Censorship – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org Independent Media for People, Not Profits. Thu, 31 Jul 2025 02:37:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.radiofree.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-Radio-Free-Social-Icon-2-32x32.png Censorship – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org 32 32 141331581 The Paranoia of Officialdom: Age Verification and Using the Internet in Australia https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/31/the-paranoia-of-officialdom-age-verification-and-using-the-internet-in-australia/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/31/the-paranoia-of-officialdom-age-verification-and-using-the-internet-in-australia/#respond Thu, 31 Jul 2025 02:37:32 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=160352 Australia, in keeping with its penal history, has a long record of paranoid officialdom and paternalistic wowsers. Be it perceived threats to morality, the tendency of the populace to be corrupted, and a general, gnawing fear about what knowledge might do, Australia’s governing authorities have prized censorship. This recent trend is most conspicuous in an […]

The post The Paranoia of Officialdom: Age Verification and Using the Internet in Australia first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Australia, in keeping with its penal history, has a long record of paranoid officialdom and paternalistic wowsers. Be it perceived threats to morality, the tendency of the populace to be corrupted, and a general, gnawing fear about what knowledge might do, Australia’s governing authorities have prized censorship.

This recent trend is most conspicuous in an ongoing regulatory war being waged against the Internet and the corporate citizens that inhabit it. Terrified that Australia’s tender children will suffer ruination at the hands of online platforms, the entire population of the country will be subjected to age verification checks. Preparations are already underway in the country to impose a social media ban for users under the age of 16, ostensibly to protect the mental health and wellbeing of children. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 was passed in November last year to amend the Online Safety Act 2021, requiring “age-restricted social media platforms” to observe a “minimum age obligation” to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from having accounts. It also vests that ghastly office of the eSafety Commissioner and the Information Commissioner with powers to seek information regarding relevant compliance by the platforms, along with the power to issue and publish notices of non-compliance.

While the press were falling over to note the significance of such changes, little debate has accompanied the last month’s registration of a new industry code by the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. In fact, Inman Grant is proving most busy, having already registered three such codes, with a further six to be registered by the end of this year. All serve to target the behaviour of internet service companies in Australia. Not all have been subject to parliamentary debate, let alone broader public consultation.

Inman Grant has been less than forthcoming about the implications of these codes, most notably on the issue of mandatory age-assurance limits. That said, some crumbs have been left for those paying attention to her innate obsession with hiving off the Internet from Australian users. In her address to the National Press Club in Canberra on June 24, she did give some clue about where the country is heading: “Today, I am […] announcing that through the Online Safety Act’s codes and standards framework, we will be moving to register three industry-prepared codes designed to limit children’s access to high impact, harmful material like pornography, violent content, themes of suicide, self-harm and disordered eating.”  (Is there no limit to this commissar’s fears?) Under such codes, companies would “agree to apply safety measures up and down the technology stack – including age assurance protections.”

With messianic fervour, Inman Grant explained that the codes would “serve as a bulwark and operate in concern with the new social media age limits, distributing more responsibility and accountability across eight sectors of the tech industry.” These would also not be limited in scope, applicable to enterprise hosting services, internet carriage services, and various “access providers and search engines. I have concluded that each of these codes provides appropriate community safeguards.”

From December 27, such technology giants as Google and Microsoft will have to use age-assurance technology for account holders when they sign in and “apply tools and/or settings, like ‘safe search’ functionality, at the highest safety setting by default for an account holders its age verification systems indicate is likely to be an Australian child, designed to protect and prevent Australian children from accessing or being exposed to online pornography and high impact violence material in search results.” This is pursuant to Schedule 3 – Internet Search Engine Services Online Safety Code (Class 1C and Class 2 Material).

How this will be undertaken has not, as yet, been clarified by Google or Microsoft. The companies have, however, been in the business of trialling a number of technologies. These include Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography, which permits people to prove that an aspect of themselves is true without surrendering any other data; using large language models (LLMs) to discern an account holder’s age based on browsing history; or the use of selfie verification and government ID tools.

Specialists in the field of information technology have been left baffled and worried. “I have not seen anything like this anywhere else in the world,” remarks IT researcher Lisa Given. This had “kind of popped out, seemingly out of the blue.” Digital Rights Watch chair, Lizzie O’Shea, is of the view that “the public deserves more of a say in how to balance these important human rights issues” while Justin Warren, founder of the tech analysis company PivotNine, sees it as “a massive overreaction after years of police inaction to curtail the power of a handful of large foreign technology companies.”

Then comes the issue of efficacy. Using the safety of children as a reason for censoring content and restricting technology is a government favourite. Whether the regulations actually protect children is quite another matter. John Pane, chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), was less than impressed by the results from a recent age-assurance technology trial conducted to examine the effect of the teen social media ban. And all of this cannot ignore the innovative guile of young users, ever ready to circumvent any imposed restrictions.

Inman Grant, in her attempts to limit the use of the Internet and infantilise the population, sees these age-restricting measures as “building a culture of online safety, using multiple interventions – just as we have done so successfully on our beaches.” This nonsensical analogy excludes the central theme of her policies, common to all censors in history: The people are not to be trusted, and paternalistic governors and regulators know better.

The post The Paranoia of Officialdom: Age Verification and Using the Internet in Australia first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/31/the-paranoia-of-officialdom-age-verification-and-using-the-internet-in-australia/feed/ 0 546948 Paramount Sells Out Journalism to Secure Purchase by Skydance https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/24/paramount-sells-out-journalism-to-secure-purchase-by-skydance/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/24/paramount-sells-out-journalism-to-secure-purchase-by-skydance/#respond Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:23:11 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9046658  

Bloomberg: FCC Chair ‘Pleased’ With Skydance-Paramount Deal Concessions

FCC chair Brendan Carr (Bloomberg, 7/24/25) enthused about Skydance‘s promises: “They’ve committed to addressing bias issues. They’ve committed to embracing fact-based journalism.”

The media production company Skydance is acquiring Paramount Global. The deal may be thought largely to be an entertainment merger, as Paramount owns Comedy Central, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Showtime and the Paramount film studio. But Paramount owns broadcast network CBS and its news programming, which means that the deal has enormous implications for journalism—particularly given that it requires federal approval.

The coast certainly seems clear for the merger at this point: Paramount has settled what is widely regarded as a frivolous lawsuit from President Donald Trump for $16 million over a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; it has also canceled its highly successful and long-running Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host was critical of the settlement. Meanwhile, Paramount‘s soon-to-be-owner has met with “anti-woke” crusader Bari Weiss about a potential partnership with CBS.

Trump has used his institutional power to attack media he dislikes such as ABC and CBS, as well as to defund liberal-leaning public broadcasters NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; Variety, 7/18/25; USA Today, 7/18/25). Late last year, Disney settled a similarly ludicrous Trump lawsuit over ABC‘s election coverage (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).

Trump has also used his power to take control of government broadcaster Voice of America, once a Cold War propaganda tool for US power projection abroad, and fill it with content from One America News Network (AP, 5/7/25), a pro-Trump outlet FAIR founder Jeff Cohen once said “makes Fox News sound like Democracy Now!” (FAIR.org, 10/15/21).

The latest moves from CBS‘s owners mark the latest seismic shift to the right in the US media landscape.

Paramount kisses the ring

Vanity Fair: “No One Is Happy About It.” CBS Staffers Were Tired of the Paramount Drama, but the Settlement Intensifies Media-Capitulation Concerns

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism” (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25).

The lawsuit that Paramount settled to pave the way for the deal preposterously claimed that an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the CBS show 60 Minutes was deceptively edited to favor her over Trump (BBC, 7/2/25). Anyone who cares about journalism or media freedom would have rooted for Paramount and CBS to fight the lawsuit, but Paramount‘s leading stockholder, Shari Redstone, apparently saw the settlement as a small price to keep Trump’s Federal Communications Commission from standing in the way of the lucrative sale. (Trump claims that the combined company has also agreed to air $16 million more in PSAs, described as messages that will “support conservative causes supported by President Trump,” as part of the settlement, though Paramount denies such a side agreement exists—Variety, 7/4/25).

The settlement has been “broadly criticized as capitulation” by CBS staffers (Vanity Fair, 7/2/25). Reuters (7/2/25) reported that one 60 Minutes source said

newsroom staff expressed ‘widespread distress’ about the settlement and concerns about the future of the CBS News prime time news magazine and its hard-hitting brand of journalism.

A filing with the FCC (Deadline, 7/18/25) suggested that an upcoming shift in CBS’s news coverage was part of the deal to get the acquisition approved. It said that Skydance and FCC officials had “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”

Presumably those “varied ideological perspectives” will not include those offensive to Trump, since airing those resulted in Paramount paying a multi-million-dollar settlement. As I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), FCC chair Brendan Carr is a lieutenant in the MAGA movement, and wrote the FCC section for Project 2025, the right-wing policy roadmap for the second Trump administration. While vowing to reduce regulation, he has shown no qualms about using state power to impose ideological limits on broadcast news.

Paramount also promised to install an ombud who would investigate “any complaints of bias or other concerns” at CBS News, and to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs (Wrap, 7/23/25).

‘Sacrificing free speech to curry favor’

Mother Jones: Colbert’s Cancellation Is a Dark Warning

Mother Jones‘ Inae Oh (7/18/25) wrote that “the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide.”

As the deal approached, it became clear that CBS’s ability to operate as a fair news provider was slipping, as Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, “announced his resignation, saying he can no longer make independent journalism decisions for the program” (NPR, 4/23/25). With Colbert’s termination, it’s unclear whether any part of the new Skydance empire will escape ideological purification.

CBS‘s announcement that it would cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been read as a muzzling of a prominent critic, not just of Trump, but of the Paramount settlement. The Writers Guild of America East (7/18/25) spelled out the authoritarian moment plainly:

On July 15, during a regular show of the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Colbert went on-air and called the settlement a “big fat bribe” in exchange for a favorable decision on the proposed merger between Paramount and Skydance, a charge currently under investigation in California.

Less than 48 hours later, on July 17, Paramount canceled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a show currently performing first in its timeslot, giving vague references to the program’s “financial performance” as the only explanation. For ten years, the show has been one of the most successful, beloved and profitable programs on CBS, entertaining an audience of millions on late night television, on streaming services and across social media.

Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that the Late Show’s cancellation is a bribe, sacrificing free speech to curry favor with the Trump administration as the company looks for merger approval.

In its first new episode in over a year, the Comedy Central flagship animated comedy South Park (7/23/25), often embraced by conservatives for its eagerness to offend liberals, attacked both Trump and the channel’s owner Paramount. In its raunchy style,  USA Today (7/24/25) reported, it “referenced everything from the company’s controversial settlement with the president to its shock decision to cancel the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had previously commented on X (7/2/25), “This merger is a shitshow and it’s fucking up South Park.” It remains to be seen whether the thin-skinned Trump White House will hold up the acquisition in retaliation for the satire.

Trump’s ‘favorite tech company’

CNN: CBS’ likely new owner is in talks with Bari Weiss to buy The Free Press

Skydance‘s David Ellison “is said to be interested in infusing [Bari] Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News” (CNN, 7/11/25). 

There are indications that more ideological restructuring at the network is on its way. CNN (7/11/25) reported that “Paramount’s owner-in-waiting, David Ellison, met with journalist entrepreneur Bari Weiss…about a possible tie-up between CBS News and her startup the Free Press.” The report added that “Ellison is said to be interested in infusing Weiss’s editorial perspective into CBS News.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Weiss, she is a former New York Times editor and writer who gained fame for attacking “wokeness” (Commentary, 11/21)—which for the right is any politics that seeks to address racial and gender inequalities—and her advocacy for Israel and against critics of its government (Intercept, 3/8/18).

While David Ellison donated to former President Joe Biden’s reelection efforts (CNBC, 4/16/24) and other Democratic campaigns, the political commitments of his father Larry Ellison may be more relevant. Larry is the co-founder of the software giant Oracle and, according to the Forbes 400 list, the fourth-richest person in the United States, behind Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos and X‘s Elon Musk. As the New York Times (4/2/25) noted, Larry “is putting up most of the $8 billion bid by his son, David, to buy Paramount.”

The elder Ellison is well-known for his contributions to conservative causes (Vox, 2/12/20; Washington Post, 5/20/22). He gave $4 million to a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio’s presidential bid (Politico, 2/20/16), and $15 million to one backing Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) (Politico, 2/19/22).

Slate (9/14/20) called Oracle the “Trump Administration’s Favorite Tech Company,” as evidenced by the fact that Trump picked Oracle to potentially “partner” with TikTok, giving the Chinese-owned social media company a reliable ideological watchdog in order to avoid a congressionally mandated ban (FAIR.org, 12/6/24).

Shared ‘Zionist values’

Jerusalem Post: Jewish business leaders transform media landscape with $8 billion deal

A Jerusalem Post article (7/31/24) “written in cooperation with SkyDance”—that is, an advertorial—touted the young executives at Skydance and Paramount as “connected to Israel and holding Zionist values.”

One thing the Ellisons agree on is wholehearted support for Zionism. In 2017, Larry Ellison gave $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11/5/17). Two years ago, the Hollywood Reporter (10/13/23) reported that “Skydance Media, led by David Ellison, has committed $1 million to humanitarian relief efforts in Israel” in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.  It quoted the company:

Skydance stands with Israel, strongly condemns the attacks against its citizens, is donating support to the victims of this tragic act of terrorism, and prays for the safe release of innocents hostages.

Last year, the Jerusalem Post (7/31/24) ran a story “written in cooperation with SkyDance” that highlighted support for Israel by David Ellison and Redstone’s son, “Brandon Korff, heir to the Paramount empire.” The article quoted a “source familiar with the details” who described Ellison and Korff sharing “Zionist values” and noted that “both quietly donate quite a bit to the state of Israel and the IDF.”

Redstone herself has been an outspoken Zionist during her time at the head of Paramount; when CBS admonished host Tony Dokoupil for his hostile interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which Dokoupil suggested that Coates was an “extremist” on Palestine, Redstone publicly criticized network management (LA Times, 10/9/24).

Given the talks with Weiss and the Free Press, one might expect CBS coverage to skew even further to the right on the Middle East, as well as on the Trump’s administration effort to clamp down on critical speech against Israel’s genocide and its support from the US. While Weiss’s brand is all about free speech, she got her start in politics agitating for the censorship of professors with pro-Palestinian views (Jewish Currents, 7/23/20).

Featured image: The 60 Minutes interview (10/7/25) that CBS is paying Donald Trump $16 million for airing.


This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/24/paramount-sells-out-journalism-to-secure-purchase-by-skydance/feed/ 0 546042 BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/19/bbc-isnt-failing-its-job-is-to-obscure-the-uks-partnership-in-israels-genocide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/19/bbc-isnt-failing-its-job-is-to-obscure-the-uks-partnership-in-israels-genocide/#respond Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:50:14 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=160015 After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found last week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines. A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – all pushed for months […]

The post BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found last week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines.

A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – all pushed for months by the Israel lobby, and amplified by the British establishment media – were dismissed one after the other by Peter Johnston, director of the editorial complaints and review body that reports to the BBC director general.

Not that you would know any of this from the eagerness of BBC executives to continue apologising profusely for the failings the corporation had just been cleared of. It almost sounded as if they wanted to be found guilty.

The row is now set to drag on for many months more after Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, announced it too would investigate the programme.

All of this is exactly what the Israel lobby and the billionaire-owned media had hoped for.

The aim of manufacturing this protracted storm in a teacup was twofold.

First, the furore was designed to distract from what the documentary actually showed: the horrors facing children in Gaza as they have had to navigate a tiny strip of land in which Israel has trapped them, bombed their homes, levelled their schools, exposed them to relentless carnage for 21 months, destroyed the hospitals they will need in time of trouble, and is starving them and their loved ones.

Second, it was intended to browbeat the BBC into adopting an even more craven posture towards Israel than it had already. If it was reluctant before to give Palestinians a voice, now it will avoid doing so at all costs.

True to form, executives hurriedly removed How to Survive a Warzone from its iPlayer catch-up service the moment the lobby went into action.

Dangerous consequences

The BBC’s ever greater spinelessness has real-world, and dangerous, consequences.

Israel will feel even freer to intensify what the International Court of Justice already suspected back in January 2024 was a genocide and what leading genocide and Holocaust scholars have subsequently concluded is a genocide.

There will be even less pressure on the British government to stop partnering Israel in its genocide by supplying weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover.

The enduring row will also hand a bigger stick to Rupert Murdoch and other media moguls with which to beat the BBC, making it cower even further.

Signs of the BBC’s defensiveness were already all too evident. While it was waiting for the Johnston report, the corporation ditched a separate documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, on Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and murder of some 1,600 health workers.

It has since been shown by Channel 4.

The BBC argued that – even though this second programme had repeatedly passed its editorial checks – airing it risked contributing to a “perception of partiality”.

What that bit of BBC gobbledygook actually meant was that the problem was not “partiality”. It was the perception of it by vested interests – Israel, its apologists, the Starmer government and the British corporate media – who demand skewed BBC coverage of Gaza so that Israel can carry on with a genocide the British establishment is utterly complicit in.

In other words, truth and accuracy be damned. This is about Israel – and the Starmer government – dictating to the BBC the terms of what can be said about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Caving in to pressure

Which brings us back to the Johnston report. The only significant finding against the BBC was on a single issue in its documentary on Gaza’s children, How to Survive a Warzone.

The film had not disclosed that its 13-year narrator was the son of an official in Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

Even in the current febrile atmosphere, Johnston found no grounds to uphold the manifold accusations of a breach by the BBC of impartiality rules. Nothing in the film, he concluded, was unfair to Israel.

Instead, he stated that it was a breach of “full transparency” not to have divulged the child-narrator’s tenuous connection to Hamas through his father’s governmental work.

Paradoxically, the BBC’s coverage of Johnston’s findings has been far more inaccurate about the child-narrator than the original documentary. But there has been no uproar because this particular inaccuracy from the BBC squarely benefits Israel.

On the News at Ten last week, reporting on the Johnston report, presenter Reeta Chakrabati claimed that the film’s narrator was “the son of an official in the militant group Hamas.”

He is nothing of the sort. He is the son of a scientist who directed agricultural policy in Gaza’s government, which is run by Hamas.

There is zero evidence that Ayman Alyazouri was ever a member of the militant wing of Hamas. He doesn’t even appear to have been a member of its political wing.

In fact, since 2018 Israel had set up a system to vet most officials in Gaza like Alyazouri to ensure they were not linked to Hamas before they were able to receive salaries funded by Qatar.

Johnston himself concedes as much, noting that the programme makers failed to inform the BBC of 13-year-old Abdullah’s background because their checks showed Alyazouri was a civilian technocrat in the government, not involved in its military or political arms.

The team’s only failing was an astounding ignorance of how the Israel lobby operates and how ready the BBC is to cave in to its pressure tactics.

In reality, Johnston’s finding against the BBC was over little more than an editorial technicality, one intentionally blown up into a major scandal.

Johnston himself gave the game away when he noted in his executive summary the need for “full transparency” when the BBC makes programmes “in such a contested setting”.

In other words, special, much stricter editorial rules apply when the corporation intends to make programmes likely to upset Israel.

From now on, that will mean that, in practice, such programmes are not made at all.

Glaring double standard

The double standard is glaring. The BBC aired a documentary last year, Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, offering eyewitness testimony from Israeli survivors of 7 October 2023 at the Nova music festival, where hundreds of Israelis were killed during Hamas’ one-day break-out from Gaza.

Did the BBC insist that the backgrounds of the Israelis interviewed were checked and disclosed to the audience as part of the broadcast? Were viewers told whether festivalgoers had served in the Israeli military, which for decades has been enforcing an illegal occupation and a system of apartheid over Palestinians, according to a ruling last year by the world’s highest court?

And what would it have indicated to audiences had the BBC included such contextual information about its Israeli eyewitnesses? That their testimonies had less validity? That they could not be trusted?

If it was not necessary to include such background details for Israeli eyewitnesses, why is it more important to do so for a 13-year-old Palestinian?

And even more to the point, if the BBC needs to give details of 13-year-old Abdullah Alyazouri’s background before he can be allowed to read a script written by the programme makers, why is the BBC not also required to give important background about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he appears in reports: such as that he is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Exactly how trustworthy a narrator of events in the devastated enclave does the BBC consider Netanyahu to be that it does not think this context needs including?

Both-sidesing genocide

The gain from this manufactured row for the Israel lobby – and for a Starmer government desperate to silence criticism of its complicity in genocide – were set out in stark detail last week by the makers of the second documentary, about Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector.

In an article in the Observer newspaper, they recounted a series of startling admissions and demands from BBC executives made in script meetings.

The corporation insisted that Doctors Under Attack could not be aired so long as the award-winning investigative reporter leading the programme, Ramita Navai, was given top billing. They demanded that she be downgraded to a mere “contributor” – her role effectively disappeared – because she had supposedly made “one-sided” social media posts criticising Israel for breaking international law.

She was considered unacceptable, according to the BBC, because she had not been “supportive enough of the other side”: that is, of Israel and its military carrying out systematic war crimes by destroying Gaza’s hospitals, as documented in great detail in her film.

In a statement to Middle East Eye on its decision to shelve the documentary, the BBC spokesperson stated that, after Navai appeared on its Today radio programme and “called Israel a ‘rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians’, it was impossible for the BBC to broadcast the material without risking our impartiality.

“The BBC holds itself to the highest standards of impartiality and it would never be acceptable for any BBC journalist to express a personal opinion in this way. We believe this is one of the reasons we’re the world’s most trusted news provider. We were left with no choice but to walk away.”

Seen another way, offering apologias for genocide, as the BBC has been doing for the past 21 months, is apparently a requirement before the corporation is willing to give journalists a platform to criticise Israel.

Also revealing is who the state broadcaster looks to when deciding how to apply its editorial standards.

BBC executives told the film-makers they should not reference the United Nations or Amnesty International because they were supposedly not “trusted independent organisations”.

Meanwhile, the corporation openly and obsessively worried to the film-makers about what fanatically pro-Israel lobbyists – such as social media activist David Collier and Camera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organisation – would say about their film on Gaza.

The team were told BBC News executives were “very jumpy and paranoid” about coverage of Gaza.

This follows a long and dishonorable tradition at the state broadcaster. In their 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, media scholars Greg Philo and Mike Berry reported a BBC producer telling them: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”

If you had been wondering why the BBC has been reflexively both-sidesing a genocide, here is a large part of the answer.

Skewed coverage

A damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring last month analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.

It found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices”.

These included the BBC running over 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians; interviewing more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians; asking 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas but asking no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools; and shutting down more than 100 interviewers who tried to refer to events in Gaza as a genocide.

Only 0.5% of BBC articles provided any context for what was happening before 7 October 2023: that Israel had been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories for decades and besieging the enclave for 17 years.

Similarly, the BBC has barely reported the endless stream of genocidal statements from Israeli political and military leaders – a crucial ingredient in legally determining whether military actions constitute genocide.

Nor has it mentioned other vital context: such as Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive on 7 October 2023, licensing it to kill its own citizens to prevent them being taken captive; or its military’s long-established Dahiya doctrine, in which the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure – and with it, the likelihood of slaughtering civilians – is viewed as an effective way to deter resistance to its aggressions.

In the specified time period, the BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russian ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.

Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered”.

None of these were editorial slip-ups. They were part of a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour – a clear breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines and one that has created a permissive environment for genocide.

Journalists in revolt

Journalists at the BBC are known to be in revolt. More than 100 signed a letter – anonymously for fear of reprisals – condemning the decision to censor the documentary Doctors under Attack. They said it reflected a mix of “fear” and “anti-Palestinian racism” at the corporation.

The BBC told MEE: “Robust discussions amongst our editorial teams about our journalism are an essential part of the editorial process. We have ongoing discussions about coverage and listen to feedback from staff, and we think these conversations are best had internally.”

The journalists, it seems, would prefer that these discussions are had out in the open. They wrote: “As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government’s involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications. These stories have instead been broken by the BBC’s competitors.”

And they added: “All too often it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military.”

They could have added, even more pertinently, that in the process the BBC has been doing PR for the British establishment too.

A former BBC press officer, Ben Murray, last week gave broader context to the meaning of the corporation’s famed editorial “impartiality”. His role, he wrote, had been a rearguard one to placate the Times, Telegraph, Sun, and most of all, the Daily Mail.

Those establishment outlets are owned by corporations and billionaires heavily invested in the very oil, “defence” and tech industries Israel is central to lubricating.

BBC executives, Murray noted, “were rightfully fearful of these publications’ influence, and often reacted in ways to appease them. Their task was to protect the BBC’s funding model, and by extension, their prestigious jobs and generous salaries.”

None of this went against the grain. As Murray pointed out, most senior BBC staff enjoyed private educations, have Oxbridge degrees, and have been “fast-tracked up the corporate ladder”. They see their job as being “to reinforce and maintain establishment viewpoints”.

Editorial smokescreen

If this weren’t enough, senior BBC staff also have to look over their shoulders to the British government, which sets the corporation’s funding through the TV licence fee.

The government, no less than the BBC, needs to keep its main constituencies happy.

No, not voters. Ministers, keen for favourable coverage, similarly dare not antagonise Israel-aligned media moguls. And equally they cannot afford to alienate powerful US administrations that pledge an undying, unshakeable bond to Israel as it projects western power into the oil-rich Middle East.

Which is precisely why Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, was only too keen to jump on the Daily Mail bandwagon in calling for heads to roll at the BBC over the supposed “failings” in its Gaza coverage.

“It makes me angry on behalf of the BBC staff and the whole creative industries in this country,” she said, apparently oblivious to the fact that many BBC journalists’ fury is not over the confected scandals generated by the Israel lobby and billionaire-owned media.

They are appalled at the corporation’s refusal to hold Israel or Nandy’s own government accountable for the genocide in Gaza.

In such circumstances, the BBC’s professed commitment to “impartiality” serves as nothing more than a smokescreen.

In reality, the corporation acts as an echo chamber, amplifying and legitimising the interests of media tycoons, the British government and the Washington consensus, however much they flout the foundational principles of international law, human rights and basic decency.

Anybody who stands outside that circle of influence – such as the Palestinians and their supporters, anti-genocide activists, human rights advocates, and increasingly the UN and its legal organs, such as the International Criminal Court – is assumed by the BBC to be suspect.

Such voices are likely to be marginalised, silenced or vilified.

The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.

The post BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/19/bbc-isnt-failing-its-job-is-to-obscure-the-uks-partnership-in-israels-genocide/feed/ 0 545232 BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/19/bbc-isnt-failing-its-job-is-to-obscure-the-uks-partnership-in-israels-genocide-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/19/bbc-isnt-failing-its-job-is-to-obscure-the-uks-partnership-in-israels-genocide-2/#respond Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:50:14 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=160015 After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found last week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines. A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – all pushed for months […]

The post BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found last week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines.

A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – all pushed for months by the Israel lobby, and amplified by the British establishment media – were dismissed one after the other by Peter Johnston, director of the editorial complaints and review body that reports to the BBC director general.

Not that you would know any of this from the eagerness of BBC executives to continue apologising profusely for the failings the corporation had just been cleared of. It almost sounded as if they wanted to be found guilty.

The row is now set to drag on for many months more after Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, announced it too would investigate the programme.

All of this is exactly what the Israel lobby and the billionaire-owned media had hoped for.

The aim of manufacturing this protracted storm in a teacup was twofold.

First, the furore was designed to distract from what the documentary actually showed: the horrors facing children in Gaza as they have had to navigate a tiny strip of land in which Israel has trapped them, bombed their homes, levelled their schools, exposed them to relentless carnage for 21 months, destroyed the hospitals they will need in time of trouble, and is starving them and their loved ones.

Second, it was intended to browbeat the BBC into adopting an even more craven posture towards Israel than it had already. If it was reluctant before to give Palestinians a voice, now it will avoid doing so at all costs.

True to form, executives hurriedly removed How to Survive a Warzone from its iPlayer catch-up service the moment the lobby went into action.

Dangerous consequences

The BBC’s ever greater spinelessness has real-world, and dangerous, consequences.

Israel will feel even freer to intensify what the International Court of Justice already suspected back in January 2024 was a genocide and what leading genocide and Holocaust scholars have subsequently concluded is a genocide.

There will be even less pressure on the British government to stop partnering Israel in its genocide by supplying weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover.

The enduring row will also hand a bigger stick to Rupert Murdoch and other media moguls with which to beat the BBC, making it cower even further.

Signs of the BBC’s defensiveness were already all too evident. While it was waiting for the Johnston report, the corporation ditched a separate documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, on Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and murder of some 1,600 health workers.

It has since been shown by Channel 4.

The BBC argued that – even though this second programme had repeatedly passed its editorial checks – airing it risked contributing to a “perception of partiality”.

What that bit of BBC gobbledygook actually meant was that the problem was not “partiality”. It was the perception of it by vested interests – Israel, its apologists, the Starmer government and the British corporate media – who demand skewed BBC coverage of Gaza so that Israel can carry on with a genocide the British establishment is utterly complicit in.

In other words, truth and accuracy be damned. This is about Israel – and the Starmer government – dictating to the BBC the terms of what can be said about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Caving in to pressure

Which brings us back to the Johnston report. The only significant finding against the BBC was on a single issue in its documentary on Gaza’s children, How to Survive a Warzone.

The film had not disclosed that its 13-year narrator was the son of an official in Gaza’s Hamas-run government.

Even in the current febrile atmosphere, Johnston found no grounds to uphold the manifold accusations of a breach by the BBC of impartiality rules. Nothing in the film, he concluded, was unfair to Israel.

Instead, he stated that it was a breach of “full transparency” not to have divulged the child-narrator’s tenuous connection to Hamas through his father’s governmental work.

Paradoxically, the BBC’s coverage of Johnston’s findings has been far more inaccurate about the child-narrator than the original documentary. But there has been no uproar because this particular inaccuracy from the BBC squarely benefits Israel.

On the News at Ten last week, reporting on the Johnston report, presenter Reeta Chakrabati claimed that the film’s narrator was “the son of an official in the militant group Hamas.”

He is nothing of the sort. He is the son of a scientist who directed agricultural policy in Gaza’s government, which is run by Hamas.

There is zero evidence that Ayman Alyazouri was ever a member of the militant wing of Hamas. He doesn’t even appear to have been a member of its political wing.

In fact, since 2018 Israel had set up a system to vet most officials in Gaza like Alyazouri to ensure they were not linked to Hamas before they were able to receive salaries funded by Qatar.

Johnston himself concedes as much, noting that the programme makers failed to inform the BBC of 13-year-old Abdullah’s background because their checks showed Alyazouri was a civilian technocrat in the government, not involved in its military or political arms.

The team’s only failing was an astounding ignorance of how the Israel lobby operates and how ready the BBC is to cave in to its pressure tactics.

In reality, Johnston’s finding against the BBC was over little more than an editorial technicality, one intentionally blown up into a major scandal.

Johnston himself gave the game away when he noted in his executive summary the need for “full transparency” when the BBC makes programmes “in such a contested setting”.

In other words, special, much stricter editorial rules apply when the corporation intends to make programmes likely to upset Israel.

From now on, that will mean that, in practice, such programmes are not made at all.

Glaring double standard

The double standard is glaring. The BBC aired a documentary last year, Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, offering eyewitness testimony from Israeli survivors of 7 October 2023 at the Nova music festival, where hundreds of Israelis were killed during Hamas’ one-day break-out from Gaza.

Did the BBC insist that the backgrounds of the Israelis interviewed were checked and disclosed to the audience as part of the broadcast? Were viewers told whether festivalgoers had served in the Israeli military, which for decades has been enforcing an illegal occupation and a system of apartheid over Palestinians, according to a ruling last year by the world’s highest court?

And what would it have indicated to audiences had the BBC included such contextual information about its Israeli eyewitnesses? That their testimonies had less validity? That they could not be trusted?

If it was not necessary to include such background details for Israeli eyewitnesses, why is it more important to do so for a 13-year-old Palestinian?

And even more to the point, if the BBC needs to give details of 13-year-old Abdullah Alyazouri’s background before he can be allowed to read a script written by the programme makers, why is the BBC not also required to give important background about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he appears in reports: such as that he is wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Exactly how trustworthy a narrator of events in the devastated enclave does the BBC consider Netanyahu to be that it does not think this context needs including?

Both-sidesing genocide

The gain from this manufactured row for the Israel lobby – and for a Starmer government desperate to silence criticism of its complicity in genocide – were set out in stark detail last week by the makers of the second documentary, about Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector.

In an article in the Observer newspaper, they recounted a series of startling admissions and demands from BBC executives made in script meetings.

The corporation insisted that Doctors Under Attack could not be aired so long as the award-winning investigative reporter leading the programme, Ramita Navai, was given top billing. They demanded that she be downgraded to a mere “contributor” – her role effectively disappeared – because she had supposedly made “one-sided” social media posts criticising Israel for breaking international law.

She was considered unacceptable, according to the BBC, because she had not been “supportive enough of the other side”: that is, of Israel and its military carrying out systematic war crimes by destroying Gaza’s hospitals, as documented in great detail in her film.

In a statement to Middle East Eye on its decision to shelve the documentary, the BBC spokesperson stated that, after Navai appeared on its Today radio programme and “called Israel a ‘rogue state that’s committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians’, it was impossible for the BBC to broadcast the material without risking our impartiality.

“The BBC holds itself to the highest standards of impartiality and it would never be acceptable for any BBC journalist to express a personal opinion in this way. We believe this is one of the reasons we’re the world’s most trusted news provider. We were left with no choice but to walk away.”

Seen another way, offering apologias for genocide, as the BBC has been doing for the past 21 months, is apparently a requirement before the corporation is willing to give journalists a platform to criticise Israel.

Also revealing is who the state broadcaster looks to when deciding how to apply its editorial standards.

BBC executives told the film-makers they should not reference the United Nations or Amnesty International because they were supposedly not “trusted independent organisations”.

Meanwhile, the corporation openly and obsessively worried to the film-makers about what fanatically pro-Israel lobbyists – such as social media activist David Collier and Camera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organisation – would say about their film on Gaza.

The team were told BBC News executives were “very jumpy and paranoid” about coverage of Gaza.

This follows a long and dishonorable tradition at the state broadcaster. In their 2011 book More Bad News from Israel, media scholars Greg Philo and Mike Berry reported a BBC producer telling them: “We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy.”

If you had been wondering why the BBC has been reflexively both-sidesing a genocide, here is a large part of the answer.

Skewed coverage

A damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring last month analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.

It found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices”.

These included the BBC running over 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians; interviewing more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians; asking 38 interviewees to condemn Hamas but asking no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools; and shutting down more than 100 interviewers who tried to refer to events in Gaza as a genocide.

Only 0.5% of BBC articles provided any context for what was happening before 7 October 2023: that Israel had been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories for decades and besieging the enclave for 17 years.

Similarly, the BBC has barely reported the endless stream of genocidal statements from Israeli political and military leaders – a crucial ingredient in legally determining whether military actions constitute genocide.

Nor has it mentioned other vital context: such as Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive on 7 October 2023, licensing it to kill its own citizens to prevent them being taken captive; or its military’s long-established Dahiya doctrine, in which the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure – and with it, the likelihood of slaughtering civilians – is viewed as an effective way to deter resistance to its aggressions.

In the specified time period, the BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russian ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.

Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered”.

None of these were editorial slip-ups. They were part of a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour – a clear breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines and one that has created a permissive environment for genocide.

Journalists in revolt

Journalists at the BBC are known to be in revolt. More than 100 signed a letter – anonymously for fear of reprisals – condemning the decision to censor the documentary Doctors under Attack. They said it reflected a mix of “fear” and “anti-Palestinian racism” at the corporation.

The BBC told MEE: “Robust discussions amongst our editorial teams about our journalism are an essential part of the editorial process. We have ongoing discussions about coverage and listen to feedback from staff, and we think these conversations are best had internally.”

The journalists, it seems, would prefer that these discussions are had out in the open. They wrote: “As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government’s involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications. These stories have instead been broken by the BBC’s competitors.”

And they added: “All too often it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military.”

They could have added, even more pertinently, that in the process the BBC has been doing PR for the British establishment too.

A former BBC press officer, Ben Murray, last week gave broader context to the meaning of the corporation’s famed editorial “impartiality”. His role, he wrote, had been a rearguard one to placate the Times, Telegraph, Sun, and most of all, the Daily Mail.

Those establishment outlets are owned by corporations and billionaires heavily invested in the very oil, “defence” and tech industries Israel is central to lubricating.

BBC executives, Murray noted, “were rightfully fearful of these publications’ influence, and often reacted in ways to appease them. Their task was to protect the BBC’s funding model, and by extension, their prestigious jobs and generous salaries.”

None of this went against the grain. As Murray pointed out, most senior BBC staff enjoyed private educations, have Oxbridge degrees, and have been “fast-tracked up the corporate ladder”. They see their job as being “to reinforce and maintain establishment viewpoints”.

Editorial smokescreen

If this weren’t enough, senior BBC staff also have to look over their shoulders to the British government, which sets the corporation’s funding through the TV licence fee.

The government, no less than the BBC, needs to keep its main constituencies happy.

No, not voters. Ministers, keen for favourable coverage, similarly dare not antagonise Israel-aligned media moguls. And equally they cannot afford to alienate powerful US administrations that pledge an undying, unshakeable bond to Israel as it projects western power into the oil-rich Middle East.

Which is precisely why Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, was only too keen to jump on the Daily Mail bandwagon in calling for heads to roll at the BBC over the supposed “failings” in its Gaza coverage.

“It makes me angry on behalf of the BBC staff and the whole creative industries in this country,” she said, apparently oblivious to the fact that many BBC journalists’ fury is not over the confected scandals generated by the Israel lobby and billionaire-owned media.

They are appalled at the corporation’s refusal to hold Israel or Nandy’s own government accountable for the genocide in Gaza.

In such circumstances, the BBC’s professed commitment to “impartiality” serves as nothing more than a smokescreen.

In reality, the corporation acts as an echo chamber, amplifying and legitimising the interests of media tycoons, the British government and the Washington consensus, however much they flout the foundational principles of international law, human rights and basic decency.

Anybody who stands outside that circle of influence – such as the Palestinians and their supporters, anti-genocide activists, human rights advocates, and increasingly the UN and its legal organs, such as the International Criminal Court – is assumed by the BBC to be suspect.

Such voices are likely to be marginalised, silenced or vilified.

The BBC has not failed. It has done exactly what it is there to do: help the British government conceal the fact that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and one that the UK has been knee-deep in assisting.

The post BBC isn’t Failing. Its Job is to Obscure the UK’s Partnership in Israel’s Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/19/bbc-isnt-failing-its-job-is-to-obscure-the-uks-partnership-in-israels-genocide-2/feed/ 0 545233 Russia gearing up to prosecute internet users for searching ‘extremist’ content  https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/russia-gearing-up-to-prosecute-internet-users-for-searching-extremist-content/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/russia-gearing-up-to-prosecute-internet-users-for-searching-extremist-content/#respond Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:15:37 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=498956 Berlin, July 18, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by a bill under consideration in the Russian State Duma that would introduce fines for accessing or searching for “extremist” online content, threatening to further restrict press freedom and access to information. 

The bill, which passed its second reading on July 17, 2025, is the “most serious step in censorship and the fight against dissent since 2022,” when lawmakers introduced penalties of up to 15 years in prison for disseminating “fake” news about the Russian army, according to the online independent news outlet The Bell. If lawmakers pass the bill and President Vladimir Putin signs it into law, it would take effect on September 1.

“Punishing people for seeking information online is a direct barrier to the free flow of information and an assault on access to independent news,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Senior Researcher Anna Brakha. “This vaguely worded, fast-tracked bill shows a clear disregard for open debate and create an even more repressive environment for the media and the public.” 

The bill provides for fines from 3,000 to 5,000 rubles (USD$38 to USD$64) for accessing or searching content that is either included in Russia’s federal list of extremist materials or that calls for or justifies extremist activities.

Russian authorities maintain a list of over 5,400 banned “extremist” materials, including books, religious texts, songs, and films. To date, while independent media have been widely branded as undesirable and foreign agents, none have been labeled as extremist.

“Nothing prevents the authorities from declaring media outlets ‘extremists’ — which will allow them to effectively ban reading such publications,” independent media outlet Meduza said, calling the bill a step toward the “criminalization of reading.” 

A representative from digital rights group Setevye Svobody, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, told CPJ he expects “the most massive example of chilling effect in the history” of the Russian internet. 

Fines for reading online articles featuring so-called extremist content “will make tens of millions of users prefer to unsubscribe from the channels and stop visiting sites with information of any unofficial nature,” the representative said. 

CPJ emailed the State Duma’s press service but did not immediately receive a reply. 


This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/russia-gearing-up-to-prosecute-internet-users-for-searching-extremist-content/feed/ 0 545093 X accuses India of press censorship after it blocks news outlets’ accounts https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/10/x-accuses-india-of-press-censorship-after-it-blocks-news-outlets-accounts/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/10/x-accuses-india-of-press-censorship-after-it-blocks-news-outlets-accounts/#respond Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:56:22 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=496541 New Delhi, July 10, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for greater transparency and due process in how Indian authorities handle social media restrictions, following reports of the temporary block of multiple international news organizations’ X accounts over the weekend. X accused the Indian government of censoring the press. 

“This incident once again underscores the serious lack of transparency and accountability in how the Indian government issues and enforces orders for the removal of social media content and the blocking of accounts,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative. “Any action affecting journalists or news organizations must be based on clear legal grounds, be subject to independent judicial oversight, and not infringe on press freedom. India still lacks a credible mechanism to review or challenge these opaque and arbitrary orders.”

On July 5, two of Reuters’ handles, @Reuters and @ReutersWorld, were blocked, with X saying the accounts were obstructed “due to legal demands.” Several reports also suggest that accounts of Turkish broadcaster TRT World and the Chinese state media outlet Global Times were censored. The accounts were restored the next day. A government official speaking on condition of anonymity told CPJ that the authorities had not issued any orders to block the accounts and that they were engaging with X to get them restored. 

However, in a July 8 post, X countered the Indian claim and said that on July 3, the Indian authorities had ordered the platform to block 2,355 accounts. X also expressed concerns about “ongoing press censorship in India due to these blocking orders.” X has already sued the Indian government over a new official portal that it says grants “countless” government officials expanded powers to issue takedown orders.

The Indian government denied issuing any recent blocking order against Reuters and others and said the accounts were unintentionally restricted due to a previously issued directive that was part of broader digital enforcement measuresimplemented in the wake of heightened national security concerns. 

Authorities said they’d asked X to restore access immediately and blamed a 21-hour delay on the platform for the continued impediment.

In May 2025, X expressed concern about the Indian government’s demand to block over 8,000 accounts, and asked for such executive orders to made public.

X and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not reply to CPJ’s emails seeking comment. 


This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/10/x-accuses-india-of-press-censorship-after-it-blocks-news-outlets-accounts/feed/ 0 543790 Cartoonists Can Compare Victims of Genocide to Nazis—But Not the Perpetrators https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/09/cartoonists-can-compare-victims-of-genocide-to-nazis-but-not-the-perpetrators/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/09/cartoonists-can-compare-victims-of-genocide-to-nazis-but-not-the-perpetrators/#respond Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:22:51 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9046394  

Image of men in front of a US/Israeli flag drinking blood from glasses, saying of the dove of peace: 'Who invited that lousy antisemite?'

This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.

Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”

Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”

Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).

Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”

‘A Holocaust in Gaza’

An IDF soldier holds a gun to the head of a baby.

Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).

It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.

Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”

Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”

Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”

‘Antisemitism forever!’

Nazi officers gathered around Hitler, who has been promised a student visa by Columbia.

Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.

If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.

Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.

Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”

Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).

‘Generated threats of personal violence’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu covered with blood and holding a knife.

A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.

Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.

Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”

After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.

It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.

Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.


This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Hank Kennedy.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/09/cartoonists-can-compare-victims-of-genocide-to-nazis-but-not-the-perpetrators/feed/ 0 543578 Cartoonists Can Compare Victims of Genocide to Nazis—But Not the Perpetrators https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/09/cartoonists-can-compare-victims-of-genocide-to-nazis-but-not-the-perpetrators-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/09/cartoonists-can-compare-victims-of-genocide-to-nazis-but-not-the-perpetrators-2/#respond Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:22:51 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9046394  

Image of men in front of a US/Israeli flag drinking blood from glasses, saying of the dove of peace: 'Who invited that lousy antisemite?'

This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/5/23) was called antisemitic because in calling attention to the Israeli army’s ongoing and very real killing of more than 17,000 children, it might evoke associations with the false trope used across centuries that Jews killed children in religious rituals.

Cartoonist Mr. Fish (real name Dwayne Booth) posted an update to his Patreon on March 20 headed “Fish: Laid Off!” Fish’s work has accompanied columns by Chris Hedges, appeared in Harper’s Magazine and currently can be found on ScheerPost. He collaborated with Ralph Nader to create The Day the Rats Vetoed Congress, a fable of a citizen uprising against Washington corruption. Fish announced he had been laid off from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 11 years. Fish states that, officially, “the reason for the termination was budgetary.”

Unofficially, Fish has been subject to an assault stoked by right-wing media since last February. The Washington Free Beacon (2/1/24) fired the starting gun with its piece, “Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Antisemitic Cartoons.” Writer Jessica Costescu freely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism in her piece. She includes as antisemitic a cartoon of accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as a “butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag,” and another showing “an Israeli holding a gun to a hospitalized baby’s head.”

Even more serious is the charge Costescu makes that Fish evokes the “blood libel,” the myth that Jews murdered Christian children to use in religious rituals, via a cartoon of American and Israeli leaders drinking cups of blood labeled “Gaza.” Fish maintains he was “playing off of the New Yorker style” in drawing “upper-crust power brokers,” and that he was unaware of the blood libel myth (Real News Network, 5/6/25).

Costescu claims that other Fish cartoons are antisemitic because they compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. She cites one showing soldiers marching under a combination Nazi and Israeli flag, and another showing prisoners in a concentration camp holding signs reading “Gaza, the World’s Biggest Concentration Camp” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”

‘A Holocaust in Gaza’

An IDF soldier holds a gun to the head of a baby.

Another cartoon by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post, 11/11/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted an IDF soldier holding a gun to the head of a baby. Medical personnel in Gaza report frequently treating children who have been shot in the head by Israeli snipers (Guardian, 4/2/24).

It’s hard to maintain that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is antisemitic when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir belonged to Lehi, a Zionist militant group so sympathetic to fascism that it offered to ally with Germany during World War II. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others wrote a letter to the New York Times (12/4/48) criticizing the right-wing Freedom Party (Herut), home of future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for similarity “in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” The Freedom Party was one of the major parties that allied to form Likud in 1973, the faction that has governed Israel for most of the last 50 years.

Pre–October 7, an editorial in Haaretz (10/3/23) warned that “neo-fascism in Israel seriously threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Israeli politicians and public figures have not shied away from using genocidal rhetoric that compares with Nazi propaganda during the Final Solution. Yitzhak Kroizer of the Jewish Power party (Guardian, 1/3/24) proclaimed: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”

Israeli parliamentarian Moshe Feiglin (Middle East Eye, 5/21/25) said in May: “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”

Israeli TV presenter Elad Barashi (New Arab, 5/5/25) made the parallels explicit when he called for “a Holocaust in Gaza.” He maintained he couldn’t “understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers…or train cars.”

‘Antisemitism forever!’

Nazi officers gathered around Hitler, who has been promised a student visa by Columbia.

Cartoonist Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) responded to the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil for protesting genocide by suggesting that Khalil was akin to Hitler.

If Israeli military and political actions are off-limits to comparisons to the Nazis in the field of cartoons, the same is not true for Palestinians. This creates a situation where the Israeli government perpetrating a genocide, per Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, cannot be compared to the Nazis, but the Palestinians—the victims of the same genocide—can.

Since our last survey of anti-Palestinian cartooning (FAIR.org, 3/27/25), some of those profiled have continued to paint pro-Palestine protests as Nazi-like or inherently antisemitic.

Henry Payne (Andrews McMeel, 3/17/25) made reference to the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against student protester Mahmoud Khalil. He drew a despondent Adolf Hitler poring over a military map, lamenting battlefield reverses. He takes consolation in that “Columbia U. has offered [him] a student visa.”

Kirk Walters (King Features Syndicate, 5/29/25) drew a college president side-by-side with George Wallace. As the segregationist yells out, “Segregation now…Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever!!” the college president yells out, “Antisemitism now… Antisemitism tomorrow… Antisemitism forever!!” The cartoon is a reference to colleges who have been accused by the Trump administration of not doing enough to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests (Politico, 4/6/25).

‘Generated threats of personal violence’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu covered with blood and holding a knife.

A Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/1/23) was called antisemitic because it depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has overseen the killing of more than 57,000 people in Gaza—as a butcher covered in blood and holding a knife.

Within two weeks of the Free Beacon article, the University of Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of University Professors felt compelled to release a statement on the targeted harassment of Fish. The AAUP stated that the article “generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him,” and that by publishing the date and time of his next class, the Free Beacon “endangered the physical safety of both [Fish] and his students.” The AAUP also criticized the interim president of the university for publicly calling Fish’s cartoons “reprehensible” and saying that Fish should not have published them.

Fish himself has long opposed censorship, writing in the Comics Journal (Summer–Fall/20), “I don’t believe there are images that are so problematic and so hurtful they should be censored, for the same reasons why I don’t believe in censoring the written word.”

After Fish announced his firing, the Free Beacon (3/22/25) could barely contain its glee. It included a quote from the AAUP crediting the publication with launching a campaign of “targeted harassment” against Fish.

It’s clear that right-wing media and pro-Israel pressure groups still have the capacity to threaten the employment of cartoonists who do not toe the pro-Israel line. There is no such organized push-back against anti-Palestinian cartoonists, even though they are targeting the victims of an ongoing genocide.

Featured image: This Mr. Fish cartoon (Scheer Post, 12/31/23) was called antisemitic because it imagined that victims of Nazi genocide were opposed to Israeli genocide.


This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Hank Kennedy.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/09/cartoonists-can-compare-victims-of-genocide-to-nazis-but-not-the-perpetrators-2/feed/ 0 543579 Dangerous Books? https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/dangerous-books/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/dangerous-books/#respond Sat, 05 Jul 2025 15:00:43 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=159676 The world of literature has turned purple, not knowing which color, blue or red, fits the current dilemma that’s causing serious students of the art to tear their hair out. The age of social media has opened the door to a cascade of new challenges to literary freedom that stifles creativity. Answers for what ails […]

The post Dangerous Books? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The world of literature has turned purple, not knowing which color, blue or red, fits the current dilemma that’s causing serious students of the art to tear their hair out. The age of social media has opened the door to a cascade of new challenges to literary freedom that stifles creativity.

Answers for what ails literature in today’s complicated world can be found in an upcoming new book: That Book is Dangerous (MIT Press, 2025) by Adam Szetela, PhD candidate in the Department of Literature in English at Cornell University.

That Book is Dangerous is scheduled to be published for purchase on August 12, 2025.

Szetela frames the current literature conundrum as follows: “At a moment when people are focused on the right’s moral panic over literature, it might seem strange that this book focuses on the left’s moral panic over literature. After all, right-wing panic has had more influence at the legislative level. That is true. But left-wing panic has had significantly more influence inside publishers, agencies, and other corners of literary culture. This is the reason why many of the progressives I interviewed are more concerned about the left than the right. While the right is remaking the world in its image, the left is standing in a circular firing squad.”

Szetela interviews people at the highest levels to discover massive self-censorship happening behind closed doors inside publishers, literary agents and other primary movers and shakers that publicly claim to be advocates of “free speech.” In contrast, he discovers a backhanded autocracy in publishing, making one wonder where the spirit of liberal democracy truly resides, if at all. Authors are subject to intimidation and dictates as to the meaning of content of their writing on a broad scale in this strange new breed of censorship hidden from public view.

Szetela gives an example of the horrors of trying to get a book published in chapter one, a YA author’s unpublished book caused an uproar on Twitter by people who had never read the book claiming it was racist because the ‘setting’ of the book was a fantastical world where oppression was not based upon skin color, therefore considering it anti-black by depicting slavery that was not African American slavery. The distressed, horribly harassed author canceled publication. The New York Times, at a later date, reported the book was to be published, but only after scrutiny by “sensitivity readers” to check for potentially offensive material.

According to the Szetela’s investigations, there’s an epidemic of mandatory sensitivity readings, plus demands to sign morality clauses in contracts as well as outright censorship of “dangerous” books in the name of antiracism, feminism, and other social norms affecting social justice. Much of this is an outgrowth of the new world of open internet exchanges of public outcries on X, Goodreads, Change.org, and other online platforms where authors are accused of racism, sexism, and homophobia, whether truly justified or not, whether reading the book or not, harsh consequences follow in the footsteps of clues as to content of a proposed book. It’s a form of mass public censorship based upon innuendo, guesswork, and misdirected testosterone.

Szetela’s book describes a national “moral panic” within the clutches of a moral crusade not all that different from the 1950s crusade to censure those who wrote and illustrated comic books as concerned adults pressured publishers and the U.S. Senate to censure distasteful material. Comic book burnings ensued in Chicago, Memphis, Port Huron, Cape Girardeau, and Binghamton, among others. Szetela’s simile explains it best: “When literature is treated as an immoral disease that is spreading like the plague, censorship is the only answer.”

This Orwellian intervention into YA and children’s literature appears to be now leaking into adult literary culture. For example, journalists at the New York Times have demanded sensitivity readers to ensure they do not offend readers; this shocker, as footnoted in the book, described in an article by Glenn Greenwald: “The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship of Colleagues.”

This bastardized moral crusade cruising throughout society is a piece of cake for anybody willing to get involved. Anyone with internet can be a moral crusader. No credentials necessary. Disturbingly, “research shows that expressions of moral anger and disgust, two emotions central to moral crusades, are associated with more retweets.” Even the most uniformed readers have an audience. The world of book reviews has turned into whack-a-mole amateur hour, as explained by one publisher: “People like a sensationalized story in our new world. An opinion can spread so quickly. I had a conversation last week about what we can do about Goodreads. How do we even know a review is real? It’s crazy. If it’s a negative response, it could kill a book.”

Open platforms have placed the world of intellect, of professional study, of publishing, of teaching in a strange new world that diminishes, sometimes obliterates, the search for true truthfulness. “The prevalence with which people freely admit they never read, nor have any intention of ever reading, books they passionately criticize is another indicator of how decrepitly anti-intellectual literary culture has become… the decline of reading — through skim reading, rushed reading, or not reading at all — is a perennial feature of the dystopian genre.” Ignorant, idiotic, silly, lunatic, stupid blabbering fools all have an official platform in today’s upside-down world.

The moral crusade has created a monstrosity of checks and balances that homogenizes literature while downsizing authors. A large cadre of sensitivity readers has sprung forth within only a few years. These are self-declared experts who ensure literature is not offensive, now being hired by Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and other major publishers.

Additionally, publishers now include “morality clauses” in contracts. These contracts specify that the publisher may terminate a contract if the author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals. Taking matters to the highest road, The Times has established a ‘sensitivity hotline’ for journalists to report on one another like tattletales found in children’s literature. And writers for the New Yorker have discovered morality clauses in their contracts that are wide open for abuse as the clauses state writers can be terminated if the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals.” What’s missing, if anything, from this list of misdemeanors? According to “Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard University: ‘No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.” (p. 185)

As described by Szetela: “The left’s approach to literature looks like the right’s approach to crime. On both sides, adults see themselves as punitive moral leaders who protect the rest of us from harm.” Fascinatingly, “there is a culture war between the punitive moral framework of the right and the compassionate moral framework of the left… These liberals are a real problem for the progressive movement.”

In the final analysis, Szetela emphasizes people must stand up to this cultural flap and resist: “In Fahrenheit 451, a retired English professor warns us: ‘I saw the way things were going, a long way back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally, they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me. By then, it’s too late.” (p. 195)

Adam Szetela:

A deluge of books have been canceled, rewritten, and otherwise censored in the past decade. My goal was to expose the current threats to literary freedom; where they came from, how they have reshaped publishing, and so on. That said, my book shows that much of this censorship occurs because people are scared to stand up to the censors. That culture of acquiescence needs to end.

World State (Brave New World, 1932)

Ministry of Truth (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)

Truth Social (Trump Media, 2022)

The post Dangerous Books? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/dangerous-books/feed/ 0 543004 Dangerous Books? https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/dangerous-books-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/dangerous-books-2/#respond Sat, 05 Jul 2025 15:00:43 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=159676 The world of literature has turned purple, not knowing which color, blue or red, fits the current dilemma that’s causing serious students of the art to tear their hair out. The age of social media has opened the door to a cascade of new challenges to literary freedom that stifles creativity. Answers for what ails […]

The post Dangerous Books? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The world of literature has turned purple, not knowing which color, blue or red, fits the current dilemma that’s causing serious students of the art to tear their hair out. The age of social media has opened the door to a cascade of new challenges to literary freedom that stifles creativity.

Answers for what ails literature in today’s complicated world can be found in an upcoming new book: That Book is Dangerous (MIT Press, 2025) by Adam Szetela, PhD candidate in the Department of Literature in English at Cornell University.

That Book is Dangerous is scheduled to be published for purchase on August 12, 2025.

Szetela frames the current literature conundrum as follows: “At a moment when people are focused on the right’s moral panic over literature, it might seem strange that this book focuses on the left’s moral panic over literature. After all, right-wing panic has had more influence at the legislative level. That is true. But left-wing panic has had significantly more influence inside publishers, agencies, and other corners of literary culture. This is the reason why many of the progressives I interviewed are more concerned about the left than the right. While the right is remaking the world in its image, the left is standing in a circular firing squad.”

Szetela interviews people at the highest levels to discover massive self-censorship happening behind closed doors inside publishers, literary agents and other primary movers and shakers that publicly claim to be advocates of “free speech.” In contrast, he discovers a backhanded autocracy in publishing, making one wonder where the spirit of liberal democracy truly resides, if at all. Authors are subject to intimidation and dictates as to the meaning of content of their writing on a broad scale in this strange new breed of censorship hidden from public view.

Szetela gives an example of the horrors of trying to get a book published in chapter one, a YA author’s unpublished book caused an uproar on Twitter by people who had never read the book claiming it was racist because the ‘setting’ of the book was a fantastical world where oppression was not based upon skin color, therefore considering it anti-black by depicting slavery that was not African American slavery. The distressed, horribly harassed author canceled publication. The New York Times, at a later date, reported the book was to be published, but only after scrutiny by “sensitivity readers” to check for potentially offensive material.

According to the Szetela’s investigations, there’s an epidemic of mandatory sensitivity readings, plus demands to sign morality clauses in contracts as well as outright censorship of “dangerous” books in the name of antiracism, feminism, and other social norms affecting social justice. Much of this is an outgrowth of the new world of open internet exchanges of public outcries on X, Goodreads, Change.org, and other online platforms where authors are accused of racism, sexism, and homophobia, whether truly justified or not, whether reading the book or not, harsh consequences follow in the footsteps of clues as to content of a proposed book. It’s a form of mass public censorship based upon innuendo, guesswork, and misdirected testosterone.

Szetela’s book describes a national “moral panic” within the clutches of a moral crusade not all that different from the 1950s crusade to censure those who wrote and illustrated comic books as concerned adults pressured publishers and the U.S. Senate to censure distasteful material. Comic book burnings ensued in Chicago, Memphis, Port Huron, Cape Girardeau, and Binghamton, among others. Szetela’s simile explains it best: “When literature is treated as an immoral disease that is spreading like the plague, censorship is the only answer.”

This Orwellian intervention into YA and children’s literature appears to be now leaking into adult literary culture. For example, journalists at the New York Times have demanded sensitivity readers to ensure they do not offend readers; this shocker, as footnoted in the book, described in an article by Glenn Greenwald: “The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship of Colleagues.”

This bastardized moral crusade cruising throughout society is a piece of cake for anybody willing to get involved. Anyone with internet can be a moral crusader. No credentials necessary. Disturbingly, “research shows that expressions of moral anger and disgust, two emotions central to moral crusades, are associated with more retweets.” Even the most uniformed readers have an audience. The world of book reviews has turned into whack-a-mole amateur hour, as explained by one publisher: “People like a sensationalized story in our new world. An opinion can spread so quickly. I had a conversation last week about what we can do about Goodreads. How do we even know a review is real? It’s crazy. If it’s a negative response, it could kill a book.”

Open platforms have placed the world of intellect, of professional study, of publishing, of teaching in a strange new world that diminishes, sometimes obliterates, the search for true truthfulness. “The prevalence with which people freely admit they never read, nor have any intention of ever reading, books they passionately criticize is another indicator of how decrepitly anti-intellectual literary culture has become… the decline of reading — through skim reading, rushed reading, or not reading at all — is a perennial feature of the dystopian genre.” Ignorant, idiotic, silly, lunatic, stupid blabbering fools all have an official platform in today’s upside-down world.

The moral crusade has created a monstrosity of checks and balances that homogenizes literature while downsizing authors. A large cadre of sensitivity readers has sprung forth within only a few years. These are self-declared experts who ensure literature is not offensive, now being hired by Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and other major publishers.

Additionally, publishers now include “morality clauses” in contracts. These contracts specify that the publisher may terminate a contract if the author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals. Taking matters to the highest road, The Times has established a ‘sensitivity hotline’ for journalists to report on one another like tattletales found in children’s literature. And writers for the New Yorker have discovered morality clauses in their contracts that are wide open for abuse as the clauses state writers can be terminated if the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals.” What’s missing, if anything, from this list of misdemeanors? According to “Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard University: ‘No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.” (p. 185)

As described by Szetela: “The left’s approach to literature looks like the right’s approach to crime. On both sides, adults see themselves as punitive moral leaders who protect the rest of us from harm.” Fascinatingly, “there is a culture war between the punitive moral framework of the right and the compassionate moral framework of the left… These liberals are a real problem for the progressive movement.”

In the final analysis, Szetela emphasizes people must stand up to this cultural flap and resist: “In Fahrenheit 451, a retired English professor warns us: ‘I saw the way things were going, a long way back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally, they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me. By then, it’s too late.” (p. 195)

Adam Szetela:

A deluge of books have been canceled, rewritten, and otherwise censored in the past decade. My goal was to expose the current threats to literary freedom; where they came from, how they have reshaped publishing, and so on. That said, my book shows that much of this censorship occurs because people are scared to stand up to the censors. That culture of acquiescence needs to end.

World State (Brave New World, 1932)

Ministry of Truth (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)

Truth Social (Trump Media, 2022)

The post Dangerous Books? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/dangerous-books-2/feed/ 0 543005 How Censorship AFFECTS Public Image and Marketing #censorship #publicimage https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/04/how-censorship-affects-public-image-and-marketing-censorship-publicimage/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/04/how-censorship-affects-public-image-and-marketing-censorship-publicimage/#respond Fri, 04 Jul 2025 13:00:47 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=25e6b0fda501d53161ea10995fb52d4a
This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/04/how-censorship-affects-public-image-and-marketing-censorship-publicimage/feed/ 0 542880 CPJ: Kyrgyz president must veto ‘dangerous’ media law https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/02/cpj-kyrgyz-president-must-veto-dangerous-media-law/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/02/cpj-kyrgyz-president-must-veto-dangerous-media-law/#respond Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:28:57 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=494578 New York, July 2, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges Kyrgyzstan President Sadyr Japarov to veto a new mass media law that would require all publications to register with the state and heavily restricts any foreign legal entities from founding or owning media outlets.

Parliament passed the bill, which would allow an authorized state body to decide which media outlets can operate, on June 25, rejecting a compromise draft of the bill that had been the product of two years of negotiations with a working group that included journalists.

“Considering Kyrgyzstan’s unprecedented media crackdown, Parliament’s last-minute reintroduction of repressive clauses into the new media law bill is dangerous and rightly sparks deep concern for the press,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “We call on President Japarov to give substance to his verbal commitments to press freedom by vetoing this version of the bill and returning it to Parliament so it can pass a version supported by the country’s journalists.”

The compromise draft was passed in a first reading by parliament in April; in mid-June, deputies reintroduced the disputed clauses before rushing the bill through in two readings on June 25.

Several journalists and media experts who worked on the compromise draft have asked the government to revert to a version based on the draft.

If the current version is ratified, “those who will print any criticism or alternative views, will simply not be registered and won’t be able to publish,” Semetey Amanbekov, a member of local advocacy group Media Action Platform, told RFE/RL, adding that it will mean journalism in Kyrgyzstan will come to an end.

Japarov withdrew a similar draft media law in March 2024 following criticism from journalists and international human rights bodies. 

Kyrgyzstan’s new media law comes amid a sustained assault on independent reporting in a country previously regarded as a regional beacon for the free press.


This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/02/cpj-kyrgyz-president-must-veto-dangerous-media-law/feed/ 0 542469 A Silence that is Defining Our Age and Which is Deafening https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/a-silence-that-is-defining-our-age-and-which-is-deafening/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/a-silence-that-is-defining-our-age-and-which-is-deafening/#respond Mon, 23 Jun 2025 09:07:02 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=159236 Note: Another long opinion piece in the local rag, Lincoln County Leader, June 18, 2025. First, though, let me explain. The idea is to not just rattle my fellow citizens’ cages, those self-imposed prisons of the mind. It’s my own journalistic and controlled demolition of the grand narratives this country has foisted on a public […]

The post A Silence that is Defining Our Age and Which is Deafening first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Note: Another long opinion piece in the local rag, Lincoln County Leader, June 18, 2025.


First, though, let me explain. The idea is to not just rattle my fellow citizens’ cages, those self-imposed prisons of the mind. It’s my own journalistic and controlled demolition of the grand narratives this country has foisted on a public that has not only become unsuspecting, but absolutely habituated into brands, and consumer dialogue, talks about trips to Costco or Costa Rica, it’s all the same fucking 24 pack of paper towels to throw at hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.

This is the spawn of Nazis, the good Germans, the guy who is now a Jew, who was trained by Jew York Jews like Roy Cohen, and alas, his grandkiddos are Jewish, and that daughter is Jewish, and the mafia in his Minyan is composed of Jews and even freak Zionists like RFK, Jr.

It is a sickness that isn’t just one chapter in the DSM-V: Victoria Nuland and cookies, man.

What is the DSM-5?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often known as the “DSM,” is a reference book on mental health and brain-related conditions and disorders. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is responsible for the writing, editing, reviewing and publishing of this book.

The number “5” attached to the name of the DSM refers to the fifth — and most recent — edition of this book. The DSM-5®’s original release date was in May 2013. The APA released a revised version of the fifth edition in March 2022. That version is known as the DSM-5-TR™, with TR meaning “text revision.”

IMPORTANT: The DSM-5 and DSM-5-TR are medical reference books intended for experts and professionals. The content in these books is very technical, though people who aren’t medical professionals may still find it interesting or educational. However, you shouldn’t use either of these books as a substitute for seeing a trained, qualified mental health or medical provider.

Additionally, the APA also publishes books that supplement the content in the DSM-5-TR. Examples of these supplement publications include the DSM-5 Handbook of Differential Diagnosis and DSM-5 Clinical Cases.

What is the purpose of the DSM-5?

The first step in treating any health condition — physical or mental — is accurately diagnosing the condition. That’s where the DSM-5 comes in. It provides clear, highly detailed definitions of mental health and brain-related conditions. It also provides details and examples of the signs and symptoms of those conditions.

In addition to defining and explaining conditions, the DSM-5 organizes those conditions into groups. That makes it easier for healthcare providers to accurately diagnose conditions and tell them apart from conditions with similar signs and symptoms.]

[Photo: While Ronald Reagan demonized the welfare system as a whole in familiar terms, his ire was largely directed toward single mothers, and his racially coded language was sufficient to make clear his overarching intentions.]

All these things, these economic things, they are on people’s minds. The chaos of Trump and Company, as he plays out his dictator role, all of that is on everyone’s minds.

The cost of being poor is rising. And it’s worse for poor families of color. Great headline.

But the point of my short op-ed was to discuss how the silence of this genocide is deafening, in fact, defeating. This has a deep deep psychological effect on those who might have cared to speak up and who are distressed by the murder incorporated on a mass murder scale that the Jews in Israel are undertaking.

But the empire of chaos is about that chaos, and the chaotic nature of our news cycle with the demented POTUS and his even more demented cabinet members and his MAGA mutt followers, that this imploding diesel belching engine has thrown so many people into discombobulation syndrome.

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

The poor and forgotten nations of the world can blame their downward spiral on an emerging world order that Samir Amin in this brilliant essay calls the “empire of chaos.” Comprised of the United States, Japan, and Germany, and backed by a weakened USSR and the comprador classes of the third world, this is an empire that will stop at nothing in its campaign to protect and expand its capitalist markets.

The interview with Professor Samir Amin was conducted on 6 May 2018 in Beijing, by Professor Lau Kin Chi and Professor Sit Tsui Jade. Professor Amin criticized monopoly capitalism and the collective imperialism of the Triad (USA, Europe, and Japan). He analyzed the current major challenges to China. He strongly suggested that China should not join financial globalization, but on the contrary, keep capital account and exchange rate under control, as well as maintain collective ownership of land and the small peasantry. These were great weapons against financial globalization. He also discussed the possibilities of building people’s internationalism.

*****
“Israel’s culture of genocide is spreading globally. We must build an alternative” by Abed Abou Shhadeh

Even as Israeli violence becomes more visible, politicians like Ben Gvir are welcomed as honoured guests in the US

‘The crimes [in Gaza] are so egregious that are being carried out… The attempt to cover them up and whitewash them is failing’ Since 7 October, western media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza has come under intense scrutiny, particularly for the language and terminology used by many outlets. As a result, the coverage has been accused of bias against Palestinians effectively providing cover for Israel’s war on Gaza. To delve into this, we’re speaking to Assal Rad, an Iranian-American scholar of the modern Middle East and fellow at DAWN, who’s also made it her mission to call out and ‘fix’ misleading headlines. Her widely shared posts earned her the title of ‘headline fixer’, turning this into a trend of its own online.

This is just a watered-down version of what I really would love to write every day, and in a sense have the public square to discuss this silence, this mute echo of silence has pushed a collective insanity and amnesia into the populous.

The Silence is Deafening

The silence is deafening, here on the coast, and throughout most of the land. Forget about large universities and valiant young people and some faculty protesting the genocide which by many expert accounts — not cited in so-called legacy media – are 100,000 murdered civilians.

Targeted assassinations of journalists and of medical workers? And the AMA is silent. The American Medical Association represents hundreds of thousands of doctors.

“We’re seeing hospitals being bombed, ambulances being bombed, doctors and other medical workers being targeted and shot. The AMA is the sixth-largest lobbying organization in the United States, it’s bigger than Boeing. It’s bigger than Lockheed Martin, it’s bigger than the National Rifle Association. They have a tremendous amount of domestic and international influence, and because they carry such weight within the realm of health care, we felt it would be appropriate for them to use their voice in this way.”

Emily Hacker, a member of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, outlined that an important reason healthcare workers want the “AMA and all other healthcare institutions to be involved in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine”  is that “the US can spend billions and billions of dollars on bombs and bullets, but there are 26 million Americans with no health insurance and 150 million Americans rely on Medicare or Medicaid.”

“People can’t afford their insulin, but there’s always money for bombs,” Hackerarticulated.

Cognitive dissonance is more than just interesting as a theory to study. In our daily lives we for the most part are silent. Hands down. No discussion of Israel’s genocide and the United States’ and Britain’s complicity because most Americans are dangerously poorly educated.

Miseducated. Brainwashed.

This is what many call “deep” or “master narratives” – that somehow the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel is the most democratic state in the Middle East. I witnessed genocide silence at the Yachats Commons June 1, where we listened to Oregon Black Pioneers presenter Zachary Stocks discuss the origin of black exclusion laws in our state as well as the pro-slavery mentality that dominated many of the state’s politicians and newspaper editors.

Good stuff he presented to a largely greying and older population. We did get some land acknowledgment from Joanne Kittel, known for her work around the Amanda Trail.

“For those of you who travel through Yachats, I ask you to pay respect to and honor the Alsea, Siuslaw, Lower Umpqua and Coos people who lost their lives as a result of their forced incarceration and mistreatment in Yachats, Waldport and Florence areas. The Amanda Trail that connects Yachats to Cape Perpetua is a spiritual and solemn path that remembers in perpetuity.” Joanne Kittel wrote this as a blurb for a book, Seeking Recognition: The Termination and Restoration of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, 1855-1984 by David R.M. Beck.

No moment of silence for Gaza? It would have been appropriate.

Deep, grand, meta or master narratives are dominant or commonly-shared stories within a society or culture. They are tools for shaping a collective idea or consciousness about who we are as a society, culture or people. Master narratives also limit our understanding of context and historical causes and effects, and they’re deployed to perpetuate stereotypes or dominant ideologies.

Erasing knowledge and context is the coin of the realm now especially with a shallow and sallow-minded president. This POTUS isn’t the be-all and end-all, but for the past five months people have been scrambling to anticipate his administration’s brand of proto- or neo-fascism. Erasing Black Medal of Honor winners or Jackie Robinson’s portrait from various locations and websites is just the tip of the iceberg of flipping around of history.

“A good Indian is a Dead Indian.” Or, from the other POTUS, Teddy Roosevelt: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

And now why is it the genocide of our times is never discussed in public or around dinner tables? Imagine that during World War Two not a word about Nazism or fascism in Italy and Spain. Silence? The price of bacon?

A Jewish Canadian journalist, many reading this might not know, Aaron Mate, says it bluntly about that Grand Narrative of Israel and Judaism: “Everything I Was Taught… Was a Lie” He says the indoctrination of how Israel is this grand democracy and mothership for all Jews starts early.

“This Jewish state commits genocide in our name. It’s a moral obligation to resist this,” Mate states.

It is more than bizarre and Orwellian, this current rampant ideology of “silence is transparency and lies are truth.”

Doctors, nurses, and medics are murdered and hospitals bombed. And no one in mixed company discusses Gaza, the genocide, the dehumanization of Palestinians, which is a dehumanization for us all.

Doctors? I have MDs in my family and I was a pre-med student for a while. Here is an anonymous statement I agree with, from a doctor condemning the American Medical Association’s complicity:

“As a doctor, I am saying loud and clear I am against all war and especially GENOCIDE. AMA and all our medical institutions that have remained silent and practiced unethical silencing, doxxing, firing of peace supporters or those speaking up for Palestine cast a long shadow of shame on our great profession.”

Silence, and the grand narrative just crumbles.

The post A Silence that is Defining Our Age and Which is Deafening first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/a-silence-that-is-defining-our-age-and-which-is-deafening/feed/ 0 540551 Zionist “anti-semitic racism” Report Expected to be Given to School Boards Canada-wide https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/zionist-anti-semitic-racism-report-expected-to-be-given-to-school-boards-canada-wide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/zionist-anti-semitic-racism-report-expected-to-be-given-to-school-boards-canada-wide/#respond Mon, 23 Jun 2025 07:44:05 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=159370 Ontario’s education ministry supposedly bans “political” bias, but with the TDSB, that “bias” means banning support of Palestinian rights: Zionism is not apparently “political”!  The most  disturbing aspect is that these damaging CIJA-developed recommendations will probably be attempted at school boards across Canada. Director of Education LaTouche, and Trustees: Many of us have been disappointed […]

The post Zionist “anti-semitic racism” Report Expected to be Given to School Boards Canada-wide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Ontario’s education ministry supposedly bans “political” bias, but with the TDSB, that “bias” means banning support of Palestinian rights: Zionism is not apparently “political”!  The most  disturbing aspect is that these damaging CIJA-developed recommendations will probably be attempted at school boards across Canada.

Director of Education LaTouche, and Trustees:

Many of us have been disappointed by the TDSB’s highly political pro-Israel actions for years, but the actions this year (the trustees’ secret discussion and support of the “Affirming Jewish Identities & Addressing Antisemitism” report not to mention it’s support of the discredited “Nova Music Festival Exhibit” and dismissing of “No Other Land”!) have crossed a line of what should be acceptable by any school board.

I read the “Affirming Jewish Identities” report and believe that, if it were implemented, it would damage all non-Jewish students by giving Jewish students and staff the power to complain about what should be Charter- protected speech (and action).  Its recommendations could be entitled, No Jew may be offended.  The Toronto TDSB’s efforts to ensure students are exposed only to (political!) Zionist perspectives are described.

I attended the Nova Exhibit when I read that TDSB had sent students there and was appalled by the pornographic propaganda: tales that had been thoroughly documented as untrue before this exhibit was constructed. My experience visiting the Nova exhibit are described here.

I spent hours trying to find the Trustees’ discussion about this report in the public February meeting, but realized that that discussion had been held secretly and with voting results that were not visible.  I understand that holding secret discussions like that is not legal in Ontario.  On February 24th, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms sent a complaint to the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB) that its secrecy in a public meeting was unconstitutional.

My attempts to find out the status of the possible implementation of this report have been disappointing, with no response to calls to my trustee, the head trustee, or my letter to Education Director LaTouche.  I have had the impression for the last several years that if a member of their public does not agree with TDSB’s Zionist agenda, no Trustee or employee feels any obligation to have any contact with them.  The TDSB looks as if it is run like a little fiefdom with no responsibility to deal with any dissent from those who voted them in.

As things now stand, I would not want any child in our family to attend a TDSB school until it shows that it is fully compliant with Charter rights and the implications of international humanitarian law in Canada.  It is unacceptable that children in at least one TDSB school have been subjected to racist hatred: “Kids in Gaza deserve what they get.”  TDSB’s “anti-racism” program should deal with all racism together, not piece-meal.

The post Zionist “anti-semitic racism” Report Expected to be Given to School Boards Canada-wide first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Karin Brothers.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/zionist-anti-semitic-racism-report-expected-to-be-given-to-school-boards-canada-wide/feed/ 0 540539 CPJ urges Paramount’s Shari Redstone to reconsider CBS lawsuit settlement https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/18/cpj-urges-paramounts-shari-redstone-to-reconsider-cbs-lawsuit-settlement/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/18/cpj-urges-paramounts-shari-redstone-to-reconsider-cbs-lawsuit-settlement/#respond Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:09:00 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=490586 The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed serious concern about the potential implications of a settlement in the lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump and U.S. House Rep. Ronny Jackson against Paramount and CBS. 

In a letter sent to Paramount Global chair Shari Redstone, CPJ emphasized that the lawsuit lacks merit and that CBS journalists acted lawfully and ethically. CPJ warned that the settlement could set a harmful precedent, signaling that political figures can pressure news organizations into altering or censoring editorial decisions, and threatening freedom of the press in the U.S. and around the world.

Read the letter here:


This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/18/cpj-urges-paramounts-shari-redstone-to-reconsider-cbs-lawsuit-settlement/feed/ 0 539630 Why do US/EU Media Hide this Truth about the War in Ukraine? https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/02/why-do-us-eu-media-hide-this-truth-about-the-war-in-ukraine/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/02/why-do-us-eu-media-hide-this-truth-about-the-war-in-ukraine/#respond Mon, 02 Jun 2025 13:59:31 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=158777 To boil it all down (and the speakers here have never yet been found to be wrong about this war, which they have been analyzing ever since 2016): the only way that America and its allied countries can now avoid a total defeat in this war is by directly going to war themselves against Russia. […]

The post Why do US/EU Media Hide this Truth about the War in Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

To boil it all down (and the speakers here have never yet been found to be wrong about this war, which they have been analyzing ever since 2016): the only way that America and its allied countries can now avoid a total defeat in this war is by directly going to war themselves against Russia. Though that would not start out as being a nuclear war, what would the loser in the conventional war then do? Would it surrender? Or would it instead initiate nuclear war against the side that has won the conventional war (which would then become World War Three)? And why are the stakes in this war (possible annihilation of civilization) not even being discussed in U.S.-and-allied media? Is this the media that would be the media in a democracy, or instead in a dictatorship?

There already are indications that the U.S. and its allies are intensively preparing for WW3. Is this because there is a public demand for these multi-trillion-dollar measures, or is it instead because the individuals who are in control over our governments (and their news-media) want these expenses by their Government? Why are people not pondering these questions? But perhaps the reason is that they’re not being informed that this is even happening. And why aren’t they?

UK and Israel are part of this empire, and at 7:45-20:30 in this video is the U.S.-UK-Israel plan laid out and documented (see especially the map at 17:57) for the completion of their final solution to the Palestinian problem in Gaza. Then, from 29:00 till 34:00 is a truthful description of how the U.S. Government’s ceaseless craving to conquer both Russia and China — and to continue providing the weapons that Israel uses to exterminate Gazans — is increasingly foreclosing any other (any peaceful) paths by which America’s economy can even grow.

U.S.-and-allied major media say that alternative viewpoints are presented by them, but why are THESE alternative viewpoints NOT among the “alternatives” (I would instead call them truths) that they present? Why are these ‘viewpoints’ censored-out by them? How and why is that done? Is this a democracy? Or is it something else?

The post Why do US/EU Media Hide this Truth about the War in Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/02/why-do-us-eu-media-hide-this-truth-about-the-war-in-ukraine/feed/ 0 536095 Regional Chinese censorship more aggressive than national Great Firewall: study https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/ https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/#respond Fri, 30 May 2025 21:50:50 +0000 https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/ Online censorship in China by some regional governments is even more aggressive than enforcement of the national-level ‘Great Firewall’ by the central government, according to a recent study and local sources.

The Great Firewall Report (GFW Report) highlights how the central Chinese province of Henan has adopted its own provincial firewall which is less sophisticated and robust than the central government’s but more volatile and aggressive, blocking significantly more websites than the national-level censorship system.

Local sources told Radio Free Asia that the heightened restrictions at the provincial government level may reflect uncertainty about instructions from higher authorities, leading to “excessive blocking” to avoid blame for failing to carry out their duties.

GFW Report is a censorship monitoring platform, primarily focused on China. During one experiment its researchers ran between Dec. 26, 2023 and March 31, 2025, they found that the Henan Firewall blocked 4.2 million domains, about six times that of the 741,542 at the national level.

Since 2023, netizens in Henan had reported a rise in the number of websites that were inaccessible in the region but accessible elsewhere in China, the study found.

“This localized censorship suggests a departure from China’s centralized censorship apparatus, enabling local authorities to exert a greater degree of control within their respective regions,” researchers Mingshi Wu at GFW, Ali Zohaib and Amir Houmansadr at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Zakir Durumeric at Stanford University, and Eric Wustrow at the University of Colorado Boulder wrote in the GFW Report published in May, “A Wall Behind A Wall: Emerging Regional Censorship in China.”

But the phenomenon extends beyond Henan, sources inside China told RFA.

Local governments in neighboring Hebei, another central Chinese province, as well as those in Tibet and Xinjiang have been operating similar censorship systems as the one reported in Henan for at least four years, Zhao Yuan, a network engineer based in Hebei, said.

“In the past, we could access overseas websites that were not blocked by the national firewall,” Zhao said. “Now, even virtual private networks (VPNs) in Henan and Hubei don’t work.”

While the national-level firewall, known as the Great Firewall, targets more news and media sites, in line with China’s long-standing policy of censoring politically sensitive information, the provincial-level firewall systems, like the one in Henan, blocks domains focusing on topics like the economy, technology, and business, GFW Report researchers found.

The Chinese Communist Party has, in recent years, emphasized a multi-pronged approach to censorship, including the management of all types of propaganda at the domestic and international level through a framework known as “territorial management” and implementation of “digital stability maintenance” measures, such as policing of sensitive content online on dates deemed politically sensitive by the government.

“Local governments have taken the initiative to establish local blocking systems, indicating that the top leaders are increasingly vigilant about the flow of information,” Wei Sicong, a Beijing-based political observer, said.

Commuters wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus browse their smartphones inside a subway train in Beijing Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. China's internet watchdog cracked down on online speech and issued a new requirement that bloggers and influencers have a license before they can publish on certain topics.
Commuters wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus browse their smartphones inside a subway train in Beijing Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. China's internet watchdog cracked down on online speech and issued a new requirement that bloggers and influencers have a license before they can publish on certain topics.
(Andy Wong/AP)

‘Turning off the whole world’

Researchers at GFW found that the Henan firewall monitors and blocks traffic leaving and entering the province, as opposed to the national-level censorship system that is focused on traffic entering and exiting the country.

Other sources in the region told RFA that the heightened restrictions at the provincial government level suggest lack of clear legal know-how about how to enforce instructions from higher-ups.

“Officials would rather block more and more than take responsibility. So the result you see is ‘turning off the whole world’,” network engineer Zhang Jianan said.

GFW Report researchers said their analysis showed no regional censorship in other areas they studied, such as Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Jiangsu.

In Henan and Hebei, however, local residents told RFA that even the websites of some foreign universities are inaccessible, as a result of which they turn to VPNs and other circumvention tools to bypass government censorship and surveillance.

“Some classmates can connect in Beijing and Shanghai, but we can’t in Zhengzhou and can only rely on circumvention software,” Zhang, a student at Henan’s Zhengzhou University, said.

Hebei-based network engineer Zhao said, “The censorship is getting stricter and stricter. We can’t even connect to some foreign university websites.”

RFA found that as early as December 2023, a university in Henan province sought to purchase a “public opinion monitoring system,” specifically aimed at international students, students and dissidents, and had conducted an open bidding process.

Henan University of Science and Technology had laid out a 2024-2025 budget of 120,000 yuan (or US$16,657) for the public opinion monitoring service system to provide 24/7 real-time monitoring, early warning analysis and crisis response of public opinion information on the entire network, covering news websites and social media platforms such as Weibo and Douyin, the university’s website showed.

When RFA contacted the university, a teacher confirmed they are using an old monitoring system and that they have now started a bidding process for a new one.

Edited by Mat Pennington.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang and Tenzin Pema for RFA.

]]> https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/feed/ 0 535791 Regional Chinese censorship more aggressive than national Great Firewall: study https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/ https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/#respond Fri, 30 May 2025 21:50:50 +0000 https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/ Online censorship in China by some regional governments is even more aggressive than enforcement of the national-level ‘Great Firewall’ by the central government, according to a recent study and local sources.

The Great Firewall Report (GFW Report) highlights how the central Chinese province of Henan has adopted its own provincial firewall which is less sophisticated and robust than the central government’s but more volatile and aggressive, blocking significantly more websites than the national-level censorship system.

Local sources told Radio Free Asia that the heightened restrictions at the provincial government level may reflect uncertainty about instructions from higher authorities, leading to “excessive blocking” to avoid blame for failing to carry out their duties.

GFW Report is a censorship monitoring platform, primarily focused on China. During one experiment its researchers ran between Dec. 26, 2023 and March 31, 2025, they found that the Henan Firewall blocked 4.2 million domains, about six times that of the 741,542 at the national level.

Since 2023, netizens in Henan had reported a rise in the number of websites that were inaccessible in the region but accessible elsewhere in China, the study found.

