’s toilet.

Alamy tried for more than an hour to reach her colleagues for help, but all entrances were being watched by security officers, including those who had chased her. She was eventually able to escape, after shedding her press armour, and pretended to be out shopping.

Life threatening

MEE reporter Shatha Hammad was also among the women journalists who were targeted in the attacks of 26 June.

She sustained a shrapnel wound to her face from a tear gas canister that a security officer shot directly at her after failing to confiscate her phone. 

Hammad says that security officers in plainclothes had focused their attention on women reporters, singling them out by pointing at them, even before the clashes erupted, which, she believes, suggests that the assault was planned and deliberate.

According to Hammad, the unprecedented violence against women journalists made her feel insecure and trapped.

“What happened is life threatening,” she says, demanding immediate action from local and international organisations to provide the necessary protection for them.

Shatha Hammad sustained wounds to face after being directly targeted with a tear gas cannister 

The detailed testimonies of women journalists were shocking to many, especially the Palestinian Authority’s use of cultural norms to shame and intimidate women, exercising social pressure against them as an attempt to silence and prevent them from performing their work. 

According to Ghazi Bani Odeh, head of the monitoring and documentation unit at the Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms (Mada), these exponential attacks against women journalists are unprecedented and planned. 

“The assaults on female journalists have two levels. The first is the direct physical violence in the streets; then comes the online attacks designed to incite people to exert social pressure on them,” Bani Odeh tells MEE, in reference to the smear campaigns that use hate speech that could fuel violence against them. 

Smear campaigns

One of the journalists targeted by a defamation campaign was Fayhaa Khanfar, who was beaten up in the street on 26 June, with her phone stolen from her as she covered the protest.

‘When I regained consciousness, I went to security officers crying and asking for help. But no one moved a muscle’

– Fayhaa Khanfar, journalist

Security officers in plain clothes had chased Khanfar to confiscate her device and knocked her to the ground, causing her to briefly lose consciousness. 

No one had intervened to help her. The attack resulted in a hairline fracture to her shoulder and bruises all over her body.

“I was attacked by security officers wearing plain clothes. They pushed me to the ground and stole my phone,” Khanfar tells MEE.

“When I regained consciousness, I went to security officers crying and asking for help. But no one moved a muscle.”

Orchestrated online attacks targeted Khanfar, who wears the hijab, aimed to discredit her in a conservative society by circulating images of a girl in beachwear, who looks very similar to Khanfar, and falsely identifying her as the journalist.

Khanfar was later summoned for interrogation at the intelligence headquarters in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, and told that she had to appear if she wanted to collect her phone, a move she considered an attempt to lure her in and arrest her.

Wafa Abdulrahman, the director of Filistiniat, a civil society organisation, sees the attacks on journalists as a chilling attempt to silence the women who have been spearheading the protests. 

Fayhaa Khanfar suffered a hairline fracture to her shoulder and bruises all over her body (Supplied)

Abdulrahman says that the systematic targeting of women journalists is intended to first send them a threatening message, and second, to warn the society that women reporters will not be spared and that the power of the security forces is unbreakable. 

As attacks on women journalists continue through online defamation campaigns and veiled threats, they find themselves living in constant danger and feeling personally insecure. 

According to Majid Arori, a media freedom activist and a human rights specialist, there has to be individual and collective legal actions to deter such attacks in the future. 

“The attacked women journalists must file legal complaints, providing the necessary documentation via local and international legal organisations to exert pressure on those who perpetrated the assaults,” he says, adding that these attacks are attempts to suppress critical voices and any protests against corruption. 

Canada’s government is seeking to silence Canadian journalists at home and abroad with a draconian censorship bill

June 30, 2021 

Eva Bartlett

RT.com

As a Canadian journalist, I could be subject to a censorship bill which, if passed in Senate, means the government in Canada can effectively shadow-ban and censor my voice into oblivion, along with other dissenting voices.

After seeing his tweet on the issue of Bill C-10, recently passed in the House of Commons, I spoke with Canadian journalist Dan Dicks about this. He explained that the bill is being presented as being about Canada bringing Big Tech companies under the regulation of the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), to have them display more Canadian content.

“But what people are missing,” he cautioned, “is that there were clauses put into this bill, protections for certain publishers and content creators that would protect people like myself and yourself.”

Those clauses, he said, were recently removed from the bill, leading many content-creating Canadians aware of the bill to worry they will be treated the same as a broadcaster or a programmer, subject to the regulations of the CRTC.

The bottom line is that, beyond the mumbo jumbo of the government, this is the latest attack on freedom of expression, and on dissent. 

“It really appears that it’s a backdoor to be able to control the free flow of information online, and to begin to silence voices that go against the status quo,” Dicks said, warning that fines for violators could follow.

“It’s not looking good for individual content creators. Anybody who has any kind of a voice or a significant audience, where they have the ability to affect the minds of the masses, to reach millions of people, they are going to be the ones who are on the chopping block moving forward.”

Names like James Corbett come to mind. Although based in Japan, as a Canadian he would be subject to the bill. And with his very harsh criticisms of many issues pertaining to the Canadian government, he is a thorn they would surely be happy to remove under the pretext of this bill.

Or Dicks, who likewise creates videos often critiquing Canadian government actions.

Or researcher Cory Morningstar, authors Maximilian Forte, Mark Taliano, Yves Engler, or outspoken physicist Denis Rancourt, to name a handful of dissenting voices. Agree or not with their opinions, they have the right to voice them.

Or myself. I’ve been very critical of Canada’s Covid policies and hypocrisy, as well as Canada’s whitewashing of terrorism in Syria, support to neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and unwavering support for Israel which is systematically murdering, starving, and imprisoning Palestinian civilians–including children.

An article on the Law & Liberty website, which describes itself as focussing on “the classical liberal tradition of law and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons,” notes the bill enables “ample discretion to filter out content made by Canadians that doesn’t carry a desirable ideological posture and [to] prioritize content that does.”

The article emphasizes that the bill violates Canadians’ right to free expression, as well as “the right to express oneself through artistic and political creations, and the right to not be unfairly suppressed by a nebulous government algorithm.”

It noted that Canadians with large followings, like Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad and Steven Crowder, “each enjoy audiences which far exceed any cable television program.”

As with my examples above, these prominent Canadian voices likewise risk shadow-banning under this bill.

But, worse, there is another bill, C-36, that also portends heavy censorship: the “Reducing Online Harms” bill. This one not only involves censorship, but hefty fines and house arrests for violators

The same  Law & Liberty article notes, “Canada is also expected to follow the template of Germany’s NetzDG law, which mandates that platforms take down posts that are determined to constitute hate speech—which requires no actual demonstrated discrimination or potential harm, and is thus mostly subjective—within 24 hours or to face hefty fines. This obviously will incentivize platforms to remove content liberally and avoid paying up.”

The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), rightly, contests this bill, noting, “the proposed definition of hate speech as speech that is ‘likely’ to foment detestation or vilification is vague and subjective.” 

Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, is likewise extremely critical of the bills.

Trudeau has made every issue about race, gender and religion since his election. Now he wants to criminalize everyone who disagrees with his tribalist vision.C-36 is the worst attack ever against free speech in Canada.https://t.co/6Z5EefmviP— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) June 25, 2021

The CCF points out the potential complete loss of Canadians’ fundamental rights with these bills.

It should be common sense that these bills are extremely dangerous to Canadians, however cloaked in talk of levelling playing fields and of combating hate speech they may be.

Kinzer: “The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative. So many people in the American press who write about the world are merely stenographers.”

JUNE 28, 2021

 EVA BARTLETT

Here is the video interview I did with award winning journalist & author Stephen Kinzer.

My article on it was published yesterday.

‘Many US commentators have never BEEN to countries they comment on, see entire world from Washington perspective’ – Stephen Kinzer

June 27, 2021, RT.com

-by Eva K Bartlett

Much of Western media is a mixture of sensationalist accusations and fear mongering about ‘enemy’ states. It is difficult to find perspectives divorced from US foreign policy, American journalist Stephen Kinzer has told RT.

I asked the author and journalist Stephen Kinzer how the corporate media came to be so devoid of honest content and discussed the rise of censorship by Big Tech.

Kinzer is a Boston Globe columnist and formerly a correspondent for the New York Times. With over two decades of experience reporting from around the world, including areas being targeted by American imperialism, Kinzer can offer a much needed critique on the state of journalism today.

He started as an independent journalist in Central America in the mid-70s, when few journalists were going there, later reporting from Central Asia, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Europe.

“I’m sometimes asked why I developed a different perspective on the world than many other people who comment in the American press,” he told RT. “I always seem to be the skunk at the foreign policy garden party. Why is that?

“Upon reflection, I think it has to do with the way that I learned about the world. Many people who write about the world in the United States learned about the world the same way: they went to international relations schools, they went to work on congressional staffs, then they worked at think tanks. And they’re very steeped in this Washington-centric view of the world.”

Unlike such journalists and commentators, Kinzer learned journalism by going places and writing firsthand what he saw and heard.

“I learned about the world from the perspective of the people who were the victims of American foreign policy. I was in the places where people were getting bombed. I saw American foreign policy from the perspective of the rest of the world.”

Having myself learned journalism the same way, I appreciated his words. And I had a followup question about the concept of journalistic qualifications, something my detractors have claimed I lack.

According to Kinzer, there are many qualifications for being a journalist that are much more important than what school you went to or what you studied.

“The most important one is independent thinking. The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative,” he said. 

In his view, many American journalists are merely stenographers. 

“They’re sitting down at a press conference, they write down what some government spokesman says, then they go and print that in a newspaper. You hardly even need to have a sentient human there, you can get an algorithm to probably put most of those stories together.

“And when you want to have a story that’s very well-sourced, they call the State Department, and the Defense Department, and several think tanks, and some congressmen. And they think, ‘Well I sure covered the landscape on this one!’”

But that, Kinzer argues, is not what covering the landscape is about. 

“The great qualification you need for a journalist is the confidence to go out and see for yourself, and believe that your eyes are actually telling you more than press releases from some other country.”

Indeed, much of the lies and war propaganda about Syria, for example, have come from journalists situated in Istanbul, Beirut, or North America, most who have never been to Syria, or if they have – not in the past decade.

“It’s amazing to see how many people have built reputations as commentators on foreign countries and world affairs who have never been there, have no idea, beyond vague tropes, of what those countries are,” Kinzer said. “It’s because they are seeing the entire world from Washington’s perspective, and don’t think there is any other perspective worth having,” he added.

“It’s truly amazing, I’ve seen the decline of this profession into such willing subservience. We don’t have any core of regular columnists or people trying to challenge established narratives. We do have voices that pop up periodically, but they’re so drowned out by the regular columnists who just voice the same tropes over and over again,” Kinzer said. 

“The intellectual laziness of the American press in covering the world has never been as extreme as it is now. It’s just as dangerous in most of what’s called NATO countries to be contradicting the narrative as it is in the United States.”

Tremendous desire of CIA to control news 

In 2014, German journalist and editor, Udo Ulfkotte, told RT he had been forced to publish works not written by him under his own name (or risk being fired), including things “written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service.” 

According to Kinzer, the CIA “has had a massive, long-term effort to influence” the Western media dating back to the Cold War era. 

“The CIA has placed its own people, people who are on its payroll, in the offices of major news outlets over many decades. There was a large project the CIA called ‘Operation Mockingbird’ aimed specifically at trying to influence the US press, and particularly what the US press writes about the world,” he said. 

He recalled that in 1954, “when the CIA was planning to overthrow the government of Guatemala… because its president was ‘communist’, a New York Times reporter there started writing stories saying that actually the president is not communist and that land reform is only answering a desperate need of starving Guatemalans.” 

At CIA Director Allen Dulles’ request, the publisher agreed to keep the correspondent, Sydney Gruson, out of Guatemala. 

“Now that’s an extreme example. But, the motivation behind it is still there. There is a tremendous desire on the part of the CIA to control news.” 

While not surprised that the CIA would interfere in journalism, Kinzer was emphatic about his disgust that journalists toe the line.

“What I don’t like is that journalists go along with this! Power has so many levers, why should journalists become yet another one of them. We are the ones that are supposed to be questioning. It’s the job of reporters not to submit themselves to that.”

‘Press a button, and the narrative changes’

Kinzer also noted how media narratives can suddenly change, like a switch has been flipped. 

“It’s so interesting that when power decides to change the narrative, it happens right away.

“I can remember just six months ago turning on my PBS News Hour, in the US, and seeing a very longreport with General Dunford and Kelly Ayotte and a bunch of these right wingers who had come up with a big report about Afghanistan. And it was about why we can’t leave Afghanistan, we have to stay. It was a 10-minute report, and no other voices, nobody came on to say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s nonsense.’ Everybody was saying, ‘We have to stay in Afghanistan forever.’

“Suddenly, the president of the United States decides, OK, we’re gonna withdraw. And now, suddenly, it’s acceptable to say, ‘That whole Afghanistan thing was a disaster.’ Somebody just has to press a button, then the narrative changes, then everybody is allowed to say what the president said. But if you had said it one day before, you would have been in a lot of trouble.

“You have to wait for the general narrative to change, then you can change your narrative, but don’t do it until power tells you it is acceptable to change.”

Later in our conversation, he gave the example of writing about Israel, which he said was hard to do, until recently.

“Suddenly, in recent weeks even, it’s become a little more OK to be critical of Israeli policies, because some people in Washington are now a little more critical.”

Big Tech censorship on the rise

In the past several years, there has been an increase in social media giants deciding what content is acceptable and what “violates” so-called “community standards.” And as I wrote recently, it has gotten to the point where Twitter issues scary warnings about “unsafe” or “spammy” content from websites the social media platform deems dangerous, potentially scaring readers away. 

Commenting on the matter, Kinzer said that “the power of private companies to decide what people see and don’t see is greater now than ever.”

As for censorship by the outlets he has written for, Kinzer said he was lucky to be writing from places that editors really didn’t have the knowledge to tell him how to report. “Nobody called me and said ‘I know everything about Uzbekistan and this is wrong.’”

That said, he does maintain that in writing his columns, some subjects are either taboo or you would have to frame them in the usual anti-Russia manner common in Western media.

“It’s very hard to get a story in the American press about Russia that’s anything other than fitting into the cliches. I’ve had trouble writing about Russia, because the narrative that Putin is something other than a killer is not welcome in the United States. And I’ve had trouble writing about Syria. And of course, it’s very difficult to write about Israel.”

Lather, rinse, repeat

On the 10-year anniversary of the war on Syria, I wrote about how, mind-bogglingly, Western media and pundits continue to repeat the cliched and debunked rhetoric and lies that have been recycled year after year.

Kinzer addressed this technique, the repetition of narratives.

“I had an editor at the New York Times years ago who told me: A lot of journalism is about repetition. And boy does the American press do that. We have been told certain things about certain countries so many times over. And it just seems like the truth.

