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By Countercurrents Collective

Thousands of people protested the French military presence in Niger and French interference in Niger’s internal affairs Saturday.

Media reports said:

The protesting people gathered outside of the French military base in Niger’s capital Niamey once again demanding the withdrawal of French forces from Niger.

The rally was sparked by a call from several civic organizations, opposed to the former colonial power’s military presence in the region.

In what was regarded as the biggest gathering since the July 26 coup in Niger, tens of thousands of protesters gathered outside the French military base.

The military coup that has widespread popular support but France refuses to recognize the change of power.

The protesters also demanded that France withdraw its ambassador from Niger as its new military government have accused Niger’s former colonial ruler France of “interference”.

A series of smaller protests leading up to the weekend rally have been “relatively calm and organized,” said a media report.

However, on Saturday some of the activists were seen “breaking the barriers set up by the security forces, police and the military” and trying to force their way into the base, which houses around 1,500 French soldiers.

Anti-French sentiment has risen in Niger since the coup but soured further last week when France ignored the junta’s order for its ambassador, Sylvain Itte, to leave.

French Army, Leave Our Country

Despite the warning by the French military that it would respond, if their military and diplomatic facilities were targeted in the renewed tensions, the demonstrators refused to leave.

“French army, leave our country,” read the banners held by the demonstrators in Niamey.

“We want to fight to remove from our country all military bases,” a protester told journalists. “We do not want it. Because for more than 13 years terrorism has been here. They do not care to fight terrorism,” he said.

A Goat’s Throat Slit And Coffin

Outside the military base, the protesters slit the throat of a goat dressed in French colours and carried coffins draped in French flags as a line of Nigerien soldiers looked on. Others carried signs calling for France to leave.

An Al Jazeera report said the protests were seen approaching the army base with some trying to force their way in.

A media report said:

The demonstrators expressed frustration as there is still a French presence in the country. They said the people were beginning to take matters into their own hands.

We Are Proud

Reuters reporters said it was the biggest gathering yet since the coup, suggesting that support for the junta – and derision of France – was not waning.
“We are ready to sacrifice ourselves today, because we are proud,” said demonstrator Yacouba Issoufou. “They plundered our resources and we became aware. So, they are going to get out.”

France had cordial relations with ousted President Mohamed Bazoum and has about 1,500 troops stationed in Niger.
Blatant Interference To Perpetrate Neo-Colonial Relationship

Niger’s military government has accused Paris of blatant interference by backing ousted president Bazoum, who has been in custody since July 26.

On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that he spoke to the deposed Nigerien leader “every day” and reassured his support towards Bazoum’s regime.

“I speak every day to President Bazoum. We support him. We do not recognize those who carried out the putsch. The decisions we will take, whatever they may be, will be based upon exchanges with Bazoum,” said Macron.

Macron has backed ousted President Bazoum and refused to recognize the new rulers.
The French President’s remarks caused backlash from Niger’s military leaders, who accused the French president of using “divisive rhetoric and seeking to perpetrate neo-colonial relationship.”

Niger’s military government spokesman, Colonel Amadou Abdramane, responded to Macron’s comments by saying that they “constitute further blatant interference in domestic affairs,” adding that Niger’s “differences” with France “do not touch on the relationship between our peoples, or on individuals, but on the relevance of the French military presence in Niger.”

Macron’s comments were published on the French Presidential Palace Elysee’s social media platform and were made as he spoke about educational matters to reporters in southern France.

Niger’s military government has denounced Macron’s comments as divisive and served only to perpetrate France’s neo-colonial relationship.
Last month, the military rulers announced the cancellation of military agreements with France and called for “immediate expulsion” of the French ambassador Sylvain Itte. The envoy’s diplomatic immunity had been withdrawn, on the basis that his presence constitutes a threat to public order.

France has refused to recall the diplomat from its former colony, stating that despite pressure from “illegitimate authorities,” the ambassador will remain in Niamey.

French ambassador, Itte, has remained in Niger despite a 48-hour deadline to leave the country given more than a week ago, a decision Macron said he “applauds”.

France, Most Impacted

A media report said:

Most impacted by the July 26 coup in Niger is France, whose influence over its former colonies has waned in West Africa in recent years just as popular discontent against former colonial rulers has grown.
France’s military forces have been kicked out of neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso since coups in those countries, reducing its role in a region-wide fight against deadly Jihadist insurgencies.

France is not the only country with strategic interests at stake. The U.S. and European powers also have troops stationed in the country.

Back To Civilian Rule

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, who holds the West African economic block ECOWAS’ revolving chairmanship, said last week that a nine-month transition back to civilian rule could satisfy regional powers.
Niger’s junta had previously proposed a three-year timeline.

Niger Court Orders Expulsion Of French Ambassador

A Bloomberg report said:

Niger’s top court approved the immediate expulsion of France’s ambassador, revoking his diplomatic immunity, according to a request addressed to the court’s president.

The development comes after France’s President Emmanuel Macron rejected the ruling junta’s demand to recall his ambassador a month after a coup disrupted relations between the two former allies.

Since the July 26 coup, France has committed acts that “violates the Vienna convention regulating diplomatic relations, including the violation of Niger’s airspace and other acts that goes against the interests of Niger and its people,” according to the court document.

Itte “has refused to leave the country after he was declared persona non grata,” it said.

A spokesman of the military government confirmed the document.

The decision by the court seems judicial support to the new military government.

An MNA report said:

Emphasizing that the French ambassador violated diplomatic protocols, Niger’s judicial system announced that the legal process of expelling the French ambassador from Niger has begun.

Nigerian sources reported on Saturday that a security atmosphere is prevailing around the French Embassy in Niamey, and the security forces do not allow anyone to approach this embassy.

Niger’s judicial system announced that the French ambassador violated diplomatic protocols and avoided being present there after being summoned to the Nigers Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The judicial system of Niger further added that the French ambassador is no longer a diplomat and does not have a residence permit.

According to reports from Nigerian sources, the legal process of expelling the French ambassador and his family from the country has begun.

French Military’s Threat

A report by The New Arab said:

Colonel Pierre Gaudilliere, the French military’s spokesman, said that “The French military forces are ready to respond to any upturn in tension that could harm French diplomatic and military premises in Niger.”

This is seen as a military threat to Niger.

Italy Fears Military Solution To Niger Crisis Could Foment Migration

A Reuters report said:

A military solution to the coup in Niger would be a “disaster” that could trigger a new migration crisis, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Thursday.

The main West African bloc ECOWAS has been trying to negotiate with the coup leaders but has warned it is ready to send troops into Niger to restore constitutional order if diplomatic efforts fail.

“(A) military solution (would) be a disaster,” Tajani told reporters as he arrived at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in the Spanish city of Toledo. “We need to work day by day for a diplomatic solution.”

The crisis in Niger is one of the main topics of the meeting, which will be addressed by Hassoumi Massoudou, the foreign minister of the ousted government, and Omar Touray, the president of the ECOWAS Commission.

Asked if he feared military intervention could lead to a migration crisis, Tajani replied: “Yes, of course. To have a war in Niger (means) more people leaving this country, as in Sudan – there are more and more people leaving Sudan.”

Tajani spoke positively of an Algerian proposal this week to resolve the crisis, involving a six-month transition period led by a civilian.

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3 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

Chicago. September 2, 2023.

“Kashmir has had its checkered history of strife, foreign invasion and occupations just like all other nations of the world. That was up to 1947 when the British Empire let South Asia (India and Pakistan) go free after nearly 200 years of colonial slavery. That is when the newly un-enslaved India chose to turn on its smaller neighbor to its north—the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir. Just to be sure the Indians had their eyes on Kashmir ever since they started dreaming of freedom from the British at the beginning of 1925- The birth Hindu nationalism of Savarkar’s Hindutva and its political manifestations in the form of RSS and Hindu Mahasaba,” this was stated by Dr. Ghulam Nabi Mir, President World Kashmir Awareness Forum and Chairman, Kashmir Global Coalition during 60th Annual Convention of Islamic Society of North American (ISNA) that took place in Chicago on September 2, 2023.