“This localized censorship suggests a departure from China’s centralized censorship apparatus, enabling local authorities to exert a greater degree of control within their respective regions,” researchers Mingshi Wu at GFW, Ali Zohaib and Amir Houmansadr at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Zakir Durumeric at Stanford University, and Eric Wustrow at the University of Colorado Boulder wrote in the GFW Report published in May, “A Wall Behind A Wall: Emerging Regional Censorship in China.”

But the phenomenon extends beyond Henan, sources inside China told RFA.

Local governments in neighboring Hebei, another central Chinese province, as well as those in Tibet and Xinjiang have been operating similar censorship systems as the one reported in Henan for at least four years, Zhao Yuan, a network engineer based in Hebei, said.

“In the past, we could access overseas websites that were not blocked by the national firewall,” Zhao said. “Now, even virtual private networks (VPNs) in Henan and Hubei don’t work.”

While the national-level firewall, known as the Great Firewall, targets more news and media sites, in line with China’s long-standing policy of censoring politically sensitive information, the provincial-level firewall systems, like the one in Henan, blocks domains focusing on topics like the economy, technology, and business, GFW Report researchers found.

The Chinese Communist Party has, in recent years, emphasized a multi-pronged approach to censorship, including the management of all types of propaganda at the domestic and international level through a framework known as “territorial management” and implementation of “digital stability maintenance” measures, such as policing of sensitive content online on dates deemed politically sensitive by the government.

“Local governments have taken the initiative to establish local blocking systems, indicating that the top leaders are increasingly vigilant about the flow of information,” Wei Sicong, a Beijing-based political observer, said.

Commuters wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus browse their smartphones inside a subway train in Beijing Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. China's internet watchdog cracked down on online speech and issued a new requirement that bloggers and influencers have a license before they can publish on certain topics.
Commuters wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus browse their smartphones inside a subway train in Beijing Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. China's internet watchdog cracked down on online speech and issued a new requirement that bloggers and influencers have a license before they can publish on certain topics.
(Andy Wong/AP)

‘Turning off the whole world’

Researchers at GFW found that the Henan firewall monitors and blocks traffic leaving and entering the province, as opposed to the national-level censorship system that is focused on traffic entering and exiting the country.

Other sources in the region told RFA that the heightened restrictions at the provincial government level suggest lack of clear legal know-how about how to enforce instructions from higher-ups.

“Officials would rather block more and more than take responsibility. So the result you see is ‘turning off the whole world’,” network engineer Zhang Jianan said.

GFW Report researchers said their analysis showed no regional censorship in other areas they studied, such as Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Jiangsu.

In Henan and Hebei, however, local residents told RFA that even the websites of some foreign universities are inaccessible, as a result of which they turn to VPNs and other circumvention tools to bypass government censorship and surveillance.

“Some classmates can connect in Beijing and Shanghai, but we can’t in Zhengzhou and can only rely on circumvention software,” Zhang, a student at Henan’s Zhengzhou University, said.

Hebei-based network engineer Zhao said, “The censorship is getting stricter and stricter. We can’t even connect to some foreign university websites.”

RFA found that as early as December 2023, a university in Henan province sought to purchase a “public opinion monitoring system,” specifically aimed at international students, students and dissidents, and had conducted an open bidding process.

Henan University of Science and Technology had laid out a 2024-2025 budget of 120,000 yuan (or US$16,657) for the public opinion monitoring service system to provide 24/7 real-time monitoring, early warning analysis and crisis response of public opinion information on the entire network, covering news websites and social media platforms such as Weibo and Douyin, the university’s website showed.

When RFA contacted the university, a teacher confirmed they are using an old monitoring system and that they have now started a bidding process for a new one.

Edited by Mat Pennington.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang and Tenzin Pema for RFA.

]]> https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/05/30/china-regional-censorship-firewall-local-province/feed/ 0 535792 Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior to return for 40th anniversary of French bombing https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/14/greenpeace-flagship-rainbow-warrior-to-return-for-40th-anniversary-of-french-bombing/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/14/greenpeace-flagship-rainbow-warrior-to-return-for-40th-anniversary-of-french-bombing/#respond Wed, 14 May 2025 22:48:19 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=114727 By Russel Norman

The iconic Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior will return to Aotearoa this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original campaign ship at Marsden Wharf in Auckland by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.

The return to Aotearoa comes at a pivotal moment — when the fight to protect our planet’s fragile life-support systems has never been as urgent, or more critical.

Here in Aotearoa, the Luxon government is waging an all-out war on nature, and on a planetary scale, climate change, ecosystem collapse, and accelerating species extinction pose an existential threat.

Greenpeace Aotearoa's Dr Russel Norman
Greenpeace Aotearoa’s Dr Russel Norman . . . “Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective.” Image: Greenpeace

As we remember the bombing and the murder of our crew member, Fernando Pereira, it’s important to remember why the French government was compelled to commit such a cowardly act of violence.

Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective. We posed a very real threat to the French government’s military programme and colonial power.

It’s also critical to remember that they failed to stop us. They failed to intimidate us, and they failed to silence us. Greenpeace only grew stronger and continued the successful campaign against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

Forty years later, it’s the oil industry that’s trying to stop us. This time, not with bombs but with a legal attack that threatens the existence of Greenpeace in the US and beyond.

We will not be intimidated
But just like in 1985 when the French bombed our ship, now too in 2025, we will not be intimidated, we will not back down, and we will not be silenced.

We cannot be silenced because we are a movement of people committed to peace and to protecting Earth’s ability to sustain life, protecting the blue oceans, the forests and the life we share this planet with,” says Norman.

In the 40 years since, the Rainbow Warrior has sailed on the front lines of our campaigns around the world to protect nature and promote peace. In the fight to end oil exploration, turn the tide of plastic production, stop the destruction of ancient forests and protect the ocean, the Rainbow Warrior has been there to this day.

Right now the Rainbow Warrior is preparing to sail through the Tasman Sea to expose the damage being done to ocean life, continuing a decades-long tradition of defending ocean health.

This follows the Rainbow Warrior spending six weeks in the Marshall Islands where the original ship carried out Operation Exodus, in which the Greenpeace crew evacuated the people of Rongelap from their home island that had been made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons testing by the US government.

In Auckland this year, several events will be held on and around the ship to mark the anniversary, including open days with tours of the ship for the public.

Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/14/greenpeace-flagship-rainbow-warrior-to-return-for-40th-anniversary-of-french-bombing/feed/ 0 533056 Lessons from Kent State, 55 Years Later and the Power of Truth-telling and Resisting Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/05/lessons-from-kent-state-55-years-later-and-the-power-of-truth-telling-and-resisting-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/05/lessons-from-kent-state-55-years-later-and-the-power-of-truth-telling-and-resisting-censorship/#respond Mon, 05 May 2025 21:30:22 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=46339 In the first segment of today’s program Mickey talks with Laurel Krause, Emily Kunstler, and Kelley Lane 55 years after the Ohio National Guard killed four students and wounded nine others at Kent State University as they protested the illegal expansion of the disastrous Vietnam War. There are many lessons…

The post Lessons from Kent State, 55 Years Later and the Power of Truth-telling and Resisting Censorship appeared first on Project Censored.


This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/05/lessons-from-kent-state-55-years-later-and-the-power-of-truth-telling-and-resisting-censorship/feed/ 0 531205 Maura Finkelstein on Academic Freedom, Jewish, Zionism, and Palestine https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/maura-finkelstein-on-academic-freedom-jewish-zionism-and-palestine/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/maura-finkelstein-on-academic-freedom-jewish-zionism-and-palestine/#respond Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:55:30 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=157703 Host Faramarz Farbod talks with Dr. Maura Finkelstein, writer, ethnographer, anthropologist, and author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (DUP 2019). Dr. Finkelstein was falsely accused of antisemitism and fired last May (2024) from her teaching position at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. We talk about the state of academic freedom, […]

The post Maura Finkelstein on Academic Freedom, Jewish, Zionism, and Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Host Faramarz Farbod talks with Dr. Maura Finkelstein, writer, ethnographer, anthropologist, and author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (DUP 2019). Dr. Finkelstein was falsely accused of antisemitism and fired last May (2024) from her teaching position at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. We talk about the state of academic freedom, classrooms as ethnographic spaces, decanonization, being Jewish and anti-Zionist in the US, Zionism, Israel, misuses of antisemitism, Islamophobia, empire, and the present moment in history.

The post Maura Finkelstein on Academic Freedom, Jewish, Zionism, and Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Faramarz Farbod.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/maura-finkelstein-on-academic-freedom-jewish-zionism-and-palestine/feed/ 0 529187 Media Censorship in the Age of Palestinian Genocide https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/18/media-censorship-in-the-age-of-palestinian-genocide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/18/media-censorship-in-the-age-of-palestinian-genocide/#respond Fri, 18 Apr 2025 06:00:18 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=360610 In the feverish days leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Colin Powell presented his dubious evidence to the United Nations Security Council, claiming Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs. The result was The Iraq Resolution, which authorized the use of force against the sovereign state, and passed the Senate by a decisive 77-23 margin, with only 23 dissenting votes. Support crossed party lines as Hillary Clinton and many other prominent Democrats consistently reached into George W. Bush’s basket of lies, echoing relentless WMD propaganda. The New York Times, fulfilling its usual perfunctory role, ran Judith Miller’s series of bogus articles parroting the same falsehoods. Outrage mounted, and across the country we took to the streets. Despite this, the U.S.’s illegal invasion was imminent. More

The post Media Censorship in the Age of Palestinian Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

]]>

Image by Phạm Nhật.

Recall those feverish days leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Colin Powell presented his dubious evidence to the United Nations Security Council, claiming Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs. The result of those bogus lies was The Iraq Resolution, which authorized the use of force against the sovereign state, and passed the Senate by a decisive 77-23 margin, with only 23 dissenting votes. Support crossed party lines as Hillary Clinton and many other prominent Democrats consistently reached into George W. Bush’s basket of lies, repeating the neocons’ WMD propaganda. The New York Times, fulfilling its usual perfunctory role, ran Judith Miller’s series of bogus articles parroting the same falsehoods. Outrage grew, and we took to the streets as the U.S. invasion loomed.

Today, I have the same sense of helplessness each time Israel is engulfed in yet another murderous deception, which warmakers spread through a compliant mainstream press. Much like their selling of the Iraq war, The New York Times relentlessly publishes pieces reiterating Israel’s rationale for bombing hospitals and promoting the (now thoroughly debunked) allegations of mass sexual assault, which have been used to depict all Palestinians as savages deserving of execution. The New York Times often qualifies its errors with caveats but rarely admits fault. Democrats still vote against halting arms shipments to war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, knowing it will likely harm innocent children in Gaza. History repeats, and mothers weep.

In March 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we were still adapting to the emerging digital media landscape. There were no smartphones, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. While information was accessible, distribution was limited to email lists and message boards. Independent outlets like CounterPunch, TomDispatch, and Antiwar.com were trailblazing radical journalism, countering the tide of pro-war disinformation from mainstream sources.

Consider YellowTimes.org, a prominent alternative to The New York Times before the Iraq War. Shortly after the U.S. military arrived in Iraq, their server was suspended for posting screenshots from Al Jazeera of dead U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The outrage stemmed not from dead Iraqis but from the sight of lifeless troops, victims of the Bush administration’s deceit.

“No TV station in the US is allowing dead US soldiers of POWs to be displayed and we will not either. We understand free press and all that but we don’t want someone’s family member to see them on some site. It is disrespectful, tacky and disgusting,” read an email to Yellow Times editor Erich Marquardt from the site’s Florida-based server provider, VortechHosting.

YellowTimes was finished, never to return. While their decision to publish graphic war photos might have smacked of poor taste, there was nothing illegal about publishing gruesome war photos. The blatant suppression of the YellowTimes, along with the mainstream media’s unwillingness to question the government’s WMD narrative, would have disastrous consequences. Over the next eight years, nearly 500,000 excess deaths would be attributed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, including 4,419 U.S. service members, and mainstream media outlets would be disseminating the majority of the reporting.

First They Came for the Students

In March, nearly 22 years to the day since YellowTimes was taken down, a video captured six plainclothes ICE agents apprehending Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk on the streets near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. As widely reported, Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar, was in the country on a student visa, concluding a PhD program in Child Study and Human Development. The disturbing video footage provides a bird’s eye view of the authoritarian overreach we are experiencing, highlighting the intensification of Trump’s efforts to suppress pro-Palestine activism and a broader assault on press freedom.

Like Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, and others who’ve been arrested in recent weeks, Öztürk had not been accused of breaking any laws; she had merely co-written an op-ed for the student newspaper urging Tufts’ President Sunil Kumar to recognize resolutions passed by the student senate, which included a call for the university to disclose and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

“These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote. “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”

Öztürk’s arrest by ICE and the threat of deportation represent an escalation. The ICE abduction of Öztürk was a draconian strategy intended to dissuade others, especially those on student visas, from expressing similar empathy for Palestinian suffering. As of April 10, a total of 600 student visas have been revoked in the United States, with most citing pro-Palestine activism.

Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protests at universities like Columbia—and the threat to withhold $400 million in federal funding–is an escalation of a bipartisan effort to silence pro-Palestinian voices. While President Biden spoke against alleged anti-Semitism, he only weakly addressed the violence directed at pro-Palestine encampments last year, which drew criticism.

“Rather than addressing the sources of violence and heeding calls for immediate federal action to protect student activists and uphold their rights to free expression and assembly, President Biden has misplaced the blame on the peaceful student activists,” wrote American Muslims for Palestine in a May 2024 statement. “Doing so sets a dangerous precedent for students across the United States, making them open targets for attacks by police, administrators, and extremist Zionist groups.”

It was Biden’s dangerous precedent that set the stage for Trump’s escalating attacks on those speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Students on visas in the country have been an easy target, but these ICE arrests may only signal the beginning of what’s to come. The press, especially media outlets that expose Israel’s genocide, are likely to be next.

The Case of the Alleged Hamas Freelancer

Ramzy Baroud, one of CounterPunch’s popular contributors, was born in a Gaza refugee camp and now resides in the U.S. His early life in the refugee camps gave him a profound understanding of his people’s struggle for liberation. A prolific journalist and author, Ramzy also serves as the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, one of the first English-language Palestinian media sources on the internet, which has been active since 1999.. Last October, his sister, Dr. Soma Baroud, was assassinated by the Israeli Defense Forces when a missile struck her vehicle. Her crime? Being a doctor in Gaza. At that time, she was one of over 1,000 healthcare workers killed by Israel.

Ramzy clearly explains why his sister, like many others, was targeted. We recently had him discuss it on our CounterPunch Radio podcast.

“ [Israel knows] the importance of our women in our society. They know the significance of doctors in our society, especially doctors who play more than the role of just someone who heals wounds and helps people at hospitals,” Ramzy explained. “Doctors who also serve the role of community leaders. And she really was a [leader] … So it’s kind of layers of devastation. I think the family is still unable to understand fully or to come to terms with the emotional loss just because the loss is never really stopped and there is just no time to even reflect in any profound or deep way about all of this.”

While Ramzy’s sister was targeted in Gaza, the non-profit Palestine Chronicle has also faced attacks. Last July, The New York Times published an article about a former Israeli hostage in Gaza named Andrey Kozlov, who had been held captive by Hamas fighters for six excruciating months after being kidnapped. Kozlov claimed that one of his captors, Abdallah Aljamal, was moonlighting as a journalist for the Palestine Chronicle. This accusation was repeated by Almog Meir Jan, who had been abducted along with Kozlov and another Israeli named Shlomi Ziv at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.

Aljamal was killed in a massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024. He was 37 years old. Israel has provided no evidence that Aljamal, a well-known Palestinian journalist, was ever a member of Hamas, participated in the October 7 attacks, or held Israeli hostages. However, as we know, Israel doesn’t require evidence to commit war crimes, including the murder of journalists. Aljamal wasn’t the only contributor to the Palestine Chronicle who Israel killed; notable journalists Wafa Al-Udani and Yousef Dawas were also targeted, among the over 175 media workers killed by Israel during its onslaught on Gaza.

In July 2024, Almond Meir Jan, one of the Israeli hostages, filed a lawsuit against the Palestine Chronicle, claiming that, by publishing Aljama, they had provided “material support” for a “designated foreign terrorist organization.” The suit was later dismissed for lack of evidence that Baroud’s media project was in any way connected to Hamas.

U.S. District Court Judge Tiffany Cartwright stated in her ruling, “Many of the positions taken by the Chronicle, such as highlighting the deaths of Palestinian civilians and criticizing Israeli airstrikes, have been echoed by countless news organizations, protesters, and political leaders around the world … These articles do not cross the line from protected speech to inciting or preparing for unlawful activity. Nothing in the complaint alleges that Defendants advocated for, incited, or planned specific human rights violations.”

For its part, the Palestine Chronicle denied having knowledge of any ties between Aljama and Hamas, noting that he was an unpaid freelancer and not a staff writer. Additionally, they stated in their response to Jan’s lawsuit that “Defendants do not contest that the underlying torts committed against Jan by Aljamal and Hamas—the kidnapping and imprisonment of a civilian hostage—are international human rights violations.”

Following the death of Ramzy’s sister last October, Almond Meir Jan and Shlomi Ziv filed another lawsuit against the Palestine Chronicle, submitting a similar complaint that by publishing Abdallah Aljamal, they were providing “material support” for terrorism. This suit is supported by the National Jewish Advocacy Center, led by Mark Goldfeder, who argues that he perceives anti-Zionist activism as inherently antisemitic. The organization has filed similar lawsuits against other media outlets, including the Associated Press, for their reporting on the October 7 attacks.

“ [Trump] wants to silence dissent in the United States, and there’s been a major war on Palestinian voices and pro-Palestinian voices, [anyone] who dares stand up for the Palestinian people,” Ramzy Baroud told CounterPunch Radio. “For many Americans, what is happening [to] Mahmoud Khalil … [is] not igniting the kind of attention that it really should be igniting … [Next we] are going to see attacks on American citizens under various guises. The Espionage Act of this and that. The Israelis have done it … I feel like the Americans are following that trajectory.”

The lawsuits targeting the Palestine Chronicle are not standalone incidents; they form part of a larger strategy involving widespread visa cancellations and, illustrated by Rümeysa Öztürk’s case, a repression of student journalism aimed at silencing those seen as threatening U.S. interests. Consider the fate of YellowTimes during the Iraq War, now intensified many times over. A fresh wave of McCarthyism is resurfacing, energized by Donald Trump.

The Media as Terrorist Enablers

Palestine supporters have faced various forms of censorship since October 7, including significant collaboration between Israel and Meta to eliminate anti-genocide content from their Facebook and Instagram platforms. Additionally, Meta has radically adjusted its algorithms to shadow ban posts criticizing Israel. In a 2023 report, Human Rights Watch described Meta’s assault on free speech as “systemic and global.”

In June 2024, former Meta engineer Ferras Hamad filed a lawsuit against Meta, claiming he was wrongfully terminated for attempting to undo a program used to suppress content related to Palestine.

These well-documented actions have affected not only personal accounts but also media outlets. And it’s not just Meta. The New York Times, seemingly acting on behalf of the State Department, has done its best to discredit journalists like Vijay Prashad, peace organizations like CODEPINK, and others, suggesting they are pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (a claim they openly deny). The Times’ questionable reporting has led conservative lawmakers to urge Attorney General Pamela Bondi to investigate the situation in hopes of shutting them down. Our own podcast, CounterPunch Radio, had an episode discussing the October 7 attacks with investigative journalist Arun Gupta removed twice, without notice, by our hosting service Blubrry. While these various attempts at censorship might seem disparate, collectively they signify a deliberate assault on media free speech.

The U.S. government has stepped up its legislative efforts against non-profit media, viewing it as detrimental to its foreign policy goals. In November 2024, HR 9495, referred to as the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, was approved with a vote of 219-184. This legislation allows the Treasury Department to strip the tax-exempt status of any non-profit organization it classifies as a “terrorist-supporting organization.” Full authority would be granted to Treasury officials, bypassing due process. While the bill has stalled in the Senate, it could be brought back at any moment and, with considerable Democratic support, might find an easier route to the President’s desk. The act would first target organizations that oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

This legislation is not an isolated act but a continuation of the government’s crackdown on voices it finds uncomfortable–a ruthless campaign that dates back to the  Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which laid the foundation for the PATRIOT Act, enacted after the 9/11 attacks. What we are experiencing now is an extension of these policies. The plan is to expand the government’s authority to curtail free speech. Under the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, journalists and whistleblowers could face prosecution. Additionally, Project Esther—developed by the same goons behind Project 2025—outlines a strategy to categorize all pro-Palestine protests as anti-Semitic and supportive of Hamas. This sinister initiative, as exposed by Mondoweiss last year, also advocates for the removal of pro-Palestine students and professors from universities.

“As the more notorious U.S. policies of the post-9/11 era … fade from public memory, these older antiterrorism laws have been normalized as a comparatively liberal baseline, their structurally anti-Palestinian character having been obscured in the meantime,” writes Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights in a 2024 report. “The most important of these has been the statute criminalizing ‘material support’ for terrorist organizations, the most commonly charged federal antiterrorism offense … As in prior moments of crisis, the same Zionist organizations that pushed for expanded antiterrorism laws – most no- tably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – now brazenly tar all advocacy of Palestinian liberation as support for terrorism.”

Frederick Douglass once stated, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”

Douglass recognized that it’s our responsibility to resist censorship in all its forms. This begins by speaking out and supporting radical, independent media. Because, no matter how hard the tyrants try, they’ll never silence us all.

The post Media Censorship in the Age of Palestinian Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/18/media-censorship-in-the-age-of-palestinian-genocide/feed/ 0 527100 Trump’s racist, corrupt agenda – like a bank robbery in broad daylight https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/trumps-racist-corrupt-agenda-like-a-bank-robbery-in-broad-daylight/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/trumps-racist-corrupt-agenda-like-a-bank-robbery-in-broad-daylight/#respond Wed, 16 Apr 2025 01:39:40 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=113281 EDITORIAL: By Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal

US President Donald Trump and his team is pursuing a white man’s racist agenda that is corrupt at its core. Trump’s advisor Elon Musk, who often seems to be the actual president, is handing his companies multiple contracts as his team takes over or takes down multiple government departments and agencies.

Trump wants to be the “king” of America and is already floating the idea of a third term, an action that would be an obvious violation of the US Constitution he swore to uphold but is doing his best to violate and destroy.

Every time we hear the Trump team spouting a “return to America’s golden age,” they are talking about 60-80 years ago, when white people ruled and schools, hospitals, restrooms and entire neighborhoods were segregated and African Americans and other minority groups had little opportunity.

Every photo of leaders from that time features large numbers of white American men. Trump’s cabinet, in contrast to recent cabinets of Democratic presidents, is mainly white and male.

This is where the US going. And lest any white women feel they are included in the Trump train, think again. Anything to do with women’s empowerment — including whites — is being scrubbed off the agenda by Trump minions in multiple government departments and agencies.

“Women” along with things like “climate change,” “diversity,” “equality,” “gender equity,” “justice,” etc are being removed from US government websites, policies and grant funding.

The white racist campaign against people of colour has seen iconic Americans removed from government websites. For example, a photo and story about Jackie Robinson, a military veteran, was recently removed from the Defense Department website as part of the Trump team’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Broke whites-only colour barrier
Robinson was not only a military veteran, he was the first African American to break the whites-only colour barrier in Major League Baseball and went on to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame for his stellar performance with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

How about the removal of reference to the Army’s 442nd infantry regiment from World War II that is the most decorated unit in US military history? The 442nd was a fighting unit comprised of nearly all second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry who more than proved their courage and loyalty to the United States during World War II.

The Defense Department removing references to these iconic Americans is an outrage. But showing the moronic level of the Trump team, they also deleted a photo of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II because the pilot named it after his mother, “Enola Gay.”

Despite the significance of the Enola Gay airplane in American military history, that latter word couldn’t get past the Pentagon’s scrubbing team, who were determined to wash away anything that hinted at, well, anything other than white, heterosexual male. And there is plenty more that was wiped off the history record of the Defense Department.

Meanwhile, Trump, his team and the Republican Party in general while claiming to be focused on eliminating corruption is authorising it on a grand scale.

Elon Musk’s redirection of contracts to Starlink, SpaceX and other companies he owns is one example among many. What is happening in the American government today is like a bank robbery in broad daylight.

The Trump team fired a score of inspectors general — the very officials who actively work to prevent fraud and theft in the US government. They are eliminating or effectively neutering every enforcement agency, from EPA (which ensures clean air and other anti-pollution programmes) and consumer protection to the National Labor Relations Board, where the mega companies like Musk’s, Facebook, Google and others have pending complaints from employees seeking a fair review of their work issues.

Huge cuts to social security
Trump with the aid of the Republican-controlled Congress is going to make huge cuts to Medicaid and Social Security — which will affect Marshallese living in America as much as Americans — all in order to fund tax cuts for the richest Americans and big corporations.

Then there is Trump’s targeting of judges who rule against his illegal and unconstitutional initiatives — Trump criticism that is parroted by Fox News and other Trump minions, and is leading to things like efforts in the Congress to possibly impeach judges or restrict their legal jurisdiction.

These are all anti-democracy, anti-US constitution actions that are already undermining the rule of law in the US. And we haven’t yet mentioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its sweeping deportations without due process that is having calamitous collateral damage for people swept up in these deportation raids.

ICE is deporting people legally in the US studying at US universities for writing articles or speaking about justice for Palestinians. Whether we like what the writer or speaker says, a fundamental principle of democracy in the US is that freedom of expression is protected by the US constitution under the First Amendment.

That is no longer the case for Trump and his Republican team, which is happily abandoning the rule of law, due process and everything else that makes America what it is.

The irony is that multiple countries, normally American allies, have in recent weeks issued travel advisories to their citizens about traveling to the United States in the present environment where anyone who isn’t white and doesn’t fit into a male or female designation is subject to potential detention and deportation.

The immigration chill from the US will no doubt reduce visitor flow resulting in big losses in revenue, possibly in the billions of dollars, for tourism-related businesses.

Marshallese must pay attention
Marshallese need to pay attention to what’s happening and have valid passports at the ready. Sadly, if Marshallese have any sort of conviction no matter how ancient or minor it is likely they will be targets for deportation.

Further, even the visa-free access privilege for Marshallese and other Micronesians is apparently now under scrutiny by US authorities based on a statement by US Ambassador Laura Stone published recently by the Journal

It is a difficult time being one of the closest allies of the US because the RMI must engage at many levels with a US government that is presently in turmoil.

Giff Johnson is the editor of the Marshall Islands Journal and one of the Pacific’s leading journalists and authors. He is the author of several books, including Don’t Ever Whisper, Idyllic No More, and Nuclear Past, Unclear Future. This editorial was first published on 11 April 2025 and is reprinted with permission of the Marshall Islands Journal. marshallislandsjournal.com

Freedom of speech at the Marshall Islands High School

Messages of "inclusiveness" painted by Marshall Islands High School students in the capital Majuro
Messages of “inclusiveness” painted by Marshall Islands High School students in the capital Majuro. Image: Giff Johnson/Marshall Islands Journal

The above is one section of the outer wall at Marshall Islands High School. Surely, if this was a public school in America today, these messages would already have been whitewashed away by the Trump team censors who don’t like any reference to “inclusiveness,” “women,” and especially “gender equality.”

However, these messages painted by MIHS students are very much in keeping with Marshallese society and customary practices of welcoming visitors, inclusiveness and good treatment of women in this matriarchal society.

But don’t let President Trump know Marshallese think like this. — Giff Johnson


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/trumps-racist-corrupt-agenda-like-a-bank-robbery-in-broad-daylight/feed/ 0 525973 Defeating Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/12/defeating-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/12/defeating-censorship/#respond Sat, 12 Apr 2025 15:05:35 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=157403 What is worse than censorship?

The post Defeating Censorship first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

The post Defeating Censorship first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/12/defeating-censorship/feed/ 0 525387 Facebook’s Zuckerberg oversaw censorship tool for China: whistleblower https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/04/11/china-meta/ https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/04/11/china-meta/#respond Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:06:09 +0000 https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/04/11/china-meta/ TAIPEI, Taiwan — Meta compromised U.S. national security and freedom of speech to do business with China, a company whistleblower testified before U.S. senators.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global policy director at Facebook, told the U.S. Senate on Wednesday that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg personally designed and implemented a content review tool for Facebook that was used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The tool, according to her, would automatically submit a Facebook post for review by a “chief editor” whenever it received over 10,000 views.

“One thing the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg share is that they want to silence their critics. I can say that from personal experience,” Wynn-Williams said at the congressional hearing.

This tool was operational in both independent Taiwan and China-controlled Hong Kong, where the Chinese Communist Party has been expanding its united front efforts.

China’s united front work combines influence, interference, and intelligence efforts to shape its political landscape. The country’s United Front Work Department is involved in activities ranging from controlling the Chinese diaspora and silencing dissent to gathering intelligence, promoting investment, and enabling technology transfer.

Sarah Wynn-Williams takes an oath before testimony to the U.S. Senate, April 9, 2025.
Sarah Wynn-Williams takes an oath before testimony to the U.S. Senate, April 9, 2025.
(Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

Meta has disputed the claims by Wynn-Williams. Spokesperson Andy Stone told the AFP news agency that Wynn-Williams’ claims were “detached from reality and full of false allegations.”

“We [Meta] currently do not offer any services in China,” he said.

However, even though Meta’s platforms are banned in China, the company still makes a significant amount of revenue from Chinese businesses that advertise to global audiences. Meta’s financial filings indicate that China is one of its biggest sources of ad revenue outside the U.S.

Wynn-Williams also disclosed that Meta once considered building a data center in China – an action she warned could have endangered the personal information of American users. She added that Meta employees had briefed Chinese officials on Meta’s AI technologies.

The so-called “chief editor,” she said, was to oversee post content originating from Chinese-speaking regions such as China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

The editor had the power to not only review viral content but also to shut down Facebook services entirely in specific regions including Xinjiang or during sensitive dates such as the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

According to Wynn-Williams, Chinese officials had reportedly tested the tool and even offered suggestions for its “optimization.”

“We must ensure you can block or filter images we don’t want people to see,” she said, quoting the communist party officials’ feedback for Facebook’s content moderation.

Facebook has a troubling track record on content moderation according to Ethan Tu, founder of Taiwan AI Labs, a non-governmental organization specializing in artificial intelligence and information warfare in Asia.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, our lab noticed that many posts highlighting Taiwan’s pandemic success were censored on Facebook,” Tu told Radio Free Asia.

“However, false information about the U.S.’ COVID situation written in Chinese was not taken down.”

He stressed that the shadow ban on Facebook is a real issue, given that he had once made posts discussing Huawei and cybersecurity that resulted in zero reach, indicating an invisible suppression.

“During the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests in 2019, we also observed that posts related to the movement or democratic activism started disappearing all of a sudden. It seemed as if someone was deliberately censoring them,” he said.

Former Facebook staffer Wynn-Williams said the social network began making hundreds of content moderation decisions related to China even before 2009. By 2018, the platform had already been in direct discussions with the Chinese government for four years.

This contradicts Zuckerberg’s 2018 congressional testimony in which he claimed that since Facebook had been banned in China since 2009, “the company couldn’t be certain how Chinese laws would be applied to its content.” Wynn-Williams called the statement “inaccurate.”

“This is a man who wears many different costumes,” Wynn-Williams said.

“We don’t know what the next costume’s going to be, but it’ll be something different. It’s whatever gets him closest to power.”

Tu said Taiwan AI Labs’ research showed that only 1.6% of takedowns were related to disinformation or hate.

“The majority were tied to politically sensitive topics,” he said.

“What was once believed to be content moderation for stopping misinformation or hate speech turned out to be mostly about political sensitivity.”

Following Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Josh Hawley said he would further investigate whether Meta misled Congress during previous testimonies and would review additional internal documents provided by Wynn-Williams.

“This is just the beginning. We are going to get the truth,” Hawley said.

Edited by Mike Firn and Stephen Wright.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alan Lu for RFA.

]]> https://rfa.org/english/china/2025/04/11/china-meta/feed/ 0 525138 “All Governments Lie”: Why We Need a Radical and Independent Free Press Now https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/08/all-governments-lie-why-we-need-a-radical-and-independent-free-press-now-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/08/all-governments-lie-why-we-need-a-radical-and-independent-free-press-now-2/#respond Tue, 08 Apr 2025 15:02:14 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=157269 Media scholar Carl Jensen was deeply influenced by the independent muckraking journalists of the twentieth century—so much so that he founded Project Censored at Sonoma State University, in 1976, in the wake of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as a watchdog organization focused on exposing “the news that didn’t make the news.” Project Censored began […]

The post “All Governments Lie”: Why We Need a Radical and Independent Free Press Now first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Media scholar Carl Jensen was deeply influenced by the independent muckraking journalists of the twentieth century—so much so that he founded Project Censored at Sonoma State University, in 1976, in the wake of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as a watchdog organization focused on exposing “the news that didn’t make the news.” Project Censored began in a sociology course Jensen taught at Sonoma State, but quickly evolved into a national effort to promote independent journalism and news literacy. The Project produced an annual list of the most important investigative news reports, which attracted attention—and praise—from some of Jensen’s best-known contemporaries, including broadcast journalists Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs, reform activist Ralph Nader, and a contemporary muckraker, investigative journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone.

Jensen’s purpose was not to tear down so-called “mainstream” media outlets but to constructively criticize their news judgment. By showing what the major media missed, or even “censored,” he hoped to improve what he saw as the lifeblood of democracy: a truly free press. Industry professionals didn’t always take kindly to such criticism, which led Jensen to turn his critique into a systematic study of what they did cover. He discovered a morass of fluff, sensationalism, and pap—what used to be called “yellow journalism” in the early 1900s. Jensen called it Junk Food News in 1983. He saw that the public would ultimately pay the price for the major media outlets’ myopic focus and critical omissions in the form of accelerating civic decay. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong.

Today, we are awash in 21st-century versions of junk food news, as produced by corporate media and propagated on social media. Worse, we are also subject to ‘round-the-clock infotainment and propaganda masquerading as journalism, what Jensen’s successor, sociologist Peter Phillips, called News Abuse in the early 2000s (now also referred to as malinformation). Of course, numerous media critics and scholars—including Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian, Neil Postman, and Robert McChesney—have long warned against rising levels of mis- and disinformation, increased consolidation of media ownership, and their combined toll on press freedom and a well-informed public. In the last decade, with the moral panic around the weaponized epithet of “fake news,” these challenges have spawned a cottage industry of so-called fact-checkers—supposedly objective third parties trying to reverse the troublesome trend of declining public trust in the Fourth Estate.

However, most of those efforts have been exposed as Trojan horses for re-establishing corporate media dominance in a digital era of podcasts, TikTok, Instagram reels, and “tweets” (or “posts” as they are now called on X). As Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker bemoaned last year at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, news industry leaders are losing control of the narrative (emphasis added):

If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well. If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news, and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying. So, it’s no longer good enough for us just to say, this is what happened, or this is the news. We have to explain– almost like explain our working. So, readers expect to understand how we source stories. They want to know how we go about getting stories. We have to sort of lift the bonnet, as it were, and in a way that newspapers aren’t used to doing and explain to people what we’re doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news.

“Lift the bonnet.” “Explain to people what we’re doing.” It’s almost as if the public wants more fact-based, transparently sourced reporting in their news, not partisan propaganda. And, go figure, in a rabidly consumerist culture, they want receipts too. Tucker seems to agree, though the corporate media and their advertisers/investors from Big Pharma, Big Tech, the Military-Industrial Complex, and other powerful institutions whose narratives the public is questioning, likely do not. For Tucker and other gatekeepers, this public scrutiny is inconvenient, perhaps even impertinent, but also a market reality news organizations must now at least pay lip service to addressing. Perhaps this is what has contributed to record-low levels of approval and trust of the news media among the public.

Indy Journalism Can Build Public Trust While Fighting Fake News

Media scholars have described this conundrum as an epistemic one, the ushering in of a “post-truth” world “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The mis- and disinformation ecosystem that has emerged in this post-truth climate has establishment institutions from the WEF to Congress and the mass media themselves clutching pearls. Even the American public has come to believe that the lack of trustworthy information is a greater threat than terrorism. With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, these concerns, along with increasing existential attacks on journalists and the news media itself, including ABC, CBS, NPR/PBS, and even the Associated Press as “enemies of the American people,” are growing rapidly and in unprecedented ways.

There certainly are major issues with corporate media and establishment outlets, which we at Project Censored have documented for nearly half a century. However, our critiques are not meant to undermine major media for partisan gain. Instead, the Project’s criticisms of corporate news expose systemic gaps and slant in coverage, in order to pressure the nation’s most prominent news outlets to use their massive budgets and influence to serve the public good, rather than private interests, by holding corporate and government abusers of power accountable. Given the well-documented limitations of corporate media, we support a robust, independent, and public media system, because a commercial, for-profit model cannot “tell the people what is really going on,” as George Seldes once put it. The solution to our present journalistic woes does not lie with industry leaders, biased fact-checkers, or Big Tech content moderators. It rests on critical media literacy and a fiercely independent free press.

In support of this proposed solution, Project Censored advocates for a healthy democracy by promoting news literacy education, especially by providing hands-on training in critical media literacy for students, through our curriculum, student internships, and Campus Affiliates Program, each of which distinguishes Project Censored from other news watch organizations and press freedom groups. Further, each year, Project Censored also recognizes some of the best independent journalists, reporting factually, transparently, and ethically in the public interest, pointing out that these are among the best advocates of news literacy, literally teaching by example. So, ironically, the very solutions to the revitalization of our failing Fourth Estate are its most radical independent practitioners, not their owners/employers or meddling partisan outsiders. History shows this to be the case, and we should listen to what the past can teach us.

“All Governments Lie”

Among the many books Jensen published, one of the most significant might be Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century. In it, he collected exemplary work by nearly two dozen legendary journalists, his selection of the previous century’s most significant truth-tellers, including excerpts from decisive reports by Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), Lincoln Steffans (The Shame of the Cities), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle and The Brass Check), George Seldes (In Fact), Edward R. Murrow (In Search of Light), and I.F. Stone (I.F. Stone’s Weekly). As Jensen wrote, “Their words led to a nationwide public revolt against social evils and [decades] of reforms in antitrust legislation, the electoral process, banking regulations, and a host of other social programs.” The reporting Jensen collected in Stories That Changed America continues to inspire those of us who believe journalism can make a difference.

“All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out,” the iconic muckraker “Izzy” Stone once wrote. But Stone had great faith in the power of the press to expose and counter those lies. We need brave, independent journalists and newsrooms to tackle the most controversial and suppressed issues of our era. Stone relentlessly exposed governmental prevarications and injustices throughout his career. He also saw the shortcomings of his own profession, to the point of resigning from the National Press Club in 1941, rather than kowtowing to its racism and political sycophancy. After realizing he had limited influence in the establishment press, he started I.F. Stone’s Weekly and dared to report the truth on his own. He took on McCarthyism at a time when his peers were being attacked, arrested, deported, and disappeared. He fought for truth and peace in the face of the unjust, murderous conflicts of the Cold War, especially in Vietnam. Sound familiar?

Governments lie. Stone’s insight is timeless, but it seems more relevant than ever in 2025. The Trump administration and its enablers bombard us daily with lies and half-truths, what Reporters Without Borders has characterized as “a monumental assault on freedom of information.” At best, the establishment press seems capable of little more than chronicling the barrage; at worst, they capitulate to it.

The notion of a press “watchdog” on a governmental leash did not begin with the current administration—as Jensen and his students at Sonoma State noted in 1976 looking back on the eve of Richard Nixon’s re-election, no major news outlet even mentioned the Watergate scandal—and the roots of a subservient press reach back to the earliest history of American journalism on the presidency. But the return of Trump to power is a nadir for many of our cherished freedoms, including those of the First Amendment, which links freedom of speech and press with the rights to assemble and petition—and the public, our democracy, needs journalism that can help us awaken from what historian Timothy Snyder has described as a “self-induced intellectual coma” that is characteristic of  “the politics of inevitability.”

The Izzy’s Are Coming!

Calling out counter-democratic measures is one way to resist the onslaught of authoritarianism. A free press provides the means for this, but people need to act in response. Rather than complain that “the left” needs a media power like Rupert Murdoch’s to “compete,” we should open our eyes and support the amazing people and organizations doing this invaluable work already. Project Censored highlights the most important but under-reported independent news stories each year, promoting the work of independent journalists, news outlets, and press freedom organizations that exemplify “media democracy in action.” Their work embodies the very spirit of resistance and amplifies the voices of those trammeled by oligarchs and would-be despots.

The Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College shares this ethos, supporting independent media as a bulwark against everyday injustices and creeping tyranny. Among the only academic centers of journalism in the United States focused solely on independent media, each year, PCIM honors the leading independent journalists of our time with its Izzy Award, named in honor of I.F. “Izzy” Stone. April 30 marks the seventeenth annual award ceremony, which will also be the occasion for numerous muckraking journalists and free press organizations to convene and build coalitions, strengthen solidarity, and fight to protect our democratic republic from anyone, whether they bat for Team Red or Team Blue, who would subvert it for their own private gain.

The Izzy Award celebrates the practice of radical muckraking journalism in the public interest, and its continuing relevance in our current Gilded Age of Big Tech plutocracy. The work at PCIM and Project Censored reminds us that we cannot wait for change to simply emerge; we must create it ourselves. If past is prologue, we also have much to learn from and pass on to the next generation, whose experiences and voices will inform and express the stories that change America again, to paraphrase Jensen.

Now is not a time for cowering; it is a time to exhibit what political activist and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg called civil courage, regardless of the odds. Or, as Izzy noted, it is time “to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; and to seek, as best I can to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of [humankind], in the hope of someday bringing about one world, in which [people] will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”

Hear, hear. Let’s not get lost in the smoke of the hashish blown in our faces by elite media and government actors. Let’s instead recognize and support the reportorial canaries in the coal mines, from the climate crisis and Kafkaesque raids on the vulnerable among us to the dismantling of education, attacks on the arts, and an ongoing genocide. Let’s act on the information independent journalists share at their own risk, for we ignore them at our own.

The post “All Governments Lie”: Why We Need a Radical and Independent Free Press Now first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Huff.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/08/all-governments-lie-why-we-need-a-radical-and-independent-free-press-now-2/feed/ 0 524460 Negative Repercussions of Digital Censorship for K-12 Students https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/negative-repercussions-of-digital-censorship-for-k-12-students/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/negative-repercussions-of-digital-censorship-for-k-12-students/#respond Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:12:59 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=46174 A January 2025 report, “Out of Step,” published by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), shows that K-12 schools across the United States frequently use web filtering software to block student access to a wide range of content, and that students and parents are largely unaware of these restrictions.…

The post Negative Repercussions of Digital Censorship for K-12 Students appeared first on Project Censored.


This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/negative-repercussions-of-digital-censorship-for-k-12-students/feed/ 0 524286 America Has Become Anti-American https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/america-has-become-anti-american/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/america-has-become-anti-american/#respond Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:35:28 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=157251 Because I live in Japan and post articles which are critical of America, I am often accused of being anti-American. The truth is both counter-intuitive and disturbing. I haven’t changed, but America certainly has. America has become anti-American! The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. Yet reporters are now being intimidated and threatened with arrest […]

The post America Has Become Anti-American first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Because I live in Japan and post articles which are critical of America, I am often accused of being anti-American. The truth is both counter-intuitive and disturbing.

I haven’t changed, but America certainly has.

America has become anti-American!

The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. Yet reporters are now being intimidated and threatened with arrest and incarceration. Whistleblowers who try to expose fraud, corruption, and waste in government by making available in public news media forums information of value to American citizens, are likewise harassed and prosecuted.

The Constitution requires the government to promote the general welfare. Yet the benefits of our economic wealth are accruing to a tiny elite while poverty is still pervasive and the majority of the population scrambles to make ends meet. Among the 34 highly developed nations in the world, America ranks 17th in terms of life satisfaction — happiness — the key factors for its low ranking being massive income inequality and excessively long hours spent on average in the work place. In terms of health care and life expectancy, for the richest country in the world, America ranks abysmally low, with longevity actually declining.

The Constitution guarantees equal representation of its citizens. Yet, the electoral system has become corrupted by unverifiable e-voting, grotesque gerrymandering of districts, and torrents of money in politics, which only guarantees the voices of average voters will be drowned out and their participation in our democracy marginalized.

The Constitution guarantees the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, and right of trial by jury before peers, yet starting in 2001 by using the endless War on Terror as an excuse, patently unconstitutional legislation has been effected — Patriot Acts I and II, FISA, and the NDAA which Obama signed into law on New Years Eve 2011 while America was preoccupied with celebrating the holidays, which have regularly been renewed ever since — now placing every citizen at risk for arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention with no access to legal counsel.

The Constitution guarantees equality before the law. Yet rich elite white collar criminals wreak havoc on our economy breaking countless laws and go free, while petty crimes by regular citizens — especially people of color — result in harsh and disproportionate prosecution and punishment.

The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech, including dissent against questionable policies. Yet, we see individuals protesting the cruel, malevolent and systematic killing of Palestinians by Israel, harassed, persecuted, and prosecuted by establishment authorities, who apparently consider the slaughter of between 50,000 and 200,000 mostly innocent Palestinians, including women and children — horrific war crimes which those in power indisputably support — necessary and laudable. U.S. support for this genocide mocks the principles we hold dear and have at least until now defined us as a people.

The Constitution specifies that the power to wage war is exclusively the responsibility of Congress. Yet the president as Commander-in-Chief as often as not ignores the constitutional limits as well as those contained in the War Powers Act, using the military purely at his own discretion. This wanton abuse of military power results in the unnecessary deaths of our citizens in uniform, while at the same time counter-productively foments enormous animosity and mistrust across much of the planet.

Our legal framework via the Posse Comitatus Act has long barred the use of the military for law enforcement but vast and sophisticated surveillance by federal security agencies, the militarization of local police forces, and their handshake agreements with federal agencies, puts us all under the iron fist of enforcement agencies like the NSA and operatives of the Pentagon itself.

I could go on. But that might offend some people.

Sometimes the truth can be so anti-American.

The post America Has Become Anti-American first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/07/america-has-become-anti-american/feed/ 0 524230 Academic Freedom under Attack https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/04/academic-freedom-under-attack/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/04/academic-freedom-under-attack/#respond Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:03:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=157183 This essay is adapted from It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics Universities in the United States are facing one of the most serious attempts to impose political control on higher education since the anticommunist loyalty tests of the 1950s. Whatever one thinks of the issues being debated today, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict, playing […]

The post Academic Freedom under Attack first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
  • This essay is adapted from It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics

    • Universities in the United States are facing one of the most serious attempts to impose political control on higher education since the anticommunist loyalty tests of the 1950s. Whatever one thinks of the issues being debated today, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict, playing politics with federal funding is a threat to open inquiry. Administrators and faculty are scrambling to respond and resistance is strengthening, although Columbia University’s capitulation to the Trump administration isn’t heartening.

    It’s too early to write an obituary for academic freedom, but whatever the outcome of these battles, universities in the United States have lost prestige that won’t be regained quickly. Though it’s difficult to critically self-reflect when under attack, I think we academics should consider our mistakes when trying to understand public opinion and political realities.

    I retired from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 and now live in a rural area, and so I’m far from the front lines. I empathize with former colleagues, but I can’t help but reflect on those colleagues’ failures in the past to offer a robust defense of academic freedom in cases in which I was in the crosshairs. So, while at the same time that we organize to defend higher education, I want to highlight two episodes from my career that raise an important question: Where do threats to academic freedom come from? Not always from government officials.

    To be clear: I never faced the kind of threats that some professors and institutions do today, such as deportations and terminating entire academic programs. But I have seen how social penalties can be effective in silencing people, as illustrated by the censure from my bosses because of writing I did after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the shunning that came after my critique of the ideology of transgenderism. In both cases, censure and shunning didn’t change my behavior but did have an effect on choices that others made.

    9/11 and the failure of a university

    One of the most important decisions a country can make is the choice to go to war. In a healthy democratic culture, that decision should be thoroughly debated before political leaders deploy troops in battle. But within hours after the 9/11 attacks, politicians of both parties were climbing over each other to get to microphones to call for a military response.

    I spent most of that day in my office watching the news coverage while trying to reach friends in New York to make sure they were safe. My memory of the day is blurry, but I remember clearly that by mid-afternoon—before anyone even had a clear understanding of the details of the events—it seemed inevitable that the United States would bomb someone, somewhere in retaliation. Whether it would be legal or sensible was irrelevant—politicians were preparing to use the terrorist attacks to justify war. By the end of that day, I had written the first of many articles sharply criticizing US foreign policy and arguing strongly against going to war.

    Not everyone agreed with me. For weeks, my voicemail and inbox were filled with critics who described me as a coward, a traitor, unpatriotic, and/or unmanly. (The most revealing, in a psychological sense, were the messages from men who imagined the sexual punishment I deserved, including being raped by Osama bin Laden.) After that article ran in the state’s largest newspaper and became a topic on conservative talk radio, people began calling for the university to fire me. Within two weeks, the president of the University of Texas at Austin responded publicly, calling me “misguided” and describing me as “an undiluted fountain of foolishness.”  (He was a chemist, not a poet.) Other university officials added their own denunciations, some of which were forwarded to me, but none of my bosses confronted me directly. Because I was a tenured professor with considerable job protection, none of them moved to fire me.

    The criticism continued for a few months, but I continued to write and speak out. At the time, I was already a part of a small national network opposing US militarism, and the support of people in that movement sustained me. Locally, we formed the group Austin Against War to organize protests and do political outreach. Around the country and throughout the world, many people defied the jingoist rhetoric and challenged that militarism.

    The university president’s statement had no effect on my activity, but it was effective in a larger sense. Many UT faculty members shared my views, yet only a handful joined the initial organizing efforts, I assume at least in part because of fear of being targeted as I had been. One untenured professor I knew stopped speaking out against militarism after his dean told him that continuing to circulate critical writing would almost certainly cost him his job, and I assume others made similar choices. Several graduate students from other countries told me they wanted to get involved in antiwar organizing but were afraid it could lead to the US government revoking their visas. Faculty colleagues with lawful permanent resident status who were from Muslim-majority countries on a special-registration list created the following year (the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System) told me they feared that the government would revoke their green cards even for trivial errors in record-keeping. The threat of legal action, fears about losing jobs, and peer pressure were enough to undermine a robust debate on my campus, though student activists created as much space as they could. But the university administration was either hostile or mute.

    The United States invaded Afghanistan with little domestic or international opposition beyond the small antiwar groups and pacifists. The Bush administration’s weak case for invading Iraq sparked more domestic and international opposition, leading to the world’s largest coordinated day of political protest on February 15, 2003, when millions of people unsuccessfully sought to stop the pending invasion. Soon it was clear that the antiwar movement’s analysis had been sound, as the disastrous consequences of those ill-advised invasions began to be measured in hundreds of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars, and destabilized societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

    Protected by tenure, I continued teaching at UT until retirement. That was positive for me, but it does not change the fact that my university failed in its obligation to foster the conversation that citizens in a democratic society needed at a crucial moment in history. Throughout that period, I argued not only that I had a right to speak out but that the university had a duty to provide a forum to make use of the expertise of the faculty and engage the community. In debates over going to war, which understandably generate strong emotions, evidence and logic are crucial, and universities have valuable resources to offer. The dominant culture needed, and still needs, to engage the evidence and logic presented by critics of US imperial foreign policy and militarism.

    Transgenderism and the failure of the left

    For more than a decade, I have offered a critique of the ideology of the transgender movement and what I believe is the failure of liberal/progressive/left people and organizations to engage with radical feminist critiques of patriarchy. I knew the potential consequences when in 2014 I wrote my first article outlining an analysis rooted in the radical feminist perspective on transgenderism, but feminist colleagues had challenged me to get off the sidelines in the debate, and I knew they were right.

    Later that year, a local left/anarchist bookstore that I had long supported sent an email blast (without speaking to me first) announcing that it was severing all ties with me. Trans activists came to some of my public lectures on feminist topics to protest or try to shout me down, even though the talks weren’t about transgenderism. Several groups that had invited me to speak about such topics as the ecological crisis withdrew invitations after receiving complaints. And, of course, I can’t know how many people who might have wanted to include me in an activity declined to invite me just to avoid hassles.

    No person or organization has an obligation to associate with me, of course. The unfortunate aspect of all this was that none of the organizations or people who shunned or de-platformed me ever explained why my writing was unacceptable, beyond repeating accusations of transphobia. I was denounced for holding views that were asserted to be unacceptable, though no coherent argument to support that denunciation was ever presented to me.

    This pattern continued for the remainder of my time at the University of Texas and in Austin, as many friends and faculty colleagues with whom I had worked on a variety of education and organizing projects avoided me. After the 2016 presidential election, I was part of a group that organized a teach-in on the political consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency. By that time, I knew my role should be behind the scenes, to avoid everyone’s work being derailed by an objection to my involvement. I had already received enough criticism to know that if I were one of the speakers, trans activists might protest. So, I handled catering and publicity, out of public view, except that the publicity material included my name and email address. That was enough to generate at least one complaint to the university, from someone who said he wouldn’t feel safe attending, knowing that I was involved in any way.

    It turned out that was the last collective education project I was part of, either at UT or with liberal/progressive/left organizations in Austin. When I talked with people about collaborating on education events that in previous years they would have wanted to be involved in, they told me my trans writing made it impossible. More common was silence; faculty colleagues I had worked with in the past simply stopped returning emails or phone messages. I continued to work on projects, either alone or with one trusted friend who shared my analysis, but I was no longer welcome in most left circles.

    I also had a number of friends and university colleagues who agreed with my critique, but would acknowledge that position only when speaking privately. These were not shy people who were afraid of public conversation about contentious issues in general. But they had observed the backlash to any challenge to the liberal/progressive/left orthodoxy on transgenderism and wanted to avoid being attacked. I never held that against anyone; we all make strategic decisions about what political battles we want to fight.

    The strangest experiences came with a few friends who seemed afraid to talk even privately, always steering conversations away from the subject. In two cases, I never really understood what my friends thought about the issue. Why the hesitancy to discuss something that was so much a part of the public debate about sex/gender justice, which they both cared about deeply, even when talking in private? I can think of two reasons. They may not have trusted me to keep their remarks confidential, but in both cases I had kept confidences before and they had no reason to doubt me. The more plausible explanation is that they didn’t want to consider reasons to challenge the liberal position that was dogma in their institutions. One of them read my 2017 book, The End of Patriarchy, and wrote me to say he thought that the chapter on transgenderism was “a great expansion of your original argument. I just don’t like it, even though it appears to be perfectly logical.” He later told me that he found conversation about the subject “unsettling,” and I honored his request that we not discuss it further.

    While these experiences were at times stressful and generally unpleasant, women who have challenged the transgender-industrial complex tend to fare much worse. I never lost a job and have never been physically attacked.  I lost some friends and missed out on organizing efforts to which I think I could have contributed, but I had other friends to rely on and always found a way to continue doing educational programs on campus.

    Just as in the 9/11 example, my experience isn’t a story of how my freedom of expression was constrained. No governmental agency shut me down, and the rejection didn’t stop me from writing or speaking out. Many other radical feminists continue to write and speak, as well. But many more people have either muted themselves or been driven out of organizations. It’s hard to imagine how we will deepen our understanding of a subject as complex as transgenderism if people making reasonable arguments that challenge the current liberal dogma are constantly attacked.

    One last personal reflection. My biggest frustration is when trans activists tell me that my work is evidence of transphobia. Stonewall, a prominent UK LGBTQ+ organization, defines transphobia as the “fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it.”  I do not fear or dislike people who identify as transgender, and I don’t deny their own sense of their identity. Offering an alternative explanation of an experience is not refusing to accept the experience.

    This is not merely an academic question for me. As a child, I was short, skinny, effeminate, and late to hit puberty—I was the smallest boy in my class and lived with a constant fear of being targeted by other boys. I also grew up in an abusive household that made impossible any semblance of “normal” development. Until the age of thirty, I had no way to make sense of that experience and assumed I was just an oddball. When I began reading feminism, especially the radical feminist writers whom I found most compelling, I realized that parts of my experience were common in patriarchy. I had suffered in the way many boys in a patriarchal society suffer, and as a man I had sought to escape that suffering by conforming to patriarchal norms of masculinity. Feminism offered a way out of that trap.

    I have empathy for people who don’t fit conventional categories and face ridicule or violence for being different, in part because I have experienced those struggles and threats. I have tried to present arguments based on credible evidence and sound logic, but underneath those intellectual positions is my own struggle, pain, and grief, which I think has sensitized me to the struggle, pain, and grief of others. But emotions are by themselves not an argument. Evidence and logic matter. The transgender movement needs to engage the evidence and logic presented by radical feminism.

    Lessons learned?

    I’m not bitter about these incidents during my teaching career. I will always be grateful that I had a chance to earn a PhD and make a living teaching. The vast majority of my experiences at the University of Texas were not only positive but joyful.

    In the classroom, I prided myself on considering all relevant points of view. When lecturing to large classes, I would often make a point on one end of the stage, then walk deliberately to the other side and say, “On the other hand …” I didn’t pretend to be neutral—I had a point of view about which analyses were most compelling—but I worked hard to be fair in the presentation of conflicting views.

    I enjoyed engaging with colleagues and students who disagreed and encouraged them to challenge me. As I said often, “Reasonable people can disagree.” I apparently said that so often that at the end of one a semester a student gave me a coffee mug with those words printed on it. I occasionally heard from, or about, a conservative student who disliked my class on political grounds, but that was rare, though of course I can’t know how many students felt that way but never spoke to me about it.

    But outside the classroom, I made a conscious choice to advocate for political positions that I knew would be controversial. I never shied away from defending my views, and I had hoped that colleagues would do the same. I made it clear in public that I was speaking as a citizen, not a representative of the university. But I also argued that when I thought I had knowledge acquired as a professor that contributed to public discourse I should share it, precisely because I was an employee of the state of Texas. That strengthens democracy.

    I wish that university administrators had made that case to the public after 9/11, instead of pursuing the duck-and-cover strategy they chose. I wish my faculty colleagues would engage challenges to left/liberal dogma, such as in the transgender debate.

    As academics today struggle with a hostile culture, it’s important to fight back, to defend the value of higher education. But it’s also wise to reflect on our missteps.

    Where do threats to academic freedom come from? Political partisans, of course. But sometimes from the folks running universities and sometimes from faculty colleagues.

    The post Academic Freedom under Attack first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Jensen.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/04/academic-freedom-under-attack/feed/ 0 523786     With Section 230 Repeal, Dems and Media Offer Trump New Censorship Tools  https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/31/with-section-230-repeal-dems-and-media-offer-trump-new-censorship-tools/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/31/with-section-230-repeal-dems-and-media-offer-trump-new-censorship-tools/#respond Mon, 31 Mar 2025 22:03:03 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9044909  

    Verge: Lawmakers are trying to repeal Section 230 again

    Sen. Dick Durbin (Verge, 3/21/25): “I hope that for the sake of our nation’s kids, Congress finally acts.”

    In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.

    According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.

    Section 230 grants platforms the ability to moderate without shouldering legal liability, a power that has historically had the effect of encouraging judicious content management (Techdirt, 6/23/20). Additionally, it indemnifies ordinary internet users against most civil suits for actions like forwarding email, sharing photos or videos, or hosting online reviews.

    Dissolving the provision would reassign legal responsibility to websites and third parties, empowering a Trump-helmed federal government to force online platforms to stifle, or promote, certain speech. While the ostensible purpose of the repeal, according to Durbin, is to “protect kids online,” it’s far more likely to give the Trump White House carte blanche to advance its ultra-reactionary political agenda.

    More power for MAGA

    Techdirt: Democratic Senators Team Up With MAGA To Hand Trump A Censorship Machine

    Mike Masnick (Techdirt, 3/21/25): “These senators don’t understand what Section 230 actually does—or how its repeal would make their stated goals harder to achieve.”

    The effort to repeal Section 230 isn’t the first of its kind. Lawmakers, namely Republicans Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former Florida senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been making attempts to restrict or remove 230 for years, sometimes with explicitly censorial aims. But with a White House so hostile to dissent as to target and abduct anti-genocide activists (FAIR.org, 3/28/25; Zeteo, 3/29/25), abusing immigration law and violating constitutional rights in the process, the timing of the latest bill—complete with Democratic backing—is particularly alarming.

    To imagine what could become of a Section 230 repeal under the Trump administration, consider an example from July 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic remained severe enough to be classified as a public-health emergency. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)—now a co-sponsor of Durbin and Graham’s 2025 bill—introduced an amendment to 230 that would authorize the Health & Human Services Secretary to designate certain online content as “health misinformation.” The label would require websites to remove the content in question.

    News sources heralded the bill as a way to stem the “proliferation of falsehoods about vaccines, fake cures and other harmful health-related claims on their sites” (NPR, 7/22/21) and to “fight bogus medical claims online” (Politico, 7/22/21). While potentially true at the time, Klobuchar’s bill would now, by most indications, have the opposite effect. As Mike Masnick of Techdirt (3/21/25) explained:

    Today’s Health & Human Services secretary is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who believes the solution to measles is to have more children die of measles. Under Klobuchar’s proposal, he would literally have the power to declare pro-vaccine information as “misinformation” and force it off the internet.

    ‘Save the Children’

    ACLU: How Online Censorship Harms Sex Workers and LGBTQ Communities

    ACLU (6/27/22): The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking. Instead, it has chilled speech, shut down online spaces, and made sex work more dangerous.”

    Since Klobuchar’s bill, Congress has drafted multiple pieces of bipartisan child “safety” legislation resembling Durbin and Graham’s bill, offering another glimpse into the perils of a Trump-era repeal.

    Consider 2023’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which the New York Times (2/17/22) welcomed as “sweeping legislation” that would “require online platforms to refrain from promoting harmful behavior.” KOSA enjoys robust bipartisan support, with three dozen Republican co-sponsors and nearly as many Democrats, as well as an endorsement from Joe Biden.

    Though KOSA doesn’t expressly call for the removal of 230, it would effectively create a carve-out that could easily be weaponized. MAGA-boosting Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a lead sponsor, insinuated in 2023 that KOSA could be used to “protect” children “from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence” on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram (Techdirt, 9/6/23). In other words, lawmakers could invoke KOSA to throttle or eliminate content related to trans advocacy, should they deem it “harmful” to children.

    KOSA has drawn criticism from more than 90 organizations, including the ACLU and numerous LGBTQ groups, who fear that the bill masquerades as a child-safeguarding initiative while facilitating far-right censorship (CounterSpin, 6/9/23). This comes as little surprise, considering the decades-long history of “Save the Children” rhetoric as an anti-LGBTQ bludgeon, as well as the fact that these campaigns have been shown to harm children rather than protect them.

    Some outlets have rightfully included the bill’s opponents in their reportage (AP, 7/31/24), even if only to characterize it as “divisive” and “controversial” (NBC News, 7/31/24). Others, however, have expressed more confidence in the legislation. The New York Times (2/1/24), for instance, described KOSA as a means to “safeguard the internet’s youngest users.” Neither Blackburn’s publicly-broadcast intentions nor the protests against the bill seemed to capture the paper’s attention.

    Instead, the Times went on to cite the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a 2018 law that amended Section 230, in part to allow victims of sex trafficking to sue websites and online platforms, as a regulatory success. What the Times didn’t note is that, according to the ACLU, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which is included in SESTA, “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking,” and could be interpreted by courts as justification to “censor more online speech—especially materials about sex, youth health, LGBTQ identity and other important concerns.”

    False anti-corporate appeals

    WSJ: Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand

    A bipartisan pair of lawmakers argue in the Wall Street Journal (5/12/24) that repealing Section 230 would mean tech companies couldn’t “manipulate and profit from Americans’ free-speech protections”—which is true only  in the sense that platforms would be forced to assume that their users do not have free-speech protections.

    Protecting kids isn’t the only promise made by 230 repeal proponents. In a statement made earlier this year, Durbin vowed to “make the tech industry legally accountable for the damage they cause.” It’s a popular refrain for government officials. The Senate Judiciary Democrats pledged to “remove Big Tech’s legal immunity,” and Trump himself has called 230 a “liability shielding gift from the US to ‘Big Tech’”—a point echoed by one of his many acolytes, Josh Hawley.

    And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/24) headlined “Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand,” former Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Democrat, argued:

    We must act because Big Tech is profiting from children, developing algorithms that push harmful content on to our kids’ feeds and refusing to strengthen their platforms’ protections against predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies.

    These soft anti-corporate appeals might resonate with an audience who believes Big Tech wields too much power and influence. But there’s no guarantee that dismantling Section 230 would rein in Big Tech.

    In fact, Section 230 actually confers an advantage upon the largest tech companies—which at least one of them has recognized. In 2021, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg proposed reforms to 230 that would increase and intensify legal requirements for content moderation (NBC News, 3/24/21). The apparent logic: monopolistic giants like Facebook and Google can more easily fund expensive content-moderation systems and legal battles than can smaller platforms, lending the major players far more long-term viability.

    But regardless of Meta’s machinations, the fundamental problem would remain: Democrats have embraced the MAGA vision for online governance, creating the conditions not for a safer internet, but a more dangerous one.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julianne Tveten.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/31/with-section-230-repeal-dems-and-media-offer-trump-new-censorship-tools/feed/ 0 522894     Publisher’s Firing Shows Double Standard in Israel/Palestine Cartooning https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning/#respond Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:21:20 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9044860  

    Jeff Danziger: Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Over a Year of Merciless War

    Jeff Danziger (1/20/25)

    “Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).

    After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).

    That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.

    For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”

    The Palestine exception

    Rob Rogers: Why do they hate us so much? (Gazans in a cage surrounded by missiles)

    Rob Rogers (8/7/14)

    Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).

    This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).

    The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.

    ‘We side with evil’

    Kirk Walters: Occupying the Administration Building Today Is Not the Same as It Was in the '60s.... (Administrator offering refreshments to antisemitic protesters)

    Kirk Walters (10/18/23)

    Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion”  (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).

    Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).

    Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.

    Ramirez: I Remember When Going to College Was Supposed to Make You Smarter (College protesters with pro-"evil" banners)

    Michael Ramirez (5/2/24)

    Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”

    Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”

    At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.

    Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”

    ‘Make Gaza great again!’

    Henry Payne: Odd. My Pager Just Exploded. (Rep. Tlaib with exploding pager.)

    Henry Payne (9/19/24)

    In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.

    Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).

    Bok: Two State Solutions (cartoon illustrating how much better Gaza would be if ethnically cleansed)

    Chip Bok (2/7/25)

    After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics, 2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.

    No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.

    ‘Missed something profound’

    Michael Ramirez: How Dare Israel Attack Civilians(Cartoon of "Hamas" with children strapped to his body)

    Michael Ramirez (11/6/23)

    The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.

    One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.

    Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.

    Benson: Yasir Ararat (Arafat depicted as a dead rat)

    Steve Benson (6/27/82)

    Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.

    Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.

     


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Hank Kennedy.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning/feed/ 0 522102     Publisher’s Firing Shows Double Standard in Israel/Palestine Cartooning https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning-2/#respond Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:21:20 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9044860  

    Jeff Danziger: Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Over a Year of Merciless War

    Jeff Danziger (1/20/25)

    “Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).

    After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).

    That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.

    For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”

    The Palestine exception

    Rob Rogers: Why do they hate us so much? (Gazans in a cage surrounded by missiles)

    Rob Rogers (8/7/14)

    Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).

    This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).

    The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.

    ‘We side with evil’

    Kirk Walters: Occupying the Administration Building Today Is Not the Same as It Was in the '60s.... (Administrator offering refreshments to antisemitic protesters)

    Kirk Walters (10/18/23)

    Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion”  (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).

    Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).

    Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.

    Ramirez: I Remember When Going to College Was Supposed to Make You Smarter (College protesters with pro-"evil" banners)

    Michael Ramirez (5/2/24)

    Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”

    Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”

    At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.

    Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”

    ‘Make Gaza great again!’

    Henry Payne: Odd. My Pager Just Exploded. (Rep. Tlaib with exploding pager.)

    Henry Payne (9/19/24)

    In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.

    Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).

    Bok: Two State Solutions (cartoon illustrating how much better Gaza would be if ethnically cleansed)

    Chip Bok (2/7/25)

    After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics, 2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.

    No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.

    ‘Missed something profound’

    Michael Ramirez: How Dare Israel Attack Civilians(Cartoon of "Hamas" with children strapped to his body)

    Michael Ramirez (11/6/23)

    The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.

    One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.

    Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.

    Benson: Yasir Ararat (Arafat depicted as a dead rat)

    Steve Benson (6/27/82)

    Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.

    Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.

     


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Hank Kennedy.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning-2/feed/ 0 522103     Publisher’s Firing Shows Double Standard in Israel/Palestine Cartooning https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning-3/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning-3/#respond Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:21:20 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9044860  

    Jeff Danziger: Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Over a Year of Merciless War

    Jeff Danziger (1/20/25)

    “Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).

    After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).

    That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.

    For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”

    The Palestine exception

    Rob Rogers: Why do they hate us so much? (Gazans in a cage surrounded by missiles)

    Rob Rogers (8/7/14)

    Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).

    This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).

    The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.

    ‘We side with evil’

    Kirk Walters: Occupying the Administration Building Today Is Not the Same as It Was in the '60s.... (Administrator offering refreshments to antisemitic protesters)

    Kirk Walters (10/18/23)

    Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion”  (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).

    Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).

    Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.

    Ramirez: I Remember When Going to College Was Supposed to Make You Smarter (College protesters with pro-"evil" banners)

    Michael Ramirez (5/2/24)

    Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”

    Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”

    At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.

    Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”

    ‘Make Gaza great again!’

    Henry Payne: Odd. My Pager Just Exploded. (Rep. Tlaib with exploding pager.)

    Henry Payne (9/19/24)

    In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.

    Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).

    Bok: Two State Solutions (cartoon illustrating how much better Gaza would be if ethnically cleansed)

    Chip Bok (2/7/25)

    After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics, 2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.

    No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.

    ‘Missed something profound’

    Michael Ramirez: How Dare Israel Attack Civilians(Cartoon of "Hamas" with children strapped to his body)

    Michael Ramirez (11/6/23)

    The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.

    One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.

    Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.

    Benson: Yasir Ararat (Arafat depicted as a dead rat)

    Steve Benson (6/27/82)

    Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.

    Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.

     


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Hank Kennedy.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/27/publishers-firing-shows-double-standard-in-israel-palestine-cartooning-3/feed/ 0 522104     Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Global Threats Turns into a McCarthy Hearing of Lies about CODEPINK: Women for Peace https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/senate-intelligence-committee-hearing-on-global-threats-turns-into-a-mccarthy-hearing-of-lies-about-codepink-women-for-peace/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/senate-intelligence-committee-hearing-on-global-threats-turns-into-a-mccarthy-hearing-of-lies-about-codepink-women-for-peace/#respond Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:29:05 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156930 Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China. During the hearing […]

    The post Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Global Threats Turns into a McCarthy Hearing of Lies about CODEPINK: Women for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.

    During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark Warner had mentioned Israel in their opening statement nor  had Gabbard mentioned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in her statement either.

    As Capitol police were taking Barry out of the hearing room, in the horrific style of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Cotton maliciously said that Barry was a “CODEPINK lunatic that was funded by the Communist party of China.”  Cotton then said if anyone had something to say to do so.

    Refusing to buckle or be intimidated by Cotton’s lies about the funding of CODEPINK, I stood up and yelled, “I’m a retired Army Colonel and former diplomat. I work with CODEPINK, and it is not funded by Communist China.”  I too was hauled out of the hearing room by Capitol police and arrested.

    After I was taken out of the hearing room, Cotton libelously continued his McCarty lie, “The fact that Communist China funds CODEPINK which interrupts a hearing about Israel illustrates Director Gabbard’s point that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together in greater concert than they ever had before.”

    Senator Cotton does not appreciate the responsibility he has in his one-month-old elevation to the chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee.

    Senator Cotton does not seem to care that his untruthful statements in a US Congressional hearing aired around the world can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those he lies about, their friends and family.  In today’s polarized political environment we know that the words of senior leaders can rile supporters into frenzies as we saw on January 6, 2021 with President Trump’s loyal supporters injuring many Capitol police and destroying parts of the nation’s capitol building in their attempt to stop the Presidential election proceedings.

    CODEPINK members have been challenging in the US Congress the war policies of five presidential administrations, beginning in 2001 with the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, long before Senator Cotton was elected as a US Senator in 2014.  We have been in the US Senate offices and halls twice as long as he has. We have nonviolently protested the war policies of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.

    After getting out of the Capitol Hill police station, a CODEPINK delegation went to Senator Cotton’s office in the Russell Senate Office building and made a complaint to this office staff.

    We are also submitting a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee for the untrue and libelous statements Senator Cotton made in the hearing.

    The abduction and deportation of international students who joined protests of U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the scathing treatment of visitors who have wanted to enter our country and now the McCarthy intimidating tactics used by Senator Cotton in a Senate intelligence committee hearing of telling lies about individuals and organizations that challenge U.S. government politics, particularly its complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza must be called out and pushed back against.

    And we must push back against US Senators who actually receive funding from front groups for other countries.  Senator Cotton has received $1,197,989 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to advocate for the genocidal policies of the State of Israel.

    The post Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Global Threats Turns into a McCarthy Hearing of Lies about CODEPINK: Women for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ann Wright.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/senate-intelligence-committee-hearing-on-global-threats-turns-into-a-mccarthy-hearing-of-lies-about-codepink-women-for-peace/feed/ 0 521626     Trump silences Voice of America – end of a propaganda machine or void for China and Russia to fill? https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/25/trump-silences-voice-of-america-end-of-a-propaganda-machine-or-void-for-china-and-russia-to-fill/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/25/trump-silences-voice-of-america-end-of-a-propaganda-machine-or-void-for-china-and-russia-to-fill/#respond Tue, 25 Mar 2025 22:37:05 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=112686 ANALYSIS: By Valerie A. Cooper, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Of all the contradictions and ironies of Donald Trump’s second presidency so far, perhaps the most surprising has been his shutting down the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for being “radical propaganda”.

    Critics have long accused the agency — and its affiliated outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — of being a propaganda arm of US foreign policy.

    But to the current president, the USAGM has become a promoter of “anti-American ideas” and agendas — including allegedly suppressing stories critical of Iran, sympathetically covering the issue of “white privilege” and bowing to pressure from China.

    Propaganda is clearly in the eye of the beholder. The Moscow Times reported Russian officials were elated by the demise of the “purely propagandistic” outlets, while China’s Global Times celebrated the closure of a “lie factory”.

    Meanwhile, the European Commission hailed USAGM outlets as a “beacon of truth, democracy and hope”. All of which might have left the average person understandably confused: Voice of America? Wasn’t that the US propaganda outlet from World War II?

    Well, yes. But the reality of USAGM and similar state-sponsored global media outlets is more complex — as are the implications of the US agency’s demise.

    Public service or state propaganda?
    The USAGM is one of several international public service media outlets based in Western democracies. Others include Australia’s ABC International, the BBC World Service, CBC/Radio-Canada, France Médias Monde, NHK-World Japan, Deutsche Welle in Germany and SRG SSR in Switzerland.

    Part of the Public Media Alliance, they are similar to national public service media, largely funded by taxpayers to uphold democratic ideals of universal access to news and information.

    Unlike national public media, however, they might not be consumed — or even known — by domestic audiences. Rather, they typically provide news to countries without reliable independent media due to censorship or state-run media monopolies.

    The USAGM, for example, provides news in 63 languages to more than 100 countries. It has been credited with bringing attention to issues such as protests against covid-19 lockdowns in China and women’s struggles for equal rights in Iran.

    On the other hand, the independence of USAGM outlets has been questioned often, particularly as they are required to share government-mandated editorials.

    Voice of America has been criticised for its focus on perceived ideological adversaries such as Russia and Iran. And my own research has found it perpetuates stereotypes and the neglect of African nations in its news coverage.

    Leaving a void
    Ultimately, these global media outlets wouldn’t exist if there weren’t benefits for the governments that fund them. Sharing stories and perspectives that support or promote certain values and policies is an effective form of “public diplomacy”.

    Yet these international media outlets differ from state-controlled media models because of editorial systems that protect them from government interference.

    The Voice of America’s “firewall”, for instance, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news”. Such protections allow journalists to report on their own governments more objectively.

    In contrast, outlets such as China Media Group (CMG), RT from Russia, and PressTV from Iran also reach a global audience in a range of languages. But they do this through direct government involvement.

    CMG subsidiary CCTV+, for example, states it is “committed to telling China’s story to the rest of the world”.

    Though RT states it is an autonomous media outlet, research has found the Russian government oversees hiring editors, imposing narrative angles, and rejecting stories.

    Staff member with sign protesting in front of Voice of America sign.
    A Voice of America staffer protests outside the Washington DC offices on March 17, 2025, after employees were placed on administrative leave. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

    Other voices get louder
    The biggest concern for Western democracies is that these other state-run media outlets will fill the void the USAGM leaves behind — including in the Pacific.

    Russia, China and Iran are increasing funding for their state-run news outlets, with China having spent more than US$6.6 billion over 13 years on its global media outlets. China Media Group is already one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, providing news content to more than 130 countries in 44 languages.

    And China has already filled media gaps left by Western democracies: after the ABC stopped broadcasting Radio Australia in the Pacific, China Radio International took over its frequencies.

    Worryingly, the differences between outlets such as Voice of America and more overtly state-run outlets aren’t immediately clear to audiences, as government ownership isn’t advertised.

    An Australian senator even had to apologise recently after speaking with PressTV, saying she didn’t know the news outlet was affiliated with the Iranian government, or that it had been sanctioned in Australia.

    Switched off
    Trump’s move to dismantle the USAGM doesn’t come as a complete surprise, however. As the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America described, the first Trump administration failed in its attempts to remove the firewall and install loyalists.

    This perhaps explains why Trump has resorted to more drastic measures this time. And, as with many of the current administration’s legally dubious actions, there has been resistance.

    The American Foreign Service Association says it will challenge the dismantling of the USAGM, while the Czech Republic is seeking EU support to keep Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty on the air.

    But for many of the agency’s journalists, contractors, broadcasting partners and audiences, it may be too late. Last week, The New York Times reported some Voice of America broadcasts had already been replaced by music.The Conversation

    Dr Valerie A. Cooper is lecturer in media and communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/25/trump-silences-voice-of-america-end-of-a-propaganda-machine-or-void-for-china-and-russia-to-fill/feed/ 0 521494     Trump silences Voice of America – end of a propaganda machine or void for China and Russia to fill? https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/25/trump-silences-voice-of-america-end-of-a-propaganda-machine-or-void-for-china-and-russia-to-fill-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/25/trump-silences-voice-of-america-end-of-a-propaganda-machine-or-void-for-china-and-russia-to-fill-2/#respond Tue, 25 Mar 2025 22:37:05 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=112686 ANALYSIS: By Valerie A. Cooper, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Of all the contradictions and ironies of Donald Trump’s second presidency so far, perhaps the most surprising has been his shutting down the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for being “radical propaganda”.

    Critics have long accused the agency — and its affiliated outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — of being a propaganda arm of US foreign policy.

    But to the current president, the USAGM has become a promoter of “anti-American ideas” and agendas — including allegedly suppressing stories critical of Iran, sympathetically covering the issue of “white privilege” and bowing to pressure from China.

    Propaganda is clearly in the eye of the beholder. The Moscow Times reported Russian officials were elated by the demise of the “purely propagandistic” outlets, while China’s Global Times celebrated the closure of a “lie factory”.

    Meanwhile, the European Commission hailed USAGM outlets as a “beacon of truth, democracy and hope”. All of which might have left the average person understandably confused: Voice of America? Wasn’t that the US propaganda outlet from World War II?

    Well, yes. But the reality of USAGM and similar state-sponsored global media outlets is more complex — as are the implications of the US agency’s demise.

    Public service or state propaganda?
    The USAGM is one of several international public service media outlets based in Western democracies. Others include Australia’s ABC International, the BBC World Service, CBC/Radio-Canada, France Médias Monde, NHK-World Japan, Deutsche Welle in Germany and SRG SSR in Switzerland.

    Part of the Public Media Alliance, they are similar to national public service media, largely funded by taxpayers to uphold democratic ideals of universal access to news and information.

    Unlike national public media, however, they might not be consumed — or even known — by domestic audiences. Rather, they typically provide news to countries without reliable independent media due to censorship or state-run media monopolies.

    The USAGM, for example, provides news in 63 languages to more than 100 countries. It has been credited with bringing attention to issues such as protests against covid-19 lockdowns in China and women’s struggles for equal rights in Iran.

    On the other hand, the independence of USAGM outlets has been questioned often, particularly as they are required to share government-mandated editorials.

    Voice of America has been criticised for its focus on perceived ideological adversaries such as Russia and Iran. And my own research has found it perpetuates stereotypes and the neglect of African nations in its news coverage.

    Leaving a void
    Ultimately, these global media outlets wouldn’t exist if there weren’t benefits for the governments that fund them. Sharing stories and perspectives that support or promote certain values and policies is an effective form of “public diplomacy”.

    Yet these international media outlets differ from state-controlled media models because of editorial systems that protect them from government interference.

    The Voice of America’s “firewall”, for instance, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news”. Such protections allow journalists to report on their own governments more objectively.

    In contrast, outlets such as China Media Group (CMG), RT from Russia, and PressTV from Iran also reach a global audience in a range of languages. But they do this through direct government involvement.

    CMG subsidiary CCTV+, for example, states it is “committed to telling China’s story to the rest of the world”.

    Though RT states it is an autonomous media outlet, research has found the Russian government oversees hiring editors, imposing narrative angles, and rejecting stories.

    Staff member with sign protesting in front of Voice of America sign.
    A Voice of America staffer protests outside the Washington DC offices on March 17, 2025, after employees were placed on administrative leave. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

    Other voices get louder
    The biggest concern for Western democracies is that these other state-run media outlets will fill the void the USAGM leaves behind — including in the Pacific.

    Russia, China and Iran are increasing funding for their state-run news outlets, with China having spent more than US$6.6 billion over 13 years on its global media outlets. China Media Group is already one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, providing news content to more than 130 countries in 44 languages.

    And China has already filled media gaps left by Western democracies: after the ABC stopped broadcasting Radio Australia in the Pacific, China Radio International took over its frequencies.

    Worryingly, the differences between outlets such as Voice of America and more overtly state-run outlets aren’t immediately clear to audiences, as government ownership isn’t advertised.

    An Australian senator even had to apologise recently after speaking with PressTV, saying she didn’t know the news outlet was affiliated with the Iranian government, or that it had been sanctioned in Australia.

    Switched off
    Trump’s move to dismantle the USAGM doesn’t come as a complete surprise, however. As the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America described, the first Trump administration failed in its attempts to remove the firewall and install loyalists.

    This perhaps explains why Trump has resorted to more drastic measures this time. And, as with many of the current administration’s legally dubious actions, there has been resistance.

    The American Foreign Service Association says it will challenge the dismantling of the USAGM, while the Czech Republic is seeking EU support to keep Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty on the air.

    But for many of the agency’s journalists, contractors, broadcasting partners and audiences, it may be too late. Last week, The New York Times reported some Voice of America broadcasts had already been replaced by music.The Conversation

    Dr Valerie A. Cooper is lecturer in media and communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/25/trump-silences-voice-of-america-end-of-a-propaganda-machine-or-void-for-china-and-russia-to-fill-2/feed/ 0 521495     Moldova Could Become a Powder Keg of the European Union https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/22/moldova-could-become-a-powder-keg-of-the-european-union/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/22/moldova-could-become-a-powder-keg-of-the-european-union/#respond Sat, 22 Mar 2025 15:00:44 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156812 In the last decade, there has been a growing concern about a democratic deficit in Europe, while the liberal mainstream has replaced all other forms of thinking from the socio-political landscape. Moldova — where pressure on the opposition and independent media increases every year, and the ruling party always has the last word on all […]

    The post Moldova Could Become a Powder Keg of the European Union first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     In the last decade, there has been a growing concern about a democratic deficit in Europe, while the liberal mainstream has replaced all other forms of thinking from the socio-political landscape. Moldova — where pressure on the opposition and independent media increases every year, and the ruling party always has the last word on all political issues — is not an exception.

    Since Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) came to power in 2021, political pluralism and freedom of speech in the country have essentially ceased to exist. Against the backdrop of rapidly rising prices and poverty levels, the Moldovans began to hold mass protests demanding the government resignation. The authorities responded by shutting down a number of television channels and electronic media outlets under the pretext that they allegedly were spreading pro-Russian propaganda and provoking contradictions within the state. Later, a “hunt” for undesirable politicians and a fight against opposition parties began in the republic. Thus, in 2023, at the request of the government, Moldova’s Constitutional Court declared the Șor Party unconstitutional, and in May 2024, the country’s Justice Ministry asked a Chisinau court to place restrictions on political activities by the Chance Political Party.

    After the constitutional referendum was held on the same day as the presidential election in 2024, tensions within the country grew even deeper. Sandu was accused of intending to use the plebiscite to save her declining popularity amid the economic crisis and protests. According to the results of the referendum on EU membership, 50.35% supported the amendments; however, some opposition parties did not recognize the results of the vote. The dissatisfaction of Sandu’s opponents was also facilitated by the results of the presidential elections, which Party of Socialists of Moldova(PSRM) called dishonest and undemocratic, pointing to the unreasonable reduction of polling stations, blocking voters’ access to ballot drop boxes, as well as cases of falsification.

    Moldova is currently positioning itself as a democratic and liberal country. However, is this actually true? Numerous arrests of activists, the suspension of broadcasting of television channels as well as blocking of dozens of information sources that have opinions different from those of the government – does not all this indicate a complete elimination of freedom of speech and pluralism in the country? Moreover, the presence of a single “correct” opinion within the divided Moldovan society could lead to a situation where part of the population begins to turn towards a more extreme and radical opposition, prepared to engage in conflict with the current authorities. Thus, with its actions, Sandu’s team is paving the way for the emergence of far-right political parties in the country, similar to Alternative for Germany and Freedom Party of Austria. Increase in the number of such parties could lead to instability not only at the local level, but could also completely undermine the already fragile political situation within the EU. In this scenario, the prospects for cooperation between Europe and the United States would become even more dim.

