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Imagine you are at home, with your wife and children. It’s dinner time before you put your three children to sleep. The room is cold, the propane cooking cylinder empty, no food, no electricity, or drinking water.
Your youngest child, Manar, cries, “I’m hungry. We haven’t had food for the last four days.” She rubs her dry bluish hands together, “Uhf-uh-ih-ih-uhhf, … I’m cold.” The words escape her chattering teeth.
You, let’s say your name is Nader, look at Manar’s feeble body, her pale skin has lost color. The once bouncy curly black hair had tangled and knotted like a cluttered eagle nest, unwashed for more than a month.
Ahmad asks his wife, “Noora, did you search the cabinets and closets for the dry food?”
Noora took a deep breath, “More than ten times, our kitchen is as empty as our stomachs.” She looked at the cold floor in despair, her face twisted into a sorrowful mask.
“Press this against Manar’s stomach,” he said in a low voice and handed Noora a bag full of sand. “It’ll help her sleep, again.”
It wasn’t the first night they put their children to sleep with a sack of sand on their stomach. This has become a common method for Gazans to suppress hunger. It was after midnight when Manar stopped crying, only then Nader and Noora had a chance to close their eyes, not knowing how more miserable the next day would be.
Unsure of the time, Nader jumps from the floor mattress to a strong pounding at the door. Loud pandemonium and commotion outside, he looks at his watch, 3:45 am. His first thought, the Israeli military ordering residents to vacate the building before blowing it up, as they had done dynamiting blocks of buildings in his neighborhood a week earlier. Noora and the children awake. Manar crawls to the corner with her siblings, wraps herself around her mother.
Nader leaped to the door to find his neighbor brother, Ali, on the other side panting for air.
“Come Nader … come, let’s go.” He stopped to catch a breath after running up the stairs. “Flour trucks.” His chest ballooned and deflated several times, “trucks arriving at the Nabulsi roundabout.” Ali moved sideways to make way for neighbors clumping down the stairs.
The children’s faces lit up. Their eyes like laser light, at Nader, wide open, waiting for his response.
“There were Israeli tanks at the roundabout. They ordered me home yesterday and didn’t allow me to bring water,” Nader said.
“The UN is distributing the flour. The Israelis allowed the trucks in.” Ali looked down the stairs, “Let’s go before it’s too late.” He urged Nader.
Nader turns his head toward his children, Manar’s laser focused eyes turn into a vacant stare, open mouth. He clenched his teeth, pulled the winter coat from the hook, closed the door behind and followed his older brother Ali, down to the street.
The above is not a work of imagination, but a reality of life endured by thousands of individuals in Gaza for more than 150 days. It is exactly what happened in the Flour Massacre on February 29 to thousands of starving fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters in north Gaza. Where Israel used aid trucks to lure, murder and injure almost 900 hungry civilians. The blood of the starving, young and old, man and woman, drenched the flour sacks meant to feed hungry children.
In its efforts to render life in Gaza uninhabitable, Israel has not only targeted essential infrastructures such as hospitals, universities, water treatment plants, and roads but has also directed attacks towards civilian police. This deliberate targeting of police aimed to exacerbate the suffering and provoke a collapse of law and order. Despite warnings from the U.S. against targeting civilian police who maintained public safety and managed the orderly distribution of food, Israel dismissed such concerns, seeking to create lawlessness and chaotic conditions to worsen starvation and justify its actions as in the case of the Flour Massacre.
In covering the story, the Gaza absent Western media became willing outlets to market Israel disinformation cloaked in euphemisms to obscure the grim reality on the ground. Outlets like CNN along with other print media and the BBC for example referred to the death of 112 and the injuring of 760 hungry human beings as “Gaza food aid carnage” or “a chaotic encounter with Israeli troops,” blaming the death on stampedes and truck drivers. They then broadcasted, unquestionably, Israeli-manipulated videos showing the product of the Israeli designed chaos and claiming the hungry crowd posed a threat to its soldiers.
This wasn’t different from an earlier misinformation propagated by CNN Wolf Blitzer, when hosting Mark Regev, the Israeli version of the German Joseph Goebbels, in his show, The Situation Room, on November 15, 2023 where he started the show by saying “Happening now, the Israeli military says it uncovered Hamas weapons and a command center inside Gaza’s largest hospital.” Needless to say, it was all false. In spite of Regev’s abject disregard to basic truth, the Israeli Goebbels was brought again to CNN this week to market the flour truck massacre spinning lies, unchallenged, and claiming no Israeli involvement in the gunfire and blaming the shooting on “Palestinian armed groups.”
Unarguably, CNN, much like most of the American and European news outlets, have become a platform for disinformation with Israeli embedded hosts such as Blitzer who honed his journalistic prowess as a pro-Israel propogandist working for America Israel Public Affairs Committee, serving as an editor for its Near East Report in the mid 1970s.
It wasn’t until Al Jazeera aired a video showing the “chaotic” scene amidst heavy gunfire around the food truck, along with footage revealing bullet injuries in the upper bodies of victims, when some U.S. outlets, such as the New York Times, who espouses a faux professionalism, couldn’t continue ignoring the flagrant Israeli lies. The paper revisited the Israeli drone video that was made available to the compliant U.S. media outlets. After careful review the newspaper concluded that the footage had been altered with “multiple clips spliced together.” The edits conveniently erased the events just before the crowd dispersed in all directions, evading bullets, scrambling over trucks, seeking cover behind vehicles and structures, and falling to the ground from direct gunshot wounds.
It is important to point out, the targeting of aid trucks at the Nabulsi roundabout is neither the first nor the last of Israeli attempts to obstruct the delivery of food aid in Gaza. Approximately three weeks prior, on February 6, Israel fired upon a crowd gathering at the Kuwaiti roundabout, while naval gunboats targeted UNRWA humanitarian food trucks. More recently, or three days following the Flour Massacre, on March 3rd, Israel once again opened fire on a hungry crowd awaiting food trucks at the Kuwaiti roundabout, resulting in the deaths and injuries of several civilians.
The submissive prostration of Western media, providing unchallenged platforms to Israeli PR spokespersons, is unprecedented in the so called “free world.” By agreeing to Israeli directives restricting media access into Gaza, Western mainstream media has no presence to report from the theater. Gone AWOL, the media has been transformed into an active participant in whitewashing Israeli genocide where the Gaza coverage has been regulated, directly and indirectly, by an Israeli hasbara manifested by the managed evidence and narrative of the Flour Massacre. Or to paraphrase the original Goebbels, Western mainstream media has become a “keyboard on which Israel plays.”
In fact, Western, and particularly American genuflection to Israel extends beyond the media. Case in point, almost two weeks ago, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, John Kirby, disparaged his own U.S. army, praising the Israeli forces for taking actions to protect civilians, stating that he was “not sure our own (American) military would take” similar actions.
When asked about the murdering of the hungry civilians in Gaza, Kirby’s boss, Joe Biden pled ignorance stating “There’s two competing versions of what happened. I don’t have an answer yet.”
In avoiding answering the question, the U.S. president accorded equal credence to the Israeli disinformation machine. In keeping up with his standing, Biden is consistent in his anti-Palestinian bias hyperbolizing Israeli victimhood, while downplaying Israeli crimes against Palestinians under the pretext of not having enough information.
This week and after five months of pleading for Israel to allow more aid trucks into Gaza, Biden joined other inept Arab dictators in an inconsequential gesture dropping 38,000 meals to 2,4 million in Gaza. A stunt by the incompetent leaders which is aimed more at mollifying international outrage against Israel than a genuine desire to alleviate the mounting starvation levels in Gaza.
The made for TV theatrical air drop of mere 38,000 meals was like a grain of sand on the beach of Gaza. The parachuted meals were equivalent to providing a minuscule 0.005 of the daily meal for every Gazans, or the equivalent of offering 5 loaves of bread per 1000 individuals. This is a farce and rings hollow from an Administration that plans to send Israel almost $15 billion, in addition to the weapons and political cover that empower Israel to carry out the very siege the air drops purportedly intend to mitigate. The starvation in Gaza is not due to a drought or a natural disaster, but an Israeli made catastrophe enabled by Biden, Western governments, and blessed by Arab dictators.
As you read this, remember Nader, who joined his brother Ali to feed his hungry child, Manar. He would have been most likely one of those killed or injured in the February 29, Flour Massacre. His children, if alive, are still hungry and cold at home, watching through a broken window (U.S.) aid parcels parachuting from the skies alongside the roar of an American-made jet delivering 2000-pound bombs over their heads.
Manar, if she wasn’t among the more than 15 children who tragically perished this week from malnutrition and dehydration, will always recall how the Israeli-made starvation drove her father to death.
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Jamal Kanj is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries, A version of article is published on Al Mayadeen TV.
Featured image: Palestinian children try to eat from a single bowl inside the tent as Palestinians, trying to live in makeshift tents they set up, are viewed in Rafah, Gaza on February 14, 2024 [Abed Zagout – Anadolu Agency]
The original source of this article is Global Research
The rejection by spokesperson Michal Paikin undermines even more the NYT’s credibility of its article: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
Allegations of rape specifically referred to by The New York Times in December, claiming rape by the Palestinian Resistance on October 7, were shut down by the spokesperson for the Kibbutz “Be’eri” identified as the location of the attack.
Two out of the three victims mentioned in NYT‘s marquee exposé, which alleged that Hamas had deliberately weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, were not, in fact, victims of sexual assault, according to the Kibbutz’s spokesperson.
The rejection by spokesperson Michal Paikin undermines even more the NYT’s credibility of its article: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” in which it described the recounts of three alleged victims of sexual assault for whom it gave specific biographical information.
Two of three women have been said to not be victims.
One of them, dubbed “woman in the black dress,” was Gal Abdush, whose family contested the NYT claims, while the two others were unnamed sisters from Kibbutz “Be’eri” whose exact ages were given, which facilitated the process of locating them.
One day following the publication of the report, the Israeli news site Ynet interviewed Gal’s parents. They emphasized the absence of evidence supporting the claim that she was raped, asserting that the newspaper’s reporters had interviewed them under false pretenses. The parents stated that they were unaware of the sexual assault issue until the article in the American daily was published. Additionally, Gal’s sisters vehemently refuted the allegations of rape.
Data from “Israel’s” public list of the victims who died at the location that day, as well as a memorial page established by the community itself, helped The Intercept in matching the description in the NYT article: sisters Y. and N. Sharabi, ages 13 and 16.
When asked about the NYT claims, the spokesperson said their name without any hinting: “You’re talking about the Sharabi girls?,” she said, adding, “No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just’, but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.”
The spokesperson discredited the very intricate and graphic details of the Israeli paramedic who was noted as the source for the allegations, not only in the NYT story but also in The Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets.
“It’s not true,” she told The Intercept. “They were not sexually abused.”
Despite the rejection of such narration, NYT spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha insisted on going along with the rape narrative.
“We stand by the story and are continuing to report on the issue of sexual violence on Oct. 7,” she told The Intercept.
Last month, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israeli police are finding paramount difficulty locating and finding any Israeli settlers who were victims of sexual assaults or witnesses of such acts allegedly committed by the Palestinian Resistance during the October 7 Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
According to Haaretz, one of the main outlets propagating the claim that the Palestinian Resistance fighters sexually assaulted Israeli women on October 7, the police cannot find any victims or any witnesses of any form of sexual assault.
“Even in the few cases in which the [police] collected testimony about sexual offenses committed on October 7, it failed to connect the acts with the victims who were harmed by them,” it said.
Faced with its longest and deadliest war to date, Israel is now under increasing pressure to transparently disclose its losses, going against the common practice of concealing casualties during wartime.
“How many Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza?”
This is a persistent question that many are asking as the Israeli military’s ground campaign in the bombed and besieged enclave nears its second month.
If the army is suffering relatively low losses while inflicting massive Palestinian civilian casualties, this suggests Israel is well on its way to achieving its clear objective of eliminating Hamas, but also its unspoken goals: conquer Gaza, ethnically cleanse its 2.3 million residents, and rebuild the Gush Katif settlement bloc.
But if the occupation army is indeed suffering huge losses, this suggests the Israeli military and political leadership may need to soon end their genocidal campaign prematurely, while citing exaggerated external pressure from the White House as the pretext.
