“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific… This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s.”
— Benjamin Netanyahu
*
Stephen Kapos’ reply to Netanyahu:
As a Holocaust survivor my message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don’t give up. We are doing exactly the same and in the long term we’re going to prevail.
I’m out from the beginning at every march. A small group of survivors and descendants of survivors demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel.
The way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they’re doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.
And we stand repeatedly in the last few demos carrying placards hanging from the neck saying: “This Survivor of the Holocaust is against the genocide in Gaza.” And we also demonstrate against the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do [and] which does nothing else but increases anti-Semitism. So we are trying to counter that by demonstrating that Jews and Holocaust survivors are against that.
We have tremendously warm reception and appreciation from the typical members of the march. We get handshakes and hugs, and some people stand, and some women cry seeing the placards. It’s a great and warm experience.
When the right-wing section of the present government is trying to press for the banning of these marches on the ground that they create no-go areas for Jews, and they are anti-semitic, we know that this is complete rubbish, and the very opposite is true.
Today’s marches are having a very hopeful aspect that it is so large, so persistent, so global, that eventually the Western leadership, which are trying to deny what is actually going on, will be forced to face up to it. And I think we are not far from that.
I think there was no parallel to that in the Jewish Holocaust experience. In fact, there was great abandonment certainly from the leadership of the country. There were some very few, very brave people, who risked everything to be on the right side of history, and to rescue as many as possible, but the majority of people were too afraid and looked the other way.
There is a question of historic responsibility towards injustice, genocide and fascism. If you are just indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt, and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even at some degree of disadvantage and risk, if you want to be guilt free when history judges what’s happening.
*
Additional:
Stephen Kapos also recently spoke to host of Not the Andrew Marr Show, Crispin Flintoff, about his experiences as a boy, how this resonates with the situation in Gaza, why he has attended every Palestine demonstration since October, and how he has been invited to speak at the big national demonstration on Saturday 27th April:
In 2017, with the support of an extraordinary grassroots movement, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn came close to becoming prime minister. The establishment trembled. Britain stood on the threshold of huge political change. But within three years all, it seemed, was lost. What happened and why?
Produced by award-winning radical film-maker Platform Films, with contributions from Jackie Walker, Ken Loach, Andrew Murray, Graham Bash and Moshé Machover, and narrated by Alexei Sayle, this feature-length documentary film explores a dark and murky story of political deceit and outrageous antisemitic smears. It also uncovers the critical role played by current Labour leader, Keir Starmer and asks if the movement which backed Corbyn could rise again.
*
Additional: Cancel culture
Screenings of the documentary “Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie” have been repeatedly blocked ever since its release and so embedded below are some of the instances of cancel culture that have dogged the organisers of events:
Above, Chris Jury of the Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival speaks with Crispin Flintoff about the failed attempt to stop the film being shown last June and how people rallied to make sure it was put on.
*
Although cleared of anti-Semitism by lawyer working for the festival, the film was likewise blocked at last year’s Glastonbury. Damien Willey explains how the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl, was extolling how pleased she was that the Eavis family who run the festival had decided to drop it, and how this caused uproar because it was only back in 2017 that Michael Eavis invited Corbyn to speak on the main stage. Well, look no further than the commercial sponsors to understand how the ban came about:
But due to popular demand, it was finally screened at Glastonbury anyway, albeit in a separate zone.
*
Finally, Crispin Flintoff speaks to other organisers across the country including Gill McCall who had by then screened the film three times in Wimbledon; John Kingston who organised five screenings in Bournemouth (of which two were cancelled); and Peter Doyle in Carlisle who managed to organise a screening but only after two cancellations. Predictably, all of the bans and attempts at censorship backfired and simply helped to spark more interest and expand the audience:
“[Israel] is a colonial enterprise that has decided willingly to desecrate and exploit Jewish symbols in favour of its settler project and we are supposed to distance ourselves from that. If you are using the Star of David as a military symbol, as an icon of conquest, how is that my fault? If you are levelling neighbourhoods to the ground then planting the Star of David in the middle of the neighbourhood; if you are literally carving the Star of David in the faces of young Palestinian men; how are we supposed to distance ourselves from this conflation? When this government is intentionally explicitly and institutionally conflating Judaism, the religion, with Zionism, a racist ideology, the burden and the responsibility of making the distinction does not fall on the oppressed. It does not fall on the colonised when they are exploiting that conflation in their favour. This falls on them.”
— Mohammed Al-Kurd [from 8:35 mins]
*
***
In the world today, there is just one overtly racist regime left standing and that is the one existing in Israel. Ever since its formation in 1948, when the Zionists came to power, it has periodically ethnically cleansed the land of its indigenous Palestinian population while it also maintains a strict and ever-tightening apartheid system. In consequence, Israel is an anachronism, because racism of this full-blown kind has otherwise been totally eradicated across the world.
Historically being racist has always equated to the false belief that your own ‘race’ or people should dominate others. Thus, as a racist you acted to ensure this happened by means of both the segregation and subjugation of those others. This is why in the past (as now) true racism always results in apartheid, expulsion and/or murder. It is why all true racism is so horrific.
Moreover, racism has traditionally followed from a parallel false belief that your own ‘race’ is inherently superior to others. And seventy-plus years ago, a great many people (especially European people) held on very tightly to this belief, buttressing their opinions with the popular science of the day. However, with the discovery of DNA and advent of real genetics, such pseudoscientific foundations were slowly dismantled altogether.
There is no race science today. In consequence, bigotry relies on cultural distinctions between peoples, which alone maintain falsehoods of racial superiority. Hence, today’s racist pretence is not that the others are genetically inferior, but that their upbringing, their lifestyle, and most importantly their religio-political beliefs, are second-rate at best, and at worst reprehensible. “Islamophobia” is a deeply problematic label, but it is also an illuminating one.
Stepping back from this, we should now recognise that the very definition of racism has been shifted in response to these changes of outlook. Indeed, the very concept of ‘racism’ has been steadily redefined and purposefully weaponised to ensure in its new formulation, the label better attaches to words and opinions than to actions and deeds.
Today, anyone who fails to stick within the bounds of acceptable thought and language on issues of ‘identity’, and in this specific case of ethnicity, is most likely to be deemed then castigated and marginalised as ‘a racist’. Meanwhile, the Western establishment effectively maintains a global hegemony – an empire – by means of subjugating the majority of the world’s population just as it did historically; by using all the well-honed tools of the old-school racists, but as it does so, there is nowadays a softer language that neoimperialism fosters.