    The post Moldova Could Become a Powder Keg of the European Union first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rom Cretu.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/22/moldova-could-become-a-powder-keg-of-the-european-union/feed/ 0 520877     How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/21/how-miriam-adelson-exemplifies-the-supreme-courts-rulings-that-political-corruption-is-protected-by-the-1st-amendment/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/21/how-miriam-adelson-exemplifies-the-supreme-courts-rulings-that-political-corruption-is-protected-by-the-1st-amendment/#respond Fri, 21 Mar 2025 14:21:56 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156798 Here is a case that so richly displays the thorough-going corruptness of the U.S. Government so that to document it in its structural details — as will be done here — is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. is, in fact, a dictatorship (controlled by a Deep State consisting not of its […]

    The post How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Here is a case that so richly displays the thorough-going corruptness of the U.S. Government so that to document it in its structural details — as will be done here — is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. is, in fact, a dictatorship (controlled by a Deep State consisting not of its bureaucracy but of its billionaires), not at all a democracy, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says; and it also displays how flagrantly our Constitution is routinely being violated by this Government, which, consequently, now must be seriously doubted as to this Government’s very legitimacy:

    Donald Trump as President is doing the work of his third-biggest political donor the Israeli-American thirty-billionaire Miriam Adelson, who demands Governmental punishment of students who protest against — or even just privately oppose — the Israel-U.S. ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    While Israel provides the troops, America (under both Biden and now Trump) provides the weapons, ammunition, and satellite intelligence, that together are producing the slaughter in, and ethnic cleansing of, Gaza; and Adelson wants it to continue so as to eliminate completely (via extermination and/or expulsion) the people who live there. Students in America who have joined public demonstrations against this ethnic-cleansing are called by Adelson and her hired agent, Trump, “anti-Semites” and supporters of “terrorists” for opposing it. Here’s how this is playing out today:

    On March 19, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants: The school faces a deadline to yield to administration demands in negotiations over federal funding,” and reported that, in order to get Trump “to restore $400 million in federal funding,” Columbia University will punish enough the students who opposed the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza.

    The U.S. Government’s poster-boy of this ‘anti-Semitism’ and support of ‘terrorists’ is the Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, whom Adelson-Trump and their Administration, have in detention awaiting forced expulsion from the United States. On March 11, CNN headlined “Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Palestinian activist detained by ICE over Columbia University protests” and reported that, “‘As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,’ he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.” Here is the 2-minute video of him being arrested while his wife cries “I don’t know what to do!” and the federal agents refuse to identify themselves, as they drive her husband away in an unmarked car. Trump wants Khalil to be flown out of the country as soon as possible.

    Also on March 19, City Journal, of the right-wing, rabidly “corporationist” (as Mussolini proudly described himself) Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which had been set up and maintained by Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief Bill Casey and some billionaires, headlined “Who Are the Shadowy Figures Defending Mahmoud Khalil? The accused Hamas sympathizer is shrouded in mystery—and so are his supporters.” In the fascist world, not merely freedom of speech and of the press cannot be tolerated, but also freedom-of-association (which the Supreme Court accepts as being protected in order for the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to be meaningful — even billionaires need freedom-of-association) cannot be tolerated — and this is today’s U.S.A. Whereas during the long period of U.S. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and of the Senator Joseph R. McCarthy witch-hunts against communists, freedom-of-association did not exist in the United States, it started to exist in order to protect businessmen, in Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), and then further in order to protect discrimination against homosexuals, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). But now, freedom-of-association likewise might, yet again, no longer exist in the U.S.

    Also on March 19, Politico made public another case, which, in some ways, is even more extreme than that of Khalil, especially against freedom-of-association. It headlined “Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown, says he is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage. Masked immigration agents arrested a Georgetown University fellow and told him his visa had been revoked, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.” The Departments of State and of Homeland Security were involved in this action. The article says that Dr. Suri has no criminal record, and that “Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the [Georgetown] university’s School of Foreign Service. According to his court petition and a university directory, he is teaching a class this semester on ‘Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia.’ Suri has a Ph.D. in peace and conflict studies from a university in India.” Suri has been removed from his home and his wife in Virginia, and — en-route to a detention facility in Texas — is reported to be at “an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‘staging’ center at the Alexandria, Louisiana, airport,” ultimately to be flown back to India. This is like, if the totalitarian-minded long-time and founding chief of the ‘Justice’ Department’s FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were now the President of the United States (which, fortunately, he never was) — he, too, routinely violated the Constitution and broke the law that he was supposedly enforcing.

    Here is how the U.S. Supreme Court itself has produced these and other such results — blatant and increasingly routine violations of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (among others) (as a therefore treasonous — anti-U.S.-Constitution — Supreme Court):

    The Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling said that the existing political-campaign-expenditure ceiling imposed “direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech” and so the Court invalidated three expenditure limitations as violating the First Amendment. In other words: they said that money is “speech” — the more spending of it in politics, the better (although the First Amendment says nothing about the “quantity” of “political speech” — the Supreme Court there invented that concern, though the Founders never expressed it) — and so any limitations on campaign-spending would violate the First Amendment’s free-speech clause. (The Court’s ruling even included the brazenly stupid falsehood: “The quantity of communication by the contributor does not increase perceptibly with the size of his contribution, since the expression rests solely on the undifferentiated, symbolic act of contributing.” So, a million-dollar contribution is merely “symbolic.”) The overall limitations on expenditures by federal candidates and their committees were therefore struck down by the Court, as being inconsistent with (their lie-based interpretation of) freedom-of-speech. Thus (despite their lie that all of this is merely “symbolic” — which they knew wasn’t at all true), people who donate more to politicians should have a bigger say in who wins office than people who can’t. This ruling — granting the rich person a bigger say in ‘our’ government than the poor person has — is widely considered to have opened the floodgates for corruption to control the U.S. Government.

    The Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling said that the anti-corruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech in question from Citizens United, and that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This ruling — based on that blatant lie by the U.S. Supreme Court — is widely considered to be the death-knell for any hope of democracy in the United States, because it opened the floodgates for corruption to rule the U.S. Government at the other end — this time, not at the candidates-end (like Buckley) but at the donors-end (the Citizens United donors-group), by the ruling’s alleging that a “corporation” is a “person,” whose free-speech right can be expressed by its political-campaign donations, without any legal limit (the more that corporations donate to political campaigns, the better, according to the U.S. Supreme Court).

    This leaves American politics in a perfectly libertarian (or “neoliberal”) condition, such that property (a person’s net worth — wealth) reigns (on a one-dollar-one-vote basis); persons (one-person-one-vote) really don’t rule in America, because the super-rich need only to donate enough to the most-corrupt candidates so as to defeat any honest political competitor (i.e., any candidate who actually intends to fulfill on his/her public campaign-promises to the voters). Only the campaign-promises (usually made in private) to the mega-donors will be actuated as governmental policies once the winner is in office. And the scientific findings unanimously CONFIRM that at least ever since 1980, this is the way it is, in the United States.

    And once this is the way it is, the public (the voters, the consumers, the workers — the public, as opposed to the OWNERS of corporations — and especially the billionaires who control the corporations) are, in any situation that involves their personal rights as against the corporate owners, actually powerless, because the super-rich now control the Government and can always far outspend (on lawyers and anything else) any one of them (any non-rich person). This is NOT “equal justice under law.” Or, as one of the mega-billionaires himself said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (There are only around a thousand billionaires in the U.S., and they rule over the entire population of 340 million.) That statement, made in 2006, is by now, very clearly an understatement: the billionaires have already won. The U.S. Constitution already means only what America’s super-rich WANT it to mean. If you want it to mean something else than what they want it to mean, then you will need to be able to outspend them to achieve that in the actual Government. (And the billionaires control almost all of the ‘nonprofits’ that advertise they represent “the public interest”; so, if what you want is inconsistent with what the billionaires want, then you won’t get any help from them to make that case.) This is the present reality, and only a Second American Revolution might be able to restore some democracy here, because, right now, we don’t have any — none, at all, in the United States of America. This is a proven fact — proven many times over. Anyone who continues to refer to the U.S. as being a “democracy” is either a fool or a liar. And America isn’t a dictatorship by “the bureaucrats,” nor by “the Democrats,” nor by “the Republicans” — it is being done by the billionaires, ones such as Adelson on the Republican Party side, and ones such as Soros on the Democratic Party side, who are collectively puppet-masters for the entire corrupt political show, which show elicits anger from the public against the puppets, instead of against the puppeteers, who fund and run the show.

    On March 19, Dawn News in Pakistan headlined “Mahmoud Khalil Wins Legal Battle Over Deportation” and reported that a judge ruled that Khalil’s case must be heard by a court, not result in his immediate deportation, and that a court in New Jersey must consider whether his rights of free speech and due proces have been violated by Trump. No timeline was set for a ruling, and so Khalil might continue in prison in Louisiana for a long time while his appeal moves forward in the courts.

    On the night of March 20, ABC News headlined “Judge blocks deportation of Georgetown fellow detained by immigration authorities” and reported that Badar Khan Suri’s lawyers had filed suit against the U.S. by saying that “the Trump administration appeared to be targeting the Georgetown University fellow due to his wife’s identity as a Palestinian and her constitutionally protected speech.” So, now, the judge is requiring Trump’s people to justify their action.

    Therefore, even if these and other similar cases might produce ultimate wins for the victims, their cases could produce long terms in prison while the courts consider them. If, at the end of these cases, Trump loses, there is still the question of whether Trump will do what judges order him to do. Of course, if he won’t, then congressional Democrats might try to impeach and remove him. At that point, it will be again Democratic Party billionaires versus Republican Party billionaires. What could be more serious would be if the result would be a Constitutional crisis: a contest of wills between the Executive and the Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. That would be a much better, more substantive, outcome. It could produce the necessary Second American Revolution, if the American public decide to make it so. Leaving such matters only to the billionaires to settle, needs to stop at some point, because, otherwise, America will simply continue to rot. The more that the billionaires continue to succeed against the public, the more that the country itself will continue to rot.

    The post How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/21/how-miriam-adelson-exemplifies-the-supreme-courts-rulings-that-political-corruption-is-protected-by-the-1st-amendment/feed/ 0 520654     In Pulling the Gaza Documentary, the BBC is Failing Palestinian Children https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/20/in-pulling-the-gaza-documentary-the-bbc-is-failing-palestinian-children/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/20/in-pulling-the-gaza-documentary-the-bbc-is-failing-palestinian-children/#respond Thu, 20 Mar 2025 09:52:49 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156770 Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is a harrowing account of life in Gaza as seen through the eyes of Palestinian children. It provides a rare window into young lives devastated by months of relentless bombings, displacements, and unspeakable horrors. It aired on 17 February on BBC Two, but was swiftly removed from iPlayer four days […]

    The post In Pulling the Gaza Documentary, the BBC is Failing Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is a harrowing account of life in Gaza as seen through the eyes of Palestinian children. It provides a rare window into young lives devastated by months of relentless bombings, displacements, and unspeakable horrors.

    It aired on 17 February on BBC Two, but was swiftly removed from iPlayer four days later, following fierce lobbying from pro-Israel voices. The reasons given for its removal? Well, they simply don’t add up.

    The main objection was that the father of Abdullah, the 13-year-old narrator, is the deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. But like it or not, it’s a fact of life in Gaza that almost anyone living there will have some connection to Hamas. Hamas runs the government, so anyone working in an official capacity must also work with Hamas. Not only that, but Abdullah’s father is hardly a “terrorist leader” as was claimed. He is a technocrat, in a role concerned with agriculture, not politics or military, who even studied at UK universities.

    Other objections included the risk of payments potentially funding Hamas. But as Hoyo Films and now the boy himself have confirmed, Abdullah was paid a very small sum via his sister’s bank account which was used to cover basic living expenses. And the complaints around the use of antisemitic language have been rebuffed by many – including Jewish Voice for Labour. The word ‘“Yehudi” is simply Arabic for “Israeli,” and is used by Jewish Israeli journalist Yuval Abrahamto to describe himself in the Oscar-winning film No Other Land.

    Crucially, absolutely nothing in the film has been found to be factually inaccurate.

    The film received five stars in the Guardian and the Times, which described it as “exceptional”. It’s an outstanding, powerful film and a crucial piece of journalism. Since international journalists are banned from Gaza, there are scant opportunities to witness Gazan children’s stories. This film gave us a small insight and humanised Palestinian children.

    Why then, is an innocent child, the victim of unimaginable suffering, put under such intense scrutiny as to whether or not they should be allowed to tell their story?

    Consider the source

    When you consider the source of the complaints, you can’t help but feel like the humanisation of Palestinians was precisely the problem.

    Spearheading the campaign to have the documentary removed from public view was Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Throughout her political career, Hotovely has gone out of her way to dehumanise Palestinians, accusing them of being “thieves of history” who have no heritage, and calling the Nakba – the violent mass displacement of Palestinians – “an Arab lie.” More recently, she claimed there was “no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza.

    Despite strong counterprotests from a far greater number of people wanting the documentary to stay put – including over 1,000 industry professionals and more than 600 British Jews – the BBC bowed to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby, and dutifully took the documentary down.

    That’s why I decided to start a petition, calling on the BBC to reconsider its decision, and allow Palestinian children their right to be heard. The petition quickly gained lots of support and now has over 25,000 signatures.

    Failing Palestinian children

    Not long after I started the petition, it emerged that Abdullah, the film’s 13-year-old narrator, has experienced harassment as a result of the kickback against the film, and now fears for his life. “I did not agree to the risk of me being targeted in any way”, he said. And “[if] anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible for it.”

    Putting children’s safety and mental wellbeing at risk is not only blatantly wrong, but is in breach of the BBC’s own guidelines on safeguarding young people. Sadly, Abdullah’s was not an isolated case.

    In a recent interview with the Independent, former BBC newsreader Karishma Patel explained her reason for quitting the BBC: its longstanding refusal to show the full extent to which Irael is harming Palestinian children. She recalls how she begged the BBC to cover five-year-old Hind Rajab’s story while she was still alive, trapped inside a car with her murdered relatives. The BBC chose not to, only naming her after she was killed, and not even making clear in the headline who had done it. “The BBC failed Hind,” says Patel. “And it has failed Palestinian children again in pulling the [Gaza] documentary.”

    I’ve just written to Tim Davie, Controller-General of the BBC, to draw his attention to the huge number of people who want the documentary to be reinstated, and why the reasons put forward to justify its removal simply do not add up. I told him, “Anyone who is offended by a child sharing their lived experiences of survival can choose not to watch it. But do not deny innocent children – who have experienced unimaginable grief and loss – the right to tell their stories.”  You can read my full letter here.

    Let’s see if he responds. The BBC didn’t bother reaching out to Abdullah to apologise to him after they pulled the film. So I’m not holding out too much hope.

    The post In Pulling the Gaza Documentary, the BBC is Failing Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sylvia Monkhouse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/20/in-pulling-the-gaza-documentary-the-bbc-is-failing-palestinian-children/feed/ 0 520297     CPJ urges US Congress to stop Trump from gutting VOA parent, other agencies https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/15/cpj-urges-us-congress-to-stop-trump-from-gutting-voa-parent-other-agencies/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/15/cpj-urges-us-congress-to-stop-trump-from-gutting-voa-parent-other-agencies/#respond Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:40:56 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=463835 Washington, D.C., March 15, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges United States congressional leaders to protect the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) after President Trump signed an executive order on Friday aimed at dismantling the parent of Voice of America and six other federal agencies.

    “It is outrageous that the White House is seeking to gut the Congress-funded agency supporting independent journalism that challenges narratives of authoritarian regimes around the world,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “We call on congressional leaders to protect this critical agency, which provides uncensored news in countries where the press is restricted.”

    In addition to Voice of America (VOA), USAGM funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia. VOA recorded weekly global audiences of more than 350 million in 2023, and RFE/RL reaches more than 47 million people in 23 countries every week. The agency operated with a budget of more than $886 million in 2024 and employed more than 3,500 people. USAGM also subsidizes annual training for hundreds of media professionals around the world. 

    CPJ’s research shows that journalists for VOA and RFE/RL often put themselves at risk by reporting in highly censored or dangerous countries.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/15/cpj-urges-us-congress-to-stop-trump-from-gutting-voa-parent-other-agencies/feed/ 0 519309     When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/13/when-dissent-becomes-a-crime-the-war-on-political-speech-begins/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/13/when-dissent-becomes-a-crime-the-war-on-political-speech-begins/#respond Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:30:33 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156592 Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly. — Heather Cox Richardson, historian You can’t have it both ways. You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state. You can’t claim to value […]

    The post When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.

    — Heather Cox Richardson, historian

    You can’t have it both ways.

    You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

    You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

    You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

    There’s always a boomerang effect.

    Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

    Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

    The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

    This is how it begins.

    Consider that Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

    This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

    Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

    If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

    We are all at risk.

    History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. What starts as a crackdown on so-called “threats” quickly expands to include anyone who challenges those in power.

    President Trump has made it clear that Mahmoud’s arrest is just “the first arrest of many to come.” He has openly stated his intent to target noncitizens who engage in activities he deems contrary to U.S. interests—an alarmingly vague standard that seems to change at his whim, the First Amendment be damned.

    If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.

    If you need further proof of Trump’s disregard for constitutional rights, look no further than his recent declaration that boycotting Tesla is illegal—a chilling statement that reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of both free speech and the rule of law.

    For the record, there is nothing illegal about exercising one’s First Amendment right of speech, assembly, and protest in a nonviolent way to bring about social change by boycotting private businesses. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982) that nonviolent boycotts are a form of political speech which are entitled to First Amendment protection.

    The problem, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a president who believes that he can do whatever he wants because he is the law is that anyone and anything can become a target.

    Mahmoud is the test case.

    As journalists Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin point out, Mahmoud’s arrest for being a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” (note: he is not actually accused of breaking any laws) is being used as a blueprint for other arrests to come.

    What this means is that anyone who dares to disagree with the government and its foreign policy and express that disagreement could be considered a threat to the country’s “national security interests.”

    Yet the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

    Indeed, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty. Certainly, if there is one freedom among the many spelled out in the Bill of Rights that is especially patriotic, it is the right to criticize the government.

    Unfortunately, the Deep State doesn’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

    This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

    Throughout history, U.S. presidents have used their power to suppress dissent. The Biden administration equated the spread of “misinformation” with terrorism. Trump called the press “the enemy of the people” and suggested protesting should be illegal. Obama expanded anti-protest laws and cracked down on whistleblowers. Bush’s Patriot Act made it a crime to support organizations the government deemed terrorist, even in lawful ways. This pattern stretches back centuries—FDR censored news after Pearl Harbor, Woodrow Wilson outlawed criticism of war efforts, and John Adams criminalized speaking against the government.

    Regardless of party, those in power have repeatedly sought to limit free speech. What’s new is the growing willingness to criminalize political dissent under the guise of national security.

    Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now, but Trump’s antagonism towards free speech is taking this hostility to new heights.

    The government has a history of using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its power.

    Once dissent is labeled a threat, it’s only a matter of time before laws meant for so-called extremists are used against ordinary citizens. Criticizing policy, protesting, or even refusing to conform could be enough to put someone on a watchlist.

    We’ve seen this before.

    The government has a long list of “suspicious” ideologies and behaviors it uses to justify surveillance and suppression. Today’s justification may be immigration; tomorrow, it could be any form of opposition.

    This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

    It’s just a matter of time.

    It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

    The groundwork has already been laid.

    Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

    So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

    After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

    This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

    It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

    Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

    Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

    This is not just about one administration or one set of policies. This is a broader pattern of governmental overreach that has been allowed to unfold, unchecked and unchallenged. And at the heart of this loss of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding—or even a deliberate abandonment—of what sovereignty really means in America.

    Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

    In other words, as the preamble to the Constitution states, in America, “we the people”—sovereign citizens—call the shots.

    So, when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

    That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

    In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

    The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”

    This is how far our republic has fallen and how desensitized “we the people” have become to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

    If we are to put an end to this steady slide into totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none, we must begin by refusing to allow the politics of fear to shackle us to a dictatorship.

    President Trump wants us to believe that the menace we face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

    Don’t believe it. That argument has been tried before.

    The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have all been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

    We are walking a dangerous path right now.

    Political arrests. Harassment. Suppression of dissident voices. Retaliation. Detention centers for political prisoners.

    These are a harbinger of what’s to come if the Trump administration carries through on its threats to crack down on any and all who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and protest.

    We are being acclimated to bolder power grabs, acts of lawlessness, and a pattern of intimidation, harassment, and human rights violations by government officials. And yet, in the midst of this relentless erosion of our freedoms, the very concept of sovereignty—the foundational idea that the people, not the government, hold ultimate power—has been all but forgotten.

    “Sovereignty” used to mean something fundamental in America: the idea that the government serves at the will of the people, that “we the people” are the rightful rulers of this land, and that no one, not even the president, is above the law. But today, that notion is scarcely discussed, as the government continues its unchecked expansion.

    We have lost sight of the fact that our power is meant to restrain the government, not the other way around.

    Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, derailed or desensitized.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the moment these acts of aggression becomes the new normal, authoritarianism won’t be a distant threat; it will be reality.

    The post When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/13/when-dissent-becomes-a-crime-the-war-on-political-speech-begins/feed/ 0 518700     California Teachers Fight Palestine Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/05/california-teachers-fight-palestine-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/05/california-teachers-fight-palestine-censorship/#respond Wed, 05 Mar 2025 06:57:34 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=356303 As the Trump administration engages in a frontal assault on the teaching of race and ethnicity at the K-12 level, a quieter but no less important battle is shaping up in deep blue California. Communities of color are mobilizing statewide to defeat AB 1468, the latest bill to emerge from the CA Legislative Jewish Caucus More

    The post California Teachers Fight Palestine Censorship appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    ]]>

    Image by Yunus Tuğ.

    As the Trump administration engages in a frontal assault on the teaching of race and ethnicity at the K-12 level, a quieter but no less important battle is shaping up in deep blue California. Communities of color are mobilizing statewide to defeat AB 1468, the latest bill to emerge from the CA Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) in its campaign to censor Palestinian voices in ethnic studies classes, and police all ethnic studies content along with it.

    Although the words “Gaza,” “Palestine” and “Israel” are nowhere to be found in the proposed legislation, the language of AB 1468 restricts the discipline to the “domestic experience” of “marginalized people” to discourage teachers from developing lessons on the impact of Israeli settler colonialism on Palestinian American and Muslim communities. AB 1468’s focus on the “domestic experience” might likewise inhibit classroom discussion of US trade policies that increase immigration at the southern border or transnational resistance to oil drilling that disproportionately harms communities of color from the global south to the Los Angeles harbor, or even discussion of state reparations for Black descendants of enslaved African peoples.

    “Students fighting for ethnic studies in the late 1960s didn’t view themselves as a domestic minority, but part of a global majority,” says Christine Hong, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz and member of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. “During the U.S. war in Vietnam, they saw the connection between here and there, between cause and effect, and understood that marginalization and racism cannot be geographically enclosed within this country’s borders.”

    The UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council, which represents 300 ethnic studies practitioners, calls for broad public education on the possible consequences of AB 1468, suggesting it would not only censor education to whitewash history, but also increase state bureaucracy, undermine local school district authority over curriculum, and burden the state with unnecessary costs.

    The Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) describes the bill as “part of a broader right-wing effort to suppress discussions on race, history, and global justice” that if passed would dangerously “place curriculum decisions in the hands of politicians instead of educators.” Other opponents of the bill include Jewish Voice for Peace-Bay Area (JVP-Bay Area), Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC), American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Palestine Solidarity Coalition, and CODEPINK-Central Coast.

    Sponsored by Senator Rick Zbur (D-Los Angeles), Assemblywoman Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay), and Senator Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), the bill has a total of 31 co-sponsors–over a fourth of the state legislature. Seventeen of its co-sponsors are members of the Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC).

    The California Legislative Black Caucus has unanimously refrained from sponsoring AB 1468, and the California Faculty Association (CFA) has emphasized “when a discipline that focuses on communities of color comes under this kind of policing, the racist implications are clear.”

    The bill, however, faces fierce opposition within the ranks of the 300,000 strong California Teachers Association (CTA). In 2024 CTA’s opposition to similar Zbur-Addis legislation in the Senate Appropriation Committee caused the authors to withdraw their bill. Had that prior bill become law, it would have erected steeplechase obstacles to the development of local ethnic studies lessons, e.g., a San Diego unit on Haitian Americans subjected to anti-immigrant rhetoric, or a San Francisco unit on Native Hawaiians protesting a telescope project on sacred land in Hawaii.

    This new bill would require the CA Department of Education to seek input from the 18-member Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) on uniform standards for ethnic studies across non-uniform academic disciplines; conduct regional hearings on proposed standards to be adopted by 2028; monitor or “surveil” and report on instruction in ethnic studies for the next five years and require submission of local ethnic studies curriculum to the State Board of Education 60 days prior to local school district public hearings on approval. Opponents of the bill say this would constitute an unprecedented and costly infringement on local control.

    AB 1468 states the intent is to establish an advisory committee of ethnic studies experts in a subsequent bill, but for now the job of developing standards and instructional materials would fall to the ICQ non-experts, including Senator Ben Allen, a member of the Legislative Jewish Caucus and a co-sponsor of AB 1468, as well as Anita Friedman, who is a former board trustee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and leader of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO). She is also executive director of the pro-Israel Jewish Family Children’s Services (JFCS), an organization spearheading the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education–a state-funded teacher training cadre that excludes Palestinian scholars on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and promotes the Anti-Defamation League’s conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

    Both Senator Allen (then-chair of the LJC) and JFCS Friedman were also part of the IQC in 2021, recommending line item edits and participating in the unanimous vote to approve the CA Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (CA ESMC) for state adoption.

    The Jewish Public Affairs Committee (JPAC), which previously attacked the ESMC, is the power behind AB 1468. Boasting it “leads a coalition of over 35 Jewish organizations that have lobbied tirelessly for standardization of the ethnic studies … to ensure there is a comprehensive, lasting solution to the ongoing issue of antisemitism in California classrooms,” JPAC is hardly a neutral player. On its website, JPAC indicates that its purpose is to “Encourage and foster cooperation – at the State level and among citizens – between the State of Israel and the State of California” and “Combat campaigns to delegitimize and demonize Israel, including the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement (BDS).” Crucially, however, JPAC’s expansive definition of antisemitism includes not only discrimination against Jews and Holocaust denial, but also content critical of Israel. JPAC’s proposed ban on anti-Israel content would contradict 10th grade California social science standards that address the rise of nationalism in the Middle East and the “significance and effects of the location and establishment of Israel on world affairs.”

    Senator Becker’s press release insists the bill will “protect students from inaccurate or biased information taught in their classrooms,” though Jewish Voice for Peace activists argue that “guardrails” prohibiting discussion of Israel’s occupation of Palestine or genocide in Gaza reflect a special interest bias in favor of an apartheid state. “Pro-Israel organizations are using false claims to suppress debate over the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism–over the difference between bigotry against Jews and rejection of a racist nationalist Jewish state,” says Seth Morrison, an organizer with the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the fastest growing Jewish organizations in the US.

    Standards confusion

    In defense of the bill, Addis, a former special education teacher, argues “strong clear standards will prevent hate from taking root.” Ethnic studies as a discipline, however, has never been about “hate” but rather about providing students with the tools to not only tell their own stories, but also critically examine the society in which they live. At the current moment, such tools are more vital than ever.

    The mandate for uniform teaching standards may sound reasonable at first blush, but a more studied look suggests the bill’s authors need to go back to class to learn more about ethnic studies.

    After AB 101 was signed into law in 2021, the California Department of Education adopted an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) with sample lesson plans, instructional resources and guiding principles that encourage students to “challenge racist, bigoted and discriminatory colonial beliefs on multiple levels” and “connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice.” School districts were given the option to use the state curriculum and its guiding values and principles or develop their own ethnic studies curriculum tailored to address their local ethnic communities.

    Under state law, ethnic studies can be taught incorporating English language arts standards in individual courses on African Americans or Chicanx/Latinx or Native Americans or Asian American/Pacific Islanders–or in a combined course on all four ethnic populations–or in an A-G course, such as English—or history, science or math, in which content is taught through the lens of marginalized communities in a class with content-specific standards.

    If the bill’s sponsors intend to mandate only one set of ethnic studies standards for stand alone ethnic studies courses and for every level of math (algebra, geometry, calculus), science (biology, chemistry, physics) and social sciences (US history, government, economics), the near-impossible task of developing one-size fits all standards could stretch long past 2030, the date the law sets for ethnic studies to become a graduation requirement.

    Ethnic studies scholars argue that instead of pushing for uniform standards, legislators should support rigorous criteria for ethnic studies courses to meet university entrance requirements. Currently, A-G ethnic studies, a proposed new ethnic studies requirement for entry into the University of California, is undergoing review by the UC Academic Senate. The UC’s proposed criteria include a focus on ethnic studies pedagogy, critical and intersectional analysis, struggles of Indigenous peoples and communities of color, examination of power, racial justice, and civic engagement.

    Dummying down

    Opponents of the bill object to its “anti-intellectual” language.

    AB 1468 bill states “the goal should not be to understand abstract ideological theories, causes or pedagogies which then filter or limit the breadth of an ethnic group’s experience.”

    “All academic disciplines are based on theories and pedagogies,” says Theresa Montaño, professor of Chicana/o Studies and activist with the California Faculty Association. “To deny the teaching of critical concepts, ideological theories, and pedagogies violates the principle of academic freedom and is plainly racist.”

    To share the stories of marginalized communities without exploring the causes of their marginalization also suggests social science teachers should disregard the California Department of Education’s social science framework that states students will “understand and distinguish cause, effect, sequence and correlation in historical events, including the long-and-short term causal relations.”

    Why ethnic studies?

    In the introduction to the state ethnic studies curriculum, members of the state board of education led by President Linda Darling-Hammond highlight the positive impact of ethnic studies on student success, referencing research by Christine E. Sleeter and Miguel Zavala, co-authors of the book, Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy and Research (2/7/20. Teachers College Press). In summarizing the research, authors of the CA Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum write,“instruction that includes diversity experiences and a specific focus on racism and other forms of bigotry has a positive impact, such as “democracy outcomes” and higher-level thinking.”

    Additional research in 2021 conducted at Stanford University, in conjunction with the San Francisco Unified School District, revealed that students assigned to an ethnic studies course in 9th grade were more likely to attend school, graduate and enroll in college.

    Darlene Lee, a UCLA lecturer in ethnic studies teacher education, conducted a search of UC’s A-G requirement database. Lee found that 1,366 of the state’s 1,556 high schools have an approved A-G ethnic studies course ahead of the 2026 deadline for high schools to offer such a course.

    The history of ethnic studies in California has multiple origins. It can be traced back to 1968 when high school students in East LA walked out to demand curriculum reflect the contributions of Mexican Americans to US society. That same year, historic student protests under the banner of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State led to the lengthiest) student strike in U.S. history. Students boycotted class for half the school year until the administration met their demands, including “a curriculum that would embrace the history of all people, including ethnic minorities.” When the TWLF pressed similar demands at UC Berkeley, “the UC administration and the State of California violently opposed the TWLF to the point where Governor Ronald Reagan declared “a state of extreme emergency” at UC Berkeley, with unprecedented constant sweeps and tear-gassing … “ (MESC)

    “The kids love the class.”

    Lourdes Barraza is a parent of two teens enrolled in ethnic studies in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District in Santa Cruz County. “Legislators like Addis disguise their intent with words like ‘standards’ when their real agenda is to police people’s stories,” says Barraza, a strong supporter of the existing ethnic studies guiding principles enshrined in the adopted state model curriculum. Rather than impose more costs on the state with a pricey bureaucracy to shuffle papers and dummy down curriculum, Barraza wishes the sponsors of AB 1468 would demand Governor Newsom fund ethnic studies to honor the intent of AB 101. “The kids love this class,” says Barraza, adding, “It’s the one class kids never want to miss, so we are fighting for state funding.”

    Barraza’s 14-year-old daughter Ixel speaks enthusiastically about her next ethnic studies class-chosen research project–the local school board and its impact on the education of her largely Latinx high school. Barraza’s 16-year-old son Maximilliano, also enrolled in an ethnic studies course, says, “My favorite project was telling a story about ourselves that highlighted how we changed and how we reflected on that pivotal experience. We could choose to present our story to the whole class or not and most students chose to present–which showed how much trust the class had built between students.”

    Yes, student stories lie at the core of ethnic studies, which affirms student identities, experiences and histories, domestic and transnational. To deny those histories, to exclude academic inquiry into systems of power–white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism—that influenced those histories is to rob students of their past, to deny them the knowledge they need to understand their present and to undermine their future ability to create a more loving society.

    For this reason, communities of color call for the defeat of AB 1468, a bill they describe as “undeniably paternalistic, hostile, and racist.”

    Guiding Principles for Ethnic Studies (CDE ESMC)

    1. Cultivate empathy, community actualization, cultural perpetuity,20 self-worth, self-determination, and the holistic well-being of all participants, especially Native People/s and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)

    2. Celebrate and honor Native People/s of the land and communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color by providing a space to share their stories of success, community collaboration, and solidarity, along with their intellectual and cultural wealth

    3. Center and place high value on the precolonial ancestral knowledge,21 narratives, and communal experiences of Native People/s and people of color and groups that are typically marginalized in society

    4. Critique empire building in history and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression22

    5. Challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, and imperialist/colonial beliefs and practices on multiple levels.

    6. Connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice and an equitable and democratic society, and conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic-racism society that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.

    The post California Teachers Fight Palestine Censorship appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Marcy Winograd.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/05/california-teachers-fight-palestine-censorship/feed/ 0 516443     Community Standards https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/26/community-standards/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/26/community-standards/#respond Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:01:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156159 What happens when you violate community standards?

    The post Community Standards first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    The post Community Standards first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/26/community-standards/feed/ 0 515365     Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel/#respond Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:33:32 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156138 On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking […]

    The post Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking out against Israeli violence.

    Surrounded by supporters, Engler reaffirmed his commitment to freedom of expression and criticized the Montreal police’s collaboration with anti-Palestinian figures. He highlighted the absurdity of the new charges, which claim he harassed the police simply by writing about the accusations already brought against him.

    This arrest follows a campaign led by anti-Palestinian media personality Dahlia Kurtz, who lobbied for Engler to be charged after he called out her pro-Israel rhetoric. Over 2,500 people have emailed the Montreal police, demanding they drop the charges.

    Watch Engler’s final words before entering police custody.

    The post Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alex Tyrell.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel/feed/ 0 514877     Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel/#respond Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:33:32 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156138 On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking […]

    The post Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking out against Israeli violence.

    Surrounded by supporters, Engler reaffirmed his commitment to freedom of expression and criticized the Montreal police’s collaboration with anti-Palestinian figures. He highlighted the absurdity of the new charges, which claim he harassed the police simply by writing about the accusations already brought against him.

    This arrest follows a campaign led by anti-Palestinian media personality Dahlia Kurtz, who lobbied for Engler to be charged after he called out her pro-Israel rhetoric. Over 2,500 people have emailed the Montreal police, demanding they drop the charges.

    Watch Engler’s final words before entering police custody.

    The post Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alex Tyrell.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel/feed/ 0 514878     Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel-2/#respond Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:33:32 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156138 On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking […]

    The post Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking out against Israeli violence.

    Surrounded by supporters, Engler reaffirmed his commitment to freedom of expression and criticized the Montreal police’s collaboration with anti-Palestinian figures. He highlighted the absurdity of the new charges, which claim he harassed the police simply by writing about the accusations already brought against him.

    This arrest follows a campaign led by anti-Palestinian media personality Dahlia Kurtz, who lobbied for Engler to be charged after he called out her pro-Israel rhetoric. Over 2,500 people have emailed the Montreal police, demanding they drop the charges.

    Watch Engler’s final words before entering police custody.

    The post Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alex Tyrell.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/22/yves-engler-arrested-for-criticizing-israel-2/feed/ 0 514879     In the quest to appease Israel, the media undermine our basic rights https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/14/in-the-quest-to-appease-israel-the-media-undermine-our-basic-rights/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/14/in-the-quest-to-appease-israel-the-media-undermine-our-basic-rights/#respond Fri, 14 Feb 2025 02:03:04 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=110826 In its eagerness to appease supporters of Israel, the media is happy to ride roughshod over due process and basic rights. It’s damaging Australia’s (and New Zealand’s?) democracy.

    COMMENTARY: By Bernard Keane

    Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.

    The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.

    Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.

    To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.

    Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.

    That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.

    The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.

    Abandoned due process
    The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.

    The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.

    The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.

    The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.

    No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.

    Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.

    Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.

    Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
    She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.

    Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.

    No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.

    The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.

    Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.

    Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.

    Damaging the fabric of democracy
    This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.

    The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.

    Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.

    The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.

    Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/14/in-the-quest-to-appease-israel-the-media-undermine-our-basic-rights/feed/ 0 513663     Trump’s ‘Riviera’ plan for Gaza heralds an age of naked fascism https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/11/trumps-riviera-plan-for-gaza-heralds-an-age-of-naked-fascism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/11/trumps-riviera-plan-for-gaza-heralds-an-age-of-naked-fascism/#respond Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:58:15 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=110718 COMMENTARY: By Sawsan Madina

    I watched US President Donald Trump’s joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week in utter disbelief. Not that the idea, or indeed the practice, of ethnic cleansing of Palestine is new.

    But at that press conference the mask has fallen. Recently, fascism has been on the march everywhere, but that press conference seemed to herald an age of naked fascism.

    So the Palestinians have just been “unlucky” for decades.

    “Their lives have been made hell.” Thank God for grammar’s indirect speech. Their lives have been made hell. We do not know who made their lives hell. Nothing to see here.

    Trump says of Gaza: “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings — level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area . . . ”

    I wonder who are those lucky “people of the area” he has in mind, once those “unlucky” Palestinians have been “transferred” out of their homeland.

    Trump speaks of transforming Gaza into a magnificent “Riviera of the Middle East”. Obviously, the starved amputees of Gaza do not fit his image of the classy people he wants to see in the Riviera he wants to build, on stolen Palestinian land.

    No ethnic cleansing questions
    After the press conference, I did not hear a single question about ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation or international law.

    Under the new fascist leaders, just like under the old ones, those words have become old-fashioned and are to be expunged from the lexicon.

    The difference has never been more striking between the meek who officially hold the title “journalist” and the brave who actually work to hold the powerful to account.

    Now, more than ever, independent journalists are a threatened species. We should treasure them, support them and protest every attempt to silence them.

    Gaza is now the prototype. We can forget international laws and international organisations. We have the bombs. You do as we wish or you will be obliterated.

    Who now dares say that the forced transfer of a population by an occupying power is a war crime under the Geneva Convention? But then again, Trump and Netanyahu are not really talking about “forced transfer”. They are talking about “voluntary transfer”.

    Once the remaining Israeli hostages have been freed, and water and food have been cut off again, those unlucky Palestinians will climb voluntarily onto the buses waiting to transport them to happiness and prosperity in Egypt and Jordan.

    Or to whatever other client state Trump manages to threaten or bribe.

    Can the International Criminal Court (ICC) command a shred of respect when Netanyahu is sharing the podium with Trump? Or indeed when Trump is at the podium?

    Dismantling the international order
    Recently, fascist leaders have been dismantling the international order by accusing its organisations and officials of being “antisemitic” or “working with terrorists”. Tomorrow they will defund and delegitimise these organisations without the need for an excuse.

    I listen to Trump speak of combatting antisemitism and deporting Hamas sympathisers and I hear, “We will combat anti-Israel views and we will deport those who protest Israel’s crimes.

    “And we will continue to conflate antisemitism and anti-Israel’s views in order to silence pro-Palestinian voices.”

    I watch Trump and Netanyahu, the former reading the thoughts of a real estate developer turned into a president’s speech and the latter grinning like a Cheshire cat — and I am gripped by fear. Not just for the Palestinians, but for all humanity.

    If we think fascism is only coming for people on a distant shore, we ought to think again.

    I watch Netanyahu repeating lies that investigative journalists have spent months debunking. Why would he care? The truth about his lies will not make it to mainstream media and the consciousness of the majority of people.

    Lies taking hold, enduring
    And the more he repeats those lies, the more they take hold and endure.

    I wonder how our political leaders will spin our allies’ new, illegal and immoral plans. For years, they have clung to the mantra of the two-state solution while Israel continued to make every effort to render this solution unfeasible.

    What will they say now? With what weasel words will they stay on the same page as our friends in the US and Israel?

    Netanyhu praises Trump for thinking outside the box. Here is an idea that Israel has spent billions on arms and propaganda to persuade people that it is dangerously outside the box.

    Instead of asking Egypt and Jordan to take the Palestinians, why not make Israel end the occupation and give Palestinians equal rights in their own homeland?

    Sawsan Madina is former head of Australia’s SBS Television. This article was first published by John Menadue’s public policy journal Pearls and Irritations and is republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/11/trumps-riviera-plan-for-gaza-heralds-an-age-of-naked-fascism/feed/ 0 513223     DeepSeek’s censorship exposed: A multilingual investigation | Radio Free Asia (RFA) #china https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/31/deepseeks-censorship-exposed-a-multilingual-investigation-radio-free-asia-rfa-china/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/31/deepseeks-censorship-exposed-a-multilingual-investigation-radio-free-asia-rfa-china/#respond Fri, 31 Jan 2025 19:10:15 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=6017ced898aceeed26233d438da12104
    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/31/deepseeks-censorship-exposed-a-multilingual-investigation-radio-free-asia-rfa-china/feed/ 0 511852     DeepSeek’s censorship exposed: A multilingual investigation | Radio Free Asia (RFA) https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/31/deepseeks-censorship-exposed-a-multilingual-investigation-radio-free-asia-rfa/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/31/deepseeks-censorship-exposed-a-multilingual-investigation-radio-free-asia-rfa/#respond Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:10:38 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=c7195bf6e765eb13023c8d4e8310cf21
    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/31/deepseeks-censorship-exposed-a-multilingual-investigation-radio-free-asia-rfa/feed/ 0 511797     Journalists covering eastern DRC conflict face death threats, censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/30/journalists-covering-eastern-drc-conflict-face-death-threats-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/30/journalists-covering-eastern-drc-conflict-face-death-threats-censorship/#respond Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:49:04 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=449704 The M23 rebel group’s assault on the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern city of Goma has brought familiar dangers for Congolese journalists, who for years have navigated intimidation and attacks from government and armed groups in the country’s restive, mineral-rich east.

    Advances by the M23, which United Nations experts say is supported by the Rwandan military — charges Rwanda has denied — in combat against DRC government forces, have intensified authorities’ efforts to control reporting about the conflict.

    DRC ministers have accused journalists of supporting terrorism for reporting on rebel advances, suspended the Qatari-based Al Jazeera, withdrawn accreditation for the broadcaster’s reporters, and threatened to suspend other media outlets.

    At the same time, journalists in Goma have told CPJ they are concerned for their safety; at least three reporters have received threatening messages. Rights groups have warned that civilians are at heightened risk of violence and called for their protection.

    “The escalation of the long-running conflict in eastern DRC has worsened already harsh conditions for journalists trying to cover the conflict. All parties must prioritize the safety of journalists,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa program. “Sadly, we are seeing death threats against journalists and Congolese authorities pursuing a strategy of censorship similar to that used by other governments to stifle public interest reporting of wars and security concerns.”

    ‘We will finish you’

    Jonas Kasula, a reporter for the private online news site Labeur Info, and Jonathan Mupenda, a correspondent for the private channel Molière TV, told CPJ they had been living in fear since January 9, forced into hiding after they began receiving text messages threatening to kill them. The messages from unknown local numbers, reviewed by CPJ, warned the Goma-based journalists that they were under surveillance.

    The messages specifically referenced their presence in Bweremana, a village about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Goma, where they had gone to cover the fighting. In early January, Kasula had published a report about the government-aligned Wazalendo militia’s resistance to advancing M23 and Rwandan forces. The M23 took control of Bweremana on January 21.

    “On the 31st [of December], you were in Bweremana with your colleague Jonathan, we had all the possibilities to end your lives. But know that we control all your movements and once we arrive in Goma, know that your fate will be sealed,” one message said.

    Separately, Goma-based freelance reporter Daniel Michombero posted a photo of his family on the social media platform X on January 26 and received several threatening replies accusing him of distributing “fake news” and suggesting that he may want to flee to Rwanda with other Congolese refugees or seek protection from the M23 to escape retribution. A reply to a separate post on Thursday, January 30, suggested he be arrested and traded for detained opponents of the government.

    In 2021, Michombero and his wife were attacked in their home by men in military uniforms after he reported on local criticism of authorities’ response to a volcanic eruption near Goma.

    ‘Terrorists have no right to speak’

    The DRC government has also threatened the press for reporting on the escalating conflict. 

    In a January 7 post on X, Christian Bosembe, president of the regulatory Higher Council for Audiovisual and Communication (CSAC), threatened to suspend French news outlets Radio France Internationale (RFI), France 24, and TV5Monde’s Africa program for reporting the “alleged advances of terrorists.”

    “We respect freedom of expression and information, but we firmly condemn any apology for terrorism. Terrorists have no right to speak in our country,” he said.

    Similarly, when government forces recaptured territory a few days later, justice minister Constant Mutamba congratulated them on X, while warning that anyone, including journalists, who “relays the activities” of the M23 and Rwandan forces “will now suffer the full force of the law (DEATH PENALTY.)” The DRC lifted a 21-year moratorium on executions in 2024.

    On January 9, following the airing of an Al Jazeera interview with M23 leader Bertrand Bisimwa, DRC communications minister Patrick Muyaya told a news conference that media accreditation for Al Jazeera journalists had been withdrawn because of their interview with the “head of a terrorist movement,” which he likened to an “apology for terrorism” that was “totally unacceptable.”

    “We are in a context of crisis and everyone must understand because we can even consider more radical measures,” he warned the assembled journalists.

    On January 13, the regulator suspended Al Jazeera for 90 days for the interview, which it said “destabilized institutions of the republic.”

    Controlling the narrative

    Congolese authorities’ tactics echo those used by governments across the world, from Russia to the Sahel, seeking to control information about conflict in their territory. During the Israel-Gaza war, Al Jazeera was banned in Israel and the occupied West Bank by authorities, citing incitement and security concerns.

    In 2022, Mali’s military government suspended RFI and France 24 because on the grounds that they published “false allegations” of abuses by Mali’s army, while authorities in Burkina Faso have suspended several outlets over their coverage of the country’s military and security situation.

    In December, Niger’s military government suspended the British public broadcaster BBC for undermining troop morale and announced its intention to file a complaint against RFI following the outlets’ reporting on jihadist attacks.

    CPJ’s text message requesting comment from M23 spokesperson Lawrence Kanyuka, calls to Muyaya, and message to Al Jazeera via its website did not receive any responses.  


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Africa Program Staff.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/30/journalists-covering-eastern-drc-conflict-face-death-threats-censorship/feed/ 0 511709     Trump’s ‘free speech’ vision comes at expense of press freedom https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/26/trumps-free-speech-vision-comes-at-expense-of-press-freedom/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/26/trumps-free-speech-vision-comes-at-expense-of-press-freedom/#respond Sun, 26 Jan 2025 12:54:00 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=110070 Pacific Media Watch

    Among his first official acts on returning to the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship”.

    Implicit in this vaguely written document: the United States is done fighting mis- and disinformation online, reports the Paris-based global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

    Meanwhile, far from living up to the letter or spirit of his own order, Trump is fighting battles against the American news media on multiple fronts and has pardoned at least 13 individuals convicted or charged for attacking journalists in the 6 January 2021 insurrection.

    An RSF statement strongly refutes Trump’s “distorted vision of free speech, which is inherently detrimental to press freedom”.

    Trump has long been one of social media’s most prevalent spreaders of false information, and his executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” is the latest in a series of victories for the propagators of disinformation online.

    Bowing to pressure from Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta platforms are already hostile to journalism, did away with fact-checking on Facebook, which the tech mogul falsely equated to censorship while throwing fact-checking journalists under the bus.

    Trump ally Elon Musk also dismantled the meagre trust and safety safeguards in place when he took over Twitter and proceeded to arbitrarily ban journalists who were critical of him from the site.

    ‘Free speech’ isn’t ‘free of facts’
    “Free speech doesn’t mean public discourse has to be free of facts. Donald Trump and his Big Tech cronies like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are dismantling what few guardrails the internet had to protect the integrity of information,” said RSF’s USA executive director Clayton Weimers.

    “We cannot ignore the irony of Trump appointing himself the chief crusader for ‘free speech’ while he continues to personally attack press freedom — a pillar of the First Amendment — and has vowed to weaponise the federal government against expression he doesn’t like.

    “If Trump means what he says in his own executive order, he could start by dropping his lawsuits against news organisations.”

    Trump recently settled a lawsuit out of court with ABC News parent company Disney, but is still suing the Des Moines Register and its parent company Gannett for publishing a poll unfavourable to his campaign, and the Pulitzer Center board for awarding coverage of his 2016 campaign’s alleged ties with Russia.

    Trump should immediately drop both lawsuits and refrain from launching others while in office.

    After a campaign where he attacked the press on a daily basis, Trump has continued to berate the media and dismissed its legitimacy to critique him.

    During a press conference the day after he took office, Trump reproached NBC reporter Peter Alexander for questions about Trump’s blanket pardons of the January 6th riot participants, saying, “Just look at the numbers on the election.

    “We won this election in a landslide, because the American public is tired of people like you that are just one-sided, horrible people, in terms of crime.”

    An incoherent press freedom policy
    The executive order also flies in the face of his violent rhetoric against journalists.

    The order asserts that during the Biden administration, “the Federal government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

    It goes on to state, “It is the policy of the United States to ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

    This stated policy, laudable in a vacuum, even if made redundant by the First Amendment, is rendered meaningless by Trump’s explicit threats to weaponise the government against the media, which have recently included threats to revoke broadcast licenses in political retaliation, investigate news organizations that criticise him, and jail journalists who refuse to expose confidential sources.

    Instead, the policy appears designed to amplify disinformation, which benefits a President of the United States who has proven willing to spread disinformation that furthered his political interests on matters small and large.

    “If Trump is serious about his stated commitment to free speech, RSF suggests he begin by ensuring his own actions serve to protect the free press, rather than censoring or punishing media outlets,” the watchdog said.

    “The United States has seen a steady decline in its press freedom ranking in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index over the past decade to a current ranking of 55th out of 180 countries, with presidents from both parties presiding over this backslide.

    “While Trump is not entirely responsible for the present situation, his frequent attacks on the news media have no doubt contributed to the decline in trust in the media, which has been driven partly by partisan attitudes towards journalism.

    “Trump’s violent rhetoric can also contribute to real-life violence — assaults on journalists nearly doubled in 2024, when his campaign was at its apex, compared to 2023.”

    Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/26/trumps-free-speech-vision-comes-at-expense-of-press-freedom/feed/ 0 511148     Can the Internet Wage Peace? Amidst a Push for War, Chinese and American Citizens Connect Online https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/18/can-the-internet-wage-peace-amidst-a-push-for-war-chinese-and-american-citizens-connect-online/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/18/can-the-internet-wage-peace-amidst-a-push-for-war-chinese-and-american-citizens-connect-online/#respond Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:20:28 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=155510 With the Tiktok ban just days away, American youth have started flooding the Chinese social media app RedNote, pushing it into #1 position on the app store. Labeled “Tiktok refugees” by Chinese netizens, the newcomers have been welcomed by app users with open arms, curiosity, and a fair bit of humor. Though initially confused at […]

    The post Can the Internet Wage Peace? Amidst a Push for War, Chinese and American Citizens Connect Online first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     With the Tiktok ban just days away, American youth have started flooding the Chinese social media app RedNote, pushing it into #1 position on the app store. Labeled “Tiktok refugees” by Chinese netizens, the newcomers have been welcomed by app users with open arms, curiosity, and a fair bit of humor.

    Though initially confused at the sudden influx of English speakers, long-dwelling app users quickly connected the dots and were quick to poke fun at the US government’s accusations of China spying on your typical American citizen.

    The app “Xiaohongshu” directly translates to ‘Little Red Book,” but it has been dubbed RedNote in the United States. Many are quick to think of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong’s famous Little Red Book, though app officials say it isn’t a direct reference. Still, the comedic composition is something to celebrate.

    The Tiktok ban is quite evidently backfiring on the US government. As users snub the ban and move to a real Chinese social media app, spontaneous interactions between US and Chinese citizens are naturally sorting through years and years of anti-China propaganda.

    WAIT! The social credit thing isn’t real??? One user commented, after locals revealed that there is no such thing as a social credit score in China — just one of the many stories the media has falsely fed us.

    The app has ushered in a new wave of cross-cultural learning. Americans have been posting questions like, “How does China feel about Palestine?” and “What does the US government tell us about China that isn’t true?” There’s been comparisons between the US and China health systems (of which China’s is undoubtedly superior) and tours of China’s incredible EVs. The vast number of Americans agree: the US has fallen way behind.

    Not only that, but American citizens cite a new appreciation for China, and the number of people learning Mandarin has grown. Duolingo has already seen a 216% spike. While Chinese citizens have taken it upon themselves to start teaching newcomers common Chinese phrases, Americans simultaneously help local users with their English homework.

    It is more than just cultural exchange, however. This is an unprecedented people-to-people moment, allowing two communities to come together and realize they are more alike than not. Such a realization is desperately needed, and undercuts a rapidly escalating war climate between the US and China.

    Recently, the US approved a $2 billion arms sale to Taiwan, citing potential war with China. In response, China sanctioned numerous US weapons companies for violating the one-China principle and destabilizing the region. War talk isn’t new — the US government has been pushing and planning for it ever since China rose to power in the early 2000s. A natural threat to US global hegemony, our politicians have been plotting the fall of China for decades, spending billions and billions of dollars to militarize the region around China and pushing a narrative of hatred and fear in the media.

    Just this week, China hawk Marco Rubio underwent his Secretary of State confirmation hearing. Due to his push for war against China, he has been travel-sanctioned by the Chinese government for years. Our nation’s top “diplomat” is going to have some trouble conducting diplomacy when he’s unable to even travel to the nation where we need it most. Not that anything Rubio does could ever be considered diplomacy.

    But despite the constant anti-China rhetoric plaguing our politicians and media, new RedNote users appear to be taking a different path:

    The internet is a modern tool not previously available to the people during the great power wars of previous decades. It provides a fresh avenue that can circumvent the weaponization of the media and allow people to easily connect from different sides of the globe.

    Perhaps an app like RedNote is exactly what we need to continue diffusing all the anti-China propaganda attempting to manufacture consent for the next great war. It’s about time the people decide for themselves who they should and shouldn’t be calling “enemy” rather than adhering to the whims of a war-obsessed government.

    The post Can the Internet Wage Peace? Amidst a Push for War, Chinese and American Citizens Connect Online first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Megan Russell.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/18/can-the-internet-wage-peace-amidst-a-push-for-war-chinese-and-american-citizens-connect-online/feed/ 0 510262     They All Are Lord of the Flies Children at Heart https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/15/they-all-are-lord-of-the-flies-children-at-heart/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/15/they-all-are-lord-of-the-flies-children-at-heart/#respond Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:53:17 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140647 forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and deploying this multilayered PSYOPS of direct and covert operations have been brought to us, partially, by the Edward Bernays of the World … now we are here: Fear and Loathing in Our Delusional and Self-Incriminating Selves! (Haeder, May 28, 2023) Trillions for Ukraine. Christ, this is 2019, […]

    The post They All Are Lord of the Flies Children at Heart first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and deploying this multilayered PSYOPS of direct and covert operations have been brought to us, partially, by the Edward Bernays of the World … now we are here: Fear and Loathing in Our Delusional and Self-Incriminating Selves! (Haeder, May 28, 2023)

    Trillions for Ukraine. Christ, this is 2019, from The Nation, not exactly a radical rag : Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine/ Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant. By Lev Golinkin

    ukraine-far-right-rtr-img

    Versus:

    Before the Russian invasion, CIA reports linked him to an oligarch so dirty and so mired in “significant corruption” that the State Department banned him from entering the U.S.

    But now CIA propaganda portrays Zelensky as nobler than Winston Churchill and saintlier than Mother Theresa.

    Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up (source)

    Now now, I know we can’t in PC/PAEC (Politically Approved by Elites Correct) society point out a spade from a diamond. Ahh, even after Nakba 75? Who stopped it, a celebration-remembrance-sadness of that genocide?

    Sorry, but it does matter who controls the levers of power, the narrative, the engines of Press-Propaganda-Entertainment. As well as, politics, marketing, education? Nakba is a lie. You don’t see a pattern here?

    In a statement Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said, “We will fight the ‘Nakba’ lie with full strength and we won’t allow the Palestinians to continue to spread lies and distort history.”

    Ahh, this commemoration, by the UN, of all organizations, is despicable, according to another Jew, and that is a-okay language, no?

    In a recorded statement, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, said that the organization’s decision was “shameful” and would harm any efforts to find a peaceful solution to the generations-old conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people.

    Asking other U.N. representatives to boycott the commemoration, he said, “[A]ttending this despicable event means destroying any chance of peace by adopting the Palestinian narrative calling the establishment of the state of Israel a disaster while ignoring Palestinian hate, incitement, terror and refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.”

    Palestinians react during a rally as they mark the 75th anniversary of Nakba in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank May 15,2023.

    “UN Recognition of Palestinian Displacement Angers Israel” — One headline, and just replace, “…angers Israel” with, “…. angers Christians, Zionists, Israel-Firsters, Members of Congress, Members of the MSM, politicians, AIPAC, etc., et. …”

    Shit, recognition of that Liberty, that United States SHIP, and more poison arrows launched by the Isra-Hellions:

    Shit, that crime memorial is coming up, June 8 = The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War.

    Ahh, can we protest that other anniversary? By virtue of General Assembly Resolution 273, Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949.  In the three years following the 1948 Palestine war , about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands.

    Can we remember June 8 without being smeared?

    For more information on Israel’s crimes, and the USS Liberty, go here: IAK.

    Now transitioning to more racism and bigotry and Big Brother-ism by Jewish leaders, ZioCryptos, and the like, let’s scour the WWW for those attacks on Pink Floyd’s front man: Jews will attack Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, and they will get countless thousands of lies published in countless broken media outfits immediately. Just Google-Gulag search: “Roger Waters and Berlin Fascism.” Hate, pure lies, and the hasbara and powerful Jewish hatred of thinking Rogers is an antisemite!

    Again, a concert, and Israel speaks up.

    Israel’s foreign ministry later criticized Waters on social media, tweeting on May 24: “Good morning to everyone but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”

     

    Roger Waters performs at Berlin concert in a Nazi-style uniform.

    I am sorry to say that the Jewish folk I have been reading about, listening to, and researching throughout my decades, even from day one of college onward, many (not all)  are indeed a clear and present danger to straight-up research and critical thinking. Then, just move over to the fact in my humble opinion, many powerful Jews hate Russia, Russians, and anyone who might dare question the UkroNazi Proxy War with Russia, started, oh, hell, way before 2014.

    Self-proclaimed Jewish criminal, Kolomoyskyi is the dirty banker and the dirty funder of Zelensky:

     

    A picture containing text, person, posing, crowd Description automatically generated

    [Photo: On the left, Zelensky in circle behind Kholomoisky. On the right, Zelensky on the campaign trail is followed by one of Kholomoisky’s bodyguards.]

    But, read this Jewish rag in Isra-Hell, Haaretz | World News/

    “Ukraine Enlists Jewish Leaders to Lobby Israel for Arms”

    Ukraine recently requested air defense systems and training from Israel, saying that Iran would use the deployment of its weapons systems in Europe to refine their capabilities. Still, Israel maintains that it would not send military assistance to Ukraine

    A senior Ukrainian official close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on world Jewry to push Jerusalem to arm his country with defensive weapons on Wednesday, only two days after Moscow warned Israel that supplying military equipment to Ukraine would “destroy the political relations between the two countries.”

    Of course, I am disgusted by any racist group calling on “all Jews worldwide to continue the murder of Russians and Ukrainians in Donbass, and now, throughout Ukraine and into Russia.

    This is merchant of death war mongering, and it has to stop, stop first by beginning to call a Jewish Fascist a Jewish Fascist when you come in contact with him or her or them: Here, more lies, blatant valorizing of a corrupt and criminal man, Zelensky!

    1. The most important Jewish leader in the world (source)

    The past week has turned us all into experts on Ukraine, now at the center of every conversation. Did you know how big it is? (When you lay it over the U.S. map, it stretches from New York to Chicago.) Who knew that we were actually using the Russian city names and not the Ukrainian ones (it’s Kyiv, not Kiev; Lviv, not Lvov; and Kharkiv, not Kharkov). And their president—did you know that he is Jewish?

    Volodymyr Zelensky is probably the most admired Jewish leader the world has to offer right now. Before entering politics in 2018, Zelensky was a popular comedian (and you can’t get any more Jewish than that); he does not often speak about his Jewish identity, but he has never tried to hide it. In a country like Ukraine, which is still struggling with a painful legacy of antisemitism, Zelensky’s Jewishness has always been present.

    For Jews across the world, Zelensky is now a source of pride: a young, inexperienced leader who is putting his life at risk for his people by leading a nation of 40 million people in opposing a ruthless Russian aggressor.

    In his inauguration speech, Zelensky famously told lawmakers not to hang his portrait on their walls. “I do not want my picture in your offices: The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”

    True to form, Zelensky maintained his unassuming, direct style when crisis hit. His video messages, posted several times a day, have been helping reassure the Ukrainian people. He spoke from his office and from the streets of Kyiv, even as Russian troops closed in on the capital, and when the fighting intensified, Zelensky candidly shared with all Ukrainians the fact that he has been marked by the Russians as “target number one” and that his family is “target number two.” But when the U.S. offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to somewhere safer, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

    I’m writing this column on Sunday, as Russian forces, bogged down and weakened by courageous Ukrainians armed with AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, or sometimes just a large pole they picked up on the side of the street, still threaten the capital. Zelensky is leading the effort to save his nation, though most foreign intelligence services still think he’s fighting a losing battle.

    So, this POS war crimes leader, Zelensky, *elensky because the letter “Z” has been outlawed, and Ukraine and Zelensky with the one-two-three punch of US and UK, with their Kill List, you have to imagine that in the USA and Canada and UK and EU and Europe, all brains have been thrown out the window, or the voice of reason has gone where?

    Read Caitlin: “Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This”

    Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.

    The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

    […]

    One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.

    It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

    Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful.

    Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes.

    Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.

    Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so.

    But then, this is another form — of propaganda . . . denial, and denigration and plain ignoring alternative views, even those that are consistent and repeated:

    Grayzone journalists added to Ukraine 'kill list' - YouTube

    Ukraine puts NBC reporter on kill list - YouTube

    But it’s the 74th Anniversary of an illegitimate state, apartheid and ethnic cleansing one albet>  This is how ZioAzovLensky rolls, and even the corrupt CIA-controlled Wikipedia has some facts here on the murderous Jews, Zelenksy’s mother ship, historical grounding, who called themselves Zionists, but I know very few Jews who are not ZIONISTS, overtly or covertly:

    A successful paramilitary campaign was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.

    The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, which was under the control of the officially recognised Jewish leadership of Palestine, remained cooperative with the British. But in 1944 the Irgun, an offshoot of the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule, thus joining Lehi, which had been active against the authorities throughout the war. Both were small, dissident militias of the right-wing Revisionist movement. They attacked police and government targets in response to British immigration restrictions. They intentionally avoided military targets, to ensure that they would not hamper the British war effort against their common enemy, Nazi Germany.

    The armed conflict escalated during the final phase of World War II, when the Irgun declared a revolt in February 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. Starting from the assassination of Baron Moyne by Lehi in 1944, the Haganah actively opposed the Irgun and Lehi, in a period of inter-Jewish fighting known as the Hunting Season, effectively halting the insurrection. However, in autumn 1945, following the end of World War II in both Europe (April–May 1945) and Asia (September, 1945), when it became clear that the British would not permit significant Jewish immigration and had no intention of immediately establishing a Jewish state, the Haganah began a period of co-operation with the other two underground organisations. They jointly formed the Jewish Resistance Movement.

    The Haganah refrained from direct confrontation with British forces, and concentrated its efforts on attacking British immigration control, while Irgun and Lehi attacked military and police targets.[6] The Resistance Movement dissolved amidst recriminations in July 1946, following the King David Hotel bombing. The Irgun and Lehi started acting independently, while the main underground militia, Haganah, continued acting mainly in supporting Jewish immigration. The Haganah again briefly worked to suppress Irgun and Lehi operations, due to the presence of a United Nations investigative committee in Palestine. After the UN Partition Plan resolution was passed on 29 November 1947, the civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs eclipsed the previous tensions of both with the British. However, British and Zionist forces continued to clash throughout the period of the civil war up to the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948.

    Within the United Kingdom there were deep divisions over Palestine policy. Dozens of British soldiers, Jewish militants, and civilians died during the campaigns of insurgency. The conflict led to heightened antisemitism in the United Kingdom. In August 1947, after the hanging of two abducted British sergeants, there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting across the United Kingdom. The conflict caused tensions in the United Kingdom–United States relations.

    Putin and Russians and those of us who actually want Russia to have a safe border, peace, and zero NATO interference, see Zelensky and his Jewish Lords — Kagan Familias, Nuland, Blinken, Yellen, Sherman, Garland, and hundreds of others in the Biden White House and thousands of others in the Military Industrial Expanded (finance, computing, surveillence) Complex and millions more in the world of turning a dollar on death — as the ENEMY. Murderous, conniving, hateful, slick enemies numero uno, those espousing war with China and war with Russia.

    I know Dissident Voice is reluctant to publish voices that might lean toward a Pepe Escobar critique of the Israel Hell unleashed on the world. I get it. But, the fact is violence and terror, those are right up Zelensky’s alley, and this war that UK and USA and Five Eyes and EU have unleashed will not end soon, because Ukraine in the minds of many is Israel 2.0. An added “benefit” for these monsters: Expect those weapons that USA taxpayer footed the bill for to bring down some commercial airlines in a neighborhood near-by soon.

     

    We are a soiled Western Culture, and we have seeded the rest of the world with our feces — high tech, low tech, money, land theft, pollution, exploitation, consumerism, throw-away mentality, sanctions, blood lust, coups, supporting despots, money laundering and gold theft and assets removal. Loans from Hell, and alas, here we are, in a putrid world, a day before the big Monday Holiday, Memorial Day, and we are straddled by syphilitic monsters running the world and our own populous generally marked for death, marked as marks, these, the billionaires, the fleecers and many left and right, Jewish or not, they are Zionists and Israel-Firsters who have sold us down the Ukrainian toilet.

    Israeli newspapers point out the victories?

     

     

    These are THEIR graphics, and by me point these out, I am deplatformed, stopped from teaching, pushed to the excrement posts of publishing my books anywhere

    But leave it to the Paranoid Former Nazis and the disgusting ADL and AIPAC and Mossad loving Israelis to attack us all attacking them:

    Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters says Berlin gig controversy a ‘smear’

    “The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in 1980,” Roger Waters said.

    “I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression where I set it… My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price,” he said.

    “Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.”

    Waters is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of holding anti-Jewish views. He has floated an inflatable pig emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts. The singer denies the anti-Semitism accusations, saying he was protesting against Israeli policies, not Jewish people.

    Ah, those old days, which now would be both considered hate speech and also ground down by the ugly media and the uglier mainstream fools in college, in towns, every where.

    Yep, it is a piece of shit piece of cloth for many, representing so so much death, murder, hate, and racism. Cloth, man, and alas, a symbol, for those who cry crocodile tears when they hear the National Anthem, and then for others, it is the greed and murder and Empire of Chaos-Lies-Terror in every red and white strip, every star and bar:

     

    Demonstrators burn flag in downtown Los Angeles to protest death of George Floyd | The Hill

    This stuff is not allowed on campuses, and not just Guantanamo Desantis’s Florida.

     

    Rizzo Ford | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs | Tumgik

    This is not anti-DIsney, but it is the Dsneyification of the world, and this is the outcome: bones, immolation, worldwide.
    Corporations Kill - Mickey Mouse – Post Modern Vandal
    Old school, but you can’t get college students to analyze this without being charged with a Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT.

    Corporate Murder | thissideofthetruth

    I doubt you can loosely call for the execution of Corporations, CEOs, what have you. Again, Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT on Haeder.
    Top Stories - If Supreme Court Says Corporations have same Rights as Humans, Can they be Charged with Murder? - AllGov - News
    Ahh, if we are the biggest war profiteers, then we’ll be letting China take first place. Yep, that’s the modern college student’s response.
    The biggest war profiteer—US. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
    Ahh, I have been warned that telling my students that I was rapped on the head by cops, in Portland, El Paso, Seattle, and elsewhere, and that protest is dangerous but necessary, and that I would dare use the ACAB as an opening to discuss that Defund the Police Movement — who, what, where, when and WHY — as well as my own work as a police reporter and what I think of cops/pigs, all verbotten! Call SWAT on Haeder.
    ACAB" Poster for Sale by dgorbov | Redbubble
    Hell, you can look this one up in Wikipedia. And babies? 
    Read the transcript: with the reason the poster was made, the soldier who was in the massacre!
    Q. And babies?" "A. And babies." | sodapop
    Oh, no, trigger warnings, vicarious PTSD, verboten.

    Partial transcriptof the Mike Wallace interview with Paul Meadlo in which Meadlo describes his participation in the My Lai massacre:

    Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
    A. Right.
    Q. And you killed how many? At that time?
    A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t – You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.
    Q. Men, women, and children?
    A. Men, women, and children.
    Q. And babies?
    A. And babies.
    Apartheid state': Israel's fears over image in US are coming to pass | Israel | The Guardian
    Ahh, loyalty oaths in how many state legislatures on never saying a bad word about Israel, and no push for boycotting Israeli goods, that’s the power of Jewish Extremism in the USA: But not enough, not enough BDS around the world.  17 BDS resolutions considered and 11 passed at US colleges last year, per ADL report
    Anti Vietnam War Posters - Fine Art America
    It is a well-oiled, well-placed, complex, 3-D kind of chess machine, and it is pure killer, pure killer, and most campuses utilized Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, DoD, BOrder Patrol, CIA, FBI, ATF, MONEY. Some of the nation’s most elite universities are deep into defense lobbying, often hiring Washington-based firms to press Congress and the Pentagon to fund their science projects.

    Asked whether students or professors ever have ethical objections to working on projects funded by the Defense Department, Zuber said that “no professor has to take money from DoD.”

    “We’re a bottom-up organization,” she said. “Professors make those choices.”

    She also said that “if there are students who have a feeling that they don’t want to work on defense-related issues, they certainly don’t have to.” But, she added, “a whole lot seem to want to.”

    Like MIT, the Association of American Universities, an alliance of 62 of the leading research institutions in the United States and Canada, advocates defense research funding.

     

    130130_harvard_university_ap_328.jpg

    [Photo: Universities chase defense dollars]

     

    The end result is that BABIES, kids, NEWBORNES, women, SENIOR citizens, disabled, PATIENTS in hospitals, youth on PLAYGROUNDS, are mudered, and killed, and imploded, so, then, BABY Killers is just a limited sigh — wedding parties, goat herders, and entire families at gravesites, murdered by universities, colleges, think tanks, corporations, marketing firms, law firms, retail services in the EMPLOY of the USA.
    When Vietnam Veterans Were Called Baby Killers And Spit On Upon Returning Home Why Didn't They Hit The People Doing It? Quora | annadesignstuff.com
    This sign? These youth? Their message? Their no war and stop the escalation and disarmament now, ahh, then, of couse, it’s triple bad, since they are free thinkers and align with New York Young Communist League.
    NYStaxtherich.jpg
    The Communist Party's position on Russia's war in Ukraine – People's World

    Hood Communist?

     

     

    So many more organizations working on it, working on it — no more NATO, no more Arms.

    Back to the Jewish thing in Ukraine: And, well, and, who writes the narrative of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of the Jewish Apartheid State supporting the Nazis under Zelensky?

    There is no way in hell you will read this story, objectively, anywhere:

    The Jews are the ones behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and their goal is to create a new Jewish state to replace the failing Zionist project of Israel, Palestinian Islamic scholar Mraweh Nassar has claimed, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

    Nassar, whom MEMRI identified as the secretary-general of the Jerusalem Committee of the International Union of Muslims Scholars, made his claims on March 22 while speaking with Channel 9, an Arabic-language TV station in Turkey that the media watchdog says is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

     

    Now now, Dan Shapiro (New Atlanticist, err, Atlantic Council) wrote this one, and again, it’s the NARRATIVE and the MEDIUM is the MESSAGE driver, and then who gets to tell the stories and how the algorithms benefit the propagandists, shit dog, need we look further?.

    Speaking to reporters this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the future he sees for his country in unusual terms: as “a big Israel.”

    Gone, he said, are hopes for “an absolutely liberal” state—replaced by the likely reality of armed defense forces patrolling movie theaters and supermarkets. “I’m confident that our security will be the number-one issue over the next ten years,” Zelenskyy added.

    With Russian forces having withdrawn from around Kyiv, suggesting that Ukraine successfully repulsed the first phase of the Kremlin’s invasion, the time is right for Zelenskyy to contemplate how to prepare for the next—and potentially much longer—phase of this conflict.

    But what does he mean by “a big Israel”? With a population more than four times smaller, and vastly less territory, the Jewish state might not seem like the most fitting comparison. Yet consider the regional security threats it faces, as well as its highly mobilized population: The two embattled countries share more than you might think.

    So if Zelenskyy really does have Israel in mind as a model for Ukraine, here are some of the key features he might consider for adoption (some of which are already applicable today):

    • Security first: Every Israeli government promises, first and foremost, that it will deliver security—and knows it will be judged on this pledge. Ordinary citizens, not just politicians, pay close attention to security threats—both from across borders and from internal sources— and much of the public chooses who to elect by that metric alone.

    • The whole population plays a role: The Israeli model goes further than Zelenskyy’s vision of security services deployed to civilian spaces: Most young Israeli adults serve in the military, and many are employed in security-related professions following their service. A common purpose unites the citizenry, making them ready to endure shared sacrific

    I ask, “Will one vapid bought-and-brainwashed media person get on with some rejiggering their knowledge:

    Here, over at Dissident Voice: “Journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Crimea” by Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling / May 25th, 2023

    The post They All Are Lord of the Flies Children at Heart first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/15/they-all-are-lord-of-the-flies-children-at-heart/feed/ 0 509783     An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the world’s fact-checkers – nine years later https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/10/an-open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg-from-the-worlds-fact-checkers-nine-years-later/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/10/an-open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg-from-the-worlds-fact-checkers-nine-years-later/#respond Fri, 10 Jan 2025 03:37:30 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=109207
    An open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in response to the social media giant’s decision to abandon its fact-checking regime protection in the US against hoaxes and conspiracy theories. No New Zealand fact-checkers are on the list of signatories.
    International Fact-Checking Network

    Dear Mr Zuckerberg,

    Nine years ago, we wrote to you about the real-world harms caused by false information on Facebook. In response, Meta created a fact-checking programme that helped protect millions of users from hoaxes and conspiracy theories. This week, you announced you’re ending that programme in the United States because of concerns about “too much censorship” — a decision that threatens to undo nearly a decade of progress in promoting accurate information online.

    The programme that launched in 2016 was a strong step forward in encouraging factual accuracy online. It helped people have a positive experience on Facebook, Instagram and Threads by reducing the spread of false and misleading information in their feeds.

    We believe — and data shows — most people on social media are looking for reliable information to make decisions about their lives and to have good interactions with friends and family. Informing users about false information in order to slow its spread, without censoring, was the goal.

    Fact-checkers strongly support freedom of expression, and we’ve said that repeatedly and formally in last year’s Sarajevo statement. The freedom to say why something is not true is also free speech.

    But you say the programme has become “a tool to censor,” and that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.” This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record.

    Meta required all fact-checking partners to meet strict nonpartisanship standards through verification by the International Fact-Checking Network. This meant no affiliations with political parties or candidates, no policy advocacy, and an unwavering commitment to objectivity and transparency.

    Each news organisation undergoes rigorous annual verification, including independent assessment and peer review. Far from questioning these standards, Meta has consistently praised their rigour and effectiveness. Just a year ago, Meta extended the programme to Threads.

    Fact-checkers blamed and harassed
    Your comments suggest fact-checkers were responsible for censorship, even though Meta never gave fact-checkers the ability or the authority to remove content or accounts. People online have often blamed and harassed fact-checkers for Meta’s actions. Your recent comments will no doubt fuel those perceptions.

    But the reality is that Meta staff decided on how content found to be false by fact-checkers should be downranked or labeled. Several fact-checkers over the years have suggested to Meta how it could improve this labeling to be less intrusive and avoid even the appearance of censorship, but Meta never acted on those suggestions.

    Additionally, Meta exempted politicians and political candidates from fact-checking as a precautionary measure, even when they spread known falsehoods. Fact-checkers, meanwhile, said that politicians should be fact-checked like anyone else.

    Over the years, Meta provided only limited information on the programme’s results, even though fact-checkers and independent researchers asked again and again for more data. But from what we could tell, the programme was effective. Research indicated fact-check labels reduced belief in and sharing of false information.  And in your own testimony to Congress, you boasted about Meta’s “industry-leading fact-checking programme.”

    You said that you plan to start a Community Notes programme similar to that of X. We do not believe that this type of programme will result in a positive user experience, as X has demonstrated.

    Research shows that many Community Notes never get displayed, because they depend on widespread political consensus rather than on standards and evidence for accuracy. Even so, there is no reason Community Notes couldn’t co-exist with the third-party fact-checking programme; they are not mutually exclusive.

    A Community Notes model that works in collaboration with professional fact-checking would have strong potential as a new model for promoting accurate information. The need for this is great: If people believe social media platforms are full of scams and hoaxes, they won’t want to spend time there or do business on them.

    Political context in US
    That brings us to the political context in the United States. Your announcement’s timing came after President-elect Donald Trump’s election certification and as part of a broader response from the tech industry to the incoming administration. Mr Trump himself said your announcement was “probably” in response to threats he’s made against you.

    Some of the journalists that are part of our fact-checking community have experienced similar threats from governments in the countries where they work, so we understand how hard it is to resist this pressure.

    The plan to end the fact-checking programme in 2025 applies only to the United States, for now. But Meta has similar programmes in more than 100 countries that are all highly diverse, at different stages of democracy and development. Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the programme worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places.

    This moment underlines the need for more funding for public service journalism. Fact-checking is essential to maintaining shared realities and evidence-based discussion, both in the United States and globally. The philanthropic sector has an opportunity to increase its investment in journalism at a critical time.

    Most importantly, we believe the decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme is a step backward for those who want to see an internet that prioritises accurate and trustworthy information. We hope that somehow we can make up this ground in the years to come.

    We remain ready to work again with Meta, or any other technology platform that is interested in engaging fact-checking as a tool to give people the information they need to make informed decisions about their daily lives.

    Access to truth fuels freedom of speech, empowering communities to align their choices with their values. As journalists, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the freedom of the press, ensuring that the pursuit of truth endures as a cornerstone of democracy.

    Respectfully,

    15min – Lithuania

    AAP FactCheck – Australia

    AFP – France

    AkhbarMeter Media Observatory – Egypt

    Animal Político-El Sabueso – México

    Annie Lab – Hong Kong SAR

    Aos Fatos – Brazil

    Beam Reports – Sudan

    Check Your Fact – United States of America

    Chequeado – Argentina

    Civilnet.am – Armenia

    Colombiacheck – Colombia

    Congo Check : Congo, Congo DR, Central African Rep

    Doğruluk Payı – Türkiye

    Dubawa – Nigeria

    Ecuador Chequea – Ecuador

    Ellinika Hoaxes – Greece

    Estadão Verifica – Brazil

    Fact-Check Cyprus – Cyprus

    FactCheck.org – United States of America

    FactCheckNI – Northern Ireland

    Factcheck.Vlaanderen – Belgium

    Factchequeado – United States of America

    FactReview – Greece

    Factnameh – Iran

    Faktisk.no – Norway

    Faktograf – Croatia

    Fatabyyano – Jordan

    Full Fact – United Kingdom

    Greece Fact Check – Greece

    Gwara Media – Ukraine

    Internews Kosova KALLXO – Kosovo

    Istinomer – Serbia

    Källkritikbyrån – Sweden

    La Silla Vacía – Colombia

    Lead Stories – United States of America

    Les Surligneurs – France

    Lupa – Brazil

    Mafindo – Indonesia

    Mala Espina – Chile

    MediaWise – United States of America

    Myth Detector – Georgia

    Newtral – Spain

    Observador – Portugal

    Open – Italy

    Pagella Politica / Facta news – Italy

    Polígrafo – Portugal

    PolitiFact – United States

    Pravda – Poland

    PressOne.PH – Philippines

    RMIT Lookout – Australia

    Snopes – United States of America

    Taiwan FactCheck Center – Taiwan

    Tech4Peace – Iraq

    The Journal FactCheck – Ireland

    The Logical Indian – India

    VERA Files – Philippines

    Verify – Syria

    Editor: Fact-checking organisations continue to sign this letter, and the list is being updated as they do. No New Zealand fact-checking service has been added to the list so far.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/10/an-open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg-from-the-worlds-fact-checkers-nine-years-later/feed/ 0 509057     FCC commissioner accuses media ratings provider of censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/08/fcc-commissioner-accuses-media-ratings-provider-of-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/08/fcc-commissioner-accuses-media-ratings-provider-of-censorship/#respond Wed, 08 Jan 2025 14:34:58 +0000 https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/fcc-commissioner-accuses-media-ratings-provider-of-censorship/

    FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr accused private company NewsGuard, which uses journalistic methods to generate reliability ratings of media outlets, of participating in a “censorship cartel” in a Nov. 13, 2024, letter to four tech companies.

    Carr accused NewsGuard of targeting and censoring certain outlets by giving them low credibility ratings and allowing bias to shape its ratings.

    In the letter to the heads of Microsoft, Apple, Meta — which owns Facebook and Instagram — and Alphabet — which owns Google — Carr demanded lists of every product or service that relies on NewsGuard, information he said would “inform the FCC’s work to promote free speech and a diversity of viewpoints.”

    Carr posted the letter on X, writing, “The Orwellian named NewsGuard along with ‘fact checking’ groups & ad agencies helped enforce one-sided narratives.”

    According to NewsGuard’s website, it employs “a team of journalists and experienced editors” to produce reliability ratings for online publishers using “journalistic criteria.” In a statement responding to Carr’s letter, the company argued that the commissioner’s accusations were based on “false reports,” including from conservative outlet Newsmax, which NewsGuard has given a low credibility rating.

    “Our journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment,” NewsGuard stated. “We’re concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly after having been misled by Newsmax, to attempt to prevent a private company (NewsGuard) from producing journalistic content.”

    When reached for comment about NewsGuard’s statement, Carr told The Washington Post, “NewsGuard’s response is a jumble of disinformation, deception and sleight of hand. In other words, it mirrors NewsGuard’s business model, in my opinion.”

    Carr seems to be attempting to punish the company “for doing journalism,” NewsGuard Co-Editor-in-Chief Steven Brill told Deadline. “It’s like saying I am going to penalize Consumer Reports because it’s giving people information when they are looking to buy a toaster.”

    Carr was appointed to the FCC in 2017 by President Donald Trump. On Nov. 17, 2024, after winning reelection, Trump announced that he had selected Carr as FCC chair, calling him “a warrior for Free Speech.”

    Carr has supported Trump’s calls for NBC, CBS and ABC to lose their broadcast licenses over their alleged mistreatment of him, NPR reported.


    This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/08/fcc-commissioner-accuses-media-ratings-provider-of-censorship/feed/ 0 508825     WaPo Kills Cartoon That Mocked the Boss—and Trump https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/07/wapo-kills-cartoon-that-mocked-the-boss-and-trump/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/07/wapo-kills-cartoon-that-mocked-the-boss-and-trump/#respond Tue, 07 Jan 2025 20:51:58 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9043645  

    Rough draft of Anne Telnaes cartoon showing Jeff Bezos and other billionaires paying homage to Trump.

    The cartoon that was rejected by the Washington Post, definitely not because it portrayed Post owner Jeff Bezos in an unflattering light.

    When Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post cartoonist, submitted a draft sketch shortly before Christmas, she must have known she was stirring the pot.

    But after watching a parade of Big Tech CEOs jet down to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage—and millions of dollars—to Trump, a cartoon depicting these groveling billionaires must have seemed natural, even if it included her own boss, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Post since 2013.

    “The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote in a Substack post (1/3/25) announcing her resignation from the Post, where she’s worked since 2008. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”

    Telnaes’ post went further, criticizing media owners like Bezos for abandoning their responsibility to safeguard the free press “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”

    In addition to Bezos, the other billionaires Telnaes depicted bowing before Trump were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

    And lying prostrate beneath these men was Mickey Mouse, Telnaes’ apparent nod to the cowardly $16 million settlement Disney-owned ABC recently offered Trump (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).

    ‘Bias against repetition’ 

    Cartoon depicting the H-1B visa issue putting the first cracks into "MAGA World"

    Somehow the Washington Post running a column by Adam Lashinsky (12/30/24) about MAGA’s internecine battles over H-1B visas didn’t prevent it from publishing a cartoon on the same theme the next day (12/31/24)—or another one the next week (1/4/25).

    The unenviable job of ensuring a thin-skinned Bezos wasn’t embarrassed by a cartoon in his own newspaper fell to Post opinions editor David Shipley. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in a statement justifying his killing of Telnaes’ cartoon:

    My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

    It’s bizarre to argue that a regular cartoonist’s work should be killed because the paper published a column—or even two!—with similar content. Even so, we can only find one recent Post opinion column addressing Bezos’ efforts to curry favor with the president-elect (12/18/24).

    What’s more, a search of the Post’s “latest cartoons” shows the paper has no problem publishing cartoons on the same topic as opinion pieces. Recent examples include Republicans’ difficulties finding a speaker (1/2/25, 1/4/25), Republican infighting over H-1B visas (12/30/24, 12/31/24, 1/4/25) and controversy over Biden’s death penalty commutations (12/23/24, 12/26/24).

    Outside of opinions, the Post has run a few recent stories on the efforts of Big Tech executives, including Bezos, to mollify Trump (12/13/24, 12/19/24, 12/31/24).

    Aside from repetitiveness, deputy opinions editor David Von Drehle offered another reason for spiking Telnaes’ cartoon. “I didn’t think it was a very good cartoon. It seemed pretty ham-handed to me,” Von Drehle told Post media critic Erik Wemple (1/6/25).

    Wemple’s blog post also disclosed that Post executive editor Matt Murray wants the paper to stop covering its own problems. “I did set a policy that broadly we should not cover ourselves,” said Murray, who claimed his change was made weeks ago and wasn’t “specifically tied to the cartoon.”

    Von Drehle’s denigrating comment about Telnaes’ cartoon only appeared in Wemple’s blog, not in a Post news story. In fact, amid the swirling controversy, the Post hasn’t written a single original news story on the spiked cartoon, only running an AP story (1/4/25) on the topic.

    Exodus of talent

    WaPo: The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media

    “It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility,” wrote Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (10/28/24) in a column that did just that.

    Following the rejection of her cartoon, Telnaes resigned, marking just the latest departure from the storied paper.

    “The Post is shedding talent at an unprecedented rate,” observed media journalist Oliver Darcy (Status, 1/6/25), who earlier noted (1/2/25): “Eventually treating employees with little respect has consequences.”

    The growing exodus comes in the wake of Bezos spiking the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in late October—a move he took to curry favor with Trump (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

    Amid the ensuing backlash—in which 300,000 Post readers reportedly canceled their subscriptions—Bezos scapegoated Post reporters for his craven action, claiming their untrustworthiness had forced him to abandon the paper’s longstanding practice of issuing presidential endorsements. “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” was the headline accompanying Bezos’ self-serving op-ed (Washington Post, 10/28/24).