“‘The evils that have taken hold of Russia. The daily genocide that’s happening under the killers in Syria…’ You don’t need to go, you don’t need to check, it’s just like the air, it’s like an obvious fact.”

“I even see it in what’s happened to the Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism,” he said, adding that in 2020 it “predictably” went to a series of reports on “how evil Russia is” and this year – to a series of reports on “how evil China is.” 

The Pulitzer, he argued, is supposed to encourage original reporting, “not people that just scribble down what officials say, and then put it in nicer prose, and use phrases that are calculated to make people believe that government opinion is actual fact.”

“The job of journalists is to rebel against the narrative. We are out there as the eyes and ears of the world. If you don’t want to do it, fine, but don’t pretend that you’re doing it, and sit in your little cubicle and think of the stereotypes you’ve been fed and just regurgitate them. That is not journalism, it’s just public relations.”

In conclusion, Kinzer recalled a quote by Mark Twain: “The majority is always wrong. When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.”

Indeed, time and again when the majority has written about “weapons of mass destruction,” “chemical attacks,” Iraqi troops “killing babies in incubators,” and other Washington-contrived narratives, those courageous few who have stood up against those lies-based-narratives have proven to be honest journalists. 

If only more journalists would follow.  

Press Violations Explode to 180 in May Alone as Israel Cracks Down to Buff Its Image

June 11th, 2021

By Jessical Buxbaum

Source

“The more that Israel is exposed internationally for its human rights violations in Palestine, the more it becomes desperate in its attempt to crack down on journalists and the media in general.” — Dr. Ramzy Baroud

OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM — Despite wearing a press vest and holding a government press card, Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Givara Budeiri was violently assaulted and arrested by Israeli police on June 5.

Budeiri was covering a demonstration in the Occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah when Israeli forces attacked and then detained her for several hours on the grounds she kicked a soldier, which she denies. She was released only on terms that she doesn’t visit Sheikh Jarrah for 15 days.

“The silencing of journalists by terrorizing them has become a routine activity for the Israeli authorities, as witnessed in recent weeks in Gaza and occupied Jerusalem,” Dr. Mostefa Souag, acting director-general of Al Jazeera Media Network, said in a statement regarding Budeiri’s detention.

Violence against journalists, destruction of media property, and online censorship are all part of Israel’s systematic campaign to prevent the Palestinian narrative from reaching a global platform and exposing Israel’s crimes. And these efforts are only increasing.

The climate of press freedom

During the course of Israel’s 11-day war on Gaza, Israeli airstrikes destroyed four buildings housing at least 18 local and international media outlets. These included the offices belonging to Al Jazeera, Associated Press, Al-Araby TV, and Nawa Online Women Media Network. Israel’s bombardment also killed Palestinian journalist Yousef Abu Hussein and injured journalists Mohammad al-Louh and Elias Karram. Since April 21, a growing number of journalists have been harassed and assaulted by Israeli security forces and right-wing activists.

But attacks on the press aren’t exclusive to the recent violence in Palestine associated with Sheikh Jarrah, Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Gaza. Israel holds a ranking of 86 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index (with “1” being the most free) and Palestine sits at 132.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 18 journalists have been killed in the region since 1992; and currently 13 Palestinian journalists are imprisoned in Israeli jails. The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) reported 408 violations in the Occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza in 2020, with Israel responsible for 53% of the attacks. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) reported 608 media violations in 2020, with 490 of those violations committed by Israeli forces.

Israeli press violations encompass a wide range of dangerous actions, including physical assaults, targeting of media institutions, arrests, detentions, interrogations, raids, confiscation and destruction of equipment, and even using journalists as human shields.

A journalist’s personal experience

In one case, Dan Cohen — an American journalist and MintPress News contributor who was in Palestine from 2014 to 2017 — experienced being used as a human shield by Israeli forces firsthand. During an Israeli army raid into the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank in March 2014, a commander grabbed Cohen while he was reporting and forced him to stand in front of soldiers shooting at Palestinian youth. He was able to escape unscathed, but the incident still burns in his mind when considering freedom of the press in Israel-Palestine. “It was a very obvious case of the Israeli army attempting to use me as a hu

man shield either to punish me for documenting their activities, potentially injure me, or just to scare me,” Cohen said.

Cohen was harassed again during another army operation into the camp in 2014. A group of soldiers approached him, with one brandishing his weapon at Cohen. They forced him to turn around against a wall. “And then when I couldn’t see, they threw a flash [grenade] at me,” Cohen said. “Of course, it startled me and then they just laughed as they walked away. So, this is typical Israeli army harassment of journalists.”

Journalists — foreign and local — face a myriad of barriers when covering Palestine-Israel. But Cohen feels the pressures are more extreme for journalists who don’t fit into the establishment mold. “If you do the mainstream, New York Times reporting and stick to official events and don’t really challenge the hasbara narrative, then you’re not in any kind of danger. But if you dare to go to where Palestinians are demonstrating, then you’ll get tear gassed. You might get shot with a rubber-coated bullet and you may even get hit with live ammunition,” Cohen said. Hasbara is the Israeli term for propaganda and refers to the government’s diplomatic efforts to manipulate information and control the global narrative on Israel-Palestine. Cohen concluded, “A lot of it just depends on what you expose yourself to, but fundamentally journalists in Israel have no real protection.”

For journalists like Cohen, who has reported for alternative media outlets like Mondoweiss, challenging Israel’s status quo can turn you into a target. This is even more likely if you’re Jewish. “Zionists consider Jews who dissent from the Israeli government positions as traitors who are even worse than Arabs,” Cohen told MintPress, adding:

Jews speaking out against Israeli crimes — whether you’re an activist, a journalist, or anybody — severely undermines the so-called Jewish state’s ability to project itself as a defender of Jews worldwide and claim that its crimes against Palestinians are necessary to ensure the livelihood of a worldwide Jewry.

Yet it’s not just the Israeli military and government targeting the press. In recent weeks, CPJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists, uncovered far-right, Jewish nationalists encouraging violence against media professionals documenting these extremists’ coordinated attacks against Palestinians. “[We] can do both [target Arabs and journalists], it really doesn’t contradict. There are Arab terrorists and there are media terrorists,” read a WhatsApp message from a local group.

According to the Union of Journalists in Israel (ITONAIM), Israeli journalists faced dozens of attacks from the public and Israeli authorities from April 21 to May 15.

The I’lam – Arab Center for Media Freedom, Development and Research also released a report documenting 13 incidents of harassment and violence against Palestinian and Israeli journalists in May. The majority of these cases were committed by Israeli security forces. I’lam reported: 

According to the testimonies collected, the Israeli security forces’ attempts to eradicate journalists and prevent the media from reporting on the events aim to provide the official Israeli narrative with legitimacy and credibility in front of the world… Eradicating journalists is not only violating national and international laws, it also undermines the people’s right to know the facts, which it appears Israel is trying to hide.

Palestinian press under greater threat

Neither Israeli nor Palestinian journalists are immune to harassment — especially when it comes to reporting on Israeli corruption. But one group faces significantly greater danger in doing their job.

“There is very little margin for press freedom in Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Traditionally, the limitations and the restrictions have been imposed on Palestinian journalists covering Israeli military activities, the Israeli occupation, and Israeli violations of human rights,” Dr. Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, told MintPress News, adding:

As of late, even Israeli journalists and media that seem to be sympathetic in any way with Palestinians or who are exposing the right-wing policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have also faced a degree of limitation and restriction. But, of course, we are still talking about a vastly disproportionate difference here in how Palestinian and Israeli journalists are treated.”

According to a report from PJS’ Freedom Committee, Israel committed more than 180 press violations against Palestinians in May. About 80 violations occurred in the Gaza Strip, with around 37 media institutions targeted and at least 10 journalists injured by rocket fire.

In the West Bank and Jerusalem, roughly 100 Palestinian journalists have faced ongoing attacks from Israeli authorities through work restrictions, confiscation of equipment, tear gas, sound bombs and rubber bullets.

PJS called on the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) to send a commission to investigate Israeli crimes against Palestinian journalists. The HRC responded on May 27 by adopting a resolution establishing a commission to investigate press violations that have occurred in Palestine-Israel since April 13.

Amid Israel’s latest crackdown on Palestinian journalists, Cohen emphasized, however, that this isn’t a new phenomenon explaining:

For decades Palestinian journalists have been persecuted by an Israeli military dictatorship that doesn’t afford Palestinians any rights or guarantee any kind of freedom, whether that’s freedom of press or anything else. So, the recent attacks on Palestinian journalists and media institutions are part and parcel of the modus operandi of the apartheid regime.”

Media attacks worsening

As previously mentioned, multiple press watchdog groups monitoring Palestine-Israel indicate a drastic increase in media violations in recent months. Dr. Baroud agrees freedom of the press is worsening as Israeli crimes are broadcast on the world stage, concluding:

The more that Israel is exposed internationally for its human rights violations in Palestine, the more it becomes desperate in its attempt to crack down on journalists and the media in general. [Journalists] pose a threat to Israel in the sense that their job exposes Israeli practices and human rights violations against the Palestinians. So, in the eyes of Israel the journalist becomes the enemy because, even though he’s not carrying a weapon, the camera and the pen become weapons.”

ناصر أبو بكر أيقونة لحرية الإعلام Nasser Abu Bakr is an icon of media freedom

03/06/2021

ناصر أبو بكر أيقونة لحرية الإعلام

ناصر قنديل

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بعد إقدام وكالة أسوشيتدبرس الأميركية على فصل الصحافية المتدربة اميلي وايلدر بسبب نشرها مواقف تضامنية مع الشعب الفلسطيني على حسابها الخاص على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي، في خطوة أثارت غضب أكثر من مئة من زملائها في الوكالة، لما في الفصل من تعسّف وانتهاك للحرية الشخصية والمهنية، ومحاولة استغلال السلطة الوظيفية للتدخل في معتقدات شخصية للعاملين في وكالة يُفترض أنها تملك من العراقة والتقاليد ما يمنح إدارتها معرفة كافية بخطورة ما ترتكب بحق المعايير الوظيفية واحترام حرية الرأي والمعتقد، جاء دور وكالة الصحافة الفرنسية التي لا تقلّ معرفة بالتقاليد المهنية، والتي يفترض بأنها أكثر تعبيراً عن المعايير المهنية لممارسة العمل الصحافي، من الوكالة الأميركية، فاختارت مدير مكتبها في فلسطين نقيب الصحافيين الفلسطينيين ناصر أبو بكر لتطرده من وظيفته عقاباً على نقله الأمين والصادق لجرائم كيان الاحتلال بحق الشعب الفلسطيني، لتقدم نموذجاً من نوع آخر على مخالفة القواعد المهنيّة التي يفترض أن يكافأ على أساسها أبو بكر بدلاً من أن يعاقب استرضاء لكيان الاحتلال، في أبشع صور التبعية لإرادة الاحتلال العنصري الاستيطاني، الذي يشكل نقيضاً كلياً للقيم التي يفترض أن الصحافة الفرنسيّة تعمل بموجبها.

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فضيحة وكالتين عالميتين كبيرتين، تتوّج مساراً من الفضائح خلال الحرب على سورية مثله نشر صور جرائم مأخوذة من حروب عمرها عقود وفي بلدان تبعد آلاف الكيلومترات عن سورية، ونسبتها الى الجيش السوري للتشويه والإساءة والتجريم، ليتكامل المشهد الفضائحيّ الغربي في مزاعم الديمقراطية، وادعاءات بمعايير حرفية مهنية في التعامل مع الأحداث العالمية، ومعايير وظيفية أخلاقية في التعامل مع الصحافيين العاملين، ليثبت أن هذه الوكالات التي تدّعي الاستقلال عن حكومات بلادها في سياساتها التحريرية وتثقل أسماعنا بالمواعظ عن مفاهيم إنسانية صارمة تقود عملها المهني في التعامل مع الخبر ومع الصحافيين، ليست إلا ابواقاً لأجهزة استخبارات حكوماتها، تنفذ تعليماتها، مهما كان السلوك مشيناً ووقحاً. وترتدي هذه الفضيحة أهمية استثنائية لكونها تجري في مناخ معاكس كلياً لتخديم الوكالتين لسياسات كيان الاحتلال، يجتاح الرأي العام في أوروبا وأميركا، حيث يخرج الملايين في الشوارع يهتفون لحرية فلسطين، بحيث بات انحياز الوكالتين لكيان الاحتلال بهذه الصورة البشعة تحدياً لإرادة الشعوب التي يفترض أنها تموّل عمل الوكالتين، وهو ما يمثل بالعرف الديمقراطي سرقة موصوفة، وجرماً جنائياً كاملاً.

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يستدرج الحدث تساؤلات عما كان سيحدث لو قامت السلطات المعنيّة في بلد آخر غير فرنسا وأميركا بمعاقبة صحافي أو مؤسسة إعلامية على الترويج لكيان الاحتلال، وعندما يكون البلد الآخر عربياً كلبنان تحرّم قوانينه الترويج للاحتلال، ألم تكن سلطات البلدين في واشنطن وباريس لتنظم حملات التنديد بالمساءلة، تحت عنوان الدفاع عن الحرية، وكانت ستنضم إليها هيئات ومؤسسات يفترض انها موجودة لرعاية وحماية عمل الصحافيين من التنكيل بسب الممارسة المهنية أو بسبب ممارسة حرية المعتقد والتعبير، وكنا سنسمع مواعظ لا تتوقف عن الحقوق والحريات، ما يؤكد سياسة الكيل بمكيالين، عندما يتصل الأمر بكيان الاحتلال، ولذلك فإن كل الصحافيين العرب والصحافيين الأحرار في العالم وهيئات الدفاع عن حرية الصحافة في العالم، والهيئات الحقوقية التابعة للأمم المتحدة، وتلك التي تعبر عن الرأي العام في بلدان الغرب، مطالبة بعدم التهاون مع سلوك وكالتين من أكثر الوكالات العالمية للأخبار تأثيراً وانتشاراً، وبعدما بادر نقابة المحررين الى إصدار بيان تنديد بطرد نقيب الصحافيين الفلسطينيين، صار مطلوباً إطلاق تحرّك أشد قوة وحضوراً بحجم الاعتصام أمام السفارات الفرنسية والأميركية في العواصم العربية، وأمام مكاتب الوكالتين الأميركية والفرنسية في البلاد العربية والعالم تنديداً بالأفعال المشينة، التي تنتمي لسلوك أبشع الديكتاوريات وأنظمة الفصل العنصري البائدة، ليصرخ العالم كله بوجه هاتين الوكالتين، ويدعو الرأي العام إلى معاقبتهما على طريقته، بفرض التراجع عن القرارات المجحفة أولاً، وبالتهديد بوقف التمويل ثانياً، فيما يجب على مجتمع الإعلام العربي التفكير بمقاطعة أخبار الوكالتين، حتى يستقيم السلوك وتصوّب المسارات، وتتم مراجعة القرارات، وهذا أضعف الإيمان.