The “war on terror” has been the single standout example of the new racism, because you can only legitimately “shock and awe” a lesser people. This campaign of slaughter of people of darker skin colour was done on the pretext that they represented an immediate danger or (without irony) these same people need saving and so we later came to their rescue in “humanitarian interventions”. In short, the entire western establishment is racist to its core. Or to paraphrase Josep Borrell, we are the garden, they are the jungle:
Yet, Israel still stands apart in this regard, since, to reiterate, it is the last remaining island of European settler colonial racism. So racism, the very word itself, has had to been reinvented to defend Israel in particular. And our new definition of “anti-Semitism” then enables the West to put aside the origins of this obscene ideology, and reattach it. To forget the rapacious imperialism of the western powers, and to look past the real-time murder of women and children whose only crime was to be born with the wrong ethnicity. To fixate instead upon a misplaced word or any word that calls back our attention to the real horrors of actual racism that still remain an everyday Twenty-first Century reality most especially in Palestine today.
Why are slogans worse than genocide? To permit genocide, of course.
*
Additional:
When I posted this article I noticed that the original version of Josep Borrell’s notorious speech has restricted viewing. Incredible isn’t it? Anyway, here’s a different version uploaded by MME that you are still permitted to view without clicking away to the Youtube link:
France could be leading the American people down a path toward a nuclear conflict decidedly not in the interests of the American people – or of humanity itself, VIPS warns President Joe Biden.
March 24, 2024
ALERT MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: On the Brink of Nuclear War
Mr. President:
France is reportedly preparing to dispatch a force of some 2,000 troops — roughly a reinforced brigade built around an armored battalion and two mechanized battalions, with supporting logistical, engineering, and artillery troops attached — into Ukraine sometime in the not-so-distant future.
This force is purely symbolic, inasmuch as it would have zero survivability in a modern high-intensity conflict of the scope and scale of what is transpiring in Ukraine today. It would not be deployed directly in a conflict zone, but would serve either as
(1) a screening force/tripwire to stop Russia’s advance; or
(2) a replacement force deployed to a non-active zone to free up Ukrainian soldiers for combat duty. The French Brigade reportedly will be supplemented by smaller units from the Baltic states.
This would be introducing combat troops of a NATO country into a theater of war, making them “lawful targets” under the Law of War.
Such units would apparently lack a NATO mandate. In Russia’s view, however, this may be a distinction without a difference. France appears to be betting – naively – that its membership in NATO would prevent Russia from attacking French troops. Rather, it is highly likely that Russia would attack any French/Baltic contingent in Ukraine and quickly destroy/degrade its combat viability.
In that case, French President Macron may calculate that, after Russian attacks on the troops of NATO members – NATO mandate or not – he could invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter and get the NATO alliance to intervene. Such intervention would likely take the form of aircraft operating from NATO nations – and perhaps include interdiction missions against tactical targets inside Russia.
On Precipice of Nuclear War?
Doctrinally, and by legal right, Russia’s response would be to launch retaliatory strikes also against targets in NATO countries. If NATO then attacks strategic targets inside Russia, at that point Russia’s nuclear doctrine takes over, and NATO decision-making centers would be hit with nuclear weapons.
We do not believe Russia will initiate a nuclear attack against the U.S., but rather would leave it up to the United States to decide if it wants to risk destruction by preparing to launch a nuclear strike on Russia. That said, Russian strategic forces have improved to the point that, in some areas – hypersonic missiles, for example – its capability surpasses that of the U.S. and NATO.
In other words, the Russian temptation to strike first may be a bit stronger than during past crises, and we are somewhat less confident that Russia would want to “go second”.
Another disquieting factor is that the Russians are likely to believe that Macron’s folly has the tacit approval of some key U.S. and other Western officials, who seem desperate to find some way to alter the trajectory of the war in Ukraine – the more so, as elections draw near.
What Needs to Be Done
Europe needs to understand that France is leading it down a path of inevitable self-destruction.
The American people need to understand that Europe is leading them to the cusp of nuclear annihilation.
Since Russian leaders may suspect that Macron is working hand in glove with Washington, the U.S. needs to make its position publicly and unambiguously clear.
And if France and the Baltics insist on sending troops into Ukraine, it must also be made clear that such action has no NATO mandate; that Article 5 will not be triggered by any Russian retaliation; and that the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including those nuclear weapons that are part of the NATO deterrent force, will not be employed as a result of any Russian military action against French or Baltic troops.
Void of such clarity, France would be leading the American people down a path toward a nuclear conflict decidedly not in the interests of the American people – or of humanity itself.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP,
VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard Black, former Virginia State Senator; Colonel, USA (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Judge Advocate General (associate VIPS)
Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer (ret) and former Office Director in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Graham E. Fuller, Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Philip Giraldi, C.I.A., Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq and Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
James George Jatras, former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Senate leadership (Associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, former C.I.A. and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
John Kiriakou, former C.I.A. Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., U.S. Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Douglas Macgregor, Colonel, USA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Ray McGovern, former U.S. Army infantry/intelligence officer & C.I.A. analyst; C.I.A. Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & C.I.A. political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, U.S. Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Pedro Israel Orta, former C.I.A. and Intelligence Community (Inspector General) officer
Scott Ritter, former MAJ, USMC; former U.N. Weapons Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War
Click here to read the same piece as it was originally published by Consortium News.
Veteran media critic Jonathan Cook recently talked to Declassified UK about his latest article (reproduced below in full) exposing the Western media’s pro-Israel bias, from the Guardian to the New York Times. He also discussed how independent media can avoid algorithm censorship and make Palestine’s plight heard:
***
How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza | Jonathan Cook
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters
The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.
Liberal democracy is not what it seems.
It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.
But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?
Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.
What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?
And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.
The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.
The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.
Depravity on show
The West is desperately trying to cope. When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.
They are given a name. It is Russia. It is Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. It is China. And right now, it is Hamas.
There must be an enemy. But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry – a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years – that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore. The excuses are hard to swallow.
Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter? Does the West really believe that the attack of 7 October warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?
To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things. First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look. And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.
Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.
Starved by Israel
To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage – especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.
How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians? After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.
A headline in the New York Times, for example, told readers last month, “Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children”, as if this were a famine in Africa – a natural disaster, or an unexpected humanitarian catastrophe – rather than a policy declared in advance and carefully orchestrated by Israel’s top echelons.
No, NYT, starvation isn't stalking Gaza's children, like some weird, abstract predator. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza's children by blocking aid.