    Ingratiation ratcheted up

    NYT: Jeff Bezos is optimistic about working with a ‘calmer’ Trump

    Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 12/4/24) said he hopes to persuade Donald Trump that the press is “not the enemy”—in part by giving him a $1 million donation.

    After Trump’s win, Bezos ratcheted up his ingratiation, saying Trump has “grown in the past eight years” and is now “calmer.” Bezos also told the New York Times’ Dealbook conference he’s “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term, and hopes to work with him (Washington Post, 12/4/24).

    “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”

    Bezos also trekked down to Mar-a-Lago, gifts in hand—just as Telnaes depicted. In addition to ponying up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration fund, Amazon is also broadcasting the inauguration live on Amazon Prime, an in-kind donation worth another $1 million (BBC, 1/4/25). Meanwhile, Amazon will release a new documentary on Melania Trump, who’s an executive producer of the film; Bezos’ company reportedly paid $40 million for the rights (Puck, 1/7/25).

    Bezos didn’t become the second-richest person alive by prioritizing civic responsibility. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

    Meanwhile at the Post, the paper today “started laying off roughly 4% of its work force” (New York Times, 1/7/25).

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2025/01/07/wapo-kills-cartoon-that-mocked-the-boss-and-trump/feed/ 0 508726     ‘Lone Soldiers’ – new Australian IDF recruits due to arrive in Israel in January https://www.radiofree.org/2024/12/02/lone-soldiers-new-australian-idf-recruits-due-to-arrive-in-israel-in-january/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/12/02/lone-soldiers-new-australian-idf-recruits-due-to-arrive-in-israel-in-january/#respond Mon, 02 Dec 2024 01:52:10 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=107671 Despite it being illegal in Australia to recruit soldiers for foreign armies, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) recruiters are hard at work enticing young Australians to join Israel’s army. Michael West Media investigates.

    INVESTIGATION: By Yaakov Aharon

    The Israeli war machine is in hyperdrive, and it needs new bodies to throw into the fire. In July, The Department of Home Affairs stated that there were only four Australians who had booked flights to Israel and whom it suspected of intending to join the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

    The Australian Border Force intervened with three of the four but clarified that they did not “necessarily prevent them from leaving”.

    MWM understands a batch of Australian recruits is due to arrive in Israel in January, and this is not the first batch of recruits to receive assistance as IDF soldiers through this Australian programme.

    Many countries encourage certain categories of immigrants and discourage others. However, Israel doesn’t just want Palestinians out and Jews in — they want Jews of fighting age, who will be conscripted shortly after arrival.

    The IDF’s “Lone Soldiers” are soldiers who do not have parents living in Israel. Usually, this means 18-year-old immigrants with basic Hebrew who may never have spent longer than a school camp away from home.

    There are a range of Israeli government programmes, charities, and community centres that support the Lone Soldiers’ integration into society prior to basic training.

    The most robust of these programs is Garin Tzabar, where there are only 90 days between hugging mum and dad goodbye at Sydney Airport and the drill sergeant belting orders in a foreign language.

    Garin Tzabar
    The Garin Tzabar website. Image: MWM

    Garin Tzabar
    In 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked Minister for Aliyah [Immigration] and Integration, Tzipi Livni, to significantly increase the number of people in the Garin Tzabar programme.

    The IDF website states that Garin Tzabar “is a unique project, a collaborative venture of the Meitav Unit in the IDF, the Scout movement, the security-social wing of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption, which began in 1991”. (Translated from Hebrew via Google Translate.)

    The Meitav Unit is divided into many different branches, most of which are responsible for overseeing new recruits.

    However, the pride of the Meitav Unit is the branch dedicated to recruiting all the unique population groups that are not subject to the draft (eg. Ultra-Orthodox Jews). This branch is then divided into three further Departments.

    In a 2020 interview, the Head of Meitav’s Tzabar Department, Lieutenant Noam Delgo, referred to herself as someone who “recruits olim chadishim (new immigrants).” She stated:

    “Our main job in the army is to help Garin Tzabar members to recruit . . .  The best thing about Garin Tzabar is the mashakyot (commanders). Every time you wake up in the morning you have two amazing soldiers — really intelligent — with pretty high skills, just managing your whole life, teaching you Hebrew, helping you with all the bureaucratic systems in Israel, getting profiles, seeing doctors and getting those documents, and finishing the whole process.”

    The Garin Tzabar programme specifically advertises for Australian recruits.

    The contact point for Australian recruits is Shoval Magal, the executive director of Garin Tzabar Australia. The registered address is a building shared by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Council of NSW, the community’s peak bodies in the state.

    A post from April 2020 on the IDF website states:

    “Until three months ago, Tali [REDACTED], from Sydney, Australia, and Moises [REDACTED], from Mexico City, were ordinary teenagers. But on December 25, they arrived at their new family here in Israel — the “Garin Tzabar” family, and in a moment, they will become soldiers. In a special project, we accompanied them from the day of admission (to the program) until just before the recruitment.“ (Translated from Hebrew via Google Translate).

    Michael Manhaim was the executive director of Garin Tzabar Australia from 2018 to 2023. He wrote an article, “Becoming a Lone Soldier”,’ for the 2021 annual newsletter of Betar Australia, a Zionist youth group for children. In the article, Manhaim writes:

    “The programme starts with the unique preparation process in Australia.

    . . . It only takes one step; you just need to choose which foot will lead the way. We will be there for the rest.”

    A criminal activity
    MWM is not alleging that any of the parties mentioned in this article have broken the law. It is not a crime if a person chooses to join a foreign army.

    However, S119.7 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 states:

    A person commits an offence if the person recruits, in Australia, another person to serve in any capacity in or with an armed force in a foreign country.

    It is a further offence to facilitate or promote recruitment for a foreign army and to publish recruitment materials. This includes advertising information relating to how a person may serve in a foreign army.

    The maximum penalty for each offence is 10 years.

    Rawan Arraf, executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, said:

    “Unless there has been a specific declaration stating it is not an offence to recruit for the Israel Defence Force, recruitment to a foreign armed force is a criminal offence under Australian law, and the Australian Federal Police should be investigating anyone allegedly involved in recruitment for a foreign armed force.”

    Army needing ‘new flesh’
    If the IDF are to keep the war on Gaza going, they need to fill old suits of body armour with new grunts.

    Reports indicate the death toll within IDF’s ranks is unprecedented — a suicide epidemic is claiming further lives on the home front, and reservists are refusing in droves to return to active duty.

    In October, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid accused Bibi Netanyahu of obscuring the facts of Israel’s casualty rate. Any national security story published in Israel must first be approved by the intelligence unit at the Military Censor.

    “11,000 soldiers were injured and 890 others killed,” Lapid said, without warning and live on air. There are limits to how much we accept the alternative facts”.

    In November 2023, Shoval Magal shared a photo in which she is posing alongside six young Australians, saying, “The participants are eager to have Aliya (immigrate) to Israel, start the programme and join the army”.

    These six recruits are the attendees of just one of several seminars that Magal has organised in Melbourne for the summer 2023 cycle, having also organised separate events across cities in Australia.

    Magal’s June 2024 newsletter said she was “in the advanced stages of the preparation phase in Australia for the August 2024 Garin”. Most recently, in October 2024, she was “getting ready for Garin Tzabar’s 2024 December cycle.”

    Magal’s newsletter for Israeli Scouts in Australia
    Magal’s newsletter for Israeli Scouts in Australia ‘Aliyah Events – November 2024’. Image: MWM

    There are five “Aliyah (Immigration) Events” in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The sponsoring organisations are Garin Tzabar, the Israeli Ministry for Aliyah (Immigration) and Integration, and a who’s who of the Jewish-Australian community.

    The star speaker at each event is Alon Katz, an Australian who joined Garin Tzabar in 2018 and is today a reserve IDF soldier. The second speaker, Colonel Golan Vach, was the subject of two Electronic Intifada investigations alleging that he had invented the 40 burned babies lie on October 7 to create a motive for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.

    If any Australian signed the papers to become an IDF recruit at these events, is someone liable for the offence of recruiting them to a foreign army?

    MWM reached out for comment to Garin Tzabar Australia and the Zionist Federation of Australia to clarify whether the IDF is recruiting in Australia but did not receive a reply.

    Yaakov Aharon is a Jewish-Australian journalist living in Wollongong. He enjoys long walks on Wollongong Beach, unimpeded by Port Kembla smoke fumes and AUKUS submarines. First published by Michael West Media and republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/12/02/lone-soldiers-new-australian-idf-recruits-due-to-arrive-in-israel-in-january/feed/ 0 504291     CPJ, 24 other organizations release report on state censorship in the Americas https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/26/cpj-24-other-organizations-release-report-on-state-censorship-in-the-americas/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/26/cpj-24-other-organizations-release-report-on-state-censorship-in-the-americas/#respond Tue, 26 Nov 2024 20:22:53 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=438203
    Twenty-four civil society organizations working in seven Latin American countries, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, released a November 2024 report titled “Impact of state censorship measures on the right to freedom of expression in the Americas,” which included information provided during the 190th regular session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in July 2024. 

    The press freedom groups work in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Nicaragua. 

    The report named three types of indirect censorship that are evident in the region and are being used to stifle freedom of expression: stigmatization; forms of social control facilitated by new technologies with surveillance capacity; and the judicialization of freedom of expression on matters of public interest.

    The report made several recommendations, including developing a model protocol that addresses the standards established by the Inter-American system regarding the freedom of expression ofpublic officials, the rights and obligations involved, and their impact on state communications and the digital world.

    Read the full report here. 


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/26/cpj-24-other-organizations-release-report-on-state-censorship-in-the-americas/feed/ 0 503655     On eve of UN human rights review, CPJ, 10 others urge Nicaragua to stop persecuting journalists https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/11/on-eve-of-un-human-rights-review-cpj-10-others-urge-nicaragua-to-stop-persecuting-journalists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/11/on-eve-of-un-human-rights-review-cpj-10-others-urge-nicaragua-to-stop-persecuting-journalists/#respond Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:00:00 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=434637 The Committee to Protect Journalists and 10 other journalism and human rights groups sent a letter on Monday, November 11, to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva ahead of its November 13 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Nicaragua’s human rights record.

    The letter is a response to a September report by the State of Nicaragua asserting that there have been no violations of freedom of expression during the U.N. evaluation period (2019-2023). But reports from press freedom and human rights groups and international bodies show that press freedom in the country is nearly nonexistent.

    The coalition of organizations calls on the Nicaraguan government to stop persecuting and criminalizing journalists and other dissenting voices, and urges the UNRHC to support press freedom and adopt measures to protect it.

    Read the letter in English here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/11/on-eve-of-un-human-rights-review-cpj-10-others-urge-nicaragua-to-stop-persecuting-journalists/feed/ 0 501402     End Washington’s New McCarthyism! https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/30/end-washingtons-new-mccarthyism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/30/end-washingtons-new-mccarthyism/#respond Wed, 30 Oct 2024 14:30:48 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=154568 In April, the U.S. House passed H.R. 6408: “An Act To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” It was introduced in the Senate as S. 1436. It sounds benign, but it reaches well beyond any narrowly defined or momentarily intended targets. If enacted into law, […]

    The post End Washington’s New McCarthyism! first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     In April, the U.S. House passed H.R. 6408: “An Act To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” It was introduced in the Senate as S. 1436.

    It sounds benign, but it reaches well beyond any narrowly defined or momentarily intended targets. If enacted into law, it can be used against any non-profit which engages in any issue not favored by whatever Administration is in power in the future.

    The Act details procedures for the Secretary of the Treasury to designate organizations as having provided material support to groups deemed to be terrorist organizations. Section (C) (ii) provides “Opportunity to Cure” procedures.  In addition to this being “guilty until proven innocent,” Section (F) states “ the United States district courts shall have exclusive jurisdiction to review a final determination with respect to an organization’s designation as a terrorist supporting organization.”  Thus, if the Administration wants to silence some voices it can simply do so unless the courts intervene.

    This bill legislates broad Executive authority to suspend normal due process, allowing the Secretary of the Treasury to strip US groups of their non-profit status in a peremptory manner with virtually no limitations, accountability, or meaningful recourse.

    Immediate support for the bill is related to the present crisis in Gaza, but it can be used in any manner in the future.  It also has a three year “look-back” feature, which means the government can designate an organization or country as “terrorist,” and then look back at any non-profit which has donated or supported that organization or country in the last three years.

    The definition of “support” is also vague. If a non-profit calls for a mutual ceasefire and negotiations in Gaza (or any other future conflict), is that support for only one side?  Some in Washington and elsewhere currently frame it that way.

    Here is a sign-on letter opposing the bill, from numerous organizations.

    And there’s a larger context here, provided by a recent Veterans For Peace statement:

    California Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s recent claims that Code Pink and other peace protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza are either Russian or Chinese funded is absurd and insulting, and Veterans For Peace calls on her to withdraw such allegations and apologize. 

     In October of 2023, Pelosi told a group of Code Pink protesters (all of whom were White American women), to “Go back to China where your headquarters is.”  Then in January of 2024, Pelosi said in an interview, “I think…some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere… Some, I think, are connected to Russia. And I say that having looked at this for a long time now, as you know.” 

     When asked whether she thought some pro-Palestinian protests were Russian plants, the responded, “I don’t think they’re plants…I think some financing should be investigated…and I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.”  

     Now that the US has declared Russia and China to be our latest enemies, Pelosi is trying to connect dots that simply aren’t there.

     On August 5, 2023, the New York Times attacked Jodie Evans, Code Pink and other peace groups in an article entitled, “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.”  But if one reads the article carefully, the evidence shows the headline was false. The American tech mogul in question made all his money in America and is donating his American money to American and international peace organizations.

     Following the NYT article, Republican US senator Marco Rubio asked the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into Code Pink and other entities for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Then in November of 2023, ten Republican House members of Congress signed a letter saying that they are ‘deeply concerned’ with Code Pink’s ties to the Communist Party of China and requesting documentation.  

    The federal government has expanded its use of FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) to target Black liberation activists and Chinese Americans working for peace with China.  Examples include the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, where three individuals were charged with acting as foreign agents of Russia based only on normal international exchange and collaboration between peace and justice advocates from different nations, something Veterans For Peace and other organizations often do, as do businesses and trade organizations. It is normal human communication and networking.

    In another example, Boston-area trade unionist Li Tang “Henry” Liang, a Chinese American activist and union member and advocate for peace between the US and China, has also been arrested and indicted under FARA.

    The US has used FARA to repress peace and justice organizers going all the way back to the 1951 prosecution of W.E.B. DuBois and the prosecution of the Cuban Five. From 2018 to 2022, the FBI arrested and prosecuted Chinese American scientists under the “China Initiative.”  Most were found innocent, and the “China Initiative” was finally dropped due to apparent racial profiling.  But Chinese American scientists can still be arrested under other criteria, and there is currently an effort under way in Congress to reinstall the “China Initiative.”

    On September 3, 2024, the Washington Post published an article claiming that the crowds of Chinese Americans who turned out to welcome China’s president Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit were “non-state actors to further China’s political goals overseas,” who had violently attacked Tibetan and Hong Kong anti-China protesters to silence them.  But the Post relied almost exclusively on the Tibetan and Hong Kong protesters’ reports and videos. There is no evidence that the welcomers attended the event intending to create disturbance, and in fact a majority of them were older retired persons with no history of violence or law breaking of any kind. There is more reason to believe the anti-China demonstrators were the ones intending to create negative publicity for propaganda purposes. The Hong Kong protesters included leaders from the Hong Kong Democracy Council, a group with a history of violence during the 2019 Hong Kong riots who were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA offshoot.

    One should also note the establishment looking the other way when violent right wing counter-protesters using weapons physically attack peaceful university  protesters against the Gaza genocide. The police have let the attacks happen, then arrested the peaceful protesters.

    Other recent events have highlighted the increasing suppression of activists and independent voices by imperial authorities, underscoring a troubling trend towards authoritarianism.

    In the US, the FBI raid on former Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter’s home and the intense questioning of Jacob Berger, following his humanitarian mission to Egypt, reveal a similar clampdown on critical voices. Ritter’s home was invaded in a bid to silence his outspoken criticism of US foreign policy, while Berger’s scrutiny highlights the dangerous repercussions for those engaged in humanitarian work abroad.

    Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with these voices, it is imperative to protect their free speech rights if we want to live in an open society where diverse perspectives can be freely expressed and debated.

    These incidents collectively demonstrate an alarming trend of targeting and silencing individuals who challenge power and advocate for the vulnerable and dispossessed. The suppression of these voices not only undermines democratic principles but also threatens the very foundation of free expression and critical engagement. It is crucial to stand in solidarity with those being targeted, defend the freedoms of speech and action, and resist this encroaching wave of authoritarianism we are facing.

    Remember Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous quote about Nazi Germany which began, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…?”

    Today, they come for Black Socialists, then Chinese Americans, then White CODEPINK women, then retired military officers, then peace activists in allied nations, and then for the peace non-profits.

    Either we all stand together, or we will all fall separately.

    END WASHINGTON’S NEW MCCARTHY PERIOD!

    The post End Washington’s New McCarthyism! first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Veterans for Peace.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/30/end-washingtons-new-mccarthyism/feed/ 0 499629     Substack De-Platformed Me With No Explanation https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/30/substack-de-platformed-me-with-no-explanation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/30/substack-de-platformed-me-with-no-explanation/#respond Wed, 30 Oct 2024 14:24:08 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=154571 I posted articles at Substack during April 11 to October 12 of 2024, a total of 202 news-reports and commentaries, during those 184 days, but then Substack removed my password and would not enable me to create a new one. When a reader-comment is posted to one of my articles, I’m no longer able to […]

    The post Substack De-Platformed Me With No Explanation first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     I posted articles at Substack during April 11 to October 12 of 2024, a total of 202 news-reports and commentaries, during those 184 days, but then Substack removed my password and would not enable me to create a new one. When a reader-comment is posted to one of my articles, I’m no longer able to reply to it if I want — I am blocked from doing that. I can’t post any comment there, even to my own article. I’ve received no explanation from Substack, and they provide me no way that I can contact anyone there.

    During that 184-day period, my number of page-views per article during an article’s first week rose from an average of about 10 to an average of about 150. However, I no longer have access even to those counts.

    Perhaps Substack will eliminate the 202 articles that I posted there (like ModernDiplomacy.eu did when an agent of the Deep State threatened that site’s owner to do that and to never again publish anything from me, and he complied). Here they are, so that you can see what they were (while Substack continues to keep them on their site):

    Ever since 6 June 2016, all of my articles are and have been directly posted by me as I do them (and still can be seen) at The Duran.

    Before that, I was posting directly each one of my articles at two sites that various powers-that-be, such as the U.S. Treasury Department, FBI, Google, NewsGuard, and others, used various means to shut down entirely, washingtonsblog.com and rinf.com:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20141015000000*/https://washingtonsblog.com

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200802213732/http://rinf.com/alt-news/

    At various times, more than 40 other sites accepted at least some of my submissions, but the same organizations that terminated washingtonsblog and rinf managed to induce all but a few of those 40+ other publishers to cease publishing anything from me.

    Currently, the only sites that sometimes do publish my submissions to them are:

    lewrockwell.com zuesse

    dehai.org zuesse

    zuesse dissidentvoice

    https://orientalreview.su/author/ez/

    https://robscholtemuseum.nl/category/zuesse/

    https://www.greanvillepost.com/author/historicus/

    zuesse theinteldrop.org

    zuesse southfront

    The post Substack De-Platformed Me With No Explanation first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/30/substack-de-platformed-me-with-no-explanation/feed/ 0 499728     Israel’s War On Journalism: A Censorship Regime https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/27/israels-war-on-journalism-a-censorship-regime/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/27/israels-war-on-journalism-a-censorship-regime/#respond Sun, 27 Oct 2024 04:52:08 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a42b76ac0c99e28362d549de458c095e
    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/27/israels-war-on-journalism-a-censorship-regime/feed/ 0 499296     US Sanctions Shoot Down Sputnik Radio https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/22/us-sanctions-shoot-down-sputnik-radio/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/22/us-sanctions-shoot-down-sputnik-radio/#respond Tue, 22 Oct 2024 22:02:11 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9042648  

    Desk: U.S. sanctions force Sputnik Radio off the air

    A spokesperson for Kansas City’s KCXL defended its former Radio Sputnik programming as “produced in Washington, DC, by American journalists who jumped at the chance to not be told what to report on by big media and big corporations” (Desk, 10/15/24).

    Russian state radio network Radio Sputnik is off the air in the two markets on which it aired in the United States, and the cause of the closure is reportedly US government sanctions.

    The Desk (10/15/24), quoting “one source familiar with the decision to wind down the network,” said “it was directly influenced by the US State Department’s imposition of new sanctions on Russia-backed broadcast outlets last month.”

    “While Sputnik was not specifically named by the State Department,” the Desk reported, the sanctions  did hit Sputnik‘s parent company, a Russian government media agency called Rossiya Segodnya. This “made it difficult to continue leasing time on Washington and Kansas City radio stations where its programming was heard.”

    The State Department (9/13/24) accused Rossiya Segodnya of carrying out “covert influence activities”; earlier (9/4/24), it had named Sputnik itself as well as Rossiya Segodnya as “foreign missions.” Significantly, the executive order under which Rossiya Segodnya was sanctioned extends penalties to the property of anyone who “acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly…any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.”

    ‘Years of criticism’

    VoA: Two US radio stations end Russian-backed 'propaganda' programming

    When Moscow does it, it’s “propaganda”; when Washington does it, it’s the Voice of America (10/16/24).

    US government broadcaster Voice of America (10/16/24) said Sputnik‘s departure comes “after years of criticism that its local [Washington] radio station, WZHF, carries antisemitic content and false information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    The VoA did not offer any evidence of its claims of antisemitism, other than saying Jack Bergman, a Republican congressman from Michigan, “cited a steady stream of antisemitic tropes.” (Critical profiles of Sputnik‘s US programming have not previously charged it with antisemitism–Washington Post, 3/7/22; New York Post, 3/28/22.)

    Sputnik’s departure from US airwaves is sudden but not unexpected. Communications lawyer Arthur Belendiuk, who has represented the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, has been trying to shut down Sputnik via the Federal Communications Commission since February (Radio and Television Business Report, 2/1/24).

    Belendiuk maintains that the network “is in violation of commission rules for broadcasting ‘paid Russian state propaganda’” (Radio and Television Business Report, 10/16/24). He told FAIR that while he understood Sputnik had freedom of speech, he also had a “freedom to petition my government.” Bergman, the Republican congressmember, requested that the FCC take action against Sputnik (Inside Radio, 1/5/24).

    The pressure has been building against the radio network for some time. VoA reported that the National Association of Broadcasters had issued a statement in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling on  “broadcasters to cease carrying any state-sponsored programming with ties to the Russian government or its agents.”

    The Washington Post (3/7/22) also noted:

    In 2017, three Democratic members of Congress sought an investigation into why it was still on the air despite evidence that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at the time, Ajit Pai, declined to take action, saying the First Amendment would bar his agency “from interfering with a broadcast licensee’s choice of programming, even if that programming may be objectionable to many listeners.”

    Chilling effect on speech

    NYT: Playing on Kansas City Radio: Russian Propaganda

    In 2020, the New York Times (2/13/20) called the arrival of Radio Sputnik in Kansas City “an unabashed exploitation of American values and openness.” Those loopholes have subsequently been closed.

    I have been interviewed several times on Sputnik programs about my articles here at FAIR (e.g. By Any Means Necessary, 4/26/23, 5/27/23, 9/27/23). I have objected to much of the network’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which its website still calls a “special operation,” as if it’s gallbladder surgery. But I am open to talking as a source to many forms of media.

    Sanctions that scare broadcasters against carrying Sputnik do carry a chilling effect on speech; if programmers know that a certain kind of content could open them up to government punishment, most are going to steer well clear of that content.

    The feds have made it clear that their punishments are serious. In 2009, New York City small-business owner Javed Iqbal “was sentenced…to nearly six years in prison for assisting terrorists by providing satellite television services to Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar” (New York Times, 4/23/09). This is an outlet that Middle East reporters constantly monitor, as they do with lots of other Middle East media.

    The New York Times (2/13/20) called Sputnik “Russian agitprop,” carrying the message that “that America is damaged goods.” The Kansas City Star editorial board (3/4/22) said that listeners to KCXL, which carried Sputnik programming, were “bombarded with pro-Putin talk” thanks to Sputnik. The paper wondered why such programming was airing in the area. “Money talks,” the board said. “Or maybe we should say rubles.”

    These critiques are hard to argue with, as you’d be hard-pressed to find investigations of the Russian government or its business elite in such media. Government broadcasters, whether it’s VoA or Sputnik, are not meant to be fair and balanced newsrooms, but vehicles to convey official thinking about the news to the rest of the world.

    But Ted Rall, the cartoonist and political commentator who co-hosted the Sputnik show Final Countdown, challenged the idea that Sputnik’s content was government-managed. “We were no one’s dupes,” he wrote in an email to FAIR explaining the end of the network’s airing in the US:

    I have worked in print and broadcast journalism for most of my life in a variety of roles at a wide variety of outlets, and I cannot recall an organization that gave me as much freedom to say whatever I felt like about any topic whatsoever.

    He said that his show offered “an incredibly interesting, intelligent roster of political analysts,” which he believed were on par with “the finest journalists at NPR, the major broadcast networks or anywhere else.”

    ‘Growing wave of threats’

    RFE/RL: Russia Declares RFE/RL An 'Undesirable Organization,' Threatening Prosecution For Reporters, Sources

    The president of the US equivalent of Radio Sputnik said that its operations being shut down in Russia “shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat'” (RFE/RL, (2/20/24). So what does the shutting down of Sputnik show?

    Belendiuk, for his part, called Sputnik’s content “divisive.” That’s a term that could be applied to lots of US radio content, like right-wing talk shows and religious broadcasting that consigns nonbelievers to Hell. The FCC’s Fairness Doctrine has been gone for a while (Extra!, 1–2/05; Washington Post, 2/4/21). At FAIR,we have long documented that US corporate media serve a propaganda function for the US government, much of it false or deceptive.

    But when official enemy states treat US-owned outlets the way the US is treating Russia’s, that’s considered an assault on a free press. When the US’s anti-Russia broadcaster, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (2/20/24), was put on a government watch list that “effectively bans RFE/RL from working in Russia and exposes anyone who cooperates with the outlet to potential prosecution,” the outlet reported that its president, Stephen Capus, responded that “the move shows that Moscow considers independent reporting to be ‘an existential threat.'”

    And when Russia barred a VoA reporter from entering the country, the CEO of the government agency that runs both VoA and RFE/RL, Amanda Bennett, told VoA (3/14/24):

    The Russian government’s decision to ban VoA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin from its country echoes a growing wave of threats to press freedom by authoritarian regimes.

    That’s heavy stuff, but ultimately the US is doing the same thing. In the case of Sputnik, sanctions seemed to have crushed the network. RT America fell without overt government pressure, as it shut down its operations after “DirecTV, the largest US satellite TV operator, stopped carrying RT America…a decision based on Russia’s attack on Ukraine” (CNBC, 3/3/22).

    And the US State Department (1/20/22) said:

    RT and Sputnik’s role as disinformation and propaganda outlets is most obvious when they report on issues of political importance to the Kremlin. A prevalent example is Russia’s use of RT and Sputnik to attempt to change public opinions about Ukraine in Europe, the United States, and as far away as Latin America. When factual reporting on major foreign policy priorities is not favorable, Russia uses state-funded international media outlets to inject pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda into the information environment.

    Harsh, but again, this is what state broadcasters have been doing for decades, and if we as Americans dislike American outlets being blocked abroad, then we are, at this point, getting a taste of our own medicine.

    ‘Begin with the least popular victim’

    Axios: U.S. press freedoms fall to new low

    Reporters Without Borders dropped the US’s press freedom ranking in 2024, “thanks in part to consolidation that has gutted local news and forced corporations to prioritize profits over public service” (Axios, 5/7/24).

    Actions like the moves against Sputnik are troubling, and not just as another sign of a roiling new Cold War. While the US prides itself on being a model of free expression, journalists here have been concerned for some time now about the nation’s decline in press freedom (Axios, 5/7/24; FAIR.org, 3/16/21).

    “In this situation, journalists should be absolutely terrified that the US government will come after them next,” Rall said. “President Biden unilaterally killed a media outlet with the stroke of a pen. Yes, it’s a foreign outlet, but the First Amendment is supposed to protect those.”

    For FAIR, the action against Sputnik seems no less dangerous than local government attempts to silence even small domestic outlets like the Marion County Record (FAIR.org, 8/14/23) and the Asheville Blade (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). For example, the New York Times (10/21/24) recently fretted that former President Donald Trump’s statement that “CBS should lose its license” was a sign that if he is elected, he would pressure the FCC to revoke licenses of major network affiliate stations. The recent news about Sputnik makes that idea far more possible.

    Rall added that he didn’t believe that the US government would stop after taking action against Russian outlets.

    “Any effort at censorship is going to begin with the least popular victim and then creep and spread after that,” he said.

     


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/22/us-sanctions-shoot-down-sputnik-radio/feed/ 0 498676     Macron’s Arms Embargo on Israel Crumbles Under Scrutiny https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/12/macrons-arms-embargo-on-israel-crumbles-under-scrutiny/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/12/macrons-arms-embargo-on-israel-crumbles-under-scrutiny/#respond Sat, 12 Oct 2024 16:59:05 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=154163 Emmanuel Macron and the macaron have many similarities. Both the French President and the French dessert are airy and insubstantial and are loved by the rich elite. For these reasons, it was a surprise to many when Macron announced his support for an end to arms deliveries to the Israeli terrorist regime. For a neoliberal […]

    The post Macron’s Arms Embargo on Israel Crumbles Under Scrutiny first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Emmanuel Macron and the macaron have many similarities. Both the French President and the French dessert are airy and insubstantial and are loved by the rich elite. For these reasons, it was a surprise to many when Macron announced his support for an end to arms deliveries to the Israeli terrorist regime. For a neoliberal following in the footsteps of interventionists such as George Bush and Tony Blair, such a declaration is nigh unthinkable. Not even Vice-President Kamala Harris, a nominal progressive, has called for an arms embargo. In fact, Harris has made it emphatically that she does not support any restraint when it comes to arms sales to Israel. Why then would a politician like Emmanuel Macron support such a position?

    Well, it seems that George Bush and Tony Blair are only secondary influences on Macron whose true playbook seems to be derived from that of Italian philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli is famous for his quote “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception”, and Macron seems to have taken this to heart with his finger always in the proverbial “wind” of politics. But what would cause Macron to adopt this position in particular? Should we believe him when he says that he wants to “avoid the escalation of tensions, protect civilian populations, free the hostages and find political solutions”?

    Up until this recent declaration, Emmanuel Macron has been anything but a friend to the people of occupied Palestine. From condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism in the presence of Bibi Netanyahu, Macron has been staunchly pro-Israel his entire political career. Macron has not just actively voiced his opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict; he has also worked to crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. In one such Orwellian maneuver, France under macron’s leadership banned all pro-Palestinian protests.

    Obviously, the French Left and, frankly, all supporters of free speech, were horrified by this despicable directive and the many other disastrous decisions carried out by the French government under Macron. Unsurprisingly, in the most recent French election, the people of France, both left-wing and right-wing, seemed to agree that Macronism should be tossed onto the trash heap of history. As a result, Macron’s party, Ensemble, suffered a historic defeat at the hands of the New Popular Front and the National Rally with the New Popular Front (NPF) faring the best out of the three. According to the Intercept, one of the factors contributing to this victory for the NPF was the coalition’s support for Palestine.

    Macron’s strategy of pandering to the Right by fear mongering about the “radial Left” clearly did not contribute to positive electoral success. According to CNBC, “Without the left vote in favor of Macron against Le Pen in 2022 and 2017, he would not be president, and he never really tried to do something together in the end with the people who made him president”. Macron failed because he counted on the Left to bend to his every whim. He did not confront the real possibility of the Left being able to stand alone, but the Left realized that they simply did not need Macron to defeat the Right. Everyone has heard the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and this seems to be the case with Emmanuel Macron. It is obvious that he truly does not care about the Palestinian people, yet he is willing to say what he believes will help him electorally including declaring his support for an arms embargo on Israel.

    Nevertheless, Macron likely has other strategic reasons for this shift as well. Under Macron, France has done its best to maintain good relations with Western and non-Western powers alike. A recent example of this was the 2024 China-France summit which saw Macron pursuing, as some described, as strategic autonomy from the United States. Likewise, Macron has supported a hypothetical Ukraine-Russia cease-fire deal because he realizes that, according to Responsible Statecraft, “The vast majority of the electorate is clearly opposed to sending troops to Ukraine… Macron will be unwilling to risk hundreds of French lives for such a distant war nobody wants”.

    Macron’s foreign policy strategy of realpolitik is all about appeasement. Macron believes that he must appease both the United States and the international community alike which is clearly opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza per the recent UN vote of 124 to 14 in favor of demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Similarly, Macron believes that in order for his centrist party to remain in power he must placate both the French political Left and Right. Unfortunately for Macron, this strategy of fence-sitting has led to failure both electorally and geopolitically and will, naturally, continue to fail in the future.

    Macron’s sudden shift in favor of an arms embargo is part of a greater political wager, which the French President believes will pay dividends in terms of international relevance and domestic support. His statement is inherently elitist and predicated on the idea that the French people are of low intelligence and will forget his history of support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For now, Macron’s dubious promises of peace and restraint are as insubstantial as the airy, delicate macarons his out-of-touch supporters so adore. And just like the dessert, they crumble easily under pressure, revealing the emptiness inside.

    The post Macron’s Arms Embargo on Israel Crumbles Under Scrutiny first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.D. Hester.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/12/macrons-arms-embargo-on-israel-crumbles-under-scrutiny/feed/ 0 497411     Disinformation Isn’t the Problem: Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/disinformation-isnt-the-problem-government-coverups-and-censorship-are-the-problem/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/disinformation-isnt-the-problem-government-coverups-and-censorship-are-the-problem/#respond Wed, 09 Oct 2024 14:00:37 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=154079 What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a […]

    The post Disinformation Isn’t the Problem: Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

    — Hannah Arendt

    In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

    Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online.

    A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship.

    It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends.

    As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.”

    In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

    The internet may well be the final frontier where free speech still flourishes, especially for politically incorrect speech and disinformation, which test the limits of our so-called egalitarian commitment to the First Amendment’s broad-minded principles.

    On the internet, falsehoods and lies abound, misdirection and misinformation dominate, and conspiracy theories go viral.

    This is to be expected, and the response should be more speech, not less.

    As Justice Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

    Yet to the government, these forms of “disinformation” rank right up there with terrorism, drugs, violence, and disease: societal evils so threatening that “we the people” should be willing to relinquish a little of our freedoms for the sake of national security.

    Of course, it never works out that way.

    The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns only to become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands.

    Indeed, in the face of the government’s own authoritarian power-grabs, coverups, and conspiracies, a relatively unfettered internet may be our sole hope of speaking truth to power.

    The right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

    You see, disinformation isn’t the problem. Government coverups and censorship are the problem.

    Unfortunately, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

    While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

    Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

    Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

    This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

    This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

    This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

    For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

    Thus, no matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

    Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

    We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

    The next phase of the government’s war on anti-government speech and so-called thought crimes could well be mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

    Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

    This is how it begins.

    In communities across the nation, police are already being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

    In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

    While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

    As the Associated Press reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

    Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

    The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

    The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

    This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

    Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

    Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

    The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

    The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

    In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.”

    Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

    Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how you subdue a populace.

    The ensuing silence in the face of government-sponsored tyranny, terror, brutality and injustice is deafening.

    The post Disinformation Isn’t the Problem: Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/disinformation-isnt-the-problem-government-coverups-and-censorship-are-the-problem/feed/ 0 496989     License to Muzzle: Taking Offence at Flag Wavers for Hezbollah https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/license-to-muzzle-taking-offence-at-flag-wavers-for-hezbollah/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/license-to-muzzle-taking-offence-at-flag-wavers-for-hezbollah/#respond Wed, 09 Oct 2024 13:37:55 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=154077 It was done for the Viet Cong in numerous countries during the US involvement in Vietnam.  It was done for the African National Congress (ANC). It was done for the Irish Revolutionary Army (IRA).  Across the United States, Europe and Australasia, all three organisations, demonised as terrorist outfits, received tacit, symbolic support from protestors.  In […]

    The post License to Muzzle: Taking Offence at Flag Wavers for Hezbollah first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     It was done for the Viet Cong in numerous countries during the US involvement in Vietnam.  It was done for the African National Congress (ANC). It was done for the Irish Revolutionary Army (IRA).  Across the United States, Europe and Australasia, all three organisations, demonised as terrorist outfits, received tacit, symbolic support from protestors.  In some cases, support was genuine and pecuniary.  Now, the Lebanese Shia militant and political group Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organisation in a number of Western states, has inspired flag holders to appear at protests against the expanding conflict in Gaza and Lebanon.

    In the previous first three instances, all outfits were integrated into the political fold of their countries, revealing the flimsy nature of badging organisations as terrorist entities.  War makers and practitioners of violence can become peacemakers and creatures of paper pushing officialdom.  Such transformations take time and an acid bath of reality.

    That backdrop offers context in understanding, and sternly critiquing, the hysteria of critics keen to press charges against those sporting Hezbollah symbols.  At the very least, it should consider the mockery that is free speech in a country such as Australia, awash with authoritarians concerned about the watery concept of social cohesion.  Down under, the skimpy protections for free speech are being whittled away year by year. The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Prohibited Hate Symbols and Other Measures) Bill 2023, passed in December last year, makes it an offence to publicly display and trade in prohibited symbols, along with the Nazi salute.  Prohibited symbols are defined as prohibited Nazi symbols or “a prohibited terrorist organisation symbol.”

    The Criminal Code Act 1995 as amended, offers a number of glutinous elements that must be made out in such a charge.  They are thickly unclear and, it follows, difficult to apply.  To be charged with a prohibited symbol offence, a reasonable person (drafters can never resist this feeble term) would have to consider that any public display would involve dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority, hatred or constitute incitement “to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate”.  That same inscrutable reasonable person would also consider the display to involve “advocacy of hatred of a group of persons distinguished by race, religion or nationality or a member of the targeted group” with the incitement element also present. Thirdly, such conduct must be “likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a reasonable person who is a member of a group distinguished by race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion or national or social origin.”

    These elements are nonsensical, attempting to impose unmeasurable standards about feelings that are rarely reasonable and always almost subjective.  Subjectively, people are constantly offended by what they disagree with.  The whole field of political opinion is one lengthy record of taking offence.  It quickly follows that some might also be intimidated, insulted, or humiliated by an opponent’s contrary view, notably when it comes to discrediting a position.  Freedom of speech, axiomatically, requires the exclusion of the offended from consideration.  But the concept is fragile in Australia’s regulation-crazed environment.

    Arrests have already been made.  On October 2, a 19-year-old woman was arrested and charged for publicly displaying the symbol of a prohibited organisation at a Sydney demonstration.  The question, however, is whether did so with the requisite intention, absurdly determined by the hypothetical reasonable person, to incite offence, insult, humiliation and intimidation. Ahead of protests scheduled for October 6 and 7, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, not wishing to find himself in a messy quagmire of prosecution and confusion, warned that they should not take place.  “It would not advance any cause.  It would cause a great deal of distress.”  Again, free speech, felled by the concept of hurt feelings.

    The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has created a dedicated taskforce to investigate nine allegations of prohibited symbols being displayed in Victoria, demonstrating how vagueness in legislation is always good for creating work for idle authorities.  Operation Ardana will consider the display of such symbols “while potentially inciting or advocating violence, or hatred, based on race and religion.”

    AFP Deputy Commissioner Krissy Barrett offers her view about what behaviour would satisfy the test.  “The context around the conduct is extremely important … If they’re holding the flag, what are they saying?  What are they chanting?  What are they wearing? What sort of physical behaviour are they demonstrating?”

    The Home Minister Tony Burke is only too grateful to leave it to Barrett and her colleagues, given his own muddle about how such laws are to apply.  Instead of offering any clarifications, he has warned mischievous Hezbollah flag wavers that they risk losing their visas.  “We don’t know whether they are actually on visas … [but] we do have a higher standard if you’re on a visa.”

    Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, all sledgehammer and no grace, senses room for political exploitation, ostensibly calling for legal improvements to an already shabby law.  “The laws already exist, and if the laws are inadequate then the Australian Federal Commissioner should advise the minister and the parliament should deal with it as a matter of urgency.”

    In addition to the Commonwealth law, states laws also exist to layer the prosecution case.  The Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, for instance, is convinced that Victoria police had the relevant powers to deal with those who “may be displaying terrorist flags”.

    With the paranoid authoritarians in charge, the very concept of valid protest has been reduced to a hint, a suggestion.  Keep it anodyne and any relevant arguments humbly polite.  Avoid the inherent brutality of a broadening bloody conflict hostile to international law.  Most of all, make social cohesion a license to muzzle.

    The post License to Muzzle: Taking Offence at Flag Wavers for Hezbollah first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/license-to-muzzle-taking-offence-at-flag-wavers-for-hezbollah/feed/ 0 496906     Handmaiden to the Establishment https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/04/handmaiden-to-the-establishment/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/04/handmaiden-to-the-establishment/#respond Fri, 04 Oct 2024 07:49:10 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=154012 When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise. The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined […]

    The post Handmaiden to the Establishment first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise.

    The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise. There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa fell within his investigative orbit. To his list of employers could also be added Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera English.

    During his tenure with Al Jazeera, for a time one of the funkiest outfits on the media scene, Greste was arrested along with two colleagues in Egypt accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. He spent 400 days in jail before deportation. Prison in Egypt gave him cover, armour and padding for journalistic publicity. It also gave him the smugness of a failed martyr.

    Greste then did what many hacks do: become an academic. It is telling about the ailing nature of universities that professorial chairs are being doled out with ease to members of the Fourth Estate, a measure that does little to encourage the fierce independence one hopes from either. Such are the temptations of establishment living: you become the very thing you should be suspicious of.

    With little wonder, Greste soon began exhibiting the symptoms of establishment fever, lecturing the world as UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland on what he thought journalism ought to be. Hubris struck. Like so many of his craft, he exuded envy at WikiLeaks and its gold reserves of classified information. He derided its founder, Julian Assange, for not being a journalist. This was stunningly petty, schoolyard scrapping in the wake of the publisher’s forced exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019. It ignored that most obvious point: journalism, especially when it documents power and its abuses, thrives or dies on leaks and often illegal disclosures.

    It is for this reason that Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917, intended as a warning to all who dare publish and discuss national security documents of the United States.

    In June this year, while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) evidence of that ongoing fixation remained. Lazily avoiding the redaction efforts that WikiLeaks had used prior to Cablegate, Greste still felt that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online,” thereby posing “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.”

    It was precisely this very same view that formed the US prosecution case against Assange. Greste might have at least acknowledged that not one single study examining the effects of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, a point also made in the plea-deal itself, found instances where any source or informant for the US was compromised.

    Greste now wishes, with dictatorial sensibility, to further impress his views on journalism through Journalism Australia, a body he hopes will set “professional” standards for the craft and, problematically, define press freedom in Australia. Journalism Australia Limited was formerly placed on the Australian corporate register in July, listing Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and executive director of The Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff, as directors.

    Members would be afforded the standing of journalists on paying a registration fee and being assessed. They would also, in theory, be offered the protections under a Media Reform Act (MFA) being proposed by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, where Greste holds the position of Executive Director.

    A closer look at the MFA shows its deferential nature to state authorities. As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains, “The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.” So much for independent journalists and those of the Assange-hue, a point well spotted by Mary Kostakidis, no mean journalist herself and not one keen on being straitjacketed by yet another proposed code.

    Rather disturbingly, the MFA is intended to aid “law enforcement agencies and the courts identify who is producing journalism”. How will this be done? By showing accreditation – the seal of approval, as it were – from Journalism Australia. In fact, Greste and his crew will go so far as to give the approved journalist a “badge” for authenticity on any published work. How utterly noble of them.

    Such a body becomes, in effect, a handmaiden to state power, separating acceptable wheat from rebellious chaff. Even Greste had to admit that two classes of journalist would emerge under this proposal, “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.”

    This is a shoddy business that should cause chronic discomfort, and demonstrates, yet again, the moribund nature of the Fourth Estate. Instead of detaching itself from establishment power, Greste and bodies such as the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom merely wish to clarify the attachment.

    The post Handmaiden to the Establishment first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/04/handmaiden-to-the-establishment/feed/ 0 496295     Legacy Media https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/legacy-media/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/legacy-media/#respond Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:06:08 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153838 Is the corporate/state media something that people want to claim as their mainstream?

    The post Legacy Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    The post Legacy Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/legacy-media/feed/ 0 496040     Australian Officials Push Authoritarian Crackdown on Pro-Hezbollah Speech https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/australian-officials-push-authoritarian-crackdown-on-pro-hezbollah-speech/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/australian-officials-push-authoritarian-crackdown-on-pro-hezbollah-speech/#respond Wed, 02 Oct 2024 17:20:58 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153953 As Israel begins another invasion of Lebanon, Australian officials from both sides of the imaginary partisan divide have been falling all over themselves to get Australians punished for speech crimes about the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah. The Australian political-media class have been in an uproar ever since footage surfaced of people waving Hezbollah flags at […]

    The post Australian Officials Push Authoritarian Crackdown on Pro-Hezbollah Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     As Israel begins another invasion of Lebanon, Australian officials from both sides of the imaginary partisan divide have been falling all over themselves to get Australians punished for speech crimes about the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah.

    The Australian political-media class have been in an uproar ever since footage surfaced of people waving Hezbollah flags at a protest in Melbourne over the weekend and displaying pictures of the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel in a massive airstrike on Friday.

    After initially stating that no crime had been committed in these acts of political speech, Victoria police are now saying they have identified six potentially criminal incidents related to the demonstration. These incidents reportedly involve “prohibited symbols” in violation of the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment which was enacted last year.

    Needless to say, free nations do not have “prohibited symbols”.

    This development follows numerous statements from various Australian leaders denouncing the protests as criminal.

    “I expect the police agencies to pursue this,” Victorian premier Jacinta Allan said of the protests, adding, “Bringing grief and pain and division to the streets of Melbourne by displaying these prohibited symbols, is utterly unacceptable.”

    Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong took to Twitter to denounce the protesters, saying Australians must not only refrain from supporting Hezbollah but from even giving “any indication of support”.

    “We condemn any indication of support for a terrorist organisation such as Hizballah,” Wong tweeted, adding, “It not only threatens national security, but fuels fear and division in our communities.”

    Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke wants to deport any international visitors displaying prohibited symbols in Australia, saying “I won’t hesitate to cancel the visas of visitors to our country who are spreading hate.”

    On the other side of the aisle, opposition leader Peter Dutton is on a crusade to get new laws passed to ensure the elimination of banned symbols from public view, saying “enforcement for law is required and if there are laws that need to be passed to make sure that our values are upheld then the Prime Minister should be doing that.”

    “Support for a proscribed terrorist organisation has no place on the streets of Melbourne,” tweeted Labor MP Josh Burns. “Anyone breaking counter-terrorism legislation should face the full force of the law.”

    “Australians cherish the right to peaceful protest,” tweeted independent MP Zoe Daniels. “However, there is no justification for supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. Those who were seen doing so on the streets of Melbourne at protests yesterday should be investigated and prosecuted.”

    In an article titled “Hezbollah flags at protests shape as test of new hate-symbol laws,” the ABC reports that these legal efforts to stomp out dissenting political speech are made possible by laws which were recently passed with the official intention of targeting Nazi symbols, but which “also cover the symbols of listed terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah.” Which is about as strong an argument on the slippery slope of government censorship as you could possibly ask for.

    Hezbollah is listed as a “terrorist organisation” on the say-so of the Australian government, not because of its actions or methods but because it stands in opposition to the US power alliance of which Australia is a part. This arbitrary designation is smeared across any resistance group on earth which opposes the dictates of Washington, and can then be used to suppress the speech of anyone who disagrees with the murderous behavior of the western empire.

    And it should here be noted that Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no national charter or bill of rights of any kind. A tremendous amount of faith has been placed in state and federal legislators to simply do the right thing, which has proved foolish and ineffective. Professor George Williams wrote for the Melbourne University Law Review in 2006:

    “Australia is now the only democratic nation in the world without a national bill of rights. Some comprehensive form of legal protection for basic rights is otherwise seen as an essential check and balance in democratic governance around the world. Indeed, I can find no example of a democratic nation that has gained a new Constitution or legal system in recent decades that has not included some form of a bill of rights, nor am I aware of any such nation that has done away with a bill of rights once it has been put in place.

    “Why then is Australia the exception? The answer lies in our history. Although many think of Australia as a young country, constitutionally speaking, it is one of the oldest in the world. The Australian Constitution remains almost completely as it was when enacted in 1901, while the Constitutions of the Australian states can go back as far as the 1850s. The legal systems and Constitutions of the nation and the Australian colonies (and then states) were conceived at a time when human rights, with the prominent exception of the 1791 United States Bill of Rights, tended not to be protected through a single legal instrument. Certainly, there was then no such law in the United Kingdom, upon whose legal system ours is substantially based. This has changed, especially after World War II and the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but by then Australia’s system of government had been operating for decades.”

    If you ever wonder why Australia so often stands out as a freakish anomaly in the western world with its jarring authoritarianism and disregard for human rights, this is why.

    The powerful abuse our civil rights because they can. We are pummeled with propaganda in the birthplace of Rupert Murdoch and increasingly forbidden from speaking out against the atrocities of our government and its allies overseas. We are being groomed into mindless, obedient sheep for the empire.

    The post Australian Officials Push Authoritarian Crackdown on Pro-Hezbollah Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/australian-officials-push-authoritarian-crackdown-on-pro-hezbollah-speech/feed/ 0 496069     Cameroon ratchets up media censorship ahead of 2025 election https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/cameroon-ratchets-up-media-censorship-ahead-of-2025-election/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/cameroon-ratchets-up-media-censorship-ahead-of-2025-election/#respond Wed, 02 Oct 2024 10:47:39 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=421127 Dakar, October 2, 2024—After a month of seeing an empty television studio with the word “censored” splashed across the screen, Cameroonians are finally able to watch Équinoxe TV’s flagship Sunday politics show “Droit de Réponse” again.

    The privately owned station fell foul of Cameroon’s regulatory National Communication Council (NCC), which judged it to have harmed the reputations of two ministers in the government of 91-year-old President Paul Biya, who has ruled the Central African country since 1982. The show and its presenter Duval Fangwa were suspended for one month. When Équinoxe TV broadcast a replacement Sunday show, “Le Débat 237,” the NCC swiftly banned that too.

    Despite the return of Droit de Réponse, the station’s difficulties are far from over.

    Two Équinoxe TV political journalists told CPJ that they had received death threats by phone and been threatened with arrest in connection with their work.

    “Every day, when I leave my house, I know that the worst can happen,” said one, who does not feel safe despite relocating. The other journalist has been in hiding since early August. Both declined to be named, citing safety concerns.

    Attacks on the press have escalated as Cameroon prepares for elections in 2025 that could see Biya — one of the world’s longest serving presidents — win another seven-year term. Tensions have been exacerbated by the delay of parliamentary and local elections until 2026, which Biya’s opponents fear will strengthen his hand in the presidential vote.

    “The reduction of freedom of expression and the media has begun. Journalists are censoring themselves under the instructions of their bosses or editors,” Marion Obam, president of the National Union of Journalists of Cameroon, told CPJ.

    Obam condemned as an “attempt to muzzle the press” a July 16 local government order banning from Mfoundi department, which includes the capital Yaoundé, anyone who “dangerously insults” government institutions or officials or takes action that could “lead to serious disturbances to public order.” Emmanuel Mariel Djikdent, prefect of Mfoundi department, said he was concerned about “the statements of certain guests on television or in radio studios.”

    Djikdent was swiftly backed up by communication minister René Sadi, who condemned an “upsurge in the use of abusive language” against state institutions and called for “restraint.”

    CPJ has since documented the following:

    • August 8
      The NCC suspended the privately owned newspaper Première Heure, its reporter Alain Balomlog, and publishing director Jeremy Baloko for one month for failing to “cross-check and balance” allegations of mismanagement by regional agriculture delegate Jean Claude Konde.
    • August 13
      Police sealed the doors of RIS Radio following the NCC’s August 8 order to suspend broadcasting and to stop station manager Sismondi Barlev Bidjocka practicing journalism, both for a period of six months. The NCC said that Bidjocka aired “unfounded and offensive statements” about the powerful Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, Secretary General of the Presidency, on July 22.
    La Voix du Centre editor Emmanuel Ekouli
    Emmanuel Ekouli (Screenshot: Facebook/Équinoxe TV)
    • August 22
      La Voix du Centre editor Emmanuel Ekouli was beaten by three men on a motorcycle in Yaoundé who stole his laptop, phone, and recording equipment. He was similarly attacked by three men on a motorcycle on July 9. Ekouli has received threats over his journalism and work with the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders investigating the 2023 murder of journalist Martinez Zogo, according to five screenshots reviewed by CPJ. La Voix du Centre reporter Guy Modeste Dzudie told CPJ that he and Ekouli had also received threatening calls and messages over a June report on corruption in an inheritance case.
    • August 28
      Amadou Vamoulké, former managing director of the state-owned Cameroon Radio and Television, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for embezzlement. The 73-year-old has been jailed since 2016 and was given a 12-year sentence in 2022 on a separate embezzlement charge. CPJ believes his imprisonment is in reprisal for his journalistic independence in the face of government directives.
    Amadou Vamoulké, former managing director of the state-owned Cameroon Radio and Television
    Amadou Vamoulké (Photo: credit withheld)
    • September 4
      Police arrested Le Zénith reporter Stéphane Nguema Zambo while he was attending an appointment related to his investigation into embezzlement in the Ministry of Secondary Education, Le Zénith’s publishing director Zacharie Flash Ndiomo told CPJ. Zambo was threatened and coerced into publishing a Facebook post recanting his findings before being released on September 6, Ndiomo said.

    “We are going through a difficult period,” said François Mboke, president of the Network of Press Owners of Cameroon (REPAC). “There are risks for those who want to remain professional.”

    NCC spokesman Denis Mbezele told CPJ that the regulator’s sanctions were to remind the media to act responsibly.

    Police spokesperson Joyce Cécile Ndjem declined to respond unless CPJ came to her office in Yaoundé.

    CPJ’s calls to request comment from the office of the Presidency, the Ministry of Communication, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Secondary Education, and Mfoundi Prefecture were not answered.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/02/cameroon-ratchets-up-media-censorship-ahead-of-2025-election/feed/ 0 495967     Taliban ban live political broadcasts, step up censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/24/taliban-ban-live-political-broadcasts-step-up-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/24/taliban-ban-live-political-broadcasts-step-up-censorship/#respond Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:20:17 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=418921 New York, September 24, 2024—The Taliban must reverse their directive banning live broadcasts of political shows, criticism of the group, and interviews with analysts not on a list of 68 pre-approved names, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.

    On September 21, the Taliban’s Ministry of Information and Culture summoned media executives in the capital Kabul and issued an unprecedented list of restrictions on media freedom, two reporters in Kabul told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

    The ministry ordered domestic journalists producing daily political discussion shows to seek its approval each morning of proposed topics and participants. Shows must then be pre-recorded and approved by the Taliban prior to broadcasting. Content contrary to Taliban policies or critical of the group or its officials must be removed, it said.

    The ministry later issued a one-page directive, reviewed by CPJ, detailing the new rules. It said that journalists wishing to interview an expert who is not on the Taliban’s list must seek the information ministry’s permission. If any of the rules are violated, the Taliban will hold the media manager, political show desk officer, editor-in-chief, and the guest accountable, and “they will be dealt accordingly,” the directive said.

    “The Taliban must immediately reverse their draconian media restrictions and stop dragging Afghanistan back to the Stone Age,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “These new restrictions signal the end of fundamental media freedoms in Afghanistan and seek to transform the media into a Taliban propaganda tool. This must be stopped, once and for all.”

    A third journalist in Afghanistan, also speaking on condition of anonymity, told CPJ that the Taliban had already begun preventing live broadcasts by verbally ordering media executives not to run them in the days prior to the September 21 meeting.

    Earlier in September, the Taliban jammed broadcasts in Kabul of the popular London-based Afghanistan International television network.

    CPJ’s text messages to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid requesting comment went unanswered.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/24/taliban-ban-live-political-broadcasts-step-up-censorship/feed/ 0 494860     Media watchdog condemns Israel’s ‘harassment’ move to strip Al Jazeera journalists of press passes https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/18/media-watchdog-condemns-israels-harassment-move-to-strip-al-jazeera-journalists-of-press-passes/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/18/media-watchdog-condemns-israels-harassment-move-to-strip-al-jazeera-journalists-of-press-passes/#respond Wed, 18 Sep 2024 09:17:43 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=105527 Pacific Media Watch

    The International Press Institute (IPI) has strongly condemned the Israeli government’s recent decision to revoke the press passes of Al Jazeera journalists, months after the global news outlet was banned in the country.

    “The Israeli government’s decision to revoke Al Jazeera press passes highlights a broader and deeply alarming pattern of harassment of journalists and attacks on press freedom in Israel and the region,” IPI interim executive director Scott Griffen said.

    The Israeli government announced it will be revoking all press passes previously issued to Al Jazeera journalists.

    Nitzan Chen, director of Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO), announced the decision via X on Thursday, accusing Al Jazeera of spreading “false content” and “incitement against Israelis”.

    Use of press office cards in the course of the journalists’ work could in itself “jeopardise state security at this time”, claimed Chen.

    The journalists affected by the decision would be given a hearing before their passes are officially revoked.

    While the GPO press card is not mandatory, without it a journalist in Israel will not be able to access Parliament, Israeli government ministries, or military infrastructure.

    Only Israeli recognised pass
    It is also the only card recognised at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank.

    Griffen said the move was indicative of a “systematic effort” by Israeli authorities to “expand its control over media reporting about Israel, including reporting on and from Gaza”.

    He added: “We strongly urge Israel to respect freedom of the press and access to information, which are fundamental human rights that all democracies must respect and protect.”

    In May, Israel’s cabinet unanimously voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, immediately ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on the company’s broadcasts.

    At the time, Al Jazeera described it as a “criminal act” and warned that Israel’s suppression of the free press “stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law”.

    Al Jazeera is widely regarded as the most balanced global news network covering the war on Gaza in contrast to many Western news services perceived as biased in favour of Israel.

    Media freedom petition rejected
    A petition for military authorities to allow foreign journalists to report inside Gaza was rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court in January 2024.

    IPI and other media watchdogs have repeatedly called on Israel to allow international media access to Gaza and ensure the safety of journalists.

    At least 173 Palestinian journalists are reported to have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza with the latest killing of reporter Abdullah Shakshak, who was shot by an Israeli military quadcopter in Rafah in southern Gaza.


    UN General Assembly debates end to Israeli occupation of Palestine.    Video: Al Jazeera

    Deadly pager attack
    Meanwhile, the deadly en masse explosion of pagers in Lebanon and Syria killing 11 and wounding almost 3000 people that has widely been attributed to Israel raises questions about what the end game may be, amid rising tensions in the region, say analysts.

    Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israeli analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that the attack was something that Israel had had in the works for several months and risked losing if Hezbollah became suspicious.

    This concern may have led the Israeli army to trigger the blasts, but Israel’s strategy overall remains unclear.

    “Where is Israel going to go from here? This question still hasn’t been answered,” Zonszein said.

    “Without a ceasefire in Gaza, it’s unclear how Israel plans to de-escalate, or if Netanyahu is in fact trying to spark a broader war,” the analyst added, noting that more Israeli troops were now stationed in the West Bank and along the northern border than in the Gaza Strip.

    In a historic moment, Palestine, newly promoted to observer status at the UN General Assembly (UNGA), has submitted a draft resolution at the body demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

    Building on a recent International Court of Justice ruling, the resolution calls for Israel to withdraw its troops, halt settlement expansion, and return land taken since 1967 within 12 months.

    While the US opposes the resolution, it has no veto power in the UNGA, and the body has previously supported Palestinian recognition.

    The resolution, which will be voted on by UNGA members today, is not legally binding, but reflects global opinion as leaders gather for high-level UN meetings next week.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/18/media-watchdog-condemns-israels-harassment-move-to-strip-al-jazeera-journalists-of-press-passes/feed/ 0 493935     The Black Alliance for Peace Condemns U.S. Convictions of Uhuru 3 As A Fascist Farce https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/14/the-black-alliance-for-peace-condemns-u-s-convictions-of-uhuru-3-as-a-fascist-farce/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/14/the-black-alliance-for-peace-condemns-u-s-convictions-of-uhuru-3-as-a-fascist-farce/#respond Sat, 14 Sep 2024 03:09:47 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153533 After being forced to acquit Omali Yeshitela, Jesse Nevel, and Penny Hess – the “Uhuru 3” – on being agents of Russia, a U.S. federal court jury resorted to the sham conviction of “conspiracy,” in what amounted to them being guilty of internationalism and the work of liberating African people. The state’s claim is that […]

    The post The Black Alliance for Peace Condemns U.S. Convictions of Uhuru 3 As A Fascist Farce first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    After being forced to acquit Omali Yeshitela, Jesse Nevel, and Penny Hess – the “Uhuru 3” – on being agents of Russia, a U.S. federal court jury resorted to the sham conviction of “conspiracy,” in what amounted to them being guilty of internationalism and the work of liberating African people. The state’s claim is that the defendants are guilty of “planning to sow discord and inflame American political tensions at the behest of Russia,” a charge carrying a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

    Although the conspiracy charge is being regarded as the less serious of the two changes, it presents a threat to all anti-imperialists and internationalists working in the bowels of the capitalist, U.S. settler state. “Conspiracy” is a U.S. legal fiction that can mean almost anything. From the definition, it is clear that determining what counts as conspiracy is often left up to the creativity of prosecution. In other words, “conspiracy” should be understood as the state deploying anything vague and circumstantial to use against our movement when it cannot get a conviction on anything else.

    The Black Alliance for Peace sounds the alarm about the danger this particular ruling represents – the severe undermining of the human right to free speech and the free flow of information. It is the creation of Orwellian, totalitarian legal precedence in support of “thoughtcrimes,” the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the U.S. settler state.

    The trial of the “Uhuru 3,” members and supporters of the African People’s Socialist Party, is “proving to be one of the most important First Amendment cases thus far in the 21st century,” according to the group’s attorney Jenipher Jones. The case also exposes the fact that the U.S. has no regard for human rights. It violates Articles 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which protects the right to freedom of expression and opinion and freedom of association, as does Article 19 of International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

    It is also significant that a small Pan-Africanist group is the first to face legal charges and other overt repression for speaking out against the racist and imperialist policies of the U.S. regime.

    After the verdict Omali Yeshitela said:

    The most important thing is that they were unable to convict us for working for anybody except Black people, that’s the most important thing. They could not convict us for working for anybody except black people. They had to say we were not working for the Russians and I am willing to be charged and found guilty of working for black people.

    But BAP suspects that this is a test case for what is to come from the racist U.S. settler state. All activists and anti-imperialists should be concerned about what has happened to the “Uhuru 3.”

    As we declared in our September 10th statement:

    BAP and our movement will not be intimated. We recognize that the complete abandonment of constitutional and human rights by the U.S. and other Western states represents an irreversible crisis of legitimacy. We will continue to stand in support of the right to resist as a core human right.

    No Compromise!
    No Retreat!

    BAP Coordinating Committee

    The post The Black Alliance for Peace Condemns U.S. Convictions of Uhuru 3 As A Fascist Farce first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/14/the-black-alliance-for-peace-condemns-u-s-convictions-of-uhuru-3-as-a-fascist-farce/feed/ 0 493315     CPJ concerned by Kazakhstan’s restrictive new media accreditation https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/03/cpj-concerned-by-kazakhstans-restrictive-new-media-accreditation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/03/cpj-concerned-by-kazakhstans-restrictive-new-media-accreditation/#respond Tue, 03 Sep 2024 19:22:08 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=414264 New York, September 3, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned that recent changes to Kazakhstan’s domestic media accreditation regulations and proposed changes to foreign media accreditation could be used to silence critical journalists.

    “New and proposed amendments to Kazakhstan’s accreditation regulations are excessive and open too many doors to censorship. Instead of the greater openness promised by President Tokayev’s ‘New Kazakhstan,’ what journalists are really getting is ever more creeping state control,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Kazakh authorities should heed journalists’ legitimate complaints and revise the media accreditation rules.”

    The new rules governing domestic media, which went into force August 20, allow journalists’ accreditation to be withdrawn for six months if they twice fail to comply with rules at news events, which could potentially include asking off-topic questions.

    The proposed rules for foreign media, posted for public comment August 19, would allow the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to deny or revoke accreditation for any violation of Kazakh law, including minor “administrative” offenses. A media law passed in June already bans foreign media from unaccredited journalistic activity.

    Press freedom advocates say the proposed changes are worrying given authorities’ monthslong denial of accreditation to dozens of journalists working for U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kazakh service, known locally as Radio Azattyq, over a “false information” fine, as well as escalating use of administrative “false information” charges against domestic journalists.

    Diana Okremova, head of local press freedom organization Legal Media Center, told CPJ that the reforms amounted to an “intensification of government control” that would give authorities “wide discretionary tools to clamp down on” journalists.

    CPJ’s emails to the Ministry of Culture and Information and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment did not receive any replies.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/03/cpj-concerned-by-kazakhstans-restrictive-new-media-accreditation/feed/ 0 491693     Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/28/technofascism-the-government-pressured-tech-companies-to-censor-users/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/28/technofascism-the-government-pressured-tech-companies-to-censor-users/#respond Wed, 28 Aug 2024 01:32:26 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153121 Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic. Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism. In a 2-1 decision in Children’s […]

    The post Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.

    In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.

    In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

    And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.

    Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

    On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

    In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

    Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

    By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

    This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

    The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

    Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

    This is the very definition of technofascism.

    Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

    The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

    As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

    Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

    The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

    In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

    Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

    This is how it starts.

    First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

    Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

    By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

    Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

    Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

    Watch and learn.

    We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

    Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

    Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

    Eventually, as Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

    If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s happening already.

    The post Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies to Censor Users first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/28/technofascism-the-government-pressured-tech-companies-to-censor-users/feed/ 0 490737     First, Elon Musk made us pay for “free speech”; now he decides who’s allowed it https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/21/first-elon-musk-made-us-pay-for-free-speech-now-he-decides-whos-allowed-it/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/21/first-elon-musk-made-us-pay-for-free-speech-now-he-decides-whos-allowed-it/#respond Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:50:25 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153027 Many users of X, formerly Twitter, seem deeply misguided. They imagine that Elon Musk is the saviour of free speech. He’s not. He is simply the latest pioneer in monetising speech. Which isn’t the same thing at all. All the blue ticks on X – mine included – are buying access to an audience. Which […]

    The post First, Elon Musk made us pay for “free speech”; now he decides who’s allowed it first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Many users of X, formerly Twitter, seem deeply misguided. They imagine that Elon Musk is the saviour of free speech. He’s not. He is simply the latest pioneer in monetising speech. Which isn’t the same thing at all.

    All the blue ticks on X – mine included – are buying access to an audience. Which is why Musk has made it so easy to get a blue tick – and why there are now so many of them on the platform. If you don’t pay Musk, the algorithms make sure you get minimal reach. You are denied your five seconds of fame.

    That has particularly infuriated corporate journalists. On what used to be called Twitter, they got access to large audiences as a natural right, along with politicians and celebrities. They never paid a penny. They felt entitled to those big audiences because they already enjoyed similarly big audiences in the so-called “legacy media”. They did not see why they start competing with the rest of us to be heard.

    The new media system was rigged, as the old media system has been for centuries, to ensure that it was their voices that counted. Or rather it was the voices of the ultra-wealthy paying their salaries who counted.

    Independent journalists, including myself, have been some of the chief beneficiaries of Musk’s X. But I don’t for a minute make the mistake of thinking Musk is really in favour of my free speech – or anyone else’s – compared to his own.

    Being able to buy yourself an audience isn’t what most people understand as free speech.

    Musk’s X is simply the latest innovation on the traditional “free speech” model from the bad old days. Then, only a handful of very rich men could afford to buy themselves lots of hired hands, known as journalists; own a printing press; and be in a position to attract advertisers.

    Billionaires paid a small fortune to buy the privilege of “free speech”. As a result, they managed to secure for themselves a very big voice in a highly exclusive market. You and I can now pay a hundred bucks a year and buy ourselves a very, very small voice in a massively overcrowded, cacophonous marketplace of voices.

    The point is this: Speech on X is still a privilege – it’s just one that you can now pay for. And like all privileges, it is on licence from the owner. Musk can withdraw that privilege – and withdraw it selectively – whenever he thinks someone or something is harming his interests, whether directly or indirectly.

    Musk is already disappearing opinions, either ones he doesn’t like or ones he cannot afford to be seen supporting – most visibly, anything too critical of Israel.

    He has threatened users with suspension for repeating slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – in other words, for calling for an end to what the judges of the World Court recently decreed to be Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians. He is also against hosting on X the term “decolonisation” in reference to Israel, claiming perversely that “it implies a Jewish genocide” – itself an implicit admission that Israelis (not Jews) have long been colonising Palestine and ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

    The Israel lobby is also pushing hard for a ban on the words “Zionism” and “Zionist”. It won’t be long before X, like Meta, cracks down on these terms too.

    Note that banning these words makes it all but impossible to discuss the specific historical forces that led to Israel’s creation at the expense of the Palestinian people, or analyse the ideology that today underpins Israel’s efforts to disappear the Palestinian people, or explain how the West has been complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories for decades and is currently aiding the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

    The loss of “Zionist” and “Zionism” from our lexicon would be a serious handicap for anyone trying to explain some of the major events unfolding in the Middle East at the moment. Which is precisely why the establishment, and Musk, are so keen to see such words discredited.

    The Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousef, one of the most acute and acid critics of Israel, has suddenly disappeared from X. Many assume he has been banned. The Jerusalem Post highlights that, shortly before he vanished from X, he had written: “Are you still scared to be called an antisemite by those Zionists?”

    Whatever the case, you will see Musk’s X getting a lot more censorious over the next months and years, especially against what he is terming the “faaaaaar left” – that is, disparate groups of people he has lumped together who hold opinions either he doesn’t like personally or that can damage his business interests.

    Billionaires aren’t there to protect free speech. They got to be billionaires by being very good at making money – by seizing markets, by inflating our appetite for consumption, and by buying politicians to rig the system to protect their empires from competitors.

    Musk understands that the only people against a world based on rapacious profit and material greed are the “faaaaaar left”. Which is why the “faaaaaar left” are in the crosshairs of anyone with power in our rigged system, from the centrists to the right wing, from “liberals” to conservatives, from Blue to Red, from Democrats to Republicans.

    The right and the centrists disagree only on how best to maintain that rapacious, consumption-driven, environmentally destructive status quo, and on how to normalise it to different segments of the public. They are competing wings of a system designed by a single ruling cabal.

    Musk used to see himself as a liberal and now leans towards the Trumpian right. Trump used to see himself as a Clintonian Democrat but now sees himself as… well, fill in the blank, according to taste.

    The point is that centrists and the right are, in essence, interchangeable – as should be only too clear from the rapid shift of free-speech liberals towards authoritarian censorship, and the rapid (pretend) reinvention of conservatives from moralising guardians of family values to the embattled defenders of free speech.

    Neither’s posturing should be taken at face value. Both are equally authoritarian, when their interests are threatened by “an excess of democracy”. Their apparent differences are simply the competition for dominance within a system that’s been gerrymandered to their mutual benefit. We are their dupes, buying into their games.

    The two tribes are there to offer the pretence of a battle of ideas, of competition, of choice at election time, of freedom. They look hostile to each other, but when push comes to shove they are united in their support for oligarchy, and opposition to genuine free speech, to real democracy, to meaningful pluralism, to an open society.

    The “faaaaaar left” are the true enemy of both the centrists and the right. Why? Because they are the only group struggling for a society in which money doesn’t buy privilege, where speech isn’t something someone can own.

    That’s why, when Musk intensifies his crackdown, it will be the “faaaaar left” that’s erased so completely you won’t notice it’s gone. You won’t remember it was ever there.

    The post First, Elon Musk made us pay for “free speech”; now he decides who’s allowed it first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/21/first-elon-musk-made-us-pay-for-free-speech-now-he-decides-whos-allowed-it/feed/ 0 489681     The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/20/the-political-matrix-sustains-the-illusion-of-freedom/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/20/the-political-matrix-sustains-the-illusion-of-freedom/#respond Tue, 20 Aug 2024 23:13:47 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153025 What you smell is the stench of a dying republic. Our dying republic. We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic. In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled […]

    The post The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     What you smell is the stench of a dying republic.

    Our dying republic.

    We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic.

    In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

    In other words, we’re allowed to bask in the illusion of freedom while we’re being stripped of the very rights intended to ensure that we can hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.

    We’re in trouble, folks.

    This is no longer America, land of the free, where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.

    Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand.

    Freedom no longer means what it once did.

    This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ commitment to the American experiment in freedom.

    Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

    My friends, we’re being played for fools.

    On paper, we may be technically free.

    In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

    We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

    Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

    As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

    Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, but we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

    In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

    Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction.

    The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

    This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

    That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    So, what’s the answer?

    For starters, stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.

    Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution.

    Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave.

    You’ve got rights. We’ve all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them.

    You’ve got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re making it way too easy for the police state to take over.

    So, stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic.

    The post The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/20/the-political-matrix-sustains-the-illusion-of-freedom/feed/ 0 490475     The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/20/the-political-matrix-sustains-the-illusion-of-freedom/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/20/the-political-matrix-sustains-the-illusion-of-freedom/#respond Tue, 20 Aug 2024 23:13:47 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153025 What you smell is the stench of a dying republic. Our dying republic. We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic. In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled […]

    The post The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     What you smell is the stench of a dying republic.

    Our dying republic.

    We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic.

    In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

    In other words, we’re allowed to bask in the illusion of freedom while we’re being stripped of the very rights intended to ensure that we can hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.

    We’re in trouble, folks.

    This is no longer America, land of the free, where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.

    Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand.

    Freedom no longer means what it once did.

    This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ commitment to the American experiment in freedom.

    Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

    My friends, we’re being played for fools.

    On paper, we may be technically free.

    In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

    We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

    Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

    As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

    Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, but we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

    In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

    Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction.

    The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

    This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

    That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    So, what’s the answer?

    For starters, stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.

    Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution.

    Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave.

    You’ve got rights. We’ve all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them.

    You’ve got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re making it way too easy for the police state to take over.

    So, stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic.

    The post The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/20/the-political-matrix-sustains-the-illusion-of-freedom/feed/ 0 490476     CPJ urges transparency as India broadcast bill raises censorship fears  https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/15/cpj-urges-transparency-as-india-broadcast-bill-raises-censorship-fears/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/15/cpj-urges-transparency-as-india-broadcast-bill-raises-censorship-fears/#respond Thu, 15 Aug 2024 17:19:23 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=410335 New Delhi, August 15, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Indian government to ensure proper consultation with media publishers before enacting a broadcast regulation bill that journalists fear will give authorities sweeping powers to control online content. 

    “India’s planned broadcast bill could have a chilling effect on press freedom,” CPJ’s Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi said on Thursday. “We are extremely concerned by the opacity surrounding the proposed law and its enactment process, and urge the Indian authorities to be transparent to ensure the bill is not tantamount to online censorship.”

    A draft of the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, released to a few select groups in July but not officially made public, would classify online content creators as “digital news broadcasters” and compel them to register with the government. 

    They would also have to set up internal vetting committees at their own expense to approve content before it is posted online. Failure to comply could result in imprisonment and fines. 

    The provisions in the bill came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost support in a national election earlier this year – a development that supporters blamed partly on social media influencers for boosting the opposition’s chances.

    Following criticism, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said on X, formerly Twitter, that a fresh draft bill will be published and it would extend the deadline for stakeholder comments until October 15, 2024. 

    The ministry did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/15/cpj-urges-transparency-as-india-broadcast-bill-raises-censorship-fears/feed/ 0 488874     Should We Obey Bad Laws? https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/10/should-we-obey-bad-laws/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/10/should-we-obey-bad-laws/#respond Sat, 10 Aug 2024 15:59:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=152625 A guest on Judging Freedom, Dr Gilbert Doctorow, took a contrarian stance to Scott Ritter’s journalism work on Russia, which seemingly aligns Doctorow’s stance with the official government stance. Doctorow accused Ritter (starting about 21:30) of stomping across redlines that any person familiar with Russia should have been aware of. Doctorow didn’t specifically state what […]

    The post Should We Obey Bad Laws? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
    A guest on Judging Freedom, Dr Gilbert Doctorow, took a contrarian stance to Scott Ritter’s journalism work on Russia, which seemingly aligns Doctorow’s stance with the official government stance.

    Doctorow accused Ritter (starting about 21:30) of stomping across redlines that any person familiar with Russia should have been aware of. Doctorow didn’t specifically state what any of these redlines might be.

    He also accused Ritter of violating FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), albeit he conceded that was not for him to judge.

    Says Doctorow,

    My concern is [that] two generations of Americans have not understood the Cold War and how you behave in circumstances when you are backing the cause or at least sympathetic to the cause or even understanding the cause of an [US] adversary. How do you avoid becoming Tokyo Rose [as English-speaking female radio propagandists for Japan were called]?

    In other words, Doctorow is accusing Ritter of being a (perhaps unwitting) propagandist for Russia as well as not knowing how to behave in certain circumstances. In other words, Doctorow (who has his academic credentials highlighted as “Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.”) comes across as questioning the intellectual rigor of Ritter.

    An additional redline, according to Doctorow,

    And, you do not accept payments of any kind, or of favors, like travel. That is air travel, hotels, and the rest of it. You do not touch that. If it is being offered to you by a country, by a foreign country, particularly a foreign country that is in such hostile relations with the United States. (23:50)

    … Ritter has “exposed himself to [violating FARA] charges by admitting he received money from RT and so forth.” (29:45)

    Such an argument is problematic for many reasons. According to Doctorow, any journalistic work with a hostile country must be unpaid. Journalism, for many, is a paying job. It is a means to be reimbursed for one’s time, effort, training, and skill. Yet Doctorow proffers that in certain circumstances a journalist should forgo payment.

    If US authorities do not explicitly decree that journalism relaying the situation or views of a certain foreign country is prohibited, then how is one to know?

    Besides, do Americans not have an inalienable right to know? Or is knowledge/information/data to be solely the prerogative of the US government to determine what citizens can be exposed to? Is gaining insight to what the other side is saying to be prohibited? Americans will just have to trust that their government knows best; for instance, that Viet Nam had fired missiles at US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, that Iraq had weapons-of-mass-destruction, that Syrian government forces had carried out chemical weapon attacks, that there is no genocide in Palestine.

    Does the First Amendment in the US not protect freedom of speech and the press? Because if one has to pay to fly to Russia, pay for hotels, transportation, and meals in Russia, then only those with the means to self-finance such an endeavor are likely to provide information — with potential for bias from the well-to-do perspective. If reporting on Russia has to be done out of the pocket of a journalist, this sounds like a good way to censor journalism. It is censorship that limits the rights of those who want to work as a journalist and also denies the rights of readers/viewers of such journalism.

    If it wasn’t largely for Ritter then how many people would have known about Iraq having been “fundamentally disarmed”? More recently, if not for Ritter, how many people would have heard that the Bucha massacre of scores of civilians blamed on Russia and reported as such by the stenographers in western monopoly media was a fabrication for killings carried out by Ukrainians?

    People and the interests behind them seek to control information. They want to prevent certain information from reaching an audience and they’d like a certain narrative, even disinformation, to reach that audience.

    If knowledge is power (not a corrupting power, it is hoped), then it should not be controlled by the already powerful, it should be a liberatory force to empower the masses.

    Don’t Be a Yes Man

    There are different types of contrarians depending on whether those who we are talking to are in agreement or disagreement.

    We are encouraged to be critical thinkers. We are taught to value leadership. However, there is a type of person called a Yes Man (or Yes Woman). This is a weak person who always supports whoever is in a position of power, rightly or wrongly. Yes Men are dangerous.

    There are plenty of bad laws on the books. One aphorism holds that laws are meant to be broken. This is too simplistic. But some bad laws should be broken and taken off the books.

    Don’t follow bad leaders or bad laws. Ritter is a contrarian to the fetid state. He has the courage to oppose censorship, bad thinking, and following bad laws.

  • Image from fractal enlightenment.

    • The post Should We Obey Bad Laws? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/10/should-we-obey-bad-laws/feed/ 0 488042     On Being a Patriot https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/08/on-being-a-patriot/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/08/on-being-a-patriot/#respond Thu, 08 Aug 2024 16:27:08 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=152569 Journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin put out a video “Scott Ritter’s home raided by the FBI.” Maupin affirmed his solidarity with Ritter, a staunch opponent of US militaristic support for Ukraine and Israel. Ritter’s anti-imperialist stand is nothing new. He first came to wider attention with his opposition to US plans to attack Iraq […]

    The post On Being a Patriot first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin put out a video “Scott Ritter’s home raided by the FBI.” Maupin affirmed his solidarity with Ritter, a staunch opponent of US militaristic support for Ukraine and Israel.

    Ritter’s anti-imperialist stand is nothing new. He first came to wider attention with his opposition to US plans to attack Iraq for having weapons-of-mass-destruction. Ritter, the then United Nations weapons inspector, said that Iraq was “fundamentally disarmed.” History has proven Ritter correct. The US government was wrong.

    Nonetheless, many patriots often trot out the canard “my country, right or wrong.”

    Scott Ritter, a former US marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector, is a fierce critic of US militarism. Yet, he does not equivocate when it comes to his patriotism: “I’m an American Patriot who puts my country and its security first.”

    This fidelity called patriotism is universal. For example, it is one of the 12 goals of socialism in China. Generally, it is understood to mean “love of country.” Thus, the Chinese characters for love and country.

    Patriotism: “devotion to and vigorous support for one’s country.”

    To vigorously support one’s country? Right or wrong? And what exactly is a country? Is it specific to a geographically defined dimension?

    Country: “a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.”

    This definition of country does not clarify precisely the orbit of patriotism. Is it government? It couldn’t be that because people, who consider themselves to be patriots, in countries with elections are often voting governments out. And one can often hear citizens venting displeasure with their government. Does this mean they are not patriots? Ritter, undeniably, does not hide his displeasure with government.

    Nation: “a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.”

    Well, the United States often describes itself as a melting pot: “a term that was used to describe Americanization in which immigrants adopt American culture and abandon culture from their home country.”

    So, US culture is the result of abandoned cultures?

    Previously, I asked why people like Scott Ritter and colonel Douglas Macgregor keep professing their love of the US while pointing out its dishonesty, bullying, war crimes, warmaking, corruption, etc. Why love such a country?

    Ritter points out the multitudinous crimes of US empire, the racism, the crimes against whistleblowers and publishers (e.g., Julian Assange), the crimes of US allies (e.g., Israel; it took him a while to realize the evil of Zionism, but credit to him that he rejected a previously held position that he later found to be intellectually and morally untenable), the unfair “trade” practices (e.g., sanctions, theft of another country’s assets), the deterioration of US infrastructure (e.g., water in Flint, MI), the destruction of the environment, the inequality, homelessness, poverty, etc. Yet, he always says he is an American patriot and that he loves his country.

    The logical disconnect seems huge, but it is also understandable. Why? If Ritter didn’t praise his American citizenship to the heavens, then he would likely be dismissed as anti-American, and people who swallow the patriotism Kool-aid would tune him out. A sad state of affairs.

    If Ritter, Macgregor, and other American voices that speak in opposition to the imperialist agenda did not profess their love of the US of America, an entity that came into existence because of a massive genocide, then they all know that they would be silenced.

    The world needs contrarian voices to be free to speak, and not just contrarian voices, all voices. People must have the opportunity to consider what the voices say. Are their facts verifiable, is their logic sound, and is their message morally based?

    Ritter educates many of us about US militarism, what the fighting in Ukraine is about, who the actors are and why they are involved.

    Back to Maupin

    I do not always agree with Ritter, and I have expressed some of my reservations and my reasons for them. Likeliest, Ritter would like to revisit and amend some of his formulations, as most of us would. But Ritter is a cut above; he is experienced; he does his homework; he talks straight and extemporaneously.

    A friend who started checking out Ritter’s geopolitical views on my recommendation, came across disturbing news about Ritter and asked me about it. The news of the FBI raid on Ritter’s domicile, has provided the monopoly media the opportunity to dredge up his past indiscretions and criminal activities. However, these should not just be brushed aside or dismissed. And neither should Ritter’s views be brushed aside. Whatever the facts are of the unsavory matter, Ritter had been punished. Now the state is piling on. Because past actions are past, we cannot undo them; the best we can do is atone.

    Some might question whether a person with certain criminal deficiencies could be trusted about their reporting on geopolitics and militarism? The answer seems obvious. The focus ought to be on whatever information, from whoever. By all means, take into account the source; regarding the information, take what is good and factual and relegate what is bad and dubious to a lesser file.

    Ritter is an important voice. The assumption is that the FBI raid was only about Ritter’s expressing his first amendment rights. Regardless, I have no problem to standing in solidarity with Ritter against imperialism, warring, and Zionism.

    The common refrain “I love my country…” is almost mandatory in the US if uttering any criticism of the state. As ex-military and a declared patriot, Ritter had created a space to function as a critic of the international crimes of America. That space appears to have severely narrowed. To express non-allegiance with America – despite it being a moral abomination – would invite the wrath of the state. For one, these critics would be slandered and have their communication platforms targeted, as Maupin knows well since his book Kamala Harris & the Future of America was banned by Amazon. This is another example of the government and its allies undermining free speech.

    As Maupin said in the video, an injustice to one is an injustice to all. It is a call for the free speech rights of Ritter, and it emphasizes the same rights for all of us.

    The post On Being a Patriot first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/08/on-being-a-patriot/feed/ 0 487736     The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Two) https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/06/the-peoples-court-of-new-normal-germany-part-two/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/06/the-peoples-court-of-new-normal-germany-part-two/#respond Tue, 06 Aug 2024 09:41:19 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=152528 So, my second trial for alleged thoughtcrime-tweeting is going ahead as planned on August 15 in Berlin Superior Court (Das Kammergericht). Full-blown anti-terrorism security protocols will be in effect in the courtroom. Yes, that’s right, the Berlin Superior Court denied my attorney’s motion to rescind their special Security Order, so the German authorities will be […]

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Two) first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    So, my second trial for alleged thoughtcrime-tweeting is going ahead as planned on August 15 in Berlin Superior Court (Das Kammergericht). Full-blown anti-terrorism security protocols will be in effect in the courtroom. Yes, that’s right, the Berlin Superior Court denied my attorney’s motion to rescind their special Security Order, so the German authorities will be putting on an elaborate official show of force, which everyone is welcome to attend!