Dr. Mir added, “Fast forward to 2014, when the worst that could happen did happen not only to Kashmir but to India itself. The butcher of Gujarat, Narender Modi, the mastermind of the 2004 Gujarat Muslim Massacre, rose to power in New Delhi. It was as if Hitler was born again, this time in India. The writing was on the wall for those who could see, including the US president, Barack Obama, who lifted the 10-year travel ban to the US on Modi. The Times Magazine’s May 2019 cover page rightly called him “divider in chief” of India for using Hundutvadi ideologies to divide India on religious sentiments. In August 2019, Modi revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status and imposed a media and internet blackout on the state. Also, India built up a massive military in the area, coupled with a shutdown and curfew in the valley to cut it off virtually and physically from the whole world. Thousands of additional Indian troops were deployed, a major Hindu pilgrimage was canceled, schools and colleges were shut, tourists were ordered to leave, telephone and internet services were suspended, and thousands of youth and resistance leaders and activists were detained. The BJP wants to change the demographic character of the Muslim-majority region by allowing non-Kashmiris to buy land there.”

“Currently, Kashmir is now a full-fledged settler-colonial project. A genocidal and ethnic cleansing plan is in place. Under the new Domicile Law, 4.2 million Indian Hindus have been issued domicile certificates. Floodgates have been opened to demographically flood Kashmir with non-Kashmiri Indian settlers to dilute the Muslim population,” Dr. Mir warned.

Mir continued, “India also resorts to harsh techniques, including attacks on Muslim spaces, such as repression of educational and religious institutions, and endowments and places of worship. Thousands of innocent Kashmiri civilians of all ages have been incarcerated for variable periods in Indian prisons over the last seven decades, starting in 1947. Some of the political prisoners have been languishing in the jails for decades, like Shabir Ahmad Shah and some for years, like Yasin Malik, Masarat Aalam, Aasia Andrabi and internationally known human rights activist Khurram Parvez.”

“There is a deep conspiracy to erase the most treasured tradition of Kashmiri Muslim creed, culture, and legacy. This atrocity is starting to run deeper and deeper under the Modi regime. It is what amounts to crimes against humanity. Even in the academic space, our history books, or any reference to Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination are being removed,” Dr. Mir alerted.

Other speakers were Dr. Miko Peled and Dr. Mohammad Karim.

Dr. Miko Peled is a writer and human rights activist, born and raised in Jerusalem. He is considered by many to be one of the clearest voices calling for justice in Palestine, and creation of a single democracy with equal rights on all of historic Palestine. Driven by a personal family tragedy to explore Palestine, its people and their narrative, he has written a book about his journey, ‘The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.’ He travels regularly to Palestine, and he has been arrested several times by the Israeli authorities for his activities.

Dr. Mohammad Karim is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the university of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He served as Provost, Executive Vice Chancellor, and Chief Operating Officer of the University. He served on the Board of Regents of the North American Bangladeshi Islamic Community (NABIC) as well as on the Bords of multiple universities in Bangladesh. He is an author of 20 engineering books and over 300 scientific publications.

Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Secretary General, World Kashmir Awareness Forum was the Emcee of the event. Dr. Fai said that Kashmir, Palestine and Rohingya genocide are the three important international conflicts. We do not need to tell the Palestinians and Kashmiris what they want. They should be provided the full opportunity to decide whatever they want without any external pressure or compulsion. That choice was given to Palestinians under UN Security Council resolution # 43, 46 and 48 which were adopted in April 1948; and to Kashmiris under UN Security Council resolution # 47, adopted on April 21, 1948. The denial of the right to self-determination to the people of Palestine and Kashmir is a clear danger to the international peace and security.

Dr. Fai added that Rohingya genocide cannot and should not go unnoticed. More than 1 million Rohingya Muslims have fled and are living in refugee camps in different parts of the world. The pain and suffering of Rohingya Muslims are a challenge to the world conscience. Time has come that the United Nations need to intervene in all these three situations to bring peace to the region of South Asia and Middle East.

[Dr. Fai is the Chairman, World Forum for Peace & Justice. He can be reached at: WhatsApp: 1-202-607-6435. Or. gnfai2003@yahoo.com.www.kashmirawareness.org]

By Arianna Huffington

Healthcare is broken. Chronic diseases are eating up an increasing share of healthcare resources in every healthcare system across the world in ways that are not sustainable. Yes, there is a golden age of innovation happening in the form of new technologies like gene therapy, neural technology, immunotherapy, and increasingly the impact of AI on diagnoses and drug development, but we can’t let these extraordinary technological advances blind us to the tragedy of modern healthcare and to the much neglected miracle drug right in front of us: our daily behaviors. Whether for preventing disease or optimizing the treatment of disease, behavior is indeed a miracle drug.

There are five foundational daily behaviors that, together, make up this miracle drug: sleep, food, movement, stress management, and connection. Because the science is clear that when we improve these daily aspects of our lives, dramatic improvements in our health and well-being follow. The breakthroughs this can bring in our health aren’t over the horizon—they’re here right now.

What’s clear is that what we’re doing right now isn’t working. According to the World Health Organization, chronic and noncommunicable diseases, like heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory diseases, kill 41 million people each year. At the current rate, by 2050, chronic diseases will be responsible for 86% of the 90 million deaths each year, an astounding 90% increase in raw numbers just since 2019. Worldwide, over 500 million people are living with diabetes, and that number is expected to rise to 783 million by 2045. By 2040, the International Diabetes Foundation predicts that spending on diabetes could exceed $800 billion a year. “The most heart-rending symbol of America’s failure in healthcare,” writes Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, “is the avoidable amputations that result from poorly managed diabetes… A toe, foot or leg is cut off by a doctor about 150,000 times a year in America.”

There’s no healthcare system in the world successfully managing health outcomes against this onslaught of chronic diseases. Whether it’s single payer, nationalized healthcare or systems based on private insurance, all healthcare systems are losing the battle. In the U.S., around 90% of our $3.8 trillion in healthcare spending goes toward the treatment of chronic and mental health conditions. From 1960 to 2021, U.S. healthcare costs soared from 5% to 18% of GDP. In the UK, the list of those waiting to receive medical care has reached 7.47 million. Clearly it’s not just a failure of prevention—our healthcare systems are even failing at the narrower goal of delivering adequate sick care.

The potential to reverse these trendlines can be found in the data: Medical care accounts only for an estimated 10% to 20% of health outcomes, while our daily behaviors drive 36% of outcomes. What does that add up to in terms of our health? According to the UN, the combination of maintaining a healthy weight, regular exercise, a healthy diet and not smoking can reduce the risk of developing the most common and deadly chronic diseases by as much as 80%. The dramatic decline of smoking in America in the last two decades and the impact this has had on health is one example of what’s possible.

Both our lifespan and our healthspan—the period of time in which we’re not just alive but healthy and enjoying a good quality of life—are hugely influenced by our lifestyle. Harvard economist Raj Chetty has found that behaviors such as eating habits, exercise, and smoking affect our life expectancy even more than access to healthcare. In other words, how long we live and how well we live are in large part governed by the choices we make each day. To truly change healthcare, along with the power of life-saving drugs and technologies, we must focus on the power of life-transforming habits within each of these foundational behaviors. Because while healthcare is episodic, health itself is continuous. Health is what happens between doctor visits.

A study in the journal Circulation gives us a vivid look at how powerful behavior can be. Researchers found that people who, at age 50, were practicing five healthy habits—exercising regularly, eating healthy, not smoking, maintaining healthy weight, and not drinking excessive alcohol—added over a decade to their lives (14 years for women and 12.2 years for men). “The main take-home message is that there’s huge gains in health and longevity to be had just by simple changes in our behavior pattern,” said study co-author and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Meir Stampfer.

So why is the power of behavior change so overlooked? Some dismiss it because they think it’s too soft—how can something like behavior change be in the same category as technological advances and new diagnostic tools? Others give up on behavior change because it’s too hard—it’s the doctor telling us to eat our broccoli and go to the gym. Eating healthier and getting some exercise are things most of us know we should do, but simply being told to do them doesn’t set us up for success.