The Financial Times offered the same perverse framing: “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza”.
But starvation is not an actor in Gaza. Israel is. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children. It renews that policy each day afresh, fully aware of the terrible price being inflicted on the population.
As the head of Medical Aid for Palestinians warned of developments in Gaza: “Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”
Last week Unicef, the United Nations children’s emergency fund, declared that a third of children aged under two in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished. Its executive director, Catherine Russell, was clear: “An immediate humanitarian cease-fire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering.”
Were it really starvation doing the stalking, rather than Israel imposing starvation, the West’s powerlessness would be more understandable. Which is what the media presumably want their readers to infer.
But the West isn’t powerless. It is enabling this crime against humanity – day after day, week after week – by refusing to exert its power to punish Israel, or even to threaten to punish it, for blocking aid.
Not only that, but the US and Europe have helped Israel starve Gaza’s children by denying funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, the main humanitarian lifeline in the enclave.
All of this is obscured – meant to be obscured – by headlines that transfer the agency for starving children to an abstract noun rather than a country with a large, vengeful army.
Attack on aid convoy
Such misdirection is everywhere – and it is entirely intentional. It is a playbook being used by every single Western media outlet. It was all too visible when an aid convoy last month reached Gaza City, where levels of Israeli-induced famine are most extreme.
In what has come to be known by Palestinians as the “Flour Massacre”, Israel shot into large crowds desperately trying to get food parcels from a rare aid convoy to feed their starving families. More than 100 Palestinians were killed by the gunfire, or crushed by Israeli tanks or hit by trucks fleeing the scene. Many hundreds more were seriously wounded.
It was an Israeli war crime – shooting on civilians – that came on top of an Israeli crime against humanity – starving two million civilians to death.
The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off. It has been repeated several times, though you would barely know it, given the paucity of coverage.
The depravity of using aid convoys as traps to lure Palestinians to their deaths is almost too much to grasp.
But that is not the reason the headlines that greeted this horrifying incident so uniformly obscured or soft-soaped Israel’s crime.
For any journalist, the headline should have written itself: “Israel accused of killing over 100 as crowd waits for Gaza aid.” Or: “Israel fires into food aid crowd. Hundreds killed and injured”
But that would have accurately transferred agency to Israel – Gaza’s occupier for more than half a century, and its besieger for the last 17 years – in the deaths of those it has been occupying and besieging. Something inconceivable for the Western media.
So the focus had to be shifted elsewhere.
BBC contortions
The Guardian’s contortions were particularly spectacular: “Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks”.
The massacre by Israel was disappeared as mysterious “food aid-related deaths”, which in turn became secondary to the Guardian’s focus on the diplomatic fallout.
Readers were steered by the headline into assuming that the true victims were not the hundreds of Palestinians killed and maimed by Israel but the Israeli hostages whose chances of being freed had been “complicated” by “food aid-related deaths”.
The headline on a BBC analysis of the same war crime – now reframed as an author-less “tragedy” – repeated the New York Times’ trick: “Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza”.
Another favourite manoeuvre, again pioneered by the Guardian, was to cloud responsibility for a clear-cut war crime. Its front-page headline read: “More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy”.
Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene. In fact, worse, the crime scene was removed too. Palestinians “died” apparently because of poor aid management. Maybe UNRWA was to blame.
Chaos and confusion became useful refrains for media outlets keener to shroud culpability. The Washington Post declared: “Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame”. CNN took the same line, downgrading a war crime to a “chaotic incident”.
But even these failings were better than the media’s rapidly waning interest as Israel’s massacres of Palestinians seeking aid became routine – and therefore harder to mystify.
A few days after the Flour Massacre, an Israeli air strike on an aid truck in Deir al-Balah killed at least nine Palestinians, while last week more than 20 hungry Palestinians were killed by Israeli helicopter gunfire as they waited for aid.
“Food aid-related” massacres – which had quickly become as normalised as Israel’s invasions of hospitals – no longer merited serious attention. A search suggests the BBC managed to avoid giving significant coverage to either incident online.
Food-drop theatrics
Meanwhile, the media has ably of Israel imposing a famine on Gaza compounded by the US and Europe de-funding UNRWA, the only agency that could mitigate that famine.
British and US broadcasters excitedly joined air crews as their militaries flew big-bellied planes over Gaza’s beaches, at great expense, to drop one-off ready-made meals to a few of the starving Palestinians below.
Given that many hundreds of truckloads of aid a day are needed just to stop Gaza sliding deeper into famine, the drops were no more than theatrics. Each delivered at best a solitary truckload of aid – and then only if the palettes didn’t end up falling into the sea, or killing the Palestinians they were meant to benefit.
The operation deserved little more than ridicule.
Instead, dramatic visuals of heroic airmen, interspersed with expressions of concern about the difficulties of addressing the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, usefully distracted viewers’ attention not only from the operations’ futility but from the fact that, were the West really determined to help, it could strong-arm Israel into letting in far more plentiful aid by land at a moment’s notice.
The media were equally swept up by the Biden administration’s second, even more outlandish scheme to help starving Palestinians. The US is to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coast so that aid shipments can be delivered from Cyprus.
The plot holes were gaping. The pier will take two months or more to construct, when the aid is needed now. In Cyprus, as at the land crossings into Gaza, Israel will be in charge of inspections – the main cause of hold-ups.
And if the US now thinks Gaza needs a port, why not also get to work on a more permanent one?
The answer, of course, might remind audiences of the situation before 7 October, when Gaza was under a stifling 17-year siege by Israel – the context for Hamas’ attack that the Western media never quite finds the space to mention.
For decades, Israel has denied Gaza any connections to the outside world it cannot control, including preventing a sea port from being built and bombing the enclave’s only airport way back in 2001, shortly after it was opened.
And yet, at the same time, Israel’s insistence that it no longer occupies Gaza – just because it has done so at arm’s length since 2005 – is accepted unquestioningly in media coverage.
Again, the US has decisive leverage over Israel, its client state, should it decide to exercise it – not least billions in aid and the diplomatic veto it wields so regularly on Israel’s behalf.
The question that needs asking by the media on every piece about “starvation stalking Gaza” is why is the US not using that leverage.
In a typical breathless piece titled “How the US military plans to construct a pier and get food into Gaza”, the BBC ignored the big picture to drill down enthusiastically on the details of “huge logistical” and “security challenges” facing Biden’s project.
The article revisited precedents from disaster relief operations in Somalia and Haiti to the D-Day Normandy landings in the Second World War.