Secrecy surrounding Israeli losses
Israel’s military claimed on 17 December that 121 soldiers had been killed since its delayed ground campaign began on 27 October, when tanks and infantry began to push into Gaza’s cities and refugee camps.
But determining the true number of Israeli soldier casualties has always been notoriously difficult, as Israel’s military goes to great lengths to cover up its combat losses. A recent battle between Hamas and Israel’s vaunted Golani Brigade exemplifies this secrecy.
“We are heading to the most difficult and deepest place with a large number of enemy fighters,” boasted Israeli Lt. Col. Tomer Grinberg, commander of the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, shortly before leading his troops on a ground operation in the legendary Shujaiyya (which aptly means “courageous”) neighborhood in northern Gaza.
He then added, “I promise you a resounding victory.”
But Grinberg is now dead.
According to Israeli sources, Grinberg was killed during the 12 December operation, along with nine other Golani soldiers, in an ambush by Hamas fighters.
After four of the brigade’s soldiers were injured in a firefight, others sought to rescue them amid fears they may be dragged into a tunnel. The second group was also hit by explosives, as was a third group that also tried to evacuate the wounded.
After the battle, Hamas issued a statement warning:
“The longer you stay there, the greater the bill of your deaths and losses will be, and you will emerge from it carrying the tail of disappointment and loss, God willing.”
Resistance claims higher soldier toll
But there is compelling reason to believe the number of soldiers killed alongside Grinberg in Shujaiyya is much higher than the nine announced by the army.
Security expert and retired Israeli Colonel Miri Eisin toldCNN that the 12 December attack was particularly painful because so many of the dead were high-ranking officers:
“We’re hurting today…It’s always hard when soldiers are killed, but when it’s this level of command, it hits you in the gut. These are commanders that commanded hundreds of soldiers.”
This led one former US soldier to ask on X whether Israel was hiding the true number of soldiers killed in the ambush. “Where are all the privates, and the corporals, and the lower enlisted?”
Hamas, through its armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, provides an answer.
Regarding the events on 12 December, the Qassam Brigades reported killing 11 soldiers in Shujaiyya, including members of a rescue team, in an apparent reference to the deaths acknowledged by the Israeli army.
But according to Qassam, on the same day, its fighters also killed or injured 10 soldiers east of the city of Khan Yunis, killed or injured another 20 soldiers barricaded inside a building in the Sheikh Radwan area of Gaza City, and killed another 15 soldiers who attacked them in their make-shift base at the Abu Rashid Pool.
Censorship on the press and hospitals
Despite claiming to be “the only democracy in the Middle East,” Tel Aviv maintains a tight grip on information related to military casualties through the use of military censors, controlling what the press can publish concerning national security issues, including injuries and deaths of soldiers.
“The human losses announced by the security establishment are usually binding on hundreds of media institutions, and these are allowed to work basically according to this rule. The death toll always comes from one source, and no one questions it,” Hassan Abdo, The Cradle’s Palestine Correspondent, reported earlier this year.
Abdo attributes this to preserving the image of the invincible Israeli soldier “who does not fall victim to a weak, primitive opponent.”
This is “one of the main pillars of the Zionist project based on the tripartite of security, immigration, and settlement,” he added.
As The Cradlenoted, even before the outbreak of war on 7 October, Israeli soldiers have had a strange tendency to die in “accidents” during periods of heightened conflict with the Palestinian resistance, including in car accidents, plane crashes, suicides, gas leaks, and even falling from balconies.
But this invincible image was shattered with the operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups broke out of the Gaza Strip to attack the Israeli military bases and settlements (kibbutzim) enforcing the brutal 17-year siege on the tiny and impoverished enclave.
During Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas killed 41 soldiers from Grinberg’s Golani battalion alone, in major battles at the Re’im and Nahal Oz military bases.
Hezbollah’s estimates and questions from within
Israel claims Hamas carried out a massacre at the Nova music festival, just a few kilometers from the Re’im base, but a major battle took place there as well. At Nova, 58 Israeli police were killed, including from elite combat counter-terror units of the Border Police, known as Yamam, who were the first to respond to the attack.
According to an Israeli police investigation regarding events at Nova, had there not been a substantial police deployment at Yad Mordechai, some 30 kilometers further north, “the terrorists would have been on their way to … Tel Aviv in 40 minutes.”
It, therefore, becomes more imperative than ever for the occupation state to hide the extent of its losses, both in the battle against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and in the north in the battle with Hezbollah, to reestablish and maintain the myth of an overwhelmingly powerful military presence in the region.
Anecdotal evidence and estimates from Hezbollah suggest that the official count of 115 Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting in Gaza and near the Lebanese border following 7 October is likely much lower than the true figure. Reports from different sources indicate a significant discrepancy, with instances of mass casualties not officially acknowledged.
The Lebanese resistance movement estimates its attacks on settlements and military bases in northern-occupied Palestine have killed at least 35 Israeli soldiers and injured 172.
After just the first week of fighting in Gaza, the death toll, as announced by the Israeli army from fighting there, had reached 19. Among them were nine soldiers killed in just one attack. Hamas struck the “Namer” armored personnel carrier transporting the soldiers to the battle with an anti-tank missile.
Seven of the dead soldiers were 20 years old or younger, which seems to confirm the perception that Israel is sending inexperienced fighters into combat against Hamas’ battle-hardened fighters motivated by a cause, resistance to occupation, they firmly believe in.
But the occupation army spokesperson’s unit quickly learned not to announce the mass killing of soldiers of this sort.
Baruch Rosenblum, an Israeli rabbi, recalled a story from a senior officer in the army from the second week of the Gaza ground campaign. The officer explained that most of the fighting takes place at night, and that in just one operation, Hamas had killed 36 soldiers.
The rabbi explained that Hamas had attacked a convoy of three Namer armored vehicles, each carrying 12 soldiers, setting them ablaze. The army command watched via drone live feed as the soldiers abandoned the vehicles and Hamas eliminated them all with anti-tank weapons.
The senior officer chose not to disclose his name to the rabbi “to avoid arrest for revealing state secrets,” and the incident was never announced by the army or reported in the Israeli press.
On 18 November, in the third week of the ground operation, David Oren Baruch, the director of Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, provided another anecdote suggesting a soldier death toll much larger than what was publicly known.
He revealed that “We are now going through a period where every hour there is a funeral, every hour and a half a funeral.”
“I was asked to open a large number of graves. Only in the Mount Herzl cemetery did we bury 50 soldiers in 48 hours,” Baruch explained further.
Military control of the narrative
The Israeli military’s reluctance to disclose the number of wounded soldiers further adds to suspicions of underreporting.
Unlike in past wars, the Israeli military had refused to make any statement about the number of wounded in Gaza. This finally changed on 10 December, just before Haaretz planned to publish its report on the number of soldier casualties based instead on hospital sources.
Haaretz noted “a considerable and unexplained gap between the data reported by the military and that from the hospitals.” The hospital data the outlet obtained showed the number of wounded soldiers was “twice as high as the army’s numbers.”
The Israeli newspaper also highlighted the military’s tight control over the data reported by the hospitals themselves, explaining that members of the army spokesperson’s unit “are in the hospitals around the clock. Every press release regarding wounded soldiers and replies to media queries must receive their approval.”
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth similarly reported on 9 December that, “Every day, about 60 new wounded are received only by the rehabilitation department” and that “the cumulative numbers since October 7 are astronomical: More than 2,000 soldiers, policemen and other members of the security forces have been officially recognized as disabled.”
“We have never been through anything even similar to this,” explained Limor Luria, head of the rehabilitation department at the Ministry of Defense.
“More than 58 percent of the wounded who are taken in by us have severe injuries of arms and legs, including those that require amputations. About 12 percent are internal injuries – spleen, kidney, tearing of internal organs. There are also head and eye injuries.”
In addition to thousands of horrific physical injuries, Israel is also facing “a tsunami of trauma,” the paper added. “I sat with a fighter who took three bullets. A physically torn person, a very serious injury,” Luria added, “but his main struggle is with the sights he saw.”
One injured soldier, Elisha Madan, recounted to a crowd how his fellow soldiers were killed in front of his eyes. “I came back from the dead alone. My entire squad died, and I was on the verge of death. I survived thanks to your prayers,” Madan said while seated in his wheelchair.
‘All warfare is based on deception’ – Sun Tzu
Since 7 October, the Israeli military leadership has reported falsehoods about almost every facet of that day’s events, and the war that followed.
They lied about Hamas beheading babies, they covered up burning alive their own soldiers and civilians with Apache helicopter and tank fire, and they continue to lie about pretending to care about the safety of Palestinian civilians, who they have mercilessly bombed for months with only the slightest pretext of targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure.
As a result, while it is impossible to know the true numbers of Israeli soldiers killed in battle against the Palestinian resistance, there is there is ample reason to question the veracity of the information provided by the US-backed occupation army.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
In the United States media editorial policy has not wavered on one subject this year: Ukraine is always winning the war.
From the first week, when the Ukrainian air force and navy were smashed, to last week’s smashing of the electrical grid – this is what “victory” looks like in the Ukrainian language, apparently. The Russians can electorally incorporate territory after territory, but to suggest that Ukrainian victory hasn’t already arrived is verboten in American public spaces.
What is the point of reading American coverage of the unrest in Ukraine when it’s so very absurd?
The point is: to learn what America is thinking, of course. If it’s deluded then – like it or not – that’s the story, and the story always writes itself in honest journalism.
I was talking with a Polish cab driver whom I found extremely intelligent, and not only because he has an Iranian brother-in-law and thus knew and respected Iranian culture. This longtime immigrant cabbie was very pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian, which is his right and not unexpected, and he was a typical Pole in that he was ardently pro-American. However, he volunteered to me that he found Americans to be the most effectively propagandised people in the world – he said they, invariably, merely mouthed whatever they heard on TV news.
It is one thing to dismiss the criticism of your enemies, but the criticisms of your friends merit some refection.
I have also personally found the same iron-jawed retention of dogma: Americans tell me that only in very recent weeks have they heard anyone even suggest the idea that the war isn’t going well for Ukrainians. I agree, as I have yet to hear such a remark (outside of interviews of political analysts for my work at PressTV), and I have gotten many strange stares when I brought up the idea – in my personal life – for discussion.
It is happy news for Americans to talk about, after all: “Hey, did you hear? The Ukrainians are winning the war! Still!” However, it is my role in the US to be a wet blanket whenever discussions turn political, I lament.
When the subject of Ukraine comes up I start with the fact that I have lived in France for over the past decade and – because France is usually at the heart of European diplomacy – I have been reporting on the Ukraine unrest since 2014. At the mention of the idea that Ukraine existed before February 2022 a glaze goes over their eyes.
Similarly, someone recently congratulated me on the Iranian revolution. What a pleasant thing to hear, thank you! Unfortunately, this person was referring to the current anti-hijab law unrest and not 1979. Just as Ukraine is winning the war, so this person was convinced that these protests have effectuated a (counter-) revolution. When it comes to Iran the American “this information cannot be allowed to even momentarily penetrate my mind” eye-glaze starts sooner – it arrives at the very first contrary word I utter.
I bring up Iran to show the pattern: Ukraine has always been winning, is winning currently and will win in the future because the US always wins every war it embarks upon.
After all, the US was always winning the war in Afghanistan. The only internal disagreement ever allowed was regarding their total retreat in August 2020 – was it poorly planned, or not? If the former, then the total US victory was disgracefully (though merely slightly) tarnished by the total US retreat.
The US was always winning the war in Iraq, as well. Shock and awe prevailed from start to finish, with the finish being a total shock at how few positives the US-led war created for either the Iraqis or the Americans. The indisputable fact of the American victory, however: totally awesome, of course.
The Balkanised disaster which is Libya? Another victory. Assad still standing in Syria? Still a victory, though don’t ask for explanations. Cold wars in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Nicaragua and any other revolutionary country? Victory is so close the US media can see it, they insist.
These foolish political mis-notions cannot be blamed on the average American: all these places are so far away and so far removed from the totally precarious daily rat race/shooting gallery which is American life, and the information they can find is so incredibly one-sided.
Negligence can constitute a crime, indeed, but we must learn that here there is not actual malice: I was not shocked to do a report on a top foreign policy poll which showed that 79% of Americans want peace with Iran. This is even the foreign policy issue which earned the most unanimity, excepting only one: by one percentage point more, Americans want more legislative control over the executive branch’s ability to wage war – i.e., they want more peace.