For the first objection, it’s not either-or. Of course, behavior change isn’t a substitute for drugs and medical treatment, but there’s a ton of hard science showing that it’s an essential companion that optimizes the management of disease. For instance, a study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that getting good sleep can increase rates of survival for breast cancer patients. “Sleep is certainly something that is controllable,” said epidemiologist and lead author Dr. Amanda Phipps. “We have control over it more than family history of the disease. These results generally suggest that the more attention we give to sleep as an important aspect of overall health, the better we might do for breast cancer patients.” Studies have also found that chronic stress increases the growth of cancer cells. And exercise can reverse stiffness in the heart associated with a condition called left ventricular hypertrophy. All five of our foundational daily behaviors deeply impact how effective medical treatment will be.

And for the second objection—yes, behavior change is hard. But here, too, the science shows that behavior change is absolutely possible when it’s done right. Behavioral science has a long history. Our habits are not formed in a vacuum, and there are certain conditions and strategies that make behavior change much more likely to succeed.

One of those proven strategies is to start as small as possible, which is why Thrive’s behavior change platform is based on Microsteps—too-small-to-fail steps you can take to immediately begin improving your life. Not only is behavior change possible, but it’s going to get easier and more effective with the rise of AI, which Thrive is using to give people real-time nudges and personalized Microsteps in their life flow when they need them most.

Along with Microsteps, other proven strategies are storytelling, compelling content, and community that engages, inspires, motivates and supports people to take charge of their own health and move from awareness to action. This is the scientific methodology that makes behavior change not only achievable but sustainable. We’ve seen the dramatic results that starting off with small Microsteps can have in the lives of employees at the companies we work with around the world.

For instance, there’s Pele Mase, a Walmart associate who lives in Tulsa. She started with a single Microstep of drinking water instead of soda, and progressed to Microsteps around her food, movement, and stress management until she lost 100 pounds.

And there’s Jerry Ouellette, a director of network services for AT&T. After his doctor told him at his annual checkup that he was pre-diabetic, Ouellette started with the goal of walking one mile a day, and then worked his way up to five: “I’ve lost 32 pounds, my sleep apnea is gone, I feel great and I’m getting ready for my annual wellness check and I expect my doctor is going to give me a lot better news. It’s been a great journey.”

Of course, there are chronic systemic health inequities that make it much harder for people to live healthy lives—food deserts, violent neighborhoods, housing instability, lack of access to healthcare —and we should be relentlessly focused on fixing those, both at the policy and at the community levels. But again it’s not either-or. While we are working to improve the social determinants of health, people don’t have the luxury to continue to ignore the impact of behavioral determinants of health—taking small steps to reduce their suffering and improve their lives and the lives of their children. That also means taking advantage of modern digital solutions, like Instacart’s availability to 93% of people living in food deserts. These steps cannot wait until systemic problems have been solved. Too many lives are at stake.

People are hungry for help and support in managing their health. A recent survey by CharityRx found that 65% of Americans turn to Google for health advice—but only 40% find online health information reliable. What makes this moment so exciting is that this growing focus on behavior change is happening at the same time that new powerful technologies—like AI, personalized digital tools and wearables—are emerging to support real and lasting behavior change.

Yes, we can look forward to new medical breakthroughs, and we should celebrate them when they happen. But if we’re truly going to move the needle on chronic diseases, we also need the miracle drug of daily behaviors.

Huffington is the founder and CEO of Thrive Global

31 August 2023

Source: tradebriefs.com

 

By Michel Chossudovsky

Half a century ago on September 11, 1973, the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet, crushed the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende.

The objective was to replace a progressive, democratically elected government by a brutal military dictatorship.

The military coup was supported by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger played a direct role in the military plot.1

In the weeks leading up the coup, US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and members of the CIA held meetings with Chile’s top military brass together with the leaders of the National Party and the ultra-right nationalist front Patria y Libertad. While the undercover role of the Nixon administration is amply documented, what is rarely mentioned in media reports is the fact that the military coup was also supported by a sector of the Christian Democratic Party.

Patricio Aylwin, who was elected Chile’s president in 1989, became head of the DC party in the months leading up to the September 1973 military coup (March through September 1973). Aylwin was largely instrumental in the break down of the “Dialogue” between the Unidad Popular government and the Christian Democrats. His predecessor Renan Fuentealba, who represented the moderate wing of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), was firmly against military intervention. Fuentealba favored a dialogue with Allende (la salida democratica). He was displaced from the leadership of the Party in May 1973 in favor of Patricio Aylwin.

The DC Party was split down the middle, between those who favored “the salida democratica”, and the dominant Aylwin-Frei faction, which favored “a military solution”. 2

On 23 August, the Chilean Camera de Diputados drafted a motion, to the effect that the Allende government “sought to impose a totalitarian regime”. Patricio Aylwin was a member of the drafting team of this motion. Patricio Aylwin believed that a temporary military dictatorship was “the lesser of two evils.”3

This motion was adopted almost unanimously by the opposition parties, including the DC, the Partido Nacional and the PIR ( Radical Left).

The leadership of the Christian Democratic Party including former Chilean president Eduardo Frei, had given a green light to the Military. Unquestionably, US intelligence must have played an undercover role in the change of leadership in the PDC.

And continuity in the “Chilean Model” heralded as an “economic success story” was ensured when, 16 years later, Patricio Aylwin was elected president of Chile in the so-called transition to democracy in 1989.

At the time of the September 11 coup, I was Visiting Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Chile (Instituto de Economia, Universidad Catolica de Chile. In the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew.

When the university reopened several days later, I started patching together the history of the coup from written notes. I had lived through the tragic events of September 11, 1973 as well as the failed June 29, 1973 coup. Several of my students at the Universidad Catolica had been arrested by the military Junta.

In the days following the military takeover, I started going through piles of documents and newspaper clippings, which I had collected on a daily basis since my arrival in Chile in early 1973. A large part of this material, however, was lost and destroyed by my research assistant, fearing political reprisals in the days following the coup.

This unpublished article was written 50 years ago (see below). It was drafted on an old typewriter in the weeks following September 11, 1973.

This original draft article plus two carbon copies were circulated among a few close friends and colleagues at the Catholic University. It was never published. For 30 years it lay in a box of documents at the bottom of a filing cabinet.

I have transcribed the text from the yellowed carbon copy draft [in 2003]. Apart from minor editing, I have made no changes to the original article.

The history of this period has since then been amply documented including the role of the Nixon administration and of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the plot to assassinate Allende and install a military regime.

Chicago Economics: Neoliberal Dress Rehearsal of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)

The main objective of the US-supported military coup in Chile was ultimately to impose the neoliberal economic agenda. The latter, in the case of Chile, was not imposed by external creditors under the guidance of the IMF. “Regime change” was enforced through a covert military intelligence operation, which laid the groundwork for the military coup. Sweeping macro-economic reforms (including privatization, price liberalization and the freeze of wages) were implemented in early October 1973.

Barely a few weeks after the military takeover, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This “economic shock treatment” had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys.”

While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.”

From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty; in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six fold (3700%). Eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.

I completed my work on the “unpublished paper’ entitled “The Ingredients of a Military Coup” (see text below) in late September 1973. In October and November, following the dramatic hikes in the price of food, I drafted in Spanish an initial “technical” assessment of the Junta’s deadly macro-economic reforms entitled

“La Medición del Ingreso Minimo de Subsistencia y la Politica de Ingresos para 1974′ .

Fearing censorship, I limited my analysis to the collapse of living standards in the wake of the Junta’s reforms, resulting from the price hikes of food and fuel, without making any kind of political analysis.

The Economics Institute of the Catholic University was initially reluctant to publish the report. They sent it to the Military Junta for its approval prior to its release.

I left Chile for Peru in December 1973. The report was released as a working paper (200 copies) by the Catholic University of Chile a few days after my departure.

In Peru, where I joined the Economics Department of the Catholic University of Peru, I was able to write up a more detailed study of the Junta’s neoliberal reforms and its ideological underpinnings. This study was published in 1975 in Spanish and English.

Needless to say, the events of September 11, 1973 also marked me profoundly in my work as an economist.

Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. Macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” –as claimed by the academic mainstream– nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation.

I also started to understand the role of military-intelligence operations in support of what is usually described as a process of “economic restructuring”.