Credulous journalists
In support of these diversionary tactics, the media have also had to accentuate the atrocities of Hamas’ 7 October attack – and the need to condemn the group at every turn – to contrast those crimes from what might otherwise appear even worse atrocities committed by Israel on the Palestinians.
That has required an unusually large dose of credulousness from journalists who more usually present as hard-bitten sceptics.
Babies being beheaded, or put in ovens, or hung out on clothes lines. No invented outrage by Hamas has been too improbable to have been denied front-page treatment, only to be quietly dropped later when each has turned out to be just as fabricated as it should have sounded to any reporter familiar with the way propagandists exploit the fog of war.
Similarly, the entire Western press corps has studiously ignored months of Israeli media revelations that have gradually shifted responsibility for some of the most gruesome incidents of 7 October – such as the burning of hundreds of bodies – off Hamas’ shoulders and on to Israel’s.
Though Western media outlets failed to note the significance of his remarks, Israeli spokesman Mark Regevadmitted that Israel’s numbering of its dead from 7 October had to be reduced by 200 because many of the badly charred remains turned out to be Hamas fighters.
Testimonies from Israeli commanders and officials show that, blindsided by the Hamas attack, Israeli forces struck out wildly with tank shells and Hellfire missiles, incinerating Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives indiscriminately. The burnt cars piled up as a visual signifier of Hamas’ sadism are, in fact, evidence of, at best, Israel’s incompetence and, at worst, its savagery.
The secret military protocol that directed Israel’s scorched-earth policy on 7 October – the notorious Hannibal procedure to stop any Israeli being taken captive – appears not to have merited mention by either the Guardian or the BBC in their acres of 7 October coverage.
Despite their endless revisiting of the 7 October events, neither has seen fit to report on the growing demands from Israeli families for an investigation into whether their loved ones were killed under Israel’s Hannibal procedure.
Nor have either the BBC or the Guardian reported on thecomments of the Israeli military’s ethics chief, Prof Asa Kasher, bewailing the army’s resort to the Hannibal procedure on 7 October as “horrifying” and “unlawful”.
Claims of bestiality
Instead, liberal Western media outlets have repeatedly revisited claims that they have seen evidence – evidence they seem unwilling to share – that Hamas ordered rape to be used systematically by its fighters as a weapon of war. The barely veiled implication is that such depths of depravity explain, and possibly justify, the scale and savagery of Israel’s response.
Note that this claim is quite different from the argument that there may have been instances of rape on 7 October.
That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.
To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.
But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.
Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.
But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.
More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.
‘Conspiracy of silence’
The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.
However, under questioning from the Intercept, a spokesperson for the New York Times readily walked back the paper’s original certainty, conceding instead that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” [emphasis added] Even that appears too strong a conclusion.
Holes in the Times’ reporting quickly proved so glaring that its popular daily podcast pulled the plug on an episode dedicated to the story after its own fact check.
The rookie reporter assigned to the task, Anat Schwartz, has admitted that despite scouring the relevant institutions in Israel – from medical institutions to rape crisis centres – she found no one who could confirm a single example of sexual assault that day. She was also unable to find any forensic corroboration.
She later told a podcast with Israel’s Channel 12 that she viewed the lack of evidence to be proof of “a conspiracy of silence”.
Instead, Schwartz’s reporting relied on a handful of testimonies from witnesses whose other easily disprovable assertions should have called into question their credibility. Worse, their accounts of instances of sexual assault failed to tally with the known facts.
One paramedic, for example, claimed two teenage girls had been raped and killed at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. When it became clear nobody fitted the description there, he changed the crime scene to Kibbutz Beeri. None of the dead there fitted the description either.
Nonetheless, Schwartz believed she finally had her story. She told Channel 12: “One person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random.”
Schwartz got further confirmation from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organisation, whose officials were already known to have fabricated Hamas atrocities on 7 October, including the various claims of depraved acts against babies.
No forensic evidence
Interestingly, though the main claims of Hamas rape have focused on the Nova music festival attacked by Hamas, Schwartz was initially sceptical – and for good reason – that it was the site of any sexual violence.
As Israeli reporting has revealed, the festival quickly turned into a battlefield, with Israeli security guards and Hamas exchanging gunfire and Israeli attack helicopters circling overhead firing at anything that moved.
Schwartz concluded: “Everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place. How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like – it is impossible. Either you hide, or you – or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”
But Schwartz dropped her scepticism as soon as Raz Cohen, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, agreed to speak to her. He had already claimed in earlier interviews a few days after 7 October that he had witnessed multiple rapes at Nova, including corpses being raped.
But when he spoke to Schwartz he could only recall one incident – a horrific attack that involved raping a woman and then knifing her to death. Undermining the New York Times’ central claim, he attributed the rape not to Hamas but to five civilians, Palestinians who poured into Israel after Hamas fighters broke through the fence around Gaza.
Notably, Schwartz admitted to Channel 12 that none of the other four people hiding in the bush with Cohen saw the attack. “Everyone else is looking in a different direction,” she said.
And yet in the Times’ story, Cohen’s account is corroborated by Shoam Gueta, a friend who has since deployed to Gaza where, as the Intercept notes, he has been posting videos of himself rummaging through destroyed Palestinian homes.
Another witness, identified only as Sapir, is quoted by Schwartz as witnessing a woman being raped at Nova at the same time as her breast is amputated with a box cutter. That account became central to the Guardian’s follow-up report in January.
Yet, no forensic evidence has been produced to support this account.
But the most damning criticism of the Times’ reporting came from the family of Gal Abdush, the headline victim in the “Screams without Words” story. Her parents and brother accused the New York Times of inventing the story that she had been raped at the Nova festival.
Moments before she was killed by a grenade, Abdush had messaged her family and made no mention of a rape or even a direct attack on her group. The family had heard no suggestion that rape was a factor in Abdush’s death.
A woman who had given the paper access to photos and video of Abdush taken that day said Schwartz had pressured her to do so on the grounds it would help “Israeli hasbara” – a term meaning propaganda designed to sway foreign audiences.
Schwartz cited the Israeli welfare ministry as claiming there were four survivors of sexual assault from 7 October, though no more details have been forthcoming from the ministry.
Back in early December, before the Times story, Israeli officials promised they had “gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas”. None of those testimonies has materialised.
None ever will, according to Schwartz’s conversation with Channel 12. “There is nothing. There was no collection of evidence from the scene,” she said.