The crime committed by the average American is neither malice nor negligence but the fault of naiveté – their expectation that a media dominated by private and not public ownership will ever consistently produce journalism which benefits the people and not the rich owners. Call it Western Liberal Democracy or the American Way or neoliberalism: history shows that it has always failed, is failing and will only fail for the 99%.
The US media and politicians know which levers to pull to produce naiveté: note how it’s always the “Ukrainian people” against “Putin” – there are no Russian people. Putin, of course, is not an actual person either – he’s a monster.
Which side could a busy soccer mom possibly be expected to take, especially when trying to have pleasant chit-chat with other busy soccer moms? Why, the only American thing to do is to buy that $25 pro-Ukraine scented candle and display it proudly for others to envy….
In the United States Ukraine will always be winning the war, no matter what actually happens in the war. When their destructive loss is indisputable, that will be unimportant – the US will certainly be in the middle of winning a new war.
Mainstream media reporting on Islam, and especially on “security threats” linked to Muslim actors, are often criticized for their bias and the way they promote Islamophobia.
All studies on media reports on Muslims and Islam show, to a greater or lesser extent, that the mainstream media across Europe are often biased against Muslims and involved in spreading Islamophobic ideas, especially the alleged relationship between Muslims and extremism and radicalization.
Why are the media racist?
But what causes this? The new report of which I am a co-author analyzes in detail the factors that cause the widespread dissemination of anti-Muslim reports in the media. In general, academic studies agree that reports are influenced by the pressures of advertising and marketing, the political orientation of publishers, and especially, from the owners of the media. Another key influence on reporting is journalists’ dependence on a narrow range of apparently authoritative sources.
Mastery of “official” sources
Research shows that these “official” definitions of the “problem” of “radicalization” and “extremism” dominate the media. Actors who enact these views can be called “primary definitions” of problems. The phrase was coined by Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the 1970s. He sees the media as “secondary” definers, who are in “structured subordination” to “primary definitions.
But who are these “primary” definers in the case of Muslims? First, the state anti-terrorist apparatus; police, intelligence services, and a wide range of other “counterterrorism” officials. They are supported by neoconservative and anti-extremism pressure groups and expert groups.
The report examines how Islam is treated in the press in five European countries: the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. A long sample period of twenty years was able to detect changes in the reports and if they were related to policy changes, to verify/falsify the thesis that official sources were the most important influence.
The evolution of anti-terrorism policy
The United Kingdom adopted a “Prevention” policy on the fight against terrorism in 2003. This was quickly followed by the EU and the Netherlands in 2005. France ( 2014 ) and Spain ( 2015 ) took another decade to introduce similar policies. Only Italy did not adopt a “prevent” style policy at the time of the study. One was almost approved in 2016 / 7, but the government collapsed before it was enacted.
Coverage of “extremism” and “radicalization” in Europe
The first significant spike in coverage of “extremism” in the UK occurred in 2005 – 2006. 2005 was the year of the London bombings on 7 July, after which Prime Minister Tony Blair said “the rules of the game are changing” and at that time the “Prevention” policy was already in force . A second peak from 2011 corresponded to a later iteration of “Prevenir”, which was a significant movement in a neoconservative direction.
French reports show an increase in attention to “radicalization” from 2012 when a political debate on radicalization began to emerge, followed by an exponential increase in 2016. This process preceded the attack in France against Charlie Hebdo ( January 2015 ) and the Bataclan ( November 2015 ). ) and is more obviously related to the launch of the new anti-terrorism strategy in April 2014.
Spanish data shows that coverage started later and peaked in 2017, one year after France. The beginnings of the increase go back to the discussion and subsequent launch of the new anti-terrorism strategy in January 2015.
Italian data shows the inverted relationship, with reports of “extremism” always higher than those of “radicalization. Given that the term “radicalization” is particularly associated with official anti-terrorism policy, this trend possibly reflects the relative lack of such a policy in Italy. The start of the “radicalization” increase in 2014 coincides with the publication of reports by neo-conservative expert groups, with an exponential increase during the attempt to approve the “Prevent” bill.
What official sources are cited in the media
But what sources were cited in the twenty-year sample? In the UK, the data showed the prominence of intelligence agencies. MI5, the national intelligence agency, and MI6, the foreign agency, stood out. Together they totaled almost six percent of the total appointments of the top one hundred.
The think tanks they were prominent in the UK, with the Quilliam Foundation, often criticized for its proximity to the British state, and the Henry Jackson Society, often described as “Islamophobic, that was presented regularly.
Civil rights organizations such as the Islamic Commission on Human Rights, ranked 96, or Cage, which is not among the top 100, were cited very little. This reflects his critical position on anti-terrorism policy and the UK government’s “radicalization” approach.
France – Intelligence-led coverage with Muslim groups captured by the state
In France, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure ( DGSI ), the national intelligence agency, was the most cited. Its external equivalent, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure ( DGSE ), was presented at 28. Government ministries obtained a relatively high ranking and generally, ( were cited more widely with 26 percent of citations ) than the EU ( 17 percent ) or the UN ( eight percent ).
Muslim civil society groups were relatively prominent with six percent of the appointments in total. On closer inspection, each of them was effectively a government spokesperson. By contrast, genuine Muslim civil rights organizations such as “Le Collectif Contre l’islamophobie” in France were not among the hundred most cited groups.
Spain – Official sources and think tanks neoconservatives
In Spain, the Ministry of the Interior is the second most cited body. It should be noted that the neoconservative think tank Fundación Real Instituto Elcano was one of the most cited organizations, standing above the think tanks of the rest of the countries. The Neo-Conservative Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies ( FAES ) also featured prominently, receiving more appointments than any Muslim civil rights organization in Spain. The president of FAES is José María Aznar, former president of the Government of Spain. Aznar is also NewsCorp director for Rupert Murdoch, responsible for a number of Islamophobic news media around the world, as well as being involved with various Zionist groups.
Italy: lack of official Italian sources
In Italy, unlike the other countries, the highest Italian ministry cited was the Ministry of Economy and Finance ( 11o ). He was cited less frequently than six international government organizations: the European Union, the United Nations, NATO, Europol and the European Commission. This shows that if the Italian state did not promote the perspective of “radicalization”, the Italian media would resort to other official international sources. US intelligence agencies – the CIA and the FBI – were more cited than the Italian national intelligence agency, Dipartimento delle Informazioni per la Sicurezza ( DIS ), not listed at all in the sample. Italian data also included some quotes from neoconservative organizations.
Official sources as holders of power
In general, the role of the security state is absolutely central to the way the media operates on issues related to Muslims and security. In each case, we examine what this was, unlike media factors such as ownership, editorial control, or “reality” ( world events ), which provided the main impetus for the direction and tone of the coverage.
Changes in anti-Muslim reporting date back to the adoption of “Prevent” style policies. This reflects the crucial role of official sources, specifically government institutions associated with the anti-terrorist apparatus and intelligence agencies, in determining what is being reported and how. This was particularly key in the dominance of intelligence sources in the French and British reports. The role of neoconservative think tanks and against extremism was also significant as defenders of the security state, for example in Spain and the United Kingdom.
The “primary definitions” of Islamophobic news media coverage are, therefore, the central institutions of the security state in relation to which the media are in structured subordination as “secondary” defining.
In terms of politics, the bottom line is that problems of racism or media bias cannot be solved only at the level of media reform. Reform of the State and anti-terrorism policy is also necessary.
The civil unrest in Iran in response to the recent death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was waiting at a Tehran police station, although rooted in legitimate grievances, also bears the hallmark of a western-sponsored covert war, covering multiple fronts.
Mere days after the protests erupted on 16 September, the Washington Postrevealed that the Pentagon had initiated a wide-ranging audit of all its online psyops efforts, after a number of bot and troll accounts operated by its Central Command (CENTCOM) division – which covers all US military actions in West Asia, North Africa and South and Central Asia – were exposed, and subsequently banned by major social networks and online spaces.
The accounts were busted in a joint investigation carried out by social media research firm Graphika, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which evaluated “five years of pro-Western covert influence operations.”
Published in late August, it attracted minimal English-language press coverage at the time, but evidently was noticed, raising concerns at the highest levels of the US government, prompting the audit.
While the Washington Post ludicrously suggested the government’s umbrage stemmed from CENTCOM’s egregious, manipulative activities which could compromise US “values” and its “moral high ground,” it is abundantly clear that the real problem was CENTCOM being exposed.
#OpIran
CENTCOM’s geographical purview includes Iran, and given the Islamic Republic’s longstanding status as a key US enemy state, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a significant proportion of the unit’s online disinformation and psychological warfare efforts were directed there.
A key strategy employed by US military psyops specialists is the creation of multiple sham media outlets publishing content in Farsi. Numerous online channels were maintained for these platforms, spanning Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even Telegram.
In some cases too, fake journalists and pundits, with numerous “followers” on those platforms emerged, along with profile photos created via artificial intelligence.
For example, Fahim News claimed to provide “accurate news and information” on events in Iran, prominently publishing posts declaring “the regime uses all of its efforts to censor and filter the internet,” and encouraging readers to stick to online sources as a result.
Meanwhile, Dariche News claimed to be an “independent website unaffiliated with any group or organization,” committed to providing “uncensored and unbiased news” to Iranians within and without the country, in particular information on “the destructive role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in all the affairs and issues of Iran and the region.”
Their respective YouTube channels pumped out numerous short-form videos, presumably in the hope they would be mistaken for organic content, and go viral on other social networks. The researchers identified one instance in which media outlets elsewhere had embedded Dariche News content into articles.
An army of bots and trolls
Some of the fake news organizations published original material, but much of their output was recycled content from US government-funded propaganda outfits such as Radio Farda and Voice of America Farsi.
They also repurposed and shared articles from the British-based Iran International, which appears to receive arm’s length funding from Saudi Arabia, as did several fake personas attached to these outlets.
These personas frequently posted non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food, in order to increase their authenticity. They also engaged with real Iranians on Twitter, often joking with them about internet memes.
Pentagon bots and trolls used different narrative techniques and approaches in an attempt to influence perceptions and engender engagement. A handful promoted “hardliner” views, criticizing the Iranian government for insufficiently hawkish foreign policy while being excessively reformist and liberal domestically.
One such bogus user, a purported “political science expert,” accrued thousands of followers on Twitter and Telegram by posting content praising Shia Islam’s growing power in West Asia, while other “hardliner” accounts praised the late General Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), slain in an illegal US drone strike in January 2020, as a martyr, and encouraged the wearing of hijabs.
The researchers state the purpose of these efforts was unclear, although an obvious explanation is the Pentagon sought to foster anti-government discontent among conservative Iranians, while creating lists of local “extremists” to monitor online.
Orchestrated opposition
Overwhelmingly though, Pentagon-linked accounts were viciously critical of the Iranian government, and the IRGC. Numerous Pentagon bots and trolls sought to blame food and medicine shortages on the latter, which was likened to ISIS, and posting videos of Iranians protesting and looting supermarkets captioned in Pashto, English, and Urdu.
More sober posts criticized Tehran for redistributing much-needed food to give to Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, while others highlighted embarrassing incidents, such as a reported power outage that caused the country’s chess team to lose an international online tournament.
Furthermore, multiple fake users claimed to seek “justice for the victims of #Flight752”, referring to the Ukraine International Airlines flight accidentally shot down by the IRGC in January 2020.
Using hashtags such as #PS752 and #PS752justice hundreds of times, they blamed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei personally for the incident.
Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February, these accounts used Persian versions of widely-trending hashtags #No_To_Putin and #No_To_War – themselves overwhelmingly disseminated on Twitter by pro-Ukraine bot and troll accounts, according to separate research.
The users condemned Khamenei’s verbal support of Putin and accused Iran of supplying drones to Moscow, which it was claimed were used to kill civilians.
They also pushed the narrative that Iran’s collusion with Russia would result in adverse political and economic repercussions for Tehran, while making unflattering comparisons between Khamenei and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“One has sold Iran to Russia and ordered their peoples’ murder,” one account tweeted. “The other is wearing a combat uniform alongside his people and has stopped the colonization of Ukraine by Russia with all his might.”