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Nasser Abu Bakr is an icon of media freedom

Translated By Zara Ali

Nasser Kandil

– When the Associated Press fired trainee journalist Emily Wilder for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people on her own social media account, the move angered more than 100 of her colleagues at the agency. They dismissed the abuse and violation of personal and professional freedom under the pretext of functional authority that permitted interference in the personal beliefs of employees of an agency which is supposedly owned by Iraq. The traditions give its administration sufficient knowledge of the seriousness of what is being committed against job standards and respect for freedom of opinion.

– I think the role of AFP, which is no less familiar with professional traditions, and supposedly more reflective of the standards and practices of journalism than the U.S. agency, chose the director of its office in Palestine, the captain of the Palestinian journalists Nasser Abu Bakr, to be dismissed from his job as punishment for his honest depiction of the crimes of the occupation entity against the Palestinian people. And this was done in line with a model of another kind, one that was used to violate the professional norms which entitled Abu Bakr for a reward instead of being punished, only to appease an occupation entity. And this reflects the most horrible form of dependency on the will of the settlement racial occupation, which is a total opposite of the values the French press is supposed to adhere to.

– The scandal of two major international news agencies, appears to be a culmination of the course of scandalous reporting during the war on Syria. Such as the publication of images depicting crimes that occurred during decades-old wars and in countries thousands of kilometres from Syria, but were attributed to the Syrian army. The intent was to distort reality, abuse and criminalize the Syrian army, because this notion could be integrated into the scandalous Western drama of democracy. The allegations of violating professional standards in dealing with world events, or violating ethical job standards in dealing with working journalists, prove that these agencies which claim independence from their governments in their editorial policies, and burden our hearing with sermons about humanitarian notions that supposedly define their professional work in dealing with news and journalists, are nothing but trumpets of their governments’ intelligence services. Carrying out their instructions, no matter how shameful and rude the conduct. This scandal is of exceptional importance. Because it takes place in an environment totally contrary to that engineered by the two agencies based on their policy towards the occupation entity. In the face of the sweeping public opinion in Europe and America, where millions have taken to the streets chanting for the freedom of Palestine, the bias of the two agencies towards the occupation entity depicted in this heinous way has posed a challenge to the will of the people. These are the very people who are supposed to finance the work of these two agencies as a democratic custom which can now be looked at as a described theft, and a complete criminal offence instead.

– The event raises questions about what would have happened if the relevant authorities in a country, other than France and America, had punished a journalist or a media organization for promoting occupation, especially when the other country was Arab, as Lebanon, where law prohibits the promotion of occupation. Would the authorities in Washington and Paris not have organized campaigns to denounce accountability under the slogan of defending freedom? Would they have not been joined by bodies and institutions which supposedly sponsor and protect the work of journalists from abuse of professional practices and the right to freedom of belief and expression? We would have heard sermons about caring and protecting the work of journalists from abuse of professional practices under the pretext of the right to freedom of belief and expression. Rights and freedoms that cease to exist otherwise, thus confirming the policy of double standards when it comes to the occupation entity.

– So all Arab journalists, free journalists in the world, press freedom organizations, and human rights bodies as well as those that express public opinion in the countries of the West, must demand from the two of the world’s most influential news agencies, the publication of a statement condemning the expulsion of the Captain of Palestinian Journalists — a stronger and more present movement launched in the form of sizable sit-ins in front of the French and American embassies in Arab capitals, and in front of the offices of the American and French agencies in the Arab countries. The world must denounce the shameful acts, which belong to the behavior of the ugliest dictators and the old apartheid regimes. The whole world must shout in the face of these two agencies and call on public opinion to punish them by imposing a reversal of unfair decisions first, and secondly by threatening to stop funding. While the Arab media community should think about boycotting the news of the two agencies, so that the behavior and the path is corrected and the decisions are reviewed — though this maybe the weakest expression of faith.

The Assange saga: Practicing real journalism is criminally insane

January 07, 2021

By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times

Synchronicity is definitely fond of mirror wonderwalls. The Julian Assange saga seemed to have entered a new chapter as he was, in thesis, on his way to – conditional – freedom this past Monday, only one day after the first anniversary of the start of the Raging Twenties: the assassination of Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani.

The fate of the journalist the Empire seeks to terminate was just juxtaposed to the fate of the warrior/diplomat the empire already terminated.

Two days later, Julian Assange was de facto re-incarcerated exactly as the Empire was hit by an “insurrection” which, whenever instigated in that distant “Third World”, is celebrated in Exceptionalistan as “people power”.

The invaluable Craig Murray, from inside Westminster Magistrates Court No. 1 in London, meticulously presented the full contours  of the insanity this Wednesday.

Read it in conjunction with the positively terrifying judgment delivered on Monday in the United States government case against Julian Assange.

The defining issue, for all those who practice real journalism all across the world, is that the judgment affirms, conclusively, that any journalist can be prosecuted under the US Espionage Act. Since a 1961 amendment, the Espionage Act carries universal jurisdiction.

The great John Pilger memorably describes “judge” Vanessa Baraitser as “that Gothic woman”. She is in fact an obscure public servant, not a jurist. Her judgment walks and talks like it was written by a mediocre rookie hack. Or, better yet, entirely lifted from the US Department of Justice indictment.

Julian Assange was – at the last minute – discharged on theoretically humanitarian grounds. So the case had, in effect, ended. Not really. Two days later, he was sent back to Belmarsh, a squalid maximum security prison rife with Covid-19. So the case is ongoing.

WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnnson correctly noted, “It is unjust and unfair and illogical when you consider her ruling of two days ago about Julian’s health in large part because he is in Belmarsh prison (…) To send him back there doesn’t make any sense.”

It does when one considers the real role of Baraitser – at a loss to juggle between the imperatives of the imperial agenda and the necessity of saving the face of British justice.

Baraitser is a mere, lowly foot soldier punching way above her weight. The real power in the Assange case is Lady Emma Arbuthnot, forced out of a visible role because of very compromising, direct ties she and her husband Lord Arbuthnot maintain with British intelligence and military, first revealed by – who else – WikiLeaks.

It was Arbuthnot who picked up obscure Baraitser – who dutifully follows her road map. In court, as Murray has detailed in a series of searing reports, Baraitser essentially covers her incompetence with glaring vindictiveness.

Baraitser discharged Julian Assange, according to her own reasoning, because she was not convinced the appalling American gulag would prevent him from committing suicide.

But the key issue is that before reaching this conclusion, she agreed and reinforced virtually every point of the US indictment.

So at this point, on Monday, the “Gothic woman” was performing a contortion to save the US from the profound global embarrassment of prosecuting a de facto journalist and publisher for revealing imperial war crimes, not United States government secrets.

Two days later, the full picture became crystal clear. There was nothing “humanitarian” about that judgment. Political dissent was equaled with mental illness. Julian Assange was branded as criminally insane. Once again, practicing journalism was criminalized.

There are reasons to believe though, that a United States government appeal may fail. A British High Court would be reluctant to overturn a judgment where Baraitser actually established findings of fact: a direct correlation between the state of the American gulag, and the extreme danger to Assange’s health if he’s thrown inside this system.

As it stands, it didn’t even matter that Assange’s defense offered a full package to obtain bail, from home arrest to the use of an ankle bracelet. Baraitser’s notion that the British security state would not be able to prevent his “escape” wearing an ankle bracelet in the middle of a total, police state-style lockdown does not even qualify as a joke.

So Julian Assange is back to suffering a perverse, interminable rewrite of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.

The US government’s legal strategy before the High Court convenes in April is basically to try to prove its American gulag is competent enough to prevent a suicide – even though the ultimate aim of this post-truth Inquisition seems to be the termination of Julian Assange inside the penal system. That goal doesn’t even require a supermax prison in Colorado. Belmarsh will do.

Trump declares civil war for voter integrity in breaking (or broken) USA

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

December 05, 2020

by Ramin Mazaheri and crossposted with PressTV

by Ramin Mazaheri and crossposted with PressTV

The idea that Donald J. Trump could be (even the guy cleaning up behind the horse of) a white knight acting in favor of integrity is laughable, hypocritical and certainly controversial, but that is what a disaster United States political culture truly is.

The man who has been nationally lampooned as a rich buffoon and denigrated as a real estate shark for decades prior to 2016 is now being held up by half the country as a moral leader and living “founding father”. In the American context these persons may somehow even be proven somewhat right, but that is what a disaster United States political culture truly is.

Since the November 3rd vote we’ve all been asking: Where’s Donald? Only future historians can tell us if Trump was right to wait a month before finally formally declaring that he would litigate in order to ensure a judicial verification of a highly- and long-disputed vote. That’s a long time for moral reflection, but in the context of today’s hyper-hyper-polarised US politics it’s been half a lifetime.

In the disputed election of 2000 Al Gore conceded, allegedly for the good of the country, on December 13th – the day before the Electoral College voted that year. This year the College must also cast their ballot on December 14th. On December 2nd Trump gave a 45-minute speech in which he promised to not concede, also allegedly for the good of the country.

What Trump’s speech means is that the US constitution insists that the nation’s political drama is about to explode.

Probably even sooner than December 14: December 8th is known as the “safe harbor” date, because all states must have resolved their disputes by then. Justified or not, they do not currently appear to be resolved satisfactorily for scores of millions of Americans.

For the average Bidenite the blinders are completely on – perhaps they never even could see anything “over there” in Trumpland, which for some reason is a foreign country to many Bidenites. They insist that, “It’s over”. That’s fine – nobody is paying them to give objective, hard-news, daily journalism. They’re free to editorialise all they want. However, saying, “It’s over, Biden won,” is gypsy future-telling, a way to censor political conversation and it also ignores the historical gravity of Trump’s speech – this election is not “over” in any sort of historically-normal way whatsoever: What US election has ever been “over” like this?

Maybe Trump’s speech will deserve to be ignored in the history books? Maybe it will go down as the day history was changed? As this is my editorial I’m entitled to make whatever wild prediction I like, but I’d rather use it to point out just how badly my US journalist colleagues are performing at the craft (not profession) of journalism.

It was certainly quite a speech, indeed

The sitting US president publicly blasted the nation’s electoral process as having allowed, “fraud and abuse to occur on a scale never seen before”.

To my American journalist colleagues: that’s news.

Countless top American journalists refused to report on it. I’ll pass on a couple highlights:

“As president I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the constitution of the United States,” said Trump, relating a political fact. “That is why I’m determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege,” said Trump, making a claim for which he’ll have to provide overwhelming evidence, and quickly. “This is not just about honouring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me – it’s about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections,” said Trump, in a statement which is seen in America as either patriotism or shameless partisan duplicity.

Trump listed a litany of alleged offences made across the country and claimed to have massive amounts of evidence to support him – these claims will have to be decided in court, definitively. Initially, however, they are decided in the court of public opinion.

However, the problem here is that US corporate media (and the tiny amount of state media) was so flagrantly biased against Trump’s speech that we probably can’t find 12 untainted people to fill a jury for one the many, many trials Trump seems to demand.

“Acting crazy”, “Propaganda”, “My God, He’s Completely Insane” – this all journalistically-false but very real headlines from the very top US media. This is truly treatment reserved for foreign leaders who are currently threatening war on your country, not your own president.

Amazingly, CNN wouldn’t even air the speech. Is that the last pound on the head of the 2016-begun nail in the coffin for viewing them as “America’s television media of record”? The problem is: what other US corporate entity is a better alternative?

The reason I – for the first time – feel comfortable using the term “civil war” to describe the modern US is: 74 million Trump voters may now see themselves as being attacked and violated. Any sober analysis shows that the November 3rd vote (like it or not) was a concretisation and not a repudiation of “Trumpism” – they prevailed at the state legislative and executive levels, they made gains in the House of Representatives, they will likely hold on to Senate, judges at both the Supreme Court and local level are dominated by conservatives – they won everywhere but the US presidency, in fact. Therefore, anyone with a sense of fair play and tolerance realises that they deserve to be taken seriously; anyone with a survival instinct may realise that trying to push them around may find that they are quickly outnumbered in many areas.

But media opinion and public opinion don’t have any real weight in court. However, a fatal mistake often being made abroad is assuming that US public opinion is as anti-Trump as media opinion is. One merely needs to refer to the November 3rd results to see how incorrect that idea is. Seventy-four million Trumpers do have their media, but it is certainly not read outside of the US and must be searched for domestically.

One doesn’t have to like Trump or Trumpism, but calling them all “insane” is a way to start a fight, no?

I have never given much credence to the idea that the US is going to explode in election-related violence – above all, this was a sensationalistic US media ploy to demonise Trumpism, to distract from real issues, to get ratings and to increase Democratic turnout – but the events of this week definitely push the US further along that path. It is still very far off, I must add.

Conclusion: the current state of two different battles – the electoral and the cultural

Electorally: I am not going to waste your time by falsely claiming all of Trump’s allegations have either no merit or much merit – only a hysterical partisan is doing that. We should assume that those making false election claims in court will be punished for daring to make false claims.

I will note that I don’t believe US elections can withstand serious scrutiny, and that they were repeatedly ranked by places like Harvard as the worst of the core Western democracies. Allegations of widespread voter fraud – like here in Chicago – laughingly go back to the time of Kennedy, and all Americans know this.

On the other hand, I also note that if Joe Biden’s projected victory is reversed due to proven election fraud this would be not just a “once in a century” story but even more astounding than even that, in the American context. I’m not one to bet on the longest of long shots, unless I feel like wasting some money.

Anyway, that is all just journalistic hot air: courts have to decide on evidence, which is allegedly not all presented – we should not declare prematurely. After Gore conceded prematurely they found that 14% of African-American Floridians had their ballots questionably tossed – that’s not exactly “voter fraud”, but it certainly does render the 2000 American presidential results “fraudulent”.

Nobody here cares about though, strangely? Maybe not even African-American Floridians?

Maybe it’s the media, which now includes the appallingly censorious Twitter and Facebook?

But the inexorable, oppressive, inescapable (and undoubtedly pro-Bidenite) mantra here is “we need to quickly move on”, exactly as it was in America exactly 20 years ago.

Since 2000 nothing is learned; nothing is paid for; no reparations are given; no apologies are made; if America does it or wants it no rules apply because everything they do is exceptional, but only because they live in a vacuum divorced from history and just consequences.

Electorally: The rest of the world is advised to keep waiting – who knows what whims an imperial hegemon will take?

Culturally: I believe it might somewhat explode here given the content of Trump’s speech, the seeming impossibility of coordinating a proper & broadly-accepted judicial review of the vote before the upcoming Electoral College procedures (these dates are prescribed in the US Constitution and would require an already do-nothing Congress to modify), as well as the total war against it from the US media class.

But the math is simple: Two-thirds of the country voted. That means one-third of the country doesn’t care and probably wants it over. One third went to Biden. So it’s fair to guess that for almost 70% of the voting eligible population, “It’s over”. Really. Any talk of civil war must include this endemic American apathy, caused by the atrociousness inequality of their antiquated and aristocratic system, which implicitly sides with the status quo in its irresponsible sloth.