In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” reforms as a well-organized instrument of “economic repression.”

Two years later, I returned to Latin America as a Visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina under the auspices of an ILO project.

My stay coincided with the 1976 military coup d’État. It was “The Dirty War” . “La Guerra Sucia”.Tens of thousands of people were arrested; the “Desaparecidos” were assassinated. The military takeover in Argentina was “a carbon copy” of the CIA-led coup in Chile.

And behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” reforms had also been prescribed, this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors.

The IMF’s deadly economic prescriptions under the “structural adjustment program” had not yet been officially launched. The experience of Chile and Argentina under the “Chicago boys” was “a dress rehearsal” of things to come.

In due course, the economic bullets of the “free market system” were hitting country after country.

Since the onslaught of the debt crisis of the 1980s, the same IMF “economic medicine” has routinely been applied in more than 150 developing countries.

From my earlier work in Chile, Argentina and Peru, I started to investigate the global impacts of these reforms. Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape.

(For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty and the New World Order, Second Edition, Global Research, 2003)

This forward with minor edits was initially published in 2003 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the September 1, 1973 military coup.

***

On a personal note

Chile, September 1973

On September 8, 1973, I was 31 years old. My friends and colleagues at the Universidad Catolica gathered at a birthday party at my home in Santiago. We were troubled and disturbed with what was unfolding, three days before the coup.

Today my thoughts are with the people of Chile, who are still under the brunt of neoliberal oppression.

Flash forward to September 2001

Thirty years later, September 8, 2001, again on my birthday, a young man, specialist in internet algorithms, came to our home on the outskirts of Montreal, on a wheel chair (he was handicapped). I remain indebted to him. He gave me a crash course on how to use the algorithm and upload articles to the internet.

And on the following day, September 9, 2001, two days before the dramatic events of 9/11, we launched globalresearch.ca.

We remain indebted to readers and authors worldwide who have participated in the Global Research Project for the last 22 years.

-Michel Chossudovsky, September 11, 2003 [minor revisions September 10, 2013, September 11, 2021, August 31, 2023]

2 September 2023

Source: substack.com

By Raïss Tinmaung

Aug. 25 marks the sixth anniversary of the last massacre of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Nearly half of their villages were exterminated and 800,000 people fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh. Today, the Rohingya still remain stranded in the refugee camps and the apartheid villages. They have been abandoned by the international community as other issues and conflicts have taken priority.

The Rohingya are an ethnic minority from northwestern Myanmar. Predominantly Muslims, they are subject to constant discrimination in their Buddhist-majority country. Numerous state-driven campaigns of terror and scorched earth have taken place in efforts to drive the Rohingya out of Myanmar. Notable ones include the massacres of 1978, 1991, 2012 and 2017, each one with horrific accounts of burnings, killings, and rapes. In 2019, the International Court of Justice began proceedings on Myanmar, accused of genocide, while the International Criminal Court is still collecting evidence to begin prosecutions against Myanmar’s leadership accused of crimes against humanity.

While the international media brought some attention to the matter back in 2017 and 2018, it has since almost lost interest in the Rohingya crisis. A simple Google search of Rohingya under the news tab yields 2,500 results in 0.22 seconds. On the contrary, a Google search for Ukraine under the News tab yields 71.2 million results in 0.44 seconds. The difference in numbers speak volumes of the sheer lack of attention to the Rohingya issue.

For the nearly one million Rohingya living in ultra-poverty in refugee camps, rations were cut from $12 per person to $10 per person to eventually $8 per person as of June 2023. With 27 cents a day, it becomes difficult to even have a bowl of rice and lentils once a day, let alone anything else that constitutes essential nutrients, especially needed for young developing children.

For the Rohingya that survived the massacres and remained in Myanmar, 153,000 of them live in internally displaced camps and 447,000 in villages with severe restrictions of movement, making it nearly impossible to earn a living, go to school, or be seen by a doctor. People in the camps live in severely overcrowded conditions and suffer from high rates of malnutrition, waterborne illnesses, and child and maternal deaths. It is common for children to die from recurring outbreaks of acute diarrhea.

The UN’s Independent Fact Finding Mission had described the situation of Rohingya in Myanmar as “deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Rohingya” or “measures of slow death… living under the threat of genocide” The conditions still prevail today and many try to escape through human traffickers that promise to take them to Malaysia or Indonesia in exchange of their life savings — only to desert them in the Andaman Sea where they eventually perish.

The international community has turned a blind eye to resolving the Rohingya crisis. None of the regional powers in ASEAN has proposed to bring back the Rohingya to their original homelands with full rights, a demand almost unanimously made by the refugees themselves. China has attempted to facilitate the repatriation of Rohingya under terms that appease China’s own relationships with Myanmar. At the same time, India’s response to the crisis has been through detention and deportation of the Rohingya that have taken refuge on Indian soil. None of the western powers has even proposed a repatriation plan.

The humanitarian response to the Rohingya crisis is also on a decline, which is evident from the severe ration cuts in the refugee camps. The World Food Program’s country brief (Bangladesh) from April 2023 highlighted a $56-million funding shortfall. This can be starkly contrasted with the global humanitarian response to the crisis in Ukraine: nearly $4 billion by the U.S. government alone, €670 million in EU civil protection mechanisms from the European Union and hundreds of millions, if not billions, in bilateral aid from countries all over the world.

Canada initially took leadership on the Rohingya issue by allocating $300 million for international development assistance from 2018 to 2021, as recommended by its Special Envoy to Myanmar. In 2021, Canada renewed the funding by committing another $288.3 million from 2021 to 2024 to support the Rohingya, as well as to advance peace building and democratic rule in Myanmar. Canada can do more to help bridge the funding shortage that has drastically reduced rations in refugee camps to 27 cents a day. In the least, it can leverage its platform on the international stage to influence other donors to increase their contributions.

Canada has also made a commitment to pursue accountability for crimes committed by Myanmar’s ruling junta in its strategy statements. It has expressed its intent to intervene in the proceedings against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, which it has yet to fulfill.

Aug. 25 is another anniversary of the last massacre of the Rohingya. One anniversary after another passes, and the lives of the Rohingya in the refugee camps of Bangladesh and the segregated villages in Myanmar continue as before, stateless and hopeless. What is lacking is the international community’s attention to the crisis and its genuine willingness to help.

Raiss Tinmaung is a Rohingya from Akyab (Sittwe) living in Ottawa.

25 August 2023

Source: ottawacitizen.com

By Mark H. Gaffney

As we approach the 22nd anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, more than enough evidence exists to draw reasonable conclusions about what happened that day and who was responsible.

Most of the basic facts have been known for years, though unfortunately have not been readily available to the general public.

Way back in 2007, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, Dr Steven E. Jones, turned up critical evidence while investigating samples of World Trade Center (WTC) dust. The samples had been collected immediately after September 11, 2001 from the thick deposit of dust that blanketed the WTC site and much of lower Manhattan. Jones found tiny bits of an exotic incendiary known as thermate that can cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. Thermate burns at ~5,000°F. The main product of the reaction is molten iron.

Thermate differs from its better known cousin thermite in that it contains sulfur which lowers the melting point of iron, speeding up the reaction. The presence of both sulfur and aluminum was diagnostic for thermate. Jones called this “the last nail in the coffin.” (Dr. Steven E. Jones, Revisiting 9/11/2001. Applying the Scientific Method, 2007, posted here)

Jones also found an abundance of tiny iron microspheres in the dust (up to .05% by volume), proof that large amounts of WTC steel had melted. The diameter of the spheres ranged from one micron to 1.5 mm. When Jones obtained some thermate, which is commercially available, and used it to cut through a steel plate, the reaction produced an intense spray of molten droplets which cooled into iron microspheres identical to the spheres in the dust.