Scattershot fury
There were also cloak-and-dagger initiatives intended to damage Iran’s standing in neighboring countries, and undermine its regional influence. Much of this work seems to have been concerned with spreading panic and alarm, and creating a hostile environment for Iranians abroad.
For instance, accounts targeting audiences in Afghanistan claimed that Quds Force personnel were infiltrating Kabul posing as journalists in order to crush opposition to the Taliban. They also published articles from a US military-linked website that claimed on the basis of zero evidence that the bodies of dead refugees who’d fled to Iran were being returned to their families back home with missing organs.
Yet another damaging false narrative perpetuated by this cluster in late 2021 and early 2022 was that the IRGC was forcing Afghan refugees to join militias fighting in Syria and Yemen, and that those who refused were being deported.
Iraq was a country of particular interest to the Pentagon’s cyber warriors, with memes widely shared throughout Baghdad and beyond depicting IRGC influence in the country as a destructive disease, and content claiming Iraqi militias, and elements of the government, were effective tools of Tehran, fighting to further Iran’s imperial designs over the wider West Asia.
Militias were also accused of killing Iraqis in rocket strikes, engineering droughts by damaging water supply infrastructure, smuggling weapons and fuel out of Iraq and into Syria, and fuelling the country’s crystal meth epidemic.
Another cluster of Pentagon accounts focused on Iran’s involvement in Yemen, publishing content on major social networks critical of the Ansarallah-led de-facto government in Sanaa, accusing it of deliberately blocking humanitarian aid deliveries, acting as an unquestioning proxy of Tehran and Hezbollah, and closing bookstores, radio stations, and other cultural institutions.
Several of their posts blamed Iran for the deaths of civilians via landmine, on the basis Tehran may have supplied them.
Laying the ground
Other CENTCOM psychological warfare (psywar) narratives have direct relevance to the protests that have engulfed Iran.
There was a particular focus among one group of bots and trolls on women’s rights. Dozens of posts compared Iranian women’s opportunities abroad with those in Iran – one meme on this theme contrasted photos of an astronaut with a victim of violent spousal abuse – while others promoted protests against the hijab.
Alleged government corruption and rising living costs were also recurrently emphasized, particularly in respect of food and medicine – production of which in Iran is controlled by the IRGC, a fact CENTCOM’s online operatives repeatedly drew attention to.
Women’s rights, corruption, and the cost of living – the latter of which directly results from suffocating US sanctions – are all key stated motivating factors for the protesters.
Despite the rioters’ widespread acts of violence and vandalism, targeted at civilians and authorities alike, such as the destruction of an ambulance ferrying police officers away from the scene of a riot, they also claim to be motivated by human rights concerns.
Establishment and fringe journalists and pundits have dismissed as conspiracy theories, any suggestions that protests in Iran and beyond are anything other than organic and grassroots in nature.
Yet, clear proof of foreign direction and sponsorship abounds, not least in the very public face of the anti-hijab movement, Masih Alinejad, who for many years has encouraged Iranian women to ceremonially burn their headscarves from the confines of an FBI safehouse in New York City, then publicizes the images online, which travel round the world and back via social media and mainstream news outlets.
A regime-change war by other means
Alinejad’s activities have generated a vast amount of fawning and credulous media coverage, without a single journalist or outlet questioning whether her prominent role in the supposedly grassroots, locally-initiated protest movement is affiliated with foreign hostile interference.
This is despite Alinejad posing for photos with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, and receiving a staggering $628,000 in US federal government contracts since 2015.
Much of these funds flowed from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government agency that oversees propaganda platforms such as Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, the latter of which has produced a Farsi-language show fronted by Alinejad for seven years.
These clusters of social media posts may appear innocuous and authentic in an age of click-bait and viral fake news, yet when aggregated and analysed, they form a potent and potentially dangerous weapon which it turns out is one of many in the Pentagon’s regime-change arsenal.
Iran, through its Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, calls US human rights records despicable and slams claims on human rights abuses in the country as baseless.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry responded to the US Secretary of State’s claims on human rights issues in Iran and slammed them as baseless, reminding the US of its own record of killings and human rights abuses committed racially, with Black people making the majority of those killed.
Following how the West, spearheaded by the US, took advantage of the death of Mahsa Amini, claiming that it was the result of a brutal arrest by the Iranian police, and the fact that the western and Arab-monarchy-backed media outlets quickly jumped to the trend of covering anti-Iran protests, picturing them as large rallies, when in fact, they included far fewer numbers than depicted, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Nasser Kanaani reminded the US of its “despicable” human rights record across the world.
With a despicable human rights record both at home & abroad, how does the US have the audacity to give itself higher moral ground to lecture the world?@SecBlinken needs to remember that he's FM of a state whose police, just in 9 months, has fatally shot 730, many of them black. pic.twitter.com/J8UBYQAOpH
“With a despicable human rights record both at home & abroad, how does the US have the audacity to give itself higher moral ground to lecture the world?” Kanaani tweeted on Friday.
Millions of people supporting the regime came out in the Iranian provinces to reject the sedition
Between Mahsa Amini and Zainab Asim: How do political agendas manipulate people?
The axis of resistance.. messages of deterrence and a coup in the scales
Establishment version: modern free market freedom, practised by freedom loving people, to freely create freedomaceous wealth everywhere! Woohoo!
Real World Translation: rigged system to funnel wealth from the poor to the rich by imposition of slave wages and debt servitude = economic enslavement of the 99%
Disinformation:
Establishment version: anything contrary to the “truthiness” narrative espoused by Western Mainstream Media Patriots. Is Israel an apartheid state? That’s disinformation!
Real World Translation: anything which portrays the AngoEuroZionist Empire in a bad light and their enemies du jour (Russia, China, Iran etc) in a neutral or favourable light. Absolutely nothing to do with truth or facts.
National Endowment for Democracy:
Establishment version: benevolent fund by the USA to promote rule by, for and of the ordinary people in foreign countries. Yay!
Real World Translation: CIA cutout to finance astroturf campaigns to destabilise foreign governments that do not bend to the US will, in order to install US puppet regimes that will funnel wealth to the USA.
US invasion of Iraq in 2003:
Establishment version: act of “liberation” to save the world from Saddam’s WMDs and bring democracy to the Iraqi people.
Real World Translation: WMD story was a fucking LIE, invasion was done to preserve the US petrodollar and control Iraqi oil assets and give massive contracts to US corporations. Killed more than a million Iraqis by 2010, so I guess you could say those Iraqis were “liberated” (from life).
Russian invasion of Ukraine:
Establishment version: unprovoked aggression by Russian dictator Vlad-the-Impaler Putin on 24 Feb 2022 because he is just plain crazy (also a vampire). So naturally the West needed to ban Russian cats and Tchaikovsky in response.
Real World Translation: belated response by Russian Duma (democratic parliament) to relentless aggression by the US/NATO since 2014 – including the murder of 14,000 civilians in Donbass, ie Russia was forced to intervene to protect Russian speaking Ukrainians from genocide by the US proxies. Also more than 30 bio-pathogen labs funded by the USA (by Victoria Nuland’s own admission) were discovered in Ukraine, so there WERE WMDs in-the-making in Ukraine.
International “Rules based order”:
Establishment version: even the USA cannot properly define WTF this crapulent term means.
Real World Translation: USA makes up their one-sided rules (to always benefit itself) and orders everybody else about, otherwise foreigners face sanctions or coups or assassination of their leaders or invasion. Nothing to do with United Nations International Law.
Far too many Newspeak and Doublethink terms to itemise here!!
Commenters can think of many more!!
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Speaking Truth is an act of Treason in an Empire of Lies.
Putin called the USA an Empire of Lies.
Who is the most prominent Truth speaker in the Empire?
Julian Assange – who is now being suitably punished for such Treason.
Because they cannot stop igniting wars in one part of the globe or another, that is the most pending danger NATO countries constitute to the welfare of human beings everywhere.
Professor John Mearsheimer said the war in Ukraine will be a footnote in the history books written about the world changes this war has triggered. This remark may provide the best explanation of the huge noise the NATO countries have made about providing Ukraine with more sophisticated armaments and with billions of dollars in order to prevent a Russian victory. It also explains the big media campaign led by the West about the so-called advance made by the Ukrainian army against the Russians in Kharkov area. The press conference by NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, and the US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, has to be seen and understood in light of the dire economic crisis which is biting into Europe.
Despite the iron fist laid on Western media, it is an open secret today that the sanctions imposed by the West against Russia have backfired on the West itself, and it has become clear that Western people are the ones suffering because of these sanctions, and not the Russian people as the western governments planned. In addition, the Eastern rapprochement between China and Russia is treading fast steps toward an alliance, and the Shanghai organization is attracting more member states, which in a short while, will become one of the most important world alliances that NATO countries do not want to see at all. Both China and Russia have announced that their future dealings and trade are going to be in Yuans and Rubles, which will start to weaken the dollar and shake its world status.
During the week and contrary to the expectations of Western media, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, announced that he is going to Kazakhstan for a Shanghai meeting with the aim of meeting with President Putin. Every time these two leaders meet, they add another brick to the fortified base of their alliance whose grand announced aim is to change the world system into a multipolar system after getting rid of Western hegemony once and for all.
Of course, western experts and planners know all this and dread it, but instead of mentioning it or trying to address it in the real world, these jumped to the domain that they know best; i.e. the military claiming to their audiences that “Ukrainian forces have been able to stall Moscow offensive in the Donbass strike back behind Russian lines and retake territory.” On this narrative, they built the argument that NATO countries should send more support to Ukraine, with more billions of dollars and with the most sophisticated arms. Their imagination was set free to imagine that this is a very important moment for the Ukrainian people and army, and we should support them in order to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine, as per their illusions.
First, there is no doubt that the press conference and all the media fever that came in its aftermath hailing progress made by Ukrainian forces against Russian forces was meant to change the focus of the Western people’s attention from the horrible consequences of the war on Ukraine on their daily lives and to stop the masses from taking to the streets to forcefully object to these policies, which proved to be disastrous to most of them.
Second, NATO countries have a history of supporting wars that have nothing to do with their geography or history. They now claim that they have to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to protect the Eastern borders of NATO. What about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; are those also bordering NATO, or threatening its power? And what about Taiwan now; is it on the borders of NATO too?
The history of these countries proves without a shadow of a doubt that the military industry is at the core of its survival and continuity, and that is why they cannot survive and keep their hegemony over the world without this industry being well and prosperous, knowing that for this industry to be well and prosperous, it can only feed on wars. That is why they cannot stop igniting wars in one part of the globe or another, and that is the most pending danger NATO countries constitute to the welfare of human beings everywhere.
What we have to remember is that we are dealing with two different worlds, two different systems of thinking, two different histories, and two very different objectives. The West, which has subjugated and colonized many countries across the world over centuries, has perfected the usage of media and psychological wars to keep people as its subject. Throughout history, Western colonial powers gave no thought to civilian casualties. A reminder of the answer of Madeleine Albright about millions of Iraqi children being killed; she said, “But it was worth it,” whereas Eastern powers represented by Russia in this war pay so much attention to avoiding unnecessary loss of civilian lives. They change their plans and their tactics if they can save lives in their military or on the adversary’s civilian lives. In fact, the Eastern attitude always believes in taking time. They are not in a hurry, and they do not rush to launch a media or psychological campaign because their objectives are far-reaching and by far nobler than those of the party whose main concern is to sell arms and accumulate more capital.
For those reasons and many others unlisted here, we have to take the Hollywood postures made by the NATO Secretary-General and the US Secretary of State with a huge pinch of salt. Their major aim was to divert attention from the huge disaster they have created to their people through this uncalculated and misconceived adventure. It would have been much wiser and historically correct to review their decisions and decide whether they should continue in this futile endeavor or acknowledge the new realities on the ground born from the rise of the East and its determination, supported by the majority of people on Earth, to put an end to Western hegemony and remap the world on the basis of equal integrity and mutual respect. This may take a bit more time than what most people desire, but the train has left the station and it will undoubtedly reach its abode. The rest are insignificant details that no one will mention in the future.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
When Green fanatic Robert Habeck, posing as Germany’s Economy Minister, said earlier this week “we should expect the worst” in terms of energy security, he conveniently forgot to spell out how the whole farce is a Made in Germany cum Made in Brussels crisis.
Flickers of intelligence at least still glow in rare Western latitudes, as indispensable strategic analyst William Engdahl, author of A Century of Oil, released a sharp, concise summary revealing the skeletons in the glamour closet.