Nonetheless, Israeli officials continue to use the reports by the New York Times, the Guardian and others to try to bully major human rights bodies into agreeing that Hamas used sexual violence systematically.
Which may explain why the media eagerly seized on the chance to resurrect its threadbare narrative when UN official Pramila Patten, its special representative on sexual violence in conflict, echoed some of their discredited claims in a report published this month.
The media happily ignored the fact that Patten had no investigative mandate and that she heads what is in effect an advocacy group inside the UN. While Israel has obstructed UN bodies that do have such investigative powers, it welcomed Patten, presumably on the assumption that she would be more pliable.
In fact, she did little more than repeat the same unevidenced claims from Israel that formed the basis of the Times and Guardian’s discredited reporting.
Statements retracted
Even so, Patten included important caveats in the small print of her report that the media were keen to overlook.
At a press conference, she reiterated that she had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.
She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she conceded it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on 7 October was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.
All of that was ignored by the media. In typical fashion, a Guardian article on her report asserted wrongly in its headline: “UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages”.
Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.
As the US Jewish scholar Normal Finkelstein has pointed out, Patten also relied on open-source material: 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence. Or as Patten phrased it: “No tangible indications of rape could be identified.”
She admitted she had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and had not met a single survivor of rape or sexual assault.
And she noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”.
Collusion in genocide
If anything has been found to be systematic, it is the failings in the Western media’s coverage of a plausible genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Last week a computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives, even as the death-toll ratio showed that 30 times as many Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza than Hamas had killed Israelis on 7 October.
The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.
In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.
A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.
Faced with a plausible case of genocide – one being televised for months on end – even the liberal elements of the Western media have shown they have no serious commitment to the liberal democratic values they are supposedly there to uphold.
They are not a watchdog on power, either the power of the Israeli military or Western states colluding in Israel’s slaughter. Rather the media are central to making the collusion possible. They are there to disguise and whitewash it, to make it look acceptable.
Indeed, the truth is that, without that help, Israel’s allies would long ago have been shamed into action, into stopping the slaughter and starvation. The Western media’s hands are stained in Gaza’s blood.
Click here to read the same article as it originally appeared on Declassified UK published on March 20th.
And here to find it reprinted on Jonathan Cook’s official website on the same day.
“I don’t know what to say to be honest. There’s no tears left to shed. There’s no pleas left to make. What else is needed to happen? Are they are they waiting for our complete annihilation, because they are annihilating Gaza as we as we speak.” — Shahd Abusalama
*
Shahd Abusalama is a Palestinian academic who was born and raised in Jabalia refugee camp on the Gaza Strip. Her grandparents were among the first wave of Palestinian refugees to be forcibly expelled from their home village of Beit Jerja during the Nakba in 1948. Today her entire extended family is resettled behind the illegally blockaded prison fences of Gaza.
On November 6th, Shahd wrote:
What is happening in Gaza is not a war. It is a genocide, accompanied by an ethnic cleansing campaign against the mostly refugee population in that besieged enclave.
The process is targeting other Palestinian communities surviving under Israeli settler-colonial and military domination between the river and the sea.
No one is spared from Israel’s killing machines: children, women, elderly people, journalists, doctors, paramedics, fire fighters. Nowhere in Gaza is safe: residential buildings have been levelled, UNRWA schools sheltering the displaced have been hit.
Hospitals, churches, mosques, bakeries, universities, ambulances, too. My parents and extended family are amongst over a million people who have been forcibly displaced – nearly half of Gaza’s entire population.
They have fled to Al-Nusairat refugee camp, which is “south of Gaza river” according to Israel’s criminal military order, but they are at close encounters with death every day amid relentless Israeli bombardment.
There is no time to process all the horrors of the past four weeks, but my family survivors keep stressing that “time passing means more bloodshed”.
On 23 October, my cousins and their little angels were amongst 23 relatives killed while asleep at their own homes in Jabalia refugee camp.
Click here to read Shahd Abusalama’s full article entitled “I was born and raised in Jabalia refugee camp where Israel killed 23 of my relatives” published on November 6th 2023 by Declassified UK.
Speaking to Electronic Intifada on Wednesday 17th [embedded above], she says:
“Every day for everyone in Gaza, every day they survive by chance and every day is about struggling to find the basics to feed the little ones, the children, to find enough water and food. And they go through great ordeals to even find wood to make fire, so they can cook or do laundry. Everything is such a great struggle.”
Adding: “The great majority of Gaza population they have no place to go to, even if the war ends today. So like what is the world is waiting for?”
*
In truth, I don’t know what the world is waiting for either. What more can be said or done to halt this ongoing genocide?
In solidarity I recently sent another letter to my constituency Labour MP Paul Blomfield after he’d replied to me over the “Anti-Boycott Bill” [more formally: Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill] that will make it unlawful for public bodies to consider ethical and human rights issues in procurement and investment decisions.
He wished to remind me that he had opposed the bill at its Second Reading back in July [you can read Paul Blomfield’s speech here] and in his letter highlighted further actions along with fellow Sheffield Labour MPs, who are collectively helping to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestinians “to support their work providing food, medical supplies and hygiene kits to Gaza. You can find out more and, if you’re able, donate here.”
I do not wish to belittle these initiatives or downplay the importance of supplying aid to desperate people in Gaza. And in the letter I express my sincere thanks for voting against a “dangerous and draconian” bill that Amnesty Internationalreports will provide “special status for Israel [that] will shield it from accountability for human rights violations and breaching international law.”
But none of this is enough. Not nearly enough. Treating the Palestinians as if they are merely unfortunate victims of an unavoidable disaster involves playing along with an outrageous lie. It denies the intentional agency of Netanyahu’s murderous Israeli regime in its policy of scorched earth destruction, population displacement and indiscriminate killing.
Members of Parliament not only have the power but also the duty to call for an immediate ceasefire to end the killing in Gaza and to demand a complete withdrawal of British support from Israel, but few show any real commitment to upholding international law or bringing justice to the Palestinians. In the end, there is no defence for those who enable ethnic cleansing and genocide, however passive their involvement.
Exasperated but respectfully, I replied as follows:
Dear Paul,
Thank you for voting against this bill. That much is greatly appreciated.
However, I feel it is necessary to be frank with you. Although I have previously delivered leaflets and canvassed on your behalf, due to the stance Keir Starmer has taken regarding Palestine I will certainly not vote for Labour again next election. In truth, I may never vote for Labour again. And I am not alone.