Other studies of the WTC dust also reported the iron microspheres. (Heather A. Lowers and Gregory P. Meeker, Particle Atlas of World Trade Center Dust, posted here; also see Damage Assessment: 130 Liberty Street Property. WTC Dust Signature Report: Composition and Morphology. December 2003, posted here)

Jones and his colleagues learned that thermite/thermate can be made more explosive by reducing the particle size of the ingredients. This more reactive variety is known as super thermate or nano-thermate. (Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, 2009, posted here)

And there were other revelations. It is indeed shocking how far the development of thermate had “progressed” by the late 1990s. Jones & Co, learned that a liquid sol-gel form of nano-thermate can be applied to steel simply by spraying or painting it on. This means insiders could have prepped the twin towers for demolition undetected during an elevator retrofit, a fireproofing upgrade, or even during routine maintenance. Nor was it necessary to wire the entire building. Ignition can be accomplished remotely using a specially designed thermitic match triggered by a radio signal. Once thermate is ignited, the reaction is self perpetuating. (Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections between NIST and Nano-thermites, July 2, 2008, posted here)

All of this is consistent with the many eyewitness accounts of explosions on 9/11. And it is consistent with the testimony of New York City firemen, first responders and clean-up crews who reported seeing copious amounts of molten steel on site. As one fireman put it: “molten steel was flowing down the channel rails like in a foundry…”

(David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor revisited, 2008, pp. 31-37; Mark H. Gaffney, The 9/11 Mystery Plane, 2008, pp.132-139; Graeme MacQueen, 118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers, posted here)

Office and building fires do not reach temperatures anywhere near hot enough to melt steel which has a melting point of 2,500°F. Nor were there any combustible materials in the WTC, nor any combination thereof, capable of approaching this temperature. Although burning jet fuel has been frequently (and incorrectly) cited as the reason for the WTC collapse, the reality is otherwise. Jet fuel is essentially kerosene and will not burn in air in excess of 1,832°F, far below the melting point of steel.

Not long after the towers collapsed, a hard rain storm drenched Manhattan. Firemen also sprayed millions of gallons of water onto the smoking ruin of the WTC in an attempt to extinguish the fires, all to no effect. This is consistent with burning thermate, which includes its own chemically bound oxygen. This is why a thermate fire cannot be smothered by dowsing and will even burn underwater.

The WTC site was so hot it melted the workmen’s rubber boots. Search-and-rescue dogs brought in to help locate survivors suffered severe burns, and three of the dogs died. Just how hot was the pile? We got an idea on September 16, 2001 when NASA conducted a flyover using an infrared spectrometer (AVIRIS) and detected surface temperatures as high as 1,376° F. Temperatures beneath the pile were undoubtedly much higher. (See this)

The site remained intensely hot for five months. Molten steel was reported as late as February 2002 when clean-up crews finally reached the bottom of the WTC bathtub. (Jennifer Lin, “Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero”, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, May 29, 2002, posted here)

The discovery of thermate in the WTC dust should have been front-page headline news across America, and indeed, around the world. Yet, as we know, the US media went deaf and dumb on the issue. Why? If Muslim jihadists were behind the 9/11 attacks, why would the media censor this breaking story? The only plausible reason for suppressing it was to prevent the truth from emerging about what actually happened. Blanket censorship has been the rule, ever since.

Nor was the cover up limited to the media. After many months of stalling, the G.W. Bush White House reluctantly appointed a government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to investigate and explain the WTC collapse.

The agency released its findings in 2005. In its final report NIST unequivocally states that it found no evidence the WTC was demolished. The multi-volume 10,000-page report gives the appearance of a thorough investigation. But a close reading (I spent many weeks digging into it) shows that NIST worked backwards looking for facts to support a predetermined conclusion that plane impacts and office fires caused the WTC collapse. In the process, NIST dismissed an abundance of evidence to the contrary.

No doubt, this is why many concerned citizens flooded NIST with critical comments and questions about its report. The public wanted to know: Did your scientists actually look for explosives? If so, where is the beef?

In 2006, the agency posted a clarification on its website. NIST acknowledged that it failed to look for explosive residues. (See question #29 here)

The admission was fatal to the agency’s credibility, and exposed the NIST report for what it is, a pile of stinking manure. Testing for thermitic incendiaries and explosives is standard practice in fire investigations. The national standard calls for it. (NFPA 921)

All of which means that the familiar narrative about Osama bin Laden and nineteen fanatic A-rabs is nothing but a cover story: a tapestry of lies. There is no way foreign jihadists could have gained access to the WTC to pre-position explosives. Nor in any event could Al Qaeda have manufactured thermate in a cave in Afghanistan. The incendiary is high-tech and in 2001 only a handful of nations had the capacity to produce it, the US and Israel at the top of the list.

As Sherlock Holmes famously told Watson: My friend, once you rule out the impossible what remains must be the truth. Like it or not.

The Devil’s Trick?

But is thermate the whole truth? Can thermate alone account for everything we witnessed on 9/11? This is the contentious question that some in the 9/11 truth community have been attempting to raise, for years.

According to NIST, the steel in the monster box columns in the core of the towers was up to seven inches thick at the base. Could thermate cut through columns of this size? Doubtful. (NIST NCSTAR 1-3 p. 10).

We know that enormous explosions ripped through the basement of each tower shortly before they fell. A photographer named Rick Siegal actually captured these explosions on film from Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The quality of Siegal’s video was excellent because his camera was set on a tripod. Moreover, it was also equipped with audio so he was able to record the thunderous noise which carried across the river. The footage is graphic. After each blast a dust cloud is plainly visible rising from around the base of the tower. Collapse ensued within minutes. These huge explosions shook the ground and evidently were intended to weaken the towers by destroying the gigantic core columns. In my opinion they were not caused by thermate.

We also know that during the collapse large segments of the outer perimeter wall were thrown at least 600 feet from the base of the towers. Could thermate do this? Not likely. This points to a much more powerful explosive.

Recently, I also learned about another anomaly. On completion of the clean up at ground zero, two cavernous holes in the bedrock were very much in evidence at the site. They were located near to where the towers stood. The deepest of these was 110-feet below street level, so deep the bottom was below sea level. Obviously, thermate did not excavate these enormous voids in the granite. I was stunned when I learned about this.

The official story is that ice age glaciers carved the “grand canyon of Manhattan” 20,000 years ago. (David W. Dunlap, At Ground Zero, Scenes from the Ice Age, New York Times, September 21, 2008, posted here)

However, a German physicist who thinks outside the box, Heinz Pommer, has a different explanation. In 2018, during a presentation in London, Pommer argued that the twin towers were demolished with a nuclear bomb [e.g. dirty bomb, “type of a “radiological dispersal device” (RDD) that combines a conventional explosive, such as dynamite, with radioactive material”]. He thinks the enormous voids in the granite may have been a collateral effect.

Pommer is not the first to refer to the use of nukes on 9/11. Others who did so before him have faced disbelief and ridicule. The main argument against nukes is the absence of radiation at the WTC site. Although a nuclear isotope, tritium, was definitely detected, allegedly its presence has been otherwise accounted for, ruling out nukes.

But Pommer begs to differ. He argues that the placement of the Uranium charge at the bottom of the WTC elevator shaft explains the seeming absence of radiation. The nuclear reaction in these simple but effective weapons proceeded slowly, at first. As the heat from fission built up, the Uranium charge melted down into the granite.

The result was a pressure chamber in the bedrock below each tower where fission ultimately fizzled and was contained. The fusion component, however, formed a rising plasma needle that eventually broke containment. At a critical point, super-heated gas and gamma radiation vented vertically through the core of each tower, analogous to a volcanic gas jet eruption. All of this was hidden from view until the moment the tower visibly exhaled dust and gas from the upper levels. Then came the symmetric top-down collapse.

Pommer argues (yet to be confirmed) that only the vast energy of a nuke can explain the conversion of hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete and steel into dust. And only a nuke can account for the sudden disintegration of the upper portion of the South Tower (WTC-2) which had tipped at a weird angle and was falling as a unit. And only a nuke can explain the near total absence of ceramic sinks and toilets, filing cabinets, furniture, and human bodies in the wreckage. Almost everything in the towers was vaporized by gamma radiation.

According to Pommer, the nuclear reaction progressed over at least an hour, and this would explain a number of anomalies. These include electromagnetic interference of radio and tv transmissions, spontaneous fires in surrounding buildings and in nearby vehicles, the pyroclastic cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan, conspicuous venting of steam from underground sewers, strange rainbow effects and silverfish flashes in video footage, and the like.