Everyone with a brain following the ghastly Eurocrat machinations in Brussels was aware of the main plot – yet hardly anyone among average EU citizens. Habeck, Chancellor “Liver Sausage” Scholz, the European Commission (EC) Green Energy VP Timmermans, EC dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen, they are all involved.
In a nutshell: as Engdahl describes it, this is about “the EU plan to de-industrialize one of the most energy-efficient industrial concentrations on the planet.”
That’s a practical translation of the UN Green Agenda 2030 – which happens to be metastasized into crypto Bond villain Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset – now renamed “Great Narrative”.
The whole scam started way back in the early 2000s: I remember it vividly, as Brussels used to be my European base in the early “war on terror” years.
At the time, the talk of the town was the “European energy policy”. The dirty secret of such policy is that the EC, “ advised” by JP MorganChase as well as the usual mega speculative hedge funds, went all out into what Engdahl describes as “a complete deregulation of the European market for natural gas.”
That was sold to the Lugenpresse (“lying media”) as “liberalization”. In practice, that’s savage, unregulated casino capitalism, with the “free” market fixing prices while dumping long-term contracts – such as the ones struck with Gazprom.
How to decarbonize and destabilize
The process was turbo-charged in 2016, when the last gasp of the Obama administration encouraged massive export of LNG out of the US’s huge shale gas production.
For that one needs to build LNG terminals. Each terminal takes as much as 5 years to build. Within the EU, Poland and Holland went for it from the start.
As much as Wall Street in the past invented a “ paper oil” speculative market, this time they went for a speculative “paper gas” market.
Engdahl details how “the EU Commission and their Green Deal agenda to ‘decarbonize’ the economy by 2050, eliminating oil, gas and coal fuels, provided the ideal trap that has led to the explosive spike in EU gas prices since 2021.”
The creation of this “single” market control implied forcing illegal rule changes on Gazprom. In practice, Big Finance and Big Energy – which totally control anything that passes for “EU policy” in Brussels – invented a new pricing system parallel to the long-term, stable prices of Russian pipeline gas.
By 2019, an avalanche of Eurocrat energy “ directives” by the EC – the only thing these people do – had established a totally deregulated gas market trading, setting the prices for natural gas in the EU even as Gazprom remained the largest supplier.
As lots of virtual trading hubs in gas futures contracts started popping up across the EU, enter the Dutch TTF (Title Transfer Facility). By 2020 the TTF was established as the real EU gas benchmark.
As Engdahl points out, “TTF is a virtual platform of trades in futures gas contracts between banks and other financial investors. Outside, of course, of any regulated exchange.
So LNG prices soon started to be set by futures trades in the TTF hub, which crucially happens to be owned by the Dutch government – “the same government destroying its farms for a fraudulent nitrogen pollution claim.”
By any means necessary Big Finance had to get rid of Gazprom as a reliable source to allow powerful financial interests behind the Green Deal racket to dominate the LNG market.
Engdahl evokes a case very few know about across Europe: “On May 12, 2022 although Gazprom deliveries to the Soyuz gas pipeline through Ukraine were uninterrupted for almost three months of conflict, despite Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, the NATO-controlled Zelensky regime in Kiev closed a major Russian pipeline through Lugansk, that was bringing Russian gas both to his Ukraine as well as EU states, declaring it would remain closed until Kiev gets full control of its pipeline system that runs through the two Donbass republics. That section of the Ukraine Soyuz line cut one-third of gas via Soyuz to the EU. It certainly did not help the EU economy at a time Kiev was begging for more weapons from those same NATO countries. Soyuz opened in 1980 under the Soviet Union bringing gas from the Orenburg gas field.”
Hybrid War, the energy chapter
On the interminable soap opera involving the Nord Stream 1 turbine, the crucial fact is that Canada deliberately refused to deliver the repaired turbine to Gazprom – its owner – but instead sent it to Siemens Germany, where it is now. Siemens Germany is essentially under American control. Both the German and Canadian governments refuse to grant a legally binding sanction exemption for the transfer to Russia.
That was the straw that broke the (Gazprom) camel’s back. Gazprom and the Kremlin concluded that if sabotage was the name of the game, they couldn’t care less whether Germany received zero gas via Nord Stream 1 (with brand new Nord Stream 2, ready to go, blocked by strictly political reasons).
Kremlin spokesman Dmity Peskov took pains to stress
“problems in [gas] deliveries arose due to sanctions that have been imposed on our country and a number of companies by Western countries (…) There are no other reasons behind supply issues.”
Peskov had to remind anyone with a brain that it’s not Gazprom’s fault if “the Europeans (…) make a decision to refuse to service their equipment” which they are contractually obligated to do. The fact is the whole Nord Stream 1 operation hinges on “one piece of equipment that needs serious maintenance.”
Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who knows one or two things about the energy business, cleared up the technicalities:
“The entire problem lies precisely on [the EU’s] side, because all the conditions of the repair contract have been completely violated, along with the terms of shipping of the equipment.”
All that is inscribed into what Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov describes as “a total war declared against us”, which is “being waged in hybrid forms, in all areas”, with “the degree of animosity of our opponents – of our enemies” being “enormous, extraordinary.”
So none of this has anything to do with “Putin weaponizing energy”. It was Berlin and Brussels – mere messengers of Big Finance – which weaponized the supply of European energy on behalf of a financial racket, and against the interests of European industry and consumers.
Beware of the toxic trio
Engdahl has summarized how, “by systematically sanctioning or closing gas deliveries from long-term, low cost pipelines to the EU, gas speculators via the Dutch TTP have been able to use every hiccup or energy shock in the world, whether a record drought in China or the conflict in Ukraine, to export restrictions in the USA, to bid the EU wholesale gas prices through all bounds.”
Translation: casino capitalism at its finest.
And it gets worse, when it comes to electricity. There is a so-called EU Electricity Market Reform in progress. According to it, producers of electricity – from solar or wind – automatically receive “the same price for their ‘renewable’ electricity they sell to the power companies for the grid as the highest cost, i.e. natural gas.” No wonder the cost of electricity in Germany for 2022 increased by 860% – and rising.
Baerbock incessantly parrots that German energy independence cannot be secured until the country is “liberated from fossil fuels.”
According to Green fanaticism, to build the Green Agenda it’s imperative to completely eliminate gas, oil and nuclear power, which happen to be the only reliable energy sources as it stands.
And it’s here that we see the toxic trio Habeck/Baerbock/von der Leyen ready for their close up. They pose as saviors of Europe preaching that the only way out is to invest fortunes in – unreliable – wind and solar power: the “answer” from Providence to a gas price debacle manufactured by none other than Big Finance, Green fanaticism and Eurocrat “leadership”.
Now tell that to struggling pan-European households whose bills will surge to a whopping, collective $2 trillion as General Winter knocks on the door.
While US and western mainstream and corporate media remain biased in favor of Israel, they often behave as if they are a third, neutral party. This is simply not the case.
Take the New York Times coverage of the latest Israeli war on Gaza as an example. Its article on August 6, “Israel-Gaza Fighting Flares for a Second Day” is the typical mainstream western reporting on Israel and Palestine, but with a distinct NYT flavor.
For the uninformed reader, the article succeeds in finding a balanced language between two equal sides. This misleading moral equivalence is one of the biggest intellectual blind spots for western journalists. If they do not outwardly champion Israel’s discourse on ‘security’ and ‘right to defend itself’, they create false parallels between Palestinians and Israelis, as if a military occupier and an occupied nation have comparable rights and responsibilities.
Obviously, this logic does not apply to the Russia-Ukraine war. For NYT and all mainstream western media, there is no question regarding who the good guys and the bad guys are in that bloody fight.
‘Palestinian militants’ and ‘terrorists’ have always been the West’s bad guys. Per the logic of their media coverage, Israel does not launch unprovoked wars on Palestinians, and is not an unrepentant military occupier, or a racist apartheid regime. This language can only be used by marginal ‘radical’ and ‘leftist’ media, never the mainstream.
The brief introduction of the NYT article spoke about the rising death toll, but did not initially mention that the 20 killed Palestinians include children, emphasizing, instead, that Israeli attacks have killed a ‘militant leader’.
When the six children killed by Israel are revealed in the second paragraph, the article immediately, and without starting a new sentence, clarifies that “Israel said some civilian deaths were the result of militants stashing weapons in residential areas”, and that others were killed by “misfired’ Palestinian rockets.
On August 16, the Israeli military finally admitted that it was behind the strikes that killed the 5 young Palestinian boys of Jabaliya. Whether the NYT reported on that or not matters little. The damage has been done, and that was Israel’s plan from the start.
The title of the BBC story of August 16, ‘Gaza’s children are used to the death and bombing’, does not immediately name those responsible for the ‘death and bombing’. Even Israeli military spokesmen, as we will discover later, would agree to such a statement, though they will always lay the blame squarely on the ‘Palestinian terrorists’.
When the story finally reveals that a little girl, Layan, was killed in an Israeli strike, the language was carefully crafted to lessen the blame on her Israeli murderers. The girl, we are told, was on her way to the beach with her family, when their tuk-tuk “passed by a military camp run by the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad”, which, “at the exact moment, (…) was targeted by Israeli fire”. The author says nothing of how she reached the conclusion that the family was not the target.
One can easily glean from the story that Israel’s intention was not to kill Layan – and logically, none of the 17 other children murdered during the three-day war on Gaza. Besides, Israel has, according to the BBC, tried to save the little girl; alas, “a week of treatment in an Israeli hospital couldn’t save her life”.
Though Israeli politicians have spoken blatantly about killing Palestinians children – and, in the case of former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, “the Palestinian mothers who give birth to ‘little snakes’” – the BBC report, and other reports on the latest war, have failed to mention this. Instead, it quoted Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who reportedly said that “the death of innocent civilians, especially childr is heartbreaking.” Incidentally, Lapid ordered the latest war on Gaza, which killed a total of 49 Palestinians.
Even a human-interest story about a murdered Palestinian child somehow avoided the language that could fault Israel for the gruesome killing of a little girl. Furthermore, the BBC also labored to present Israel in a positive light, resorting to quote the occupation army’s statement that it was “devastated by (Layan’s) death and that of any civilians.”
The NYT and BBC have been selected here not because they are the worst examples of western media bias, but because they are often cited as ‘liberal’, if not ‘progressive’, media. Their reporting, however, represents an ongoing crisis in western journalism, especially relating to Palestine.
Books have been written about this subject, civil society organizations were formed to hold western media accountable and numerous editorial board meetings were organized to put some pressure on western editors, to no avail.
Desperate by the unchanging pro-Israel narratives in western media, some pro-Palestine human rights advocates often argue that there are greater margins within Israel’s own mainstream media than in the US, for example. This, too, is inaccurate.
The misnomer of the supposedly more balanced Israeli media is a direct outcome of the failure to influence western media coverage on Palestine and Israel. The erroneous notion is often buoyed by the fact that an Israeli newspaper, like Haaretz, gives marginal spaces to critical voices, like those of Israeli journalists Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.
Israeli propaganda, one of the most powerful and sophisticated in the world, however, can hardly be balanced by occasional columns written by a few dissenting journalists.
Additionally, Haaretz is often cited as an example of relatively fair journalism, simply because the alternatives – Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post and other right-wing Israeli media – are exemplary in their callousness, biased language and misconstruing of facts.
The pro-Israel prejudices in western media often spill over to Palestine’s sympathetic media throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, especially those reporting on the news in English and French.
Since many newspapers and online platforms utilize western news agencies, they, often inadvertently, adopt the same language used in western news sources, thus depicting Palestinian resisters or fighters, as ‘militants’, the Israeli occupation army as “Israeli Defense Forces” and the Israeli war on Gaza as ‘flare ups’ of violence.
In its totality, this language misinterprets the Palestinian struggle for freedom as random acts of violence within a protracted ‘conflict’ where innocent civilians, like Layan, are ‘caught in the crossfire.’
The deadly Israeli wars on Gaza are made possible, not only by western weapons and political support, but through an endless stream of media misinformation and misrepresentation. Though Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians in recent years, western media remains as committed to defending Israel as if nothing has changed.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website iswww.ramzybaroud.net
Russia’s Defense Ministry on May 20 announced the liberation of the Azovstal plant from Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Battalion, and some days later stated that sappers had demined an area of one and a half million square meters around the city’s port.