A reversal of Biden’s projected win implies, as I wrote, something of a revolution. In history civil wars have been launched by one-third of the population, but winning them without recourse to secession is certainly rare, and a change installed by only one-third of the population is not a revolution at all. Certainly, any Trumper “explosion” would have to be entirely grassroots, as the media wouldn’t cover it any more than they covered Trump’s historic speech, and it would have to be nearly clandestine, as Facebook and Twitter are now so incredibly and heavily censored. Finally, the US is imperialist and thus there is no revolution possible at all – Trumper or otherwise – they are barely able to have a functioning “democracy with imperialist characteristics”.

I can report that despite what a disaster United States political culture truly is the US system – like it or not – certainly seems to be democratically supported by the (highly propagandised) majority, therefore the world is obligated to respect its processes and results.

The problem for the entire world is that many inside the US do not or will not support the processes surrounding this 2020 presidential election, and that implies either broken processes or a broken culture.

When the imperial hegemon’s culture is broken that is either cause for concern or celebration, depending on your class. And maybe the US is not broken, but just breaking?

*************************************************************

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020

Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem – November 17, 2020

The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’ – November 22, 2020

80% of US partisan losers think the last 2 elections were stolen – December 3, 2020

The Smearing of Robert Fisk…Now That He Can’t Defend Himself

DECEMBER 3, 2020

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism [ MORE ]

BY JONATHAN COOK

Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly a fraud, a fabulist, a fantasist, a liar.

What is most ironic is that the journalists doing this are some of the biggest frauds themselves, journalists who have made a career out of deceiving their readers. In fact, many of the crowd attacking Fisk when he can no longer defend himself are precisely the journalists who have the worst record of journalistic malpractice and on some of the biggest issues of our times.

Set aside the fact these corporate blue ticks are citing Oz Katerji – a conman on Syria – for their assessment of Robert Fisk. These very journalists helped carry out the biggest fraud in recent journalistic history, selling you the Iraq WMD lies. They have zero credibility https://t.co/VZq8MgOQ22

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 29, 2020

At least I have the courage to criticise them while they are alive. They know dead men can’t sue. It is complete and utter cowardice to attack Fisk when they could have made their comments earlier, to his face. In fact, if they truly believed any of the things they are so keen to tell us now, they had an absolute duty to say them when Fisk was alive rather than allowing the public to be deceived by someone they regarded as a liar and fantasist. They didn’t make public these serious allegations – they didn’t air their concerns about the supposedly fabricated facts in Fisk’s stories – when he was alive because they know he would have made mincemeat of them.

Most preposterous of all is the fact that the actual trigger for this sudden, very belated outpouring of concern about Fisk is a hit-piece written by Oz Katerji. I’m not sure whether I can find the generosity to call Katerji a journalist. Like Elliot Higgins of the US government-funded Bellingcat, he’s more like an attack dog beloved by establishment blue-ticks: he is there to enforce accepted western imperial narratives, disguising his lock-step support for the establishment line as edgy, power-to-the-people radicalism.

Anyone who challenges Katerji’s establishment-serving agenda gets called names – sometimes very rude ones. Fisk is just the latest target of a Katerji hatchet job against any journalist (myself, of course, included) who dares to step outside of the Overton Window. That these “serious” journalists think they can hang their defamation of Fisk on to anything said by Katerji, most especially the thin gruel he produces in his latest article, is truly shameful. If their concerns really relate to journalistic integrity and reliability, Katerji would be the very last person to cite.

Great piece by @OzKaterji, hard to read even having heard all similar stories about Fisk. Like so many, he was inspiring to me as student & so depressing the evidence that he fabricated so much and how he was so badly on wrong side of history on Syria https://t.co/aZjQMoNmJ0

— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) November 28, 2020

Katerji’s prime area of western narrative enforcement is the Middle East – perhaps not surprisingly, as it is the place where there is an awful lot of oil that western states and corporations are desperate to control. But one should not ignore his wide-ranging efforts to boot-lick wherever he is needed on behalf of western establishment narratives.

Here he is desperately trying to breathe life into two fairytales: that the election of the leftwing Evo Morales as Bolivia’s president was fraudulent, and that Morales was forced to resign last year rather than that he was ousted in a CIA-backed military coup. Notably, Katerji was clinging to these discredited story lines as late as last month, long after even the liberal corporate media had abandoned them as no longer tenable.

So there was no CIA fascist coup in Bolivia after all, and free and fair elections were held entirely as predicted.

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) October 19, 2020

Katerji was also, of course, an enthusiastic recruit to evidence-free establishment smears that Labour was overrun with antisemitism under the leadership of the leftwing Jeremy Corbyn, the very same anecdotal claims promoted by the entire corporate media.

Not only that, but he even had the gall to argue that he was speaking on behalf of Palestinians in smearing Corbyn, the only leader of a major European party ever to champion their cause. Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer, like most other politicians in the wake of the Corbyn episode, has all but disappeared the Palestinians from the political agenda. Katerji must be delighted – on behalf of Palestinians, of course.

I wish you would stop using Arabs to whitewash your own bigotry and lies Jonathan. You speak for yourself, not my community, when you publish filth like this.

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) May 10, 2018

But Katerji’s beef with Fisk derives chiefly from the fact that the Independent’s foreign correspondent broke ranks with the rest of the western press corps over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.

Katerji is part of what – if we were being more brutally honest about these things – would be called the west’s al-Qaeda lobby. These are a motley crew of journalists and academics using their self-publicised “Arabhood” to justify the intimidation and silencing of anyone not entirely convinced that ordinary Syrians might prefer, however reluctantly, their standard-issue dictator, Bashar al-Assad, over the head-chopping, women-stoning, Saudi-financed jihadists of Islamic State and al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria; or who question whether the western powers ought to be covertly funding and backing these extremists.

Exercise any doubt at all on either of these points and Katerji will lose no time in calling you an “Assadist”, “war crimes denier”, “antisemite”, “9/11 truther” and worse. Then in yet more evidence of a circle jerk, those establishment blue ticks, even ones beloved by much of the left, will cite his smears as proof that you are indeed an Assadist, war crimes denier, and so on.

Here's Oz Katerji completely owning a typical Assad apologist. This thread provides a powerful lesson in how to confront the falsehoods generated by the Russian and Syrian governments, and spread by their useful idiots in the UK. https://t.co/CdzeOSURnP

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) February 13, 2018

Here are just a few examples of Katerji engaging with those critical of the imperial western narrative on Syria, so you get the idea:

LOL. Abby Martin is an Assadist and a 9/11 truther who LITERALLY works for the Venezuelan government.

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) October 1, 2017

Electronic Intifada is a pro-Assad war crimes denial blog run by antisemites. Ali Abunimah is a war crimes revisionist who denies Assad's crimes and parrots sectarian lies about the civilians Assad is murdering. Nobody interested in human rights would ever share their work.

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) May 23, 2019

Why should I no-platform you as an Assadist? Your own boss did that, clown.

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) October 2, 2020

Back in 2011 and 2012, in what looked like the possible eruption of an Arab Spring in Syria, the arguments of Katerji and co at least had an air of plausibility. But their real agenda – one that accorded with western imperialism rather than an Arab awakening – became much clearer once local protests against Assad were subsumed by an influx of jihadi fighters of the very kind that had been labelled “terrorists” by the western media everywhere else they appeared in the Middle East.

Inevitably, anyone like Fisk who adopted a position of caution or scepticism about whether the majority of Syrians actually wanted a return to some kind of Islamic Dark Age incurred the wrath of Katerji and his cohorts.

But Fisk infuriated these western al-Nusra lobbyists even further when he visited the town of Douma in 2018 and raised serious questions about claims made by the jihadists who had been ruling the town that, just before Assad’s forces drove them out, the Syrian military had bombed it with chemical gas, killing many civilians. The story, which at that stage was based exclusively on the claims of these head-chopping jihadists, was instantly reported as verified fact by the credulous western media.

My latest: How did liberal media like the Guardian deal with the first on-the-ground reporting in Douma from veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk? They managed the difficult task of denigrating his account while ignoring the fact that he was ever there https://t.co/PemzQTFw9u

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 18, 2018

Based solely on claims made by the al-Qaeda franchise in Douma, President Donald Trump hurriedly fired off missiles at Syria, in flagrant violation of international law and to cheers from the western media.

Fisk, of course, knew that in discrediting the evidence-free narrative being promoted by the western press corps (who had never been in Douma) he was doing himself no favours at all. They would resent him all the more. Most of his peers preferred to ignore his revelations, even though they were earth-shattering in their implications. But once the official watchdog body the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued its report into Douma many months later, implicitly backing the jihadists’ version of events, Fisk’s earlier coverage was snidely dismissed by fellow journalists.

Sadly for them, however, the story did not end there. Following publication of the OPCW’s Douma report, a number of its senior experts started coming forward as whistleblowers to say that, under pressure from the US, the OPCW bureaucracy tampered with their research and misrepresented their findings in the final report. The evidence they had found indicated that Assad had not carried out a chemical attack in Douma. More likely the jihadists, who were about to be expelled by Assad’s forces, had staged the scene to make it look like a chemical attack and draw the US deeper into Syria.

Important overview of the leaks that exposed political corruption at the main chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW, in relation to Syria https://t.co/bWTEA7JIRP

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 25, 2020

Of course, just as the corporate media ignored Fisk’s original reporting from Douma that would have made their own accounts sound like journalistic malpractice, they resolutely ignored the whistleblowers too. You can scour the corporate media and you will be lucky to find even an allusion to the months-long row over the OPCW report, which gained enough real-world prominence to erupt into a major row at the United Nations, including denunciations of the OPCW’s behaviour from the organisation’s former head, Jose Bustani.

This is the way frauds like Katerji are able to ply their own misinformation. They sound credible only because the counter-evidence that would show they are writing nonsense is entirely absent from the mainstream. Only those active on social media and open-minded enough to listen to voices not employed by a major corporate platform (with, in this case, the notable exception of Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail) are able to find any of this counter-information. It is as if we are living in parallel universes.

Everything about this appalling war crimes revisionist screed is a sick, sad, desperate lie. pic.twitter.com/ILdcMQFuxw

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) November 24, 2019

The reason why Fisk was so cherished by readers, and why there was a real sense of loss when he died a month ago, was that he was one of the very few journalists who belonged to the mainstream but reported as though he were not beholden to the agenda of his corporate platform.

There were specific reasons for that. Like a handful of others – John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Chris Hedges among them – Fisk made his name in the corporate media at a time when it reluctantly indulged the odd maverick foreign correspondent because they had a habit of exposing war crimes everyone else missed, exclusives that then garnered their publications prestigious journalism awards. Ownership of the media was then far less concentrated, so there was a greater commercial incentive for risk-taking and breaking stories. And these journalists emerged in a period when power was briefly more contested, with the labour movement trying to assert its muscle in the post-war decades, and before western societies were forced by the corporate elite to submit to neoliberal orthodoxy on all matters.

Notably, Pilger, Hersh and Hedges all found themselves struggling to keep a place in the corporate media. Fisk alone managed to cling on. That was more by luck. After being forced out of Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper for breaking a disturbing story in 1989 on the US shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane, he found a new home at Britain’s Independent newspaper, which had been recently founded. As a late-comer to the British media scene, the paper struggled not only to make money but to create a distinctive identity or gain any real visibility. Fisk survived, it seems, because he quickly established himself as one of the very few reasons to buy the paper. He was a rare example of a journalist who was bigger than the outlet he served.

Readers trusted him because he not only refused to submit to his peers’ herd-think but endlessly called them out as journalistically and intellectually lazy.

Robert Fisk has died. He was not only courageous, informed and insightful, but one of the very rare journalists in the western corporate media to carve out for himself enough freedom to present an honest picture of the Middle East https://t.co/opIeNaVbcI

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 1, 2020

Those now trying to tarnish his good name are actually inverting the truth. They want to suggest that support for Fisk was cultish and he was hero-worshipped by those incapable of thinking critically. They will say as much about this piece. So let me point out that I am not without my own criticisms of Fisk. I wrote, for example, an article criticising some unsubstantiated claims he made during Israel’s massive bombardment of Lebanon in 2006.

But my criticism was precisely the opposite of the blue-tick crowd now traducing him. I questioned Fisk for striving to find an implausible middle ground with those establishment blue ticks (before we knew what blue ticks were) by hedging his bets about who was responsible for the destruction of Lebanon. It was a rare, if understandable, example of journalistic timidity from Fisk – a desire to maintain credibility with his peers, and a reluctance to follow through on where the evidence appeared to lead. Maybe this was a run-in with the pro-Israel crowd and the corporate journalists who echo them that, on this occasion, he did not think worth fighting.

Not talking about criticism and accusations in general, which could prove v costly re libel laws, but the fact that he maintained employment long after it became pretty obvious & easier to prove he was a fraud

— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) November 28, 2020

The discomfort Fisk aroused in his peers was all too obvious to anyone working in the corporate media, even in its liberal outlets, as I was during the 1990s. I never heard a good word said about Fisk at the Guardian or the Observer. His death has allowed an outpouring of resentment towards him that built up over decades from journalists jealous of the fact that no readers will mourn or remember their own passing.

Just adding my voice to the chorus of those saying what an excellent and necessary article this is by Oz https://t.co/zxjiMb7hJ5

— Marina Hyde (@MarinaHyde) November 30, 2020

Fisk’s journalism spoke up for the downtrodden and spoke directly to the reader rather than, as with his colleagues, pandering to editors in the hope of career advancement. In the immediate wake of his death, his colleagues’ disdain for Fisk was veiled in weaselly language. As Media Lens have noted, the favourite term used to describe him in obituaries, even in his own newspaper, was “controversial”.

“It turns out that the term ‘controversial’ is only applied in corporate media to political writers and leaders deemed ‘controversial’ by elite interests.

“This was unwittingly made clear by the big brains at the BBC who noted that Fisk ‘drew controversy for his sharp criticism of the US and Israel, and of Western foreign policy’. If Fisk had drawn ‘controversy’ from China, Iran or North Korea, the ‘weasel word’ would not have appeared in the Beeb’s analysis…

“In corporate media newspeak, ‘controversial’ can actually be translated as ‘offensive to power’. The term is intended as a scare word to warn readers that the labelled person is ‘dodgy’, ‘suspect’: ‘Handle with care!’ The journalist is also signalling to his or her editors and other colleagues: ‘I’m not one of “them”!’”

The journalists who now claim Fisk was a fraud and fantasist are many of those who happily worked for papers that readily promoted the gravest lies imaginable to rationalise an illegal attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. Those publications eagerly supported lies supplied by the US and British governments that Iraq had WMD and that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was colluding with al-Qaeda – claims that were easily disprovable at the time.