    Or, actually, according to the Security Order, only 35 people are welcome to attend. That’s one of the anti-terrorism security protocols. Also, if you do attend, you’ll have to surrender all your personal possessions (i.e., notebooks, phones, wallets, pens, pencils, other writing instruments, wristwatches, hats, and other head coverings, etc.) and any outwear (i.e., jackets, scarves, etc.) and totally empty your pockets of all items, presumably into a plastic bin like the ones they use at airport security, which the Court’s security personnel will carry away and store somewhere while you attend the trial, and which the Superior Court expressly denies any liability for (i.e., for your items). Once you have surrendered all your possessions, and have been body-scanned and metal-detected, and possibly physically patted down, you will be admitted into Room 145a, where you will have to sit in the rear five rows of the gallery, behind a presumably bullet-proof security barrier, so that the security staff can monitor you during the proceedings.

    OK, I know what you’re probably thinking, but the Superior Court’s Security Order is not at all intended to prevent members of the press from attending and reporting on the trial. Members of the press are absolutely welcome! It’s just that they will have to surrender their cameras and phones and their pens and other writing instruments to the security staff before they enter the courtroom. But they are welcome to attend and report on the trial! The security personnel will even provide them with pencils — presumably those little child-sized pencils, which are harder to use as Jason-Bourne-style stabbing weapons — and sheets of paper that they can position on their knees and attempt to make notes on during the trial.

    Same goes for all you members of the public. This Security Order is not in any way intended to discourage you from attending the trial, or to intimidate or humiliate you by subjecting you to pointless “security protocols” and treating you like suspected terrorists. No, you are absolutely welcome to attend! You just might want to think about what you bring with you. Sharp objects are probably not a good idea. Likewise anything the Court might construe to be a camera or an audio-recording device. The Security Order is clear about that … there is to be no photographic or audio record of the proceedings.

    Oh, and, definitely do not bring any state-of-the-art terrorist “wiretapping technology” with you. The Court is particularly worried about that stuff. Hence the need to subject everyone to TSA-style body-scanning, and pat-downs, and to confiscate their personal possessions, i.e., to ensure that no one smuggles in some sort of remotely-activated wiretapping technology that will infect the judges’ smartphones with some kind of untraceable surveillance software that will secretly record everything they say and transmit it to Tehran, or Moscow, or wherever.

    You probably think I’m joking. I’m not. Here’s how one of the Superior Court judges justified the Court’s Security Order in his denial of our motion to have the Order rescinded …

    I cannot see the unreasonable restriction of the press and your defense that you are concerned about, nor any violation of the guarantee of a fair trial. I admit that the restrictions imposed by the Security Order are quite significant; however, they are by no means unreasonable. They are objectively required both by the overall tense security situation (e.g. publicly announced threats of attacks against judges of the Superior Court) and the increased special security requirements in at least one criminal trial conducted in the same courtroom. Since only the courtroom in question is assigned to the Criminal Division (and the other divisions) as a permanent courtroom, and a regular search of the courtroom following every session using suitable technology for recently introduced wiretapping technology represents an objectively unjustifiable burden, its introduction must be prevented from the outset if possible.

    Yes, you read the judge’s explanation right. Apparently, the Court is worried that my readers, or maybe members of the German independent press, might be planning to launch an “attack” on the judges, presumably with their phones and writing instruments, and possibly their head coverings and outerwear (for example, their scarves, which I suppose, in the hands of trained terrorist assassins, could be used to strangle them). In any event, they clearly believe that an “overall tense security situation” exists, one which necessitates these anti-terrorism security protocols at the trial of a 62-year-old playwright, author, and political satirist.

    OK, I probably should have mentioned that earlier for the benefit of anyone not familiar with my case. I’m not a terrorist, or in any way terrorist adjacent. I’m just an author and a political satirist. The German authorities are prosecuting me because I criticized them and their Covid mask mandates.

    As I explained in my most recent column …

    The German authorities have been investigating and prosecuting me since August 2022. My case has been covered in The Atlantic, Racket News, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Multipolar, and many other outlets … Basically, I am being prosecuted for ‘spreading pro-Nazi propaganda’ because I criticized the Covid mask mandates and tweeted the cover artwork of one of my books, The Rise of The New Normal Reich. Here’s the cover artwork of that book. The other two images are recent covers of Der Spiegel and Stern, two well-known mainstream German magazines, which are not being prosecuted for spreading pro-Nazi propaganda.

    My punishment for doing that (i.e., criticizing the Covid mask mandates, not spreading Nazi propaganda) has been … well, here I am, on trial, again, in The People’s Court of New Normal Germany. The German authorities had my Tweets censored by Twitter. They reported me to The Federal Criminal Police Office, which is kind of the German FBI. They reported me to The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic Intelligence agency. My book is banned in Germany. They have damaged my income and reputation as an author. They have forced me to spend thousands of Euros in attorney’s fees to defend myself against these blatantly trumped-up charges. And now they are going to subject me, and my attorney, and anyone who attends my trial, to this humiliating, ham-fisted, official show of force.

    If you’re an American (or a Brit, or Australian, or whatever), and you’re thinking this is just a story about Germany, or the EU … well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t. My case is just one of countless examples of the criminalization of dissent that is happening throughout the West. A lot of Americans don’t realize it, but freedom of speech is protected in the German constitution.

    My story is not about the differences between the German and American freedom-of-speech protections. It is about the authorities prosecuting government critics like me on fabricated charges, banning our books, and censoring our political speech.

    Once a government starts doing that, the protections in its constitution no longer matter. You are no longer dealing with questions of law. You are dealing with the exercise of authoritarian power. That is what my story is about. Any Americans (and any other non-Germans) who have been paying attention to recent events will recognize what I’m talking about.

    As I’ve been saying, repeatedly, for the last four years or so, the global-capitalist power system (or the “corporatocracy,” or “The Powers That Be,” or whatever other name you need to call it) is going totalitarian on us. It dominates the entire planet, so it doesn’t have anything else to do. It is conducting a global “Clear and Hold” op. It is neutralizing internal resistance … any and all forms of internal resistance. The criminalization of dissent is an essential part of that. I’ve been documenting this process in my columns and in my books, and specifically in The Rise of the New Normal Reich — which you can read, unless you live in Germany — so forgive me if I don’t rehash it all here.

    The point is, we’re not in Kansas anymore. All that democracy and rule of law stuff is over. It is being gradually, and not so gradually, phased out.

    I get that most people don’t believe that. Most people won’t, until it’s too late. That’s how these transitions generally work. Most people can’t see what is coming until it gets here. I see it, but not because I’m a prophet. I’m just a loudmouth, and the loudmouths get crushed first.

    Anyway, if you are in Berlin on August 15, and would like to observe The People’s Court of New Normal Germany in action, or just get groped by a German law enforcement officer, the trial is scheduled to start at 10:30AM. Seating is on a first-come-first-served basis. So you may want to show up a little early, given all the scanning and screening and groping, and the “overall tense security situation.”

    The address is Elßholzstraße 30-33.

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Two) first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/06/the-peoples-court-of-new-normal-germany-part-two/feed/ 0 487319     Big Tech’s Trump Censorship Exposed https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/04/big-techs-trump-censorship-exposed/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/04/big-techs-trump-censorship-exposed/#respond Sun, 04 Aug 2024 03:41:19 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=152452 You might be shocked to learn that Big Tech is already censoring information about America’s presidential race… I know it’s SHOCKING!

    The post Big Tech’s Trump Censorship Exposed first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Redacted.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/04/big-techs-trump-censorship-exposed/feed/ 0 487109     The People’s Court of New Normal Germany https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/24/the-peoples-court-of-new-normal-germany/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/24/the-peoples-court-of-new-normal-germany/#respond Wed, 24 Jul 2024 11:25:16 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=152206 Just when I thought things could not possibly get more shockingly totalitarian in New Normal Germany, where I’m being prosecuted in criminal court (for the second time) for tweeting, the German authorities have gone and surprised me again. No, they haven’t established an actual Nazi-style People’s Court (pictured above) yet, and, of course, there is […]

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Just when I thought things could not possibly get more shockingly totalitarian in New Normal Germany, where I’m being prosecuted in criminal court (for the second time) for tweeting, the German authorities have gone and surprised me again. No, they haven’t established an actual Nazi-style People’s Court (pictured above) yet, and, of course, there is absolutely no similarity between the current German justice system, which is totally fair and democratic and a paragon of impartial justice and the rule of law, and The People’s Court of Berlin during the Nazi era, nor is there any similarity between Nazi Germany and New Normal Germany (i.e., modern-day Germany), and I would never, ever, suggest that there was, as that would be intellectually lazy, and tasteless, and completely inaccurate, and illegal, and … well, let me fill you in on the latest.

    The Berlin Superior Court has set a date for my next thoughtcrime trial. As regular readers will probably recall, my first thoughtcrime trial in January ended with my acquittal. So, the German authorities are putting me on trial again. Yes, they can do that in Germany. But, wait, that’s not the best part.

    The best part is, at my new thoughtcrime trial — this time in Berlin Superior Court — full-scale Anti-Terrorism Security protocols will be effect in the courtroom. Everyone will be subjected to TSA-style scanning and screening, and will have to surrender all their personal possessions and hats and coats and head coverings to the Security Staff, and completely empty their pockets of all items, before entering the courtroom. No computers, phones, smart-watches, or any other potential recording devices will be allowed in the courtroom. Pencils and sheets of paper will purportedly be provided to members of the press by Security Staff. Members of the press and public will be limited to 35, and, after they have successfully passed their “security screening,” they will be cordoned off in the last five rows of the gallery in the very back of the courtroom, “for security reasons,” and monitored by the armed Security Staff.

    For the benefit of any new readers unfamiliar with me and my case, I am not a terrorist. I’m an award-winning American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. I have lived here in Berlin for 20 years. The German authorities have been investigating and prosecuting me since August 2022. My case has been covered in The Atlantic, Racket News, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Multipolar, and many other outlets, so I won’t reiterate every little detail again here. Basically, I am being prosecuted for “spreading pro-Nazi propaganda” because I criticized the Covid mask mandates and tweeted the cover artwork of one of my books, The Rise of The New Normal Reich.

    Here’s the cover artwork of that book. The other two images are the recent covers of Der Spiegel and Stern, two well-known mainstream German magazines, which are not being prosecuted for “spreading pro-Nazi propaganda.”As anyone (even the German authorities) can see, the Spiegel cover artwork uses exactly the same concept as the cover artwork of my book. The only difference is, the Spiegel swastika is covered by the German flag, whereas the swastika on my book is covered by a medical mask.

    Both artworks are obviously intended as warnings of the rise of a new form of totalitarianism. Der Spiegel was warning about the Alternativ für Deutschland party (AfD) — as was Stern with its swastika floating in a champagne glass. I was warning about what I dubbed “The New Normal Reich,” the new nascent form of totalitarianism that emerged during 2020-2023, which is still very much on the rise, and which is thoroughly documented and analyzed in my book (which book was banned by Amazon in Germany at the same time the German authorities launched a criminal investigation of me and instructed Twitter to censor my Tweets, which Twitter did).

    The pretext the Court is citing for ordering these Anti-Terrorism Security protocols at my trial is ridiculous, and infuriating. The Court claims that the courtroom in which my trial is to take place is occasionally used for a certain “high-security” trial. Therefore, according to the Court, my trial must also be subjected to Anti-Terrorism Security protocols. Seriously, the Court sent my attorney a fax setting forth this “explanation,” which is, of course, a load of horseshit. The Berlin Superior Court is a huge building containing multiple courtrooms, one or two which are probably not subject to such Anti-Terrorism Security protocols when “high-security” trials are not taking place within them.

    No, the imposition of these Anti-Terrorism Security protocols is clearly a cynical ploy intended (a) to suppress coverage of the trial, (b) to discourage the press and public from attending, and (c) to intimidate and harass me and my legal counsel, and any members of the press and public who nevertheless attend the trial in spite of the “security procedures” they will be subjected to.

    This cynical tactic — which is not an official press blackout, because journalists can still attend and attempt to scribble notes on their knees with the pencils and sheets of paper provided by the Security Staff — comes as no real surprise. As I mentioned above, my case and my first trial got a fair amount of attention from the international press, enough to put the Court on notice that my prosecution was being watched. So, it’s no mystery why the German authorities would want to discourage any reporting on my “do-over” trial in Superior Court.

    Also, the gallery was filled to capacity at my original trial in January, where I delivered a rather unusual closing Statement to the Court, which was then published and disseminated widely in Germany. So, again, it is no real mystery why the Superior Court wants to discourage members of the public from attending this new trial by threatening to subject them to these humiliating “security” protocols, and why it has limited the gallery size to only 35 seats.

    I assume the German authorities — and by “authorities” I mean the Berlin District Prosecutor’s office, the Berlin Superior Court (Der Kammergericht), and whatever other authorities are intent on punishing me, and making an example of me, for daring to criticize the government’s edicts during 2020-2022, i.e., suspension of the constitutional rights, mask mandates, segregation, the banning of protests, etc. — I assume these authorities are particularly motivated to prevent the press from covering this second trial in Superior Court, because, from what I understand of the German legal system, they are going to “do” me (i.e., convict me) this time.

    The way the German legal system works, if they want to do you, is (1) you are acquitted in the lower Criminal Court, (2) the District Prosecutor appeals the verdict to the Superior Court, (3) the Superior Court overturns your acquittal, and (4) the prosecution goes back to the original Criminal Court, which stages a new trial, at which you will be found guilty, because, once the Superior Court has overruled your acquittal, the Criminal Court will convict you based on the Superior Court’s ruling. At which point you will appeal. And on and on and on it will go, until you are broke, or until you give up fighting because you are just so fucking exhausted.

    I’m not making this up. This is how The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (i.e., the post-Covid German justice system, which, again, bears no resemblance whatsoever to The People’s Court of Berlin in Nazi Germany, or to the courts in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, or any other totalitarian “justice” system) … this is how it works in New Normal Germany if you are a critic of the authorities and refuse to meekly accept whatever punishment they want to summarily dish out for whatever they deem to be your thoughtcrimes.

    But, hey, at least they’re not going to take me out and put me up against a wall and shoot me, like they did with political criminals in Nazi Germany, and the USSR, so I suppose I should be grateful. I’ll have to work on that.

    If you think my case is an aberration, it isn’t. There are many, many other people — critics of the government’s “Covid measures” during 2020-2023 — who are being persecuted and made examples of. Most of these people do not have the financial resources to pay lawyers to fight these prosecutions, so they plead guilty to the charges and pay the fines, which are typically much less than what they would face in attorney’s fees. Being somewhat of a public figure, I thought it was my responsibility not to do that. I’m extremely grateful to everyone who has donated to my legal defense fund, which is how I have been able to cover my legal expenses. There’s enough left in that fund to cover this next trial in Superior Court, so I’m OK for now, financially. I mention that because people are already asking how they can send me money.

    What people can do, if they want to do something helpful, is make as much noise as possible about what is happening, not just in Germany, but all throughout the West. Because what is happening is, well, what I tried to capture and analyze in my book. The Powers That Be are going totalitarian on us. They are gradually, and not so gradually, phasing out the so-called “liberal” or “democratic” rights and principles that it was necessary to placate the Western masses with during the Cold War era, which it is no longer necessary to do beyond a certain superficial point.

    I have published three books of essays documenting this transition to a new global-capitalist form of totalitarianism, so I’m not going to go on and on about it here. But that’s what all the censorship is about. That’s what all the manufactured hysteria, fomented hatred, fanaticism, the permanent state of “emergency” and “crisis,” the “culture wars,” the cults of personality, the bombardment of our minds with absolutely meaningless nonsense, the naked displays of force, the blatant instrumentalization of the justice system to punish political dissidents, not just here in Germany, but throughout the “democratic” West … that is what all this is about.

    I’ll keep my readers posted on the details of my upcoming trial in Berlin Superior Court. My attorney is objecting to these “security protocols,” of course. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, instead of sending me money this time, maybe try to step back from all the mass hysteria and hatred that we are being inundated with and see the big picture. It isn’t pretty.

    Help spread the word about the new totalitarianism, about the phasing-out of our democratic rights. I don’t care which “side” of whatever you are on — Trump, Biden, Palestine, Israel, the culture wars, the cancel campaigns, Covid, Elon Musk, Russia, whatever — and neither do The Powers That Be. Take a step back and try to see the bigger picture … the forest, instead of just the trees. And then make as much noise about it as you can.

    We are heading somewhere very ugly … somewhere most of us can’t imagine. Some of us will get there first, but all of us will be there, together, eventually. My story is just one example of what it will be like there, in that ugly place. It isn’t really a story about Germany. It is a story about the end of the myth of democracy, and the rule of law, and all that good stuff. As Frank Zappa once so eloquently explained …

    The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

    It’s something to behold, that brick wall is, especially up close and personal. You’ll see when you get here. I’ll save you a seat.

    The post The People’s Court of New Normal Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/24/the-peoples-court-of-new-normal-germany/feed/ 0 485422     Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/11/project-total-control-everything-is-a-weapon-when-totalitarianism-is-normalized/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/11/project-total-control-everything-is-a-weapon-when-totalitarianism-is-normalized/#respond Thu, 11 Jul 2024 01:49:41 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=151839 The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state. This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office. This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election. In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a […]

    The post Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

    This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

    This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

    In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

    Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

    For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

    For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

    “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

    This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

    Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

    Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

    Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

    Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

    Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Digital currencies, combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism, will create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society.

    Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

    Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    Weaponizing politics. Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset.

    Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have-nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

    The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the facts speak for themselves.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

    The post Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/11/project-total-control-everything-is-a-weapon-when-totalitarianism-is-normalized/feed/ 0 483304     Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/25/electing-the-next-dictator-ugly-truths-you-wont-hear-from-trump-or-biden/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/25/electing-the-next-dictator-ugly-truths-you-wont-hear-from-trump-or-biden/#respond Tue, 25 Jun 2024 22:58:56 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=151449 No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire […]

    The post Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.

    Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.

    Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.

    In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.

    1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”

    2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

    3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

    4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

    5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.

    6. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

    7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

    8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

    9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

    12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

    13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.

    14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

    15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes.

    16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.

    17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state.

    18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

    20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

    These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.

    No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.

    Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

    There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    We are the government.

    The post Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/25/electing-the-next-dictator-ugly-truths-you-wont-hear-from-trump-or-biden/feed/ 0 481114     Censorship at a Jewish School Part of a Crisis for Free Expression https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/24/censorship-at-a-jewish-school-part-of-a-crisis-for-free-expression/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/24/censorship-at-a-jewish-school-part-of-a-crisis-for-free-expression/#respond Mon, 24 Jun 2024 23:44:52 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9040442  

    Boiling Point: School censors story about LA Muslim teens and war

    Shalhevet school head David Block (Boiling Point, 6/2/24): “If our community can’t handle something, I do have to consider that.”

    The staff of the Boiling Point don’t consider themselves student journalists. They consider themselves journalists.

    The official paper of Shalhevet, a prestigious orthodox Jewish day school in Los Angeles, is not a mere extra-curricular activity for the college-bound, but a living record of the larger community. And so the fact that the school is censoring the paper’s coverage of pro-Palestine viewpoints is an illustration of the nation’s current crisis of free speech and the free press as Israel’s slaughter in Gaza rages on.

    The Boiling Point (6/2/24) reported that the school administration had censored an article about Muslim perspectives on Gaza because it quoted a teenager who “said Israel was committing genocide and that she did not believe Hamas had committed atrocities.” The paper said:

    Head of school Rabbi David Block told faculty advisor Mrs. Joelle Keene to take down the story from all Boiling Point postings later that day.

    It was the first time the administration had ordered the paper to remove an active story. The story is also not published in today’s print edition.

    “Shalhevet’s principal ordered that the entire paper be taken out of circulation in what advisor Joelle Keene said was a striking change of pace,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (6/11/24) reported. She told the wire service, “There have been difficult stories and difficult moments and conflicts and that sort of thing. We’ve always been able to work them out.”

    Justifications for censorship

    The administration’s justification for the censorship was twofold. The first reason for the censorship was that the pro-Palestine viewpoints were simply too hurtful for a community that was still in shock over the October 7 attacks against Israel by Hamas.

    This is, to be quite blunt, demeaning to the students and the community. I was not much older than these students during the 9/11 attacks, but I spent that day and days after that at my student newspaper, the Michigan Daily. While our reporters piled into a car to drive to New York City, I joined my fellow editorial board members—Jews, Arabs and many others—in navigating a future of war, attacks on civil liberties and anti-Islamic hate.

    And today, student journalists are no less important in this historical moment where students are standing up against the genocide in Gaza (USA Today, 5/2/24; AP, 5/2/24).

    The Boiling Point is hardly pro-Hamas. As one of its editors, Tali Liebenthal, said in response to this point, it was indeed painful for the community to hear anti-Israel opinions, but “I don’t think that the Boiling Point has any responsibility to shield our readers from that pain.” The Shalhevet students, in the tradition of Jewish inquiry, do certainly appear able to explore the tough and difficult subjects of their moment.

    But there’s a second, more banal reason for the censorship. Block told the Boiling Point, “My feeling is that this article would both give people the wrong impression about Shalhevet.” He added:

    It would have very serious implications for whether they’re going to consider sending the next generation of people who should be Shalhevet students to Shalhevet.

    Block is placing prospective parents’ sensitivities before truth and debate. He’s worried that families will see a quote in the paper they disagree with, decide the school is a Hamas hot house, and send their child for an education elsewhere. The suggestion is that the school’s enrollment numbers are more important, not just than freedom of the press, but than a central aspect of Jewishness: the pursuit of knowledge.

    Would Block block articles exploring why ultra-religious Jews like Satmars (Shtetl, 11/22/23) and Neturei Karta (Haaretz, 3/27/24) oppose Zionism for theological reasons? We should hope a school for Jewish scholarship would be wise to value discussions of deep ideas over fear of offending potential enrollees.

    Perverting ideals of openness

    Intercept: Columbia Law Review Refused to Take Down Article on Palestine, So Its Board of Directors Nuked the Whole Website

    Intercept (6/3/24): “After the editors [of the Columbia Law Review] declined a board of directors request to take down the articles, the board pulled the plug on the entire website.”

    The Boiling Point affair is indicative of a larger problem with a censorship that exploits the term “antisemitism” and a sensitivity to Jewish suffering to silence anything remotely critical of Israel’s far-right government. Raz Segal, a Jewish Israeli scholar of genocide, had his position as director at the Center of Genocide and Holocaust students at the University of Minnesota rescinded (MPR, 6/11/24) because he wrote that Israel’s intentions for its campaign in Gaza were genocidal (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23). The board of directors of the Columbia Law Review briefly took down the journal’s website in response to an article (5/24) published about the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians—after the piece had already been spiked by the Harvard Law Review (Intercept, 6/3/24).  The chair of the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth College was violently arrested during an anti-genocide protest (Jerusalem Post, 5/3/24).

    The 92nd Street Y, a kind of secular Jewish temple of arts and culture in New York City, encountered massive staff resignations (NPR, 10/24/23) after it canceled a talk by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (London Review of Books, 10/18/23). The author of the American Jewish Committee’s definition of antisemitism admits that his work is being used to crush free speech (Guardian, 12/13/19; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/27/24).

    These are prominent institutions that are meant to be pillars of openness and discourse in a free society, yet that are perverting themselves in order not to offend donors, government officials and sycophantic newspaper columnists. And the victims of this kind of censorship are Jews and non-Jews alike.

    From the highest universities down to high schools like Shalhevet, administrators are cloaking their worlds in darkness. The journalists at the Boiling Point are part of a resistance keeping free speech and expression alive in the United States.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/24/censorship-at-a-jewish-school-part-of-a-crisis-for-free-expression/feed/ 0 480989     Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/21/quixotic-regulation-australias-esafety-commissioner-capitulates/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/21/quixotic-regulation-australias-esafety-commissioner-capitulates/#respond Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:05:36 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=151356 It was given top billing, a near absurd show intended to rope in content on a global social media platform, thereby denying all outside Australia access to it.  Because an Australian official had deemed a video too disturbing and offensive for Australians of ordinary sensibility (the standard remains opaquely absurd), the world’s citizenry were also […]

    The post Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     It was given top billing, a near absurd show intended to rope in content on a global social media platform, thereby denying all outside Australia access to it.  Because an Australian official had deemed a video too disturbing and offensive for Australians of ordinary sensibility (the standard remains opaquely absurd), the world’s citizenry were also to be barred from viewing it.  It did not matter that those in the US, for instance, could readily digest the same, unabridged content, or that news networks in that country could readily broadcast the material in its entirety.

    On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, smacked X (formerly known as Twitter) and Meta with legal notices to remove links to a video within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The video featured a livestreamed church service at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church, which was abruptly interrupted by a stabbing assault.  The perpetrator was a 16-year-old youth.  Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.

    X Corp’s erratic, truculent CEO thought differently about this overly generous extension of Australia’s Online Safety Act.  Elon Musk found Inman Grant’s demand insensible, calling her a “censorship commissar” in her insistence on global content bans.  While he was happy to acquiesce to restricting access to the video in Australia, the world was quite something else.

    The issue wound its way to the Federal Court.  On May 15, the Commissioner’s case received something of a sinking blow.  Justice Geoffrey Kennett pondered the “potential consequences for orderly and amicable relations between nations, if a notice with the breath contended for were enforced”.  It would, for instance, “be ignored or disparaged in other countries”.  In the United States, no court would agree to enforce any relevant injunction requiring X Corp to take down the relevant URLs, numbering 65.

    The judge acknowledged that the Online Safety Act covered “acts, omissions, matters and things outside Australia” but did not stipulate what “all reasonable steps” were in the context of removing material.  “A clear expression of intention would be necessary to support a conclusion that Parliament intended to empower the Commissioner to issue removal notices with the effect for which she contends.”  It followed that she had failed to establish “that compliance with the removal notice entails blocking access to the 65 URLs by all users of X Corp.”

    The matter should have ended there, but the regulatory instinct of condescending officials is often obstinate.  As proceedings continued through the month, more opposition manifested.  On May 27, Justice Kennett granted orders permitting the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) leave to intervene.  The intervention, reasoned FIRE, sought “to focus the court’s attention on how a global takedown order would disregard the strong free speech protections of countries like the US and lend an air of legitimacy to repressive regimes’ efforts to assert control over online content everywhere.”

    On June 5, the Commissioner finally filed a notice of discontinuance in proceedings against X.  The EFF stated with much satisfaction “that the Commissioner saw the error of her efforts”, reasoning that such global take down notices “threaten freedom of expression around the world, creating conflicting legal obligations, and lead to the lowest common denominator of internet content being available around the world”.  Doing so permitted “the least tolerant legal system to determine what we all are able to read and distribute online.”

    Very true – except that the Commissioner showed few signs of enlightenment, and certainly nothing in mending her crypto-authoritarian ways.  A statement from Inman Grant showed that her program of infantilisation and regulation of the Internet is an ongoing one.  “Our sole goal and focus in issuing our removal notice was to prevent this extremely violent footage from going viral, potentially inciting further violence and inflicting more harm on the Australian community. I stand by my investigators and the decisions eSafety made.”

    In Inman Grant’s mind, Australians generally accepted (very good of her to think so) that such “graphic material should not be broadcast on television, which begs an obvious question why it should be allowed to be distributed freely and accessible online 24/7 to anyone, including children.”  As the country’s online safety regulator, she expected “reasonable companies to be taking action in relation to this type of content.”

    Unfortunately for free speech advocates and information libertarians, the Commissioner’s paranoia does have an audience. Ever since its creation, the Australian Commonwealth has shown a parental obsession with censorship.  And now, we have such sentiments as those of Michael Miller, Executive Corp Australasia Executive Chairman, lecturing the public about the need for big tech companies to pay “a social license” should they “want access to Australian consumers”.

    Such an encumbering license would permit the Australian government “to make the platforms liable for all content that is amplified, curated, and controlled by their algorithms or recommender engines”.  It would also grant the government powers to “ultimately block access to our country and our people if they refuse to play by our rules.”

    When an entity such as News Corp gives advice on what should or should not be accessible to the broader citizenry of any country, the bells should be going off.  The Big Tech behemoths have much to answer for – the destruction of privacy, the ruthless monetisation of user data, behavioural modification and hypnotic seduction.  But governments of all hues always cling to the same logic: the public is a dangerous beast best fed morsels of information rather than the whole buffet.  Ignorance breeds manageable docility.

    The post Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/21/quixotic-regulation-australias-esafety-commissioner-capitulates/feed/ 0 480562     Chinese artist hits back at party censorship with trashy performance https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/australia-art-exhibit-junk-06172024135802.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/australia-art-exhibit-junk-06172024135802.html#respond Mon, 17 Jun 2024 17:58:18 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/australia-art-exhibit-junk-06172024135802.html A Chinese artist is hitting back at the Communist Party's ongoing attempts to censor cultural expression even far beyond China's borders with an exhibit in Sydney depicting the kind of "garbage" that gets produced when artists agree to stay within the government's "red lines."

    As part of her performance art exhibit at Sydney's Passage Gallery — titled "Junk," which runs through July 19 – Xiao Lu creates artwork live, but within a pattern of red neon strips, before crumpling it up and tossing it away like trash.

    "The whole of the Passage Gallery exhibition hall is set up as a black space,"  Xiao told RFA Mandarin at the launch of her exhibit. "There are red lights that represent China's censorship of art exhibitions and free speech."

    "In Chinese, we use the phrase 'red lines' to denote lines that can't be crossed," Xiao said. "If you cross them, something bad will happen."

    She said it's not just in China that Beijing stifles creativity, however.

    "Self-censorship by art institutions invades everyone's soul," Xiao said, adding that even exhibition venues in Australia can be wary of annoying the Chinese government.

    "Even here, it's rare to see an exhibit that truly reflects the reality of China," she said.

    It's not that Australia lacks work by Chinese artists. In Sydney alone, small and large venues alike run frequent shows year round that are lavishly sponsored by Chinese companies.

    "Most of those exhibits focus on work with 'Chinese characteristics' that is overwhelmingly unrelated to political and social reality in China today," she said.

    ENG_CHN_ART CENSORSHIP_06172024.2.jpg
    Chinese artist Xiao Lu’s performance art exhibit at Sydney’s Passage Gallery, June 14, 2024. (Lionel TC/RFA)

    "This is increasingly similar to what's happening in China, where most of the works I see are devoid of content," Xiao said. "Contemporary art shouldn't be about eulogizing something, or focusing on superficial form."

    "It should face up to the problems of the age it is living in, and raise questions about them," she said. "I don't see this kind of work in China, but I only see it rarely in Australia, which is a problem."

    ‘Soft-power infiltration’

    Xiao cites an example of Sydney's Vermilion Art gallery, which invited her to write an article about the situation in China during the stringent restrictions of the zero-COVID era.

    "I was still in China when I received a call from a gallery asking me to write an article about the situation in China," Xiao said. "It was during the pandemic [restrictions], and I wrote an article about lockdown. But the gallery didn't dare to publish it."

    Radio Free Asia approached Vermilion Art and invited them to respond to Xiao's allegations, but no reply had been received by the time of publication.

    Taiwan-based artist Kacey Wong, who went to art school in Australia, agreed with Xiao's assessment that Beijing is packaging approved forms of art to be shown in overseas galleries.

    "They take ancient Chinese culture and add various Communist Party-influenced elements to it, then export it as a form of soft-power infiltration and soft-power confrontation," Wong said.

    "The Chinese Communist Party turns every walk of life into a battlefield," he said.

    In January, Xiao boycotted an exhibition of Chinese art linked to former Australian Ambassador Geoff Raby, saying he had been lauded by the Communist Party newspaper the People's Daily in December 2019 for his uncritical attitude to Beijing.

    In February, she held an exhibit in Melbourne which hit back at Beijing's suppression of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and its clearance operations targeting the low-income population in the Chinese capital.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lionel TC for RFA Mandarin.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/australia-art-exhibit-junk-06172024135802.html/feed/ 0 479995     In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/16/in-our-make-believe-politics-the-strings-pulled-by-the-super-rich-are-all-too-visible/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/16/in-our-make-believe-politics-the-strings-pulled-by-the-super-rich-are-all-too-visible/#respond Sun, 16 Jun 2024 03:45:44 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=151164 We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show. 1. The “leader of the free world”, […]

    The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

    1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

    And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

    2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

    We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

    We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

    And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

    3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

    And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

    We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

    We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

    In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

    4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

    The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

    We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

    We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

    5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

    We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

    We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

    We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

     

    We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

    We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

    6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

    We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

    We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

    We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

    In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

    In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

    All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

    The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

    The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/16/in-our-make-believe-politics-the-strings-pulled-by-the-super-rich-are-all-too-visible/feed/ 0 479800     Censorship, Free Speech, Carol Christ & Mario Savio https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/10/censorship-free-speech-carol-christ-mario-savio/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/10/censorship-free-speech-carol-christ-mario-savio/#respond Mon, 10 Jun 2024 05:55:27 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=325117 Now that Cal has the go-ahead from the State Supreme Court to build student housing in People’s Park I thought of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the ’64 Free Speech Movement who was also for several decades a colleague of mine at Sonoma State University (SSU), an hour north of Berkeley. I wondered More

    The post Censorship, Free Speech, Carol Christ & Mario Savio appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    ]]>

    Photograph Source: Mjlovas – CC BY-SA 3.0

    Now that Cal has the go-ahead from the State Supreme Court to build student housing in People’s Park I thought of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the ’64 Free Speech Movement who was also for several decades a colleague of mine at Sonoma State University (SSU), an hour north of Berkeley. I wondered what Mario would say to Cal’s outgoing Chancellor, Carol Christ, who recently stated, “I’ve come to recognize that while freedom of speech is an absolute, just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean it’s right to say.” She added, “We all use censorship in our speech in relation to the occasion we are in. If you value your community, you have to find ways of sharing your views that are not vitriolic, that are not needlessly hurtful to other people.”

    Christ speaks with what might be called a “forked tongue.” She might seem to stand on the side of free speech. After all, she says that it is “an absolute.” But she goes on to say “we all use censorship in our speech.” Speak for yourself, Christ; don’t speak for “all” of us. Our community includes Gaza today; it’s not just Berkeley. And if and when we speak for a truce and peace we might hurt the feelings of war mongers here and in Israel. Tough. “Fuck politeness.” Someone’s feelings will always be hurt no matter what one says. Hurt feelings can’t be our yardstick for deciding what to say or not say.

    Mario would agree with Christ that one ought not to express views that “needlessly hurt other people.” He expressed that view many times at SSU when and where there were clashes between The Star, the student newspaper, and the Black students on campus. The Star published the “N” word in its pages; it also ran a cartoon that the Black students regarded as racist. The “N” word seemed to be blatantly racist, especially because it appeared in a centerfold collage created by a visiting student, a white man, from the American South who didn’t see anything wrong with using the “N” word.

    The controversial cartoon depicted a group of Black men who looked like derelicts and who were on a basketball court. In and of itself the cartoon might not have been terribly offensive. But it was the one and only image of Blacks that appeared in the newspaper all semester. It clearly stereotyped Black men. The Black students at SSU collected all the copies of The Star with the “N” word and with the cartoon and burned them in a demonstration on campus. They had a permit for the fire from the campus police.

    In the early 1990s, when the burning of the papers took place at SSU, The US Supreme Court would have regarded that act as an expression of “symbolic speech,” akin to burning the Stars and Stripes, an act it defended in Texas v. Johnson from 1989.  Today, the court would probably overturn Texas v. Johnson.

    Mario Savio valued the First Amendment. As a foe of racism, he was also sensitive to the needs and wants of the Black community on campus. He wanted the editors and reporters on The Star to understand why Black students confiscated and burned copies of the paper. (They didn’t steal them. The paper was free and not sold. ) The staff of the paper refused to meet with the Black students. They argued that the First Amendment was absolute; they dug in their heels and refused to budge. They said that they believed in free speech but would not speak with the Black students. (In Rohnert Park, the city in which SSU is located, Black students told me they heard the “N” word directed at them.)

    Mario said famously “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part!” He added, “you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!” That time is now. The operation of the war machine in Gaza is so odious and so sickening that it demands that humans do everything they can do to stop it, including sitting in and occupying space on college campuses, like Cal where Christ called the cops and where  students were arrested. If you’re arrested for expressing your First Amendment rights it’s not free. You pay a penalty.

    I was the “faculty adviser” to The Star, the most odious part of my teaching job.  The students wouldn’t listen to me. David Benson the SSU president wanted me to censor the paper, something I could not and would not do and didn’t do, though I thought it might cost me my job. It didn’t. Benson departed. I stayed and taught a class on the First Amendment.

    For much of my life I censored myself, though it hurt to do so. Then I began to speak out and felt better doing so. If and when I hurt someone’s feelings and didn’t mean to do so I could and did apologize. It is better, I decided, to say something than nothing at all. Silence in some situations can be worse than saying something that might be misunderstood. You can take back what you said that hurt.

    Chancellor Christ will not be remembered as an advocate for free speech but rather as the administrator who called the cops on the students at Cal and who put some of the final nails in the coffin of People’s Park. In March of 2024, Christ and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice appeared on the stage together at Zellerbach on the Cal campus to talk about free speech. Outside Zellerbach, students carried a banner that read, War Criminal.” They also shouted “Free Palestine.” Christ chose Rice to share the stage with her. What does that say about her commitment to freedom of speech? It says that when push comes to shove she stands with the machine. Oh, Mario, I wish you were here now to defend the First Amendment and to speak for Gaza. We will all have to speak for you.

    The post Censorship, Free Speech, Carol Christ & Mario Savio appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonah Raskin.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/10/censorship-free-speech-carol-christ-mario-savio/feed/ 0 478940     Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/08/academia-is-only-as-free-as-powerful-donors-allow-it-to-be/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/08/academia-is-only-as-free-as-powerful-donors-allow-it-to-be/#respond Sat, 08 Jun 2024 03:30:16 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150951 Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the […]

    The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.

    Here’s what happened:

    1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.

    3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

    5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

    6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”

    7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).

    If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.

    University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.

    The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.

    Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.

    Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.

    In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.

    There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.

    We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.

    The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/08/academia-is-only-as-free-as-powerful-donors-allow-it-to-be/feed/ 0 478559     Columbia Law Review website shut down over ‘censored’ article critical of Israel https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/05/columbia-law-review-website-shut-down-over-censored-article-critical-of-israel/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/05/columbia-law-review-website-shut-down-over-censored-article-critical-of-israel/#respond Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:38:28 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=102332 Pacific Media Watch

    The editorial board of the Columbia Law Review journal — made up of faculty and alumni from the university’s law school — shut down the review’s website on Monday after editors refused to halt publication of an academic article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that was critical of Israel.

    Al Jazeera reports that the student editors of the journal said they were pressured by the board to not publish the article which accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza and implementing an apartheid regime against Palestinians.

    The review’s website was taken down after the article was published on Monday morning and remained offline last night, reports AP news agency.

    Columbia Law Review
    Columbia Law Review . . . “under maintenance”. Image: APR screenshot

    A static homepage informed visitors the domain was “under maintenance”.

    Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical.

    In a letter sent to student editors yesterday, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles”.

    However, the editor involved in soliciting and editing the aricle said they had followed a “rigorous review process”.

    ‘A microcosm of repression’
    The author of the article, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, said the suspension of the journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across US campuses”.

    The Intercept reports that this was the second time in barely eight months that Eghbariah had been censored by US academic publications.

    Columbia Law Review
    Columbia Law Review . . . second journal to censor Palestinian law scholar over Nakba truth. Image: APR screenshot

    Last November, the Harvard Law Review made the unprecedented decision to “kill” (not publish) the author’s edited essay prior to publication. The author was due to be the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the quality journal.

    As The Intercept reported at the time, “Eghbariah’s essay — an argument for establishing ‘Nakba’, the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope — faced extraordinary editorial scrutiny and eventual censorship.”

    “When the Harvard publication spiked his article, editors from another Ivy League law school reached out to Eghbariah.

    “Students from the Columbia Law Review solicited a new article from the scholar and, upon receiving it, decided to edit it and prepare it for publication.

    “Now, eight months into Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, Eghbariah’s work has once again been stifled.”


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/05/columbia-law-review-website-shut-down-over-censored-article-critical-of-israel/feed/ 0 478023     Broadcast bill passed by Uruguay Senate threatens press freedom https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/30/broadcast-bill-passed-by-uruguay-senate-threatens-press-freedom/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/30/broadcast-bill-passed-by-uruguay-senate-threatens-press-freedom/#respond Thu, 30 May 2024 21:43:34 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=392087 Mexico City, May 30, 2024—Uruguayan authorities should not approve a proposed broadcast law passed by the Senate and should ensure that all media legislation is discussed broadly, including with civil society organizations and journalist representatives, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

    On May 14, the Uruguayan Senate approved the proposed “Law of Audiovisual Content Broadcasting Services” without consulting civil society organizations or other groups, according to news reports.

    Article 72 of the proposed law states that broadcasting services “have the duty to provide citizens with information, analysis, opinions, comments, and evaluations in a complete, impartial, serious, rigorous, plural, and balanced manner among and regarding political actors.” Local civil rights groups, including press freedom organization CAinfo, have warned this could potentially serve as a state control mechanism over the media.

    The House of Representatives must vote in June to either approve or reject the bill without amendments, according to the news reports.

    “Uruguayan lawmakers should not approve the proposed broadcasting law and should ensure that any new legislation is discussed broadly,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in Sao Paulo. “Control over what constitutes ‘complete, impartial, serious, rigorous, plural, and balanced’ information should never be in the hands of the state.”

    Fabián Werner, president of CAinfo, told CPJ that the bill would put Uruguay in a dangerous position, especially ahead of the country’s general elections scheduled for October 27.

    “This new law was rushed through the Senate to avoid democratic discussion and goes against international standards of freedom of expression,” he said. “It is very bad for democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.”

    Werner said that Uruguay’s current media law, approved by the government of former President José Mujica in 2013, was widely discussed with civil society sectors and international organizations such as UNESCO before and after passage.

    International organizations, including the Inter American Press Association, UNESCO, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have also expressed concerns about the proposed law.

    CPJ emailed the president of the Uruguayan House of Representatives, Ana Olivera, but did not immediately receive a reply.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Geoffrey King/CPJ Technology Program Coordinator and Tom Lowenthal/CPJ Staff Technologist.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/30/broadcast-bill-passed-by-uruguay-senate-threatens-press-freedom/feed/ 0 477282     Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/30/get-up-stand-up-dont-give-up-the-fight-know-your-rights-or-you-will-lose-them/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/30/get-up-stand-up-dont-give-up-the-fight-know-your-rights-or-you-will-lose-them/#respond Thu, 30 May 2024 17:39:08 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150750 If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. — Thomas Jefferson If America’s schools are to impart principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, they must start by respecting the constitutional rights of their students Take the case of […]

    The post Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

    — Thomas Jefferson

    If America’s schools are to impart principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, they must start by respecting the constitutional rights of their students

    Take the case of Lucas Hudson.

    With all the negative press being written about today’s young people, it’s refreshing to meet a young person who not only knows his rights but is prepared to stand up for them.

    Lucas is a smart kid, a valedictorian of his graduating class at the Collegiate Academy at Armwood High School in Hillsborough County, Fla.

    So, when school officials gave Lucas an ultimatum: either remove most of his speech’s religious references from his graduation speech—in which he thanked the people who helped shape his character, reflected on how quickly time goes by, and urged people to use whatever time they have to love others and serve the God who loves us—or he would not be speaking at all, Lucas refused to forfeit his rights.

    That’s when Lucas’s father turned to The Rutherford Institute for help.

    In coming to Lucas’ defense, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute warned school officials that their attempts to browbeat Lucas into watering down his graduation speech could expose the school to a First Amendment lawsuit.

    Thankfully for Lucas, the school backed down, and he was able to deliver his speech as written.

    It doesn’t always work out so well, unfortunately.

    Over the course of The Rutherford Institute’s 42-year history, we have defended countless young people who found themselves censored, silenced and denied their basic First Amendment rights, especially when they chose to exercise their rights to free speech and religious freedom.

    In case after case, we encounter an appalling level of ignorance on the part of public school officials who mistakenly believe that the law requires anything religious be banned from public schools.

    Here’s where government officials get it wrong: while the government may not establish or compel a particular religion, it also may not silence and suppress religious speech merely because others might take offense.

    People are free to ignore, disagree with, or counter the religious speech of others, but the government cannot censor private religious speech.

    Unfortunately, you can only defend your rights when you know them, and the American people—and those who represent them—are utterly ignorant about their freedoms, history, and how the government is supposed to operate.

    As Morris Berman points out in his book Dark Ages America, “70 percent of American adults cannot name their senators or congressmen; more than half don’t know the actual number of senators, and nearly a quarter cannot name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment. Sixty-three percent cannot name the three branches of government. Other studies reveal that uninformed or undecided voters often vote for the candidate whose name and packaging (e.g., logo) are the most powerful; color is apparently a major factor in their decision.”

    More than government corruption and ineptitude, police brutality, terrorism, gun violence, drugs, illegal immigration or any other so-called “danger” that threatens our nation, civic illiteracy may be what finally pushes us over the edge.

    As Thomas Jefferson warned, no nation can be both ignorant and free.

    Unfortunately, the American people have existed in a technology-laden, entertainment-fueled, perpetual state of cluelessness for so long that civic illiteracy has become the new normal for the citizenry.

    In fact, most immigrants who aspire to become citizens know more about national civics than native-born Americans. Surveys indicate that half of native-born Americans couldn’t correctly answer 70% of the civics questions on the U.S. Citizenship test.

    Not even the government bureaucrats who are supposed to represent us know much about civics, American history and geography, or the Constitution although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

    For instance, a couple attempting to get a marriage license was recently forced to prove to a government official that New Mexico is, in fact, one of the 50 states and not a foreign country.

    You can’t make this stuff up.

    Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. The government’s purpose is to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

    It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.”

    Those who founded this country knew quite well that every citizen must remain vigilant or freedom would be lost. As Thomas Paine recognized, “It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”

    You have no rights unless you exercise them.

    Still, you can’t exercise your rights unless you know what those rights are.

    “If Americans do not understand the Constitution and the institutions and processes through which we are governed, we cannot rationally evaluate important legislation and the efforts of our elected officials, nor can we preserve the national unity necessary to meaningfully confront the multiple problems we face today,” warns the Brennan Center in its Civic Literacy Report Card. “Rather, every act of government will be measured only by its individual value or cost, without concern for its larger impact. More and more we will ‘want what we want, and [will be] convinced that the system that is stopping us is wrong, flawed, broken or outmoded.’”

    Education precedes action.

    As the Brennan Center concludes “America, unlike most of the world’s nations, is not a country defined by blood or belief. America is an idea, or a set of ideas, about freedom and opportunity. It is these ideas that bind us together as Americans and have kept us free, strong, and prosperous. But these ideas do not perpetuate themselves. They must be taught and learned anew with each generation.”

    There is a movement underway to require that all public-school students pass the civics portion of the U.S. naturalization test—100 basic facts about U.S. history and civics—before receiving their high-school diploma, and that’s a start.

    Lucas Hudson would have passed such a test with flying colors.

    On graduation day, Lucas stepped up to the podium and delivered his uncensored valedictorian speech as written, without any interference by school censors.

    As Lucas’s father relayed to The Rutherford Institute:

    In the end, Lucas got to give his entire speech the way he wanted to give it, and everybody was paying attention.  Nobody got hurt.  Nothing bad happened.  It was just a young man using the First Amendment rights to speak his mind regarding his personal beliefs. [Lucas] never thought a few sentences in a speech would create such a controversy in his world, but this speech turned into a defining moment for him.  He will never be the same after this experience, but this permanent change is a good thing.  When it mattered, Lucas stood up for himself, and when those he stood up against tried to push him down, [The Rutherford Institute] came to his aide and backed him up to make it a fair fight. I am comforted to know you are defending the rights of the people.  These fights matter.  Every time you defend the rights of one person, you defend the rights of every person.  You helped my son fight for his rights against the school, and, in doing so, Hillsborough County Public Schools will think twice before infringing on the rights of future students. Your defense of Lucas became an inspiration for the students in his school and sparked a healthy and meaningful debate among the teachers, students, and parents about the value of the First Amendment and the need for limits on government control over our personal beliefs.  You are fighting for good and doing important work.  Don’t ever stop. Thank you, Rutherford Institute, for being there for my son when he needed you most.

    America needs more freedom fighters like Lucas Hudson and The Rutherford Institute.

    It’s up to us.

    We have the power to make and break the government.

    We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

    We must act—and act responsibly.

    A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s our job to keep freedom alive using every nonviolent means available to us.

    As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized in a speech delivered on December 5, 1955, just four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery city bus: “Democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.”

    Know your rights. Exercise your rights. Defend your rights. If not, you will lose them.

    The post Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/30/get-up-stand-up-dont-give-up-the-fight-know-your-rights-or-you-will-lose-them/feed/ 0 477255     From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/from-covid-19-to-campus-protests-how-the-police-state-muzzles-free-speech/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/from-covid-19-to-campus-protests-how-the-police-state-muzzles-free-speech/#respond Wed, 22 May 2024 20:57:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150545 The police state does not want citizens who know their rights. Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights. This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s […]

    The post From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.

    Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.

    This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to campus protests.

    Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies; policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

    And now, when they should be empowered to take their rightful place in society as citizens who fully understand and exercise their right to speak truth to power, they are being censored, silenced and shut down.

    Consider what happened recently in Charlottesville, Va., when riot police were called in to shut down campus protests at the University of Virginia staged by students and members of the community to express their opposition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

    As the local newspaper reported, “State police sporting tactical gear and riot shields moved in on the demonstrators, using pepper spray and sheer force to disperse the group and arrest the roughly 15 or so at the camp, where for days students, faculty and community members had sang songs, read poetry and painted signs in protest of Israel’s ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.”

    What a sad turn-about for an institution which was founded as an experiment in cultivating an informed citizenry by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president.

    Unfortunately, the University of Virginia is not unique in its heavy-handed response to what have been largely peaceful anti-war protests. According to the Washington Post, more than 2300 people have been arrested for taking part in similar campus protests across the country.

    These lessons in compliance, while expected, are what comes of challenging the police state.

    Free speech can certainly not be considered “free” when expressive activities across the nation are being increasingly limited, restricted to so-called free speech zones, or altogether blocked.

    Remember, the First Amendment gives every American the right to “petition his government for a redress of grievances.”

    Along with the constitutional right to peacefully (and that means non-violently) assemble, the right to free speech allows us to challenge the government through protests and demonstrations and to attempt to change the world around us—for the better or the worse—through protests and counterprotests.

    If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment with all its robust protections for free speech, assembly and the right to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances is little more than window-dressing on a store window—pretty to look at but serving little real purpose.

    After all, living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign.

    That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about: it assures the citizenry of the right to express their concerns about their government to their government, in a time, place and manner best suited to ensuring that those concerns are heard.

    Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

    In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

    Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

    Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

    Yet if Americans are not able to peacefully assemble for expressive activity outside of the halls of government or on public roads on which government officials must pass, or on college campuses, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

    If we cannot stand peacefully outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties that we cherish as Americans.

    And if we cannot proclaim our feelings about the government, no matter how controversial, on our clothing, or to passersby, or to the users of the world wide web, then the First Amendment really has become an exercise in futility.

    The source of the protest shouldn’t matter. The politics of the protesters are immaterial.

    To play politics with the First Amendment encourages a double standard that will see us all muzzled in the end.

    The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the final link in the police state chain.

    If ever there were a time for us to stand up for the right to speak freely, even if it’s freedom for speech we hate, the time is now.

     

    The post From COVID-19 to Campus Protests: How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/from-covid-19-to-campus-protests-how-the-police-state-muzzles-free-speech/feed/ 0 475875     "The New McCarthyism": Pro-Palestine Educators Face Censorship, Harassment & Firings Across U.S. https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/the-new-mccarthyism-pro-palestine-educators-face-censorship-harassment-firings-across-u-s-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/the-new-mccarthyism-pro-palestine-educators-face-censorship-harassment-firings-across-u-s-2/#respond Wed, 22 May 2024 15:51:20 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=74c9ae4f430220d3bf4ef284f984a5ca
    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/the-new-mccarthyism-pro-palestine-educators-face-censorship-harassment-firings-across-u-s-2/feed/ 0 476001     “The New McCarthyism”: Pro-Palestine Educators Face Censorship, Harassment & Firings Across U.S. https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/the-new-mccarthyism-pro-palestine-educators-face-censorship-harassment-firings-across-u-s/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/the-new-mccarthyism-pro-palestine-educators-face-censorship-harassment-firings-across-u-s/#respond Wed, 22 May 2024 12:44:08 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=229bc82b3ad07e150b185c8baf650922 Seg4 natasha newschool arrests

    The Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard details how the combination of anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic repression and very few worker protections across the U.S. has created a “very dangerous constellation” for academic laborers that is “overwhelmingly only facing pro-Palestinian speakers, not speakers who are supporting Israel’s genocide.” She calls it “the New McCarthyism” on college campuses. “A lot of media attention has focused on the spectacle of encampments and the very, very brutal police response,” says Lennard. “What you also have going on behind the scenes is the targeting of individuals who work at universities.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/22/the-new-mccarthyism-pro-palestine-educators-face-censorship-harassment-firings-across-u-s/feed/ 0 475830     Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/21/indeed-there-is-no-comparison-israels-crimes-are-far-worse-than-hamas/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/21/indeed-there-is-no-comparison-israels-crimes-are-far-worse-than-hamas/#respond Tue, 21 May 2024 05:42:04 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150537 There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why: * Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long […]

    The post Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’ first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:

    * Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.

    * Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.

    * For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel’s favour have been true for decades.

    * Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.

    * Israel has laid waste to Gaza’s entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.

    * Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.

    * Israel is actively starving Gaza’s population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.

    * Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.

    * Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.

    * And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.

    Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.

    The post Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’ first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/21/indeed-there-is-no-comparison-israels-crimes-are-far-worse-than-hamas/feed/ 0 475563     Gaza is our moment of truth https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/16/gaza-is-our-moment-of-truth/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/16/gaza-is-our-moment-of-truth/#respond Thu, 16 May 2024 02:54:09 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150410 A protest by students at George Washington University. Probal Rashid SIPA USA) Powerful student movements in the 1960s and 1970s shook the world’s conscience to end America’s slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia. The moral force of Black people rising together in their pain and rage against legislated racism changed the social fabric of America, ending […]

    The post Gaza is our moment of truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     A protest by students at George Washington University. Probal Rashid SIPA USA)

    Powerful student movements in the 1960s and 1970s shook the world’s conscience to end America’s slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia. The moral force of Black people rising together in their pain and rage against legislated racism changed the social fabric of America, ending formal segregation and ushering a new era in the struggle against institutional racialism.

    Power did what power does, deploying brute force, murder, intimidation, silencing, marginalizing, surveillance and all manner of corrupt policing.

    We see the outcome and we think we know it.

    Labels like “victory” and “advancement” are applied. “Civil rights” is a term spoken as an absolute, a singular point of history with a terrible before and liberated after.

    It’s the “happy ending” reframing of what is indeed a boundless thread of struggle for Black liberation stretching in both directions through time.

    The resilience of elite capitalist rule relies heavily on such narrative construction that manipulates public imagination with platitudes and reversible concessions, followed by a rebranding of oppression.

    Enslavement becomes mass incarceration and purposeful drug addiction. Segregation is sacrificed to be replaced with conscription of Black faces around the same table of power ethos.

    Rebooted with greater cruelty

    Power adapted since the 1960s, creating new stops, levers, gates and gatekeepers. They lulled us back into their system, rebooted it with greater cruelty and corruption, and retooled it with distractions and celebrity worship while they consolidated and concentrated power in the hands of a tiny minority.

    They bought politicians, who in turn work to safeguard and increase the wealth and influence of this elite minority, turning millionaires into billionaires and soon trillionaires, a staggering wealth gap built on the misery of the masses. They created laws to exonerate their criminality and criminalize dissent.

    They busted up the unions, subjugated workers and pitted them against each other. Instead of confronting the bosses, workers were manipulated into demanding iron borders and separation of families at those borders.

    They gutted regulations and bought up the airwaves to now dictate the content of 95 percent of everything we see, hear and read in the way of journalism, entertainment, education and cultural productions.

    This is the reason terrorist characters dominate Arab depictions in Hollywood. It’s the reason for the unusually high number of casual mentions of Israeli benevolence or genius in so many television series and films; the reason why Palestinian humanity is ignored or at best obscured in both print and broadcast news media no matter how many atrocities we face at Israel’s hands.

    It’s why Black media outlets, owned and run by Zionists of all stripes, take out hit pieces on the likes of Amanda Seales for her righteous stand on Palestine.

    Instead of paying taxes, these billionaires “donate” to universities sufficient sums to impose their vision not only for higher education, but for the acceptable expression of constitutional rights like the First Amendment.

    For example, outraged by a Palestinian literature festival – a beautiful celebration of Palestinian excellence and indigenous heritage – the billionaires Marc Rowan, Dick Wolf and the Lauder family conspired to remove the president of the University of Pennsylvania for her insufficient deference to their interpretation of academic freedom.

    Enlisting their hired goons in Congress, they and others of their ilk, like Bill Ackman, denigrated and/or removed more university presidents for the same reason.

    They even managed to bring the internet – which gave the 1990s generation hope for real democracy – under their nefarious control through algorithms and various forms of surveillance and censorship.

    Hiding the horrors

    Americans tried to stop the march of US corporate and Zionist warmongers toward war in the early 2000s, but they marched on, trampling our will and the bodies of millions of Iraqis. And the world watched as the US pulverized Iraq, a once glorious, high functioning ancient society.

    An “embedded” media hid the bloody horrors and kept the secrets of US corporate looting of Iraq’s treasures and laundering of US tax dollars through rebuilding schemes.

    Desensitized, Americans didn’t bother protesting when the US did the same in Libya, spurring a staggering de-development of one of Africa’s most advanced nations into a veritable human slave market.

    The enslavement and mutilation of Congolese children and whole families in mineral mines to benefit American tech billionaires (as well as Israel’s blood diamond trade) barely elicit a blip in Western media, a shockingly cruel reality they continue to obscure.

    There are hundreds more examples of American and Israeli militarism killing and destroying others in the service of this ruling corporate class.

    Mass surveillance of the populace followed the gutting and looting of public education in the United States. The rich got richer and the poor became destitute.

    In the name of technology and efficiency, capitalists degraded our food and water – poisoned them even – benefitting pharmaceutical billionaires who keep the masses teetering on the edge of health.

    Popular gurus pushed philosophies of individualism, contempt for family, and various forms of alienation that shattered community and social or familial bonds, leaving vast swaths of the people unable to cope with life without drug varieties, both legal and illegal.

    They have weighed us down with the fake dreams they scripted for us – insurmountable debt as a stand-in for family and education, blood diamonds as a stand-in for love and carnage abroad as a stand-in for greatness. They sold us a glorious pile of shit and made us think it was a normal – even inevitable – way of life.

    They glorified obsessive consumerism and obscenely ostentatious lifestyles. And we let them, believing it was our choice.

    But we had none.

    An American illusion

    Choice, like democracy and free press, is an American illusion, a fairytale they peddle in school, newspapers and songs.

    Look how quickly they disbanded, silenced and erased memory of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Look how we are taught to believe that change can only come through the ballot box, where we’re told to “choose” between two war criminals one election after another.

    This moment of livestreamed genocide is the culmination of decades of global capitalist criminality and genocidal Western and Zionist imperialism. We watch in horror as whole Palestinian families are buried alive in their homes, crushed beneath the weight of rubble, their bodies torn and shredded.

    Then they gaslight us.

    Politicians, spokespeople, pundits, journalists and broadcasters take to the airways to convince us that we hadn’t just seen brains, tongues and eyeballs spilling from the crushed skulls of children and babies. Or worse, that they somehow deserved it.

    “Fog of war.”

    “Collateral damage.”

    “Hamas. Hamas. Hamas.”

    “The only democracy.”

    “Self-defense.”

    Over and over they use their wicked justifications and obfuscations. They speak to us as if we’re stupid because they’re accustomed to our silence and acquiescence.

    And they go on, prancing into the Met Gala in obscene finery, the vulgarity of which is made all the more apparent in juxtaposition to the burned and dismembered small bodies on the same day, pouring into Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, screaming, bewildered, in shock and in pain.

    But thank God for the students.

    Thank God for every Palestinian journalist and every Palestinian healthcare worker risking their lives day in and out to serve their people.

    For every fighter choosing martyrdom over indignity.

    For the local organizations and activists you never hear about, but whose work has been keeping thousands alive. I dare not say their names, lest they become targets.

    For Naledi Pandor in South Africa, Francesca Albanese at the United Nations and Clare Daly in the European Parliament.

    For the masses rising up in #Blockout2024. For artists and musicians from Roger Waters and Talib Kweli, to Macklemore and Black Thought, Questlove and more.

    For Yemen, South Africa and Colombia. For every person who refuses to remain silent.

    All dots connected

    This time is different from the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a new sense of global interconnection, an emerging class consciousness and foundational political analyses predicated on post-colonial studies and intersectionality.

    Back then the white students protesting the war wouldn’t unite with the Black Panthers because they couldn’t connect the dots. All dots are connecting now.

    Gaza is no longer the enclave sealed and besieged by Israel and Abdulfattah al-Sisi’s Egypt into a concentration camp. Gaza is no longer the densely-populated strip of Israeli-occupied land.

    Rather, Gaza is now all the world.

    Gaza is our collective moment of truth, the meaning in our lives. It is the clarity we need and seek.

    It is the definitive divide between us and the ruling class that tramples us.

    It is us or them. There is no middle place now.

    All the borders fade, leaving us united to confront this greedy genocidal minority everywhere.

    Gaza is the most anguished place on earth at this hour, dimmed by unimaginable Zionist cruelty, which their military and society conduct with perverted glee that they set to music for TikTok.

    And from this tortured place of rubble, death and misery there springs the greatest light we have ever known to guide us out of the darkness in which we’ve been forced to live. The light of our ancestors – from Palestine and Alkebulan to Turtle Island and Aotearoa.

    Gaza may well be our last chance to save humanity.

    If we allow the wheels of this genocidal Zionist engine to keep turning, there will be no more limits to fascism. There will be no shame or red lines before which they will halt.

    This struggle can no more be just about a ceasefire. It must demand liberation and accountability across our burning planet.

    Already they are using the tactics of brute force, violent intimidation, suspension and marginalization. They will attempt the same dismantlement, silencing and erasure they did with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

    They will offer half-baked promises with no teeth, enough to quiet matters long enough to adopt new strategies and enact new laws.

    If we stop they will adapt, and they will do so with artificial intelligence, against which we may well have no defenses, not for a long time to come. So beware of their concessions.

    Beware of victory that pulls us back into the lanes they made.

    We cannot allow Israeli genocide against a defenseless and captive indigenous population to become a whitewashed, declawed historic moment of before and after.

    We cannot leave the lawns and streets and courts and battlefields until Zionism is dismantled and Palestine is free.

    This moment belongs to the people. We can dream our own dreams and create a new world in every personal act of refusal to participate in this horrible system predicated on genocide and unending exploitation.

    Together we are powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. Compassion and defiance are our superpowers, and this is just our origin story.

    The youth are leading and showing us that the future is ours, if we dare to claim it.

    • First published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Gaza is our moment of truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Susan Abulhawa.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/16/gaza-is-our-moment-of-truth/feed/ 0 474808     Virtual Home Invasions: We’re Not Safe from Government Peeping Toms https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/09/virtual-home-invasions-were-not-safe-from-government-peeping-toms/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/09/virtual-home-invasions-were-not-safe-from-government-peeping-toms/#respond Thu, 09 May 2024 03:01:51 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150288 The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion. Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that […]

    The post Virtual Home Invasions: We’re Not Safe from Government Peeping Toms first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion.

    Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

    We are no longer safe in our homes, not from the menace of a government and its army of Peeping Toms who are waging war on the last stronghold of privacy left to us as a free people.

    The weapons of this particular war on the privacy and sanctity of our homes are being wielded by the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries.

    Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting virtual home invasions using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, aerial drones, and other monitoring devices.

    Just recently, in fact, the Michigan Supreme Court gave the government the green light to use warrantless aerial drone surveillance to snoop on citizens at home and spy on their private property.

    While the courts have given police significant leeway at times when it comes to physical intrusions into the privacy of one’s home (the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.), the menace of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment rights has barely begun to be litigated, legislated and debated.

    Consequently, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

    Indeed, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

    Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

    A byproduct of this surveillance age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

    Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

    Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

    Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT).

    In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

    It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

    These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

    Given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices become government informants, reporting independently on anything you might do that runs afoul of the Nanny State.

    Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

    It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains, “Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others.”

    Once technology is able to access and act on your thoughts, not even your innermost thoughts will be safe from the Thought Police.

    Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, when the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    The post Virtual Home Invasions: We’re Not Safe from Government Peeping Toms first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/09/virtual-home-invasions-were-not-safe-from-government-peeping-toms/feed/ 0 473645     Why impact of Israel-Gaza war has become harder to document https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/06/why-impact-of-israel-gaza-war-has-become-harder-to-document/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/06/why-impact-of-israel-gaza-war-has-become-harder-to-document/#respond Mon, 06 May 2024 17:25:14 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=385078 Israel’s surprise attack on Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza on March 18, and the two weeks of fighting that followed, resulted in hundreds of deaths and a trail of destruction. It also left a morass of contradictory information about exactly who was killed there, who was arrested, and who went missing.  

    As the Israel-Gaza war enters its eighth month, the verification of such information has slowed to a crawl. An unprecedented number of deaths, with more than 90 Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli forces since the start of the war, displacement, and censorship are all making it exponentially harder to confirm information about the conflict’s devastating impact on Gaza’s media community – and, by extension, about the broader impact of the war.

    “At the start of the war it would take us a day or two to verify information about a journalist who had been killed or injured,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “Collecting and vetting this information is now taking us weeks or months, and in some cases won’t be possible at all.”

    More than six weeks after the Al-Shifa hospital attack, CPJ is still working to verify what happened to four people on the site who may have been journalists. Were they killed, did they go missing, or were they detained in the raid, and were they working as journalists at the time? Efforts to glean accurate information about these four have been obstructed by a communications blackout, conflicting accounts, and the near-total destruction of the Al-Shifa site, where evidence may be destroyed or buried under the rubble.

    One effect of this uncertainty is that the names of these journalists are not yet included in CPJ’s reports about other journalists held in the Al-Shifa attack – a stark illustration that the true casualty count may be much higher, and may not be known for months or even years.

    These constraints have become the norm in Gaza and, as the number of media workers in the region dwindles, pose fresh challenges to CPJ’s real-time documentation of the war’s toll on journalists.

    “Every bit of information we cannot access means the world loses more of its ability to understand what is happening in the war, how it has affected journalists and media workers, and who is specifically accountable,” said Mohamed Mandour, a researcher on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) program.

    Devastating loss of local sources

    The decimation and displacement of Gaza’s media community, which was estimated to number at least 1,000 before the war, means that there are fewer and fewer local journalists left to provide details about the fate of their colleagues. As of May 6, at least 97 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza, Lebanon, and Israel since October 7, 2023, the vast majority (92) Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes. Others have been injured, fled into exile, and had their offices destroyed. 

    Those who died may have been directly targeted or victims of a broader attack, but with whole families killed in many instances, there are fewer survivors to provide information about the circumstances of a relative’s death. To date, CPJ has determined that at least three journalists were directly targeted by Israeli forces in killings which CPJ classifies as murders, but is still researching the details for confirmation in 10 other cases that indicate possible targeting. 

    More Israel-Gaza war coverage

    CPJ has been documenting the impact of the war’s impact on journalists since it began October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an unprecedented surprise attack against Israel, which responded by declaring war on Hamas and launching airstrikes and a ground assault on Gaza. CPJ has also offered safety guides on war reporting, psychological safety, and advice for journalists arrested or detained. 

    * List of journalist casualties
    * 2023 report: War brings journalist killings to devastating high
    * Palestinian journalists detained by Israel in record numbers
    * Methodology
    * Full coverage

    “Imagine the amount of information we could have had if nearly 100 journalists had not been killed,” Mandour said. “Many journalists have also fled Gaza, some in urgent need of medical care that is not available, especially after the attacks on hospitals. Others fled to avoid being killed or injured, as there is no longer a safe space for journalists in Gaza, not even hospitals.”

    The overall scale of loss has made it harder for journalists to get the information they need to convey the full impact of the war. 

    Diaa Al-Kahlout, the Gaza bureau chief for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, who recently told CPJ that he was tortured during 33 days in Israeli detention, said that the outside world “sees only 10% of the actual reality” in Gaza. “I used to be able to get all the news, and today, many significant stories haven’t been covered,” he said.

    Diaa Al-Kahlout, Gaza bureau chief for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, recently told CPJ that he was tortured during 33 days in Israeli detention. (Photo: Courtesy of Diaa Al-Kahlout)

    In addition to journalists and their families, others who could have provided information about the situation for journalists are now dead, displaced, or injured. One of those injured and now in exile is Abdullah Al-Hajj, a photographer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), who provided crucial drone imagery of war damage before he was severely injured in a February Israeli strike in which he lost both legs. Al-Hajj was being treated in Al-Shifa hospital when Israel raided it in March, but survived and was later evacuated to Qatar.

    More than 34,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed in the war, and an April 28 Wall Street Journal report notes that Gaza health authorities – a primary source of casualty data for institutions like the U.N. – say they can no longer provide an accurate count of the dead. 

    Precarious living conditions

    Another factor hampering access to information is that overstretched Gaza journalists are drained by the same dire shortages as other residents, struggling to find food, equipment, protective gear, and safe places to stay. “They are busy trying to save their own lives,” said Mandour.

    “The day-to-day includes a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability,” Hoda Osman, executive editor of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), told CPJ recently. “They have a home today, they might not have a home tomorrow. They have their family members with them today, they might lose them tomorrow. They themselves are alive today, they might be injured or killed tomorrow.”

    Absence of foreign journalists

    The near-total ban on international journalists allowed in Gaza further complicates the situation. In most conflicts, a rotating international press corps provides additional coverage and can help assist in documentation of threats to journalists.

    Before the war, many foreign press outlets had offices in Gaza, but those bureaus have been unable to operate effectively after many were damaged during Israeli attacks. Those hit included the building housing international news agency Agence France-Presse, which had been streaming live images of the war from a camera at the top of the building.

    Despite more than 4,000 international journalists coming to Israel to cover the war, the High Court in Israel upheld the IDF’s decision to prevent almost all foreign media from Gaza. The only exceptions are a handful of tightly controlled army-led press tours. 

    “With so many Palestinian journalists killed, in exile, or physically and psychologically depleted after months of reporting and living in a conflict zone, and no international media present within Gaza either, the process of finding credible sources to verify the facts on the ground has become increasingly difficult,” CPJ MENA Representative Doja Daoud said.

    For CPJ, this dearth of sources means that it is taking longer to investigate whether a victim meets the organization’s criteria for classification as a journalist and to ensure that CPJ researchers have more than one source confirming details of a situation involving members of the media.

    “We are trying to preserve the history of what’s happening to the journalists themselves and the increasingly difficult situation they are in,” said Daoud. “And we want to be fair to everyone who is a journalist or media worker by not adding anyone to the list who should not be there or by skipping anyone. Even if we must work more slowly, it is worth the wait.”

    Communications breakdowns

    Frequent communications blackouts and destruction of media equipment are further disrupting efforts to gather information about the war. CPJ researchers say that calls that do get through are plagued with background noise from constant drone flyovers, and voice messages can get lost in often-unreliable internet connections. Journalists’ vehicles, computers, phones, cameras, and other gear also have been destroyed in attacks. “At the start of the war, it was easy to call anyone in Gaza and hear back from them immediately. Now you are not sure when or if you’ll get a response,” Mandour said. “The drone attack on Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital was less damaging than at Al-Shifa, but many journalists still lost their phones and laptops so their ability to communicate was gone.”

    Deteriorating due process

    In the case of journalist arrests – most of which have happened in the Israeli-occupied West Bank – “we are finding it difficult to document arrests because even the lawyers for the journalists’ families don’t have access to the details,” said Ignacio Delgado Culebras, a consultant for CPJ’s MENA team. “Due process is failing because authorities can use administrative detention laws to put people behind bars without charging them or publicly disclosing evidence. It’s only over time we find out where they are held or whether there are any charges filed.” 

    In one of the cases CPJ is investigating, freelance journalist Hamza al-Safi was arrested in February, but his wife still doesn’t know the reason for his arrest or the charges he is facing. Al-Safi, who contributes to the Hamas-affiliated Quds News Network, the news website Al-Jarmaq News, and other outlets, was arrested at his house in the West Bank on February 9, according to news reports and his wife.

    Israel’s use of administrative detention, a practice in place before the onset of the war, has long been condemned by human rights groups and U.N. experts.

    Fear of retribution in multiple regions, perceptions of indifference

    Many sources are increasingly afraid to speak out. “People don’t want to be killed, attacked, or imprisoned by the authorities for echoing critical voices” whether those authorities are Hamas or Israel, Daoud said. 

    Daoud noted that this fear transcends borders as journalists in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt have all faced violence and censorship during the war: 

    • Israel raided and closed the Jerusalem office of Al-Jazeera after the Israeli cabinet voted on May 5 to shut down the broadcasts of the Qatar-based channel in Israel under a law that could also restrict other international outlets working in Israel if they are deemed to be a threat to the country’s security. Israeli journalists have said they fear expressing views critical of their country’s actions in the war. Some have been attacked by Israeli citizens while covering events. Military officials have also voiced concerns about government efforts to stifle reporting. 
    • In Lebanon, at least five journalists, who spoke to CPJ anonymously for fear of retribution, said they had been detained in the country while trying to document the war in the south. Others have faced online threats and investigations for being critical of the war.
    • In Jordan, journalists have been detained for reporting on the protests in front of the Israeli embassy in Amman. Charges of “impersonating a journalist” are being brought against journalists who aren’t members of the government-approved Press Syndicate. (Most practicing journalists are not in the syndicate.) Many journalists also tell CPJ they are facing threats but do not want to report them publicly.
    • Egypt has banned international and Egyptian journalists from entering Gaza through the Rafah border crossing. Additionally, when one of the few independent media outlets in Egypt, Mada Masr, reported on the effect of the Israel-Gaza war in Egypt, the Egyptian authorities banned Mada Masr’s website for six months and referred its editor-in-chief for prosecution.

    Perceptions of global indifference are also making people more cautious in providing information. “In the beginning of the war people were interested in exposing actions against journalists,” Mandour said. “Now everyone knows the international community has been ineffective in stopping media arrests and violence. They wonder why they should speak out if they are not getting any protection.”

    CPJ’s road to accountability

    CPJ believes that the decline in reporting – along with the war’s impact on the media – will continue if Israel is able to continue attacking and imprisoning journalists without consequence. “Deadly Pattern,” a CPJ investigation published in May 2023, found that Israel did not charge any soldiers for 20 journalist killings in over 22 years. 

    This pattern of impunity may be repeated in the current war, where it could become a playbook for repressive behavior in the Israel-Gaza region and elsewhere – endangering journalists and suppressing information needed to hold accountable those who kill, attack and imprison them for their work. 

    To help curb the threats to journalists and press for more information attacks against them, CPJ continues to conduct methodical research and to press both regional and global authorities to act on journalists’ behalf. Said Daoud: “We are keeping in mind that the road to accountability, to justice, to all of these court hearings and rulings and lawsuits is through our accurate documentation.”


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/06/why-impact-of-israel-gaza-war-has-become-harder-to-document/feed/ 0 473226     Why the media have failed Gaza https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/06/why-the-media-have-failed-gaza/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/06/why-the-media-have-failed-gaza/#respond Mon, 06 May 2024 13:32:33 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150261 [This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.] Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things. First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a […]

    The post Why the media have failed Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     [This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.]

    Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things.

    First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a horrifying price for making the Palestinian experience of genocide visible to western audiences over the past seven months.

    Israel has killed a tenth of their number – some 100 journalists – as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel’s has been most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.

    Second, we must shame the western media – not least the BBC – who have so utterly betrayed their Palestinian colleagues by failing to properly report the destruction of Gaza, or name it as a genocide.

    The BBC aired only the briefest coverage of South Africa’s devastating case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January – a case so powerful the court has put Israel on trial for genocide. A fact you would barely know from the BBC’s reporting.

    By contrast, the corporation cleared the schedules to present in full Israel’s hollow legal response.

    The BBC’s double standards are all the more glaring if we recall how it reported Ukraine, also invaded by a hostile army – Russia’s.

    Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv’s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.

    BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post – apparently approvingly – a diagram showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.

    Two years later, in its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.

    It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks – even though those soldiers, unlike Russia’s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.

    Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.

    But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren’t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.

    The same media that celebrated families taking in Ukrainian refugees has willingly conspired in the smearing of those whose only crime is that they wish to stop the slaughter of 15,000-plus Palestinian children in Gaza.

    There is apparently nothing heroic about opposing Israel’s genocide, even if opposing Russia’s invasion is still treated as a badge of honour.

    The media give politicians a free pass to vilify as an antisemite anyone outraged that UK weapons are being used to help kill, maim and orphan many, many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. That accusation assumes that every Jew supports this slaughter, and erases all those Jews standing alongside us today at this protest.

    In the US, police forces are beating and arresting students who have peacefully called on their universities to stop investing in the arming of Israel’s genocide. When the police pulled back at UCLA, it was only to allow pro-Israel thugs to assault the students – again many of them Jews.

    A clear war is being waged against the right to protest against a genocide. And in tandem, the media has declared a war on the English language.

    The roles of aggressor and victim have been reversed. The BBC accused the students, encamped on university grounds, of “clashing” with pro-Israel groups that invaded the campus to violently attack them.

    What explains these glaring inconsistencies, this gigantic failure by a media that’s supposed to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power.

    Part of the answer is old-school racism. Ukrainains look like us, as some reporters let slip, and therefore deserve our solidarity. Palestinians, it seems, do not.

    But there is another, more important answer. The establishment media isn’t really a watchdog on the abuse of power. It never was. It is a narrative factory, there to create stories that make those abuses of power possible.

    State and billionaire-owned media achieve this goal through various sleights of hand.

    First, they omit stories that might disrupt the core narrative.

    The media’s script is a simple one:

    What the West and its allies do is always well-meant, however horrific the outcomes.

    And what the West does, however provocative or foolhardy, can never be cited as an explanation for what our “enemies” do.

    No cause and no effect. They, whoever we select, are simply savage. They are evil. Theyare out to destroy civilisation. They must be stopped.

    Nightly for weeks, I have watched the BBC news. If it were all I relied on, I would barely know that Israel is daily bombing the refugee camps of Rafah that are supposedly a “safe zone”.

    Or that Israel continues to engineer a famine by blocking aid, and that Palestinians continue to die of hunger.

    Or that the UK has actively assisted the creation of that famine by denying UNRWA funding.

    Or that the protests to end the Gaza genocide – painted as terror-supporting and antisemitic – are backed by many, many Jews, some of them here today.

    And of course, I would have little idea that Israel’s imprisonment and slaughter of Palestinians did not begin on October 7 with Hamas’ attack.

    That’s because the BBC continues to ignore the siege of Gaza as the context for October 7 – just as it and the rest of the media largely ignored the 17-year siege throughout the years Israel was enforcing it.

    If I relied on the BBC, I would not understand that what Israel is doing can be neither “retaliation”, nor a “war”. You can’t go to war, or retaliate, against a people whose territory you have been belligerently occupying and stealing for decades.

    And when the media can no longer omit, it distracts – through strategies of deflection, misdirection and minimisation.

    So when Gaza makes the news, as it rarely does now, it is invariably filtered through other lenses.

    The focus is on interminable negotiations, on Israel’s plans for the “day after”, on the agonies of the hostages’ families, on the fears evoked by protest chants, on where to draw the line on free speech.

    Anything to avoid addressing a genocide that’s been carried out in broad daylight for seven months.

    In their defence, establishment journalists tell us that they have a duty to be impartial. Their critics, they say, do not understand how news operations work.

    As a journalist who spent years working in major newsrooms, I can assure you this is a self-serving lie.

    Just this week, an interview went viral of the Norway Broadcasting Corporation interviewing Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. Unlike on the BBC, Mencer’s lies did not pass unchallenged.

    The Norwegian journalist spent 25 minutes unpicking his falsehoods and deceptions, one by one. It was revelatory to see an Israeli spokesperson’s claims stripped away, layer by layer, until he stood there naked, his lies exposed.

    It can be done – if there is a will to do it.

    Journalists at the BBC and the rest of the establishment media understand, however implicitly, that their job is to fail. It is to fail to investigate the genocide in Gaza. It is to fail to give voice to the powerless. It is to fail to provide context and aid understanding. It is to fail to show solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza being killed for their journalism.

    Rather, the BBC’s role is to protect the political establishment from ever being held to account for their complicity in genocide.

    The establishment media’s job is to create the impression of uncertainty, of doubt, of confusion – even when what is happening is crystal clear.

    When one day, the World Court finally gets round to issuing a ruling on Israel’s genocide, our politicians and media will claim they could not have known, that they were misled, that they could not see clearly because events were shrouded by the “fog of war”.

    Our job is to explode that lie, to deny them an alibi. It is to keep pointing out that the information was there from the start. They knew, if only because we told them.

    And one day, if there is any justice, they will stand in the dock – at the Hague – their excuses stripped away.

    The post Why the media have failed Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/06/why-the-media-have-failed-gaza/feed/ 0 473277     Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/24/warring-against-encryption-australia-is-coming-for-your-communications/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/24/warring-against-encryption-australia-is-coming-for-your-communications/#respond Wed, 24 Apr 2024 02:52:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149957 On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The relevant material featured a […]

    The post Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The relevant material featured a livestreamed video of a stabbing attack by a 16-year-old youth at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church the previous day.  Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.

    Those at X, and its executive, Elon Musk, begged to differ, choosing to restrict general access to the graphic details of the video in Australia alone.  Those outside Australia, and those with a virtual private network (VPN), would be able to access the video unimpeded.  Ruffled and irritated by this, Grant rushed to the Australian Federal Court to secure an interim injunction requiring X to hide the posts from global users with a hygiene notice of warning pending final determination of the issue.  While his feet and mind are rarely grounded, Musk was far from insensible in calling Grant a “censorship commissar” in “demanding *global* content bans”.  In court, the company will argue that Grant’s office has no authority to dictate what the online platform posts for global users.

    This war of grinding, nannying censorship – which is what it is – was the prelude for other agents of information control and paranoia to join the fray.  The Labour Albanese government, for instance, with support from the conservative opposition, have rounded on Musk, blurring issues of expression with matters of personality.  “This is an egotist,” fumed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “someone who’s totally out of touch with the values that Australian families have, and this is causing great distress.”

    The values game, always suspicious and meretricious, is also being played by law enforcement authorities.  It is precisely their newfound presence in this debate that should get members of the general public worried.  You are to be lectured to, deemed immature and incapable of exercising your rights or abide by your obligations as citizens of Australian society.

    We have the spluttering worries of Australian Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw in claiming that children (always handy to throw them in) and vulnerable groups (again, a convenient reference) are “being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison on the open and dark web”.  These muddled words in his address to the National Press Club in Canberra are shots across the bow.  “The very nature of social media allows that extremist poison to spray across the globe almost instantaneously.”

    Importantly, Kershaw’s April 24 address has all the worrying signs of a heavy assault, not just on the content to be consumed on the internet, but on the way communications are shared.  And what better way to do so by using children as a policy crutch?  “We used to warn our children about stranger danger, but now we need to teach our kids about the digital-world deceivers.”  A matronly, slightly unhinged tone is unmistakable.  “We need to constantly reinforce that people are not always who they claim to be online; and that also applies to images and information.”  True, but the same goes for government officials and front-line politicians who make mendacity their stock and trade.

    Another sign of gathering storm clouds against the free sharing of information on technology platforms is the appearance of Australia’s domestic espionage agency, ASIO.  Alongside Kershaw at the National Press Club, the agency’s chief, Mike Burgess, is also full of grave words about the dangerous imperium of encrypted chatter.  There are a number of Australians, warns Burgess, who are using chat platforms “to communicate with offshore extremists, sharing vile propaganda, posting tips about homemade weapons and discussing how to provoke a race war”.

    The inevitable lament about obstacles and restrictions – the sorts of things to guard the general citizenry against encroachments of the police state – follows.  “ASIO’s ability to investigate is seriously compromised.  Obviously, we and our partners will do everything we can to prevent terrorism and sabotage, so we are expending significant resources to monitor the Australians involved.”  You may count yourselves amongst them, dear reader.

    Kershaw is likewise not a fan of the encrypted platform.  In the timeless language of paternal policing, anything that enables messages to be communicated in a public sense must first receive the state’s approval.  “We recognise the role that technologies like end-to-end encryption play in protecting personal data, privacy and cyber-security, but there is no absolute right to privacy.”

    To make that very point, Burgess declares that “having lawful and targeted access to extremist communications” would make matters so much easier for the intelligence and security community.  Naturally, it will be up to the government to designate what it deems to be extremist and appropriate, a task it is often ill-suited for.  Once the encryption key is broken, all communications will be fair game.

    When it comes to governments, authoritarian regimes do not have a monopoly on suspicion and the fixation on keeping populations in check.  In an idyll of ignorance, peace can reign among the docile, the unquestioning, the cerebrally inactive.  The Australian approach to censorship and control, stemming from its origins as a tortured penal outpost of the British Empire, is drearily lengthy.  Its attitude to the Internet has been one of suspicion, concern, and complexes.

    Government ministers in the antipodes see a world, not of mature participants searching for information, but inspired terrorists, active paedophiles and noisy extremists carousing in shadows and catching the unsuspecting.  Such officialdom is represented by such figures as former Labor Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who thankfully failed to introduce a mandatory internet filter when in office, or such nasty products of regulatory intrusion as the Commonwealth Online Safety Act of 2021, zealously overseen by Commissar Grant and the subject of Musk’s ire.

    The age of the internet and the world wide web is something to admire and loathe.  Surveillance capitalism is very much of the loathsome, sinister variety.  But ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, and the Australian government and other agencies do not give a fig about that.  The tech giants have actually corroded privacy in commodifying data but many still retain stubborn residual reminders of liberty in the form of encrypted communications and platforms for discussion.  To have access to these means of public endeavour remains the holy grail of law enforcement officers, government bureaucrats and fearful politicians the world over.