In early June, the ministry declared the facility ready for use anew. “The de-mining of Mariupol’s port has been completed. It is functioning normally, and has received its first cargo ships,” Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said at the time.
Russia promised to give ships safe passage, and on June 21, the Turkish ship Azov Concord left with a Russian escort. At Mariupol port that day, prior to setting off, the captain of the ship, Ivan Babenkov, spoke to the media, telling us that the vessel, without cargo, was heading to Novorossiysk for loading, and then on to its destination.
Rear Admiral Viktor Kochemazov, commander of the Russian naval base in Novorossiysk on the Black Sea’s northeastern coast, down the Kerch Strait from Mariupol, explained that while the corridor has been operational since May 25, the nearly one-month delay in departing was because “ships were significantly damaged during the conduct of hostilities.” Notably, he also said that some ships were deliberately damaged by Ukrainian forces in order to prevent them from leaving.
Yesterday, watching Turkey's Concord leave Mariupol port, escorted by Russia to safe waters. It was the first foreign ship to leave the port, after repairs & after Russia demined the deadly mess Ukraine left behind. pic.twitter.com/enU3TSJJjV
From aboard a Russian anti-sabotage forces boat, media watched the Azov Concord leave port. Further on, the ship would be met by warships of the Novorossiysk base and escorted to the Kerch Strait where FSB border control ships would continue to escort the ship.
A Bulgarian ship, the Tsarevna, was readying to depart the port next, “also following the same humanitarian corridor to its destination in accordance with plans for the use of the court by the owner,” Rear Admiral Kochemazov said.
Western press ignoring developments
Predictably, just as the Western media continues to ignore Ukraine’s war crimes against the Donbass republics, including not only the bombing of houses, hospitals, and busy markets – plus the killing and maiming of civilians – so too do they omit coverage of anything positive emanating from areas where Ukrainian forces have been ousted and stability restored.
Instead, Western media continues to spin the story that it’s Russia that’s blocking ports and preventing grain exports, and blame Moscow for “aggravating the global food crisis” – when in reality, it is Ukraine that has mined ports and burned grain storages.
More blatant disinformation from our US colleagues. They perfectly know that the Ukrainian ports are mined by Kiev and our offers of humanitarian sea passages were repeatedly rejected. And don’t trigger famine in #Ukraine by depriving it of grain-don’t tell us we didn’t warn you! https://t.co/Y9PqG9hoJZ
In fact, according to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, “70 foreign vessels from 16 countries remain blocked in six Ukrainian ports (Kherson, Nikolaev, Chernomorsk, Ochakov, Odessa and Yuzhniy). The threat of shelling and high mine danger posed by official Kiev prevent vessels from entering the high seas unhindered.”
While Russia maintains it has opened two maritime humanitarian corridors in the Black and Azov Seas, Kiev is apparently not engaging with representatives of states and ship-owning companies about the departure of docked foreign ships.
Meanwhile, in the same vein, media outlets like the New York Times (writing as always from afar) claim that Mariupol is “suffering deeply” under Russian rule (citing the runaway former mayor, nowhere near the city for months, who is the source of previous war propaganda) even describing the Azov Neo-Nazis as “the city’s last military resistance.”
Yet, what I’ve seen in multiple trips to Mariupol in the past couple of weeks is rubble being removed so that the rebuilding process can begin, newly established street markets, public transportation running, and calm in the streets.
While waiting for a flat tire to be changed, just entering Mariupol. Public transportation working. pic.twitter.com/e1nZh3P0fF
— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) June 26, 2022
The people of Mariupol have indeed suffered, but now that the Azov Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists no longer reign, they can live without fear of persecution, execution, rape, torture, and all of the other ‘democratic values’ of the forces backed by the West.
The rebuilding will take time, but with the port functioning anew, and the possibility now of also bringing reconstruction materials by sea, it can begin, ship by ship.
As a teacher of history, the topic of Nazi Germany is always one which generates numerous questions from students. How were the Nazis able to convince the public to vote for them? How did they convince the people to go along with their fascist agenda and barbaric policies? How was the Holocaust allowed to take place?
Despite discussing the role of propaganda and censorship, as well as the fear of opposing the Nazi regime, one still finds students often somewhat bemused. Moreover, many invariably argue that nowadays, due to social media, the Internet, and other methods of communication, the evils of Nazism could never succeed in flourishing again.
However, that is about to change. One only has to look at the manner in which the Azov Battalion, a fully-fledged Ukrainian Nazi militia, with significant influence, has been whitewashed in the space of ten weeks. Whereas prior to February 24th 2022, they were recognised as a neo-Nazi battalion, these fascists are now being portrayed as valiant defenders of an oppressed people, fighting bravely against insurmountable odds.
In the past, we have become only too well aware of the role played by the media and big tech in propagandising and manufacturing consent. Whether it’s the mainstream media parroting establishment talking points, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube censoring dissenting views, or Paypal denying media outlets access to their own accounts apparently due to their political stances, Western disinformation full-spectrum dominance appears to be at its zenith.
Yet, the perennial Western purveyors of fake news, such as The New York Times, CNN and the BBC, declare themselves to be gatekeepers of truth, integrity and morality. And this, despite their lies which facilitated the slaughter and deaths of over a million men, women and children, in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
But still it goes on, right up to the present. From the Ghost of Kiev to Snake Island, the Collective Western media has acted as stenographers for the Western and Ukrainian regimes. The examples are too numerous to mention, but the media coverage of the air strike at a railway station in Kramatorsk provided a striking example of the overt and cynical propaganda role the western media has played throughout this conflict.
The missile strikes that killed over fifty people and injured more than one hundred were initially widely reported, with images on front pages across the Western media. However, within forty-eight hours the story had disappeared and barely received a mention. This was due to an Italian news team identifying one of the missiles as being of the type used by Ukrainian forces. The narrative of Ukrainians killing civilians obviously didn’t fit into the propaganda of the Collective West, and consequently, the dead and injured found instant irrelevance.
Now the Western media has turned its malevolent myth-making to the Nazi Azov battalion in the Ukraine. An overtly Nazi formation, descended from the Fascist Banderites of World War 2, it is now being staunchly defended by the Collective West.
Interestingly, it had been previously accepted that the Azov were a far-right, Nazi militia, and indeed, their presence and influence was widely viewed as a dark force within the Ukraine. It’s fascist rituals and regalia, worship of the fascist Stepan Bandera, and its adherence to Nazi ideology, left nobody in any doubt that these were committed fascists, and they were commonly described as neo-Nazis in numerous Western media outlets.
However, since February 24th there has been a stunning shift.
Now, the fact that the Azov battalion is a Nazi organisation is glossed over. The BBC, a propaganda arm of the British State, ran a nine-minute puff piece, arguing, almost pleading, that the Azov fighters were not fascists, but simply a battalion integrated into the Ukrainian army. Meanwhile, MSNBC interviewed Azov Nazis teaching elderly women how to use weapons, and newspapers from the Financial Times to the New York Times are now portraying the Azov as brave defenders of the Ukraine.
An obvious aim of this shameless media operation is to delegitimise the Russian claims of denazification, by arguing that there is no Nazi problem in the Ukraine. Even on the rare occasion that the media refers to the ideology of the Azov units, and indeed, the presence of other fascist and far-right groups such as C14, Right Sector and Svoboda, it claims they have minimal impact on the politics of the Ukraine, pointing to their weak electoral performances. What they fail to point out, is that the mainstream’ parties are implementing policies that the fascists support. Moreover, the notion that parliamentary representation is a metric of influence is absurd when one looks at the likes of Al Qaeda and Isis.
In fact, a leader of the fascist group C14, Yevhen Karas, described the 2014 Maidan coup as a ‘victory of nationalist ideas’. He went on to assert that without the influence of fascist groups, Maidan would have been nothing but a ‘gay parade’.
But this is now an inconvenient truth for the Collective West. Consequently, Azov and their fellow travellers are no longer Nazis or fascists. Instead, they are merely ‘misunderstood patriots’.
Of course, this is nothing new. When it comes to hypocrisy, the Collective West has it in spades. Whether it’s supporting the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, ISIS and AL Nusra in Syria, or the fascists in Ukraine, the Collective West has shown itself to be devoid of any morality when it comes to serving their own interests.
Now, just as Isis and Al Nusra are ‘moderate rebels’, the fascists of Azov are well-meaning nationalist warriors.
So, according to our so-called liberal democracies, even though there might be bad Nazis, there are also good fascists, whose adherence to Nazism is just an ideological quirk. Obviously, those who are on our side are the good Nazis. And it’s the Collective West that always gets to decide who is who.
But one thing is now evident – the blatant manner in which Nazism has been made palatable due to an unrelenting, systematic propaganda campaign, will answer those questions posed by students regarding how German Nazis were able to attain power in 1933 and to subsequently pursue the policies that they did.
‘Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds’, I was once told many years ago.
The events of the past months have proven just how accurate that old adage is.
Originally from Ireland, Roddy Keenan is a teacher and freelance reporter based in the UK. Roddy specialises in international politics and is the author of US Presidential Elections 1968-2008: a narrative history of the race for the White House’.
We—I, and my spousal unit, Violeta—pulled into DC after a conventionally miserable flight from Guadalajara in seats apparently designed for dwarves with our feet almost in our pockets and Delta trying to sell us beer at seven dollars a can. I didn’t get it. If you can sell watery brew at seven balloonishly inflating greenbacks a can, why do you need an airline?
The occasion was a visit to a woman with whom I immediately became involved, though with Violeta’s permission. She weighs seven and a half pounds and has a smile that would make a dead man weep. This may have little geopolitical importance, though.
Anyway, the proud father celebrated having produced, or coproduced, a baby who probably deserves a world run by psychiatrically less fascinating adults, by taking about a dozen of us to Fogo da Something, a Brazilian restaurant on Pennsylvania across from the Trump Hotel. This costs $64 a head for all the meat and salad bar you could eat, desserts and drinks extra, so with tip you can crawl out, stuffed and economically depleted, for about $90. Salad bar good, desserts swell, meat tasteless. You can do better for a sixth the price at La Carreta, down the lake from us in Mexico.
The meal was a pre-guillotine experience, especially the restaurant. Or I hope so. The waiter says, “Hi! I’m Bruce and I am going to be your waitperson and do everything I can to make sure you have a wonderful, wonderful dining experience. We are orgasmically delighted to see you and….” When a waiter oozes like that, sure, he’s looking for tips, but I wonder, tips of what?
In Mexico waiters are courteous but you can tell they don’t want to sit in your lap or have a long-term relationship. In New York a waiter says, “What’ll it be?” and you say, “Eggs over medium, bacon on the side, cuppa mud,” and he says, “You got it.” Human. It gets the job done. You couldn’t write a Proust novel about it.
Anyway, the place was big, I’d guess between seventy-five and a hundred people doing the squat-and-gobble, likely disgorging on average a C-note per. This is DC, with the five richest counties in America, Montgomery, Loudoun, Fairfax, that kind of place, a city where the graft never stops, recession proof, where bribes run in freshets. Out there in Flyover Land, in Appalachia and the Rust Belt and the rural Deep South, families think going to Mickey D’s is a treat. And the swarming derelicts in the warm states increase in their medieval Ly diseased hordes.
Guillotine stocks. It’s the way to invest.
Washington is a rerun. In Paris in 1788 , creeping toward the Terror, the aristocracy was, like Washington’s upper crust, wealthy and schooled and cultured and cared not a withered farthing about the peasantry, as neither does Washington. Marie Antoinette didn’t really say, “Let them eat cake,” but they all thought it, and Hillary Antoinette, with her contempt for the Basket of Deplorables, expresses the same sentiment. There will be a price. Maybe anyway.
I spent two weeks in this diseased city wondering, “What are they thinking? The country is disintegrating internally, inflation growing like kudzu on a Georgia roadcut, living standards falling, the schools going to hell, and Washington is worried about…the Ukraine? Things crumble, resources are desperately needed domestically, and Washington buys the B-21, which Aviation Week prices at $640 million a copy of which, by design, you have probably never heard.”
It’s nuts. The racial situation is an intensifying disaster with continent-wide rioting, burning cities, ghetto kids graduating illiterate, desperate white people offing themselves with opioids, the rabble storming the Bastille—wait, this time I think it was the Capitol–but we need to raise prices by tariffs on China and Russia.