Journalists now attacking Fisk include ones, like the Guardian’s Jessica Elgot, who have been at the forefront of advancing the evidence-free antisemitism smears against Corbyn. Or, like the Guardian’s Hannah Jane Parkinson, have engaged in another favourite corporate journalist pastime, ridiculing the plight of Julian Assange, a fellow journalist who puts their craven stenography to shame and who is facing a lifetime in a US super-max jail for revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It really upsets me that he has been detained for so long. Imagine being trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for years, no proper exercise, no sunlight, no good company…please join me in hatching an escape plan for Julian Assange's cat pic.twitter.com/8r5lV4XC1Y

— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) February 6, 2018

Even the Guardian’s Jason Burke, who claims to have experienced Fisk’s lying first-hand while working for the Observer newspaper in 2001 (as was I at that time), has been unable to come up with the goods when challenged, as the pitiable Twitter thread retweeted here confirms:

I assume that Jason Burke wishes us to believe he previously admired Robert Fisk so that his account of his disillusionment sounds that bit more plausible. Because without the alleged incident, his story might sound a lot more like professional jealousy

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 29, 2020

Noticeably, there is a pattern to the claims of those now maligning Fisk: they hurry to tell us that he was an inspiration in their student days. They presumably think that mentioning this will suggest their disillusionment was hard-earned and therefore make it sound more plausible. But actually it suggests something different.

It indicates instead that in their youthful idealism they aspired to become a journalist who would dig out the truth, who would monitor centres of power, who would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. To do, in fact, exactly what Fisk did.

But once they got a footing on the corporate career ladder, they slowly learnt that they would need to adopt a more “nuanced” approach to journalism – certainly if they hoped to progress up that ladder, earning the right to their blue tick, and gaining a big enough salary to cover the mortgage in London or New York.

In other words, they became everything they despised in their student days. Fisk was the constant reminder of just how much they had sold out. His very existence shamed them for what they were too cowardly to do themselves. And now in death, when he cannot answer back, they are feasting on his corpse like the vultures that they are, until there is nothing left to remind us that, unlike them, Robert Fisk told uncomfortable truths to the very end.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

November 17, 2020

by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog

I think everybody would like 2020 to be over, and that we’d all like the US election to be over, but journalists shouldn’t stop accurately reporting just because the news is unpleasant.

“Breaking news: Plane lands safely!”

It just doesn’t work that way in life or journalism. We can’t give out participation medals and say it doesn’t really matter who won the US election.

Neither should Bidenites be calling for blacklisting both journalists and Republican public officials or successfully trying to deny Donald Trump a lawyer in Pennsylvania, but that’s another story.

A poll 227 pages long from The Economist – which will likely sink like a stone in the US Mainstream Media because it’s so very damning – reveals total US division and the devastation of its electoral integrity: 9 out of 10 Trump voters say Biden “did not legitimately win the election”, and 9 out of 10 Trump voters say, “mail ballots are being manipulated to favor Joe Biden”.

In good news, only 7 out of 10 Trump voters say that we will,” never know the real outcome of this election.” Is this the new, “Who killed JFK?” (Never getting a clear answer there surely increased political alienation among many Americans.)

Even though I relayed the findings in a manner which stresses political partisanship, this is definitely not a partisan issue: the percentages of Americans who hold the views described above are 45%, 42%, and 41%.

Take out the partisan labels (and the poll had not just Republican/Democrat but male/female, White/Black, age 18-29/65+, income level, College Grad/Non-College Grad, blah/blah, blah/blah, and blah/blah): the poll shockingly finds that 40% of Americans answered, “Enough to influence the outcome,” to the question, “How much voter fraud do you think occurred in this election?”

Again, it’s only a partisan issue to people who have been so distorted by fake-leftist identity politics that they can’t see the nation for the tribes. This Western tribalism is, of course, a fundamentally imperialist worldview, and also the view incessantly foisted on others by Westerners. But America doesn’t have something like a Supreme Leader whose primary job is to constantly remind about the good of the nation – that revolutionary Iranian institution has successfully gotten the nation through tough times, which is precisely why it is so despised and falsely slandered in places like London, Washington DC, Tel Aviv and Paris. But in the United States, there is not this governmental branch which exists almost solely to smooth out partisan issues, and the concept of putting the national good above tribal politics is only heard once every four years: in the victory speech of the winning candidate.

In case you were not convinced that this is not a Democrat/Republican issue: 84% of Americans answered, “Yes,” when asked, “Would you say that you are angry about the results of the 2020 presidential election?” That’s hard to explain, but it certainly does not indicate happiness with how the 2020 vote was conducted.

Regardless, when 40% of the country – 130 million people – say there was enough fraud to influence the outcome of the election, that’s a huge problem.

For those highly-tribal Americans who obsessively and emotionally insist on viewing this solely in a partisan manner, fine: 60 million voters who are crying electoral fraud is still a huge, huge problem. They can be drowned out by crying louder, and they can be ignored, but they simply can’t go away any more than the Vietcong had somewhere else to go.

So there’s really only one way to solve this perhaps fatal gutting of national integrity: a judicial review of the election.

It’s not true that the US already tried this in 2000 – there was not a thorough judicial review of the vote but a judicial decision by the Supreme Court to stop counting votes. That’s why it was indeed a partisan mess. So the US did not get the full judicial review to which I am referring, and which is the only solution other than drawing up an entirely new system.

PressTV seems to be one of the few English-language media which is actually reporting on the widespread election fraud allegations, rather than just dismissing the idea as nonsense and calling for blacklists. All I can say is: In 2009 the US did not respect the laws and judges of Iran’s electoral system – they meddled instantly and with total self-interest, and did seemingly all they could to fuel deadly violence. That was totally wrong, and I personally think that it is not for foreign media to do anything but to respect the will of the American people and the system they created.

They want to change their system? Please do.

But until they do how can we be faulted for respecting their electoral system, judges, and laws? And how can we not report that 60 million voters still openly cry voter fraud two weeks after the election?

But who cares about PressTV and Iran? I agree, and that’s entirely my point – this is an American issue, and we are objectively reporting what’s happening over here: claims of voter fraud are going unreported; not just CNN anchorpeople but actual elected officials are calling for blacklists; lawyers are being intimidated into not representing Donald Trump’s electoral grievances; and that Americans have apparently held a vote but seem to disagree on the system to properly process that vote.

What on earth is the point of a vote without also following the vetting system? The US seems to be taking a vote simply to take a vote? We better understand why they have such enormous abstention problems!

But the poll continues: Only 26% of Americans somewhat agree with the idea that “No matter who wins an election, things do not change very much.”

Elections do matter to Americans.

But elections which lack public confidence from nearly a majority are problematic, to put it mildly.

So where’s Trump?

Public servants follow both laws and public opinion, right?

All of this criticism of journalists who haven’t fallen at Biden’s (allegedly) president-elect’s feet has me questioning the most basic ideas, these days.

However, the path forward seems simple:

Question: Do you think Donald Trump should contest the results of the election in court?

Answer: 46% of America, “Yes”.

This poll is just a poll, sure, but it only says what every person on the ground says. Those in the MSM newsroom bubbles maybe can’t see that, but the nice thing about TV journalism is that you actually still have to report from the street – in modern internet “written” journalism, not so much anymore.

For the tribal-obsessed: Nine out of 10 of those who identify as Republicans said, “Yes”, but also 1 out of 10 Democrats. That great mass which is totally ignored by the all-strangling US duopoly – those who identify as “Independents” – reported that 53% of them also said, “Yes”.

It’s not a partisan issue, it’s a systemic issue. So where’s Trump?

Trump is doing the worst thing possible: He has not conceded, nor has he held a press conference to openly say that he will resolutely press forward to verify the vote – he has remained silent for two weeks. Slinking in the background and issuing a few tweets is by far the worst thing he could do. I can report that many Americans expect him to continue doing only that, but we can only wait.

Trump does have a right (to contest his grievance in court, as top Republican leaders reminded days ago) to take time to make up his mind. Pressing for a judicial review would get him crucified worldwide (even the Pope has prematurely declared Biden the victor, even though I thought the West was so very objectively secular?), and it would be the 1973 televised Watergate hearings times ten, but Trump undoubtedly has “democracy with American characteristics” – with its emphasis on minority/states/individualistic rights – on his side.

At 46% he very nearly has a democratic majority.

That’s really narrow? Maybe the poll was slightly miscounted? Don’t worry – I won’t ask The Economist if part of this poll was conducted via mail-in ballots.

*************************************************************

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The foreman/overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2)

November 13, 2020

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

By Ramin Mazaheri and cross-posted with PressTV

CNN anchorman Jake Tapper is one of the most widely-seen journalists in the United States, and a recent tweet of his revealed just how very much careerism it takes to climb the ladder so high.

As the US mainstream media continued its unconstitutional and absurd insistence that both the presidential election is over and that discussion around it must cease, a miffed Tapper took to Twitter on November 9th and issued a clear threat designed to intimidate other journalists into silence on these subjects:

“I truly sympathize with those dealing with losing — it’s not easy — but at a certain point one has to think not only about what’s best for the nation (peaceful transfer of power) but how any future employers might see your character defined during adversity.”

I’m a journalist and I don’t think I’m reading between the lines here when I relate that what I just read is: Journalists should promote the idea that Joe Biden is the undisputed victor or else you will never move up the ladder, or possibly ever even get hired as a journalist again.

Tapper was lambasted by some – obviously for intimidation, enforcing groupthink, hindering free press and free speech, overstepping the bounds of a “fourth estate” which has no formal governmental role in deciding US elections, etc. – but it was mostly unaddressed and tacitly condoned by his MSM colleagues.

One thing that struck me about Tapper’s mindset is: As the French say about Americans – “C’est marche ou crève” (It’s march or die). Very, very true.

But what struck me most – as the previous sentence is old news – is: How will my younger colleagues take this?

Tapper’s threat probably caused a lump in the throat of every mid-20s American journalist who is well-steeped in the most necessary virtues a journalist needs – an insistence on accuracy as well as skepticism — but is also just out of college in a horrible job market, probably deep in tuition-related debt, in a field which is known for being perennially low-paid, who is likely expected to smile for the opportunity to work for free as an intern as there is so much job competition in this exciting field, and who is now realising that a questioning US free press extends for less than a week, per the very privileged and powerful Jake Tapper.

It’s huge incompetence and dereliction of duty if Tapper did not realise that he has responsibilities to defend other journalists during chaotic times, given his privileged position, and absolutely to not to attack and threaten them.

It’s beyond pathetic as a human to go around threatening those who disagree with you about politics, but focusing on Tapper’s role in the labor structure in our craft is more interesting because I think it says a lot about US work culture.

Careerism may be the true US (false, divisive, selfish, unpatriotic) religion

Given their total precariousness it’s hard to not be empathetic with a young journalist, in this age where nothing gets deleted (and when Americans are apparently so politically intolerant), who doesn’t want to take an unpopular position. They certainly have every right to expect those with labor seniority – and the many privileges that go along with that – to lead the way during tough and unstable times.

What’s interesting about Tapper’s tweet is how it also reveals his own mind: maybe this tweet is just Tapper talking to himself about how “employers might see” him, Jake Tapper?

Then the tweet becomes him thinking, “Now think about your job here, Tappy old boy. If Ted Turner says Biden won then who cares about the constitution and the 70 million Trump voters and electoral integrity and democratic checks and balances and the alienation, apathy, anger and abstention rushing to judgement in this already-disputed election might cause? Remember what newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst said: ‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war’. So there’s nothing new here – we all do it. Crack the whip, Tappy old boy. How many times have they cracked the whip on you before they let you sit in the big boy chair?”

With that in mind Tapper dutifully sent out a tweet/whip-crack to keep all the other lower workers in line.

And lesser-privileged workers often do get unruly – perhaps they are complaining amongst themselves about increasingly-dangerous working conditions, or talking about the luxurious life of the boss when they haven’t had a raise in years, or they are muttering that the newly announced plans of action are cubicle-drone nonsense which will run the company into the ground, or in this case that many millions of Americans truly are contesting these election results and maybe we should honestly report that? Such anti-1% complaints are why the foreman/overseer so often issues a threat during unstable times (of getting fired, of not getting hired during the next season’s busy work periods, of getting railroaded by cops, etc.).

So we all know people like Tapper, because we have all worked. We all do not like the Tappers – he is a tool of the 1% at our jobs. It’s dangerous to go against the foremen and the Tappers, but the whole idea of post-1917-modelled societies is that we have safety in numbers.

And we do have numbers.

Which is why I can tell Tapper: Take his job and shove it.

(This is a reference to a famous American country song, and while crude: we are working in English here and need to speak their language.)

I don’t want to work at CNN. I don’t even want to be called by CNN for an interview about facts on the ground.

I will happily chitchat and discuss things informally with any journalist, but if you think I want to have to report to people like Jake Tapper, you are totally, totally wrong.

I can sure find a place with better foremen.

And I am hardly alone or exceptional – there are SO MANY great journalists who refuse the lure of careerism that I must use caps there. We are not alone, and Tapper doesn’t realise that: We have big enough numbers, too.

(And wasn’t US democracy especially concerned with minority rights? I guess not for what the Tappers claim is the minority presidential vote in the recent election.)

Tapper also thinks we are powerless – we are not powerless, either.

It’s entirely possible that Tapper is just such a blatant careerist that to him it’s both personally unthinkable and intolerable that others would not be covering the 2020 US election with future employment gains foremost in their minds.

That’s a significant statement to consider, and it is entirely to the demerit of Tapper he has even made us consider it. If he has made a mistake he should clarify it (which he has done yet – his follow-up tweet was nearly as bad as his first), but he still would get demerits because TV journalist are supposed to be clear and understandable the very first time around.

And the US is also just blatantly unstable, which Tapper’s tweet also reminds us:

Even though this is the third election in six which has come under major dispute, what’s not important is dispassionately answering long-standing domestic questions about the integrity of presidential elections, or ensuring ideals such as free press and free votes, but ensuring a “(peaceful transfer of power)”.

Tapper seems to view the US in November 2020 as such a powder keg that totally legitimate questions about the integrity of this election must be tamped down or the United States of America is finished, self-immolated, destroyed, etc.

Is Tapper is saying the US is too unstable to have a transparent vote? If so, that’s a huge, huge, huge problem with the American system.

I disagree: there has been no political violence on or since the election (despite the months of MSM fear-mongering about it). I think that’s a hysterical view which Tapper is manipulatively resorting to so that his candidate wins. Hysteria is the both the American word of 2020 and also a way to intimidate people – via emotional force.

I would finally conclude that it is a careerist view: Tapper wants, above all, power to smoothly transfer from one hand of the duopoly to the other (although it’s true that Trump is a latecomer to the duopoly). Despite all the economic catastrophe, coronavirus health catastrophe, the inner cultural catastrophe of this ongoing disputed election – Jake Tapper is doing just fine, so stop asking questions.

Many will continue to not do so, and we are safe in our numbers.