As you know, Israel is facing genocide charges at the ICJ. Whether the international court finally judges Israel guilty is largely a question of politics, since the case against them is essentially open and shut. The aim to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its native population has been repeatedly stated and backed up by the relentless aerial bombardment of the largely civilian population of mainly women and children who are forced to flee and then bombed again.
Israel has now been carpet bombing the terrified people of Gaza for over three months. A unremitting murder spree. They are still flattening hospitals, residential blocks, schools, refugee camps, even attacking ambulances, while simultaneously restricting access to food, energy and clean water. The spread of disease is already rife in Gaza. Further restrictions on medicines mean that hundreds of Palestinian children have faced amputations without anaesthesia. In the twenty-first century we can watch this horror show unfold on a daily basis, and yet still nothing is being done to stop it.
Gaza is already a death camp. As I said in my original email to you [read here] a holocaust is taking place. A collective punishment and a ‘burnt offering’ as revenge. This is no exaggeration, just an uncomfortable statement of the facts. Those in power in Israel also candidly say as much and talk about the full clearance of the land – a final solution to their Palestinian problem.
Meanwhile, the US and UK governments are enabling this genocide against the Palestinians whether by votes at the UN, or by arming the IDF and directly offering military support. In consequence, our nation is culpable too. Indeed, the entire western world must bear its share of responsibility for the worst atrocity in living memory (certainly of most people). And Keir Starmer has likewise done nothing at all to end the carnage. Instead, whether through calculated inaction or by his outspoken support for Israel, he too is complicit in this ongoing genocide.
Finally, there is no need to reply to this email. I shall not write again on the subject. In any case, the shame and sadness I feel is well beyond words. Nor can any words express the horrors or the sickness I feel whenever I fully reflect on the plight of the Gazans. Likewise, the underlying dread that what is happening to the Palestinians may come home to us. It is all completely beyond words. So please don’t reply. Just reflect.
***
Shahd is currently based in London. After completing her masters with distinction at the School of Oriental and African Studies, she was given a scholarship to do a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University where she became an associate lecturer. However her academic rise soon stalled after she was targeted by a pro-Zionist smear campaign. Just a fortnight later, the university management having capitulated, she was suspended from her post.
The basis for the university action against her? Shahd explains:
“The Jewish Chronicle published two articles, one online and a shorter print version two days later, accusing me of anti-Semitism over a tweet I made in 2012 when I was barely twenty years old. The irrational wave of hate and racism kept flooding my way, despite deleting the tweet, recognizing its unintended offensive content, and clarifying that in my whole life in Gaza’s prison until September 2013, I had never interacted with any Israeli Jew outside the framework of the ongoing wars which cost us horrific human and material loss.”
Click here to read a full statement from the Sheffield Left Labour (SLL), one of the groups that had campaigned in support for Shahd.
Shahd first came to my attention in May 2020, when a 32-year-old autistic Palestinian, Eyad el-Hallaq, was shot dead by Israeli police officers in occupied East Jerusalem. In a call for justice, she had written to her constituency Labour MP, Louise Haigh, and shared her letter with the Sheffield Labour Friends of Palestine (SLFP). With her permission I afterwards republished Shahd’s letter on my blog.
My family’s survivors couldn’t give a goodbye or a proper funeral as Israel’s killing machines have haunted them. My auntie’s son Khalil is the only survivor of his family.
The lifeless bodies of his wife Heba (35) and children Leen (12), Jihad (10) and Sham (5) were pulled from under the rubble after six hours.
Heba, a skilled nurse at the Indonesian hospital, and her children had left their home and sought refuge at the home of another cousin Rana, who is married to Heba’s brother Jawad.
Jawad survived but Rana (40) was killed, alongside two of her five children, the little ones, Mohammed (5) and Naama (7), while the twin girls Jana and Jinan (12) and Husni (10), survived with wounds.
I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences to Shahd and her family who lost 23 relatives killed while asleep in their own homes in Jabalia refugee camp on October 23rd.
John Pilger was the outstanding international journalist of his time. He was a brilliant communicator, a tireless reporter and researcher, and he leaves a remarkable volume of work: 50 films, a dozen books, many hundreds of thousands of articles and speeches. All of this relates to his lifelong mission to expose the lies and cruelties of the West’s most powerful regimes led by the United States, and it reflects their devastating impact on the people of the Global South.
John was an unmistakably imposing figure. He was Australian, tall, handsome and with a compelling low, slow voice. People often found him intimidating. Too confident. Too well informed. Too opinionated. Also perhaps too famous. A winner of countless awards including Journalist of the Year. Other journalists, well aware of his harsh views of most mainstream media work, were probably rather jealous of his successes.
For all his fame, John was actually a very private person. Where to outsiders he could come across as intimidating to his friends he was always Mr loyal, especially in troubled times. He was embedded in 30 years of a happy partnership and great pride in his two beloved children.
For young journalists and filmmakers and his friends, John always had time. He was generous. He could open doors to help people get their work seen and he did that a lot.
The roots of John’s life and work lay in 1960s politics. Our decades of friends and allies lay there. He spent eight years between Vietnam and the US as the Mirror’s star writer.
He was immersed in the catastrophe of the Vietnamese people. Hundreds and thousands of refugees on the move. Countryside devastated by US bombings and the poison of Agent Orange. It was a pointless war. It was an intolerable level of injustice and pain. And in the US, the streets were on fire. The Civil Rights Movement was challenging America. Opposition to the Vietnam War paralysed universities and came to the gates of the White House. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy lit a blaze of rage.
John’s writing was in The Mirror spread over pages and pages. He had a voice.
It was in 1977 that John hit a nerve that made him notorious as well as famous. He made a film called Palestine is Still the Issue. The Israeli government and the British Board of Deputies denounced it, and the producer of the film, Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, publicly disowned it. He wrote that it was one-sided, totally unrealistic, and in quotes “but it was John Pilger, factually incorrect, historically incorrect” end quote.
This could have ended John’s career as was surely intended, but an industry inquiry ensued and the critique was found to be baseless. John made a follow-up film with the same name 24 years later. He got lasting respect across the world for these, but the tone of Green’s unfair critique lingered in the mainstream media’s attitude to John.
His Cambodia films in 1979 and 1980 showed the searing horror of Pol Pot’s regime, but they also showed, as he put it, how three US administrations had colluded in Cambodia’s tragedy. No US network would show the films. PBS, the most liberal, told John: your films would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. This harsh political reality underlies John’s experience.
He made so many other brilliant and unique films. From Burma’s military dictatorship, from the small former Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste’s invasion and military occupation by Indonesia, and from Iraq, destroyed by another US-led war.