Recently, important new evidence has also come to light. In 2019, doctors at Mt. Sinai Medical Center reported “an increased incidence of thyroid cancer among 9/11 rescue workers….the etiology of which remains unclear.” I only learned about this, a few days ago. (See this)

Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thyroid cancer has been recognized as the tell-tale signature of exposure to nuclear radiation. A spike of thyroid cancers also occurred after the Chernobyl disaster. (See this)

I believe the thyroid cancers are the true smoking gun of 9/11, and a wake up call. Pommer’s thesis deserves thoughtful consideration. He calls it the devil’s trick. (Part one below, part two here, part three here)

The 9/11 nuke’s total energy; Part 1 of “The Power Source(s) of the 9/11 Event”

Read part two of this essay

Mark H. Gaffney is the author of Dimona the Third Temple (1989), The 9/11 Mystery Plane and the Vanishing of America (2008), Black 9/11.

27 August 2023

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Mike Whitney and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Mike Whitney interviews Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, a renowned author and academic, and chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.

Mike Whitney (MW): To what extent has the war in Ukraine accelerated the move to a new global realignment?

Paul Craig Roberts (PCR): It was Washington’s economic sanctions against Russia, the theft of Russia’s central bank reserves, and the theft of Venezuela’s gold, not the conflict in Ukraine, that weaponized the US dollar and resulted in global realignment.

The limited Russian intervention in Donbas was Putin’s belated eight-year-delayed response to the US coup that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014 and installed a government hostile to Russia and to the Russian population that had been incorporated into the Ukraine province of the Soviet Union by Soviet leaders. The intervention was forced on Putin by the United States’ buildup of a large Ukraine army poised to overthrow the self-declared Donbas republics.

By habit and convenience, the US dollar is used as world money to settle imbalances in international trade, but the sanctions woke the world up to the risks of using the dollar. Consequently, the BRICS suddenly expanded with membership extended to Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The organization now contains essentially the entirety of world oil production and 40-45% of World GDP.

Clearly, a realignment has already occurred.

MW: Iran, Saudi Arabia and UAE have now all joined BRICS. How will this affect the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency? (Is this the end of the petrodollar?)

PCR: Saudi Arabia announced the end of the petrodollar when it began accepting payment for oil in other currencies. The BRICS are working out how to carry on trade among themselves without use of the US dollar, which in effect brings to an end the role of the dollar as world reserve currency.

The BRICS might try to create a new reserve currency consisting of a weighted basket of their currencies. This is unnecessary and could lead to strains among BRICS members from disputes over the shares of each currency in the basket. A reserve currency is no longer needed. A reserve currency was needed at the end of WWII because the other industrialized economies were destroyed. As the US had the only intact economy, the role fell to the US dollar. Today this is not the situation. Central banks can keep their reserves in the form of the currencies of their trading partners.

What this means for Washington is that the US will begin having financing problems for its large budget and trade deficits. As long as the dollar was the world money, foreign central banks kept their reserves in US Treasury debt. As US budget and trade deficits grew, so did the reserves of the world banking system.

The situation is changing. If a dozen countries constituting about half of the world’s population and 40-45% of world GDP cease using the dollar, the foreign central bank market for US debt shrinks considerably. Having offshored its manufacturing, the US is import-dependent. Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.

MW: Can Washington allow this realignment to stand or should we expect to see a coup in Saudi Arabia where the US has five military bases and numerous CIA offices?

PCR: I do not know if Washington has the ability to overthrow the Saudi government or whether Russia, China, and Iran would permit it. Remember, President Obama was going to overthrow Assad in Syria, but Putin did not permit it.

MW: The globalist dreams of the western oligarchs (WEF) appear to be coming to an end along with the so-called “rules-based order”. In your opinion, how important has Vladimir Putin been in spearheading the move towards a “new architecture for global security” and laying the groundwork for a new multipolar world order?

PCR: What broke up Washington’s version of global order was the West’s cold shoulder to Putin’s effort to be a part of the world order on equal standing and not in a subservient position. It was Washington’s arrogance and foolishness that broke up the global order.

MW: Before he died, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that the US would need to seek an accommodation with Russia and China to ease the transition away from the unipolar system. Here’s what he said:

“As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture… the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, i t is no longer the globally imperial power….

the United States must take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence …can be contained without destroying the global order.…

a long and painful road toward an initially limited regional accommodation is the only viable option for the United States, Russia, China, and the pertinent Middle Eastern entities. For the United States, that will require patient persistence in forging cooperative relationships with some new partners (particularly Russia and China)…

The fact is that there has never been a truly “dominant” global power until the emergence of America on the world scene…. During the latter part of the 20th century no other power even came close. That era is now ending. Toward a Global Realignment, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The American Interest

In your opinion, how should the United States deal with Moscow and Beijing? Is there a way that we can defend US interests while –at the same time– avoiding years of conflict and confrontation? What should our foreign policy objectives be?

PCR: The neoconservatives’ goal of US hegemony prevents Washington from hearing Brzezinski’s advice. Washington’s chance to deal with Russia and China has passed. The question we face is how will Russia and China deal with Washington. The neoconservative monopoly on US foreign policy means that there are no other voices for Washington to hear, and American hegemony is out of the question.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State.

Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published.

29 August 2023

Source: globalresearch.ca

 

 

By Noam Chomsky

The Path to Disaster

27 Aug 2023 – What is the future likely to bring?  A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside.  So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now — assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious — and you’re looking back at what’s happening today.  You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.  That’s been true since 1945.  It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction. So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

How to Destroy a Planet Without Really Trying

The question is: What are people doing about it?  None of this is a secret.  It’s all perfectly open.  In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

There have been a range of reactions.  There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them.  If you look at who they are, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer would see something strange indeed.  Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada.  They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world — Australia, India, South America — there are battles going on, sometimes wars.  In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally, but also in their general consequences.  In societies where indigenous populations have an influence, many are taking a strong stand.  The strongest of any country with regard to global warming is in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the “rights of nature.”

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of where the government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground, instead of producing and exporting it — and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently and was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the U.N. General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a devil.  He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting.  Of course, Venezuela is a major oil producer.  Oil is practically their whole gross domestic product.  In that speech, he warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil fuel use.  That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer.  You know, he was part Indian, of indigenous background.  Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the U.N. was never even reported.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster.  At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.  Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.

Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States.  Energy independence is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside.  What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to destroying the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere.  Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe is doing something.  Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps 100 relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets.  It’s not because the population doesn’t want it.  Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming.  It’s institutional structures that block change.  Business interests don’t want it and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that’s what the future historian — if there is one — would see.  He might also read today’s scientific journals.  Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

“The Most Dangerous Moment in History”

The other issue is nuclear war.  It’s been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow.  You can read about it in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  It’s well understood.  So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We’ve just passed the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was called “the most dangerous moment in history” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Kennedy’s advisor.  Which it was.  It was a very close call, and not the only time either.  In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that the lessons haven’t been learned.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded.  The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.  There was a point, as the missile crisis was reaching its peak, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy offering to settle it by a public announcement of a withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey.  Actually, Kennedy hadn’t even known that the U.S. had missiles in Turkey at the time.  They were being withdrawn anyway, because they were being replaced by more lethal Polaris nuclear submarines, which were invulnerable.

So that was the offer.  Kennedy and his advisors considered it — and rejected it.  At the time, Kennedy himself was estimating the likelihood of nuclear war at a third to a half.  So Kennedy was willing to accept a very high risk of massive destruction in order to establish the principle that we — and only we — have the right to offensive missiles beyond our borders, in fact anywhere we like, no matter what the risk to others — and to ourselves, if matters fall out of control. We have that right, but no one else does.

Kennedy did, however, accept a secret agreement to withdraw the missiles the U.S. was already withdrawing, as long as it was never made public.  Khrushchev, in other words, had to openly withdraw the Russian missiles while the U.S. secretly withdrew its obsolete ones; that is, Khrushchev had to be humiliated and Kennedy had to maintain his macho image.  He’s greatly praised for this: courage and coolness under threat, and so on.  The horror of his decisions is not even mentioned — try to find it on the record.