Lastly, some people may object to my use of “overseer” in the headline, which refers to pre-1917 times in the US (“foreman” refers to modern work culture): I think it’s important to place Tapper in his American historical-linguistic context because we need to be reminded of how careerism is not a 21st century phenomenon. The struggle of workers against unjust managers is something which goes back to the building of the Pyramids, but what would have been the point of using an Arabic word for “overseer”, which only a minuscule minority of readers would understand? The agricultural “overseer” is not used much anymore in America – because it brings up issues of slavery, and few White people can discuss that openly here, much to the chagrin of Blacks – but it is a necessary image to retain in the American consciousness and should not be obliterated from their current era, as pre-modern overseers did so much damage to the 99% for such a long period of time.

This type of pure nonsense is what passes for leftism over here when it is a huge waste of time and space. There are far, far huger issues, such as:

Clearly, Tapper does not believe, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, which is a summation of the thoughts of the French writer Voltaire by his English biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall and repeated constantly by Americans: all these countries are huge, huge believers in free speech and free press. This makes us fairly question not the patriotism of Tapper but whether he is authentically championing the grassroots values of the broad nation which he is covering, which I believe is a primary role of journalism, because: don’t the elite have enough mouthpieces, already?

Tapper is not alone.

America is in such hysteria, and eliciting such hypocrisy, and is so dangerously divided that a second part in this series is required to address Tapper’s cohorts who think calling for a judicial review of a highly-contested vote merits such an incredible crackdown on human rights.

*************************************************************

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

In Memory of Robert Fisk: “The Forgotten Massacre” – Reposted

By Staff

In memory of Robert Fisk, a journalist who was “renowned for his courage in questioning official narratives” and publishing “frequently brilliant prose”.

During his decades-long career, Fisk covered key international events including the Lebanese civil war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, conflicts in the Balkans and the Arab Spring.

Fisk was particularly renowned for his war reporting.

The Forgotten Massacre

Robert Fisk, Sunday 15 September 2013

The memories remain, of course. The man who lost his family in an earlier massacre, only to watch the young men of Chatila lined up after the new killings and marched off to death. But – like the muck piled on the garbage tip amid the concrete hovels – the stench of injustice still pervades the camps where 1,700 Palestinians were butchered 30 years ago next week. No-one was tried and sentenced for a slaughter, which even an “Israeli” writer at the time compared to the killing of Yugoslavs by Nazi sympathizers in the Second World War. Sabra and Chatila are a memorial to criminals who evaded responsibility, who got away with it.

Khaled Abu Noor was in his teens, a would-be militiaman who had left the camp for the mountains before “Israel’s” Phalangist allies entered Sabra and Chatila. Did this give him a guilty conscience, that he was not there to fight the rapists and murderers? “What we all feel today is depression,” he said. “We demanded justice, international trials – but there was nothing. Not a single person was held responsible. No-one was put before justice. And so we had to suffer in the 1986 camps war [at the hands of Shia Lebanese] and so the “Israelis” could slaughter so many Palestinians in the 2008-9 Gaza war. If there had been trials for what happened here 30 years ago, the Gaza killings would not have happened.”

He has a point, of course. While presidents and prime ministers have lined up in Manhattan to mourn the dead of the 2001 international crimes against humanity at the World Trade Centre, not a single Western leader has dared to visit the dank and grubby Sabra and Chatila mass graves, shaded by a few scruffy trees and faded photographs of the dead. Nor, let it be said – in 30 years – has a single Arab leader bothered to visit the last resting place of at least 600 of the 1,700 victims. Arab potentates bleed in their hearts for the Palestinians but an airfare to Beirut might be a bit much these days – and which of them would want to offend the “Israelis” or the Americans?

It is an irony – but an important one, nonetheless – that the only nation to hold a serious official enquiry into the massacre, albeit flawed, was “Israel”. The “Israeli” army sent the killers into the camps and then watched – and did nothing – while the atrocity took place. A certain “Israeli” Lieutenant Avi Grabowsky gave the most telling evidence of this. The Kahan Commission held the then “defense” minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible, since he sent the ruthless anti-Palestinian Phalangists into the camps to “flush out terrorists” – “terrorists” who turned out to be as non-existent as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction 21 years later.

Sharon lost his job but later became prime minister, until broken by a stroke which he survived – but which took from him even the power of speech. Elie Hobeika, the Lebanese Christian militia leader who led his murderers into the camp – after Sharon had told the Phalange that Palestinians had just assassinated their leader, Bashir Gemayel – was murdered years later in east Beirut. His enemies claimed the Syrians killed him, his friends blamed the “Israelis”; Hobeika, who had “gone across” to the Syrians, had just announced he would “tell all” about the Sabra and Chatila atrocity at a Belgian court, which wished to try Sharon.

Of course, those of us who entered the camps on the third and final day of the massacre – 18 September, 1982 – have our own memories. I recall the old man in pajamas lying on his back on the main street with his innocent walking stick beside him, the two women and a baby shot next to a dead horse, the private house in which I sheltered from the killers with my colleague Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post – only to find a dead young woman lying in the courtyard beside us. Some of the women had been raped before their killing. The armies of flies, the smell of decomposition. These things one remembers.

Abu Maher is 65 – like Khaled Abu Noor, his family originally fled their homes in Safad in present-day “Israel” – and stayed in the camp throughout the massacre, at first disbelieving the women and children who urged him to run from his home. “A woman neighbor started screaming and I looked out and saw her shot dead and her daughter tried to run away and the killers chased her, saying “Kill her, kill her, don’t let her go!” She shouted to me and I could do nothing. But she escaped.”

Repeated trips back to the camp, year after year, have built up a narrative of astonishing detail. Investigations by Karsten Tveit of Norwegian radio and myself proved that many men, seen by Abu Maher being marched away alive after the initial massacre, were later handed by the “Israelis” back to the Phalangist killers – who held them prisoner for days in eastern Beirut and then, when they could not swap them for Christian hostages, executed them at mass graves.

And the arguments in favor of forgetfulness have been cruelly deployed. Why remember a few hundred Palestinians slaughtered when 25,000 have been killed in Syria in 19 months?

Supporters of “Israel” and critics of the Muslim world have written to me in the last couple of years, abusing me for referring repeatedly to the Sabra and Chatila massacre, as if my own eye-witness account of this atrocity has – like a war criminal – a statute of limitations. Given these reports of mine [compared to my accounts of Turkish oppression] one reader has written to me that “I would conclude that, in this case [Sabra and Chatila], you have an anti-“Israeli” bias. This is based solely on the disproportionate number of references you make to this atrocity…”

But can one make too many? Dr. Bayan al-Hout, widow of the PLO’s former ambassador to Beirut, has written the most authoritative and detailed account of the Sabra and Chatila war crimes – for that is what they were – and concludes that in the years that followed, people feared to recall the event. “Then international groups started talking and enquiring. We must remember that all of us are responsible for what happened. And the victims are still scarred by these events – even those who are unborn will be scarred – and they need love.” In the conclusion to her book, Dr. al-Hout asks some difficult – indeed, dangerous – questions: “Were the perpetrators the only ones responsible? Were the people who committed the crimes the only criminals? Were even those who issued the orders solely responsible? Who in truth is responsible?”

In other words, doesn’t Lebanon bear responsibility with the Phalangist Lebanese, “Israel” with the “Israeli” army, the West with its “Israeli” ally, the Arabs with their American ally? Dr al-Hout ends her investigation with a quotation from Rabbi Abraham Heschel who raged against the Vietnam war. “In a free society,” the Rabbi said, “some are guilty, but all are responsible”.

Related

The Death of Andre Vltchek, a Passionate Warrior for Truth

By Edward Curtin

Source

This is a must read!

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” – Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, 1998

For decades, Andre Vltchek, an old-school journalist and artist (but a young man) who traveled the world in search of truth and who always stood up straight, tried to revolve the world and encourage people to revolt against injustice. In this age of arm-chair reporters, he stood out for his boldness and indefatigable courage. He told it straight. This irritated certain people and some pseudo-left publications, who sensed in him a no bullshit fierceness and nose for hypocrisy that frightened them, so they stopped publishing his writing. He went where so many others  feared to tread, and he talked to people in places that were often the victims of Western imperialistic violence. He defended the defenseless and encouraged their defense.

Now he is dead.  He died in the back seat of a chauffeur driven rental car on an overnight drive to Istanbul, Turkey. He was sleeping, and when his wife attempted to wake him upon arrival at their hotel, she couldn’t.  He was 57-years-old.

Let him sleep in peace, but let his words ring out, his passionate cries for justice and peace in a world of violent predators.

Those who knew him and his work feel a great, great loss. His friend and colleague Peter Koenig wrote this touching goodbye.

As Koenig says, Vltchek was always defending those around the world who are considered disposable non-people, the Others, the non- whites, victims of Western wars, both military and economic, in places such as West Papua, Iraq, Syria, Africa, etc. He had a chip on his shoulder, a well justified chip, against the one-sided Western media and its elites that were always lecturing the rest of the world about their realities.

He was recently in the United States, and here is what he wrote:

But notice one thing: it is them, telling us, again, telling the world what it is and what it is not! You would never hear such statements in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. There, people know perfectly well what it really is all about, whether it is about race or not!

I have just spent two weeks in the United States, analyzing the profound crises of U.S. society. I visited Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. I spoke to many people in all those places. What I witnessed was confusion and total ignorance about the rest of the world. The United States, a country which has been brutalizing our Planet for decades, is absolutely unable to see itself in the context of the entire world. People, including those from the media, are outrageously ignorant and provincial.

And they are selfish.

I asked many times: “Do black lives matter all over the world? Do they matter in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and do they matter in West Papua?” I swear, I received no coherent answer.

Somebody has to tell them… Somebody has to force them to open their eyes.

A few years ago, I was invited to Southern California to show my documentary work from Africa (my feature documentary film Rwanda Gambit, about West-triggered genocides in both Rwanda and later in the Democratic Republic of Congo), where millions of black people are dying, in order for the vast majority of the U.S. whites to live in piggish opulence.

But before I was allowed to present, I was warned: ‘Remember, people here are sensitive. Do not show too much of brutal reality, as it could disturb them.’

Hearing that, I almost left the event. Only my respect for the organizer made me stay.

Now I am convinced: it is time to force them to watch; to see rivers of blood, which their laziness, selfishness, and greed have triggered. It is time to force them to hear shouts of the agony of the others.

But as everyone knows, it is nearly impossible to force people to open their eyes and ears when they are dead set against doing so.  Andre tried so hard to do that, and his frustration grew apace with those efforts that seemed to fall on deaf ears.

He was a relentless fighter, but he was a lover, too.  His love for the people and cultures of the world was profound.  Like Albert Camus, he tried to serve both beauty and suffering, the noblest of vocations. A lover of literature and culture, the best art and beauty ever produced, he was appalled at the way so many in the West had fallen into the pit of ignorance, illiteracy, and the grip of propaganda so tight that “what is missing is life. Euphoria, warmth, poetry and yes – love – are all in extremely short supply there.”

He sensed, and said it, that nihilism rules in the United States beneath the compulsive consumerism and the denial of the violence that the U.S. inflicts on people across the world. It was selfishness run amok. Me me me. It was, he felt, soul death, the opposite of all the ostensible religiousness that is a cover story for despair. He wrote:

It has to be stopped. I say it because I do love this life, the life, which still exists outside the Western realm; I’m intoxicated with it, obsessed with it. I live it to the fullest, with great delight, enjoying every moment of it.

Poetry, music, great literature, these he loved as he fought on the barricades for peace.

I urge you to read his article, Love, Western Nihilism and Revolutionary Optimism.

He was a rare and courageous man.  Let us ring bells in his honor.

Here’s a Kenneth Rexroth poem for Andre, the fighter with the poet’s heart:

No Word

The trees hang silent

In the heat….

Undo your heart

Tell me your thoughts

What you were

And what you are….

Like the bells no one

Has ever rung

Why The ‘Journalists’ Don’t Like Julian

By Jeremy Salt

Source

Why is it that so many journalists have turned their backs on Julian Assange? Why do so many abuse him instead of defending him?  He is, after all, a world historic figure who will be remembered centuries from now in the same way we remember Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Thomas Paine.  Thanks to technology, Assange has been able to do far more than they could ever imagine in advancing the ‘right to know’ component of human rights.  He has broken more real news than all the journalists who sneer at him put together,  so resentment could be one explanation.   They say Assange is ‘not a journalist’ when what they mean is that he is not a journalist like them.

The keywords here are mediation and control. ‘What lies behind the headlines’ has another meaning beyond what is really going on in politics. ‘What lies behind the headlines’ is also what goes on in newsrooms before you read your morning paper or watch the evening news bulletin.  

News is a product, like anything that comes off the factory floor.  The raw material comes in, is processed,  refined and polished before being placed on the sales shelf called ‘news.’   Millions of pieces of news flow into editorial rooms every day.  What you read or watch is only the tiniest fraction of this flood.  

What you read or see is what someone is choosing for you,  what someone thinks is ‘news’ compared to all the other items that never see the light of day,  what someone thinks you should know as opposed to what you might like to know.    

News in the mainstream is mediated from start to finish.  The reporter produces the raw product.  Whether it is a car crash or civil war, someone else will always see it differently but his or her particular version is the raw material submitted for processing.  Editors at the daily news conference decide if it deserves a place and where it should be placed, on page one, three or five,  at the top of the page or lower done,  under a one column or three column heading,  at the top of the nightly news bulletin or closer to the bottom.  

The editor has the final say.  He or she is the link between the board and the advertisers and has to deal with the pressure that might come from their direction when the story is a sensitive one.  Thus,  depending on the relationship between editor and the board/proprietor, an important story might not be published at all or might be shriveled to the point where it no longer seems important.

The decision made, an editor gets to work,  cutting,  reshaping, honing and polishing the story, maybe moving paragraphs around if he or she thinks they are not in the right order, until the product is ready to attract the attention of the reader/viewer, much as the male jackdaw lines the nest with silver paper to attract the attention of the female. There can be differences of opinion between the reporter and the editor along the way but in essence they are egotistical, not over truth or untruth or the public’s right to know, but over how the story should be written and presented.  

There is no unmediated news in the mainstream media.  It is the news as decided by reporters and editors,  from the choice of story to report in the first place to the end of the production line. There could be thousands of other news items you the reader or viewer might think are worthier of space and time that never see the light of day. 

What is happening around the world, therefore, is only what is reported as happening,  before being processed to meet editorial requirements.  If it is not reported it might as well not have happened,  beyond the impact within the immediate circle of where it did happen. Thus the media can make something happen or unhappen, according to the choices made in editorial rooms.

Control relates to control as exerted vertically,  from the board or proprietor down to the editor and then to the very bottom of the editorial chain.  Apart from the car crash, the rape or the robbery, there is a line that has to be protected when it comes to important political stories or stories that affect advertisers and the particular media outlet’s commercial interests.  There is always some flexibility,  depending on how tightly controlled the editorial line is from the top,  but the general political/social profile of the organization always has to be protected.  