What I love now is that the British Library holds all John’s work. He will be discovered there by new generations who will see the world through different eyes because of John.
A tribute paid to John Pilger who died on on December 30, 2023 by British journalist, author and personal friend, Victoria Brittain. She worked for twenty years at the Guardian where she became associate foreign editor but is currently Chair of Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation with a focus on UK foreign, military and intelligence policies.
*
In another tribute, independent journalist Katie Halper released the full version of her recent extended interview with John in which he speaks at length on topics relating to US foreign policy, media propaganda and the plight of his own friend and compatriot Julian Assange:
*
And Mark Curtis, who had worked with John Pilger since the 1990s, paid further tribute to his friend’s remarkable life, in discussion with fellow Declassified UK author Phil Miller:
*
My own small tribute can be found in the comments beneath. It reads simply:
John Pilger was the best around. Simple as that. Fearless, tenacious, eloquent and absolutely committed to disclosing the truth about western imperialism. His body of journalistic work is unsurpassed. He will be sadly missed. RIP John.
***
His 2002 documentary follow-up Palestine is Still the Issue is embedded below:
John Pilger wrote dozens of books, including Heroes, Hidden Agendas, and Freedom Next Time. He made over 60 documentaries, including Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back, The War You Don’t See, The Coming War on China. He appeared as a contributor on BBC Television Australia, BBC Radio, BBC World Service, London Broadcasting, ABC Television, ABC Radio Australia, among others, and his writing appeared at the Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation: New York, The Age: Melbourne, The Sydney Morning Herald and more.
Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté meticulously debunk a New York Times article purporting to demonstrate that Hamas carried out a policy of sexual assault against Israelis on October 7th, and demonstrate that the Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman is guilty of journalistic malpractice and serving as a willing tool for the serially mendacious Israeli government.
*
Update:
In an extended segment of a more recent Electronic Intifada livestream broadcast on January 3rd, further debunked the NYT claims and put the weaponisation of such claims into better historical context by reminding us of how the US manufactured false claims of mass rape as a pretext for the Nato war on Libya.
The clipped segment was reuploaded by Electronic Intifada and is embedded below:
*
Ali Abunimah begins by quoting from a detailed assessment of the October 7th claims published by the feminist initiative Speak Up which reports:
[A]s of now, there are no direct allegations from any woman claiming she experienced sexual violence on October 7th, and there is no evidence to support the occupation’s allegations. Contrarily, hostages recently released by Hamas have provided several testimonies confirming that they were not subjected to any form of assault.
Continuing:
[N]one of the accounts provided in the Times investigation offer any clear indication of the alleged events or perpetrators. All we have is the confirmed history of the Israeli army’s involvement in gender-based violence towards women, both Israelis and Palestinians and even within their own army.
And concluding in response to their own question, “Should we believe these allegations based solely on claims from the Israeli forces and hearsay?”
No, we should exercise extreme caution when considering claims made by the Israeli forces. This is not only due to the apparent bias intended to sway public opinion in favor of their genocide in Gaza but also because of the Israeli occupation’s lengthy and documented history of fabricating events and evidence. This pattern has been observed on various occasions. For instance, in the case of the killing of journalist Shereen Abu Akleh, the Israeli side initially claimed she was killed by Palestinians, a claim that was later disproven. Similarly, after bombing the largest hospital in Gaza, home to almost 50,000 refugees, the Israelis attributed the attack to Hamas’s rockets, a claim which was also later confirmed to be false. And most recently, the widely circulated claim of beheaded babies on October 7 has been repeatedly debunkedand retracted.
Click here to read the full report and final recommendations on the Speak Up website.
*
Meanwhile, also on Jan 3rd, Max Blumenthal was invited to speak with Andrew Napolitano on his show Judging Freedom. Once again, he points out how none of the allegations of rape or sexual violence has yet been substantiated, while many are entirely contracted by available forensic evidence:
Max Blumenthal also cites the story of the Washington Post rescinding a statement originally quoted by the Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, who had falsely claimed that interrogations of captured Palestinians revealed that Hamas had designated specific Hamas fighters to rape specific IDF soldiers. The redaction features in an article written by Wyatt Reed entitled “Washington Post erases Israeli minister’s farfetched October 7 rape claim at his request” that was published by The Grayzone also on Jan 3rd.
The following passages are taken from an article published by Tony Greenstein on January 2nd on his official website.
An Open Letter to Stephen Fry whose ‘Alternative’ Xmas Message on ‘Antisemitism’ Flew in the Face of Everything He Once Stood For
Dear Stephen,
As you are all too aware, ‘anti-Semitism’ is the standard defence, the only defence, that Israel has for its genocide and sadism in Gaza today. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is the stock response to torture, imprisonment and abuse of Palestinian children and the creation of a state which Netanyahu boasts is a state, not for all its citizens but only those who are Jewish.
When I refer to sadism I mean things like Israel’s removal of anaesthetics from aid lorries resulting in over 1,000 Palestinian children having to undergo amputations without anaesthetic. This is what your ‘Alternative’ Xmas Message was condoning.
Fortunately we were privileged to have a genuine Alternative to the Establishment’s Xmas that you delivered and it was by a fellow Jewish comedian, Alexei Sayle.
Alexei had a few choice words for you and it is this that I am pleased to publish. As an aside you mentioned how, as a Gay man attitudes in Britain, especially amongst those you hang out with, have improved immeasurably in the past 25 years. I wonder whether the radicalism that was engendered all those years ago led you to support the Palestinians whereas acceptance by the Establishment of your sexuality has resulted in you turning your back on the oppressed.
Stephen Fry’s Xmas Message on Behalf of the British Establishment:
*
As Caitlin Johnson writes concerning the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear against those who oppose Israeli war crimes:
If I saw someone murdering a child, there are many things I might say and do, but the very last thing that would ever occur to me would be to wonder what religion he is. It’s the silliest, most nonsensical narrative in mainstream politics and media today.
Your ‘new’ anti-Semitism has nothing to do with traditional anti-Semitism. Its sole concern is about defending Israel – right or wrong.
Anti-Semitism historically was hostility, prejudice or discrimination against Jews. In 2005 a campaign was launched by Israeli and Zionist academics to redefine anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel. The resulting was the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism, a definition which anti-Semites like Victor Orban of Hungary supports.