    The post Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/24/warring-against-encryption-australia-is-coming-for-your-communications/feed/ 0 471311     The Importance of Independent Journalism in Fighting Censorship and Countering Corporate Media Propaganda https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/the-importance-of-independent-journalism-in-fighting-censorship-and-countering-corporate-media-propaganda/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/the-importance-of-independent-journalism-in-fighting-censorship-and-countering-corporate-media-propaganda/#respond Tue, 23 Apr 2024 20:35:08 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=40571 In the first segment, Mickey speaks with Professor Raza Rumi, director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, who explains the declining relevance of “legacy” media and the essential work of a truly independent press. They go on to talk about media censorship and propaganda around Israel…

    The post The Importance of Independent Journalism in Fighting Censorship and Countering Corporate Media Propaganda appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/the-importance-of-independent-journalism-in-fighting-censorship-and-countering-corporate-media-propaganda/feed/ 0 471279     Australian journalist Avani Dias leaves India over visa delay, censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/australian-journalist-avani-dias-leaves-india-over-visa-delay-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/australian-journalist-avani-dias-leaves-india-over-visa-delay-censorship/#respond Tue, 23 Apr 2024 16:49:12 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=381983 New Delhi, April 23, 2024—Indian authorities should safeguard press freedom and stop using visa regulations to prevent foreign journalists covering sensitive subjects, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.

    Avani Dias, South Asia bureau chief for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), left India on April 19, the first day of India’s election, after being told by a Ministry of External Affairs official that her visa extension would be denied because her reporting had “crossed a line,” according to multiple news reports.

    “We were also told my election accreditation would not come through because of an Indian ministry directive,” Dias, who had been based in India since 2022, posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.

    Dias said that she was granted a two-month visa extension, following an Australian government intervention, less than 24 hours before her flight was due to leave.

    In March, ABC broadcast a documentary by Dias on the June 2023 killing in Canada of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was a Canadian citizen. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there were “credible allegations” that India was involved in the Sikh leader’s shooting, which India dismissed as “absurd.”

    After receiving a demand from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, YouTube blocked access in India to Dias’ report, as well as an ABC news segment about Australian national security agents meeting with Sikh activists in Australia regarding Nijjar’s death, ABC said.

    “The case of ABC journalist Avani Dias is not an isolated incident. Foreign correspondents in India have faced increasing pressure and harassment from authorities, particularly when reporting on topics deemed unfavorable to the administration. Such actions not only infringe upon the rights of journalists but also deprive the public of access to important information and diverse perspectives,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative.

    “The Indian government must respect the fundamental principles of press freedom, refrain from retaliating against journalists for their reporting, and foster an environment for independent journalism. Visa regulations should not be used to censor or intimidate the media.”  

    Late Tuesday, an unnamed government source told NDTV that Dias’ account of her departure was “not correct, misleading and mischievous.” The official was quoted as saying, “Dias was found to have violated visa rules while undertaking her professional pursuits,” without providing further details. 

    Dias’ reports were blocked under India’s Information Technology Act, which was also used in March to block access on YouTube in India to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary featuring footage of Nijjar’s killing and in April to block prominent Hindi language news channels Bolta Hindustan and National Dastak without explanation.

    In the last decade, journalists in India have faced an increasingly difficult environment, with critical websites censored, the departure of prominent editors, and independent outlets bought by politically-connected conglomerates, while divisive content has grown in popularity. India had the most video takedowns globally from October to December 2023, with over 2 million YouTube videos removed. 

    From April 19 until June 1, Indians are voting in a general election, which the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been in power since 2014, is expected to win. Journalists told CPJ they were concerned about political violence, trolling, and device hacking.

    Dias is the second foreign correspondent to leave India this year due to visa problems, following French journalist Vanessa Dougnac.

    India’s Ministry of External Affairs did not immediately respond to CPJ’s email seeking comment on Dias’ departure.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/australian-journalist-avani-dias-leaves-india-over-visa-delay-censorship/feed/ 0 471249     Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/censorship-wars-elon-musk-safety-commissioners-and-violent-content/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/censorship-wars-elon-musk-safety-commissioners-and-violent-content/#respond Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:40:46 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149922 The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy.  While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders […]

    The post Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy.  While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders being attacked by his assailant in Sydney suggests a lengthy couch session is in order.  But more than that, it suggests that the censoring types are trying, more than ever, to tell users what to see and under what conditions for fear that we will all reach for a weapon and go on the rampage.

    It all stems from the April 15 incident that took place at an Assyrian Orthodox service conducted by Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and the Rev. Isaac Royel at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, Sydney.  A 16-year-old youth, captured on the livestream of the surface, is shown heading to the bishop before feverishly stabbing him, speaking Arabic about insults to the Prophet Muhammed as he does so.  Rev. Royel also received injuries.

    Up to 600 people subsequently gathered around the church.  A number demanded that police surrender the boy.  In the hours of rioting that followed, 51 police officers were injured.  Various Sydney mosques received death threats.

    The matter – dramatic, violent, raging – rattled the authorities.  For the sake of appearance, the heavies, including counter-terrorism personnel, New South Wales police and members of the Australian domestic spy agency, ASIO, were brought in.  The pudding was ready for a severe overegging.  On April 16, the NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb deemed the stabbing a “terrorist incident”.  NSW Premier Chris Minns stated that the incident was being investigated as a “terrorist incident” given the “religiously motivated” language used during the alleged attack.

    After conducting interviews with the boy while still in his hospital bed on April 18, the decision was made to charge him with the commission of an alleged act of terrorism.  This, despite a behavioural history consistent with, as The Guardian reports, “mental illness or intellectual disability.”  For their part, the boy’s family noted “anger management and behavioural issues” along with his “short fuse”, none of which lent themselves to a conclusion that he had been radicalised.  He did, however, have a past with knife crime.

    Assuming the general public to be a hive of incipient terrorism easily stimulated by images of violence, networks and media outlets across the country chose to crop the video stream.  The youth is merely shown approaching the bishop, at which point he raises his hand and is editorially frozen in suspended time.

    Taking this approach implied a certain mystification that arises from tampering and redacting material in the name of decency and inoffensiveness; to refuse to reveal such details and edit others, the authorities and information guardians were making their moralistic mark.  They were also, ironically enough, lending themselves to accusations of the very problems they seek to combat: misinformation and its more sinister sibling, disinformation.

    Another telling point was the broader omission in most press reporting to detail the general background of the bishop in question.  Emmanuel is an almost comically conservative churchman, a figure excommunicated for his theological differences with orthodoxy.  He has also adopted fire and brimstone views against homosexuality, seeing it as a “crime in the eyes of God”, attacked other religions of the book, including Judaism and Islam, and sees global conspiracies behind the transmission of COVID-19.  Hardly, it would seem, the paragon of mild tolerance and calm acceptance in a cosmopolitan society.

    On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, got busy, announcing that X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had been issued with legal notices to remove material within 24 hours depicting “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”.  The material in question featured the attack at the Good Shepherd Church.

    Under the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth), the commissioner is granted various powers to make sure the sheep do not stray.  Internet service providers can be requested or required to block access to material that promotes abhorrent violent conduct, incites such conduct, instructs in abhorrent violent conduct or depicts abhorrent violent conduct.  Removal of material promoting, instructing, or depicting such “abhorrent violent conduct”, including “terrorist acts” can be ordered for removal if it risks going “viral” and causing “significant harm to the Australian community”.

    X took a different route, preferring to “geoblock” the content.  Those in Australia, in other words, would not be able to access the content except via such alternative means as a virtual private network (VPN).  The measure was regarded as insufficient by the commissioner.  In response, a shirty Musk dubbed Grant Australia’s “censorship commissar” who was “demanding *global* content bans”.  On April 21, a spokesperson for X stated that the commissioner lacked “the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally.  We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.”

    In court, the commissioner argued that X’s interim measure not to delete the material but “geoblock” it failed to comply with the Online Safety Act.  Siding with her at first instance, the court’s interim injunction requires X to hide the posts in question from all users globally.  A warning notice is to cover them. The two-day injunction gives X the opportunity to respond.

    There is something risible in all of this.  From the side of the authorities, Grant berates and intrudes, treating the common citizenry as malleable, immature and easily led.  Spare them the graphic images – she and members of her office decide what is “abhorrent” and “offensive” to general sensibilities.

    Platforms such as Meta and X engage in their own forms of censorship and information curation, their agenda algorithmically driven towards noise, shock and indignation.  All the time, they continue to indulge in surveillance capitalism, a corporate phenomenon the Australian government shows little interest in battling.  On both sides of this coin, from the bratty, petulant Musk, to the teacherly manners of the eSafety Commissioner, the great public is being mocked and infantilised.

    The post Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/23/censorship-wars-elon-musk-safety-commissioners-and-violent-content/feed/ 0 471134     CPJ, others warn against censorship attempt from former Brazilian attorney general https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/19/cpj-others-warn-against-censorship-attempt-from-former-brazilian-attorney-general/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/19/cpj-others-warn-against-censorship-attempt-from-former-brazilian-attorney-general/#respond Fri, 19 Apr 2024 18:59:11 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=381047 The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) joined eight other press freedom organizations in an April 19 statement urging the Brazilian Supreme Court to dismiss the case against journalist André Barrocal filed by former attorney general Augusto Aras.

    Aras filed a defamation case against Barrocal in response to the reporter’s July 2020 article about Aras’s performance, which was published in Carta Capital Magazine. The Superior Court of Justice (STJ) rejected the case, and Aras has now appealed to the Federal Supreme Court (STF).

    The signatory press freedom organizations trust that the Federal Supreme Court will reject this unfounded attempt to silence public criticism and criminalize journalism in Brazil.

    Read the joint statement here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/19/cpj-others-warn-against-censorship-attempt-from-former-brazilian-attorney-general/feed/ 0 470666     Germany buries the evidence of complicity in genocide: Nicaragua exposes it https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/17/germany-buries-the-evidence-of-complicity-in-genocide-nicaragua-exposes-it/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/17/germany-buries-the-evidence-of-complicity-in-genocide-nicaragua-exposes-it/#respond Wed, 17 Apr 2024 08:01:26 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149807 Last Thursday, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian war surgeon, gave his first address as the newly-appointed rector of Glasgow University, chosen in recognition of his work at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The following day he flew to Berlin, where he had been invited to address a major conference about Palestine. On arrival he was taken […]

    The post Germany buries the evidence of complicity in genocide: Nicaragua exposes it first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Last Thursday, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian war surgeon, gave his first address as the newly-appointed rector of Glasgow University, chosen in recognition of his work at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The following day he flew to Berlin, where he had been invited to address a major conference about Palestine. On arrival he was taken away by police, interrogated for several hours and eventually told he had to leave Germany and wouldn’t be allowed to return until at least the end of April. Any attempt to speak to the conference via Zoom could result in a fine or even a year’s prison sentence. By the time he was released he couldn’t have taken part in the conference anyway, since it had been already invaded by at least 900 police and closed down. Berlin’s mayor said that it was ‘intolerable’ that the conference was taking place at all.

    Speaking about his experience afterwards, Dr Abu-Sittah referred to the fact that Germany had – also last week – been defending itself at the International Court of Justice against charges by Nicaragua that it is an accomplice to genocidal war. ‘This is exactly what accomplices to a crime do’ he said. ‘They bury the evidence and they silence or harass or intimidate the witnesses’.

    Watching the live feed of Germany’s lawyers at the Hague a few days earlier had been an odd experience. They gave the impression of being affronted that Germany had been accused of such crimes, especially by a small country which, they argued, had no stake in the case. Also, Israel could not yet be said to be committing genocide, because the ICJ has not yet determined the case brought against it by South Africa, which Germany had supported Israel in contesting. Because Israel was not party to the new case, it should simply be thrown out.

    Some research might have given them a better appreciation of Nicaragua’s credentials to bring the case. Its mutual solidarity with Palestine goes back a long way. It also has more experience at the Hague than Germany, including its pioneer action against the US in 1984, when it won compensation of £17 billion (that was never paid) for the damage done to Nicaragua by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports. Carlos Argüello, who led the case last week and many of its previous cases, said that Nicaragua offered its expertise to Palestine and it had already joined in with South Africa’s action. It had decided to target Germany, the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, the biggest supplier, is outside the court’s jurisdiction on this issue.

    Argüello explains that the object is to create a precedent with wider application – that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law. Germany’s argument that legal action cannot proceed before South Africa’s earlier case is resolved is nonsense, since countries have an obligation to prevent genocide, not merely wait until it is proven to be happening. In any case, Germany must have been aware of the numerous warnings from senior UN officials of the imminence of genocide in Gaza, which began as early as October 9th.

    Germany claimed that it has a “robust legal framework” in place to ensure its arms exports are not misused, and that sales to Israel are now restricted to non-lethal equipment. But any supplies being sent to a genocidal army are helping to sustain its criminal actions, Nicaragua replied.

    Much was made of Germany’s historic obligations due to its Nazi history, but Argüello argues that these should relate to the Jewish people, not the Israeli state. He adds that Germany’s past might also oblige it to help prevent genocide wherever it might occur. Its government spokesman on the South Africa case had claimed that Germany is ‘particularly committed to the Genocide Convention’.

    The economist Yanis Varoufakis was also banned from speaking in Berlin. He planned to conclude his speech by telling German politicians that ‘they have covered themselves in shame’ through their unflinching support for Israel’s atrocities. Carlos Argüello echoes this point when asked whether a decision by the ICJ can actually be enforced: we have to mobilise shame, he says, ‘…that’s the hope with this. Perhaps being too idealistic, but it’s the only weapon we have’.

    The post Germany buries the evidence of complicity in genocide: Nicaragua exposes it first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Perry.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/17/germany-buries-the-evidence-of-complicity-in-genocide-nicaragua-exposes-it/feed/ 0 470185     The Palestine Congress https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/16/the-palestine-congress/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/16/the-palestine-congress/#respond Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:51:00 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149786 Thank God for the German Hate Police! Or heil … or whatever the appropriate salutation is for these unsung heroes. They just saved us all from “hate” again! Yes, that’s right, once again, democracy-loving people here in New Normal Berlin and all across the New Normal world were right on the brink of being exposed […]

    The post The Palestine Congress first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Thank God for the German Hate Police! Or heil … or whatever the appropriate salutation is for these unsung heroes. They just saved us all from “hate” again!

    Yes, that’s right, once again, democracy-loving people here in New Normal Berlin and all across the New Normal world were right on the brink of being exposed to “hate,” and would have been exposed to “hate,” had the Hate Police not sprang into action.

    You probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

    OK, what happened was, some pro-Palestinian activists organized a “Palestine Congress,” and attempted to discuss the situation in Gaza, and call for solidarity with the Palestinians, and so on, right here in the middle of Berlin, the epicenter of European democracy, as if they thought they had a right to do that. The German authorities were clearly intent on disabusing them of that notion.

    Early Friday morning, hundreds of black-clad Hate Police descended on the congress location. Reinforcements were called in from throughout the nation. Metal barricades were erected on the sidewalks. Hate Police stood guard at the entrance. The German media warned the public that a potential “Hate-Speech” attack was now imminent. Berliners were advised to shelter in place, switch off their phones and any other audio-receptive communication devices, and wad up little pieces of toilet paper and ram them deep into their ear canals to prevent any possible exposure to the “hate.”

    Sure enough, minutes into the congress, the anticipated “Hate-Speech” attack was launched! A Palestinian activist — Salman Abu Sitta — who had written an article that allegedly “expressed understanding of Hamas,” and thus had already been placed on the official German “No-Speak” list, started speaking to the congress on Zoom or whatever. Or … it isn’t quite clear whether he actually started speaking. According to a Hate Police spokesperson, they raided the congress because “there is a risk of a speaker being put on the screen who in the past made anti-Semitic and violence-glorifying remarks.”

    Anyway, the Hate Police stormed the venue, pulled the plug, dispersed the crowd, and banned the rest of the “Palestine Congress,” which was scheduled to continue on Saturday and Sunday. Then they arrested a Jewish guy who was wearing a Palestinian-flag-kippah, presumably out of an abundance of caution.

    But the “Hate-Speech” attack wasn’t over yet. It was one of those multi-pronged “Hate-Speech” attacks, or at least it involved one other prong. Earlier that morning, or perhaps while the Hate Police were still neutralizing the threat at the venue, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a prominent British surgeon, who had volunteered in Gaza and was due to speak at the congress, was intercepted by the Berlin Airport Hate Police, refused entry into Germany, and forced to return to the UK. The Airport Hate Police informed the doctor that he was being denied entry in order to ensure “the safety of the people at the conference and public order,” Abu Sitta told the Associated Press.

    Kai Wegner, Berlin’s mayor, presumably feeling a bit nostalgic for the fanatical days of 2020 to 2023 when one could persecute “the Unvaccinated” with total impunity, took to X to celebrate the Hate Police’s thwarting of this “Hate event.”

    The pro-Palestinian activist community also took to X and expressed their displeasure. Yanis “Vaccinate Humanity” Varoufakis, who was one of the organizers and was scheduled to speak, was particularly incensed over the new German “fascism,” which apparently he has just now noticed, despite the fact that it has been goose-stepping around in a medical-looking mask for the last four years.

    Yanis was not alone in his outrage. An increasing number of mainstream German journalists, authors, academics, and other members of the professional “progressive” classes are stunned that the new totalitarian society that they fanatically ushered into being during the so-called “Covid Pandemic” era — or stood by in silence and watched it happen — is now unleashing its fascistic force against them.

    Which, OK, I get it. I mean, if I had just spent the last four years behaving like a Nazi, you know, persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” demonizing everyone who refused to wear the insignia of my fascist ideology on their face, and parroting official propaganda like an enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument, or just stood by in silence while other people did that, I would probably want to act like that never happened, and pretend that Germany was suddenly going “fascist” over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and just memory-hole the whole “Covid” thing.

    I would probably be highly motivated to do that — if that were how I had behaved for the past four years — so that I didn’t appear to be a fucking hypocrite who will start clicking heels and following orders the moment the authorities declare another fake emergency and jack up the Fear.

    Sorry … I’ve been trying to be less vituperative, but this memory-holing bullshit makes me go ballistic. If there is one demographic that I do not need to hear sanctimonious exhortations to speak out against the global crackdown on dissent from, it’s recently ex-Covidian-Cult leftists.

    In any event, thank God for those Hate Police! If it weren’t for them … well, just imagine the horror, if the activists at that Palestine Congress had been allowed to express their opinions about Israel. They might have even said the word “genocide,” or made reference to a “river” and a “sea.”

    Who knows what that kind of unbridled “hate” could lead to? Perhaps the end of democracy. Maybe even World War III.

    The post The Palestine Congress first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/16/the-palestine-congress/feed/ 0 470023     Germany confirms its collaboration with genocide https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/15/germany-confirms-its-collaboration-with-genocide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/15/germany-confirms-its-collaboration-with-genocide/#respond Mon, 15 Apr 2024 23:19:02 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149778 The photo is a screen shot from Press TV showing a demo protest against the shutdown of the conference. A three day Palestine conference in Berlin was forcibly shut down after three hours on Friday. Electricity was abruptly terminated in the midst of the presentation by Salman Abu Sitta, the 87 year old author of […]

    The post Germany confirms its collaboration with genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The photo is a screen shot from Press TV showing a demo protest against the shutdown of the conference.

    A three day Palestine conference in Berlin was forcibly shut down after three hours on Friday. Electricity was abruptly terminated in the midst of the presentation by Salman Abu Sitta, the 87 year old author of the authoritative “Atlas of Palestine”.

    Former Greek Finance Minister and leader of DIEM25, Yanis Varoufakis, was prevented from entering Germany to attend the conference. He went on Twitter/X to send a message:

    Do you know that the German Interior Ministry has just banned me from entering Germany? Indeed if that were not enough,  I have been banned  from talking to you via zoom, or indeed through a video message like this, exactly like this. The threat being that I will be tried in Germany for breaking German law. Why? Because of a speech that I published yesterday on my blog calling for universal human rights in Israel- Palestine …. So my question to my German friends, to Germans in general whether you agree with me or not doesn’t matter. … Is this (banning) in your name? Is it something that you feel comfortable happening in your democracy? From my perspective this is essentially the death knell of the prospects of democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany.

    Another banned guest speaker was UK citizen Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. He reported on Twitter/X:

    I have just returned from Germany where I was prevented from entering the country for attending a conference in Germany to give evidence on the war in Gaza and my witness statement as a doctor working in its hospitals. This morning at 10 I landed in Berlin to attend a conference on Palestine where I had been asked … to give my evidence of the 43 days that I had seen in the hospitals in Gaza, working in both Shifa and al-Ahli Hospital. Upon arrival I was stopped at the passport office. I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport where I was questioned for around 3.5 hours. At the end of 3.5 hours I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil and that this ban will last the whole of April. Not just that … if I were to try to link up by Zoom or Facetime with the conference even if I were outside Germany or if I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to have a fine or even up to a year in prison.

    Dr. Abu Sitta further commented:

    Germany is defending itself against Nicaraguan charges that it is an accomplice to genocidal war as described by the International Court of Justice. This is exactly what accomplices to a crime do. They bury the evidence and they silence or harass or intimidate the witnesses. …. This crackdown on free speech is a dangerous precedent…  We are watching the first genocide unfold in the 21st Century and for Germany to become implicated as an accomplice in silencing the witnesses of this genocide does not bode well for the rest of the century.

    A large contingent of police invaded the conference and shut off the electricity. Organizers told the reported 250 conference attendees to not provoke the police to violence. Afterward, organizers  held a press conference  reporting on the behaviour of police before and during the crackdown. Even before the conference, police tried to intimidate supporters of the conference and the owner of the conference venue. They threatened the venue owner might not be able to hold events in future if the conference went ahead.  An organizer asked, “Are these the methods of the mafia or democracy?”

    Western and Israeli media reported the closure was to prevent “anti semitism” or “hatred of Israel”. On this dubious and hypothetical basis, public education about a real ongoing massacre and mass starvation was made illegal.

    The post Germany confirms its collaboration with genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/15/germany-confirms-its-collaboration-with-genocide/feed/ 0 469957     Russian Government Intensifies Online Censorship Ahead of Presidential Election https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/10/russian-government-intensifies-online-censorship-ahead-of-presidential-election/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/10/russian-government-intensifies-online-censorship-ahead-of-presidential-election/#respond Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:22:05 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=40056 According to a March 15th report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Russian government has introduced strict laws aimed at tightening its grip on the internet by outlawing VPN promotion and increasing censorship of Western social media. These policies come in the wake of Russia’s 2024 presidential election and have…

    The post Russian Government Intensifies Online Censorship Ahead of Presidential Election appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/10/russian-government-intensifies-online-censorship-ahead-of-presidential-election/feed/ 0 469194     Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/09/israels-killing-of-aid-workers-is-no-accident-its-part-of-the-plan-to-destroy-gaza/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/09/israels-killing-of-aid-workers-is-no-accident-its-part-of-the-plan-to-destroy-gaza/#respond Tue, 09 Apr 2024 21:11:54 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149637 After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza. Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British […]

    The post Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

    Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.

    Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.

    With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.

    But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.

    Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.

    In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.

    Not this time.

    “This has to stop”

    Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”

    Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.

    When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were“indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?

    Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”

    The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.

    A salutary equation indeed.

    British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.

    But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.

    Israel’s playbook

    British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.

    But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

    Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.

    Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.

    They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.

    Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.

    Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.

    Gaza isolated

    But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

    Israel needed to take firmer action.

    The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.

    This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the region to protect its volunteers, while Israel formally banned the group from accessing the occupied territories.

    Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.

    Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.

    The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.

    With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.

    The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.

    The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.

    Western complicity

    That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.

    Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.

    The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.

    The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.

    Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to account.

    And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World War.

    This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to transform apartheid into genocide.

    Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel, and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.

    Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.

    The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK, led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.

    WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.

    Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing off, fearful for their workers’ safety.

    Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West, rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade of Gaza but in its starvation too.

    Life and death lottery

    Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.

    The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.

    Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed. The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.

    Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere safe.

    According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians. That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations imposed by a human conscience.

    Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on “kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of “terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one in 10.

    Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.

    An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

    As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other Palestinians being killed too.

    Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”

    That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have been so regularly slaughtered.

    Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man, woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.

    Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”

    This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.

    Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.

    If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.

    Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.

    Reporting stifled

    Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the media.

    Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15 years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in the best possible light.

    That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western outlets that have highlighted its coverage.

    Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.

    Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.

    What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics – when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.

    But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their extended families as a warning to others.

    The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al Jazeera.

    The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7 October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed, as well as being injured himself.

    His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper two years ago.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in Hamas’ 7 October attack.

    Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of, and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.

    Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out its reporting.

    Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.

    Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian children emaciate and starve to death.

    Rulebook torn up

    And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure they rely on.

    Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.

    Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.

    Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave for 17 years.

    Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones, and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether this all constitutes a violation of international law.

    Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law may have been breached.

    Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law. Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide.

    Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than how to stop an accelerating genocide.

    The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force needed to achieve legitimate military goals.

    The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is not under threat, it has collapsed.

    Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason, Israel assumes it is untouchable.

    Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more discreetly, more unobtrusively.

    The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/09/israels-killing-of-aid-workers-is-no-accident-its-part-of-the-plan-to-destroy-gaza/feed/ 0 469055     Degenerate Art in New Normal Germany https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/05/degenerate-art-in-new-normal-germany/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/05/degenerate-art-in-new-normal-germany/#respond Fri, 05 Apr 2024 06:32:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149478 One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists […]

    The post Degenerate Art in New Normal Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists running around loose, making fun of you and your propaganda. No, you need to get the culture business under control, and dictate what is and isn’t “art,” and what types of art are “harmful to society,” and demonize them, and the artists who created them, and censor them, or otherwise erase them.

    The Nazis went about this process in their characteristically ham-fisted fashion …

    “In September 1933, the Nazis created the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Chamber oversaw the production of art, music, film, theater, radio, and writing in Germany. The Nazis sought to shape and control every aspect of German society. They believed that art played a critical role in defining a society’s values. In addition, the Nazis believed art could influence a nation’s development. Several top leaders became involved in official efforts on art. They sought to identify and attack ‘dangerous’ artworks as they struggled to define what ‘truly German’ art looked like.” — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

    One of the most ham-fisted events in the course of this process of ideological “synchronization” (a process known as “Gleichschaltung” in German) was the Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich in 1937 …

    New Normal Germany is not Nazi Germany, so there is no “New Normal Chamber of Culture,” and no new “Degenerate Art” exhibition. The New Normal is a new form of totalitarianism, one which can’t afford to be perceived as totalitarianism, and thus the Gleichschaltung process works a bit differently.

    I’m going to use my prosecution as an example, again. I apologize to any regular readers who are sick of hearing me go on about it. I know, I promised not to go all “Late Lenny Bruce,” but the Germans keep providing me with new comedy material. If you’re not one of those regular readers and thus are unfamiliar with the background of my case, you can read about it in The Atlantic, Matt Taibbi’s Racket News, and in various independent media outlets.

    The short version is, back in 2022, I posted two Tweets criticizing mask mandates and making fun of Karl Lauterbach, the German Health Minister. Both Tweets included an image from the cover artwork of my latest book, The Rise of The New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).

    The German authorities did not appreciate those Tweets, so they (1) had them censored by Twitter, (2) had Amazon ban my book in Germany, and (3) dragged me into criminal court and prosecuted me on trumped-up “hate crime” charges. I was acquitted of those charges at my trial in January, but the Berlin State Prosecutor has appealed the verdict.

    The latest bit of comic material the German authorities have provided me with is a copy of the prosecutor’s grounds for the appeal. In it, the Oberstaatsanwältin als Hauptabteilungsleiterin (i.e., “The Senior Public Prosecutor and Department Head”) argues that my Tweets do not express opposition to the Nazis, which … she’s right, they don’t. They express opposition to the mask mandates, and lies of the German authorities, and their violation of the German constitution.

    My Tweets do not express my opposition to the Nazis because my Tweets assume opposition to the Nazis. They assume that all decent people understand and take it for granted that the Nazis were … well, Nazis, vicious, sadistic, mass-murdering fascists, with zero respect for democracy and the rule of law, who were obsessed with imposing their fanatically insane ideology on the entire planet. They (i.e., my Tweets) assume that comparing a contemporary group of power-intoxicated, constitution-violating, official-propaganda-spewing psychopaths — for example, the current German authorities — to the Nazis is not exactly a compliment.

    The Senior Public Prosecutor and Head of Department, who is clearly not only an expert on the law, and political commentary, but is also an expert on art, and subtlety, and other elements of aesthetics, explains the other problem with my art (i.e., in addition to the problem of opposing the German authorities’ unconstitutional dictates when I should have been opposing the Nazis) in her “Revisionsbegründung” (“Grounds for Appeal”) … too much subtlety, not enough “clarity” and “obviousness.”

    Here’s an excerpt from the Revisionsbegründung (translation, clarification, and emphasis mine).

    “The general politically-critical presentation [of the Tweets] does not even begin to express opposition to the NSDAP [i.e., the Nazi Party] and its ideology in an equally obvious and unequivocal way.” […] “Ultimately, the representations express that the accused wanted to emphasize his concerns about the measures in the Corona policy by adding the so-called swastika and the implicit reference to National Socialism. The implication is diametrically opposed to the required obviousness and clarity.”

    If only someone had told me about the importance of “obviousness” in works of art when I was back in film school or starting out as an avant-garde playwright in New York City, who knows, I could have been somebody! Instead, I got myself all confused by artists like … well, for example, John Heartfield. The title of this 1936 piece is “HAVE NO FEAR – HE’S A VEGETARIAN.”

    In light of The Senior Public Prosecutor’s argument, I don’t know what to think about this piece anymore. What was Heartfield trying to say? Was he pro- or anti-Hitler? More importantly, was he pro- or anti-vegetarian?

    And what are we supposed to think about this? Is Barbara Kruger pro- or anti-shopping?

    And here’s an illustration by Anthony Freda, the artist who designed the cover of my book, and who is clearly suffering from a “clarity and obviousness” deficiency!

    Oh, and speaking of inadequate “clarity” and “obviousness,” and the displaying of swastikas on German Twitter, here’s a Tweet by Die Tageszeitung, the big “left” newspaper here in Berlin …

    Back in November, my attorney filed a complaint about that Tweet with the Public Prosecutor, as an experiment, just to see how they would respond. Of course, they declined to investigate, and prosecute, and cited the same exceptions to the ban on displaying swastikas that apply in my case, and which the judge also cited when she acquitted me in January.

    I asked my attorney to carry out that experiment, because, at the time, I was terribly confused about whether Die Tageszeitung opposed the Nazis, or was trying to promote the Nazis, or what, exactly, all those swastikas and smirking Nazis were doing in a Tweet about “German Muslims” and other “migrant people” and how they think about the Holocaust. In the end, I decided the Twitter operators at Die Tageszeitung were probably working under the same assumption about how people view the Nazis as I was when I posted my two Tweets, i.e., the assumption that the Nazis were bad and that you do not have to reiterate that to the general public each and every time you include a photograph of them, or a swastika, in your social-media artwork.

    But, seriously now, as I noted in court, my case has nothing to do with the Nazis or The Senior Public Prosecutor’s understanding of art. It’s part of the crackdown on political dissent that is being carried out, not just here in Germany, but in countries all throughout the West. Yes, it’s particularly fascistic in Germany — if you can read German, here is yet another example of a case like mine, but under a different pretext — and it is absolutely focused on critics of the official Covid narrative and the Covid restrictions, but it isn’t focused exclusively on us. If you can set aside your allegiance to whatever side of whatever you have pledged it to, and have a look at what is coming down the pipe, or is already all the way down the pipe, in the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, France, and various other countries … well, I strongly recommend that you do that, preferably before we all get “gleichgeschaltet.”

    If you need a place to start, I posted links to a few articles on Matt Taibbi’s Notes thing …’

    OK, that’s it … I need to finish this column and go and up my “clarity and obviousness” game. The last thing I’d want to do at this point is post some other non-obvious art and accidentally “delegitimize the state.” I’m already in enough trouble as it is! Thank God I have The Senior Public Prosecutor’s Revisionsbegründung to refer to!

    I tell you, I don’t know where I’d be without these Germans!

    The post Degenerate Art in New Normal Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/05/degenerate-art-in-new-normal-germany/feed/ 0 468198     Israel’s Al Jazeera ban ‘alarms’ media watchdog on free press stranglehold https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/02/israels-al-jazeera-ban-alarms-media-watchdog-on-free-press-stranglehold/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/02/israels-al-jazeera-ban-alarms-media-watchdog-on-free-press-stranglehold/#respond Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:00:50 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=99295 Pacific Media Watch

    The New York-based media watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists says the announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of his intention to ban Al Jazeera follows a similar pattern of media interference, including the killing of media workers.

    “We’ve seen this kind of language before from Netanyahu and Israeli officials in which they try to paint journalists as ‘terrorists’, as ‘criminals’. This is nothing new,” Jodie Ginsberg told Al Jazeera.

    “It’s another example of the tightening of the free press and the stranglehold the Israeli government would like to exercise. It’s an incredibly worrying move by the government.”

    Netanyahu wrote on X on Monday that “Al Jazeera harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the October 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers.

    “The terrorist channel Al Jazeera will no longer broadcast from Israel. I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel’s activity.’

    The Qatar-based network rejected what it described as “slanderous accusations” and accused Netanyahu of “incitement”.

    “Al Jazeera holds the Israeli Prime Minister responsible for the safety of its staff and network premises around the world, following his incitement and this false accusation in a disgraceful manner,” it said in a statement.

    ‘Slanderous accusations’
    “Al Jazeera reiterates that such slanderous accusations will not deter us from continuing our bold and professional coverage, and reserves the right to pursue every legal step.”

    Netanyahu has long sought to shut down broadcasts from Al Jazeera, alleging anti-Israel bias, the network reports on its website.

    The law, which passed in a 71-10 vote in the Knesset, gives the prime minister and communications minister the authority to order the closure of foreign networks operating in Israel and confiscate their equipment if it is believed they pose “harm to the state’s security”.

    White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that an Israeli move to shut down Al Jazeera would be “concerning”.

    “The United States supports the critically important work of journalists around the world and that includes those who are reporting in the conflict in Gaza,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.

    “So we believe that work is important. The freedom of the press is important. And if those reports are true, it is concerning to us.”

    The legislation’s passage comes nearly five months after Israel said it would block Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen. It refrained from shutting Al Jazeera at the same time.

    Move with closure
    After the vote on Monday, Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said he intended to move forward with the closure. He said Al Jazeera had been acting as a “propaganda arm of Hamas” by “encouraging armed struggle against Israel”.

    “It is impossible to tolerate a media outlet, with press credentials from the Government Press Office and offices in Israel, acting from within against us, certainly during wartime,” he said.

    According to news agencies, his office said the order would seek to block the channel’s broadcasts in Israel and prevent it from operating in the country. The order would not apply to the occupied West Bank or Gaza.

    Israel has often lashed out at Al Jazeera, which has offices in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

    In May 2022, Israeli forces shot dead senior Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin.

    A UN-commissioned report concluded that Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” in the killing, violating her “right to life”.

    During the war in Gaza, several of the channel’s journalists and their family members have been killed by Israeli bombardments.

    On October 25, an air raid killed the family of Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, including his wife, son, daughter, grandson and at least eight other relatives.

    Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 32,782 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.

    Pacific Media Watch and news agencies.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/02/israels-al-jazeera-ban-alarms-media-watchdog-on-free-press-stranglehold/feed/ 0 467536     Green Left fights another Facebook ban without warning over Gaza https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/29/green-left-fights-another-facebook-ban-without-warning-over-gaza/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/29/green-left-fights-another-facebook-ban-without-warning-over-gaza/#respond Fri, 29 Mar 2024 23:35:56 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=99094 EDITORIAL: By Pip Hinman and Susan Price

    Meta, the giant social media corporation, has “unpublished” Green Left’s longstanding Facebook page, which had tens of thousands of followers.

    We had been regularly posting stories, videos and photographs on the page from our consistent reporting of the news and views that seldom get into the mainstream media.

    But our recent interviews with veteran Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled have resulted in what appears to be a 10-year ban, imposed without warning, nor an avenue of appeal.

    Green Left's Facebook page today
    Green Left’s Facebook page today . . . https://www.facebook.com/GreenLeftOnline/. Image: FB screenshot APR

    Khaled, 79, is a member of the Palestinian Council (Palestine’s parliament) and a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She lives in political exile in Jordan.

    She is recognised as the Che Guevara of Palestine; she has enormous respect from Palestinians and millions of progressive people around the world.

    The Facebook banning came shortly after Zionist organisations combined with right-wing media (SkyNews and the Murdoch media) to pressure Labor to say it would prevent Khaled from addressing Ecosocialism 2024 — a conference GL is co-hosting in Boorloo/Perth in June — by not only denying her a visa, but even banning her from speaking by video link.

    Multiple visits
    As GL reported, the excuse for such political censorship is, as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry alleged in its letter to Labor, that allowing Khaled to speak “would be likely to have the effect of inciting, promoting or advocating terrorism”.

    This is nonsense.

    Khaled has visited Britain on multiple occasions over the past few years. Israel issued her a visa to visit the West Bank in 1996.

    She has visited Sweden and South Africa and, on one of her multiple visits, met Nelson Mandela (once also labelled a “terrorist” by the West), who warmly welcomed her.

    A growing number of human rights activists, academics, journalists and community leaders have protested against this blatant political censorship. Their statements are here and we urge you to join in by sending us a short statement.

    Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled
    Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled . . . “Kurds have a national identity just as we have our identity as Palestinians.” Image: Green Left/ANF

    Khaled told GL the real reason for this censorship is to “make us shut up about what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank today”.

    Meta has been exposed for carrying out “systematic online censorship”, particularly of Palestinian voices.

    Suppression of content
    In December 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented “over 1050 takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses”.

    Meta did not apply the same censorship to pro-Zionist posts that incited hate and violence against Palestinians.

    HRW noted that “of the 1050 cases reviewed for this report, 1049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel”.

    Other studies have described the systematic “shadow banning” of pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram.

    AccessNow, which defends the “digital rights of people and communities at risk” reports that Meta is “systematically silencing the voices of both Palestinians and those advocating for Palestinians’ rights” through arbitrary content removals, suspension of prominent Palestinian and Palestine-related accounts, restrictions on pro-Palestinian users and content, shadow-banning, discriminatory content moderation policies, inconsistent and discriminatory rule enforcement.

    Social media corporations, such as Meta and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), exercise a lot of power to manipulate people’s social and political views. This power has grown exponentially as more people access their news, views and information online.

    Break this power
    The search for ways to break this power will go on.

    In the meantime there is one way readers can break the social media bans and restrictions on GL’s voice-for-the-resistance journalism: become a supporter and get GL delivered to you.

    It has always been a struggle to keep people-power media projects alive. But GL has been going since 1991 and, with your help, we will not let the giant social media corporations silence us.

    Republished with permission from Green Left.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/29/green-left-fights-another-facebook-ban-without-warning-over-gaza/feed/ 0 467071     American Censorship is Bad for Peace https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/25/american-censorship-is-bad-for-peace/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/25/american-censorship-is-bad-for-peace/#respond Mon, 25 Mar 2024 15:15:13 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149194 I cannot sit back and allow the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. — General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove Most people would agree that in any modern, wealthy, multicultural, free, non-colonized, democratic society, people have the right to know what is going on in their community. In fact, […]

    The post American Censorship is Bad for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    I cannot sit back and allow the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

    — General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove

    Most people would agree that in any modern, wealthy, multicultural, free, non-colonized, democratic society, people have the right to know what is going on in their community. In fact, in order to fulfill their various responsibilities as citizens, consumers, workers, company presidents, government officials, family members, etc., they have to know what is going on. We want and need to know what our own government and foreign governments are doing; what products, services, and sociopolitical programs are available in our country; and what medical choices we have when we are sick or injured. There are exceptions, such as children and psychopaths, but in general, all people have the right to benefit from the knowledge in libraries, on the Internet, in museums, and in doctors’ offices. In U.S. cities, almost everyone has a right to a library card.

    During a “state of exception” or a state of emergency though, some convincingly argue that you do not have the right to certain dangerous information. The United States is officially not at war yet with Russia; we just supply their enemies with lots of expensive weapons. But if and when we are at war with Russia, do U.S. citizens have a right to hear Vladimir Putin speak? When we are under attack by a lethal virus, do we have the right to hear about all the various methods of protecting our health, even alternative, traditional, foreign, naturopathic, or unorthodox methods?

    Some would say “no.” Just as you must not be allowed to buy enriched uranium and download from the Internet blueprints for how to make a nuclear bomb, you do not have the right to protect your health from SARS-CoV-2 without using mRNA vaccines. And people who advocate for the Russians, who love Russia, work with Russian companies, promote positive images of Russia, and facilitate the spread of state-sponsored, pro-Russia propaganda must be silenced or banned. Like hate speech, there are certain statements that are just beyond the pale, that are too dangerous and must be suppressed. Some, such as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argue that when teens are jumping out of windows, the government has a responsibility to step in and prevent people from reading posts encouraging them to engage in this dangerous behavior. With the Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri, Americans are now forced to think about exactly how precious our First Amendment is, and when we prioritize free speech over health and safety.

    In the U.S. today, the government is censoring people and publications on both the Left and the Right, the typical library book-banning activities are up, and there is evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are now doing some of the censorship work, strengthening the hand of the government vis-a-vis the people in ways generally only seen during great crises or wars. (This is documented in the downloadable report from the U.S. House of Representatives “The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation: How NSF Is Funding the Development of Automated Tools To Censor Online Speech”).

    Here we delve into two cases of the Government suppressing free speech, one on the “Left” of the political spectrum and one on the “Right.” On the Left we see the anti-racist and anti-imperialist, African-American activist Omali Yeshitela and two other socialists. On the Right we see people such as Jill Hines, co-director of conservative Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that reportedly has published threats against election workers for false claims of election-rigging. Suppressed along with these two on the Right but actually going beyond political categories, we see Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologists that raised questions about government pandemic policies, and professor of psychiatry and human behavior Aaron Kheriaty, who was dismissed by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing an mRNA shot. And finally, we see the suppression of millions of people who do not identify with either the Left or the Right, some of whom are not conspiracy theorists, who have expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s public health measures that were taken in response to SARS-CoV-2.

    Silencing African-American Socialists

    In April of last year the “Uhuru 3,” Omali Yeshitela, an African-American man born in 1941; Penny Hess, a white woman over the age of 70, who is the chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee; and Jesse Nevel, a young, white man who is the “National Chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the mass organization of the African People’s Solidarity Committee,” were charged by a federal grand jury with acting as unregistered agents of the Russian government. The Biden administration apparently considers them major threats to U.S. national security.

    Yeshitela’s political roots go back to the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1972, he and others felt the need to move beyond protests and to capture political power, so they formed the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). This was and is an internationalist Black Power movement, or African internationalism, and has been developed over 50 years, fighting against colonialism, and this is not the first time that their free speech rights have been violated, he says.

    Yeshitela explains that he got in trouble with the law this time by touring the U.S. in 2016 to gain support for a movement charging the U.S. with genocide, and going to Russia to speak about self-determination with a Russian NGO, not for the government of the Russian Federation. According to Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors, for the sacrifices he made for white, capitalist Russia, he has received the whopping sum of $7,000. In a summary of the case in October, the Grayzone’s Anya Parampil warns that “lawyers for the Uhuru 3 maintain that the DOJ’s justification for prosecuting their clients sets the stage for the US government to legally harass and prosecute other Americans who criticize US domestic and foreign policy, particularly where designated enemies like Russia or China are concerned.”

    Award-winning peace advocate, spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace, and 2016 candidate for U.S. vice president on the Green Party ticket Ajamu Baraka has provided insightful analysis of this case. Early on in the “Russiagate” hype, he warned that those fearmongering about Russia would soon target anti-capitalist, Black liberation movements, just as they did at the end of the Second World War, when peace activists including W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Paul Robeson (1898-1976) suffered government oppression. (Robeson also charged the U.S. government with genocide. He did so in 1951 for their failure to stop U.S. lynchings).

    Like Noam Chomsky, Baraka categorizes the U.S. as a lawless, “rogue state.” He warns that our “national security state” is engaging in systematic repression against anyone who opposes them, including “the Left” (from around 7:30 in the video). For example, people who protest “Cop City” are being labeled as “domestic terrorists.” What we are looking at is “McCarthyism 2.0,” he suggests. The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center is one of the few organizations standing up for the Uhuru movement’s right to free speech.

    As Chomsky once said, “Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore, they have to control what they think.”

    Silencing Opponents of Government COVID-19 Policies

    Besides the violations of free speech that have resulted from Russophobia, Afro-phobia, and reparations-justice-phobia, we are now also facing such violations caused by SARS-CoV-2-phobia, the biosecurity panic, and the war on the virus. In the opinion of Benjamin Wallace-Wells writing for the New Yorker, “the most eyebrow-raising revelations in the Twitter Files, documented mostly by Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang, concern the extent to which the F.B.I. and the Pentagon were interested in controlling what was seen on the platform.” For instance, Lee Fang has written about a British company called “Logically.ai.” According to AP, they are “an established social enterprise bringing credibility and confidence to news and social discourse,” and they launched an app in the U.S. in 2020 that enables “users to receive personalized, verified and in-depth information on any storyline in order to restore digital trust.”

    Such words might make some people feel safe, but Lee Fang warns about the American censorship advocate Brian Murphy, who used to be an FBI agent leading the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, and is an executive of Logically.ai. Murphy has argued that the U.S. government must now rein in the social media companies, and we, U.S. citizens, must give up some of our freedoms that we “need and deserve” so that we can get our “security back.”

    “Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.” The company Logically is doing work outsourced to them by the British government. The government agency responsible, called the “Counter Disinformation Unit” or “CDU,” were targeting a “former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies,” Fang explains. Apparently, not only groups that opposed lockdowns but also groups that promote peace are being surveilled and flagged as dangerous, by a foreign company based in a foreign country.

    Not long ago, few would have guessed that Stanford University would be against free speech, but now it appears that some segment of the university is actively participating in censorship, as a kind of government proxy. Professor Jay Bhattacharya at the Stanford School of Medicine, who is an expert on health policy at Stanford University, and who holds an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in Economics, has summarized the free speech case Murthy v. Missouri that is currently before the Supreme Court. He points out that Stanford University, his own employer, has a program called the “Stanford Internet Observatory” (SIO) (10:00 to 12:00 in the video) who describe themselves as a “cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media.” The program was founded in 2019.

    In an appellate court struggle, his own university weighed in against him, and they claimed that the Stanford Internet Observatory is not a government cut-out, is just doing research, and is not meant to violate the 1st Amendment. He describes that as “disingenuous.” Stanford has a rule that they require researchers to adhere to, like universities around the world, that human subjects of a research project must not be harmed by the research. Yet this Internet Observatory is basically making a list, effectively a blacklist, of organizations or people to suppress. That would constitute an ethics violation, since the subjects of the research are U.S. citizens, and their rights under the 1st Amendment have been violated. Either this is not research, or it is unethical research, Bhattacharya argues.

    In his expert opinion, the U.S. government is “the number one source of misinformation during the Pandemic.” His “short list” of their misinformation includes the following:

    1. The government overestimated the lethality of COVID-19.
    2. The risk to children was minimal, but the government talked as if everyone was equally at risk.
    3. The government suppressed the “idea of immunity after COVID recovery,” and made people wait for the vaccine.
    4. Evidence that masking was ineffective was available during the early stages of the pandemic. There was no consensus among scientists that masks worked, but the government recommended masks anyway.
    5. The government promoted the illusion that there was a consensus about lockdowns and censored the Great Barrington Declaration.
    6. The government censored people who provided evidence that the vaccines were not safe and effective, even after evidence emerged that there was a risk of myocarditis.

    (12:00-17:00 in video)

    In May of last year, the “New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s ongoing efforts to work in concert with social media companies and the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project to monitor and censor online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”

    The Stanford Internet Observatory is a proud member of the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) along with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”), Graphika, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The Atlantic Council are notorious militarists.

    In his Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi calls the Stanford Internet Observatory the “ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” The DFRLab is partially funded by the Global Engagement Center (GEC). And they, the GEC, are part of the State Department. Taibbi views the GEC as part of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” along with organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the DFRLab itself, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). In other words, it appears that many of the same organizations that have engaged in fear mongering over Russia or promoting militarism have also engaged in censoring Americans.

    Conclusion

    The U.S. has become a nation-state that is obsessed with national security. Ajamu Baraka sums up our situation best:

    It’s us today but it’s you tomorrow, if you persist in any kind of oppositional politics, because the ruling element in the U.S. is serious. They are serious about attempting to maintain their hegemony, and their global hegemony. And the notion, of some of the values of the liberal framework, liberal philosophy, liberalism—they have completely abandoned that. They have jettisoned that. And basically they are engaged in lawlessness. The U.S. is now a rogue state. What we have domestically in the U.S. is systematic repression from a national security state that seems to be completely unbound by any kind of standards beyond its own. (From 6:50 to 7:40 in video).

    Then Baraka raises a very important question, i.e., “Where is the opposition?” Our national security state is currently run by “liberals,” people who are supposed to care about freedom of speech and freedom in general, like their liberal predecessors who espoused the idea that freedom was an essential condition for happiness. (Never for people of African or Native American descent or for women, but they did espouse it for wealthy white men). Instead of protecting our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they are giving us “death, shackles, and misery.” Now the question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

    We need free speech if we are to build peace. Today they are coming for militant revolutionaries who reject white supremacy, for the narrow-minded Right, and for the medical scientists who recommend a different approach from the government’s approach to SARS-CoV-2. Without a thriving movement against the current censorship, the U.S. government, along with the companies that help the government censor people, could easily pull the rug out from under our feet, even as we diligently work for peace and human rights. Do not be surprised if tomorrow the FBI, or the “Blob,” (i.e., the foreign policy establishment including the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA), or any of the many companies that work for them in this constantly expanding biodefense industry come after you next.

    The post American Censorship is Bad for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/25/american-censorship-is-bad-for-peace/feed/ 0 466106     Private Profits vs. Social Prophets https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/21/private-profits-vs-social-prophets/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/21/private-profits-vs-social-prophets/#respond Thu, 21 Mar 2024 05:15:42 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149020 …What we see at work is not an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs of political life. — Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, p. 343. We entered the massive marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always […]

    The post Private Profits vs. Social Prophets first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    …What we see at work is not an expression of the sentiments of the American people; rather it reflects the will of a powerful minority which uses its economic power to control the organs of political life.

    — Albert Einstein, Einstein on Peace, p. 343.

    We entered the massive marketplace labeled “our democracy” as always long before any election and at this date hundreds of millions have already been spent both officially and off the books to insure that ruling power maintains control over American capitalism no matter who or what may be elected sheriff, mayor, animal control officer or president of the United States. Given that, the spending and consciousness brutality have already exceeded past experience and, as befitting a system verging on complete collapse and involving much more of humanity than American voters, the time for global as well as national focus on the status of an American empire making more people rich than ever before while making multitudes far more poor and continuing mass murders in other subject nations is not only at hand but at all parts of the international political economic organism.

    As the fading rulers of western capitalism act more like a crazed rat on a sinking ship but instead of leaping into the deeps it promotes the entire world into more warfare, mass murder, incredible profits for those who feed on bloodshed and a mental condition that might make homicidal maniacs seem critically thinking human beings, the natural and especially political environmental reality approaches the worst fantasy of religious fanatics: eternal damnation in the fires of hell. This joyful futuristic vision was born of a brilliant past that might make the present seem docile since none of the modern weapons existed in biblical times when spears, lances and demented religious leaders operated as ruling wealth as opposed to the lethally armed with weapons of mass murder political and media servants of rulers do today.

    The continuing since 1917 American imperial attacks on Russia have reached a point in the current war using Ukrainians to kill Russians while they die by the thousands with no hope of winning and American and foreign munitions makers make billions. Various of the NATO lapdog leaders sound even more crazed than Americans and urge broadening of the war to stop the eternal threat of Russia which exists in their fevered minds, said fever having been planted by America since the end of the second world war.

    Meanwhile, the center of global anti-Semitism, Israel, has exploded as never before with such bloody horror that many of the innocent and previously comatose have awakened and expressed anger and hostility about a situation that has prevailed since 1948 when Palestine was engulfed and devoured by the new nation said to have been a haven for those suffering horror during the second world war. This would be like Japan getting even for the American atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by invading Mexico, throwing the natives out when possible and making all others second class citizens once they took over, changed the language and culture to Japanese and proceeded to treat Mexicans worse than Americans ever had.

    In only one of thousands of contradictions of logic, language and morality, the European Jews who stole the land continue calling themselves Semites and screaming anti-Semitism whenever real Semites commit an act of aggression in retaliation and millions in the western world have their brains sunk deeper into an ocean of mental sewage. Like everything else in a radically changing world in which previous western dominance is nearing an end and hopefully global freedom is nearer than ever, the radical changes underway that can spell revolution for the human future can be made to seem more dismal than ever under the consciousness control of purveyors of the imperial lies now fantastically more powerful than any past relatively tin-pot dictatorial regime of later made to seem glorious royals and other past murderers.

    While it seems that the horrible choice offered voters by capital’s two parties back in 2020 will be the same in 2024 the only difference is that the divisions among Americans have grown even worse than before. But as the frustration and anger at both parties increase alternate choices, usually written off as foreign plots or national disorders, may finally have space to speak to radical change favoring democracy in substance rather than the bogus brain disease foisted on innocent people who are told it is freedom and democracy. Of course, and rape is simply an economic form of dating and hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the street are merely getting close to nature.

    While political madness depicts Putin as a menace to humanity for reacting to an American owned and operated insurrection in Ukraine and fill voters heads with alleged crimes committed by Trump which are the everyday reality of political pimps and hustlers who own and operate “our” democracy, especially Congress and the white house, Palestinians will continue to be murdered by Israelis financed by American taxpayers proving that our peace loving democracy is just what the world needs to bring on a nuclear destruction of humanity which is in the planning stages of our Mass Murder Inc. at the pentagon. This will come to pass if Americans do not rise up and create real democracy before it is too late. Among other things that will mean voting against the supposed lesser evil of the two party combo of economic cancer and political polio to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of a future for the human race that does not involve growing poverty for hundreds of millions while a relative handful become billionaires.

    The opening quote is from someone long admired for something called the theory of relativity, a term not even vaguely understood by billions of humans, but far more relevant, easily understandable and important is the fact that he was an anti-capitalist, a socialist and an anti-war pacifist, easily understandable by those same billions and hardly known by most. That and many other hidden facts about people, nations and political economics should become clearer while we adjust and work to transform a dreadful social reality into a hopeful future by ending warfare capitalism and bringing about a democratic world such as our pre-historic beginnings in social and communistic cooperation. And after we clear up some reality about Einstein, we’d all do well by checking out Marx in his own words and not those of his simplistic and far too often murderous detractors. He can help us learn more about what we need to understand about why our reality is crumbling and what we need to do to rebuild it.

    The post Private Profits vs. Social Prophets first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Frank Scott.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/21/private-profits-vs-social-prophets/feed/ 0 465295     “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both” https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/13/they-can-have-rogan-or-young-not-both/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/13/they-can-have-rogan-or-young-not-both/#respond Wed, 13 Mar 2024 16:39:42 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=148867 On December 31, 2021 the interview that I recorded with Joe Rogan went live and the internet went crazy. This is old news, as is the fact that both Neil Young and a favorite artist of my youth, Joni Mitchell, pulled their music collections from the Spotify catalog – due to the “misinformation” that was […]

    The post “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both” first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    On December 31, 2021 the interview that I recorded with Joe Rogan went live and the internet went crazy. This is old news, as is the fact that both Neil Young and a favorite artist of my youth, Joni Mitchell, pulled their music collections from the Spotify catalog – due to the “misinformation” that was spread during that show. Of course, nothing I said on that show was misinformation. Over the past two years – what was said during the interview has been validated again and again.

    This week, major main-stream-media outlets report that Neil Young has decided to put his music back on Spotify – good for him, I suppose. Article after article in legacy media is covering his return, all indicating that he left in protest of “misinformation”, but never mentioning the Joe Rogan/Malone episode or discussing what the claimed “misinformation” actually consisted of. And not a single article from any conservative media outlet pushing back against the approved legacy media narrative. No one has asked me for an interview on this topic. Seems like that might be relevant, don’t you think, as I was the one evidently spreading the “misinformation” ?

    For me, I am still banned or shadow banned on many platforms – including a permanent ban on Linked-in. State sponsored media still has no interest in reporting on facts surrounding the pandemic lock-downs, masks, vaccine safety, a corrupted vaccine pre-clinical and clinical trials process, adverse events associated with the jab, the corruption of academic journals – including capture by the WEF. The fact is that the world went crazy and transnational corporations used that season of madness to increase profits and market share.

    That particular episode (#1757) is almost impossible to find on the googleweb or on the spotify search engine. However, in response to the widespread censorship efforts a transcript was entered into the congressional record.

    People have asked me again and again, when is “Joe” going to have you back on. Of course, Joe Rogan never asked me back on his show. He basically ghosted me after that episode. I guess it was to be expected, the blow back from Spotify must have been huge. But still – it was (and is) kind of weird. And now Rogan has done another deal and cut himself loose of the Spotify exclusivity.

    As of February this year, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is no longer exclusive to Spotify. The host signed a new multi-year deal, believed to be worth $250m (£196m), that allows the podcast to be distributed by other platforms including Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music.

    — The Guardian: “Neil Young to return music to Spotify as he attacks ‘disinformation’ across streaming services”

    So, here I am – still standing. Still strong. Still banned from main-stream-media. My very name has been made toxic on Facebook. Thousands of essays on Substack, and none can be found via Google search engines. Permanently banned on Linked In. Gaslight, defamed, stereotyped and slandered by both legacy media and a wide range of professional on-line trolls and malcontents who post lies daily. Wikipedia still promotes a variety of lies about me, but at least it is more accurate than it once was.

    Not once has Neil Young or Joni Mitchell ever reached out to discuss their concerns. Not that I expected them to. The once-rebels have turned into the status-quo. No better than their fathers or mothers or big government.

    Will mainstream State-sponsored media ever change their spots and do some real reporting? It appears not. The deep state, including President Trump, just doubles down on the “safe and effective” false narrative, despite all the evidence to the contrary. This saddens me. An opportunity lost for the science and government to evolve and learn from these public policy mistakes, which have caused a huge amount of suffering and unnecessary loss of life.

    Now the World Health Organization thinks that it should rule the world – with its new pandemic treaty and amended International Health Regulations to lead the way to its version of a better future for the world – a totalitarian technofascist future. The New World Order is not a conspiracy theory – international law will take control of the world and is now the top dog. Controlling the regulatory capture that is occurring may not be doable in my lifetime. Scary thought.

    All “we” can do is continue to fight. To fight the increasing regulatory burden that is placed upon us each and every day. To fight for our rights to be free. The right to privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms and all our other rights are more critical than ever.

    I am strong. I am still standing. Let’s stand together and fight to make America free again.

  • Read also: “The Onus on Those Who Accuse Others of Mis/Disinformation“
    • The post “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Malone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/13/they-can-have-rogan-or-young-not-both/feed/ 0 463818     Israel’s “Flour Massacre”: When A Crime Becomes A “Tragedy” https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/13/israels-flour-massacre-when-a-crime-becomes-a-tragedy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/13/israels-flour-massacre-when-a-crime-becomes-a-tragedy/#respond Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:36:26 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=148853 Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be. Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often […]

    The post Israel’s “Flour Massacre”: When A Crime Becomes A “Tragedy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.

    Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:

    My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)

    Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:

    The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.

    But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:

    The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.

    I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.

    Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.

    In 2013, Simpson opined:

    The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…

    Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.

    Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:

    World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked

    Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:

    Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy

    Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:

    Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…

    The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

    Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.

    The BBC headline reporting this story read:

    Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO

    Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.

    Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:

    If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.

    Needless to say, that was not to be.

    On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:

    Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

    Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.

    On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

    As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals

    Author Assal Rad responded:

    Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.

    The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’

    What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:

    Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid

    And:

    Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks

    USA Today’s headline was surreal:

    112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers

    On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:

    More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy

    The standfirst (sub-heading):

    Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush

    Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.

    It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:

    ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104

    Compare also its standfirst:

    ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries

    On 1 March, Associated Press reported:

    The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)

    The following day, a BBC headline read:

    Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza

    A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:

    After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)

    The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:

    They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.

    And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.

    It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.

    Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.

    On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:

    The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.

    Brown commented on video footage:

    Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.

    Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.

    “Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”

    Brown added:

    Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”

    Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

    As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

    The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

    The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).

    This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.

    A BBC report on 5 March stated:

    Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.

    Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.

    Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?

    According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:

    After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.

    Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.

    Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:

    “It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.

    ”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.

    ”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”

    CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:

    We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.

    On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:

    UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

    “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

    The UN added of its experts:

    They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.

    “Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.

    None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:

    During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.

    Conclusion

    It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:

    Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows

    Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:

    Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.

    UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.

    The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.

    On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:

    The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)

    See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’

    Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.

    We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)

    With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:

    What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)

    The answer, of course, was oil.

    The post Israel’s “Flour Massacre”: When A Crime Becomes A “Tragedy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/13/israels-flour-massacre-when-a-crime-becomes-a-tragedy/feed/ 0 463778     Global Momentum of Censorship & Debunking Corporate Media https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/11/global-momentum-of-censorship-debunking-corporate-media/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/11/global-momentum-of-censorship-debunking-corporate-media/#respond Mon, 11 Mar 2024 14:49:51 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=38985 In the first segment, media scholars Robin Andersen, Nolan Higdon and Steve Macek come back on the show, this time to discuss their latest edited book, Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression. The recent upsurge in censorship is a global phenomenon taking many forms across…

    The post Global Momentum of Censorship & Debunking Corporate Media appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/11/global-momentum-of-censorship-debunking-corporate-media/feed/ 0 463343     CPJ, 21 other groups, call on social media firms to resist censorship ahead of Turkey elections https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/04/cpj-21-other-groups-call-on-social-media-firms-to-resist-censorship-ahead-of-turkey-elections/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/04/cpj-21-other-groups-call-on-social-media-firms-to-resist-censorship-ahead-of-turkey-elections/#respond Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:52:04 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=363598 The Committee to Protect Journalists joined 21 rights groups and journalists’ organizations on Monday in a joint statement calling on social media platforms to prioritize the free flow of information and ideas, and to resist government censorship ahead of the March 31 municipal elections in Turkey.

    “As important country-wide local elections loom, the Turkish authorities are once again intensifying efforts to control social media platforms through use of the restrictive internet law, demanding the blocking of content critical of the government,” the joint statement said and made a call of unity: “Social media platforms should take a firm, united stance against formal and informal pressure targeting expression protected under international human rights law and adopt heightened transparency in the face of increasing online censorship.”

    The municipal elections is a critical test for the opposition parties of Turkey considering the leading Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its partners’ victory in parliamentary and presidential elections last year. On the opposing side, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP wants to win back the metropolitan municipalities of Turkey’s capital Ankara and biggest city Istanbul from the opposition.

    Read the joint statement here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/04/cpj-21-other-groups-call-on-social-media-firms-to-resist-censorship-ahead-of-turkey-elections/feed/ 0 462043     Girl Scouts Threatened for Supporting Palestinian Children https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/girl-scouts-threatened-for-supporting-palestinian-children/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/girl-scouts-threatened-for-supporting-palestinian-children/#respond Fri, 01 Mar 2024 16:08:03 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=148553 Guess who threatened them? The Girl Scouts of the United States. Stories abound of retaliation against those who express concern over Israeli ethnic cleansing – from censoring news reports to reprimanding faculty, mass arrests, and suppressing students’ right to protest. A well-orchestrated campaign against Palestine’s right to exist is spreading like Covid across the US. […]

    The post Girl Scouts Threatened for Supporting Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Guess who threatened them? The Girl Scouts of the United States.

    Stories abound of retaliation against those who express concern over Israeli ethnic cleansing – from censoring news reports to reprimanding faculty, mass arrests, and suppressing students’ right to protest. A well-orchestrated campaign against Palestine’s right to exist is spreading like Covid across the US. Now, it has hit a new low.

    The national Girl Scouts are threatening legal action against a St. Louis troop for the crime of making bracelets to raise money for Gaza’s children.

    A story in the March 25, 2024 St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Aisha Sultan documents that the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri and the Girl Scouts of the United States have written scout leader Nawal Abuhamdeh of her failure to follow proper procedure and “sent her instructions on how to leave the organization.”

    For four years Abuhamdeh had coordinated the group’s cookie sales. But after witnessing what happened to her parents’ Palestinian homeland she brought the idea of raising money to the diverse group of girls whose families are from Somalia, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and India.

    Not just these countries, but most others around the world are horrified at the Zionist “final solution” against Palestinians.

    With reports of IDF forces summarily killing captive Palestinians, Ralph Nader’s question of the scarcity of reports on Israeli POW camps becomes salient. Has Netanyahu given the order for “No prisoners” even after Palestinians have surrendered?

    Though there are now reports of 30,000 Palestinian deaths, Israeli efforts to block food, water and human waste management means that death by starvation, thirst and infectious diseases may vastly exceed deaths via weapon annihilation.

    As of February 21, US representatives have stymied efforts to have the UN call for a cease-fire four times. While Biden calls for “restraint” by Israel out of one side of his mouth, the other side continues to order that weapons of mass destruction be sent.

    The targeting of hospitals continues as the deaths of children mount. These facts are consistent with a Zionist goal of obliterating the future of Palestinians as a people.

    These scenes are not lost on the girls in Abuhamdeh’s troop. Videos of the war crimes are highly disturbing.

    One video shows a Palestinian father using a shopping bag to collect pieces of his slaughtered children. Another depicts a doctor who must amputate a leg of his 16-year-old niece on the dinner table without anesthesia. In one, viewers see that “A wailing 4-year-old tried to get up and look for his parents — both of whom were killed, and his own legs amputated.”

    Particularly revealing are the comments published at the bottom of the Sultan article. Though most were supportive of the St. Louis scouts, several identified with Zionist disdain for Palestinians. A person self-identifying as “kuuindhater” wrote “Helicopter Mom with an article dripping in victimology.” “medi8r” added “I fear this sort of one sided propaganda leads to misplaced hate toward Israel and Jews.”

    One called “billikenforever” exuded general dislike: “What a crock! The Girl Scouts have partnered with Planned Parenthood for years in promoting the elimination of innocent babies.”

    The St. Louis scout troop had posted on social media that supporters could buy bracelets for $5 or $10, with the funds going to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF). The Girl Scouts of the US then wrote to them that it was impermissible to raise money for “partisan politics.” Agreeing with them, “lucygirl” posted in the comments “Does the PCRF fund Hamas? The Girls Scouts are correct in not wanting their organization accused of having members donate to an organization that fund terrorist groups.”

    Interestingly, the Girl Scouts had no problem with raising money for those injured in Ukraine. Abuhamdeh pointed out the similarity and the absence of reprisals for that effort. Defending this double standard, “MOgal2” commented that “This is a political war unlike Ukraine. Ukraine was invaded by an unprovoked army. They are fighting back on their own land. Israel was attacked in a heinous way.”

    Yes, the propaganda machines control millions of minds in colonizing countries. Slicing through the Gordian knot of twisted logic, “zap973” simply noted “It’s obvious that Ukrainians are perceived as white westerners therefore deserving of compassion. Palestinians are not. End of story.”

    The post Girl Scouts Threatened for Supporting Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Fitz.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/girl-scouts-threatened-for-supporting-palestinian-children/feed/ 0 461560     CPJ calls for Israel to halt war censorship plans https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/16/cpj-calls-for-israel-to-halt-war-censorship-plans/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/16/cpj-calls-for-israel-to-halt-war-censorship-plans/#respond Fri, 16 Feb 2024 18:29:38 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=357484 Washington D.C., February 16, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern on Friday about Israeli government plans to make it illegal to publish leaked details from security cabinet meetings without approval from the military censor, saying this restriction would severely damage press freedom.

    “We urge Israel to drop this plan and ensure that the media can report freely. The Israeli government must not hide information about its conduct in the Israel-Gaza war,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “We need press freedom in time of war and in time of peace. It is our firewall for democracy and our antidote to the fog of war. Censorship must end both in Israel and Gaza.”

    CPJ has documented numerous cases of censorship, threats, and intimidation against Israeli and Palestinian journalists since the start of the war.

    Israeli forces have killed an unprecedented number of journalists since October 7, refused to give any guarantees to international news organizations regarding the safety of their employees in Gaza, and only allow foreign media to enter Gaza on escorted military tours provided they agree to submit pre-publication coverage for military approval. In January, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected a petition by the Foreign Press Association for military authorities to allow foreign journalists to report inside Gaza.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/16/cpj-calls-for-israel-to-halt-war-censorship-plans/feed/ 0 459078     Meta Considering Increased Censorship of the Word “Zionist” https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/09/meta-considering-increased-censorship-of-the-word-zionist/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/09/meta-considering-increased-censorship-of-the-word-zionist/#respond Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:50:44 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=460596

    Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, is contemplating stricter rules around discussing Israeli nationalism on its platforms, a major policy change that could stifle criticism and free expression about the war in Gaza and beyond, five civil society sources who were briefed on the potential change told The Intercept.

    “Meta is currently revisiting its hate speech policy, specifically in relation to the term ‘Zionist,’” reads a January 30 email sent to civil society groups by Meta policy personnel and reviewed by The Intercept. While the email says Meta has not made a final determination, it is soliciting feedback on a potential policy change from civil society and digital rights groups, according to the sources. The email notes that “Meta is reviewing this policy in light of content that users and stakeholders have recently reported” but does not detail the content in question or name any stakeholders.

    “As an anti-Zionist Jewish organization for Palestinian freedom, we are horrified to learn that Meta is considering expanding when they treat ‘Zionism’ — a political ideology — as the same as ‘Jew/Jewish’ — an ethno-religious identity,” said Dani Noble, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the groups Meta has contacted to discuss the possible change. Noble added that such a policy shift “will result in shielding the Israeli government from accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”

    For years, Meta has allowed its 3 billion users around the world to employ the term “Zionist,” which refers to supporters of the historical movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, as well as backers of modern-day nationalism in support of that state and its policies.

    Meta’s internal rules around the word “Zionist,” first reported by The Intercept in 2021, show that company moderators are only supposed to delete posts using the term if it’s determined to be a proxy for “Jewish” or “Israeli,” both protected classes under company speech rules. The policy change Meta is now considering would enable the platform’s moderators to more aggressively and expansively enforce this rule, a move that could dramatically increase deletions of posts critical of Israeli nationalism.

    “We don’t allow people to attack others based on their protected characteristics, such as their nationality or religion. Enforcing this policy requires an understanding of how people use language to reference those characteristics,” Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told The Intercept. “While the term Zionist often refers to a person’s ideology, which is not a protected characteristic, it can also be used to refer to Jewish or Israeli people. Given the increase in polarized public discourse due to events in the Middle East, we believe it’s important to assess our guidance for reviewing posts that use the term Zionist.”

    In the months since October 7, staunchly pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League have openly called for treating anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, pointing out that the word is often used by antisemites as a stand-in for “Jew.” The ADL and American Jewish Committee, another pro-Israel, Zionist advocacy group in the U.S., have both been lobbying Meta to restrict use of the word “Zionist,” according to Yasmine Taeb, legislative and political director at the Muslim grassroots advocacy group MPower Change. In his statement, Chambliss responded, “We did not initiate this policy development at the behest of any outside group.”

    Taeb, who spoke to a Meta employee closely involved with the proposed policy change, said it would result in mass censorship of critical mentions of Zionism, restricting, for example, non-hateful, non-violent speech about the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza.

    While a statement as general as “I don’t like Zionists” could be uttered by an antisemitic Instagram user as a means of expressing dislike for Jews, civil society advocates point out that there is nothing inherently or necessarily anti-Jewish about the statement. Indeed, much of the fiercest political activism against Israel’s war in Gaza has been organized by anti-Zionist Jews, while American evangelical Christian Zionists are some of Israel’s most hardcore supporters.

    “The suppression of pro-Palestinian speech critical of Israel is happening specifically during the genocide in Gaza,” Taeb said in an interview. “Meta should instead be working on implementing policies to make sure political speech is not being suppressed, and they’re doing the exact opposite.”

    According to presentation materials reviewed by The Intercept, Meta has been sharing with stakeholders a series of hypothetical posts that could be deleted under a stricter policy, and soliciting feedback as to whether they should be. While one example seemed like a clear case of conspiratorial antisemitic tropes about Jewish control of the news media, others were critical of Israeli state policy or supporters of that policy, not Judaism, said Nadim Nashif, executive director of the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh, who was briefed this week by Meta via video conference. Meta plans to brief U.S. stakeholder groups on Friday morning, according to its outreach email.

    Examples of posts Meta could censor under a new policy included the statements: “Zionists are war criminals, just look at what’s happening in Gaza”; “I don’t like Zionists”; and “No Zionists allowed at tonight’s meeting of the Progressive Student Association.” Nashif said that one example — “Just read the news every day. A coalition of Zionists, Americans and Europeans tries to rule the world.” — was described by Peter Stern, Meta’s director of content policy stakeholder engagement, as possibly hateful because it engaged in conspiratorial thinking about Jews.

    In an interview with The Intercept, Nashif disagreed, arguing that criticism of the strategic alliance and foreign policy alignment between the U.S., European states, and Israel should not be conflated with conspiratorial bigotry against Judaism, or collapsed into bigoted delusions of global Jewish influence. In their meeting, Nashif says Stern acknowledged that Zionism is a political ideology, not an ethnic group, despite the prospect of enforcement that would treat it more like the latter. “I think it may actually harm the fight against antisemitism, conflating Zionism and the Israeli government with Judaism,” Nashif told The Intercept.

    It will be difficult or impossible to determine whether someone says they “don’t like” Zionists with a hateful intent, Nashif said, adding: “You’d need telepathy.” Meta has yet to share with those it has briefed any kind of general principles, rules, or definitions that would guide this revised policy or help moderators enforce it, Nashif said. But given the company’s systematic censorship of Palestinian and other Arab users of its platforms, Nashif and others familiar with the potential change fear it would make free expression in the Arab world even more perilous.

    “As anti-Zionist Jews, we have seen how the Israeli government and its supporters have pushed an agenda that falsely claims that equating ‘Zionist’ with ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ will somehow keep Jews safe,” added Noble of Jewish Voice for Peace. “Not only does conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism harm all people who fight for human rights in the world by stifling legitimate criticism of a state and military, it also does nothing to actually keep our community safe while undermining our collective efforts to dismantle real antisemitism and all forms of racism, extremism and oppression.”

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    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/09/meta-considering-increased-censorship-of-the-word-zionist/feed/ 0 457899     Russell Brand Responds to Coordinated Smear Campaign Against Him https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/06/russell-brand-responds-to-coordinated-smear-campaign-against-him/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/06/russell-brand-responds-to-coordinated-smear-campaign-against-him/#respond Tue, 06 Feb 2024 15:18:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=147947 Governments colluded to shut down and destroy @RussellBrand. This is his first interview since that happened. It’s one of the most brilliant explanations of the modern world you’ll ever hear.

    The post Russell Brand Responds to Coordinated Smear Campaign Against Him first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Tucker Carlson.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/06/russell-brand-responds-to-coordinated-smear-campaign-against-him/feed/ 0 457214     Teachers Have the Right to Criticize Israel Without Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/31/teachers-have-the-right-to-criticize-israel-without-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/31/teachers-have-the-right-to-criticize-israel-without-censorship/#respond Wed, 31 Jan 2024 21:29:11 +0000 https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/teachers-have-the-right-to-criticize-israel-without-censorship-sacks-20240131/
    This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Glenn Sacks.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/31/teachers-have-the-right-to-criticize-israel-without-censorship/feed/ 0 456089     Battling Censorship, Propaganda, and Nuclear Colonialism https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/29/battling-censorship-propaganda-and-nuclear-colonialism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/29/battling-censorship-propaganda-and-nuclear-colonialism/#respond Mon, 29 Jan 2024 18:09:58 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=37285 In the first half of the show, journalist Alan MacLeod joins Eleanor Goldfield to discuss his personal battle against censorship as well as the ways in which corporate media work…

    The post Battling Censorship, Propaganda, and Nuclear Colonialism appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/29/battling-censorship-propaganda-and-nuclear-colonialism/feed/ 0 455545     "Many of My Shows Have Been Canceled": Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei on Israel, Gaza & Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/many-of-my-shows-have-been-canceled-chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-on-israel-gaza-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/many-of-my-shows-have-been-canceled-chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-on-israel-gaza-censorship/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:38:20 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a22089c2c4f73df01468811efa16946c
    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/many-of-my-shows-have-been-canceled-chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-on-israel-gaza-censorship/feed/ 0 454260     How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/how-the-u-s-carries-out-its-oppression/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/how-the-u-s-carries-out-its-oppression/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:04:17 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=147654 The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime […]

    The post How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup that the U.S. regime hid behind popular 2013-2014 anti-corruption demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kiev and so turned that nation into a battering-ram against the U.S. regime’s top target for conquest, which is Russia right next door to Ukraine.

    In both examples — both domestic and foreign — the U.S. regime’s motivation was to increase and to intensify the power of its owners, whom it serves and who are never satisfied with the immense power that they already have but always crave to acquire yet more.

    How It Does Domestic Oppression

    On 4 May 2020, Jordan Smith headlined “MISSOURI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AN INNOCENT MAN IN PRISON: Despite ample evidence that Lamar Johnson was wrongfully convicted, Eric Schmitt is sparing no effort to keep him locked up as the coronavirus spreads”, and reported that:

    The police had nothing concrete to go on. But by the time they finally interviewed Elking, they had already latched onto a suspect: 20-year-old Lamar Johnson.

    Johnson would soon be arrested and tried for the October 1994 murder on thin and troubling evidence. …

    In 1995, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Still, he has long maintained his innocence — and now has a powerful ally in his corner: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis.

    Gardner ran on a reform agenda and in 2016 became the first black elected prosecutor in the city’s history. She won federal funding to start a conviction integrity unit and in 2018, at the behest of the Midwest Innocence Project, began investigating Johnson’s case. A year later, she concluded that he was innocent.

    In July 2019, Gardner filed a motion with Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan conceding that Johnson was wrongfully convicted. She asked the judge to grant a hearing on the matter and, ultimately, a new trial for Johnson. “When a prosecutor becomes aware of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of a crime that the defendant did not commit — the position in which the circuit attorney now finds herself — the prosecutor is obligated to seek to remedy the conviction,” Gardner wrote in the court filing.

    But [Judge] Hogan balked, questioning whether Gardner had the power to challenge the conviction. She called in Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to see what he had to say about it. Schmitt argued that not only did Gardner lack that authority, but the court couldn’t even entertain the matter. Hogan aligned herself with Schmitt and dismissed the case without considering the evidence Gardner had uncovered.

    Hogan’s decision sparked a unique legal battle that, on April 14, culminated in a video conference hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction. …

    Gardner’s yearlong inquiry revealed that Johnson’s conviction had been marred by extensive police and prosecutorial misconduct. She found that police had fabricated witness statements in an effort to frame Johnson (the witnesses said they’d never told police the things that had been attributed to them) and had pressured Elking into making an identification after he’d repeatedly told them he did not know who had attacked Boyd that night. Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

    Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

    Gardner learned that Elking had been paid more than $4,000 in exchange for his testimony and that prosecutors had also fixed a string of traffic tickets for him. None of this information was turned over to Johnson’s defense. … The state also failed to tell the defense that the jailhouse informant, Mock, had an epic criminal history (some 200 pages long) and a history of testifying for the state. … There was also the fact that Johnson had an alibi: He was with his girlfriend, child, and two friends several miles away at the time of the shooting.. … On top of it all, Gardner learned that not long after Johnson was convicted, two men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, had each separately confessed to killing [Markus] Boyd. Both insisted that Johnson had nothing to do with it. … Given the breadth of the misconduct, Gardner felt she had to find a way to make things right — after all, it was her office that was responsible for Johnson’s conviction.  …

    Not everyone agrees with that position. Schmitt’s office has since doubled down in opposition to Gardner with a mind-numbing array of arguments. …

    No prosecutor in the state of Missouri has the power to undo a wrongful conviction, sys the attorney general. … Schmitt says that Johnson can vindicate his rights by following regular post-conviction procedure: File a challenge based on the evidence Gardner has supplied and let the legal system work its ordinary, slogging magic. …

    Even if Johnson’s appeal were to survive a procedural challenge, the process would only draw out his already wrongful incarceration. …

    Unless the Missouri Supreme Court steps in, prosecutors in the state may remain hobbled, which is essentially what Schmitt is advocating: Keep the power to vet these claims in his hands and dismiss from the process elected prosecutors like Gardner, who vowed on the campaign trail to work toward a more equitable criminal justice system. …

    Reform prosecutors across the country have faced varying degrees of backlash from the entrenched power structures they’ve challenged, and they’ve repeatedly had their discretion questioned as they’ve sought changes that upset the old guard. …

    On 15 February 2023, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bannered “Judge frees Lamar Johnson after 28 years in prison: Original murder case was ‘suspect at best’”, and reported:

    Lamar Johnson walked out of the downtown courthouse Tuesday afternoon, a free man for the first time in decades.

    Just hours earlier, a St. Louis Circuit judge vacated Johnson’s murder conviction, ruling he was wrongly imprisoned nearly 30 years ago and that there is clear and convincing evidence of his innocence.

    The ruling by 22nd Circuit Court Judge David Mason comes roughly two months after a weeklong hearing in December during which another man confessed to the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd — the crime that sent Johnson to prison with a life sentence.

    Cheers erupted in the courtroom as Mason read his decision. …

    The ruling ends Johnson’s decadeslong fight to prove his innocence. After years of being turned down on appeals and habeas corpus petitions, Johnson’s case attracted national attention in 2019 when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit reported misconduct by the investigation’s lead detective and other constitutional errors in the 1995 trial. …

    Much of Mason’s decision centered on the main witness in Johnson’s 1995 trial, Greg Elking, who said at the December hearing that police coerced his original identification of Johnson as the man who wore a ski mask and shot Boyd. Mason described that identification as “suspect at best.”

    ”All Elking witnessed was the assailant’s eye, giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘eye witness,’” Mason said, describing it as “yet another serious weakness in the case against Johnson.”

    Without Elking’s identification, there was no case. …

    Photos: Wrongfully convicted inmate Lamar Johnson set free after serving 28 years for murder he did not commit. …

    Once Lamar Johnson was freed, the national press reported the case, as being an example showing that though ‘mistakes’ can happen in American ‘justice’, they can be rectified: in this ‘democracy’, such mistakes can be rectified — the Government isn’t set up so as to produce these ‘mistakes’; it’s not set up that way so as to produce the world’s highest percentage of its population (almost all of which are poor people) being in prisons. It’s only mistakes. So, the public don’t know that it’s NOT mistakes — that it’s the way ‘our’ Government functions.

    On 8 November 2022, Eric Schmitt won Missouri’s election to the U.S. Senate, and became appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he joins the other key Senators that represent the interests of U.S. armaments contractors (America’s most profitable industry), such as Boeing Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer in the state and is seeking tax-breaks from people such as Schmitt.

    How It Does Foreign Oppression

    Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled government an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

    The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already become beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.

    However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.

    So: how did the U.S. regime carry out this oppression of the Ukrainian people? It was done by the same means as it had been done in the Lamar Johnson case: coercion, including coercion against the mind, which is deceit, and including coercion against public officials who might otherwise try to do the right thing in order to serve the public instead of to serve their masters who have been funding their political careers.

    On 17 June 2015, I headlined “The Who’s Who at the Top of the Coup” in Ukraine, and focused upon Dmitriy Yarosh, whom Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose to run the Maidan demonstration in Kiev that provided cover for the Obama-Nuland-organized February 2014 coup in Ukraine; and, on 1 February 2015, I headlined “The Ideology of the New Ukraine”, and focused upon Andrei Biletsky (or Beletsky), who organized and ran the openly nazi Ukrainiani Azov Battalion and, unlike Yarosh, Biletsky didn’t equivocate about his being a Ukrainian Social Nationalist or (National Socialist) in the Hitler vein, but he aimed “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich],” instead of Hitler’s German “Third Reich.” Then, on 20 March 2022, I headlined “How The Western Press Handles The Ukrainian Government’s Nazism” and presented a universally hidden-in-The-West photo of Biletsky leading his men in salute to what had been Nazi Germany’s Wolfsangel insignia.

    On 27 May 2019, the OBOZREVATEL online Ukrainian news site headlined (as translated into English) “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life” , the transcript of their interview with Yarosh, right after Zelensky had won the Presidential election against Poroshenko, and, in that interview, Yarosh made unambiguously clear that if as President, Zelensky were to negotiate seriously with Russia,”he will lose not his position, but his life.” Yarosh — the agent of the regime in Washington DC — was sending the new Ukrainian President the very clear message, that even if the U.S. wouldn’t get rid of such a Ukrainian President, Ukraine’s nazis would. So: Zelensky (like Poroshenko before him) was being controlled not only from above, the empire’s imperial regime in Washington, but also from below, the U.S.-empowered nazis whom the U.S. regime had used in order to take over Ukraine during February 2014.

    Conclusion

    The U.S. Establishment (called “neocons” in foreign policy, and “neoliberals” or “libertarians” in domestic policy, but, in any case, America’s under-1,000 billionaires and their numerous employees and other agents) work via threats, not only against heads-of-state abroad such as Zelensky, but ALSO  against domestic public officials such as the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to turn the screws upon those down below (such as in plea-bargains to lie in court cases) in order to keep those billionaires on top, and everyone else down below; and this is the empire’s social and political and even international, “rules-based order.” Whereas Lamar Johnson, as an extremely lucky exception to the rule (or “rules-based order”) managed finally to get free in 2023 after entering prison in 1995 for a frame-up against him by the regime that he and other Americans are forced to fund with their taxes, few others are and will be so lucky, but America’s ‘news’-media won’t and don’t report this fact. For example: there is nothing to indicate that Lamar Johnson sees what happened to him as being a frame-up by the regime instead of just a bunch of tragic mistakes that the U.S. Government had made. Even the victims usually remain ignorant of the reality. — the ‘news’-media cover it up. But the whole operation — like that of any other empire — is based ultimately upon requiring the public officials to impose by raw coercion if necessary, their masters’ rule, in this “rules-based order.” It’s the way that any empire functions. And, in the world of today, the only empire that remains is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’).

    The post How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/how-the-u-s-carries-out-its-oppression/feed/ 0 454401     How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/how-the-u-s-carries-out-its-oppression/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/how-the-u-s-carries-out-its-oppression/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:04:17 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=147654 The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime […]

    The post How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup that the U.S. regime hid behind popular 2013-2014 anti-corruption demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kiev and so turned that nation into a battering-ram against the U.S. regime’s top target for conquest, which is Russia right next door to Ukraine.

    In both examples — both domestic and foreign — the U.S. regime’s motivation was to increase and to intensify the power of its owners, whom it serves and who are never satisfied with the immense power that they already have but always crave to acquire yet more.

    How It Does Domestic Oppression

    On 4 May 2020, Jordan Smith headlined “MISSOURI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AN INNOCENT MAN IN PRISON: Despite ample evidence that Lamar Johnson was wrongfully convicted, Eric Schmitt is sparing no effort to keep him locked up as the coronavirus spreads”, and reported that:

    The police had nothing concrete to go on. But by the time they finally interviewed Elking, they had already latched onto a suspect: 20-year-old Lamar Johnson.