If ‘news’ is to be defined as something we don’t know,  we could spend our entire lives reading books (and might be better off for it).  Much of the ‘news’ that is printed falls into the same category of what we don’t know but whether we really need or want to know it is another question. 

The endless goings-on of the Kardashian family might be a good example.   The definition of news has swung in the direction of ‘celebrity gossip’ and the celebrities have responded by providing editors with all the ‘news’ they might want to print,  but ‘news’ that many of ‘us’ (readers and viewers) would regard as trash. Of course, for the media to remain viable, the product has to sell and amidst all the Kardashian bottoms, that is the bottom line.

So mediation and control are two reasons the journalists abuse Assange.  Given the massive volume of material Wikipedia receives, he or his team have to exert some control and make decisions about how much they can upload within their technical capacity but what they do post is unmediated.  There are no cuts, no editing no polishing: the news comes to you in its raw state and you the reader can decide what to make of it, instead of someone telling you what to make of it. 

Another reason for disliking Assange is jealousy.  He has scooped all of these journalists who abuse him thousand times over,  by releasing sensational material that exposes the dirty secrets they would love to get their hands on.

In recent history only one reporter,  Seymour Hersh, without the technical ability to penetrate government vaults that Wikipedia’s sources have and relying entirely on his human sources,  has come anywhere close to what Assange has achieved.  Hersh is the greatest reporter of this age, or just about any age, a model of courage and the determination to dig for the truth, whatever the obstacles.

His fate is instructive. He broke the My Lai massacre in 1968, he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison torture in 2004  and he broke many other stories in between,  yet when he crossed the government-media line on Syria by exposing the falsity of the claim that the Syrian government was responsible for an alleged chemical weapons attack close to Damascus in 2013 his usual outlet, the New Yorker,  refused to publish. The story was handed to the Washington Post, which also turned it down.   The arguments that it did not meet their standards don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Eventually, the  London Review of Books took the story on but when Hersh followed up with an account questioning the trans-Atlantic government and media line on the alleged role of the Syrian government in the alleged chemical weapons attack at Khan Sheikhun in April, 2017, the LRB declined to publish even though it had paid for the story. 

Subsequently,  Hersh had to publish in Germany (‘Khan Sheikhun Trump’s Red Line,’ Welt am Sonntag, June 25, 2017) and he now has no place anywhere in the mainstream print media of his own country.

Another reason for journalists disliking Assange is that in one way or another,  they are not free to write what they want.  They belong to institutions, ‘belonging’ defined as owned by them. They depend on them for their salaries and their careers.  Basically they are correct when they say ‘No-one tells me what to write.’  No one has to tell them because they already know what to write if they want to keep their jobs,  wherever they happen to work. 

Self-censorship is central to the practice of journalism in the mainstream.  No-one with an eye on their best interests is going to write something they know editors will throw in their face, not because it is badly written but because it goes against the editorial line.  They might be lucky enough to agree with the editorial line anyway but if they don’t they have to adjust, or look for a future in journalism elsewhere.

Thus, journalists have power,  the power and the money of the institution behind them.  Assange has no institution behind him.  Indeed, the institutions are all against him. A media which used him up has abandoned him.  The government of his own country, Australia, has not lifted a finger in his defense.

What Assange does have behind him is the power of the truth-telling that should be the core of journalism,  not the truth-tailoring and the acceptance of downright lies that characterizes much of mainstream journalism today.   So of course the journalists don’t like him, or should we say ‘journalists’, because who is doing the real work of journalism today,  they or Julian Assange?

How Western Media Fabricate The “China Experts”

August 06, 2020

by Thorsten J. Pattberg for The Saker Blog

NEW YORK – A media professional from China asks: “Why do the Western media always promote the same ‘China experts’ who preach China doom, over and over again?” The answer is quite simple: The game of ‘expert testimonials’ is rigged.

‘Expert testimonials’ is not a level playing field. Never was. It is no coincidence that you will always see the same China experts and the same Chinese dissidents paraded in the news. Our key media are collusive. It means they act in concert.

If they act in concert, they project power. Here’s a definition of power by Hannah Arendt: “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.”[i]

Yes, our media are corrupt beyond hope. And society is largely to blame: We often feel intimidated by the manipulative press, and powerless. We condemn cronyism, misconduct, and cheating in business, politics, and sports. But exposing the rampant corruption in the media and education? That remains a taboo.

Nobody knows exactly why they get away with it. Of course, they won’t report their own corruption. Also, journalism is inherently feminine (not the gender, the characteristics!); so manipulative journalism is always defensible, is always right, is always the victim.

Expert testimonials in journalism are witnesses that support the argument or mouth-piece what the journalist wants to say. For example, the New York Times will not directly call for violent riots in Hong Kong; instead it will offer expert testimonials that violence is indeed justified.[ii]

The expert testimonials in journalism are not the same as the ‘expert testimony’ used in the legal system. The press is illegitimate; it is not a governmental institution; it is not under oath, and it is absolutely not required to be neutral.

Most persuasive pieces of journalism have at least two testimonials. There are three kinds of testimonials. The first and most vital one is the ‘expert testimonial’. Without quoting a real expert, the journalist, who is by definition a non-expert on anything except journalism, is simply not credible. The second kind of testimonial is ‘plain folks’. That’s the taxi driver, the man from the corner shop, ordinary people. This creates sympathy. The third kind of testimonial is what this author calls a ‘negative-positive’. It means that someone with an opposing view, negative, is quoted, but in such an manipulative way, that it actually helps the journalist, hence the “positive.”

Plain folks are almost always made-up. Negative-positives are a manner of writing. But the expert testimonials shouldn’t be fake. That “expert” should ideally be consulted by the journalist.

Here’s an example (you may want to skip this exercise, if in hurry, and continue in the main text below) of three testimonials in one article. See, if you can guess which kind of testimonials they are. It’s from a British Guardian propaganda piece,[iii] by a certain Adam Gabbatt. The Guardian rushes to the defense of Chris Buckley from the New York Times, who’s a notorious propagandist. Since this is the global Western anti-China coalition, if one of their press soldiers gets into trouble in China, the others will naturally close ranks:

A: “I regret that Chris Buckley has been forced to relocate outside of China despite our repeated requests to renew his journalist visa,” Abramson said. [Ms. Abraham, a Harvard graduate, is the chief executive editor of the New York Times.]

B: Lawyers for Wen Jiabao’s family denied reports of their riches as untrue in October. “Some of Wen Jiabao’s family members have not engaged in business activities. Some were engaged in business activities, but they did not carry out any illegal business activity. They do not hold shares of any companies,” the statement said.

C: Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the piece “smears China’s name and has ulterior motives”, later insisting that the China’s critics were attempting to destabilize the country and were “doomed to failure”.

As a general rule, for every New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Guardian, The Diplomat, or Forbes piece (etc.) there should be at least one expert testimonial in it! [Other testimonials are optional.] That said, you can image that there must be, in theory, a huge market for expert testimonials out there. Right?

Now, think: Does it not make perfect strategic sense, since tens of thousands of China articles must be mass-produced every year in the West, for the Western media to have a ‘ready-made’ stall of loyal experts to ask for phony testimonials any time they want? Better still, how about jointly fabricating EXACTLY the experts (and dissidents) we later want to see at the top!

So they fabricate experts. It’s not illegal, see. And not just any experts: Their buddies and friends and mutual benefactors. Those are the David Shambaugh, Ezra Vogel, Minxin Pei, Orville Schell (now out of favor, it seems), and Roderick Macfarquhar, to name a few.

Now, of those five experts mentioned, all of them are associated with Harvard University, and all were prominently featured in the New York Times. So, understandably, many readers get very upset every time they spot such obscene, shameless favoritism. For example when Harvard man and New York Times journalist Michael Forsythe prominently features a fellow Harvard man, Minxin Pei.[iv] Or when Evan Osnos, a Harvard man from The New Yorker, prominently features all of them Harvard experts in his book. So that he can get “conversations”[v] with them. And his buddies promote his book in The New York Times.[vi] Or the Guardian.[vii] Or Mr. Forsythe’s spouse, also Harvard, also New York Times, miraculously gets to promote her own book in the New York Times.[viii] Yes, the New York Times people are not stupid: they try to disguise cronyism. So NY Times Kirsten Didi Tatlow gets to write about NY Times Mr. Forsythe’s wife’s book.[ix] And NY Times Christ Buckley gets to interview David Shambaugh, alright.[x] NY Times Javier C. Hernandez, also Harvard, gets the Ezra Vogel interview.[xi] And NY Times Austin Ramzy interviews Evan Osnos, right![xii]

Journalists are un-elected. They enjoy relative low status in society in exchange for the privilege of fools. Some hang around with politicians and pose as ‘political analysts’. Others pose as ‘intellectuals’ by collaborating, say, with enough “Harvard” scholars: The journalists get artificial respectability, the scholars gets gratuitous media coverage. For them, it’s a win-win situation. The big loser, of course, is the global audiences to whom – not even talking about US colonialism – the vanity and the arrogance of these few privileged men is sold as “correct” information and news about China.

Remember when back in the old days the media set out to expose the corruption of the elites? Well, they didn’t. They joined the corrupt elites.

It gets worse. Think about this: Why would the New York Times EVER change the status quo? They have absolutely no incentives to do so. They would be stupid to reform. In fact, upon reading this, they will probably even tighten the status quo. Out of pure spite.

This all reminds your author of the following story from the Mahabharata: There’s this great guru, Drona, who promised prince Arjuna to make him “the greatest archer in the world.” Then one day they go into the forest and meet Eklavya, who trained all by himself under the idol of Drona. Eklavya is clearly the better archer! But Drona cannot tolerate this, because it would completely ruin the royal narrative. So they politely ask Eklavya to cut off the thumb of his right hand. Which he reluctantly does. To preserve the status quo. Uninterruptedly, Drona now goes on to fulfill his promise and make Arjuna “the greatest archer in the world.”

This is exactly how it is: The New York Times & Co act in concert and are systematically empowering their own buddies and protégées from Harvard as “the greatest China experts in the world.” And to the rest of the world, especially to the 1.3 million Chinese: cut your talented limbs off, will you!

The author is a German cultural critic and frequent commentator on Sino-Western affairs.  He describes himself as “Thorsten J. Pattberg, Asia specialist, PhD comparative literature and linguistics, unbeknownst writer, polyglot, monster, idiot”.

[i] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970), Harcourt Brace & Company, New York

[ii] http://www.east-west-dichotomy.com/why-the-ny-times-promotes-violence-in-hong-kong/
[iii] The Guardian, China forces New York Times reporter Chris Buckley to leave country, Dec 31, 2012, London
[iv] The New York Times, Q. and A.: Minxin Pei on the Future of Communist Rule in China, Feb. 29, 2016, New York
[v] http://www.livestream.com/roosevelthouse/evan-osnos-chasing-fortune
[vi] The New York Times, Q & A: Evan Osnos on the ‘Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China’, May 13, 2014, New York
[vii] The Guardian, Age of Ambition; The New Emperors reviews – two studies on modern China, July 6, 2014, London
[viii] The New York Times, China’s ‘Leftover’ Women, Oct. 11, 2012, New York
[ix] The New York Times, Rejecting the ‘Leftover Women’ label, April 24, 2013, New York
[x] The New York Times, Q. and A.: David Shambaugh on the Risks to Chinese Communist Rule, March 15, 2015, New York
[xi] The New York Times, Q. and A.: Ezra F. Vogel on China’s Shifting Relations With Japan and Taiwan, Nov 12, 2015, New York
[xii] The New York Times, Q & A: Evan Osnos on the ‘Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China’, May 13, 2014, New York

What would it take for proponents to say: ‘The Great Lockdown was wrong’?

April 28, 2020

By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog

There must be SOME criteria where the proponents of the Great Lockdown could say, “In hindsight, this was wrong.”

It is obviously hysterical to insist that admitting a policy mistake is totally, completely impossible. German fascists are not wiping out Poland, after all.

I mean, what if a secret global doomsday machine in Poland gets triggered if global GNP falls below a certain threshold, wiping out humanity? Certainly then all would agree, “The Great Lockdown turned out to be a mistake,” right?

Absurd extremes aside, the coronavirus overreaction has turned into a major test case for today’s Western worship of both technocracy and scientific secularism. Since 1980 they have insisted that national cultures should not play any shaping role in public policy because Westerners have discovered a system of “universal values” which should guide all national governments.

(The Western system is – of course – actually based on aristocratic/bourgeois neoliberalism & neo-imperialism.)

A corollary is that a technocratic 10% should be implementing these values with zero lower-class input into public policy formation. A second corollary is that science is the one, true, rightly-guided, infallible way. In April 2020 the doctors and professors are always right, and US President Donald Trump is always wrong.

But… then how do we explain this written – not spoken – declaration from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, as reported by AP? This was published on April 24, during the truly fake-news controversy regarding Trump and injecting disinfectants.

“Given that countries currently in ‘summer’ climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed,” the researchers wrote earlier in April in response to questions from the White House Office of Science and Technology.”

But Iran is not in summer – they are in the northern hemisphere, so Iran is in spring.

Australia is in the southern hemisphere – it is in autumn.

In fact, due to the tilting of the earth, if the northern hemisphere is in spring then the southern hemisphere can only be in autumn, never in summer. Spring in the north and summer anywhere else is an impossibility.

Not only am I not a rightly-guided epidemiologist, I am not even a scientist and yet I know this. Heck, maybe even Trump knows this.

Associated Press, the largest news-gathering organisation in the world, obviously made the same elementary mistake as these scientists. It is very possible that in their rabid desire to discredit Trump the journalists cared more about over-exaggerating his clearly off-the-cuff science than fact-checking.

My point here is not to say “gotcha, you are dumb” – my point is to say that this is precisely why socialist democracy (which relies on consensus) is so much more valuable than Western technocratic individualism. You see: God, in His wisdom, made humans imperfect – and that includes epidemiologists and we journalists.

That is why the West’s choice to rely solely on epidemiologists, and also a mainstream media which is supposed to be always ever-skeptically vetting everyone’s declarations, is a fundamentally flawed approach to handling the corona response. Combine this with a Western system where politicians are forced to be always either in electioneering mode or fund-raising mode, and you get a system which uncritically bows to very mistake-prone earthly authorities.

I find it stunning that US polls have consistently pegged general support for the lockdowns to be at 80%, and that an unthinkable 95% of Democrats say the measures don’t go too far. Considering all the poverty, the refusals to loan to Main Street, the delays in government aid, the exponentially-increasing certainty of prolonged economic chaos – Americans are still not fed up? I can only theorise that the US people have been so propagandised by a lack of “contrarian voices” – contrarian because they dare to say that the needs of the lower classes must be voiced and implemented – that they have been terrified into submission by their media. Democrats are obviously the least open to different ideas – we see how fantastically total their groupthink is.

But back to my main point: what are the realistic criteria where people would say – as people must often do if we are to have a civilised society which progresses – “I was wrong”?

I can’t think of any which would be acceptable… and that shows the massive hysteria of the Western response

Please note that “I was misled” is certainly acceptable.