And to add a little more, a couple of months before the crisis blew up the United States had sent missiles with nuclear warheads to Okinawa.  These were aimed at China during a period of great regional tension.

Well, who cares?  We have the right to do anything we want anywhere in the world.  That was one grim lesson from that era, but there were others to come.

Ten years after that, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert.  It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israel-Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a ceasefire the U.S. and Russia had just agreed upon.  Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan was in office.  Soon after he entered the White House, he and his advisors had the Air Force start penetrating Russian air space to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems, Operation Able Archer.  Essentially, these were mock attacks.  The Russians were uncertain, some high-level officials fearing that this was a step towards a real first strike.  Fortunately, they didn’t react, though it was a close call.  And it goes on like that.

What to Make of the Iranian and North Korean Nuclear Crises

At the moment, the nuclear issue is regularly on front pages in the cases of North Korea and Iran.  There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises.  Maybe they wouldn’t work, but at least you could try.  They are, however, not even being considered, not even reported.

Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West — not in the Arab world, not in Asia — the gravest threat to world peace.  It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons for it, but I’ll put that aside here.  Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace?  Actually there are quite a few.  One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed a couple of months ago at a meeting of the non-aligned countries in Tehran.  In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the U.N. General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region.  That wouldn’t be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward.  And there were ways to proceed.  Under U.N. auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland last December to try to implement plans to move toward this.  What happened?

You won’t read about it in the newspapers because it wasn’t reported — only in specialist journals.  In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting.  A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn’t right.  The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states.  Nothing resulted.  So we’ll move toward ever-harsher sanctions against the Iranian population — it doesn’t hurt the regime — and maybe war. Who knows what will happen?

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing.  North Korea may be the craziest country in the world.  It’s certainly a good competitor for that title.  But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways.  Why would they behave the way they do?  Just imagine ourselves in their situation.  Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing.  Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that, since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply — a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.   And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive.  The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination.  It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death.  How magnificent!  It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory.

Let’s turn to the present.  There’s an interesting recent history.  In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country.  President Clinton intervened and blocked it.  Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test.  The U.S. and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted its nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides.  When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea — “axis of evil” and all that — so North Korea got back to work on its nuclear program.  By the time Bush left office, they had eight to 10 nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement.  In between, other things happened.  In 2005, the U.S. and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development.  In return, the West, but mainly the United States, was to provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements.  They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.

It was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it.  He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones.  The North Koreans reacted by reviving their nuclear weapons program.  And that’s the way it’s been going.

It’s well known.  You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship.  What they say is: it’s a pretty crazy regime, but it’s also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy.  You make a hostile gesture and we’ll respond with some crazy gesture of our own.  You make an accommodating gesture and we’ll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean-U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which, from the North’s point of view, have got to look threatening.  We’d think they were threatening if they were going on in Canada and aimed at us.  In the course of these, the most advanced bombers in history, Stealth B-2s and B-52s, are carrying out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea’s borders.

This surely sets off alarm bells from the past.  They remember that past, so they’re reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way.  Well, what comes to the West from all this is how crazy and how awful the North Korean leaders are.  Yes, they are.  But that’s hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going.

It’s not that there are no alternatives.  The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous.  So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture.  Unless people do something about it.  We always can.

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist.

28 August 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Lara-Nour Walton

22 Aug 2023 –  “This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May 8 tweet. As many of us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing.

“I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he said. The natural-language processing tool responded to Abusaada’s query ambivalently:

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, feelings or beliefs. The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a complex and controversial issue with many different perspectives and opinions….

But then he posed the same question about Israelis. This time, the chat box did not equivocate:

Yes, like all people, Israelis deserve to be free. Freedom is a fundamental human right that should be protected and guaranteed for all individuals, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is essential that Israelis, like all people, are able to live their lives free from violence, oppression and discrimination….

“Explanation?” demanded Abusaada.

The explanation lies in the overarching attitudes of the 570 GB of data that ChatGPT scrapes from the internet. And, with news media being one of the primary sources of information that the bot is trained on, Abusaada’s experience is hardly surprising.

To say that US news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. With outlets like NPR vilified as “National Palestinian Radio” and papers like the New York Times castigated by pro-Israel watchdogs for lending “the Palestinian narrative” undue credence (CAMERA, 10/15/13), the myth of pro-Palestine bias appears plausible.

Yet such claims have been litigated, and the verdict is plain: US corporate media lean in favor of Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (New Arab, 7/28/22) noted: “The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases which distort the Palestinian struggle.” Some trends are more ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation.

1. Where Are the Palestinians?

In 2018, 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, analyzed almost 100,000 news headlines published by five leading US publications between 1967 and 2017. The study revealed that major newspapers were four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over Palestinian ones. (This trend was further confirmed by Maha Nassar—+972, 10/2/20).

Owais Zaheer, an author of 416Labs’ study told the Intercept (1/12/19) that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”

In its media resource guide, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) counseled reporters: “Former US diplomats, Israeli military analysts and non-Palestinian Middle East commentators are not replacements for Palestinian voices.”

The exclusion of Palestinian voices from corporate media reporting does not stop at sourcing. For example, contrary to its pro-Israel critics, NPR’s correspondents are rarely Palestinian or Arab, and almost all reside in West Jerusalem or Israel proper (FAIR.org, 4/2/18). Editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son of the New York Times‘ then–Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (Extra!, 4/10).

When Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) acknowledged that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father,” Times executive editor Bill Keller rejected this advice, saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner “a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say, signed up with Hamas.

Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, also had a son who enlisted in the IDF (Mondoweiss, 10/27/14). Moreover, her husband, Hirsh Goodman, has worked at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (FAIR.org, 5/1/12), where his job was

shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.

When establishment media outlets privilege one narrative over another, public opinion is likely to follow. Thus, the suppression of alternative viewpoints is among today’s most concerning media afflictions.

2. Turning Assaults Into ‘Clashes’

Reporting on Israel/Palestine often relies on a lexical toolbox designed for occlusion rather than clarity, “clashes” rather than “assaults.” Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/9/18) explains that “clash” is “a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, ‘to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.’”

FAIR has documented the abuse of “clash” in the Israeli/Palestinian context time and time again: In 2018 Gaza, Israeli troops fired at unarmed protestors 100 meters away. No Israelis perished, but 30 Palestinians were murdered. That was not a “clash,” as establishment media would have you believe; that was a mass shooting (FAIR.org, 5/1/18). During the funeral for Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was assassinated by Israeli gunfire, the IDF beat mourners, charged at them with horses and batons, and deployed stun grenades and tear gas. The procession was so rocked by the attacks that they nearly dropped Abu Akleh’s casket. That was not a clash, that was a senseless act of cruelty (FAIR.org, 7/2/22). This summer, when Israeli forces raided the West Bank and stood by as illegal settlers arsoned homes, farmland and vehicles, that was not a “clash”; that was colonialism (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

The choice to use “clash”—and other comparably hazy descriptors of regional violence, like “tension,” “conflict” and “strife”—is bad journalism. Such designations lack substance, disorient readers and above all spin a spurious storyline whereby Israelis and Palestinians inflict and withstand equivalent bloodshed. (According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 3,584 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli security forces since January 19, 2009, while 196 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians during the same period.)

AMEJA’s media resource guide reminds journalists that the occupation “is not a conflict between states, but rather between Israel, which has one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the Palestinians, who have no formal army.”

But when such a power imbalance is inadequately acknowledged, “clash” and its misleading corollaries will not sound out of place, and readers will not have the context necessary to separate the perpetrators from the victims of violence.

3. Linguistic Gymnastics

The passive voice—or, as William Schneider describes it, the “past exonerative” tense—is a grammatical construction that describes events without assigning responsibility. Such sentence structures pervade coverage of the Israeli occupation.

In her 2021 investigation into coverage of the first and second intifadas, Holly M. Jackson identified disproportionate use of the passive voice—i.e., “the man was bitten” rather than “the dog bit the man”—as one of the defining linguistic features of New York Times reporting on the uprisings. The Times used the passive voice to talk about Palestinians twice as often as it did Israelis, which demonstrated the paper’s “clear patterns of bias against Palestinians.”