*
Click here to read Tony Greenstein’s full article including references to the younger Stephen Fry who had in April 2008 signed a letter with 104 other Jews, including Tony Greenstein, headed We’re not celebrating Israel’s anniversary. The letter said:
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Spartacus was a 1960 Hollywood film based on a book written secretly by the blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, and adapted by the screenplay writer Dalton Trumbo, one of the ‘Hollywood 10’ who were banned for their ‘un-American’ politics. It is a parable of resistance and heroism that speaks unreservedly to our own times.
Both writers were Communists and victims of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities which, during the Cold War, destroyed the careers and often the lives of those principled and courageous enough to stand up to a homegrown fascism in America.
‘This is a sharp time, now, a precise time …’ wrote Arthur Miller in The Crucible, ‘We live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.’
There is one ‘precise’ provocateur now; it is clear to see for those who want to see it and foretell its actions. It is a gang of states led by the United States whose stated objective is ‘full spectrum dominance’. Russia is still the hated one, Red China the feared one. From Washington and London, the virulence has no limit. Israel, the colonial anachronism and unleashed attack dog, is armed to the teeth and granted historical impunity so that ‘we’ the West ensure the blood and tears never dry in Palestine. British MPs who dare call for a ceasefire in Gaza are banished, the iron door of two-party politics closed to them by a Labour leader who would withhold water and food from the children of Palestine.
In McCarthy’s time, there were bolt holes of truth. Mavericks welcomed then are heretics now; an underground of journalism exists (such as this site) in a landscape of mendacious conformity. Dissenting journalists have been defenestrated from the ‘mainstream’ (as the great editor David Bowman wrote); the media’s task is to invert the truth and support the illusions of democracy, including a ‘free press’.
Social Democracy has shrunk to the width of a cigarette paper that separates the principal policies of major parties. Their one subscription is to a capitalist cult, neoliberalism, and an imposed poverty described by a UN special rapporteur as ‘the immiseration of a significant part of the British population.’
War today is an unmoving shadow; ‘forever’ imperial wars are designated normal. Iraq, the model, is destroyed at a cost of a million lives and three million dispossessed. The destroyer, Blair, is personally enriched and fawned over at his party’s conference as an electoral winner. Blair and his moral counter, Julian Assange, live 14 miles apart, one in a Regency mansion, the other in a cell awaiting extradition to hell.
According to a Brown University study, since 9/11, almost six million men, women and children have been killed by America and its acolytes in the ‘Global War on Terror’. A monument is to be built in Washington in ‘celebration’ of this mass murder; its committee is chaired by the former president, George W Bush, Blair’s mentor. Afghanistan, where it started, was finally laid to waste when President Biden shop-lifted its national bank reserves
There have been many Afghanistans. The forensic William Blum devoted himself to making sense of a state terrorism that seldom spoke its name and so requires repetition:
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. It has attempted to murder countless leaders.
Perhaps I hear some of you saying: that is enough. As the Final Solution of Gaza is broadcast live to millions, the small faces of its victims etched in bombed rubble, framed between TV commercials for cars and pizza, yes, that is surely enough. How profane is that word ‘enough’?
Afghanistan was where the West sent young men weighed down with the ritual of ‘warriors’ to kill people and enjoy it. We know some of them enjoyed it from the evidence of Australian SAS sociopaths, including a photograph of them drinking from an Afghan man’s prosthetic.
Not one sociopath has been charged for this and crimes such as kicking a man over a cliff, gunning down children point-blank, slitting throats: none of it ‘in battle’. David McBride, a former Australian military lawyer who served twice in Afghanistan, was a ‘true believer’ in the system as moral and honourable. He also has an abiding belief in truth, and loyalty. He can define them as few can. On 13 November he is in court in Canberra as an alleged criminal.
‘An Australian whistleblower,’ reports Kieran Pender, a senior lawyer at the Australian Human Rights Law Centre,‘ [will face] trial for blowing the whistle on horrendous wrongdoing. It is profoundly unjust that the first person on trial for war crimes in Afghanistan is the whistle blower and not an alleged war criminal.’
McBride can receive a sentence of up to 100 years for revealing the cover-up of the great crime of Afghanistan. He tried to exercise his legal right as a whistleblower under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which the current Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, says ‘delivers on our promise to strengthen protections for public sector whistleblowers’. Yet it is Dreyfus, a Labor minister, who signed off on the McBride trial following a punitive wait of four years and eight months since his arrest at Sydney airport: a wait that shredded his health and family.
Those who know David and know of the hideous injustice done to him fill his street in Bondi near the beach in Sydney to wave their encouragement to this good and decent man. To them, and me, he is a hero.
McBride was affronted by what he found in the files he was ordered to inspect. Here was evidence of crimes and their cover-up. He passed hundreds of secret documents to the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Sydney Morning Herald. Police raided the ABC’s offices in Sydney while reporters and producers watched, shocked, as their computers were confiscated by the Federal Police.
Attorney-General Dreyfus, self-declared liberal reformer and friend of whistleblowers, has the singular power to stop the McBride trial. A Freedom of Information search of his actions in this direction suggests an indifference to whether or not an innocent man rots.
You can’t run a fully-fledged democracy and a colonial war; one aspires to decency, the other is a form of fascism, regardless of its pretensions. Mark the killing fields of Gaza, bombed to dust by apartheid Israel. It is no coincidence that in rich, yet impoverished Britain an ‘inquiry’ is currently being held into the gunning down by British SAS soldiers of 80 Afghans, all civilians, including a couple in bed.
The grotesque injustice meted out to David McBride is minted from the injustice consuming his compatriot, Julian Assange. Both are friends of mine. Whenever I see them, I am optimistic. ‘You cheer me,’ I tell Julian as he raises a defiant fist at the end of our visiting period. ‘You make me feel proud,’ I tell David at our favourite coffee shop in Sydney. Their bravery has allowed many of us, who might despair, to understand the real meaning of a resistance we all share if we want to prevent the conquest of us, our conscience, our self respect, if we prefer freedom and decency to compliance and collusion. In this, we are all Spartacus.
Spartacus was the rebellious leader of Rome’s slaves in 71-73 BC. There is a thrilling moment in the Kirk Douglas movie Spartacus when the Romans call on Spartacus’s men to identify their leader and so be pardoned. Instead hundreds of his comrades stand and raise their fists in solidarity and shout, ‘I am Spartacus!’ The rebellion is under way.
Julian and David are Spartacus. The Palestinians are Spartacus. People who fill the streets with flags and principle and solidarity are Spartacus. We are all Spartacus if we want to be.
wall of controversy 