After all, just turn on your television and you are almost guaranteed to see a journalist nodding along to whatever an epidemiologist is saying – these two classes have been given the key to socioeconomic policy. In the corona hysteria these two have worked in tandem, and both must be judged according to the huge power they have been given.

As late as March 20th The New York Times fake-leftist bien-pensant Nicolas Kristof quoted “one of the best disease modellers in the world” declaring that the best-case scenario in the US was “about 1.1 million deaths”, with the worst-case being “2.2 million deaths”. They even put the latter in the sub-headline. Because he is such an awful, unreadable journalist Kristof does not make it clear if these two scenarios are the result of everyone doing absolutely nothing to combat coronavirus (an absurdity, which only an ivory tower academic would waste time studying) – I assume that is the case. However, many others may not make that assumption because Kristof leads the reader to believe (and maybe he believes this – he is not clear) that despite all the personal protective gear, ventilators, new hospital beds and everything else that US society could throw at corona, then we should still expect over 1 million deaths. Thus, both scientists and Kristof conclude: “If anything, we’re still underreacting.”

It turns out the epidemiologist’s numbers were indeed based on the idea that everyone did absolutely nothing. Well, thanks for getting dumb journalists all worked up over nothing! And I guess epidemiologists can’t write Kristof’s article for him but it’s certain that this power tandem failed at the top.

I’m not surprised, because I always doubted 2.2 million and here’s one reason why: MSM journalists seem to forget that recent history is not kind to US epidemiologists: In 2014 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted 1.4 million Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone alone. There were only 28,616 total cases. If this was Iran or China we could just accuse them of a cover-up, but alas…. And those are two countries with far, far less resources to throw at a virus. On April 3 satirical website The Onion re-ran Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What’s Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions – they are indeed more credible than The New York Times.

So what are the criteria for a fact-based backtracking?

Frankly, I don’t think the Great Lockdown supporters have thought about this at all, and that should cause them some worry.

This question has clearly been repeatedly shot down to the point where everyone self-censors, which is the most effective form of censorship. The question itself has been deemed to be proof of being a far-right neo-fascist: A Google search reveals What If the Pandemic Policymakers Are Wrong? Will health experts become the latest elite deemed “too big to fail”? That’s a great sub-headline – I’d nick it, but this article is almost completely written already. What’s too bad is that this article is from the website American Greatness, LOL.

So just asking “what if” puts me on the far-right? Well, I did just sign off on the cover to my latest book on socialism so, LOL, I could debate that rather at length. However, asking “but what if”, providing a modicum of contrarian views, being skeptical – this is what objective journalism is in any nation.

I am willing to question my faith: One article idea in my “to do” basket is, “What do socialists do if the bailouts actually work?” I am not so self-righteous, smug and smothering that I refuse to honestly ask and answer that question – it’s at least possible they will… because the question is not mathematical and because that history is not yet written.

Can Great Lockdown supporters question themselves? I doubt they can or even want to respond.

What I fear is this: that many Great Lockdown supporters are so self-righteous, out of touch and indoctrinated that they will genuinely believe that “even preventing one death made it worth it”. This is the view of a child, not an adult citizen who should know that any “War on Dying” is nothing but a joke. That is the exact view of a lowest-common denominator American politician – are REALLY trying to be like them? “Whatever you say” politicians are the third wheel on the tricycle which is steering Western, pro-upper-class corona policy.

To answer my own question: Because the virus was supposed to be so extraordinary, extraordinary measures have been taken. So it’s gone far beyond only total deaths – the accurate counting of which appears to be already hopelessly muddled.

If corona pricks the Western bubble economy (Condensing the data leaves no doubt: Fear corona-economy more than the virus) and “Great Depression 2” becomes a real thing – was it worth it?

If major aspects of the current drastic reduction in political rights get normalised – just as France prolonged a “temporary” state of emergency for two full years, and then Emmanuel Macron legalised it into common police practice – was it worth it?

If the US bows to Dr. Anthony Fauci, their nation’s leading technocrat on infectious diseases, and permanently “breaks that custom” of shaking hands to show warmth and friendship to strangers or if France ends the la bise hello kisses – was it worth it?

There are economic, political and cultural shockwaves stemming from the Great Lockdown – maybe their proponents didn’t foresee them, or maybe they were misled, but these things cannot be ignored because they, too, will cause death and pain.

You don’t want to talk about those things? No problem.

You don’t even have to answer the simple question the headline poses – too many people getting bossed around these days already.

***********************************

Corona contrarianism? How about some corona common sense? Here is my list of articles published regarding the corona crisis, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Capitalist-imperialist West stays home over corona – they grew a conscience? – March 22, 2020

Corona meds in every pot & a People’s QE: the Trumpian populism they hoped for? – March 23, 2020

A day’s diary from a US CEO during the Corona crisis (satire) March 23, 2020

MSNBC: Chicago price gouging up 9,000% & the sports-journalization of US media – March 25, 2020

Tough times need vanguard parties – are ‘social media users’ the West’s? – March 26, 2020

If Germany rejects Corona bonds they must quit the Eurozone – March 30, 2020

Landlord class: Waive or donate rent-profits now or fear the Cultural Revolution – March 31, 2020

Corona repeating 9/11 & Y2K hysterias? Both saw huge economic overreactions – April 1, 2020

(A Soviet?) Superman: Red Son – the new socialist film to watch on lockdown – April 2, 2020

Corona rewrites capitalist bust-chronology & proves: It’s the nation-state, stupid – April 3, 2020

Condensing the data leaves no doubt: Fear corona-economy more than the virus – April 5, 2020

‘We’re Going Wrong’: The West’s middling, middle-class corona response – April 10, 2020

Why does the UK have an ‘army’ of volunteers but the US has a shortage? – April 12, 2020

No buybacks allowed or dared? Then wave goodbye to Western stock market gains – April 13, 2020

Pity post-corona Millennials… if they don’t openly push socialism – April 14, 2020

No, the dollar will only strengthen post-corona, as usual: it’s a crisis, after all – April 16, 2020

Same 2008 QE playbook, but the Eurozone will kick off Western chaos not the US – April 18, 2020

We’re giving up our civil liberties. Fine, but to which type of state? – April 20, 2020

Coronavirus – Macron’s savior. A ‘united Europe’ – France’s murderer – April 22, 2020

Iran’s ‘resistance economy’: the post-corona wish of the West’s silent majority (1/2) – April 23, 2020

The same 12-year itch: Will banks loan down QE money this time? – April 26, 2020

The end of globalisation won’t be televised, despite the hopes of the Western 99% (2/2) – April 27, 2020

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.

MSNBC: Chicago price gouging up 9,000% & the sports-journalization of US media

March 25, 2020

By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog

The Chicago Tribune – seemingly the only major newspaper which did not endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016 (they endorsed Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson) – has reported that price gouging in Chicago has skyrocketed a spectacular 9,000% since March 1.

What’s worse, that figure only includes complaints to the city’s Business Affairs and Consumer Protection Department from March 1, excluding the first two months of 2020.

From some it’s a dagger in the heart of perceptions of superior codes of polite conduct in the Midwest. For others it’s verification of all the worst accusations of moral, and especially financial, corruption in the city forever linked in the global imagination with gangster Al Capone.

Now… this is all entirely accurate. I have even presented it with hallowed (and phony/naive) “objectivity”. Nobody can sue me for anything.

But it’s terrible journalism.

It’s eye-catching, newspaper-selling, ratings-grabbing, if-it-bleeds-it-leads journalism. It’s journalism designed to grab eyeballs by inciting panic… and panic is what the West is doing very, very well during the Corona crisis.

The City of Chicago received 175 price gouging complaints so far this month – there were only 2 such complaints all of last year, per The Chicago Tribune. The newspaper’s journalists handled the story ok: only got quotes from the government – nothing from victims, grassroots groups or even vox pops – but it’s not terrible.

Now my headline was rather click bait-y and terrible – irresponsible/negligent use of a colon, certainly. See what I can do if I decide to use my powers for evil rather than good?

Was there an 8,650% increase? Yes. I can say I was, “Just reporting the facts,” which is the ultimate journalistic cop-out. This was exactly the defense used by the reporter in Clint Eastwood’s fine new movie on Atlanta Olympics non-bomber Richard Jewell when confronted by Jewell and his lawyer. MSMers would do the same if you questioned their constant, provoking “Corona death toll reaches ___” headlines.

But even The Chicago Tribune knew better than to phrase this trend that way. Is price gouging a real concern? Yes, and more to me than The Chicago Tribune, judging by the space they gave the story.

But it probably won’t be a concern at all to MSNBC because Illinois is a solidly Democratic state which has no chance of flipping to Trump, and Illinois also has a (billionaire, aristocratic) Democratic governor. The hyper-partisan channel is happy to excuse in Democrats what they shame Republicans for; their editorial line is – ignore blue state malfeasances, attack red states.

(FYI, my headline’s colon is negligent because MSNBC has not reported on this story, and the colon implies that. Should have been a comma.)

I like to read the business sections of the world’s top papers and media when I can – you often find the most serious hard news there – and certainly we all have time off now. I figure it’s either do that or panic. That’s how I found this price gouging story.

I also had time to check out fake-leftist darling/rightly-guided prophet Rachel Maddow’s latest show: she opened with the Spanish ice rink converted to a morgue story, which was the most eye-catching, panic-inducing, if-it-bleeds-it-leads choice possible to start her show.

That was terrible journalism.

In my first article on the corona crisis I quickly got to the point: “The problem in the West is that those in power during the corona crisis should not be in power.”

Maddow, incredibly, has become the Walter Cronkite of seemingly one-third of the US despite constantly evincing atrocious and sensationalistic journalism standards.

In 2018, for fun while on vacation, I wrote a minute-by-minute analysis of one of her shows, which just happened to be about (of course) her one-woman Russophobia campaign: “This was supposed to be a funny article, but when you diagram it out…I rather feel like I just watched Joseph McCarthy at work.”

Why would we assume that instead of McCarthyist red-baiting (and I have more red in my pinky toenail clippings than Maddow has in her whole body) or Russophobia-baiting or Trump-baiting, Maddow isn’t now fine with corona-baiting? Her viewers do not seem to ever ask themselves this fundamental question.

Of course, as many foreigners know: in the US there is no such thing as “propaganda” – that only exists in other countries.

Kudos to Maddow for being a Rhodes Scholar, but that does not make her qualified to be a journalist, and certainly not one holding such a vital position.

Journalists, of course, need no official qualifications. It’s a craft and not a profession – there is no single code of conduct, nor any board to revoke your license as no such license exists. A journalism degree is a nice way to start learning the craft but not necessary (Maddow does not have one), and who on earth would waste their time getting a Master’s in Journalism (except journalism professors)? The US public airwaves are not nationalised, and nearly all privately-owned, so forget about governmental review boards for civil servant journalists.

My irresponsible/negligent use of colons is thus no problem: my colon, my business. And that’s no matter how much confusion I sow. And maybe this is all a problem? But in the “free speech” loving West such ideas are verboten.

From what I can gather Maddow’s only serious daily journalism job was as a local morning radio talk show host. FYI – US morning talk radio is about as serious as the regular flu (although that may now be upgraded to semi-pandemic status). Then she was tapped for hosting a show with a US rapper. I simply don’t observe in her work any solid grounding in the craft of journalism and the importance of its social responsibilities. As I wrote in that article: “As a journalist you can’t make an unproven claim just because you hope the future proves you right.”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper may be a scion of the oligarch Vanderbilt family, and while he did admit to working for the CIA for two summers he has way, way more serious journalistic experience than Maddow: He waited 10-15 minutes before running the Spanish ice morgue story on his show last night.

Not such good politicians, not such good governors, not such good journalists = a really good response to the Corona crisis? That’s pretty funny math.

What’s stunning as well is to see how – even amid what they are telling us is a huge global pandemic which rivals the Spanish Flu of 1918 (even though it clearly does not) – the Western MSM continues to obsess with degrading Donald Trump: in their broadcast media it’s still taking up a huge proportion of their coverage. But how can a daily habit dating from November 2016 be shut off so easily?

Well, journalist, it’s your job to roll with the punches, eh? You should be able to easily transition from a pandemic story to a cat-in-the-tree-rescue story to covering the local high school football game. This is what good journalists can do.

But the MSM doesn’t want good journalists, especially in front of the camera or at the editor’s desk; you do get good journalists writing columns. Newspapers, after all, are a whole different kettle of fish than TV, radio and internet journalism.

There has been a long-running trend in Western journalism: I call it the “sports-journalization of news journalism”. Everything is presented as a dramatic game, or a “war”; statistics (minus analysis and discernment) are paramount; incredibly juvenile attitudes and behaviors are not just considered normal, but expected.

Have you ever dealt with any sports journalists? I have: they are by far the most juvenile, emotionally-stunted people in any newsroom.

They often are gamblers and drunks – how else can you possibly get excited about covering a local high school football game time after time? Of course they are emotionally-stunted: they are covering something which can be fairly called more juvenile than the fashion or (what they used to call the) society pages, and how juvenile are those sections? These guys hope to make it to the big time one day: to stand next to the used jock strap laundry basket while naked men answer questions about why the ball bounced funny that one time.

Don’t give me anecdotal evidence – I know sports journalists who are intelligent, artistic, suave, upstanding people, sure. But if I had a daughter who said she was marrying a sports journalist I’d think: “Well, I should get some free tickets, which are so expensive now due to inflation… but I can’t talk about inflation with this guy: This guy probably only wants to talk about stuff 8-year olds excitedly discuss.”

My point is: in broadcast journalism the journalists who get promoted in the West best apply the absurd, childish dramatics of sports journalism into hard news issues, and especially in the US. France’s media isn’t nearly as bad: they have far more newspapers; they actually have normal-looking people as anchors on the top channels; they have far more state-run channels; they have state subsidies for media to provide some stable revenue. The UK is, of course, terrible and tabloid, but at least they are hilarious.

So of course the US is hyper-partisan, hyper-panicked, hyper-dramatic and hyper-susceptible to things which adults should not be. A sign of adulthood is putting away childish things and acting responsibly on serious issues.

Sports is the ultimate reality TV – yes, we men grasped that first! – but who doesn’t know it’s only an empty-calorie diversion? The sports-journalization of US media, contrarily, has made their hard news an empty-calorie diversion, and this trend diverts the public’s attention into the worst, bloodiest, scariest aspects of the Corona virus situation.

This article from the great website CounterPunch is an extension of my first article on Corona: Starvation, bad water, urban violence, imperialist war – these, and others, kill far, far more innocents annually than Corona: Where has been the panic for those?

Such things often don’t come near to touching the White fake-leftist class in America, which slavishly follows MSNBC. However, Corona might touch them – thus the panic and, above all with them: outrage, outrage, outrage.

If we judge by the Western MSM sports scoreboard (and what’s more capitalist-imperialist than competition?): Western good sense is getting its butt kicked during the Corona crisis.

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.