    Johnson would soon be arrested and tried for the October 1994 murder on thin and troubling evidence. …

    In 1995, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Still, he has long maintained his innocence — and now has a powerful ally in his corner: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis.

    Gardner ran on a reform agenda and in 2016 became the first black elected prosecutor in the city’s history. She won federal funding to start a conviction integrity unit and in 2018, at the behest of the Midwest Innocence Project, began investigating Johnson’s case. A year later, she concluded that he was innocent.

    In July 2019, Gardner filed a motion with Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan conceding that Johnson was wrongfully convicted. She asked the judge to grant a hearing on the matter and, ultimately, a new trial for Johnson. “When a prosecutor becomes aware of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of a crime that the defendant did not commit — the position in which the circuit attorney now finds herself — the prosecutor is obligated to seek to remedy the conviction,” Gardner wrote in the court filing.

    But [Judge] Hogan balked, questioning whether Gardner had the power to challenge the conviction. She called in Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to see what he had to say about it. Schmitt argued that not only did Gardner lack that authority, but the court couldn’t even entertain the matter. Hogan aligned herself with Schmitt and dismissed the case without considering the evidence Gardner had uncovered.

    Hogan’s decision sparked a unique legal battle that, on April 14, culminated in a video conference hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction. …

    Gardner’s yearlong inquiry revealed that Johnson’s conviction had been marred by extensive police and prosecutorial misconduct. She found that police had fabricated witness statements in an effort to frame Johnson (the witnesses said they’d never told police the things that had been attributed to them) and had pressured Elking into making an identification after he’d repeatedly told them he did not know who had attacked Boyd that night. Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

    Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

    Gardner learned that Elking had been paid more than $4,000 in exchange for his testimony and that prosecutors had also fixed a string of traffic tickets for him. None of this information was turned over to Johnson’s defense. … The state also failed to tell the defense that the jailhouse informant, Mock, had an epic criminal history (some 200 pages long) and a history of testifying for the state. … There was also the fact that Johnson had an alibi: He was with his girlfriend, child, and two friends several miles away at the time of the shooting.. … On top of it all, Gardner learned that not long after Johnson was convicted, two men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, had each separately confessed to killing [Markus] Boyd. Both insisted that Johnson had nothing to do with it. … Given the breadth of the misconduct, Gardner felt she had to find a way to make things right — after all, it was her office that was responsible for Johnson’s conviction.  …

    Not everyone agrees with that position. Schmitt’s office has since doubled down in opposition to Gardner with a mind-numbing array of arguments. …

    No prosecutor in the state of Missouri has the power to undo a wrongful conviction, sys the attorney general. … Schmitt says that Johnson can vindicate his rights by following regular post-conviction procedure: File a challenge based on the evidence Gardner has supplied and let the legal system work its ordinary, slogging magic. …

    Even if Johnson’s appeal were to survive a procedural challenge, the process would only draw out his already wrongful incarceration. …

    Unless the Missouri Supreme Court steps in, prosecutors in the state may remain hobbled, which is essentially what Schmitt is advocating: Keep the power to vet these claims in his hands and dismiss from the process elected prosecutors like Gardner, who vowed on the campaign trail to work toward a more equitable criminal justice system. …

    Reform prosecutors across the country have faced varying degrees of backlash from the entrenched power structures they’ve challenged, and they’ve repeatedly had their discretion questioned as they’ve sought changes that upset the old guard. …

    On 15 February 2023, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bannered “Judge frees Lamar Johnson after 28 years in prison: Original murder case was ‘suspect at best’”, and reported:

    Lamar Johnson walked out of the downtown courthouse Tuesday afternoon, a free man for the first time in decades.

    Just hours earlier, a St. Louis Circuit judge vacated Johnson’s murder conviction, ruling he was wrongly imprisoned nearly 30 years ago and that there is clear and convincing evidence of his innocence.

    The ruling by 22nd Circuit Court Judge David Mason comes roughly two months after a weeklong hearing in December during which another man confessed to the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd — the crime that sent Johnson to prison with a life sentence.

    Cheers erupted in the courtroom as Mason read his decision. …

    The ruling ends Johnson’s decadeslong fight to prove his innocence. After years of being turned down on appeals and habeas corpus petitions, Johnson’s case attracted national attention in 2019 when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit reported misconduct by the investigation’s lead detective and other constitutional errors in the 1995 trial. …

    Much of Mason’s decision centered on the main witness in Johnson’s 1995 trial, Greg Elking, who said at the December hearing that police coerced his original identification of Johnson as the man who wore a ski mask and shot Boyd. Mason described that identification as “suspect at best.”

    ”All Elking witnessed was the assailant’s eye, giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘eye witness,’” Mason said, describing it as “yet another serious weakness in the case against Johnson.”

    Without Elking’s identification, there was no case. …

    Photos: Wrongfully convicted inmate Lamar Johnson set free after serving 28 years for murder he did not commit. …

    Once Lamar Johnson was freed, the national press reported the case, as being an example showing that though ‘mistakes’ can happen in American ‘justice’, they can be rectified: in this ‘democracy’, such mistakes can be rectified — the Government isn’t set up so as to produce these ‘mistakes’; it’s not set up that way so as to produce the world’s highest percentage of its population (almost all of which are poor people) being in prisons. It’s only mistakes. So, the public don’t know that it’s NOT mistakes — that it’s the way ‘our’ Government functions.

    On 8 November 2022, Eric Schmitt won Missouri’s election to the U.S. Senate, and became appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he joins the other key Senators that represent the interests of U.S. armaments contractors (America’s most profitable industry), such as Boeing Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer in the state and is seeking tax-breaks from people such as Schmitt.

    How It Does Foreign Oppression

    Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled government an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

    The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already become beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.

    However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.

    So: how did the U.S. regime carry out this oppression of the Ukrainian people? It was done by the same means as it had been done in the Lamar Johnson case: coercion, including coercion against the mind, which is deceit, and including coercion against public officials who might otherwise try to do the right thing in order to serve the public instead of to serve their masters who have been funding their political careers.

    On 17 June 2015, I headlined “The Who’s Who at the Top of the Coup” in Ukraine, and focused upon Dmitriy Yarosh, whom Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose to run the Maidan demonstration in Kiev that provided cover for the Obama-Nuland-organized February 2014 coup in Ukraine; and, on 1 February 2015, I headlined “The Ideology of the New Ukraine”, and focused upon Andrei Biletsky (or Beletsky), who organized and ran the openly nazi Ukrainiani Azov Battalion and, unlike Yarosh, Biletsky didn’t equivocate about his being a Ukrainian Social Nationalist or (National Socialist) in the Hitler vein, but he aimed “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich],” instead of Hitler’s German “Third Reich.” Then, on 20 March 2022, I headlined “How The Western Press Handles The Ukrainian Government’s Nazism” and presented a universally hidden-in-The-West photo of Biletsky leading his men in salute to what had been Nazi Germany’s Wolfsangel insignia.

    On 27 May 2019, the OBOZREVATEL online Ukrainian news site headlined (as translated into English) “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life” , the transcript of their interview with Yarosh, right after Zelensky had won the Presidential election against Poroshenko, and, in that interview, Yarosh made unambiguously clear that if as President, Zelensky were to negotiate seriously with Russia,”he will lose not his position, but his life.” Yarosh — the agent of the regime in Washington DC — was sending the new Ukrainian President the very clear message, that even if the U.S. wouldn’t get rid of such a Ukrainian President, Ukraine’s nazis would. So: Zelensky (like Poroshenko before him) was being controlled not only from above, the empire’s imperial regime in Washington, but also from below, the U.S.-empowered nazis whom the U.S. regime had used in order to take over Ukraine during February 2014.

    Conclusion

    The U.S. Establishment (called “neocons” in foreign policy, and “neoliberals” or “libertarians” in domestic policy, but, in any case, America’s under-1,000 billionaires and their numerous employees and other agents) work via threats, not only against heads-of-state abroad such as Zelensky, but ALSO  against domestic public officials such as the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to turn the screws upon those down below (such as in plea-bargains to lie in court cases) in order to keep those billionaires on top, and everyone else down below; and this is the empire’s social and political and even international, “rules-based order.” Whereas Lamar Johnson, as an extremely lucky exception to the rule (or “rules-based order”) managed finally to get free in 2023 after entering prison in 1995 for a frame-up against him by the regime that he and other Americans are forced to fund with their taxes, few others are and will be so lucky, but America’s ‘news’-media won’t and don’t report this fact. For example: there is nothing to indicate that Lamar Johnson sees what happened to him as being a frame-up by the regime instead of just a bunch of tragic mistakes that the U.S. Government had made. Even the victims usually remain ignorant of the reality. — the ‘news’-media cover it up. But the whole operation — like that of any other empire — is based ultimately upon requiring the public officials to impose by raw coercion if necessary, their masters’ rule, in this “rules-based order.” It’s the way that any empire functions. And, in the world of today, the only empire that remains is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’).

    The post How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/how-the-u-s-carries-out-its-oppression/feed/ 0 454402     “Many of My Shows Have Been Canceled”: Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei on Israel, Gaza & Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/many-of-my-shows-have-been-canceled-chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-on-israel-gaza-censorship-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/many-of-my-shows-have-been-canceled-chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-on-israel-gaza-censorship-2/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 13:35:10 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=802fb34d256d2fd3a5326670049be847 Seg2 ai weiwei

    We speak with acclaimed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who recently had an exhibition in London canceled after he publicly criticized Israel’s assault on Gaza. “We are gradually losing the ground of democracy or personal freedom,” says Ai, whose show in London was indefinitely postponed after he posted a controversial tweet about Israel in November. He joins Democracy Now! to discuss his longtime support of Palestine and Western hypocrisy over human rights and free speech. Ai Weiwei also describes his new graphic novel Zodiac, about his experiences as a Chinese dissident.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/many-of-my-shows-have-been-canceled-chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-on-israel-gaza-censorship-2/feed/ 0 454301     ABC staff ‘have lost confidence’ in boss in defending public trust in Israel row https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/abc-staff-have-lost-confidence-in-boss-in-defending-public-trust-in-israel-row/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/abc-staff-have-lost-confidence-in-boss-in-defending-public-trust-in-israel-row/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 01:27:04 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=95977 Pacific Media Watch

    Union members at the Australian public broadcaster ABC have today passed a vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson for failing to defend the integrity of the ABC and its staff from outside attacks, reports the national media union.

    The vote was passed overwhelmingly at a national online meeting attended by more than 200 members of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union said in a statement.

    Union members have called on Anderson to take immediate action to win back the confidence of staff following a series of incidents which have damaged the reputation of the ABC as a trusted and independent source of news.

    The vote of ABC union staff rebuked Anderson, with one of the broadcaster’s most senior journalists, global affairs editor John Lyons, reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as saying he was “embarrassed” by his employer, which he said had “shown pro-Israel bias” and was failing to protect staff against complaints.

    This followed revelations of a series of emails by the so-called Lawyers for Israel lobby group alleged to be influential in the sacking of Lebanese Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf for her criticism on social media of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that has killed 25,000 people so far, mostly women and children.

    Staff have put management on notice that if it does not begin to address the current crisis by next Monday, January 29, staff will consider further action.

    The acting chief executive of MEAA, Adam Portelli, said staff had felt unsupported by the ABC’s senior management when they have been criticised or attacked from outside.

    Message ‘clear and simple’
    “The message from staff today is clear and simple: David Anderson must demonstrate that he will take the necessary steps to win back the confidence of staff and the trust of the Australian public,” he said.

    “This is the result of a consistent pattern of behaviour by management when the ABC is under attack of buckling to outside pressure and leaving staff high and dry.

    “Public trust in the ABC is being undermined. The organisation’s reputation for frank and fearless journalism is being damaged by management’s repeated lack of support for its staff when they are under attack from outside.

    “Journalists at the ABC — particularly First Nations people, and people from culturally diverse backgrounds — increasingly don’t feel safe at work; and the progress that has been made in diversifying the ABC has gone backwards.

    “Management needs to act quickly to win that confidence back by putting the integrity of the ABC’s journalism above the impact of pressure from politicians, unaccountable lobby groups and big business.”

    The full motion passed by MEAA members at today’s meeting reads as follows:

    MEAA members at the ABC have lost confidence in our managing director David Anderson. Our leaders have consistently failed to protect our ABC’s independence or protect staff when they are attacked. They have consistently refused to work collaboratively with staff to uphold the standards that the Australian public need and expect of their ABC.

    Winning staff and public confidence back will require senior management:

    • Backing journalism without fear or favour;
    • Working collaboratively with unions to build a culturally informed process for supporting staff who face criticism and attack;
    • Take urgent action on the lack of security and inequality that journalists of colour face;
    • Working with unions to develop a clearer and fairer social media policy; and
    • Upholding a transparent complaints process, in which journalists who are subject to complaints are informed and supported.

    A further resolution passed unanimously by the meeting read:

    MEAA members at the ABC will not continue to accept the failure of management to protect our colleagues and the public. If management does not work with us to urgently fix the ongoing crisis, ABC staff will take further action to take a stand for a safe, independent ABC.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/abc-staff-have-lost-confidence-in-boss-in-defending-public-trust-in-israel-row/feed/ 0 454080     ABC staff ‘have lost confidence’ in boss in defending public trust in Israel row https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/abc-staff-have-lost-confidence-in-boss-in-defending-public-trust-in-israel-row-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/abc-staff-have-lost-confidence-in-boss-in-defending-public-trust-in-israel-row-2/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 01:27:04 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=95977 Pacific Media Watch

    Union members at the Australian public broadcaster ABC have today passed a vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson for failing to defend the integrity of the ABC and its staff from outside attacks, reports the national media union.

    The vote was passed overwhelmingly at a national online meeting attended by more than 200 members of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union said in a statement.

    Union members have called on Anderson to take immediate action to win back the confidence of staff following a series of incidents which have damaged the reputation of the ABC as a trusted and independent source of news.

    The vote of ABC union staff rebuked Anderson, with one of the broadcaster’s most senior journalists, global affairs editor John Lyons, reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as saying he was “embarrassed” by his employer, which he said had “shown pro-Israel bias” and was failing to protect staff against complaints.

    This followed revelations of a series of emails by the so-called Lawyers for Israel lobby group alleged to be influential in the sacking of Lebanese Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf for her criticism on social media of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that has killed 25,000 people so far, mostly women and children.

    Staff have put management on notice that if it does not begin to address the current crisis by next Monday, January 29, staff will consider further action.

    The acting chief executive of MEAA, Adam Portelli, said staff had felt unsupported by the ABC’s senior management when they have been criticised or attacked from outside.

    Message ‘clear and simple’
    “The message from staff today is clear and simple: David Anderson must demonstrate that he will take the necessary steps to win back the confidence of staff and the trust of the Australian public,” he said.

    “This is the result of a consistent pattern of behaviour by management when the ABC is under attack of buckling to outside pressure and leaving staff high and dry.

    “Public trust in the ABC is being undermined. The organisation’s reputation for frank and fearless journalism is being damaged by management’s repeated lack of support for its staff when they are under attack from outside.

    “Journalists at the ABC — particularly First Nations people, and people from culturally diverse backgrounds — increasingly don’t feel safe at work; and the progress that has been made in diversifying the ABC has gone backwards.

    “Management needs to act quickly to win that confidence back by putting the integrity of the ABC’s journalism above the impact of pressure from politicians, unaccountable lobby groups and big business.”

    The full motion passed by MEAA members at today’s meeting reads as follows:

    MEAA members at the ABC have lost confidence in our managing director David Anderson. Our leaders have consistently failed to protect our ABC’s independence or protect staff when they are attacked. They have consistently refused to work collaboratively with staff to uphold the standards that the Australian public need and expect of their ABC.

    Winning staff and public confidence back will require senior management:

    • Backing journalism without fear or favour;
    • Working collaboratively with unions to build a culturally informed process for supporting staff who face criticism and attack;
    • Take urgent action on the lack of security and inequality that journalists of colour face;
    • Working with unions to develop a clearer and fairer social media policy; and
    • Upholding a transparent complaints process, in which journalists who are subject to complaints are informed and supported.

    A further resolution passed unanimously by the meeting read:

    MEAA members at the ABC will not continue to accept the failure of management to protect our colleagues and the public. If management does not work with us to urgently fix the ongoing crisis, ABC staff will take further action to take a stand for a safe, independent ABC.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/abc-staff-have-lost-confidence-in-boss-in-defending-public-trust-in-israel-row-2/feed/ 0 454081     Holocaust Survivor Marione Ingram Decries Climate of Censorship After Her Hamburg Talks Are Canceled https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/holocaust-survivor-marione-ingram-decries-climate-of-censorship-after-her-hamburg-talks-are-canceled/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/holocaust-survivor-marione-ingram-decries-climate-of-censorship-after-her-hamburg-talks-are-canceled/#respond Thu, 18 Jan 2024 15:55:26 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=381f2ba237dbed3cd9382f3027980f7b
    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/holocaust-survivor-marione-ingram-decries-climate-of-censorship-after-her-hamburg-talks-are-canceled/feed/ 0 452919     Artist Emily Jacir: Rampant Censorship Is Part of the Genocidal Campaign to Erase Palestinians https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/artist-emily-jacir-rampant-censorship-is-part-of-the-genocidal-campaign-to-erase-palestinians-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/artist-emily-jacir-rampant-censorship-is-part-of-the-genocidal-campaign-to-erase-palestinians-2/#respond Thu, 18 Jan 2024 15:54:34 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=cb3966a1d8f334e0f705dd18d4baea70
    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/artist-emily-jacir-rampant-censorship-is-part-of-the-genocidal-campaign-to-erase-palestinians-2/feed/ 0 452946     Holocaust Survivor Marione Ingram Decries Climate of Censorship After Her Hamburg Talks Are Canceled https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/holocaust-survivor-marione-ingram-decries-climate-of-censorship-after-her-hamburg-talks-are-canceled-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/holocaust-survivor-marione-ingram-decries-climate-of-censorship-after-her-hamburg-talks-are-canceled-2/#respond Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:50:04 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=05d5667c1919fe8c2a577372d1114376 Seg3 marione sign v3

    We are joined by 88-year-old Jewish German American Marione Ingram, who describes how her scheduled speaking tour in Hamburg — the city she fled in the Holocaust — was “postponed” this month amid a wider backlash against those speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Ingram has been protesting for months outside the White House calling for a ceasefire, and characterizes U.S. and German pro-Israel policy as “disturbing” and “frightening.” As a survivor of the Holocaust, Ingram says, “My childhood was spent in the first 10 years much the same way as the children of Gaza. I know exactly what they’re going through. I know exactly how they’re feeling.” She argues “it should be an absolute standstill of all governments that you are told over 10,000 children are being murdered. There is no excuse for that.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/holocaust-survivor-marione-ingram-decries-climate-of-censorship-after-her-hamburg-talks-are-canceled-2/feed/ 0 452935     Artist Emily Jacir: Rampant Censorship Is Part of the Genocidal Campaign to Erase Palestinians https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/artist-emily-jacir-rampant-censorship-is-part-of-the-genocidal-campaign-to-erase-palestinians-3/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/artist-emily-jacir-rampant-censorship-is-part-of-the-genocidal-campaign-to-erase-palestinians-3/#respond Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:33:26 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=4210b92ef7b0ae12a462be0212e86dc8 Emilyjacir germany

    We speak with award-winning Palestinian American artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir, whose event in Berlin in October was canceled after Israel launched its ongoing assault on Gaza. Jacir decries a pattern of “harassment, baseless smear campaigns, canceling shows, canceling talks” conducted against Palestinian artists in Germany and around the world. “It’s very much part of a coordinated movement,” she says, connecting global censorship of diasporic Palestinian voices with the violent “targeted destruction of culture in Gaza,” which she calls a “part of genocide.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/18/artist-emily-jacir-rampant-censorship-is-part-of-the-genocidal-campaign-to-erase-palestinians-3/feed/ 0 452967     Substack’s No-Platforming Climbdown Isn’t “Censorship,” But It’s Still a Bad Idea https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/16/substacks-no-platforming-climbdown-isnt-censorship-but-its-still-a-bad-idea/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/16/substacks-no-platforming-climbdown-isnt-censorship-but-its-still-a-bad-idea/#respond Tue, 16 Jan 2024 06:55:28 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=310844

    Photograph Source: RoySmith – CC BY-SA 4.0

    In January of 2022, Lulu Cheng-Meservey — at the time, Vice President of Communication for Substack, though she’s since moved on to a similar role at Activision Blizzard — wrote on Twitter (now known as “X”):

    “At Substack, we don’t make moderation decisions based on public pressure or PR considerations. An important principle for us is defending free expression, even for stuff we personally dislike or disagree with. … We want a thriving ecosystem full of fresh and diverse ideas. That can’t happen without the freedom to experiment, or even to be wrong.”

    Not quite a year later, Substack finds itself losing writers, and likely bleeding revenue, in a “can’t win for losing” scenario.

    In November, The Atlantic alleged the existence of “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters” on the Substack platform.

    Since then, Substack has gone from defending Ms. Cheng-Meservey’s position to taking action against such content based on the “hate speech” prohibitions in its terms of service, in the process pleasing virtually no one.

    Some content creators are leaving because they don’t want to share a platform with content they deem offensive. After all, they might find themselves tarrred with guilt by association.

    Others are leaving because they don’t trust a platform that lets public pressure determine its content policies. After all, they might eventually turn up on the list of targets themselves.

    Of course, the word “censorship” keeps popping up to describe any and all refusals by platforms (including Substack) to let users publish whatever they damn well please.

    Let’s get one thing out of the way: It’s not “censorship.” Censorship involves government force, intimidation, etc.

    If I tell you you can’t sing “Auld Lang Syne,” period, I’m trying to censor you.

    If I tell you you can’t sing “Auld Lang Syne” at 3am in my living room, I’m just setting terms for use of my living room, and you’re free to go sing it on the nearest streetcorner or at your local tavern’s karaoke night event.

    While I’m completely OK with the latter (in fact, I have a side gig moderating comments at a popular web site based on guidelines that forbid, among other things, “hate speech”), I don’t like the idea of platforms setting guidelines, but enforcing or not enforcing them based on public outcry.

    Yes, Substack has a financial bottom line to guard. And yes, that may mean making hard decisions. But operating in obedience to a “Heckler’s Veto” is probably a bad business decision in the long term, and it’s damaging to public discourse — in the same way as real, i.e. government, censorship —  in the short term.

    Substack needs to decide whether it’s an open platform or an activist-curated walled garden. It can’t be both.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/16/substacks-no-platforming-climbdown-isnt-censorship-but-its-still-a-bad-idea/feed/ 0 452182     Facing an Undeniable Fact https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/03/facing-an-undeniable-fact/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/03/facing-an-undeniable-fact/#respond Wed, 03 Jan 2024 19:38:12 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=147145 The rarely discussed war.

    The post Facing an Undeniable Fact first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    The post Facing an Undeniable Fact first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/03/facing-an-undeniable-fact/feed/ 0 449268     State of the Free Press 2024: A Discussion of Ongoing Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/state-of-the-free-press-2024-a-discussion-of-ongoing-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/state-of-the-free-press-2024-a-discussion-of-ongoing-censorship/#respond Tue, 02 Jan 2024 23:16:20 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=36616 Project Censored’s yearly publication, State of the Free Press 2024, hit the shelves in December. The work details the many issues regarding corporate media, from the spread of news deserts…

    The post State of the Free Press 2024: A Discussion of Ongoing Censorship appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/02/state-of-the-free-press-2024-a-discussion-of-ongoing-censorship/feed/ 0 449086     A Patriotic Duty https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/24/a-patriotic-duty/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/24/a-patriotic-duty/#respond Sun, 24 Dec 2023 15:56:26 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=146841 “My country, right or wrong”, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober”. -- G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (1901), p. 166.

    The post A Patriotic Duty first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    The post A Patriotic Duty first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/24/a-patriotic-duty/feed/ 0 447705     A Tidal Wave of Truth https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/20/a-tidal-wave-of-truth/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/20/a-tidal-wave-of-truth/#respond Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:21:50 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=146730 It's breaking on the beach of censorship.

    The post A Tidal Wave of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    The post A Tidal Wave of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/20/a-tidal-wave-of-truth/feed/ 0 446991     Gessen’s Cancellation Can’t Go Unchallenged https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/15/gessens-cancellation-cant-go-unchallenged/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/15/gessens-cancellation-cant-go-unchallenged/#respond Fri, 15 Dec 2023 22:44:18 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9036552 Gessen, a queer Jew, is being punished by the German political machine for being too open about the nature of global authoritarianism.

    The post Gessen’s Cancellation Can’t Go Unchallenged appeared first on FAIR.

    ]]>     Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has built an impressive career in US journalism by being a constant thorn in the side of the Russian state. That journalistic campaign entered a new chapter in November when the Russian government issued a warrant for their arrest (Washington Post, 11/27/23; AP, 12/8/23; RFE/RL, 12/8/23; Newmark School of Journalism, 12/11/23).

    Gessen, a staff writer at the New Yorker, gave an interview in which they spoke about well-documented Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (OHCHR, 12/7/22). The Russian government, forever clamping down on negative press of its military invasion of Ukraine, symbolically declared them an outlaw. (Gessen lives in the United States.)

    Masha Gessen

    Masha Gessen (Photo: Clarissa Villondo)

    Gessen has been an annoyance for the Russian government for some time; their book, The Man Without a Face, portrays Russian President Vladimir Putin not as a cunning political genius, but as a simpleton whose ego ruined the country (Washington Post, 4/7/12; Foreign Affairs, 5/1/12). Gessen, who is nonbinary, left Russia a decade ago after covering the country’s hostility toward LGBTQ people led them to fear for their own safety (Business Insider, 8/23/13).

    In the post-2016 shock of Donald Trump’s presidential election, a great deal of US media fell into a trance of believing that Trump’s success could only be explained by Russian electoral sabotage. Gessen, refreshingly, took a different approach. Rather than blame one regime for the electoral outcome, they rightfully put Trump in the context of a global movement of authoritarian backlash toward liberalism. Their pieces linking Trump’s success to the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and Hungary remain essential reading (New York Review of Books, 11/10/16; New Yorker, 3/2/21).

    Critical reporting on Putin and Trump is highly valued, and not controversial, in US media. Putin is an authoritarian, yes, but one not backed by the United States, and is viewed as an enemy. Trump, for most liberal publications, is an abhorrent aberration in an otherwise flawed but democratic political system.

    ‘The ghetto is being liquidated’

    New Yorker: In the Shadow of the Holocaust

    Masha Gessen (New Yorker, 12/9/23): “From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away.”

    But when Gessen turned their lens to Israel, they fell victim to pro-Israel censorship. Their recent essay (New Yorker, 12/9/23) on Holocaust remembrance culture in Germany was a self-fulfilling prophecy: As a result of Gessen’s observation that the language that most accurately describes what is happening in Gaza—”the ghetto is being liquidated”—comes from the Jewish experience during World War II, the Green Party–affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS), which was planning to award Gessen its Hannah Arendt Prize, canceled the event.

    The Guardian (12/14/23) explained:

    The HBS said it objected to and rejected a comparison made by Gessen in a 9 December essay in the New Yorker between Gaza and the Jewish ghettos in Europe.

    In the essay, Gessen, who uses they, criticized Germany’s unequivocal support of Israel, drawing attention to the Bundestag’s 2019 resolution condemning the Israel boycott movement BDS as antisemitic and quoting a Jewish critic of Germany’s politics of Holocaust remembrance as saying memory culture had “gone haywire.”

    In the paragraph the HBS draws attention to, Gessen wrote that “ghetto” would be “the more appropriate term” to describe Gaza, but the word “would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

    The foundation said Gessen was implying that Israel aimed to “liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto,” adding that “this statement is unacceptable to us and we reject it.”

    Chilling censorship regime

    Hannah Arendt

    Hannah Arendt (New Yorker, 12/9/23) called Israel’s Herut party—a forerunner of Likud—”a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Such opinions would likely disqualify her for the Hannah Arendt Prize.

    Germany’s political culture of strong support for Israel, deeply tied to its guilt over the Nazi genocide of Jews, has led to a deeply chilling and severely anti-Palestinian censorship regime. As I have previously reported for FAIR (11/5/21), this culture has even taken a grip in US media.

    There is a special irony in a prize in the name of German Jewish philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt, whose work on the rise of German fascism is essential, being withheld from another Jewish journalist for writing about the rise of authoritarianism.

    Arendt herself, as Gessen’s essay noted, wasn’t afraid to link Zionist extremism with the “N word,” joining other Jewish intellectuals in 1948 (including Albert Einstein) who protested the visit of Israeli politician Menachem Begin to the United States, denouncing Begin’s Herut (Freedom) party as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Haaretz, 12/4/14). It seems likely that Hannah Arendt would also be deemed unworthy to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize.

    The Daily Beast (12/13/23), New York Post (12/14/23), Washington Post (12/14/23) and Literary Hub (12/13/23) covered the issue. But the absurdity of the situation should be shouted from the rooftops of every respectable newspaper.

    Job-costing solidarity

    Gessen, of course, isn’t the only media victim of anti-Palestinian censorship since the outbreak of violence began in October. Reuters (10/21/23) reported that

    Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen said…a Jewish organization in New York City canceled a reading he was due to give on Friday without explanation, a day after he said he signed an open letter condemning Israel’s “indiscriminate violence” against Palestinians in Gaza.

    Two writers were forced out of the New York Times Magazine because of their protests against Israel’s military action in Gaza, as the magazine’s editor “Jake Silverstein said the letter violated the outlet’s policy on public protest” (Democracy Now!, 11/14/23).

    After Artforum editor David Velasco was fired for posting an open letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians, he told the New York Times (10/26/23), “I have no regrets.” He added that he was “disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”

    Jackson Frank, a sports writer for PhillyVoice.com, was fired for tweeting “solidarity with Palestine always” (Guardian, 10/10/23). Michael Eisen lost his job as editor-in-chief of the academic journal eLife after commenting favorably on an Onion (10/13/23) article with the headline “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas” (Science, 10/23/23).

    The absurdity of Gessen, a queer Jew, being punished in the name of Hannah Arendt, also a Jew, by a branch of the German political machine for being too open about the nature of global authoritarianism should be a wake up call for how degraded our discourse on Israel/Palestine has become. But it likely won’t change minds in most media. At least not yet.

    The post Gessen’s Cancellation Can’t Go Unchallenged appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/15/gessens-cancellation-cant-go-unchallenged/feed/ 0 446092     Sen. Elizabeth Warren Questions Meta Over Palestinian Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/14/sen-elizabeth-warren-questions-meta-over-palestinian-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/14/sen-elizabeth-warren-questions-meta-over-palestinian-censorship/#respond Thu, 14 Dec 2023 18:00:00 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=454975

    In a letter sent Thursday to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., calls on the Facebook and Instagram owner to disclose unreleased details about wartime content moderation practices that have “exacerbated violence and failed to combat hate speech,” citing recent reporting by The Intercept.

    “Amidst the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, a humanitarian catastrophe including the deaths of thousands of civilians in Gaza, and the killing of dozens of journalists, it is more important than ever that social media platforms do not censor truthful and legitimate content, particularly as people around the world turn to online communities to share and find information about developments in the region,” the letter reads, according to a copy shared with The Intercept.

    Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, social media users around the world have reported the inexplicable disappearance of posts, comments, hashtags, and entire accounts — even though they did not seem to violate any rules. Uneven enforcement of rules generally, and Palestinian censorship specifically, have proven perennial problems for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and the company has routinely blamed erratic rule enforcement on human error and technical glitches, while vowing to improve.

    Following a string of 2021 Israeli raids at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, Instagram temporarily censored posts about the holy site on the grounds that it was associated with terrorism. A third-party audit of the company’s speech policies in Israel and Palestine conducted last year found that “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred.”

    Users affected by these moderation decisions, meanwhile, are left with little to no recourse, and often have no idea why their posts were censored in the first place. Meta’s increased reliance on opaque, automated content moderation algorithms has only exacerbated the company’s lack of transparency around speech policy, and has done little to allay allegations that the company’s systems are structurally biased against certain groups.

    The letter references recent articles by The Intercept, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets’ reporting on the widespread, unexplained censorship of Palestinians and the broader discussion of Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza. Last month, for instance, The Intercept reported that Instagram users leaving Palestinian flag emojis in post comments had seen those comments quickly hidden; Facebook later told The Intercept it was hiding these emojis in contexts it deemed “potentially offensive.”

    “Social media users deserve to know when and why their accounts and posts are restricted, particularly on the largest platforms where vital information-sharing occurs.”

    These “reports of Meta’s suppression of Palestinian voices raise serious questions about Meta’s content moderation practices and anti-discrimination protections,” Warren writes. “Social media users deserve to know when and why their accounts and posts are restricted, particularly on the largest platforms where vital information-sharing occurs. Users also deserve protection against discrimination based on their national origin, religion, and other protected characteristics.” Outside of its generalized annual reports, Meta typically shares precious little about how it enforces its rules in specific instances, or how its policies are determined behind closed doors. This general secrecy around the company’s speech rules mean that users are often in the dark about whether a given post will be allowed — especially if it even mentions a U.S.-designated terror organization like Hamas — until it’s too late.

    To resolve this, and “[i]n order to further understand what legislative action might be necessary to address these issues,” Warren’s letter includes a litany of specific questions about how Meta treats content pertaining to the war, and to what extent it has enforced its speech rules depending on who’s speaking. “How many Arabic language posts originating from Palestine have been removed [since October 7]?” the letter asks. “What percentage of total Arabic language posts originating from Palestine does the above number represent?” The letter further asks Meta to divulge removal statistics since the war began (“How often did Meta limit the reachability of posts globally while notifying the user?”) and granular details of its enforcement system (“What was the average response time for a user appeal of a content moderation decision for Arabic language posts originating from Palestine?”).

    The letter asks Meta to respond to Warren’s dozens of questions by January 5, 2024.

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    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/14/sen-elizabeth-warren-questions-meta-over-palestinian-censorship/feed/ 0 445795     Media Censorship and Attacks on Press Freedoms: Genocide in Gaza, Julian Assange https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/11/media-censorship-and-attacks-on-press-freedoms-genocide-in-gaza-julian-assange/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/11/media-censorship-and-attacks-on-press-freedoms-genocide-in-gaza-julian-assange/#respond Mon, 11 Dec 2023 18:08:09 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=35773 Mickey’s first guest, journalist Abby Martin of The Empire Files, explains how corporate media has carefully avoided presenting the full atrocity of the Israeli attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza…

    The post Media Censorship and Attacks on Press Freedoms: Genocide in Gaza, Julian Assange appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/11/media-censorship-and-attacks-on-press-freedoms-genocide-in-gaza-julian-assange/feed/ 0 444969     The Attack Against the Freedom to Read and What to Do About It https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/08/the-attack-against-the-freedom-to-read-and-what-to-do-about-it-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/08/the-attack-against-the-freedom-to-read-and-what-to-do-about-it-2/#respond Fri, 08 Dec 2023 15:48:16 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=146400 During the past three years, the country has seen a dramatic increase in book bans at public and K-12 school libraries and in rightwing pro-censorship activism, usually targeting books that address race, gender identity, or sexuality. In Texas, Suzette Baker was fired from her job as director of a rural public library for refusing to […]

    The post The Attack Against the Freedom to Read and What to Do About It first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     During the past three years, the country has seen a dramatic increase in book bans at public and K-12 school libraries and in rightwing pro-censorship activism, usually targeting books that address race, gender identity, or sexuality.

    In Texas, Suzette Baker was fired from her job as director of a rural public library for refusing to withdraw books about racial justice and the lives of LGBTQ people from circulation. A mob of neo-fascist Proud Boys descended on a Downers Grove, Illinois, school board meeting to demand that school libraries under the district’s control remove Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel that explores non-binary gender identity. In Florida, a member of Moms For Liberty, the group behind many recent book challenges, actually reported a school librarian to the police for distributing a popular young adult novel the Moms for Liberty activist claimed was “child pornography.” Meanwhile, in Virginia, one woman, Jennifer Peterson, has filed challenges against some 71 books held by her school district’s school libraries on the grounds that they contain “sexually explicit” passages; Peterson has succeeded in getting 36 titles removed, including Toni Morrison’s classic Beloved and Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. And all over the country, school librarians have received death threats and school libraries have been shut down by bomb threats over books deemed objectionable by conservative fanatics.

    According to PEN America’s September 2023 report, School Book Bans: The Mounting Pressure to Censor, during the 2022-23 school year there were 3,362 reported instances of book censorship in K-12 schools impacting 1,557 different titles. As PEN America noted, this represents a 33 percent increase over the 2021-22 school year and a dramatic increase from the last time the organization issued a comprehensive report on school book bans in 2016. (The American Library Association, which also tracks challenges to books at public and school libraries, says that library book challenges this year have risen to the highest level since the organization began tracking them more than twenty years ago.) Books that featured LGBTQ+ characters or themes related to gender identity or queer sexuality—including Fun Home, Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, And Tango Makes Three, and I Am Jazz—were singled out as the target of some 36 percent of the book bans from 2021-2023 investigated by PEN America. Roughly 37 percent of the challenges targeted books that “discussed race and racism.”

    The majority of these bans have occurred in Republican-controlled states—like Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas—which have passed laws that restrict teaching about race, gender, and sexuality or that empower parents to challenge school library books about such topics. This, in turn, has encouraged school districts to often preemptively purge their libraries of books and other materials that might be seen as controversial. Indeed, PEN America reports that more than 40 percent of all book bans last year occurred in GOP-dominated Florida, with 1406 bans, followed by Texas with 625 and Missouri with 333.

    Florida: A Gulag for Young Minds

    Because Florida is by far the worst offender against K-12 students’ freedom to read, it is worth examining the legislation the state has adopted that facilitates this censorship. Although Florida governor Ron DeSantis dismisses news about book bans in his state as “a nasty hoax,” he has signed several pieces of legislation that directly contribute to censorship in his state.

    In March 2022, DeSantis famously signed HB 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Act, popularly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, that bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender from kindergarten through third grade. The Act requires that any teaching about these topics in older grades be “age appropriate” and in accordance with state standards. It also specifies that any teacher found to have violated the Act will have their teaching license revoked. Confusion about whether this legislation applied to school libraries led districts across the state to purge books addressing sexual orientation or gender from their collections simply as a precaution.

    Just one month later, DeSantis signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, HB 7, which among other things bans teaching in schools about what it calls “divisive concepts”—principally related to race and the history of race relations in the United States—that might make a student feel “guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” because of their race, gender, sex, or national origin. The law specifically bans the teaching of so-called “critical race theory.” Tellingly, since HB 7 became law, one Florida school district banned a graphic novel, The Little Rock Nine, which details a well-known episode in the civil rights movement’s struggle against segregation, on the grounds that “its subject matter is ‘difficult for elementary school students to comprehend.’”

    In July 2022, DeSantis signed HB 1467 into law. This legislation requires every elementary school in the state to “publish on its website, in a searchable format… a list of all materials maintained in the school library media center or required as part of a school or grade-level reading list.” It orders school librarians to  certify that books in their collections do not “contain pornography or material deemed harmful to minors” without spelling out clear standards for what exactly counts as “harmful to minors.” It orders districts to develop a policy and a process for resolving any “objection by a parent or a resident of the county” to any library material and mandates that schools report all objections to the Department of Education. The law mandates that all meetings “convened for the purpose of ranking, eliminating, or selecting instructional materials for recommendation to the district school board must be noticed and open to the public,” and that “any committees convened for such purpose must include parents.”

    Finally, just this past May, DeSantis ratified HB 1069, a law that makes it even easier to ban books in Florida schools. The law extends the prohibition on instruction about sexuality and gender established by HB 1557 to eighth grade. It would prevent students below the ninth grade from accessing any books through school libraries that contain “sexual conduct.” It also modifies HB 1467 by specifying that “parents shall have the right to read [out loud] passages from any material that is subject to an objection” at a school board meeting and requires that if a school board denies someone the right to read a passage due to its indecent or inappropriate content, “the school district shall discontinue the use of the material.”

    This recent law has many librarians, educators, and opponents of censorship particularly concerned. It could, conceivably, be used to ban from K-8 school libraries the works of William Shakespeare or Toni Morrison. The notion of “sexual conduct” as articulated in the law is so extremely vague and broad that commonly assigned middle school books like The Diary of Anne Frank could be prohibited under its auspices. HB 1069 certainly has had an oppressive impact on the Sunshine State’s school librarians, forcing them to meticulously screen as many as a million books for any material that might be objectionable to a parent or resident.

    Moms For Liberty

    In Florida and elsewhere, ultraconservative “parent groups,” such as Moms for Liberty, have exploited these laws to force school boards and individual school administrators to remove hundreds of books that conservative censors frame as divisive or obscene. Founded in Florida in 2021 by a former school board member, Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Bridget Ziegler, wife of the Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler, the organization was originally formed to protest school and library mask mandates and other public health regulations affecting K-12 education during the COVID crisis. Since then, the group has turned its focus to fighting inclusive curriculum and allegedly “inappropriate” library materials. They claim to have 285 chapters in 45 states and over 100,000 members. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Moms for Liberty an extremist hate group and noted its many ties with fascist and white supremacist groups,  including the Proud Boys.

    Moms for Liberty has been training its members to bombard school boards and administrations with complaints about lengthy lists of books. Unlike in the past, when most complaints fielded by schools concerned individual titles or series (such as the Harry Potter or Twilight series), today conservative activists turn up at meetings and demand that lists of a hundred or more titles be expunged. In fact, according to the ALA, last year eleven states recorded complaints about a hundred or more titles, up from six in 2022 and zero in 2021. The explosion of mass challenges to school library books is best understood as a direct result of the rise of Moms for Liberty and other such groups.

    Lawsuits, Anti-Book-Banning Laws, Book Sanctuaries, and Other Signs of Resistance

    The good news is that defenders of intellectual freedom are fighting back.

    Earlier this year PEN America, Penguin Random House, five authors of banned books, and two parents with children affected by school book bans in Florida’s Escambia County brought a federal lawsuit claiming that by removing several books from school libraries—including young adult books with LGBTQ characters, such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower—the country’s schools were attempting to ”prescribe an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendments.” In Lake County, Florida, the authors of And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins who adopt and raise a chick, brought a suit contesting the county school board’s ban on the book for kindergarten through third-grade students, charging that the board’s actions were unconstitutional viewpoint and content discrimination.

    Beyond these isolated legal actions, state legislatures across the country have begun passing laws designed to make the sort of mass book challenges promoted by Moms for Liberty impossible. Illinois has led the way with a law signed in June by Governor J. B. Pritzker that withholds funding for any public library that restricts or bans materials for “partisan or doctrinal” reasons. It also mandates that Illinois public libraries adhere to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which requires that they “challenge censorship” and resist the exclusion of materials because of the “origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.” In September, California followed suit, with a law that imposes fines on schools that “block textbooks and school library books for discriminatory reasons.”

    Libraries and librarians are resisting the right’s current clampdown on the right to read. In September 2022, the Chicago Public Library system declared itself a “book sanctuary” to make heavily censored books available to the public at all 81 of their branch libraries. There are now similar sanctuary libraries across the country, including in “red” states such as Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Ohio.

    Educators and teachers unions have staged mass rallies to protest book bans in states like Florida. Civic groups have also battled book bans in often creative ways. For instance, in the summer of 2023, progressive activist group MoveOn launched a “banned bookmobile” that visited states across the South and the Midwest where bans have been enacted or attempted, distributing copies of some of the most frequently challenged books. In July 2023, the Digital Public Library of America launched the Banned Book Club, an app that allows users to freely access books that have been banned in their area. In November 2023, the popular singer Pink distributed thousands of banned or challenged books at concerts she performed in Miami and Sunrise, Florida.

    But perhaps the most inspiring sign of resistance to the assault on young people’s right to read has been the activism of young people themselves. Students are taking the lead in organizing against restrictions on books about race, the LGBTQ+ community, and other subjects abhorred by conservatives. In Texas, for example, Da’Taeveyon Daniels and other high school students led the battle against censorship of school books as part of a new organization Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT). (For more on teens’ role in the battle against censorship, see Da’Taeveyon Daniels’s Project Censored Dispatch, The Rising Political Battle over Censorship). Across the country, students have formed “banned book” reading groups in one high school after another.

    The efforts of groups like SEAT, the ALA, PEN America, and other champions of intellectual freedom like the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Civil Liberties Union deserve our support. The culture warriors of the right know that their toxic strain of hate-filled politics thrives on ignorance, bigotry, and cultural chauvinism. To defeat them, we should do all we can to promote critical thinking, deep cross-cultural knowledge, and tolerance that is best cultivated through the reading of exactly the sorts of books they seek to suppress.

    First published at Project Censored.

    The post The Attack Against the Freedom to Read and What to Do About It first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Steve Macek.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/08/the-attack-against-the-freedom-to-read-and-what-to-do-about-it-2/feed/ 0 444517     Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/musks-lawsuit-is-about-destroying-free-speech/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/musks-lawsuit-is-about-destroying-free-speech/#respond Wed, 22 Nov 2023 20:52:59 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9036260 The point of this lawsuit is to intimidate anyone who speaks out against antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry.

    The post Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech appeared first on FAIR.

    ]]>      

    MMFA: As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content

    Media Matters for America (11/16/23): “We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X.”

    He wasn’t bluffing.

    After threatening to sue liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America (CNBC, 11/18/23), Twitter’s principal owner Elon Musk did just that, arguing in papers filed in a Texas court that the group “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” the social media platform, causing major advertisers to pull back (BBC, 11/20/23).

    The world’s richest human was responding to an MMFA report (11/16/23) about Twitter—which Musk has rebranded as X since purchasing the once publicly traded company—and its promotion of far-right, antisemitic content. It said that while “Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” the social media network has been “placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”

    BBC: Elon Musk's X sues Media Matters over antisemitism analysis

    Elon Musk (BBC, 11/20/23) promised a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against anyone “who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”

    The report came just as the world stood in shock of Musk’s latest outburst of antisemitism: Just before the lawsuit was filed, he “publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among white supremacists: that Jewish communities push ‘hatred against whites’” (CNN, 11/17/23). This received widespread condemnation, including from the White House (Reuters, 11/17/23).

    A few weeks earlier, the South African–born billionaire had endorsed the “white genocide” conspiracy theory (Mediaite, 10/27/23), a central myth of white supremacy: “They absolutely want your extinction,” he replied to a Twitter user who claimed that the melting down of a statue of Robert E. Lee was proof that “many seek our extinction.” The reported exodus of advertisers from Twitter in such a brief time span has been enormous (AP, 11/18/23).

    The AP (11/20/23) reported that Twitter’s lawsuit claims MMFA “manipulated algorithms on the platform to create images of advertisers’ paid posts next to racist, incendiary content,” and that the lawsuit states that the instances of hateful content near such advertisements were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare.” (By “manufactured,” Musk means that MMFA got its results by following far-right accounts on Twitter as well as the accounts of Twitter‘s major advertisers.)

    Antisemitic vitriol

    NYT: Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find

    New York Times (12/2/22): Researchers said “they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.”

    It isn’t a secret that antisemitic vitriol has increased on the site under Musk’s management (New York Times, 12/2/22; Washington Post, 3/20/23; Vice, 5/18/23). What’s different now is that the MMFA report and the anger toward his last outburst happened as he is losing the business he desperately needs, as the brand has been rapidly tanking since he spent $44 billion to acquire it (Fortune, 5/30/23).

    The case was filed in Texas, although Twitter is based in California and MMFA is in Washington, DC. Musk’s choice of venue has everything to do with his right-wing politics and nothing to do with compliance with the law. Fast Company (11/21/23) wrote:

    The case has been assigned to District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee whose previous rulings include blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and declaring a Texas law banning people ages 18 to 20 from carrying handguns in public was unconstitutional.

    Also, by filing in the state, the case can be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has backed several conservative figures who claim they’ve been censored in the past.

    MMFA is nevertheless confident that it will win the case; in a statement published by CNBC (11/18/23) before Musk’s suit was filed, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone declared:

    Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate. Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win.

    Defamation cases are difficult for the plaintiff to win, especially in the case of someone like Musk, a public figure, who must prove that even false statements against them were intentional lies or made with “reckless disregard for the truth.” Legal experts cited by CNN (11/21/23) characterized the lawsuit as “weak” and “bogus.”

    That doesn’t mean that legal fees, hours of working on the case and sleepless nights won’t impact MMFA’s work. In a case like this, a Goliath like Musk doesn’t need to win in court to hamper a David like MMFA, which reports an annual revenue of about $19 million and total assets of $26 million. That’s pennies in comparison to Musk, whose net worth is valued at nearly $200 billion (CBS News, 10/31/23). Mounting legal bills for oligarchs like Musk are as significant as a McDonald’s hamburger.

    Rallying call for right

    NY Post: Elon Musk yet again pulls back the veil to reveal the machinery of the liberal censorship complex

    In the topsy-turvy world of the New York Post (11/21/23), billionaires who sue critics of hate speech are champions of free speech.

    The suit is also a rallying call for the right, as former Fox News host Megyn Kelly (New York Post, 11/20/23) and the Federalist (11/21/23) are cheerleading the legal action. Greg Gutfeld of Fox News (11/21/23) welcomed the lawsuit, calling MMFA a “hard-left smear machine.” The New York Post editorial board (11/21/23), using Freudian projection, said the suit was a reaction to the liberal determination to “bring down Elon Musk for championing free speech.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who fought to overturn the 2020 presidential election (Austin American-Statesman, 5/25/22), said he was opening an investigation into MMFA (The Hill, 11/21/23).

    Musk—who is hostile to organized labor (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 12/5/22), who has promoted anti-trans hate on Twitter (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/13/22; Business Insider, 1/2/23; The Nation, 6/23/23) and who backed Republicans in last year’s midterm elections (Politico, 11/7/22)—has become a darling of the right. A billionaire boss with socially conservative views, he has amped up the mythology that social media networks are somehow rigged against the right (Vox, 12/9/22; New York, 12/10/22; Daily Beast, 4/6/23; CNN, 6/6/23), and that his takeover of Twitter will lead to more balance.

    What has resulted since his takeover is an unrelenting campaign of censorship. El País (5/24/23) reported that since his takeover, the platform “has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments,” and has shown a particular interest in censoring critics of India’s right-wing regime (Intercept, 3/28/23). It has silenced left-wing voices at the behest of “far-right internet trolls” (Intercept, 11/29/22). And in order to silence criticism of Israel–an impulse that is not incompatible with antisemitism–Musk has threatened to suspend users who use the word “decolonization” or the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a reference to the original borders of historic Palestine before the proposed partition and Israel’s eventual founding (Mother Jones, 11/18/23). Journalists on the social media beat have been banned (CNN, 12/17/22; Daily Beast, 4/19/23).

    Sinister forces

    Media Matters: Elon Musk praises antisemitic replacement theory that motivated a mass shooting as “the actual truth”

    Media Matters (11/15/23): Musk has reinstated known white nationalists and antisemites on the platform” and “amplified conspiracy theories that were used to push antisemitism.”

    MMFA was founded in 2004—in the midst of the “War on Terror” fervor of the George W. Bush years—by former right-wing journalist turned liberal consultant David Brock, who launched it to keep an eye on the rising influence of conservative news and talk shows (New York Times, 5/3/04). Its ongoing criticism of both Musk and corporate media like Fox News (Rolling Stone, 7/28/19) makes it the perfect target for the right. In the paranoid fantasyland of US conservatism, MMFA sits alongside George Soros, Black Lives Matter and Antifa as sinister forces who are out to undermine traditional social hierarchies.

    And one can understand why Musk has a personal interest in going after MMFA, as the group (10/5/23, 11/13/23, 11/15/23) has focused on his politics and his administration of the website since he took it over.

    I have written for several years about the right’s attempt to use the courts and legislatures to destroy press freedom to suppress reporting and opinions the rich and powerful don’t like (FAIR.org, 3/26/21, 5/25/22, 11/2/22, 3/1/23). The lawsuit sends a warning to reporters and advocates that can be easily interpreted: Musk isn’t just interested in taking over one social media network, but also drowning out the voices of anyone who challenges him. The point of this lawsuit is to intimidate anyone who speaks out against antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry.

    For those of us who care deeply about free speech and a free press, let’s hope this lawsuit is swiftly tossed out.

    The post Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/musks-lawsuit-is-about-destroying-free-speech/feed/ 0 441134     Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/musks-lawsuit-is-about-destroying-free-speech/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/musks-lawsuit-is-about-destroying-free-speech/#respond Wed, 22 Nov 2023 20:52:59 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9036260 The point of this lawsuit is to intimidate anyone who speaks out against antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry.

    The post Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech appeared first on FAIR.

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    MMFA: As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content

    Media Matters for America (11/16/23): “We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity and IBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X.”

    He wasn’t bluffing.

    After threatening to sue liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America (CNBC, 11/18/23), Twitter’s principal owner Elon Musk did just that, arguing in papers filed in a Texas court that the group “manipulated” data in an effort to “destroy” the social media platform, causing major advertisers to pull back (BBC, 11/20/23).

    The world’s richest human was responding to an MMFA report (11/16/23) about Twitter—which Musk has rebranded as X since purchasing the once publicly traded company—and its promotion of far-right, antisemitic content. It said that while “Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” the social media network has been “placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.”

    BBC: Elon Musk's X sues Media Matters over antisemitism analysis

    Elon Musk (BBC, 11/20/23) promised a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against anyone “who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”

    The report came just as the world stood in shock of Musk’s latest outburst of antisemitism: Just before the lawsuit was filed, he “publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among white supremacists: that Jewish communities push ‘hatred against whites’” (CNN, 11/17/23). This received widespread condemnation, including from the White House (Reuters, 11/17/23).

    A few weeks earlier, the South African–born billionaire had endorsed the “white genocide” conspiracy theory (Mediaite, 10/27/23), a central myth of white supremacy: “They absolutely want your extinction,” he replied to a Twitter user who claimed that the melting down of a statue of Robert E. Lee was proof that “many seek our extinction.” The reported exodus of advertisers from Twitter in such a brief time span has been enormous (AP, 11/18/23).

    The AP (11/20/23) reported that Twitter’s lawsuit claims MMFA “manipulated algorithms on the platform to create images of advertisers’ paid posts next to racist, incendiary content,” and that the lawsuit states that the instances of hateful content near such advertisements were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare.” (By “manufactured,” Musk means that MMFA got its results by following far-right accounts on Twitter as well as the accounts of Twitter‘s major advertisers.)

    Antisemitic vitriol

    NYT: Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find

    New York Times (12/2/22): Researchers said “they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.”

    It isn’t a secret that antisemitic vitriol has increased on the site under Musk’s management (New York Times, 12/2/22; Washington Post, 3/20/23; Vice, 5/18/23). What’s different now is that the MMFA report and the anger toward his last outburst happened as he is losing the business he desperately needs, as the brand has been rapidly tanking since he spent $44 billion to acquire it (Fortune, 5/30/23).

    The case was filed in Texas, although Twitter is based in California and MMFA is in Washington, DC. Musk’s choice of venue has everything to do with his right-wing politics and nothing to do with compliance with the law. Fast Company (11/21/23) wrote:

    The case has been assigned to District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee whose previous rulings include blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and declaring a Texas law banning people ages 18 to 20 from carrying handguns in public was unconstitutional.

    Also, by filing in the state, the case can be heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has backed several conservative figures who claim they’ve been censored in the past.

    MMFA is nevertheless confident that it will win the case; in a statement published by CNBC (11/18/23) before Musk’s suit was filed, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone declared:

    Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate. Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win.

    Defamation cases are difficult for the plaintiff to win, especially in the case of someone like Musk, a public figure, who must prove that even false statements against them were intentional lies or made with “reckless disregard for the truth.” Legal experts cited by CNN (11/21/23) characterized the lawsuit as “weak” and “bogus.”

    That doesn’t mean that legal fees, hours of working on the case and sleepless nights won’t impact MMFA’s work. In a case like this, a Goliath like Musk doesn’t need to win in court to hamper a David like MMFA, which reports an annual revenue of about $19 million and total assets of $26 million. That’s pennies in comparison to Musk, whose net worth is valued at nearly $200 billion (CBS News, 10/31/23). Mounting legal bills for oligarchs like Musk are as significant as a McDonald’s hamburger.

    Rallying call for right

    NY Post: Elon Musk yet again pulls back the veil to reveal the machinery of the liberal censorship complex

    In the topsy-turvy world of the New York Post (11/21/23), billionaires who sue critics of hate speech are champions of free speech.

    The suit is also a rallying call for the right, as former Fox News host Megyn Kelly (New York Post, 11/20/23) and the Federalist (11/21/23) are cheerleading the legal action. Greg Gutfeld of Fox News (11/21/23) welcomed the lawsuit, calling MMFA a “hard-left smear machine.” The New York Post editorial board (11/21/23), using Freudian projection, said the suit was a reaction to the liberal determination to “bring down Elon Musk for championing free speech.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who fought to overturn the 2020 presidential election (Austin American-Statesman, 5/25/22), said he was opening an investigation into MMFA (The Hill, 11/21/23).

    Musk—who is hostile to organized labor (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 12/5/22), who has promoted anti-trans hate on Twitter (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/13/22; Business Insider, 1/2/23; The Nation, 6/23/23) and who backed Republicans in last year’s midterm elections (Politico, 11/7/22)—has become a darling of the right. A billionaire boss with socially conservative views, he has amped up the mythology that social media networks are somehow rigged against the right (Vox, 12/9/22; New York, 12/10/22; Daily Beast, 4/6/23; CNN, 6/6/23), and that his takeover of Twitter will lead to more balance.

    What has resulted since his takeover is an unrelenting campaign of censorship. El País (5/24/23) reported that since his takeover, the platform “has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments,” and has shown a particular interest in censoring critics of India’s right-wing regime (Intercept, 3/28/23). It has silenced left-wing voices at the behest of “far-right internet trolls” (Intercept, 11/29/22). And in order to silence criticism of Israel–an impulse that is not incompatible with antisemitism–Musk has threatened to suspend users who use the word “decolonization” or the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a reference to the original borders of historic Palestine before the proposed partition and Israel’s eventual founding (Mother Jones, 11/18/23). Journalists on the social media beat have been banned (CNN, 12/17/22; Daily Beast, 4/19/23).

    Sinister forces

    Media Matters: Elon Musk praises antisemitic replacement theory that motivated a mass shooting as “the actual truth”

    Media Matters (11/15/23): Musk has reinstated known white nationalists and antisemites on the platform” and “amplified conspiracy theories that were used to push antisemitism.”

    MMFA was founded in 2004—in the midst of the “War on Terror” fervor of the George W. Bush years—by former right-wing journalist turned liberal consultant David Brock, who launched it to keep an eye on the rising influence of conservative news and talk shows (New York Times, 5/3/04). Its ongoing criticism of both Musk and corporate media like Fox News (Rolling Stone, 7/28/19) makes it the perfect target for the right. In the paranoid fantasyland of US conservatism, MMFA sits alongside George Soros, Black Lives Matter and Antifa as sinister forces who are out to undermine traditional social hierarchies.

    And one can understand why Musk has a personal interest in going after MMFA, as the group (10/5/23, 11/13/23, 11/15/23) has focused on his politics and his administration of the website since he took it over.

    I have written for several years about the right’s attempt to use the courts and legislatures to destroy press freedom to suppress reporting and opinions the rich and powerful don’t like (FAIR.org, 3/26/21, 5/25/22, 11/2/22, 3/1/23). The lawsuit sends a warning to reporters and advocates that can be easily interpreted: Musk isn’t just interested in taking over one social media network, but also drowning out the voices of anyone who challenges him. The point of this lawsuit is to intimidate anyone who speaks out against antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry.

    For those of us who care deeply about free speech and a free press, let’s hope this lawsuit is swiftly tossed out.

    The post Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/musks-lawsuit-is-about-destroying-free-speech/feed/ 0 441135     Zionist anti-Palestine censorship is surging w/Dylan Saba | The Chris Hedges Report https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/zionist-anti-palestine-censorship-is-surging-w-dylan-saba-the-chris-hedges-report/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/zionist-anti-palestine-censorship-is-surging-w-dylan-saba-the-chris-hedges-report/#respond Wed, 22 Nov 2023 19:42:44 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=acbbb171384e3c3c39c68e152fa0dd1f
    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/22/zionist-anti-palestine-censorship-is-surging-w-dylan-saba-the-chris-hedges-report/feed/ 0 441452     Smearing Photojournalists as Hamas Collaborators Gets Them Added to a Hit List https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/16/smearing-photojournalists-as-hamas-collaborators-gets-them-added-to-a-hit-list/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/16/smearing-photojournalists-as-hamas-collaborators-gets-them-added-to-a-hit-list/#respond Thu, 16 Nov 2023 21:20:35 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9036142 Israeli officials are accusing major news media of coordinating with Hamas, painting Palestinian stringers as terrorist operatives.

    The post Smearing Photojournalists as Hamas Collaborators Gets Them Added to a Hit List appeared first on FAIR.

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    HonestReporting: Featured Broken Borders: AP & Reuters Pictures of Hamas Atrocities Raise Ethical Questions

    HonestReporting (11/8/23) presented photojournalists taking photos of combat—something photographers have been doing since there was photography—as though it were a grave breach of journalistic ethics.

    During Israeli military offensives in the Occupied Territories, it is common for the Israeli government and its supporters to claim media are biased in favor the Palestinians, often by invoking that there is “no moral equivalence” between the Israeli government and Palestinian militant organizations like Hamas (American Jewish Committee, 10/17/23). Akin to Alex Jones falsely smearing grieving parents of school shooting victims as “crisis actors,” pro-Israel advocates sometimes dismiss media images of Palestinian suffering as staged fakery they call “Pallywood” (France24, 10/27/23).

    Now Israeli government officials are accusing major news media of coordinating with Hamas, essentially painting Palestinian stringers as terrorist operatives. At least one Israeli official threatened to “eliminate” anyone involved in the October 7 attacks, and indicated that some journalists were included included on that list.

    The pro-Israel media advocacy organization HonestReporting (11/8/23) raised questions about the presence of AP, Reuters, New York Times and CNN photographers near the sites Hamas attacked in southern Israel on October 7:

    What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and the New York Times, notify these outlets?

    ‘No different than terrorists’

    NY Post: Netanyahu slams Hamas-linked journos used by CNN, NYT, Reuters and AP who were at Oct. 7 massacre

    The New York Post (11/9/23) described Hassan Eslaiah (pictured) and three other freelance photographers as having been “accused…of being inside the Hamas attack”—as though reporting on violence were the same as taking part in it.

    Israeli officials are taking the group’s words seriously, going hard against these news agencies and individual Palestinian stringers. These accusations were featured throughout the corporate media.

    The Financial Times (11/10/23) reported that Benny Gantz, who has held numerous Israeli military and ministerial roles, said “journalists found to have known about the massacre, and [who] still chose to stand as idle bystanders while children were slaughtered, are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such.” Knesset member Danny Danon (Twitter, 11/9/23), Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, said that Israel would “eliminate all participants of the October 7 massacre,” adding that “the ‘photojournalists’ who took part in recording the assault will be added to that list.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called these journalists “accomplices in crimes against humanity” (New York Post, 11/9/23).

    Politico (11/9/23) reported that Israel’s “Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi accused the foreign media of employing contributors who were tipped off on the Hamas attacks.” It added that Nitzan Chen, director of Israel’s government press office, had asked the four media outlets “for clarifications regarding the behavior” of their photographers.

    ‘Mobilized by Hamas’

    NYT: Israel Accuses Freelance Photographers of Advance Knowledge of Oct. 7 Attack

    By making Israel’s charge the headline, the New York Times (11/9/23) gave credence to the idea that covering violence was itself a violent act.

    The affair was covered in many other outlets, including the New York Times (11/9/23), The Hill (11/9/23), Newsweek (11/9/23) and the Daily Beast (11/9/23). The Jerusalem Post (11/10/23) took the government and watchdog’s allegations as fact and said in an editorial:

    These so-called photojournalists made no effort to stop or distance themselves from the barbaric events. On the contrary: They were mobilized by the Hamas terrorists to glorify their acts, help promote their terrorism and spread fear among their enemies—Israel and the West. In this way, too, Hamas recalls ISIS, which deliberately recorded its beheadings and other barbaric murders.

    In a statement, Reuters (11/9/23) “categorically denies that it had prior knowledge of the attack or that we embedded journalists with Hamas on October 7.” Al Jazeera (11/9/23) reported that “AP also rejected allegations that its newsroom had prior knowledge of the attacks”; the agency said in a statement that the

    first pictures AP received from any freelancer show they were taken more than an hour after the attacks began…. No AP staff were at the border at the time of the attacks, nor did any AP staffer cross the border at any time.

    Neither HonestReporting nor Israeli officials raising a stink about this have provided any evidence of unethical behavior by these media outlets or their stringers (Reuters, 11/11/23). HonestReporting has shrouded its rhetoric with the disclaimer of “just asking questions.” The AP (11/9/23) reported that “Gil Hoffman, executive director of HonestReporting and a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, admitted…the group had no evidence to back up” its suggestion that the photographers had “prior coordination with the terrorists.” Hoffman “said he was satisfied with subsequent explanations from several of these journalists that they did not know.”

    Nevertheless, CNN and the AP stopped working with Hassan Eslaiah, one of the freelancers mentioned in the HonestReporting report, who in fact “got extra emphasis in the HonestReporting story, which resurfaced a several-years-old photo of him posing with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar,” according to the Washington Post (11/9/23).

    Deadly time for journalists

    UPI: Committee to Protect Journalists says 39 journalists killed in Israel-Gaza war

    Citing the Committee to Protect Journalists, UPI (11/8/23) reported that the “month since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas has been the deadliest for journalists since it began gathering data in 1992.”

    Any journalist who read HonestReporting’s questions had to smirk a bit. Journalists all over the world are tipped off by all sorts of sources to get somewhere at a certain time, with the undetailed promise of some hot footage. This is just the nature of the job, and doesn’t mean that a journalist’s relationship with a source is the same as working together on a common message.

    I have already written at FAIR (10/19/23) that Israel’s killings of journalists in Gaza, combined with legal attempts to silence media critics within Israel, are a threat to the public’s ability to know about the nature of the ongoing violence, which is financed with US tax dollars. The Committee to Protect Journalists (11/15/23) said that 42 journalists have been killed in the month since fighting broke out, making that period “the deadliest for journalists since it began gathering data in 1992” (UPI, 11/8/23).

    Now Israeli officials have insinuated that if you are too physically close to a Palestinian fighter and get a good photo in the process, their government may consider you an enemy combatant. That is another chilling escalation of a troubling trend in Israel’s relationship with the press.

    Information stranglehold

    NBC: Palestinian journalists in Israel say they face intimidation and harassment

    Palestinian “reporters from at least three news outlets said they were questioned or assaulted by Israeli police,” NBC (11/11/23) reported.

    It’s all part of the Israeli government’s attempt to keep a tight stranglehold on information coming out in the press. Recently, the government used the tried and true method of embedding journalists within military units; in exchange for on-the-ground access, the military gets to review the footage journalists’ obtain (New Arab, 11/8/23). Israel also moved to criminalize the “consumption of terrorist materials” (Al Jazeera, 11/8/23) and to shut down media deemed a threat to national security (International Federation of Journalists, 10/20/23). NBC (11/11/23) reported that the Israeli government has “cracked down on broadcasts, reports and social media posts that” are deemed “a threat to national security or in support of terror organizations since Hamas’ October 7 assault.”

    As the Israeli publication +972 (9/18/23) pointed out, before the outbreak of the current war, Israeli government censorship had actually declined, but it still found that in 2022, the

    Israeli military censor blocked the publication of 159 articles across various Israeli media outlets, and censored parts of a further 990. In all, the military prevented information from being made public an average of three times a day—on top of the chilling effect that the very existence of censorship imposes on independent journalism that seeks to uncover government failings.

    While Israel likes to think of itself as a bastion of Western enlightenment in a sea of backward nations, this anti-media trend in the country makes it more like its neighbors than its supporters would like to believe.

    In the case of the death of famous British correspondent Marie Colvin, a judge ruled that she was intentionally targeted by the Assad regime for giving a voice to opposition factions (BBC, 1/31/19). Egypt frequently detains journalists for the supposed crime of collaboration with subversive organizations and foreign powers (Reporters Without Borders, 6/30/23). The rate of the Turkish government’s jailing of journalists has accelerated (Voice of America, 12/15/22), and last year the government “detained 11 journalists affiliated with pro-Kurdish media for their alleged links to Kurdish militants” (AP, 10/25/22).

    This is the club Israel belongs to. And such hostility toward the free press makes it harder for journalists to deliver clear, fair reporting about the Middle East conflict. And that’s the point. The insinuation that media organizations who report freely on the Israel/Palestine conflict are anti-Zionist agents is meant to keep the situation shrouded in haze.

    The post Smearing Photojournalists as Hamas Collaborators Gets Them Added to a Hit List appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/16/smearing-photojournalists-as-hamas-collaborators-gets-them-added-to-a-hit-list/feed/ 0 439339     ‘Free Speech’ Fans Call for Censoring TikTok as Chinese Plot to Make Israel Look Bad https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/13/free-speech-fans-call-for-censoring-tiktok-as-chinese-plot-to-make-israel-look-bad/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/13/free-speech-fans-call-for-censoring-tiktok-as-chinese-plot-to-make-israel-look-bad/#respond Mon, 13 Nov 2023 22:21:22 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9036047 The Republican-held House could push to ban TikTok completely, on the grounds that it allows too much criticism of Israel.

    The post ‘Free Speech’ Fans Call for Censoring TikTok as Chinese Plot to Make Israel Look Bad appeared first on FAIR.

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    Free Press: Why Do Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok.

    “A free press for free people” boldly champions the censorship of dangerous foreign ideas (Free Press, 11/1/23).

    Axios (10/31/23) reported that in a two-week period, TikTok saw “nearly four times the number of views to TikTok posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine globally compared to posts using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael.” As a result, the conservative outrage machine kicked into high gear.

    Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wisc.), who serves on the House select committee investigating China’s Communist Party, took to the web publication Free Press (11/1/23) to sound the alarm: TikTok’s Chinese ownership meant that a dangerous foreign power was using social media to sway public opinion against Israel. His solution was clear: It’s “time for Congress to take action. Time to ban TikTok.”

    This is interesting for a few reasons, but chief among them is that the Free Press was started by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, one of a handful of conservative journalists who banded together to assert the federal government exerted too much control on Twitter before it was acquired by Elon Musk (NPR, 12/14/22). The company’s liberal corporate governance, they asserted, had suppressed conservative ideas (Washington Post, 12/13/22).

    Weiss even signed the Westminster Declaration, a vow to protect “free speech”: “Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices,” it said. These “large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Now the Free Press fears the internet is too free, and should be cleansed of ideas deemed hurtful to the Israeli government.

    Censorship by the wrong people

    Gallagher said that “TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z, and about six in ten Americans are hooked on the app before their 17th birthday.” This is worrisome, he said, because TikTok “is controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

    This brings Gallagher, and other GOP lawmakers, to the conclusion that the US must ban TikTok. “We are ceding the ability to censor Americans’ speech to a foreign adversary,” he said–suggesting that censorship isn’t altogether wrong, it’s just wrong when committed by an undesirable entity. He pointed out that “for a century, the Federal Communications Commission has blocked concentrated foreign ownership of radio and television assets on national security grounds.”

    This indicates that Gallagher, in the name of anti-Communism, doesn’t think the market should decide which media consumers can access. Instead, this must be highly regulated by a powerful federal agency. So much for his commitment to “get big government out of the way.”

    ‘Massively manipulating’

    NBC: Critics renew calls for a TikTok ban, claiming platform has an anti-Israel bias

    Critics call for banning TikTok because users are getting the “wrong information,” thus “undercutting support for Israel among young Americans,” which is “contrary to US foreign policy interests” (NBC, 11/1/23).

    He’s hardly alone. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.), who once blasted (10/20/20) what she saw as censorship against conservative voices at Facebook and Twitter, called for a ban (NBC, 11/1/23), saying “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) concurred,  saying in a statement, “For quite some time, I have been warning that Communist China is capable of using TikTok’s algorithm to manipulate and influence Americans.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) wants a ban (UPI, 11/7/23), and the New York Post editorial board (11/6/23) approvingly cited Gallagher’s Free Press piece.

    Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who has called for punitive action against Harvard University students who made pro-Palestine statements (Wall Street Journal, 10/11/23; Business Insider, 11/5/23), “said TikTok should ‘probably be banned’ for ‘massively manipulating public opinion’ in favor of Hamas and stoking anti-Israel animus,” the New York Post (11/1/23) reported.

    CNN (11/5/23) also insinuated that TikTok is skewing public opinion and reported that the Biden administration is monitoring the situation, saying the president’s aides “are also warily monitoring developments like how the Chinese government-controlled TikTok algorithm just happens to be prioritizing anti-Israel content.”

    If this freakout about TikTok seems selective, that’s because it is. Since Musk took over Twitter, hate speech and antisemitism have run amok on the platform (Washington Post, 3/20/23; LA Times, 4/27/23), but congressional Republicans and their journalistic allies on the social media beat aren’t clamoring for an intervention into the mogul’s extremist influence on US discourse.

    Republicans have been looking to ban TikTok, howling about its Chinese ownership, since the Trump administration, but the call became all the more real when the state of Montana banned the app completely (FAIR.org, 5/25/23). TikTok is banned on US government devices (CBS, 3/1/23); in liberal New York City, the same is true for city government devices (NPR, 8/17/23). Given all that, the concept that the Republican-held House could push to ban TikTok completely, on the grounds that it allows too much criticism of Israel, is no laughing matter.

    Media moral panics

    WaPo: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

    Facebook‘s parent company paid a PR firm to promote the view that “TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is No. 1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

    Some of this vitriol toward TikTok is purely cynical. The Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that “Facebook parent company Meta,” a major competitor to TikTok, worked with “one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.”

    But the history of US politics has been defined by periodic moral panics about the subversion of American values through media. The Grant administration took tight control of the US Postal Service out of fear that sexual content circulated through the mail was degrading the nation’s moral core.

    The advent of film spawned local and state censorship boards throughout the country, starting with Chicago in 1907. The Supreme Court held in 1915 that film was “a business pure and simple,” and thus not protected by the First Amendment—a decision not reversed until 1952. In the mid–20th century, anti-Communist zealots in the House of Representatives persecuted numerous Hollywood writers and actors, based on the suspicion that they were indoctrinating the American public with socialist ideas through the movies.

    In the 1980s, Tipper Gore, wife of then-Sen. Al Gore (D–Tenn.), started a campaign that forced record labels to put warning stickers on albums with “explicit lyrics” (New York Times, 1/4/88).

    They must be brainwashed

    WaPo: TikTok was slammed for its pro-Palestinian hashtags. But it’s not alone.

    The Washington Post (11/13/23) noted that “young Americans have consistently shown support for Palestinians in Pew Research surveys, including a poll in 2014, four years before TikTok launched in the United States.”

    The current rhetoric against TikTok is not only a hypocritical attack on free speech, it’s an insinuation that the only reason people could be critical of Israel is manipulation by a foreign government. There’s no way people from all walks of life could simply be horrified by what’s happening in Gaza; those devilish Chinese Communists must be warping their minds.

    In fact, the Washington Post (11/13/23) found that TikTok was not even unique among social networks for the gap between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel support in public posts. It said:

    But Facebook and Instagram, TikTok’s US-based rivals, show a remarkably similar gap, their data show. On Facebook, the #freepalestine hashtag is found on more than 11 million posts—39 times more than those with #standwithisrael. On Instagram, the pro-Palestinian hashtag is found on 6 million posts, 26 times more than the pro-Israel hashtag.

    Any move by elected officials to ban TikTok should be taken seriously; it’s not just about the app’s videos about terrible first dates and secret menu items. Free speech is a principle. When so-called defenders of free speech advocate censorship because they find certain political ideas too dangerous, be very worried.

    Featured image: Screenshots of Israel/Palestine content on TikTok.

    The post ‘Free Speech’ Fans Call for Censoring TikTok as Chinese Plot to Make Israel Look Bad appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/13/free-speech-fans-call-for-censoring-tiktok-as-chinese-plot-to-make-israel-look-bad/feed/ 0 438255     The Official Story on Hate Speech https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/12/the-official-story-on-hate-speech/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/12/the-official-story-on-hate-speech/#respond Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:54:22 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=145683


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/12/the-official-story-on-hate-speech/feed/ 0 439127     Mass Media Needs to Probe Deeper into Israel’s Invasion of Gaza https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/28/mass-media-needs-to-probe-deeper-into-israels-invasion-of-gaza/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/28/mass-media-needs-to-probe-deeper-into-israels-invasion-of-gaza/#respond Sat, 28 Oct 2023 14:45:01 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=145294 In the midst of extensive coverage of the war in Gaza, there are questions that the U.S. mass media should address:

    1. How did Hamas, with tiny Gaza surrounded by a 17-year Israeli blockade, subjected to unparalleled electronic surveillance, with spies and informants, and augmented by an overwhelming air, sea and land military presence, manage to get these weapons and associated technology for their October 7 surprise raid?

    2. What is the connection between the stunning failure of the Israeli government to protect its people on the border and the policy of P.M. Netanyahu? Recall the New York Times (October 22, 2023) article by prominent journalist, Roger Cohen, to wit: “All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: ‘Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.’” (Note: Israel and the U.S. fostered the rise of Islamic Hamas in 1987 to counter the secular Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]).

    3. Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. This, in the midst of a childcare crisis. Should U.S. taxpayers be expected to pay for Netanyahu’s colossal intelligence/military collapse?

    4. Why hasn’t the media reported on President Biden’s statement that the Gaza Health Ministry’s body count (now over 7000 fatalities) is exaggerated? All indications, however, are that it is a large undercount by Hamas to minimize its inability to protect its people. Israel has fired over 8,000 powerful precision munitions and bombs so far. These have struck many thousands of inhabited buildings – homes, apartments buildings, over 120 health facilities, ambulances, crowded markets, fleeing refugees, schools, water and sewage systems, and electric networks – implementing Israeli military orders to cut off all food, water, fuel, medicine and electricity to this already impoverished densely packed area the size of Philadelphia. For those not directly slain, the deadly harm caused by no food, water, medicine, medical facilities and fuel will lead to even more deaths and serious injuries.

    Note that over three-quarters of Gaza’s population consists of children and women. Soon there will be thousands of babies born to die in the rubble. Other Palestinians will perish from untreated diseases, injuries, dehydration, and from drinking contaminated water. With crumbled sanitation facilities, physicians are fearing a deadly cholera epidemic.

    Israel bombed the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border. Only a tiny trickle of trucks are now allowed there by Israel to carry food and water. Fuel for hospital generators still remains blocked.

    5. Why can’t Biden even persuade Israel to let 600 desperate Americans out of the Gaza firestorm?

    6. Why isn’t the mass media making a bigger issue out of Israel’s long-time practices of blocking journalists from entering Gaza, including European, American and Israeli journalists? The only television crews left are Gazan-residing Al Jazeera reporters. Israeli bombs have already killed 26 journalists in the Gaza Strip since October 7. Is Israel targeting journalists’ families? The Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera, Wael Al-Dahdouh’s family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.

    7. Why isn’t the mainstream U.S. media giving adequate space and voice to groups advocating a ceasefire and humanitarian aid? The message of Israeli peace groups’ peaceful solutions are drowned out by the media’s addiction to interviews with military tacticians. Much time and space are being given to hawks pushing for a war that could flash outside of Gaza big time. Shouldn’t groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab-American Institute, Veterans for Peace and associations of clergy have their views and activities reported?

    8. Why is the coverage of the war overlooking the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter and the many provisions of international law that all the parties, including the U.S., have been violating? (See the October 24, 2023 letter to President Biden). Under international law, Biden has made the U.S. an active “co-belligerent,” of the Israeli government’s vocal demolition of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Gaza, who are mostly descendants of Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in 1948. (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

    9. What about the human-interest stories that would be revealing? For example: How do Israeli F-16 pilots feel about their daily bombing of the completely defenseless Gazan civilian population and its life-sustaining infrastructures? What are the courageous Israeli human rights and refuseniks thinking and doing in a climate of serious repression of their views as a result of Netanyahu’s defense collapse on October 7?

    10. Where is the media attention on the statements from Israeli military commentators, who, for years have declared high-tech US-backed, nuclear-armed Israel to be more secure than at any time in its history? Israel is reasserting its overwhelming military domination of the entire region, fully backed by U.S. militarism.

    Historians remind us that in a grid-locked conflict over time, it is the most powerful party’s responsibility to lead the way to peace.

    Establishing a two-state solution has been supported by Palestinians. All the Arab nations, starting with the Arab League peace proposal in 2002, support this solution as well. It is up to Israel and the U.S., assuming annexation of what is left of Palestine is not Israel’s objective. (See, the March 29, 2002 New York Times article: Mideast Turmoil; Text of the Peace Proposals Backed by the Arab League).

    More media attention on this subject matter is much needed.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/28/mass-media-needs-to-probe-deeper-into-israels-invasion-of-gaza/feed/ 0 437192     Mass Media Needs to Probe Deeper into Israel’s Invasion of Gaza https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/28/mass-media-needs-to-probe-deeper-into-israels-invasion-of-gaza/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/28/mass-media-needs-to-probe-deeper-into-israels-invasion-of-gaza/#respond Sat, 28 Oct 2023 14:45:01 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=145294 In the midst of extensive coverage of the war in Gaza, there are questions that the U.S. mass media should address:

    1. How did Hamas, with tiny Gaza surrounded by a 17-year Israeli blockade, subjected to unparalleled electronic surveillance, with spies and informants, and augmented by an overwhelming air, sea and land military presence, manage to get these weapons and associated technology for their October 7 surprise raid?

    2. What is the connection between the stunning failure of the Israeli government to protect its people on the border and the policy of P.M. Netanyahu? Recall the New York Times (October 22, 2023) article by prominent journalist, Roger Cohen, to wit: “All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: ‘Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.’” (Note: Israel and the U.S. fostered the rise of Islamic Hamas in 1987 to counter the secular Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]).

    3. Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. This, in the midst of a childcare crisis. Should U.S. taxpayers be expected to pay for Netanyahu’s colossal intelligence/military collapse?

    4. Why hasn’t the media reported on President Biden’s statement that the Gaza Health Ministry’s body count (now over 7000 fatalities) is exaggerated? All indications, however, are that it is a large undercount by Hamas to minimize its inability to protect its people. Israel has fired over 8,000 powerful precision munitions and bombs so far. These have struck many thousands of inhabited buildings – homes, apartments buildings, over 120 health facilities, ambulances, crowded markets, fleeing refugees, schools, water and sewage systems, and electric networks – implementing Israeli military orders to cut off all food, water, fuel, medicine and electricity to this already impoverished densely packed area the size of Philadelphia. For those not directly slain, the deadly harm caused by no food, water, medicine, medical facilities and fuel will lead to even more deaths and serious injuries.

    Note that over three-quarters of Gaza’s population consists of children and women. Soon there will be thousands of babies born to die in the rubble. Other Palestinians will perish from untreated diseases, injuries, dehydration, and from drinking contaminated water. With crumbled sanitation facilities, physicians are fearing a deadly cholera epidemic.

    Israel bombed the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border. Only a tiny trickle of trucks are now allowed there by Israel to carry food and water. Fuel for hospital generators still remains blocked.

    5. Why can’t Biden even persuade Israel to let 600 desperate Americans out of the Gaza firestorm?

    6. Why isn’t the mass media making a bigger issue out of Israel’s long-time practices of blocking journalists from entering Gaza, including European, American and Israeli journalists? The only television crews left are Gazan-residing Al Jazeera reporters. Israeli bombs have already killed 26 journalists in the Gaza Strip since October 7. Is Israel targeting journalists’ families? The Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera, Wael Al-Dahdouh’s family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.

    7. Why isn’t the mainstream U.S. media giving adequate space and voice to groups advocating a ceasefire and humanitarian aid? The message of Israeli peace groups’ peaceful solutions are drowned out by the media’s addiction to interviews with military tacticians. Much time and space are being given to hawks pushing for a war that could flash outside of Gaza big time. Shouldn’t groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab-American Institute, Veterans for Peace and associations of clergy have their views and activities reported?

    8. Why is the coverage of the war overlooking the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter and the many provisions of international law that all the parties, including the U.S., have been violating? (See the October 24, 2023 letter to President Biden). Under international law, Biden has made the U.S. an active “co-belligerent,” of the Israeli government’s vocal demolition of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Gaza, who are mostly descendants of Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in 1948. (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

    9. What about the human-interest stories that would be revealing? For example: How do Israeli F-16 pilots feel about their daily bombing of the completely defenseless Gazan civilian population and its life-sustaining infrastructures? What are the courageous Israeli human rights and refuseniks thinking and doing in a climate of serious repression of their views as a result of Netanyahu’s defense collapse on October 7?

    10. Where is the media attention on the statements from Israeli military commentators, who, for years have declared high-tech US-backed, nuclear-armed Israel to be more secure than at any time in its history? Israel is reasserting its overwhelming military domination of the entire region, fully backed by U.S. militarism.

    Historians remind us that in a grid-locked conflict over time, it is the most powerful party’s responsibility to lead the way to peace.

    Establishing a two-state solution has been supported by Palestinians. All the Arab nations, starting with the Arab League peace proposal in 2002, support this solution as well. It is up to Israel and the U.S., assuming annexation of what is left of Palestine is not Israel’s objective. (See, the March 29, 2002 New York Times article: Mideast Turmoil; Text of the Peace Proposals Backed by the Arab League).

    More media attention on this subject matter is much needed.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/28/mass-media-needs-to-probe-deeper-into-israels-invasion-of-gaza/feed/ 0 437193     The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: Censorship, Harassment Intensifies on Campus Amid Gaza War https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/27/the-palestine-exception-to-free-speech-censorship-harassment-intensifies-on-campus-amid-gaza-war-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/27/the-palestine-exception-to-free-speech-censorship-harassment-intensifies-on-campus-amid-gaza-war-2/#respond Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:18:24 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=4c77ddec1baeb8b3ed3011a3f34805ae
    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/27/the-palestine-exception-to-free-speech-censorship-harassment-intensifies-on-campus-amid-gaza-war-2/feed/ 0 437021     The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: Censorship, Harassment Intensifies on Campus Amid Gaza War https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/27/the-palestine-exception-to-free-speech-censorship-harassment-intensifies-on-campus-amid-gaza-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/27/the-palestine-exception-to-free-speech-censorship-harassment-intensifies-on-campus-amid-gaza-war/#respond Fri, 27 Oct 2023 12:46:42 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=3048777201ecbad94f64a8e1c6f27919 Seg3 ryna

    A free speech battle is playing out on college campuses, as students, professors and others advocating for Palestinian rights across the United States are facing racist attacks and retaliation that threaten their safety and livelihoods. These attacks aim to suppress criticism of Israel and U.S. support of its actions in Gaza. This comes as the U.S. Senate has unanimously passed a resolution “condemning Hamas and antisemitic student activities on college campuses.” The resolution references a student at New York University’s law school whose job offer was withdrawn after they sent a newsletter to classmates expressing “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination.” We’re joined by that student, Ryna Workman, who was also suspended from their position as president of the NYU Law Student Bar Association after publicly expressing support for Palestine, and by Dima Khalidi, the founder and director of Palestine Legal, a legal aid organization dedicated to documenting and supporting people who face retaliation for supporting Palestinian rights. “Folks are now afraid to speak up, in fear that they might become the next me,” says Workman about what Khalidi terms “the Palestine exception to free speech.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/27/the-palestine-exception-to-free-speech-censorship-harassment-intensifies-on-campus-amid-gaza-war/feed/ 0 436964     Renewed Farmer Agitation in India Amid Brutal Crackdown on Press Freedom https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/23/renewed-farmer-agitation-in-india-amid-brutal-crackdown-on-press-freedom/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/23/renewed-farmer-agitation-in-india-amid-brutal-crackdown-on-press-freedom/#respond Mon, 23 Oct 2023 15:00:55 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=145116 The BJP-led government in India is seeking to extract revenge for the humiliating defeat it suffered at the hands of farmers whose one-year agitation led to the repeal of three farm laws in late 2021.