One night we went to eat with old friends from an earlier life. Like so many in DC, they were ninety-ninth percentile in intelligence, well educated, and decent people. We pondered, “Thai? Chinese? There’s a new Turkish place that’s supposed to be good.” Again, good people, though living in million-dollar houses, but…but…for much of the country Turkish, in some spiffy joint on Cap Hill or upper Connecticut Ave, would be the adventure of a lifetime. Washington has an ampleness of evil people, the Bidens, Blinkens, Victoria Newlands, Trump at one remove, but so many are just out of touch. There’s a new Turkish place in the city, and when was the last time they dined in Flint?
The media, a salt mine in which I once labored, are an embarrassment, utterly partisan, ranting and howling about Russia. OK, in war it is usual to cut the public off from information and to keep them stirred up with accounts of rape, human shield, “genocide,” chemical war, massacres, torture, a rule of television being to get a woman to cry and fill the frame. In Vietnam the media ran all over the country and actually reported what was happening, which eventually ended the war. This error is not being repeated.
{what bothers me is the apparent lack of curiosity, of doubt of official sources. Contrary to belief in some quarters, reporters are not given orders to adopt a particular point of view, though they know better than to contradict the publication’s line. No scribbler at the Washington Post will discuss racial differences in intelligence. But they are herd animals.}
Violeta, whose cynicism toward government—anybody’s government—would peel paint from a wall, watched a video clip purportedly of a Russian tank crushing a car occupied by Ukrainians. She noticed after research that the Russian tank was black without markings, like Ukrainian tanks, instead of green with markings, like all other Russian tanks. OK, maybe it was an undercover Russian tank. She also noticed in some of the Russian-destruction video, street signs are blurred out. Uh…, why dat? Anyone want to guess?
Why do reporters not pay attention? First, again, they are creatures of the pack. They live in the Beltway Terrarium, talk to each other, read each other, and so know they are right. Don’t their colleagues all say so? Second, they are painfully ignorant of matters military, knowing chiefly the bureaucracies involved in policy, contracting, and so on. This includes those for the WaPo, whom I knew—Gerge Wilson, Molly Moore, etc. As a comparison with the coverage of the Washington media, here is a piece by Scott Ritter, a former American intelligence officer stationed in, among other places, Moscow. It is long but contains the kind of knowledge that not one of the Beltways reporters, squalling, screeching, preening and yodeling has an earthworm’s grasp.
Why did Russia attack? Anyone who can read a map can see that since 1991 the US has been trying, with considerable success, to encircle Russia militarily. Russia has said over and over that it was not going to have American missiles on its border in the Ukraine any more than America would allow Chinese missiles in Tijuana. I encountered no one in DC who had even heard of this, though it has been going on for years. This is journalism?
Yes.
All things end, except those that don’t. On a cold rainy predawn morning we caught an Uber to Reagan National, returning to a country that has just left the Third World to one energetically returning to it. A stewardess aboard read the boilerplate about have a wonderful flight. She didn’t explain just how that laudable goal might be achieved. Remember, cometh the guillotine. Kachunk. Kachunk. Kachun.
*Following is a lengthy overview of my recent re-visit to the Donbass, on a two day media delegation, with a brief critique of some of the media’s slanted reporting. It is also a follow up from my 2019 visit to hard hit areas of the Donetsk People’s Republic. It is now 8 years of Ukraine’s war on the people of the Donetsk & Lugansk Republics.
Point of impact of March 14 Ukrainian missile attack on Donetsk. Photo: Eva Bartlett, March 24, 2022.
In the last week of March, I stood on a central Donetsk main street next to two of the impact points of a Ukrainian missile attack that had killed 21 civilians and injured nearly 40 more on March 14. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) maintains that their military intercepted Ukraine’s Tochka-U ballistic missile, and that not all of the cluster munitions inside had exploded in the city streets, thereby lessening the already terrible bloodshed it caused. Indeed, if all of the munitions had exploded, it would have been a bloodbath more horrific than the 21 killed.
Photo: Eva Bartlett, March 24, 2022.
Near the ATM, there were flowers and candles laid in memory of the civilians murdered that day, with haunting photos nearby depicting the aftermath of the bombing, the grisly scenes of the dead and the maimed—scenes you will generally never see blasted across Western corporate media, just as the same media were silent when terrorism struck civilian areas in Syria.
I’m intimately familiar with war zones, and with Western corporate media’s white-washing of the perpetrators’ crimes (Israeli crimes against Palestinians; Western-backed terrorists’ crimes against Syrians; Ukrainian military and Nazi crimes against the civilians of the Donbass—and also against Ukrainians proper), so the lack of media coverage on this recent Ukrainian war crime doesn’t surprise me.
They don’t report on it, or the myriad Ukrainian war crimes prior, because it doesn’t suit their narrative, a narrative that erases the eight years of Ukraine’s war against the four million people of the Donbass republics, killing at least 14,000 people, to give a modest estimate.
War crimes investigator, Ivan Kopyl, spoke about Ukraine’s March 14 attack, noting, “The warhead of a Tochka-U missile contains 50 cassettes of cluster munitions. We managed to find 28 traces of cluster explosions on the soil…A Tochka-U missile changes its orientation just before landing, so after it flies on a trajectory it makes a turn and falls vertically down before detonating at a certain height. The fragments then shower the surface in a radius of approximately 150 meters.”
I have one of those cluster fragments, a twisted and jagged square-shaped piece of metal—seemingly harmless looking on its own, but deadly when flying through the air at high speed, in great numbers.
The attack occurred around noon, when this central city street—not a military area, but a civilian one—would have been busy. Photos show a gutted bus and gutted cars. Pensioners, Koply noted, would have been lined up at the ATM right where the blasts occurred. “There was also damage to a yard where there are two kindergartens – there were several craters there,” he noted.
The strike on the heart of the city is among the latest in Ukraine’s litany of war crimes.
Ukraine again bombed Donetsk following the March 14 attack. Donetsk News Agency reported on March 30 that the Ukrainian forces’ bombing had killed one person and seriously injured four others. One of the girls injured in that attack fell into a coma, the DPR Ombudsman noted.
And just now, there’s been news of another Ukrainian Tochka-U attack. According to RT, at least 50 people (including 5 children) were killed at a railway station in Kramatorsk, where thousands of people were waiting for evacuation trains. Eduard Basurin, a representative of the DPR People’s Militia, stated that the attack was a missile containing prohibited cluster munitions.
“This is a fragment of the missile that hit the Kramatorsk train station…The AFU has blamed the Russians, but this picture of the missile shows that it is indisputably a Tochka-U rocket — used exclusively by the Ukrainian side. It’s the same kind of missile that two weeks ago hit the center of Donetsk and killed 27 civilians.
What’s that saying? Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times . . .”
As of March 31, the Ombudsman reported that there’s been 6,010 deaths, including 96 children, since Ukraine’s war began in 2014. And that’s only with regards to the DPR. In the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), which has also been under Ukrainian fire since 2014, as of late February, 1,762 civilians had been killed, including 35 children.
During my 2019 visit to the DPR, I went to the northern city of Gorlovka, of which I wrote:
“Gorlovka was hardest hit in 2014, especially on July 27, when the center was rocked by Ukrainian-fired Grad and Uragan missiles from morning to evening. After the dust settled and the critically-injured had succumbed to their wounds, at least 30 were dead, including five children. The day came to be known as Bloody Sunday.
A monument commemorates the Gorlovka victims of Ukrainian bombings and sniping from 2014-2017. Near a sculpture of an angel, over 230 names fill the marble slabs, the first dedicated solely to children, 20 of them.”
Photo: Eva Bartlett, March 24, 2022.
At the site of the March 14 bombing, DPR head Denis Pushilin spoke, outlining the chronology the last 8 years, from the violent coup in Ukraine and subsequent increase in radical Ukrainian nationalism, to the two republics’ decision to push for autonomy, to Ukraine unleashing hell on the 4 million people and continual violations of the (2014 & 2015) Minsk Agreements and the massive amounts of weapons pumped from the West to Ukraine (see also). [*Note: I’ll be adding a subtitled clip of his words in the next day or two.]
School and Hospital shelled by Ukrainian forces
The town of Volnovakha—on the road between Donetsk and Mariupol further south—was secured by DPR forces nearly two weeks prior to our visit. Entering the town, we passed destroyed homes and buildings, which was expected, as there was heavy fighting to liberate the area held by the Ukrainian forces.
As they did in their copy-paste reporting on liberated areas of Syria, most Western media reports on Volnovakha focus on the destruction, without any context as to why it occurred—these residential areas were occupied by Ukrainian forces, and not all of the destruction was from DPR forces’ fighting against the Ukrainian forces: the Ukrainian forces themselves fired on homes, and according to hospital staff, on the hospital itself.
In addition to not giving this context, most Western media in general depict the liberating forces as deliberately and wantonly destroying everything in sight. Some media went as far as to claim that Putin himself had destroyed the town. This cartoonish narrative, so prevalent in Western reports whitewashing terrorism in Syria and now in whitewashing Ukrainian forces’ crimes, unfortunately does achieve its intended effect: duping Western viewers into believing the opposite of reality–that the liberators are the war criminals.
In a central area of Volnovakha, Russian soldiers handed out humanitarian aid to lines of residents, including: bags of canned goods, fresh bread, water.
According to Alexander Yurievich Kachalov, the interim mayor, Ukrainian forces used civilians as human shields. “They made sure to destroy as much infrastructure as possible. They bombed buildings in order to leave ruins after they left, to make it harder for us to restore.”
This was common in Syria. Terrorist factions destroyed buildings and vehicles when fleeing, while leaving mines and booby traps on streets and in houses, to kill still more civilians and soldiers.
A woman waiting in line for humanitarian aid said, “They say Russia did this. This wasn’t Russia, Ukraine did it, destroyed everything here! They shot at our hospital. I work there. The new children’s and infection units have been destroyed. The outpatient clinic was destroyed. And then they left. They took the medical staff’s car and went away.”
At the destroyed hospital, Chief Physician, Viktor Fedorovich Saranov, said:
“[The Ukrainian Army] were there. There were tanks on our territory. There were guns and Grads outside the territory. I asked them to act in accordance with the Hague and Geneva conventions. I asked them to leave the hospital. They said it was war.
Many people come to us from nearby houses under fire. About 500-600 people came to our basement. We gave everyone three meals a day.
The second and third floors were occupied here. We were preparing for a long siege, and then it turned out like this: they conducted an attack. They evacuated the soldiers. And they mined the entrance to the intensive care unit. On the last day, when they were leaving, they shot at the intensive care unit.” The ICU, he said, had already been evacuated.
A woman who said she had worked at the hospital as a nurse for nearly 58 years said:
“On the 28th I was home alone. They soon started shelling. How can they do it with their local hospital? With patients here. They were laying in corridors, as they had been evacuated. They said there was no one in the hospital, no staff, no patients. This is a lie.”
Later, researching, I came across this news (*warning, graphic video at the link):
“Foreign mercenaries who were wounded in the Volnovakha hospital were shot by their own before leaving the city so that they could not tell anything. All the wounded have a control shot in the temple or the back of the head.”
On the road back towards Donetsk, we stopped at a school that had been shelled in late February.
According to Victoria Terichenko, head of the Dokuchaevsk city administration’s Department of Education, the shelling was by Ukrainian forces.
“Of course, Ukraine. There were only Ukrainian troops there. We had no military here, we were only civilians here.”
Fortunately, children weren’t at school at the time of the shelling, but Terichenko said a nursery school in the area had been shelled, with children inside, but again, fortunately, not on the side of the building shelled.
Horrors of Ukraine’s War on the People of the Donbass Republics
Ukraine’s relentless bombing and sniping of the people of Donbass is bad enough, along with it being ignored by Western press and politicians.
But in its eight years of warring on a people who rejected the rule of ultra-nationalists and Nazis, who just wanted to live autonomously, speak their own language, remember their history (Ukraine has rewritten history to glorify Nazis and Nazi collaborators and to vilify those who defeated Nazism, namely the Soviets), Ukraine has committed war crimes as heinous as ISIS and their co-terrorists in Syria, with more and more testimonies coming out of mass graves, rapes, torture of civilians and Donbass soldiers, beheadings. None of this shocking given the crimes these extremists commit against even Ukrainian civilians and journalists.