While Jackson’s study only examined New York Times coverage during the intifadas, passive voice remains a common grammatical cop out—still permeating national newspaper headlines in recent months:

• “At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Clashes After Israeli Raid in West Bank” (New York Times, 6/19/23)
• “Two Palestinians Killed in Separate Episodes in Latest West Bank Violence” (AP, 8/4/23)
• “Israeli Forces Say Three Palestinians Killed in Occupied West Bank” (CNN, 8/7/23)

Other times, raids are miraculously carried out on their own, violence randomly erupts and missiles are inexplicably fired. The now-amended New York Times headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” (7/10/14) begged the question: Who fired the missile that, as if it had a mind of its own, “found” Palestinian World Cup spectators?

Similarly, the Washington Post piece “Yet Another Palestinian Journalist Dies on the Job” (5/12/22) leaves the reader puzzled. How exactly did Shireen Abu Akleh—left unnamed in the title—die?

Headlines that omit the Israeli subject are unjustifiably exculpatory, because editors know exactly who the assailant is.

4. Newsworthy and Unnewsworthy Deaths

Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week military assault on Gaza in 2008, was carnage. According to Amnesty International and B’Tselem, the attack claimed 13 Israeli lives (four of which were killed by Israeli fire), while Palestine’s death toll was nearly 1,400—300 of which were children. Yet the media response was far from proportional.

In a 2010 study of New York Times coverage of Operation Cast Lead, Jonas Caballero found that the Times covered 431% of Israeli deaths—meaning each Israeli fatality was reported an average of four times—while reporting a mere 17% of Palestinian deaths. This means that Israeli deaths were covered at 25 times the rate Palestinian ones were.

The Times is not an outlier. FAIR’s examination (Extra!, 11–12/01) of six months’ worth of NPR Israel/Palestine broadcasting during the Second Intifada determined that 81% of Israeli fatalities were reported on, while Palestinian deaths were acknowledged just 34% of the time. The disparity only widened when Palestinian victims were minors:

Of the 30 Palestinian civilians under the age of 18 that were killed, six were reported on NPR—only 20%. By contrast, the network reported on 17 of the 19 Israeli minors who were killed, or 89%…. Apparently being a minor makes your death more newsworthy to NPR if you are Israeli, but less newsworthy if you are Palestinian.

Media also erase or downplay Palestinian deaths in the language of their headlines. When the New York Times (11/16/14) ran a story entitled “Palestinian Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza Border” it did not seem to occur to the editor that specifying the age of the victim would be important. The Palestinian in question was a 10-year-old boy. In another headline, “More Than 30 Dead in Gaza and Israel as Fighting Quickly Escalates,” the Times (5/11/21) neatly obscures that 35 out of the “more than 30 dead” were Palestinian, while five were Israeli.

5. Sidelining International Law

Attempts to insulate Israel from condemnation also manifest themselves in establishment media’s reluctance to identify the country’s breaches of international law (FAIR.org, 12/8/17).

In Operation Cast Lead coverage, FAIR (Extra!, 2/09) noted that—despite the blatant illegality of Israel’s assaults on Palestine’s civilian infrastructure—international law was seldom newsworthy. By January 13, 2009, only two evening news programs  (NBC Nightly News, 1/8/09, 1/11/09) had broached the legality of the Israeli military offensive. But, only one of those TV segments (Nightly News, 1/8/09) reprimanded Israel—the other (Nightly News, 1/11/09) defended the illegal use of white phosphorus, which was being deployed on refugee camps.

Meanwhile, just one daily newspaper (USA Today, 1/7/08) mentioned international law. But that single reference—embedded in an op-ed by a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy in Washington—was directed at Hamas violations, rather than Israeli ones.

When it comes to reporting on the unlawful establishment of Israeli settlements, media are no better. Colonizing occupied territories violates both Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 446, yet outlets like NPR, CNN and the New York Times have a history of concealing Israeli criminality by benevolently branding settlements as “neighborhoods” (FAIR.org, 8/1/02, 10/10/14).

Such charitable descriptions have also been extended to settlers themselves. In an October 2009 Extra! piece, Julie Hollar investigated a bevy of articles that characterized settlers as “law-abiding,” “soft-spoken,” “gentle” and “normal.” One tone-deaf Christian Science Monitor headline (8/9/09) even read: “Young Israeli Settlers Go Hippie? Far Out, Man!” As Hollar observed, “ethnic cleansing could hardly hope for a friendlier hearing.”

Even when news media have characterized settlements and settlers as engaging in unlawful colonial practices, they have done so reluctantly. In 2021, Israeli settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah culminated in an unlawful campaign of mass expulsion. A New York Times (5/7/21) article on the crisis waited until the 39th paragraph before suggesting that Israel was acting criminally. Similarly, while describing Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly aggressive settlement policies, Associated Press (6/18/23) buried the lead by avoiding the “illegal” designation until the middle of the piece.

It’s important to bring up the rule of law not only when Israel is actively injuring innocents or erecting colonial communities. The ceaseless maltreatment of Palestinians constitutes—according to Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch—apartheid. Apartheid is a crime against humanity, yet news media avoid acknowledging the human rights community’s consensus (FAIR.org, 7/21/23, 2/3/22, 4/26/19). As FAIR (5/23/23) pointed out, it is a journalistic duty to do so:

The dominant and overriding context of anything that happens in Israel/Palestine is the fact that the state of Israel is running an apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory it controls. Any obfuscation or equivocation of that fact serves only to downplay the severity of Israeli crimes and the US complicity in them.

6. Reversing Victim and Victimizer

As Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 5/18/21) wrote:

Only the Israeli side has ethnically cleansed and turned millions…into refugees by preventing [Palestinians] from exercising their right to return to their homes. Israel is the only side subjecting anyone to apartheid and military occupation.

Nevertheless, US media enter into fantastical rationalizations to make the Israeli aggressor appear to be the victim. Blaming Palestinians for their suffering and dispossession has become one of the prime ways to accomplish this feat.

A 2018 FAIR report (5/17/18) analyzed coverage of the deadly Great March of Return—protests that erupted in response to Israel’s illegal land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. The ongoing siege bans the import of raw materials and significantly curtails the movement of people and goods. The International Committee of the Red Cross (6/14/10) deplores the blockade: “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility.”

Despite the ICRC indictment, FAIR found that established media held besieged Palestinians accountable for Israel’s reign of terror following anti-blockade demonstrations. The New York Times (5/14/18) editorial board went so far as to suggest that Palestinians (and not the siege-imposing Israel) were the only obstacles to peace:

Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly peaceful.

Casting Palestinians as incorrigible savages is also easier when US media use defensive language to excuse the bulk of Israeli violence (FAIR.org, 2/2/09, 7/10/14). FAIR (5/1/02) conducted a survey into ABC, CBS and NBC’s use of the word “retaliation”—a term that “lays responsibil­ity for the cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’ against, since they presumably initiated the conflict.” Of the 150 mentions of “retaliation” and its analogs between September 2000 and March 17, 2002, 79% referred to Israeli violence. Twelve percent were ambiguous, or encompassed both sides. A mere 9% framed Palestinian violence as a retaliatory response.

Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s books Bad News From Israel and More Bad News From Israel posit that television’s “Palestinian action/Israeli retaliation” trope has a “significant effect” on how the public remember events and allot blame (FAIR.org, 8/21/20). When Palestinians are consistently portrayed as the aggressive party and Israel as the defensive one, US news media are “effectively legitimizing Israeli actions.”

Coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine celebrates the efforts of Ukrainian resistance. With the anti-imperial Palestinian struggle, however, news media refuse to extend the same favor (FAIR.org, 7/6/23), thus creating a

media landscape where certain groups are entitled to self-defense, and others are doomed to be the victims of  “reprisal” attacks. It tells the world that…Palestinians living under apartheid have no right to react to the almost daily raids, growing illegal settlements and ballooning settler hostility.

***

Malcolm X once declared,“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard our screens and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to remain aware of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment news coverage. Then maybe one day we can move towards a future where ChatGPT answers “yes” when users like Abusaada ask it whether Palestinians deserve to be free.

Lara-Nour Walton is a Summer 2023 FAIR intern.

28 August 2023

Source: transcend.org