Along a sidewalk flanking a central park, there is a row of photos containing incredibly disturbing images of murdered LPR civilians.
Elders slaughtered on benches and in wheelchairs, the corpse of an infant, mass graves, a room used to imprison and torture people, the insignia of the notorious rapists and murderers of the “Tornado” battalion.
One photo shows Nazi graffiti left on a wall.
These are similar to the graffiti I saw in January 2009 left by Israeli soldiers who occupied the home of a Palestinian family, half of which had been killed by Israeli-fired White Phosphorous. One of the slogans written in Hebrew was: “Next time it will hurt more.” This, to the family whose infant had burned alive due to the White Phosphorous bombing, and whose surviving family members were badly mutilated from the prohibited weapon. In another house in eastern Gaza, likewise occupied and desecrated by Israeli soldiers, more hate and death graffiti had been left for the traumatized inhabitants.
Different people and places–same violent hatred of the population being targeted.
In the same park area, there is a monument to two journalists killed in 2014 by Ukrainian forces. Had these journalists been killed by Russia or Syria, their names would have been on the front pages of news sites and TIME magazine covers. In Syria, dozens of journalists have been killed by terrorist forces, to the silence of not only Western media but also of the groups supposedly advocating for journalists’ rights and safety.
In Shchastia, north of Lugansk, more civilians received humanitarian aid in the liberated town.
Humanitarian aid being handed out in Shchastia, a town north of Lugansk, liberated in early March.
Western Delivered Weapons on Display
In the two republics, we saw some of the vehicles and weapons captured from Ukrainian forces. Telesur journalist Alejandro Kirk spoke to me about these captured weapons and vehicles, noting the many foreign made weapons sold to Ukraine. Western countries continue to sell weapons to Ukraine.
On March 20, journalist Alexander Rubinstein wrote of the West’s exorbitant shipping of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine over the years. He noted:
“At least 32 countries have announced their intention to ship billions of dollars in weapons into Ukraine for use against Russian forces in Ukraine. Photographic evidence shows that these weapons have already ended up in the hands of neo-Nazi paramilitaries – units which have already received training and arms the US and its NATO allies.
All of this builds on $3.8 billion in military aid from the United States to Ukraine, the training of 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers by Canada and the United Kingdom, and a longstanding CIA program aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency.
…weapons furnished by NATO allies have been placed in the hands of the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi former paramilitary organization incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
The governments of Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom have presided over a massive program to train and equip Ukrainian soldiers for a full-scale war with Russia. Trainees have included top commanders of the Azov Battalion.
In late February, the European Union opened the floodgates of weapon shipments to Ukraine, approving financing through the aptly-named “European Peace Facility” to reimburse countries sending weapons to the country to the tune of $500 million USD. Another $55 million USD is earmarked for non-lethal military aid.
This February, the State Department announced $350 million in additional military aid to Ukraine, bringing “the total security assistance the United States has committed to Ukraine over the past year to more than $1 billion.”
Another $200 million was sent in early March, and following Zelensky’s March 16 appeal to Congress for more weapons, Biden is reportedly set to dole out another $800 in military aid including 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 9,000 anti-tank systems, 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, 400 shotguns, 400 grenade launchers, 20 million rounds of ammunition, 100 tactical drones, 25,000 sets of body armor and 25,000 helmets. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
These figures add to the $2.5 billion in military aid the US delivered between 2014 and the summer of 2021, bringing the total to $3.8 billion.”
A shipment of NLAW grenade launchers and instructors from #NATO countries arrived in #Kharkiv. The Azov regiment was the first to learn about new weaponry pic.twitter.com/CCzjN40rW7
Missing Context: What the Donbass People Have Endured In 8 Years of Ukraine’s War
After my September 2019 visit to the DPR, I wrote about the mostly elderly civilians I met who were living in battered homes damaged by Ukrainian shelling and heavy machine gun fire just 500 meters and 600 meters from Ukrainian forces. They remained there, they told me, mostly because they had nowhere else to go. Some spoke to me on camera, others were afraid of Ukrainian retaliation were they to be interviewed.
But their stories were all pretty much the same: at night, when the observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) left, the Ukrainian terrorizing began, with shelling throughout the night.
I also met a couple who had been living for 6 years in the stinking, dank, basement of a battered school, after Ukrainian bombing destroyed their home.
The DPR press officer who accompanied me and provided translations, spoke of how Ukrainian forces used weapons prohibited under the Minsk Agreements.
Dmitri, press officer of the DPR People's Militia, explaining the Ukrainian-fired shell found at home Zeitsevo resident. According to him, Ukrainian forces ~600m from this point.
Irina Dikun, head of the administration of Zaitsevo, another frontline village, spoke at length on the Ukrainian bombing that erupted nearly every night.
“They are destroying street by street in the town. They take one street and destroy it house by house. Then they turn to another street. There was a school, and a nursery school, before, but they were both destroyed by Ukrainian artillery.”
As in Syria, when schools and hospitals are actually destroyed (in Syria by terrorist factions), the same media that howls over militarized hospitals being targeted, the same media that also manufactures stories that never even occurred, is silent when the destroying is actually done, by Ukrainian forces.
In Zaitsevo, Irina explained fire trucks and medics couldn’t reach targeted homes, because the ambulances themselves became targets for Ukrainian forces (as happens in Gaza, where medics are targeted by Israeli forces, as I myself witnessed).
During that 2019 visit, I also interviewed some of the defenders of the DPR, painted by Western media as “separatists”, “pro-Russian forces” and other such descriptions meant to dehumanize. The same Western media so quick to humanize terrorists, including one who chewed the organ of a dead Syrian soldier.
One more relevant note from that visit: Dmitri asked what people in the West think about the fact there is a Nazi state in Europe. I replied that most people don’t know, because of the media whitewashing.
Which brings me to my recent return to the Donbass: I was curious to see whether the journalists on the same delegation as me would report truthfully, partial truths, or fabricated lies. As it turned out, my skepticism was warranted.
Distortions and Omissions of Some Western Media on the Ground in the Donbass
Telesur’s report gave the historical context needed to understand the present, including the coup in Ukraine, the active neo-Nazis in Ukraine (many of whom re entrenched in the Ukrainian army), the past eight years of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass, the 14,000 killed during these years, and the media blackout on the suffering of the Donbass people.
Sky News’ report was good, mentioning the civilians killed in Donbass by Ukraine’s war, including the March 14 attack and the school shelling, while also giving air time to the DPR’s Pushilin.
Neither of the two French channels’ (FranceInfo and TF1Info) reports on the delegation’s visit mentioned the March 14 Tochka-U attack, even though we visited the site & Pushilin spoke of it at length, much less the roughly 8,000 civilians killed in the two republics alone. I couldn’t find mention of the Azov or other Nazi battalions participating in the atrocities against the Donbass people, even though we heard about them and saw the graphic photo display in Lugansk. Their reports were framed as, “this is what Russia wants us to see,” regarding the humanitarian aid and reclaimed towns.
🔴 Le Kremlin a organisé ces dernières heures le premier voyage de presse dans le #Donbass, région d'#Ukraine où l'armée russe a réalisé ses plus fortes percées. @JeromeGarro était présent : notre envoyé spécial vous explique l'un des objectifs de cette opération, regardez ⤵. pic.twitter.com/3NN4cj6tRA
And of course, they focused greatly on the destruction, but not on the reasons for it, the implication being that the Russians and the “pro-Russian separatists” were responsible.
The chief physician of the hospital in Volnokava spoke at length and did specifically state the Ukrainian army had occupied the hospital, as did the nurse I cited, both of whom addressed the group of journalists.
FranceInfo’s mention of the hospital was framed as, “The Russians accuse the Ukrainians of having bombed it.” They included a few seconds of the chief physician saying he didn’t know who had done it, there were soldiers in the area, he didn’t know who.
But actually, the physician spoke to us for about several minutes, during which—as I wrote earlier—he did specifically talk about the presence of the Ukrainian army in the hospital.
One journalist asked: “Why did such destruction happen?” To which the chief physician replied, “I don’t know. They were military. And who they were: military, national battalions, army? I don’t know.”
That’s the bit France TV cherry picked, omitting his previous words about the Ukrainian army occupying the hospital, as well as omitting what he said afterwards: “There was Ukrainian territory on that side and the rockets were from that side. They mined the entrance to the intensive care unit. On the last day when they were leaving, they shot at the intensive care unit.”
Likewise, TF1Info included just a few seconds of the physician’s words on the Ukrainian cannons and machine guns at the hospital, but then followed up with the presenter’s caveat: it is one of the arguments often presented by the Kremlin—in spite of the fact that not only he, but the nurse and many people I encountered in the town specifically blamed the Ukrainian army for occupying the hospital and attacking it themselves when leaving.
If there were any further TF1Info reports from their journalist’s visit which might have included mention of Donbass’ dead, I couldn’t find them. Likewise, of FranceInfo.
This tactic of cherry picking quotes and omitting information is a standard corporate media war propaganda tactic and, unfortunately one seen over and over in Syria and elsewhere.
Journalist Vanessa Beeley wrote of one particularly horrific and sadistic terrorist massacre of 200 Syrian civilians, including 116 children, in April 2017, killed by an explosion as they were being evacuated from their terrorist besieged villages. She wrote of one traumatized woman who lost 20 family members (10 dead, 10 missing) having witnessed the attack.
“Then, after the filming session (by various agencies, including Dubai based Orient News & Qatari Al Jazeera) which lasted approximately ten minutes, she and the other parents were forced back onto the buses, at gunpoint, and locked inside. They had to watch, while the armed militia collected the dead, dying and mutilated bodies of their community’s children and flung them in the back of trucks and Turkish ambulances, before driving them away from their families in Rashideen.
Not one western media outlet questioned why these injured, dying and disoriented children were being piled on top of one another in the back of a truck that obviously belonged to Nusra Front.”
In fact, as they did routinely in their Syria coverage, media essentially relegated these dead civilians as unimportant, because their deaths didn’t fit the corporate narrative, even when civilians were repeatedly targeted by horrific terrorist bombings, mortars and missiles.
Global Media Abusing the Suffering of the Donbass to Further Anti-Russia War Propaganda, Just as They Did in Syria…
It is already bad enough that Western media generally don’t report on Ukraine’s relentless shelling of the Donbass, but all the more disgusting when it depicts a scene from the March 14 bombing of Donetsk as if it was a bombing of Lvov by Russia.
“The aftermath of the bombing of Donetsk by Ukrainian “Tochka-U” missile, used by Italian newspaper “La Stampa” as an image from Lvov“ *Propaganda noted in this article: The Hard Facts about Ukraine and DonbassAt the site of the Tochka-U missile attack in Donetsk, photos of the moments after the bombing, including the scene depicted in Western media as in Lvov. Photo: Eva Bartlett, March 24, 2022.
This isn’t the only instance. More recently, various Western media have used footage showing a multi-story apartment building in Donetsk that was bombed by Ukraine on March 30 to infer that the scene depicted was actually of Ukrainian areas that had been bombed by Russia. If you followed the war propaganda around Syria, you would be aware that this practice is common, not accidental.
New York post using Donetsk bombing photo to infer the scene was Kiev or elsewhere, under Russian bombing. The article has since been updated, photo removed. They would say it was a mistake. With corporate media, it never is. Luckily, at the time, some observers caught the lie.
And as with war propaganda on Syria, some media will use footage not even from Ukraine:
I could add paragraphs of examples of how Western media did this in Syria, but for the sake of brevity will state simply that this is one of many deceitful and deliberate propaganda tactics used to both downplay the hell civilians are suffering under Ukraine’s bombing, and instead to pretend Ukraine is the victim. How the journalists that propagate such lies live with themselves, I’ll never understand.
Finally, a word to some in independent media who feel the need to denigrate Russia’s denazification operation in Ukraine by snidely putting “special operation” in quotation marks, or others who took to social media to tell the world they don’t like war, and denounced Russia for its military operation (to stop a war): The people of the Donbass don’t like war, they didn’t ask for Ukraine to unleash hell upon them. Such posturing disrespects the at least 14,000 killed by Ukraine’s war.
As journalist Roman Kosarev, who has covered the war eightyears, said: “Russia isn’t starting a war, Russia is ending one.“
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 