    This claim was made during a recent press conference in Delhi held by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) (United Farmers Front).

    The SKM was formed in November 2020 as a coalition of more than 40 Indian farmers’ unions to coordinate non-violent resistance against three farm acts initiated two months before.

    Asserting that the laws violated the constitution and were anti-farmer and pro big business, the SKM announced renewed agitation and expressed grave concern about a crackdown by the government against the online media platform NewsClick, which supported the farmers throughout their one-year struggle.

    Those present heard that there has been “baseless dishonest and false allegations in the Newsclick FIR against the historic farmers’ struggle” and that the “FIR accuses the farmers’ movement as anti-national, funded by foreign and terrorist forces”.

    An FIR is a ‘first information report’: a document prepared by police in India when they receive information about the commission of a “cognisable” (serious) offence.

    Delhi Police issued an FIR against NewsClick founder Prabir Purkayastha and the human resources head Amit Chakravarty, which infers that the farmers’ movement was aimed at stopping the supply of essential goods for citizens and creating law and order issues.

    An article on The Hindu newspaper’s Frontline portal describes the nature of the FIR, which goes far beyond the farmers’ issue, and concludes police actions along with the FIR marks a major low point for media freedom in India.

    According to Frontline, the police raids on the offices of NewsClick and the residences of virtually anyone associated with it; the indiscriminate seizure of the electronic devices of journalists and other employees; the sealing of the news portal’s main office; the arrest of its founder-editor and its administrative officer on terrorism-related charges; and the searches conducted at the premises of NewsClick and the home of its founder-editor mark the lowest point for media freedom in India since the Emergency of 1975-1977.

    The withdrawal of the FIR against Newsclick was called for during the press conference. There was also a demand for the immediate release of NewsClick journalists.

    The SKM said that farmers across the country will burn copies of the FIR on 6 November after a sustained campaign at village level against the government’s pro-corporate policies from 1-5 November.

    The farmers’ coalition also pledged to campaign in five poll-going states with the slogan “Oppose Corporate, Punish BJP, Save Country.”

    And a 72-hour sit-in will take place in front of the Raj Bhawans (official residences of state governors) in state capitals between 26 and 28 November.

    The SKM states that the farmers’ movement was committed and patriotic and saw through the “nefarious plan” of the three farm laws to withdraw government support from agriculture and hand over farming, mandis (state-run wholesale agricultural markets) and public food distribution to corporations led by Adani, Ambani, Tata, Cargill, Pepsi, Walmart, Bayer, Amazon and others.

    It added that the farmers exposed the corporate-backed plan of depriving the people of India of food security, pauperising farmers, changing cropping patterns to suit corporations and allowing the free penetration of foreign corporations into India’s food processing market.

    Those in attendance also heard about the hardships experienced by farmers during the one-year agitation:

    “In the process, the farmers braved water cannons, teargas shelling, roadblocks with huge containers, deep road cuts, lathi charge, cold and hot weather. Over 13 months, they sacrificed 732 martyrs … This was a patriotic movement of the highest quality in the face of repression by a fascist government serving interests of Imperialist exploiters.”

    State investment in agriculture infrastructure was called for, along with the promotion of profitable farming, the facilitation and securing of modern food processing, marketing and consumer networks under the collective ownership and control of peasant-worker cooperatives.

    Accusing the government of acting on behalf of corporate interests, one speaker said that it had targeted Newsclick because it only did what a genuine news media should have been doing — reporting on the truth, the problems of farmers and the nature of the struggle.

    It was claimed that: 

    The BJP Government is using the farcical FIR to spread a canard that the farmers’ movement was anti-people, anti-national and backed by terrorist funding routed through Newsclick. This is factually wrong and mischievously inserted to portray the movement in bad light and seeking to extract revenge for the humiliating defeat they suffered at the hands of the farmers of our country.

    The farmers’ coalition argued that the government is moving to falsely charge the farmers movement of being foreign funded and sponsored by terrorist forces, while it is “promoting FDI, Foreign MNCs, big corporations into agriculture”.

    The coalition says it remains committed to saving the rural economy, preventing foreign looting and rejuvenating the village economy in order to build a strong India.

    The author’s e-book, Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order, includes insight into the farm laws and farmers’ struggle mentioned above.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/23/renewed-farmer-agitation-in-india-amid-brutal-crackdown-on-press-freedom/feed/ 0 436121     Attacks, arrests, threats, censorship: The high risks of reporting the Israel-Gaza war https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/20/attacks-arrests-threats-censorship-the-high-risks-of-reporting-the-israel-hamas-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/20/attacks-arrests-threats-censorship-the-high-risks-of-reporting-the-israel-hamas-war/#respond Fri, 20 Oct 2023 19:14:41 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=324948 Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.  

    In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank.

    These include 75 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship. As of February 4, 2025, CPJ’s records showed that 45 of these journalists were still under arrest.

    Since July, the hostile environment for the press has spread across the Middle East.

    (Editor’s note: These numbers are being updated regularly as more information becomes available.)

    Several journalists have also lost family members while covering the war. Two examples are detailed below:

    INDEX

    Assaults
    Arrests
    Threats
    Cyberattacks
    Censorship
    Harassment

    Journalist casualties
    Killed, injured and missing

    • On November 8, 2023, HonestReporting — a group that monitors what it describes “ideological prejudice” in media coverage of Israel — raised questions about photojournalist Yasser Qudih and three other Gaza-based photographers having prior knowledge of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, prompting death threats against him on social media.

    The Israeli prime minister’s office posted on the social media platform X that the photographers were accomplices in “crimes against humanity” and Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz said they should be treated as terrorists. Major media outlets, including Reuters, rejected the claims and HonestReporting subsequently withdrew the accusations.

    On November 13, 2023, eight members of Qudih’s family were killed when their house in southern Gaza was struck by four missiles.

    • On October 25, 2023, Wael Al Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief for Gaza, lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson when an Israel airstrike hit the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of Gaza, according to a statement from Al Jazeera and Politico.

    On January 7, the Al Jazeera bureau chief lost a fifth family member. Another son, Hamza Al Dahdouh, a journalist and camera operator for Al Jazeera, was killed along with a colleague while on their way back to the southern city of Rafah after filming the aftermath of an airstrike when their vehicle was struck by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), news reports said.

    In Gaza, 90% of the population has been displaced, many are starving, and 80% of buildings have been destroyed. Many journalists have no safe place to do their jobs as they live in tents and work from makeshift offices, such as hospitals, where they can access power.

    In both Gaza and Israel, journalists reporting on the war lack personal protective equipment (PPE). CPJ has received multiple requests for PPE, but delivering this equipment to journalists in the region is difficult. CPJ recommends journalists consult CPJ’s PPE guide to source their own equipment.

    “Journalists in Gaza are facing exponential risk,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “Their colleagues in the West Bank and Israel are also facing unprecedented threats, assaults, and intimidation to obstruct their vital work covering this conflict.”

    Here are some of the reported obstructions to journalists’ reporting since the war began:

    Assaults

    • In the early hours of October 19, 2024, dozens of protesters stormed and looted the offices of the Saudi state-funded broadcaster MBC in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, outraged by the TV channel’s report that labeled key pro-Iranian figures assassinated by Israel and the U.S. as “terrorists.” These included former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militia.

    Videos circulated on social media showed protesters waving PMF, Hezbollah, and Palestinian flags as they stormed the building, setting fire to the courtyard and causing significant damage.

    On October 19, Iraq’s Communications and Media Commission revoked MBC’s broadcasting license, citing the network’s violation of media regulations for disrespecting the “martyrs of the resistance.” MBC has yet to issue a response.

    Saudi Arabia’s media regulator announced that it had referred MBC’s officials for investigation for violating media guidelines in the report.

    Following Iraq’s decision, on October 22, Algeria’s communications ministry also suspended the operating license of MBC’s sister outlet, the Arabic news channel Al Arabiya over allegations of reporting bias, according to news reports.  

    • In the early morning of October 3, 2024, a group of men attacked journalist Robin Ramaekers and camera operator Stijn De Smet, with the Belgian broadcaster VTM Nieuws, as they were reporting on the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a medical center in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, Ramaekers told CPJ via messaging app.

    Arriving in the Bashoura neighborhood with a local fixer, Ali, the two journalists wore “Press” vests and made their identities clear when introducing themselves and asking questions, Ramaekers told CPJ. The three men were cornered by locals, some of whom were armed, and who assaulted, questioned, and detained the team until about 5 a.m, said Ramaekers, who sustained facial fractures. De Smet was shot in the leg and Ali’s nose was broken.

    “As far as we understand now, we were attacked, held, and questioned by people belonging to Amal,” Ramaekers told CPJ, referring to a Shiite political party, allied with Hezbollah, that forms part of Lebanon’s ruling coalition. “They believed we were Israeli spies/spotters instead of journalists.”

    After receiving hospital treatment, the two Belgian journalists were evacuated to Brussels.

    • On the evening of July 30, 2024, MTV Lebanon reporter Nawal Berry and camera operator Dany Tanios were beaten and kicked by a group of men in the Lebanese capital Beirut’s southern suburbs, known as Dahiyeh, while reporting live on reactions to an Israeli strike that targeted a Hezbollah leader in the area, the journalists said in an interview with their outlet and Tanios told CPJ.

    “When we arrived in the area, people were very angry. We went live on TV, when a group of about five men started obstructing us. We moved to another location in a nearby street but a group of men there obstructed us as well. Some were telling us to leave. I was beaten and kicked by about four men, and one of them broke our camera, with the mic and the material on it,” Tanios told CPJ, adding, “I feel sore in my head and back from the beating and kicking.”

    Berry published a video on Instagram showing a man destroying the camera and MTV Lebanon published a video of the journalist being attacked.

    Tanios said that his lawyer would file a lawsuit against the attackers.

    Dahiyeh is seen as a Hezbollah stronghold. MTV Lebanon, a local channel privately owned by businessman Michel El Murr, is considered anti-Hezbollah. A post on its website accused Hezbollah supporters of conducting the assault.

    • On July 30, 2024, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the house of David Wertheim, the controlling shareholder of Israel’s Channel 12 News. Keshet Broadcasting media group, which owns Channel 12, said in a statement that the attack was “part of a systematic campaign of incitement against Channel 12, which crossed all lines last night.”

      In addition, CNN reported that Noam Goldberg, a correspondent with Channel 13, and her camera operator were verbally and physically abused in Beit Lid, a central Israel military base where some of the soldiers under investigation were being questioned.

    Reporter Ilana Curiel of the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the protesters, who broke into the detention center in southern Israel, called her and other Israeli journalists traitors and Hamas supporters and told them to go back to Gaza.

    “I’m in tears. I was spat on, called a slut, and unfaithful. My phone was thrown away twice while I was just trying to do my job. They tried to steal my phone. I was cursed again and again,” Curiel posted on X. A team from Channel 12 News, including correspondent Ori Isaac, were also hit, spat on and verbally abused, those sources said. Security officers helped Curiel and Isaac to safety; neither sustained serious injury.

    • On July 26, 2024, a group of soldiers with the Israeli Border Police obstructed the work of two camera operator Omar Awad, who was also assaulted, and reporter Mujahed Admeer with Turkish state broadcaster TRT who were covering Friday prayers at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque, according to the Beirut-based press freedom group SKeyes and the journalists who spoke to CPJ.

    A video of the incident, shot by Awad and reviewed by CPJ, shows soldiers hitting two men and pushing Awad away.

    “An Israeli soldier came and put his hand on my camera, pushing it away from the scene,” Awad told CPJ. He added “Another pushed me forcefully and threw me to the ground, which led to my arm injury and the camera was also damaged.” 

    Awad and Admeer told CPJ that the same soldiers checked their press cards three times before and during the incident.

    Admeer said he started filming the attack on Awad on his phone but a soldier forced him to hand it over and deleted the footage. Admeer said he told the soldier, “I’m a journalist with accreditation,” but she responded, “I don’t care, go home.”

    CPJ’s email to the Israeli Border Police seeking comment did not receive a response.

    • On June 5, 2024, during the annual Jerusalem Day Flag March, which commemorates the capture of East Jerusalem by Israeli forces in the 1967 war, Israeli settlers and far right protesters assaulted Palestinian freelance journalist Saif Kwasmi, who contributes to the local news agency Al-Asiman News, and Israeli journalist Nir Hasson, a reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz, according to the journalists’ employers, and Kwasmi and Hasson, who spoke to CPJ in person and on the phone on June 5 and 6, respectively. 
    • On December 18, 2023, an Israeli soldier shot Palestinian journalist and freelance photographer Ramez Awad, injuring his thigh, while he was covering Israeli operations in the village of Jaffna, north of the West Bank city of Ramallah, according to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, the Palestinian Authority-run Wafa news agency, and the Beirut-based press freedom group SKeyes.

    Journalists from Sky News Arabia, Firas Lutfi, and Raed El-Helw, who were previously assaulted on October 7, told PJS that Israeli forces targeted them with tear gas and unidentified bullets while reporting from what they thought was a safe area, away from clashes in front of Ofer Prison. They were wearing “Press” vests and told the soldiers that they were members of the media. As a result of this attack, El-Helw’s hand was injured while trying to retrieve his camera and leave the area. El-Helw said he believed that it was a deliberate sniper attack as he observed a laser light on his hand right before he was targeted. PJS shared a video interview with Lutfi and El-Helw, and footage documenting El-Helw’s injury. PJS added that crews from TRT and Roya News were present during the attack.

    • In a separate November 26, 2023, incident near Ofer Prison, Al-Araby TV reporter Fadi Al-Assa, an Al-Araby camera operator, and a third reporter were targeted with tear gas and rubber bullets from their position on rooftops in the vicinity of the prison. Al-Assa told The New Arab that an IDF drone flew right above them, and they were clearly identifiable as journalists holding their cameras. Israeli forces entered the house, came up to the rooftop, and searched the journalists. They confiscated the memory card of Al-Araby’s camera operator and forced them to leave at gunpoint, according to The New Arab and Al Araby TV.
    • On November 17, Al Jazeera English videographer Joseph Handal was assaulted by Israeli settlers in Bethlehem, West Bank, according to the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency Wafa, the Palestinian News Network, and the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate. The attackers smashed the lights and windows of Handal’s car and hit Handal in the face with a stone before he was taken to a hospital, those sources said.
    • On November 17, 2023, in Jerusalem, reporter Murat Can Ozturk and camera operator Ahmet Bagis of Turkish news channel TRT Haber were assaulted while live on air covering Israeli forces clashing with Palestinian worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem’s Wadi Al Joz neighborhood. An Israeli Border Police officer broke the camera with his weapon, according to TRT Haber, Turkey’s Daily Sabah newspaper, and TRT’s manager in Jerusalem, Yalcin Aka, who spoke to CPJ over the phone.
    • On October 16, 2023, journalist and columnist Israel Frey went into hiding after his home was attacked the previous day by a mob of far-right Israelis after he expressed solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, according to Haaretz and Middle East Eye.
    • On October 12, 2023, BBC Arabic reporters Muhannad Tutunji, Haitham Abudiab, and their team were dragged from their vehicle, searched, and held at gunpoint by police in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, despite their vehicle being marked “TV” in red tape and Tutunji and Abudiab presenting their press cards to police, the BBC reported. The broadcaster said Tutunji was struck on the neck and his phone was thrown on the ground while trying to film the incident. 

    In response, the Israeli police issued a statement, quoted by the BBC, that its officers noticed “a suspicious vehicle and stopped it for inspection” and searched the vehicle “for fear of possession of weapons.”

    • On October 7, 2023, Sky News Arabia said that its team in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon was assaulted by Israeli police. The channel’s correspondent, Firas Lutfi, said the police pointed rifles at his head, forced him to undress, confiscated their phones, and escorted them out of the area, according to Sky News Arabia and the Cairo-based Alwafd news.

    Threats

    • On August 27, 2024, Israeli MP Tally Gotliv called for Mohammad Magadli, head of news for the Arabic-language station Nas Radio and an analyst at Israel’s popular privately owned Channel 12, to be sentenced to death or life imprisonment for helping an enemy during wartime. Her tweet on the social platform X included a screenshot of Magdali’s Telegram channel, where the Arab-Israeli journalist said that the IDF was stepping up military operations near the tunnel where the hostage Farhan al-Qadi was found in the hopes of rescuing others.

    Gotliv accused Magadli of “helping the murderous Hamas” by revealing the location and intentions of Israeli soldiers. “He endangers our heroic fighters and our hostages,” Gotliv wrote, adding, “the penal code states that anyone assisting the enemy in times of war is sentenced to death or life imprisonment. I am tired of enemies at home!”

    Previously, in a February tweet, Gotliv accused Magdali of disloyalty to Israel and expressing joy over the death of Jewish people on Channel 12’s “Meet the Press” program when he said, referring to the Israel-Gaza war, that if “we continue to gallop in this direction … there will really be a civil war between Jews and Arabs and the Arabs would win.”

    In an August 27 response to Gotliv’s tweet, Magdali wrote on his Telegram account that “the next time you hear an MP talking about democracy and freedom of expression remind them of this explicit incitement to kill a person whose only crime is that he is an Arab journalist and writes in Arabic.”

    • On November 22, 2023, Anas Al-Sharif, a reporter and videographer for Al Jazeera Arabic in northern Gaza, reported receiving threats from Israeli military officers via the phone, according to Al Jazeera and the Beirut-based press freedom group SKeyes. Al-Sharif said on Al Jazeera that he had received multiple phone calls from officers in the Israeli army instructing him to cease coverage and leave northern Gaza. Additionally, he received voice notes on WhatsApp disclosing his location. However, he emphasized his role as one of the few journalists staying to cover northern Gaza and stated his determination to continue reporting. The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate issued a statement expressing concern about the imminent risk faced by journalists in the north, citing threats against some of them, including Al-Sharif.
    • From November 19 to 26, 2023, journalist Motaz Azaiza received multiple threats from anonymous numbers urging him to cease his coverage in northern Gaza and relocate to the south or flee to Egypt, according to his post on the social media platform X, and the Amman-based news outlets Roya News and Al Bawaba. Azaiza has been reporting on the war via his Instagram account, which has over 14 million followers, and has gained significant recognition in the media as his coverage has provided a window from Gaza to the world.
    • On November 5, 2023, a team of journalists from the German public broadcaster ARD, including ARD correspondent Jan-Christoph Kitzler, accompanied by a Palestinian and a German network employee, were returning from reporting on violence by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. They were stopped by Israeli soldiers south of the Palestinian city of Hebron. The soldiers threatened the journalists with their weapons, and questioned whether they were Jewish, according to the German news service Tagesschau and Haaretz. One team member was also called a traitor, according to the same sources. Kitzler posted a photo on the social media platform X, showing one of the soldiers aiming a gun towards him. Kitzler attributed the soldiers’ aggression to the team reporting on increasing settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, writing in his post that “it’s noteworthy that many of the soldiers in that area are settlers themselves, creating an environment where journalists are generally unwelcome.”

    Christian Limpert, head of the ARD Tel Aviv studio, called the incident an attempt to obstruct ARD and other international media from reporting in the West Bank, according to Tagesschau and Haaretz.

    After over an hour, the situation eased when the IDF’s Foreign Desk, responsible for foreign correspondents, mediated by telephone. Haaretz reported that the IDF apologized and stated its commitment to ensuring press freedom in the West Bank. Limpert reported that days before this incident, soldiers detained ARD’s camera and sound operators for two hours while reporting on settler violence near Qawawis in South Hebron. During that incident, their phones and camera were temporarily confiscated, according to Haaretz and a Foreign Press Association in Israel statement.

    • On October 30, 2023, Al Jazeera’s Gaza Strip correspondent Youmna El-Sayed told the broadcaster that her husband received a threatening phone call from a private number from a man who identified himself as a member of the IDF and told the family “to leave or die,” according to the advocacy group Women In Journalism and CNN Arabic. El-Sayed told Al Jazeera English that she felt it was too risky to drive on any road in Gaza, especially as two cars had been shelled by a tank earlier in the day and that the previous time her family had tried to flee Gaza City, they had been forced to turn back because of Israel’s bombardment of southern Gaza.
    • On October 15, 2023, RT Arabic correspondent Dalia Nammari and her crew, who held Israeli press cards, were stopped by Israeli police at the border for identity checks, according to RT Arabic and the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate. One officer threatened Dalia with his weapon and they warned the crew not to return to the location or else they risked arrest, those sources said.
    • On October 15, 2023, a video posted by Al-Araby TV depicted an Israeli police officer shouting and swearing at their correspondent while he was reporting live from Ashdod in southern Israel. The journalist said on air that the officer was armed.
    • On October 14, 2023, Al Jazeera shared footage from an area in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip, known as the Gaza envelope, showing four IDF soldiers ordering Al Jazeera journalists to stop filming and leave the area immediately. The incident was also covered by Arabia News 24.

    CPJ’s emails requesting comment on these incidents from the IDF spokesperson for North America and the Israeli police did not receive any replies.

    Cyberattacks

    • On November 11, 2023, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate announced that its website had been subjected to cyberattacks. The syndicate added that they believed it was a targeted attack due to their role in reporting on crimes committed against journalists, according to the syndicate and Rania Khayyat, who works for the syndicate and spoke with CPJ.
    • On November 10, 2023, Plestia Alaqad, a Palestinian journalist whose Instagram reporting from Gaza has been featured by NBC News and The New York Times, said on the social platform X that she had experienced multiple hacking incidents on her Instagram account. This was also reported by Sinar Daily. Several other journalists covering Gaza via Instagram also reported hacking attempts. Journalist Yara Eid said she believed the incidents might be politically motivated cyberattacks aimed at undermining the credibility and work of Palestinian journalists, according to the Coalition For Women in Journalism and Sinar Daily.
    • On November 3, 2023, Al-Mamlaka TV in Jordan experienced cyberattacks on its website, according to a statement by the channel and the Beirut-based press freedom group SKeyes. The channel said on the social media platform X that this attack was related to its coverage of the war in Gaza.
    • On October 31, 2023, the Qatari-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera released a statement saying that its websites and servers were targeted in a cyberattack, attributed to its coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. Al Jazeera said that certain attackers’ IP addresses were linked to a party actively participating in the conflict, while other IPs made efforts to mask their true origins, according to Al Jazeera and the Lebanese news website Al-Modon.
    • On October 18, 2023, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, Wafa, experienced a cyberattack that disrupted its news website, according to Wafa and the Amman-based news outlet Roya News. “This attack is part of a broader effort to suppress Palestinian media and silence platforms of truth,” Wafa said. CPJ was unable to determine who carried out the attack.
    • On October 9, 2023, The Jerusalem Post reported that its website was down due to a series of cyberattacks the previous day. The group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for these attacks on Telegram, Axios and Time magazine reported.

    Censorship

    • On August 11, 2024, the Israeli government approved a proposal by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi to renew a 45-day ban on the Lebanon-based, pro-Hezbollah broadcaster Al Mayadeen TV, according to news reports. This included confiscating Al Mayadeen’s equipment and blocking its websites on the grounds that the channel “harms the national security.”

    In a video on Facebook, Karhi accused Al Mayadeen of being a “terrorist incitement platform” and called on the minister of defense to “announce it a terrorist organization.”

    The decision came after Al Mayadeen reporter Hanaa Mahameed reported on a July 27 strike in Majdal Shams town in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. Israel and Hezbollah blamed each other for the attack.

    • On November 23, 2023, Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi proposed a government resolution to cease any state advertising, subscriptions, or other commercial connections with the Haaretz daily newspaper, according to Haaretz and The Times of Israel. He cited what he described as the publication’s “defeatist and false propaganda” against the State of Israel during wartime. However, the Cabinet did not approve the proposal, which the Union of Journalists slammed as “harmful to freedom of the press” and a “populist” maneuver. Karhi, who led efforts to pass emergency regulations to shut down foreign broadcasters deemed harmful to national security, also included domestic media in his initial draft, the Times of Israel reported.
    • On November 12, 2023, Israel’s security cabinet approved a decision to shut down the Lebanon-based, pro-Hezbollah Al-Mayadeen TV in Israel. This move aligned with emergency regulations passed in October allowing the government to close foreign news outlets deemed to be harming national security, as reported by the Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel. According to these sources, the Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi was authorized to order the channel’s Israel offices closed and its equipment confiscated.
    • On November 8, 2023, the Israeli Knesset passed an amendment to the Counter-Terrorism Law, introducing a new criminal offense called the “consumption of terrorist materials,” with a maximum penalty of one year’s imprisonment, according to Al Jazeera and The Times of Israel. The amendment adds a new offense to Article 24 of the law, described as the “systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization under circumstances that indicate identification with the terrorist organization.” Several human rights organizations have raised concerns about the ramifications of the law on freedom of expression and press freedom, saying its broad terms could be weaponized against journalists who rely on consuming information from entities or sources designated as “terrorist” by Israel, compromising their work.
    • On October 30, Rolling Stone magazine announced that the Israeli government denied a press credential to its journalist Jesse Rosenfeld, who has covered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration critically. “Rolling Stone is not a news organization and we are not dealing with this gentleman, thank you,” Ron Paz, Israel’s director of foreign press, told Rolling Stone on Monday, according to Rolling Stone and The Wrap entertainment website.
    • On October 29, 2023, Israeli authorities shut down Dream radio station, based in the West Bank’s largest city Hebron, on the grounds that it was disrupting the movement of their aircraft, according to the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency Wafa, Palestinian news agency Maan, and the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate. The station’s director Talab Al-Jaabari told CPJ that “the head of the Israeli intelligence called me and threatened me with confiscation of equipment. There was no official order.” Dream was previously closed by the IDF in 2015 and 2022. 
    • On October 16, 2023, Israel proposed new emergency regulations that would allow it to halt media broadcasts that harm “national morale.” Officials have threatened to close Al Jazeera’s local offices under this proposed rule, and to block the global news outlet from freely reporting on the war.
    • On October 16, 2023, the IDF ordered the West Bank-based J-Media agency to shut down, according to the Palestinian press freedom group MADA and the London-based news website The New Arab. In a statement, the IDF described the media outlet as “an illegal organization” and said its closure was necessary for “the sake of the security of the State of Israel and for the safety of the public and public order,” those sources said, adding that J-Media complied and ceased its operations immediately. J-Media provides footage and media services to broadcasters and covers Palestinian news, according to the Beirut-based press freedom group SKeyes and CPJ’s review of its website.

    Harassment

    • On October 19, 2024, Lebanese-Syrian journalist and activist Alia Mansour was briefly detained by Lebanese State Security officers at her home in the capital Beirut, following a smear campaign that falsely accused her of being behind an account on the social media platform X that was corresponding with an Israeli account. It has been illegal for Lebanese citizens to communicate with Israelis since 1955.

    Mansour, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Now Lebanon, told CPJ via phone that on October 17, a fake X account using her photo posted a comment on the X account of a well-known Israeli journalist. Screenshots of the post “kept going viral” the following day, even though she had reposted it and tagged the Lebanese army and Internal Security Forces, calling on them to investigate who was behind the campaign. That evening, security forces pretending to be from a delivery service came to her building to “double check” her address, she said.

    On the morning of October 19, security forces arrested Mansour from her home, confiscated her phone and laptop, and questioned her without her lawyer present, the journalist told CPJ. The officers asked Mansour why she had a news agency photo of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon in the deleted items on her phone and she explained that she sometimes uses such photos in her work as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Now Lebanon. “There is no accusation, just an ongoing investigation, they said,” Mansour told CPJ.

    • On October 13, 2024, Israeli police officers detained two Palestinian freelance journalists, Amir Abed Rabbo and camera operator Mohamed Al-Sharif, who work for Turkish state-owned broadcaster TRT and Anadolu Agency, in the Old City of Jerusalem, Al-Sharif and Anat Saragusti, press freedom director at the Union of Journalists in Israel, told CPJ.

    Al-Sharif told CPJ via phone that he and Rabbo were arrested while interviewing Jewish residents about the religious holidays. A police officer asked them what they were doing, checked their press cards, and “asked us to walk with them to the police station for questioning,” said Al-Sharif, who said he was asked whether he still worked with Palestine TV.

    After 14 hours, the police released both journalists on the condition that they stay out of the Old City for one week.

    Al-Sharif said that the police confiscated his camera and mobile phone, which were returned to him one day later. The Beirut-based press freedom group SKeyes reported that police also confiscated and returned Abed Rabbo’s phone and other equipment.

    Saragusti told CPJ by messaging app that the union’s lawyer went to the police station to help get both journalists released, adding that their arrest was not in accordance with Israeli law, which “requires the investigating police unit to obtain authorizations from very senior levels in the police and sometimes also from the deputy state attorney.”

    • On October 4, 2024, Palestinian police briefly detained Palestinian freelance journalist Laith Jaar, a correspondent for the Qatari-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera, in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, according to Al Jazeera and Jaar, who spoke to CPJ. Jaar had arrived at the police station to file a complaint against a Palestinian intelligence service officer for assaulting and threatening himthe previous day, while he was reporting on the killing of Palestinians by an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp. But the journalist was himself arrested on the basis of a complaint by that same officer.

    Jaar told CPJ via messaging app that all charges against him had been dropped and his complaint about the attack was still in process.

    Al Jazeera condemned Jaar’s assault and detention as “a serious escalation and clear violation to journalists’ rights.”

    • On August 9, 2024, Brendan Rains, an American freelance photojournalist and Spanish video journalist Raul Gallego Abellan, were harassed by about five West Bank settlers who came up to their car while they were reporting on Palestinian access to water in Al Auja town, north of Jericho.

    Rains posted photos and a videos of the incident on Instagram, in which one young man pulled a face, another stuck his tongue out, and a third spat and threw his drink at the journalists in the car, who were accompanied by Israeli activist Guy Hirshfield.

    “While taking photographs and video of settlers bathing in a natural spring about 10 miles north of Jericho, our car … was attacked and our ability to work obstructed,” wrote Rains, 23, who recently started the Rains Report on Substack to publish his coverage of the region.

    Rains told CPJ that it was his first interaction with settlers, on his third day in the West Bank, and that the team were fine as they drove off.

    • On July 24, 2024, four Palestinian journalists who were wearing “Press” vests and covering the burning of a military vehicle in the West Bank village of Artas, near Bethlehem, were harassed by Israeli soldiers who confiscated their equipment.

    Anadolu Agency photographer Hisham Abu Shakra, Abu Dhabi-based Viory video news agency photographer Abed Alrahman Younis, and Palestine Post news site reporter Ayah Ramadan, and a fourth journalist who declined to be named told CPJ that they were reporting in the area at about 8:00 a.m. when three IDF vehicles stopped nearby and about 15 soldiers got out. The soldiers ordered the journalists to move and one soldier said, “Don’t film me.” The journalists responded that they were not filming and started walking away as instructed. The soldiers confiscated Younis’ camera, phone, and ID; Abu Shakra’s camera, tripod, and mics; and Ramadan’s ID.

    The journalists then moved to stand by a building, waiting to get their equipment back, when four soldiers ran up to them with their guns raised, shouting. This time, they confiscated Ramadan’s phone, and the fourth journalist’s ID. Part of the incident was captured in a video by a surveillance camera, reviewed by CPJ. The journalists said the items were never returned, hindering their ability to move around freely and work.

    CPJ’s email to the IDF’s North America desk seeking comment did not receive a response.

    • On June 30, 2024, correspondent Lara Escudero of the Spanish television news program Noticias Cuatro and her team were harassed by a crowd of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood who shouted and threw bottles and garbage at them while the journalists attempted to cover their rally.

    Escudero posted a video of the incident on social media, in which she said that the crowd threatened the journalists, spat on them, and shouted in unison that they were impure for wearing trousers.

    “They wished us death. And, in the end, they decided to join forces to scare us and get us out of their neighborhood. They followed us and started throwing whatever they found in their path,” she wrote, adding that women also shouted down from the windows of buildings, calling the journalists impure and telling them to go away.

    Lara told CPJ that she felt “somewhat overwhelmed by how the ultra-Orthodox citizens reacted” and by the response on social media to her post. “Many people have been attacking and recriminating me for having covered the demonstration as a woman. They say I went to provoke,” she said.

    • On May 11, 2024, Israeli police officers briefly detained an Al-Araby TV crew consisting of reporter Ahmed Darawsha and camera operator Ali Mohamad Dowani when they were covering a demonstration in Tel Aviv for the release of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, according to the journalists’ employer, footage posted on social media by eyewitnesses, and Dowani, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app on May 12. 

    “While we were covering anti-war demonstrations in Tel Aviv, we were detained for two hours and prevented from working under the pretext that we are affiliated with Al Jazeera, which is banned in Israel, just because we spoke Arabic,” Dowani said. 

    Footage of the incident shows Israeli police officers checking the journalists’ press cards and Darawsha holding a microphone with the logo of Al-Araby TV.  


    More on journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza conflict

    See our safety resources for journalists covering conflict


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Mohamed Mandour.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/20/attacks-arrests-threats-censorship-the-high-risks-of-reporting-the-israel-hamas-war/feed/ 0 435748     A Reading List for the Delhi Police from Tricontinental Research Services https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/14/a-reading-list-for-the-delhi-police-from-tricontinental-research-services/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/14/a-reading-list-for-the-delhi-police-from-tricontinental-research-services/#respond Sat, 14 Oct 2023 16:36:41 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=144818

    On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. During this ‘act of sheer harassment and intimidation’, as the Committee to Protect Journalists called it, the Delhi Police raided and interrogated the Tricontinental Research Services (TRS) team. Based in Delhi, TRS is contracted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to produce materials on the great processes of our time as they play out in the world’s most populous country, including the struggles of workers and farmers, the women’s movement, and the movement for Dalit emancipation from caste oppression. It would be a dereliction of duty for TRS researchers to ignore these important developments that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet it is this very focus on issues of national importance that has earned them the ire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it possible to live in the world as a person of conscience and ignore the daily struggles of the people?

    At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, both of the media project NewsClick.

    During the raid of the TRS office, the Delhi Police seized computers, phones, and hard drives. I very much hope that the Delhi Police investigators will read all of the materials that the TRS team has produced with great care and interest. So that the Delhi Police does not miss any of the important texts that TRS has produced for Tricontinental, here is a reading list for them:

    1. The Story of Solapur, India, Where Housing Cooperatives Are Building a Workers’ City (dossier no. 6, July 2018). Balamani Ambaiah Mergu, a maker of beedis (cigarettes), told TRS researchers that she used to ‘stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained the hut used to leak, and there wouldn’t be a single dry patch inside’. Since 1992, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has campaigned to secure dignified housing for workers in this town in the state of Maharashtra. Since 2001, CITU has been able secure government funds for this purpose and build tens of thousands of houses, a process led by the workers themselves through cooperative housing societies. The workers built ‘a city of the working class alone’, CITU leader Narasayya Adam told TRS.

    2. How Kerala Fought the Heaviest Deluge in Nearly a Century (dossier no. 9, October 2018). In the summer of 2018, rain, and subsequent flooding, swept through the southern coastal state of Kerala, impacting 5.4 million of the state’s 35 million residents. TRS researchers documented the flood’s rage, the rescue and relief work of organised volunteers (largely from left formations), and the rehabilitation of both the Left Democratic Front government and various social organisations.

    3. India’s Communists and the Election of 2019: Only an Alternative Can Defeat the Right Wing (dossier no. 12, January 2019). To understand the political situation in India in the lead-up to the 2019 parliamentary elections, the TRS team spoke with Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat. Rather than confine her analysis to the electoral or political sphere, Karat discussed the challenges facing the country at a sociological level: ‘Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticisation of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth’.

    4. The Only Answer Is to Mobilise the Workers (dossier no. 18, July 2019). In April–May 2019, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, prevailed in India’s parliamentary elections. In the aftermath of the elections, the TRS team met with CITU President K. Hemalata to talk about the periodic massive strikes that had been taking place in the country, including an annual general strike of nearly 300 million workers. Whereas working-class movements in other countries seemed to be weakened by the breakdown of formal employment and the increasingly precarious nature of work, unions in India displayed resilience. Hemalata explained that ‘the contract workers are very militant’ and that CITU does not distinguish between the demands of contract workers and permanent workers. One of the best examples of this, she said, is the anganwadi (childcare) workers, who – along with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers – have been on the forefront of many of the major agitations. Both of these sectors – childcare and health care – are dominated by women. ‘Organising working-class women is part of organising the working class’, Hemalata told TRS.

    5. The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India (dossier no. 21, October 2019). P. Sainath, one of the most important journalists reporting on rural India and a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, traced the impact of the crises of neoliberal policies and climate catastrophe that are simultaneously imposed on India’s farmers. He documents the work of Kudumbashree, a cooperative made up of 4.5 million women farmers in Kerala, which he calls ‘the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world’ (and about whom we will publish a longer study in the coming months compiled by TRS).

    6. People’s Polyclinics: The Initiative of the Telugu Communist Movement (dossier no. 25, February 2020). In the Telugu-speaking parts of India (which encompass over 84 million people), doctors affiliated with the communist movement have set up clinics and hospitals – notably the Nellore People’s Polyclinic – to provide medical care to the working class and peasantry. The polyclinics have not only provided care but have also trained medical workers to address public health concerns in rural hinterlands and small towns. This dossier offers a window into the work of left-wing medical personnel whose efforts take place outside the limelight and into the experiments in public health care that seek to undercut the privatisation agenda.

    7. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India (dossier no. 32, September 2020). Not long after the October Revolution brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees in 1917, a liberal newspaper in Bombay noted, ‘The fact is Bolshevism is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of ill-requited toil in order that a few thousand may revel in luxury’. In other words, the communist movement is the product of the limitations and failures of capitalism. On 17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was formed alongside scattered communist groups that were emerging in different parts of India. In this brief text, the TRS team documents the role of the communist movement in India over the past century.

    8. The Farmers’ Revolt in India(dossier no. 41, June 2021). Between 1995 and 2014, almost 300,000 farmers committed suicide in India – roughly one farmer every 30 minutes. This is largely because of the high prices of inputs and the low prices of their crops, a reality that has been exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policies since 1991 and their amplification of other crises (including the climate catastrophe). Over the past decade, however, farmers have fought back with major mobilisations across the country led by a range of organisations such as left-wing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions. When the government put forward three bills in 2020 to deepen the privatisation of rural India, farmers, agricultural workers, and their families began a massive protest. This dossier is one of the finest summaries of the issues that lie at the heart of these protests.

    9. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (dossier no. 45, October 2021). Patriarchy, with its deep roots in the economy and culture, cannot be defeated by decree. In the face of this reality, this dossier offers a glimpse of the Indian women’s movement for equality and maps the range of struggles pursued by working women across the country to defend democracy, maintain secularism, fight for women’s economic rights, and defeat violence. The dossier closes with the following assessment: ‘The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future’.

    10. The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam (dossier no. 55, August 2022). One of my favourite texts produced by the TRS team, this dossier tells the story of the workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, who have fought against the government’s attempts to privatise this public steel company. Not much is written about this struggle led by brave steel workers who are mostly forgotten or, if remembered, then maligned. They stand beside the furnaces, rolling the steel out and tempering it, driven by a desire to build better canals for the farmers, to build beams for schools and hospitals, and to build the infrastructure so that their communities can transcend the dilemmas of humanity. If you try to privatise the factory, they sing, ‘Visakha city will turn into a steel furnace, North Andhra into a battlefield… We will defend our steel with our lives’.

    11. Activist Research: How the All-India Democratic Women’s Association Builds Knowledge to Change the World (dossier no. 58, November 2022). The dossier on Visakha Steel was built in conversation with steel workers and reflected the evolving methodology of TRS. To sharpen this method, the team met with R. Chandra to discuss how the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has used ‘activist research’ in the state of Tamil Nadu. Chandra shows how AIDWA designed surveys, trained local activists to conduct them among local populations, and taught the activists how to assess the results. ‘AIDWA’s members no longer need a professor to help them’, she told TRS. ‘They formulate their own questions and conduct their own field studies when they take up an issue. Since they know the value of the studies, these women have become a key part of AIDWA’s local work, bringing this research into the organisation’s campaigns, discussing the findings in our various committees, and presenting it at our different conferences’. This activist research not only produces knowledge of the particularities of hierarchies that operate in a given place; it also trains the activists to become ‘new intellectuals’ of their struggles and leaders in their communities.

    12. The Condition of the Indian Working Class (dossier no. 64, May 2023). In the early days of the pandemic, the Indian government told millions of workers to go back to their homes, mostly in rural areas. Many of them walked thousands of kilometres under the burning hot sun, terrible stories of death and despair following their caravan. This dossier emerged out of a long-term interest in cataloguing the situation of India’s workers, whose precariousness was revealed in the early days of the pandemic. The last section of the dossier reflects on their struggles: ‘Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. … In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle’.

    The Delhi Police investigators who took the material from the TRS office have each of these twelve dossiers in hand. I recommend that they print them and share them with the rest of the force, including with Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora. If the Delhi Police is interested, I would be happy to develop a seminar on our materials for them.

    Study and struggle shaped the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, for instance, read voraciously and even translated Plato’s The Apology into Gujarati, rooted in the belief that reading and study sharpened his sense not only of how to struggle but how to build a better world.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/14/a-reading-list-for-the-delhi-police-from-tricontinental-research-services/feed/ 0 434430     The Essential Facts Concerning Zionism and Palestine https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/10/the-essential-facts-concerning-zionism-and-palestine/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/10/the-essential-facts-concerning-zionism-and-palestine/#respond Tue, 10 Oct 2023 11:38:15 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=144762 1. Doctrine. Zionism was devised by some middle-class Jewish Europeans (most prominently Lev Pinsker and Theodore Herzl) as one response to horrendous late 19th century anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Like many of their contemporaries among nationalistic privileged-class European intellectuals and like the Nazis who came later, the Zionists conceived of the world’s Jews as a race. Moreover, they viewed the Jews as: (in their own words) a “parasitic” and “alien” presence within the gentile countries; and therefore a “Jewish problem”, which could only be resolved by removing all or most Jews from the gentile countries to a country of their own, which they decided would need to be in Palestine. Consequently, the Zionists opposed assimilation and disparaged those Jews who assimilated. [1]

    2. Colonialism. The Zionists, like other European colonialists, approved of the subjugation of non-white peoples and justified it with the then-commonplace racist rationale that God, or Destiny, had chosen the “superior” Europeans to bring “civilization” to the territories populated by the “primitive” peoples of Africa and Asia. Therefore, no meaningful consideration was given to the rights of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. [2]

    3. Imperialism. The Zionists coalesced in 1897 with the formation of the Zionist Organization [ZO]. Its leaders then began appealing to various European colonialist powers for sponsorship of their proposal to create a so-called Jewish homeland in Palestine. Ultimately, it was Britain which became the imperial sponsor by issuing the Balfour Declaration (1917) calling for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The British motivations were twofold. [3]

    ♦ Firstly, Britain envisioned the creation of a British-allied outpost of European civilization in oil-rich southwest Asia as an instrument for projecting British imperial and commercial power over a part of the world in which British capital and empire were already heavily invested (notably in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [now BP Inc.], Shell Oil, and the Suez Canal).

    ♦ Secondly, there was the anti-Jewish prejudice of some leading Cabinet members, including former Prime Minister Balfour, who hoped to reduce the Jewish presence in European government, commerce, and the professions.

    4. Anti-Arab racism. Jews (4% of the population) and their Muslim and Christian neighbors (85% and 11% respectively) had coexisted amicably in Palestine for many generations prior to the arrival of the Zionists. Zionist doctrine and practice destroyed this relationship.

    ♦ During the period of British rule over Palestine (1917—48), sympathetic Jewish capitalists in Europe and the United States provided money for Zionist land acquisitions in Palestine. The Zionists then evicted the Arab tenant farmers thereby violating the traditional rights of the latter. Moreover, the Zionist governing body required that Jewish employers hire only Jews and prohibited the sale of any Jewish-owned land to Arabs. Such racial discrimination was standard practice within the Zionist settlements; and it quite predictably provoked Arab resentment against the Zionist settlers. [4]

    ♦ Meanwhile, there were recurring suggestions (in private) by top Zionist leaders (Herzl, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and others) that the “Arab problem” could be resolved through “population transfer” to other Arab countries. In fact, from the very beginning, the Zionist leadership intended to eventually expel the indigenous Arab population from Palestine. [5]

    5. Collusion with anti-Jewish persecutors. For several decades, the Zionist organizations refused to fight for equal rights for Jews. In fact, they acted in concert with the persecutors.

    ♦ Whereas many Jews joined other anti-racists (including Communists) in the fight against the chauvinist, xenophobic, and anti-Jewish nationalisms and related persecutions which arose in Europe in the years between the two world wars of the 20th century; the Zionists, largely because of Communist opposition to the racialism at the heart of Zionist ideology, joined the fascists and allied bigots in denouncing the Communists. Meanwhile, the Zionist organizations, claiming to represent the interests of the world’s Jews, refused to fight anti-Jewish bigotry and persecutions. Why? Because they wanted persecuted Jews, not to fight for equal rights within their native countries, but to emigrate to Palestine.  To that end, the Zionist organizations routinely colluded with anti-Jewish states in sponsoring migration, legal and illegal, of European Jews to Palestine. [6]

    ♦ In the 1930s, the New Zionist Organization [NZO] (representing the minority “revisionist” faction) allied itself with fascist Italy until Mussolini broke off the alliance in order to enter the Axis Pact with Hitler. [7]

    ♦ Meanwhile, the German affiliate of the ZO (majority faction) refused to support resistance to Nazi anti-Jewish racial policies in order to maintain cooperation with the Nazi state in promoting and facilitating German Jewish emigration to Palestine. Moreover, the NZO-affiliated German State Zionist Organization (while receiving special favor from the Nazi regime which imposed its leader, Georg Kareski, as director of the Jewish Culture Leagues): praised Nazi policies, opposed the anti-Nazi boycott, and colluded with the Gestapo. [6]

    ♦ After the War largely cut off routes for Jewish emigration, Nazi Germany (in 1941) began its extermination project. In 1944, the ZO’s operative (Rezso Kasztner) in Hungary made a bargain with Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of exterminating Europe’s Jews. If Kasztner would reassure the Hungarian Jews that they were to be resettled, not killed; then Eichmann would permit the ZO to take a number of select Jews to safety and Palestine. Kasztner provided the false assurance thereby enabling the Nazi SS to avoid significant resistance as it rounded up 450,000 Jewish Hungarians for deportation to the extermination camps. In return, the Nazi SS permitted the ZO to save 1,700 select Jews. Those, who had assimilated, or were non-Zionist, or were insufficiently young and vigorous were excluded and thereby left to be exterminated by the Nazis. [8]

    ♦! For Zionists, the persecution of Jews within their native countries (certainly prior to the Nazi’s “final solution”) was not something to fight, but a pretext for creating the so-called Jewish State in Palestine. Meanwhile, they dismissed any concern for the human rights of its indigenous population. 

    6. Obstruction of Jewish emigration. During the 1930s, Zionist obstruction of efforts, as at the 1938 Evian conference, to find safe havens for persecuted Jews outside of Palestine, impeded and limited Jewish emigration from Europe. Consequently, a huge number of Jews, who would otherwise have gotten out, were left trapped in Nazi-ruled Europe when the Axis War closed off (to nearly all Jews) avenues for further emigration [9]. Many of these Jews then become victims of the Nazi “final solution”. Moreover, after the War the Zionists opposed any consideration, during the 1946 inquiries of the Anglo-American Committee, to find countries willing to give refuge to the displaced Jews of Europe in Australia, the Americas, et cetera. They wanted these desperate people to have only one option, namely to go, legally or illegally, to Palestine [10]. 

    7. Exploitation of the genocide. Ever since the Axis War, the Zionists and their supporters have manipulated popular sympathy for the Jewish victims of the genocide in order to obtain support for Zionism. They and their supporters insist that the world must atone for the genocide of the six million Jews by granting them Palestine for a “Jewish state”; but they evade the fact that justice would require atonement and compensation for that genocide to be borne by Christian Europe, which perpetrated and/or permitted the genocide, not by the Palestinian Arabs, who had no part in it. [11]

    8. Censorship of critics. Zionists and their supporters routinely attempt to silence opponents of Zionism and critics of Israeli crimes against humanity by smearing said critics as purveyors of “antisemitism”, the word which Zionists and their allies use to mean Judeophobia (hatred of Jews), even though the Arab victims of Zionism are also Semitic in language and ancestral origin. When their critics are Jewish, as many are; Zionists have often disparaged and dismissed them as “self-hating Jews”. As Zionists obsessively smear their anti-racist critics, they generally give much less attention to actual Judeophobes.

    9. Majority rule denied. Throughout most of its (1917—48) rule over Palestine, Britain, in violation of its Article 22 obligations under its League of Nations Mandate, deferred to the Zionists: by turning a deaf ear to repeated Palestinian Arab appeals for redress of grievances, and by refusing to establish any democratically-elected representative governing body. Why? Because such body would undoubtedly have rendered stillborn the scheme to transform Palestine into a Zionist nation-state by acting to stop: further Zionist immigration, land acquisitions, evictions of Arab tenant farmers, and discriminatory employment practices. [12]

    10. Rebellions. Ultimately, the Arabs lost patience and resorted (in 1936) to armed rebellion. The British then used armed Zionist paramilitaries as “police” to assist in suppressing the Arab revolt. However, the persistence and cost of the Arab revolt finally convinced Britain of the folly of continuing to disregard the rights of the Arab majority in Palestine. Consequently, Britain (in 1939) abandoned its totally one-sided support for Zionist goals, and adopted a quasi-neutral policy, which both: offended the Arabs by continuing the refusal of majority rule, and angered the Zionists by restricting Zionist immigration and land acquisitions. The Zionists then revolted. When Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, two of the three Zionist paramilitaries (Haganah and Irgun) suspended the rebellion, while the third (Lehi a.k.a. Stern Gang) attempted (in 1940 and again in 1941) to ally itself to Nazi Germany but was rebuffed. In 1944, Irgun resumed the revolt; and in 1945 the three Zionist paramilitaries jointly resumed their rebellion with sabotage and murders including terrorist bombings. Their violent acts included: IED (improvised explosive device) attacks upon passing trains and motor vehicles; letter bombs; time bombs in hotels and other venues with civilian victims; and so forth; as well as attacks upon police and military targets. They also illegally trafficking large numbers of unauthorized Jewish immigrants into the country. [13]

    11. Partition. In 1947, Britain concluded: that the objectives of the Zionists and of the Palestinian Arabs were irreconcilable, and that it could not maintain peace and order in Palestine with the resources which it was willing to commit. Britain then turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. The UN, then consisting of 56 mostly white-ruled (European and western-hemisphere) states, adopted a partition plan (General Assembly Resolution 181) which was grossly discriminatory against the Arabs. Of the 15 Asian and African member states (excluding white-ruled South Africa), only two, having been bribed or coerced, voted for it. [14]

    ♦ Distribution of territory. Although Jews were only 32% of the population, this UN plan allocated 55% of the territory to the “Jewish” state, 42% to the Arab state, and 3% to a UN administered zone in and around Jerusalem.

    ♦ Distribution of population. In the Zionist state, which was to have a population of 995,000, a bare majority of Jews was to rule over 497,000 mostly Arab and Bedouin others. The majority Arab state was to have a population of 735,000, of which a mere 10,000 (1.4%) was to consist of Jews. As had been the policy throughout the Mandate, majority-rule was deemed unacceptable when Jews were a minority but acceptable when and where they were in the majority.

    ♦ Responses. The ZO, intent upon obtaining international acceptance for the proposed Jewish state, professed acceptance of the partition plan. The Palestinian Arabs and neighboring Arab states denounced the plan as a racist and colonialist injustice and refused to be bound by it.

    12. Conquest and ethnic cleansing. Armed conflict began between the Zionists and the Arabs even before Britain withdrew its forces in 1948 May 15. Although the Arabs had greater numbers, they were at a tremendous disadvantage with far fewer individuals trained for military service. Moreover, the intervening military contingents from Arab states were mostly: small in numbers, ill-trained, poorly equipped, and lacking in combat experience. In contrast, the Zionists: had long given priority to immigration by men capable of bearing arms; had tens of thousands of war veterans and other well-trained soldiers; were far better armed; and possessed a much more cohesive civil society with functioning governmental and military organizations. The Zionists proceeded: to conquer as much as possible of the territory allocated for the Arab state, and to expel most of the Arab population from Zionist-held territory. [15]

    13. Nakba. The outcome of the war was a nakba (catastrophe) for the Palestinian Arabs.

    ♦ Territory. By war’s end in 1949, the so-called “Jewish state” had conquered 77% of the territory (including half of the territory allocated by the UN for the Palestinian Arab state); and the remaining 23% was occupied and/or annexed by Jordan and Egypt. [16]

    ♦ Ethnic cleansing. Zionist armed forces had used massacres, death threats broadcast by radio and mobile loudspeakers, and expulsions at gunpoint to dispossess nearly 60% of the indigenous Arab population thereby making refugees of at least 711,000 Palestinian Arabs. [17]

    ♦ Land. Immediately before the war, Jews owned 6.2% of the land in Palestine [15]. During and after the war, the Zionists confiscated the land and homes of the Arabs, who had fled or been expelled [18, 19]. They also confiscated nearly 40% of the landholdings of Arabs, who remained resident within Israeli-held territory [18]. The Zionist state then leased the confiscated land to Zionist Jewish settlers [18, 19]. By 1950, Zionists were in possession of 94% of the land within Israeli-ruled territory (that is 73% of the land within the whole of Palestine) [19].

    ♦ Redress. In 1948 Dec 11, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194 calling for: (1) a demilitarized permanent international zone for Jerusalem, and (2) respect for the right of return for all refugees willing to live in peace with their neighbors. In 1949 May 11 the UN General Assembly admitted Israel to UN membership based upon its promised acceptance of the UN Charter and General Assembly Resolutions 181 and 194. Compliance with the Charter and with the two Resolutions would have required Israel: (1) to withdraw from occupied territory in the parts of Palestine allocated by the UN for the Palestinian Arab state and for the international zone, (2) to permit repatriation of the Palestinian Arab refugees to their homes in all Israeli-controlled territory, and (3) to accord equal citizenship rights to its Arab minority. Israel refused to comply with its obligations regarding: refugee repatriation, Jerusalem, and occupied Arab territory. Israel dealt with those Arabs remaining within its territory by expelling some and by eventually conferring an inferior class of citizenship upon the remainder. [20]

    ♦ Cover-up. Attempting to conceal evidence of its crimes against humanity, the Zionist state conducts a policy of sequestering, and denying access to, documents consisting of contemporary reports of the massacres, expulsions, and other ethnic cleansing operations which its forces perpetrated during the nakba and subsequently. [21]

    14. Later conquests. The Zionist appetite for Arab territory was not satisfied by their conquests in 1948.

    ♦ Pursuant to a secret duplicitous conspiracy with France and Britain, Israel, in 1956 October, invaded Egypt. France and Britain, hoping to regain possession of the Suez Canal, then also invaded Egypt upon the pretense of intervening in order to safeguard commerce thru the Canal. During the meeting in which the conspiracy was hatched, Israeli leader David Ben Gurion proposed his “grand design”: that Israel should annex the remainder of Palestine plus southern Lebanon plus much of the Sinai. Because a ceasefire was imposed before Israeli forces could re-deploy for their planned invasion of Lebanon and the Jordanian-ruled West Bank, actual Israeli conquests were limited to Gaza and Sinai. Strong pressure by the US (which had not been consulted) ultimately compelled the aggressors to give back the conquered territory. [22]

    ♦ In 1967, the Zionist state launched a massive sneak attack upon Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Therewith, it conquered the remaining 23% of Palestine plus the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan. Its difficulties during a subsequent war (1973), and the costs of defending its conquests, eventually induced the Zionist state to return the Sinai to Egypt (by 1982); but it has refused to give up any of its remaining 1967 conquests. [23]

    ♦ Israel has repeatedly invaded neighboring Lebanon. It occupied much of Lebanon’s territory for two decades (1982—2000), and finally withdrew only in response to strong armed resistance by the Hezbollah militia. Israel continues to occupy the Sheba’a Farms district of Lebanon. Since 2000, Israeli armed forces have repeatedly (almost daily since 2006) breached Lebanese airspace, territorial waters, and/or land borders. It has also repeatedly bombed targets in the country. Massive Israeli airstrikes in 2006 killed some 1,100 people (mostly Lebanese civilians) and displaced another million. These Israeli actions provoke retaliatory action by the Hezbollah militia and by the Lebanese Army thereby perpetuating tensions and violent conflict. [24]

    ♦ Territories taken from the indigenous Arabs and currently occupied and ruled by the Zionist state consist of seven territories, the last five of which were conquered in the 1967 war. These include all of Palestine consisting of: (1) the partition territory, the 55% of Palestine allocated to the Zionist state by the UN in 1947; (2) the Nakba annexation, the additional 22% conquered by the Zionists in 1948—49; (3) East Jerusalem, 2%; (4) the West Bank, 19½%; and (5) Gaza, 1.4%. The other two, which were taken from neighboring Arab countries, are: (6) Golan, taken from Syria; and (7) Sheba’a Farms, a small piece of Lebanon. [23]

    15. Occupation regime. The Zionist state has persistently committed human rights violations in defiance of both international human rights conventions and UN resolutions.

    ♦ Land grabs. Despite pretending to want peace with the Syrians and Palestinians, the Zionist state has illegally (officially or de facto) annexed their conquered territories. Within all of its occupied territories, it persists: in seizing land from the Arab inhabitants; expelling the Arabs; and settling Jews on those lands (all in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention which pertains, among other matters, to the treatment of the native populations within foreign territories under military occupation). [23, 25]

    ♦ Citizenship and residency rights. The Israeli state encourages Jews with no personal ties to Palestine to take up residence in the country and become citizens, but it denies the right of return to the Palestinian Arabs who fled the war or were forcibly expelled in 1948. [26]

    ♦ Ethnic discrimination. Israel subjects Arabs, including those to whom it has conceded a third-class citizenship, to both overt and institutionalized discrimination. Infrastructure, services, and subsidies, which are routinely provided to Zionist communities, are denied to their Arab neighbors. Required building permits are almost never provided to Arabs, and the state routinely demolishes Arab homes and additions when constructed without such permits. Water resources are confiscated from Arab communities and given to their Zionist neighbors. Within the territories occupied since 1967, Zionist settlers are subject to civil law with liberal civil rights whereas Arabs are subject to arbitrary military law (with no such rights) and rigged judicial proceedings (with due process denied and near-certain conviction predetermined). [25]

    ♦ Repression. The Zionist state subjects the Arab population within occupied territories to murderous repression and collective punishments (in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention and other international human rights laws). Specifics have included: unlawful targeted killings of resistance leaders; detentions and deportations of Palestinian Arab leaders; denial of travel rights to Arab critics of Zionist occupation practices; a profusion of arbitrary detentions and long imprisonments without charge; routine torture of prisoners; home demolitions where a single family member is suspected of an act of violent resistance; use of excessive force in quelling protests; mass bombings of civilian populations (as in Gaza, 2008, 2014 and 2021); a blockade depriving the 2 million Gazans of life-sustaining essentials (export income and vital imports including food, medical supplies, fuel, and sorely needed building materials); checkpoints and road blockages applicable only to Arabs; obstructions of access to education and employment; and so forth. Israel’s systematic and pervasive abuses create such extreme despair that it provokes violent resistance, both collective and individual, against the Israelis; and the Zionist state then uses every incident of violent resistance as a “security” pretext for continuing its injustices against the Palestinian Arabs. [25, 27]

    16. Peace negotiations. The Zionist state, devoted to a racist ideology and existing upon the spoils of its robbery and oppression of the Arabs, has never sought a just peace.

    ♦ Until 1993, Israel refused to negotiate with the Palestinian interlocutors who actually could speak for the Palestinian Arabs. It has also often refused, upon one or another pretext, to even negotiate key issues which have included: the rights of the dispossessed Arabs to return to their native land, Palestinian statehood, the status of Jerusalem, the settlements in the West Bank, and the oppressive policies of the occupation regime. Then, whenever any of these issues have been discussed, Israel has insisted that any concessions on its part be conditional upon their interlocutors bargaining away the fundamental rights of the indigenous Palestinians, rights provided under international law. [28, 29]

    ♦ Israel has unilaterally and persistently created “facts on the ground” and bludgeoned the Palestinians so that their leaders have been compelled to negotiate from a position of such desperation that they are essentially captives negotiating with the Zionist gun to their heads. [30]

    ♦ Finally, the Zionist state, having given a lip-service acceptance of the so-called 2-state solution, pretends to be agreeable in principle to Palestinian statehood so that it can then “justify” continuing to exclude most Palestinian Arabs from citizenship and equal civil rights. Meanwhile, it has planted so many settlements as to make a viable Palestinian state impossible even in the West Bank. Any such “state” would be a collection of disconnected and subjugated cantons similar to the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa. [31, 29]

    Date: originally researched and written in 2018 June, slightly revised 2021 October.

    Comment on subsequent events.

    The most overtly fascist coalition now governing the Zionist state has intensified its oppression of the Palestinians, especially in the occupied West Bank. That has naturally provoked an increase in militant resistance. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whatever their faults, currently constitute the most organized force in said resistance. The current armed conflict (begun Oct 07) between Gaza and the Zionist state is the natural outcome of Israeli/Zionist persecution and violence against the Palestinians.

    The US-dominated West (US, NATO, EU, et cetera) and their mainstream media view the conflict essentially from the Zionist perspective. Palestinian violence is categorized as “terrorism”, while Israeli violence against Palestinians never is; the country is always called “Israel”, never “Palestine”; Palestinian grievances usually go unmentioned; and so forth.

    The anti-racist “left” needs to recognize that Biden and his counterparts in the Western allies, now rushing to assist Israel, are no less racist than are Trump’s MAGA Republicans and other right-wing populists.

    ENDNOTES

    [1] Howard M Sachar (Zionist American historian): A History of Israel (Knopf, © 1979) ~ p 10—17, 36—47 ♦ ISBN 0-394-73679-6.

    Lenni Brenner (American social justice writer/activist): Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lawrence Hill Books, © 1983) ~ p 1, 4, 15, 18—25, 29—32, 50—51 ♦ ISBN 0-7099-0628-5.

    [2] Benny Morris (Zionist Israeli historian): 1948 – A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press, © 2008) ~ p 4 ♦ ISBN 978-0-300-12696-9.

    [3] Morris: ~ p 5.
    Sachar: ~ p 47—54, 96—110.
    Brenner: ~ p 9.

    [4] Sachar: ~ p 77—78, 142—143, 163—167, 175—176.

    [5] Morris: ~ p 2—3, 18—19.

    [6] Brenner: ~ chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 12.

    [7] Brenner: ~ chapters 4, 10, 14.

    [8] Brenner: ~ chapter 25.

    [9] Robert Silverberg (American writer): If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem (Pyramid Communication, Inc., © 1970) ~ p 174—175 ♦ ISBN 0-515-02765-0.

    [10] Morris: ~ p 23, 26, 65.

    [11] Morris: ~ p 33.

    [12] United Nations Information System for Palestine [UNISPAL]: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988 (1990) ~ Part I (§ III).

    [13] Morris: ~ p 14—20, 29—31, 35—36.

    Wikipedia: 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine (last edited 2018 May 29); Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine (last edited 2018 May 26) ~ § 1 Origins, § 2 Timeline; Semiramis Hotel bombing (last edited 2018 May 05).

    [14] Morris: ~ p 37—38, 55, 61, 63—65.
    Wikipedia: United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (last edited 2018 May 14).
    UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§§ III, IV).

    [15] Morris: ~ p 77—93.
    UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§ V).

    [16] UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§ IX).

    [17] Wikipedia: 1948 Palestinian exodus (last edited 2018 Jun 01).

    [18] Sachar: ~ p 386—389.

    [19] Stephen Lendman: “Israel’s Discriminatory Land Policies” (2009 Jul 31) Global Research.
    Wikipedia: Israeli land and property laws (last edited 2018 May 23) ~ § 2 Overview.

    [20] UNISPAL: ~ Part II (§ VI).
    Sachar: ~ p 382—386.

    [21] Hagar Shezaf: “Burying the Nakba” (Haaretz, 2019 Jul 05) Portside.

    [22] Wikipedia: Protocol of Sèvres (last edited 2018 Apr 02); United Nations Emergency Force (last edited 2018 May 27).
    Sachar: ~ p 506.

    [23] Wikipedia: Israeli-occupied territories (last edited 2018 May 23).

    [24] Wikipedia: South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000) (last edited 2018 May 30); Israeli-Lebanese conflict (2018 May 23) ~ § 6 Border clashes, assassinations …, § 7 2006 Lebanon War, § 8 Post-2006 war activity, § 9 Israeli incursions into Lebanon.

    [25] Amnesty International: “Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories 2016/2017” (accessed 2017 Oct) Amnesty International.
    Human Rights Watch: “Israel – 50 years of occupation abuses” hrw.org.

    [26] UNRWA: “Palestine refugees” (accessed 2017 Oct 01).
    Wikipedia: Israeli nationality law (last edited 2018 May 27); Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (last edited 2018 Mar 05).

    [27] Ilan Pappe (anti-Zionist Israeli historian): Ten Myths About Israel (Verso, © 2017) ~ chapter 9 ♦ ISBN 978-1-78663-019-3.

    [28] BBC News: “History of Mid-East Peace Talks” (2013 Jul 29).

    [29] Jakob Reimann: “Israel Is an Apartheid State (Even if the UN Report Has Been Withdrawn)” (2017 Mar 31) Foreign Policy Journal.

    [30] Wikipedia: Facts on the ground (last edited 2018 May 18).

    [31] Pappe: ~ chapter 10.
    Seraj Assi: “Is Israel an Apartheid State?” (2017 Apr 07) Foreign Policy Journal.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Pierce.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/10/the-essential-facts-concerning-zionism-and-palestine/feed/ 0 433296     Government Targeting Journalists in Canada https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/07/government-targeting-journalists-in-canada/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/07/government-targeting-journalists-in-canada/#respond Sat, 07 Oct 2023 15:12:48 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=144592 The Trudeau government in Canada is doing the bidding of the World Economic Forum in creating its very own online news registry aimed at “disinformation”. This is code for censorship and control. Canada is also rolling out the Online Safety Act which will protect you from nefarious truth-tellers that speak out against government propaganda.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Redacted.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/07/government-targeting-journalists-in-canada/feed/ 0 432727     Gratitude, Guile, and Guts: September’s Gone, Banned Book Week is Here https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/06/gratitude-guile-and-guts-septembers-gone-banned-book-week-is-here/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/06/gratitude-guile-and-guts-septembers-gone-banned-book-week-is-here/#respond Fri, 06 Oct 2023 23:07:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=144567

    And, so, THAT Anniversary too is on my mind: 22 Years Ago, October 7, 2001, US-NATO Invaded Afghanistan: It Was Presented as “Act of Self Defense.” “America Was Attacked by an ‘Unnamed Foreign Power.'”

    World Water Monitoring Day | Ecovie Water Management

    From silly to serious, these national and international celebration days give pause for serious writers.

    World Suicide Prevention Day - LMFM

    Shoot, here are some powerful dates to remember: 9/5, International Day of Charity; 9/8, International Literacy Day; 9/10, World Suicide Prevention Day; 9/16, International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer; 9/18, World Water Monitoring Day.

    Rapidly changing global context took a new meaning over the past years, hampering the literacy progress and widening inequalities across world regions, countries, and populations.  In low- and middle-income countries, the share of 10-year-old children who could not read and understand a simple text with comprehension has increased from 57 per cent in 2019 to an estimated 70 per cent in 2022.

    In this context, this year’s International Literacy Day will be celebrated worldwide under the theme, ‘Promoting literacy for a world in transition: Building the foundation for sustainable and peaceful societies’.

    Newport Local News Program to Celebrate International Literacy Day - Newport Local News

    It is incumbent upon the reader to check out national and international days,  weeks and months of recognition. Heck, K12 educators could develop  curricula around deep and not-so-deep topics for each month.

    Heck, National Guacamole Day (9/16) might seem like a foodie thing, but in the hands of competent teachers, the details of how the dip is made unravels some seriously environmentally and culturally damaging aspects of the avocado.

    Here comes the downer: Up to 20,000 acres of forest are believed to be cleared yearly to facilitate avocado crops. Water: It takes more than 500 gallons of water to grow only 2 pounds of avocados. Yep, transportation and pesticides add to the negative outcomes of a guacamole dip.

    My adopted country, Mexico, pays the brunt of the avocado farming: Avocado production is valued at $3 billion annually, ahead of Mexico’s beer and tequila industries. That money has attracted the country’s cartels.

    I still have journalist buddies in Juarez and elsewhere covering avocado violence: The thugs’ tactics include “protection fees,” but much worse — cutting down swaths of forest to start their own orchards. Just like the old USA Mafia days, avocado “pickers” have been forced to work at gunpoint for no pay. Trucks full of avocados have been robbed and hijacked.

    Cartels even use government databases to find, extort, and kidnap avocado farmers. In some instances, cartels directly take over the farming lands, becoming ‘informal owners’ of the fields or installing avocado orchards on protected woodlands. They ensure they get their share of a thriving industry using force, intimidation, and violence.

    When I was teaching college in El Paso,  we adopted a systems thinking approaches to topics. We looked at redistributive justice programs, and restorative conservation. We studied embedded/embodied energy and the  impact of consumer goods and services. We did cradle to grave (life cycle) analyses.

    For every great idea, there are a dozen or hundreds of negative/bad consequences.

    That was September, but now we’re in October? Banning, and, in some sense, book burning, if you consider being de-platformed and demonetized on the Internet. But here, from my days as a writing and literature instructor in Oregon, Washington, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico:

    The American Library Association has tracked attempts to ban or restrict access to books across the United States and “to inform the public about censorship efforts in our libraries and schools.”

    Last year the ALA, documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.. Of the titles entered into this report, the majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community or by and about Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.

    Or head over to the Project Censored, and you will understand another form of “censoring” and “banning” of stories that should be at the forefront of our critical debates about our society, our world.

    Banned in the USA: Banned Books Week Celebrates its 40th Anniversary as Book Bans and Challenges to Academic Freedom Surge = Link

    • -Betsy Gomez is coordinator for the Banned Books Week Coalition.
    • -Cameron Samuels is a recent high school graduate and activist from the Katy Independent School District near Houston, Texas. Cameron was named the Youth Honorary Chair of Banned Books Week (the first time the title has been awarded) for actively opposing book banning in the District as a student there.
    • -Jordan Smith is the digital editor at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
    • -Nico Perrino is Executive Vice-President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, an organization specializing in protecting academic freedom.

    That’s where I also take my students – projectcensored (dot) org. The Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2012-2022 actually threads through how broken our reprehensive and participatory democracy is.

    Take a look at the ALA’s list of challenged and cancelled books, and then go to Project Censored:

    • Federal Safety Agency Underreports Deaths of Offshore Oil and Gas Workers;
    • Injustice for Incarcerated Women in Maryland after State Defunds Prerelease Facility;
    • School-Issued Technology Poses ;
    • Surveillance Risks for Students;
    • Facebook’s Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” Stifles Public Debate;
    • Concerns for Journalistic Independence as Gates Foundation Gives $319 Million to News Outlets.

    The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. The Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 have been selected from several hundred candidate stories submitted by 207 student researchers from ten US college and university campuses.

    You’re  biting at the bit to get into stories that were reported by valiant and intrepid reporters at less well known, or so-called alternative media sites, to discover what we need to know about our democracy, our world.

    Are you willing to let (sic) educators broach these topics in the school system, i.e. 6-12 classes?

    Do your own biases and contexts hold you back from allowing for more critical looks at the world around you?

    While the banned books week (Oct. 1-7) is worthy of discussing with your friends and family and children, getting deeper in your lives beyond  your “news” feeds and posts on social media platforms is paramount in making wise decisions based on knowledge and points of view.

    In Portland, where I worked for years as educator and social worker, I went to a Peace Park near the Lloyd Center. It’s almost hidden, not a high profile site. But what I gathered from my visits was a reminder of another sort of banning. My friend, a US Air Force combat veteran friend, Rusty Nelson, spoke about peace and alternative ways to serve one’s country at a Spokane high school graduation ceremony.

    His message was one of peace and asking students who were graduating to look deeper into the role of the military and politicians in exporting harm to the world, as well as bringing back that harm to the US in the form of damaged soldiers.

    In Portland, I worked with soldiers, veterans, many of them homeless and struggling through substance abuse. Their problems occurred through in many cases bad leadership in boot camp. All my female clients had been sexually assaulted by their own soldiers, in the USA and sometimes in combat areas.

    As a substitute teacher, here in Lincoln County, I too have felt the knife of banishment. I was asked to leave a class I was teaching when students asked about drug abuse, homelessness, and their role in understanding themes in the books I was directed to help them with – Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm.

    Banning, disenfranchisement, ghosting, gas-lighting, marginalizing, manipulating facts, being found guilty without a fair hearing or airing of a situation, those are also the Scarlet Letter moments in this supposed free and open society.

    I have to say to Rusty, who was permanently banned from the Spokane School system as an expert and active member of Spokane’s justice community, “Peace out, brother.” He and his wife started the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane. Here are comments he made in 2016:

    “Be creative, kind, considerate. Be involved, outspoken, radical, subversive. Stop worrying about where your next dollar is coming from, and be concerned about where your neighbor’s next breath of fresh air and drink of clean water are coming from, where your child’s next raft of information is coming from, where your next tax dollar is going, your next consumer dollar. Make your needs known to your local officials and be tenacious.”

    My older stuff at the Newport News Times: Banning books: An American tradition that should be stopped

    Freedom of the press means having a press in the first place

    Haeder, Paul, Newport News Times.

    *****

    Finally, you will hear nothing in the Mainstream Mush and Muddling and Murdering Press about this reality – Oct. 7, 2001.

    Freedom to Lie Press. Here, reality. A Day of Infamy (many many of those for all the countries bombed, invaded, couped, sanctioned by the U$A)!

    The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade Afghanistan was that the September 11 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, and that consequently “the laws of war” apply, allowing the nation under attack, to strike back in the name of “self-defense”.

    The “Global War on Terrorism” was officially launched by the Bush administration on September 11, 2001. On the following morning (September 12, 2001), NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, adopted the following resolution:

    “if it is determined that the [September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added)

    In this regard, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stipulates that if:

    “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” (NATO, What is Article 5,  NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added; October 7, 2001. Afghanistan was invaded under the doctrine of “self-defense”)


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/06/gratitude-guile-and-guts-septembers-gone-banned-book-week-is-here/feed/ 0 432599 Renowned HK actor laments China’s censorship hurts creativity https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hk-actor-censorship-10062023061514.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hk-actor-censorship-10062023061514.html#respond Fri, 06 Oct 2023 10:21:16 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hk-actor-censorship-10062023061514.html Hong Kong film legend Chow Yun-fat has conceded that the city’s film industry – on the decline from its heyday – has no freedom, and creativity was at the mercy of China’s censorship requirements. 

    A movie script is subject to multiple departments and layers of approval, Chow told the press at South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival on Thursday.

    “We have a lot of restrictions now. It is very difficult for Hong Kong filmmakers. But we will try our best to make movies with the Hong Kong spirit. This is our goal.”

    Chow is the first prominent figure in the industry to speak out publicly against the Chinese film approval system. He was named Asian Filmmaker of the Year at the Busan festival.

    Once the trend setter in Asian entertainment and films, way before South Korea’s K-pop and movies grabbed the world’s attention, the Hong Kong film industry is dying a slow death, battling first with piracy and then competition from capital-rich China which has lured some of its best talent. 

    At the same time, Beijing’s tightened controls on free speech and expression have crimped creativity, as most, if not all, productions depended on investments from China and for a commercial release in the world’s second-largest economy.

    Hong Kong’s box office receipts in the first half of this year totaled HK$771.9 million (US$98.56 million), according to the Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association. The figure is less than 3% of the 26.3 billion yuan (US$3.7 billion) that Chinese cinemas have raked in for the six-month period, based on data from the China Film Administration. 

    “Somehow, up to 1997 … a lot of different things changed,” Chow said. “We have to pay attention to our government, the direction, where we have to go. You know, this is important. Otherwise, it’d be very hard to get the money to build up a story and shoot the movie. Because the mainland China market is so huge, so we are trying [out] some solutions – to make a living.”

    No ghosts or dirty cops

    In the 20 years since the Mainland Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership (CEPA) was signed, the Hong Kong-China model in filmmaking has become a mainstay, which means the script also has to be vetted by the Chinese authorities before filming can commence.

    Tin Kai Man, chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers told Radio Free Asia that joint productions inevitably need to meet “national conditions” – no sex, ghosts and monsters, as well as dirty cops content – in order to be released in China.

    “Hong Kong [authorities] wouldn’t kill your movies, or ban them. At most, they’d ask for certain cuts to be made. The Chinese system is different. If you want to make a film, you need to first finish the script, get approval to film, and then submit to the China Film Administration to vet, to obtain the so-called dragon seal,” Tin said.

    Meanwhile, actor Chow said every film market has its golden age. The 1980s and 1990s are touted as the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, and Chow said the spotlight is now on Korean films – South Korea not only has the creative freedom that his city lacks, but the movies are also recognized by Hollywood.

    “Why Korean shows are good is because the range of the topics is huge. Perhaps because of the [Korean] government’s support and the wide freedom, the thinking of creators is broad,” he said. “I’m surprised at so many themes – woah, they are brave to make such films. I think they have unlimited imagination, strong creativity. The films are good; I’m happy and excited about them.”

    Chow entered the industry in 1973. He first found fame in television in the 1970s and 1980s, before moving on to the big screen. Over the past 50 years, he has created many classic films, which helped propel Hong Kong to the status of Asia’s Hollywood. He also successfully broke into Hollywood with a number of films like “Anna and the King,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

    Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Cantonese.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hk-actor-censorship-10062023061514.html/feed/ 0 432359     The Rising Political Battle over Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/03/the-rising-political-battle-over-censorship-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/03/the-rising-political-battle-over-censorship-2/#respond Tue, 03 Oct 2023 14:00:55 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=144492
    In the land of the free and the home of the brave, a wave in the politically charged battle for intellectual freedom has peaked once more. Censorship threatens to silence underrepresented communities nationwide, encompassing LGBTQ+ youth, marginalized racial and ethnic groups, and many other facets of social identity. In academic spaces from coast to coast, the increasingly politicized, rising tide of book bans and challenges is washing away voices that need to be heard.

    Imagine striving to understand your place in the world as a 16-year-old queer student in today’s America. The journey of self-discovery is challenging enough without the additional burden of denied access to literature that reflects your experiences. Yet, this is the reality that many young people face as a growing number of states and school districts ban books that explore themes related to LGBTQ+ identities, racial diversity, gender equality, and the list continues.

    For me and my peers, books are not just stories; they are lifelines. Literature provides us with solace, understanding, and a sense of belonging to a world where our voices matter. When narratives that represent the experiences of underprivileged and underrepresented communities are silenced, the message is clear: your experiences and identity are not valid, and your voice does not matter.

    The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom’s latest report shows that the most recent bans on books strike a deeply troubling chord. It is alarming how these banned books overwhelmingly represent the challenges and lives of underprivileged, underrepresented groups. In the eyes of those imposing these bans, any ideas or identity that doesn’t fit the mold of a perfect white heteronormative America should be denied to our youth.

    Recent years have seen Texas leading the nation on this front, with challenges and book bans increasing significantly. In 2023 alone, the rate nearly doubled, and the year has yet to conclude. These bans are not occurring in isolation but are fueled by organized groups, including one that was recently categorized as an extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    This is only one of the more organized groups that constantly try to trump the rights of students and youth across the nation in the name of “parental rights.” However, their day of reckoning is soon approaching because students have rights, too, and deserve better. As more and more groups like Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) call out this students’ rights crisis and work with legislators to combat these issues, a powerful movement is emerging.

    One leader can ignite a movement in their community, but it is not enough for one voice to rise against this tide. We need a chorus of voices, united in our determination to protect intellectual freedom and diversity of thought. It is time to reject the stifling influence of politics on our education system. We must demand that our schools remain spaces where all voices are heard, and all stories are valued, not where fear and politics supersede our rights.

    Whether you are a student, adult ally, policy maker, teacher, librarian, or anything in between or beyond, you can make a difference:

    1. Stay Informed: Educate yourself about the issues at hand. Understand what books are commonly banned, where, and why. Stay updated on the actions of groups advocating for censorship.
    2. Advocate: Attend school board meetings, engage with local policymakers, and use your voice to advocate for the inclusion of diverse perspectives in education.
    3. Support Affected Communities: Offer your support to marginalized communities, including LGBTQ+ youth, racial and ethnic minorities, and others who are disproportionately affected. Amplify their voices and stories.
    4. Join or Support Organizations: Engage with SEAT and other groups actively working to combat censorship and promote intellectual freedom.
    5. Engage Youth: If you are an adult ally, engage with young people. Listen to their concerns, empower them to speak out, and provide guidance and support in their advocacy efforts.
    6. Encourage Open Dialogue: Foster open dialogue in your communities about the importance of intellectual freedom and the value of diverse literature.
    7. Vote: Use your voting power to support candidates who prioritize education and intellectual freedom.

    In the face of this escalating battle for intellectual freedom, the call to action is clear. The rising tide of politically driven book bans and censorship threatens the very core of our imperfect educational system and the values we hold dear. Book bans are a threat to the voices of underprivileged and underrepresented communities of all backgrounds who deserve to see themselves reflected in the literature they read.

    Our response to this challenge must be resolute and unwavering. Let our rallying cry be clear: censorship has no place in our classrooms, and we stand united to protect the right to learn and the freedom to explore diverse ideas. The battle is ongoing, but with the growing coalition of advocates, educators, and students, we can turn the tide.

    Together, we can ensure that our future generations inherit a society that values humanity, acceptance, and understanding above all else. Let us march forward, hand in hand, knowing that our collective efforts will bring about the change we seek. In unity and mutual aid, we shall prevail against the forces of censorship, for the sake of a more inclusive, empathetic, and enlightened future.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Da’Taeveyon Daniels.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/03/the-rising-political-battle-over-censorship-2/feed/ 0 431599     Cancel culture? Trans-inclusive writers say they face abuse and censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/cancel-culture-trans-inclusive-writers-say-they-face-abuse-and-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/cancel-culture-trans-inclusive-writers-say-they-face-abuse-and-censorship/#respond Thu, 28 Sep 2023 08:58:21 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/anti-trans-views-academia-kathleen-stock-sussex-university-brian-leiter/
    This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Sasha Baker.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/cancel-culture-trans-inclusive-writers-say-they-face-abuse-and-censorship/feed/ 0 430390     Cancel culture? Trans-inclusive writers say they face abuse and censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/cancel-culture-trans-inclusive-writers-say-they-face-abuse-and-censorship-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/cancel-culture-trans-inclusive-writers-say-they-face-abuse-and-censorship-2/#respond Thu, 28 Sep 2023 08:58:21 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/anti-trans-views-academia-kathleen-stock-sussex-university/
    This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Sasha Baker.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/cancel-culture-trans-inclusive-writers-say-they-face-abuse-and-censorship-2/feed/ 0 430722     The Rising Political Battle Over Censorship: https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/the-rising-political-battle-over-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/the-rising-political-battle-over-censorship/#respond Thu, 28 Sep 2023 02:42:58 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=33182 Da’Taeveyon Daniels, Youth Honorary Chair, Banned Books Week, 2023 Special Guest Writer for Project Censored’s Dispatches on Media and Politics In the land of the free and the home of…

    The post The Rising Political Battle Over Censorship: appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/28/the-rising-political-battle-over-censorship/feed/ 0 430317     PNG’s Chief Censor warns over ‘fake nudes’ harassment of young girls https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/25/pngs-chief-censor-warns-over-fake-nudes-harassment-of-young-girls/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/25/pngs-chief-censor-warns-over-fake-nudes-harassment-of-young-girls/#respond Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:47:58 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=93585 By Marjorie Finkeo in Port Moresby

    The rise in social media platforms uploading naked pictures of women and girls has come to the attention of the Censorship Board in Papua New Guinea with Chief Censor Jim Abani warning about the dangers.

    In what many have termed as cyber bullying, a picture of women or girls uploaded on social media is then downloaded by other people who use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in creating new content like images and videos of the women or girls involved in sexual activities, including being naked and also involved in pornography.

    Chief Censor Abani said his office had received many complaints regarding GAI in creating new content like images and videos of recent reported cases, including uploading of nude images of females on social media.

    He said it was disrespectful and a “disgrace to our mothers and sisters”.

    More than 20 girls in Spain reported receiving AI-generated naked images of themselves in a controversy that has been widely reported globally.

    When they returned to school after the summer holidays, more than 20 girls from Almendralejo, a town in southern Spain, received naked photos of themselves on their mobile phones.

    Chief Censor Abani said the increase of using new and advanced technology features was alarming for a young and developing country such as PNG.

    “We are talking about embracing communication and connective and empowering economy but also the high risks and dangers of wellbeing is my concern, Chief Censor Abani said.

    “I call on those sick minded or evil minded people to stop and do something useful and contribute meaningful to nation building.

    New Facebook trend
    “This is a new trend with Facebook users in the country on social media platforms increasing with unimaginable ways of discriminating and harassment using fake names to post images — particularly of young females — that are not suitable for public consumption or viewing,” he said.

    He said he was calling on all relevant agencies to come together, including the Censorship Office, to start implementing some policies and regulations to address these
    issues.

    Chief Censor Abani said people were unaware of dangers — “particularly our female users of social media platforms”.

    These acts were without the individuals’ consent and knowledge using Generative AI applications.

    “Technology is good but we must use wisely and being responsible in using such information that is provided,” he said.

    He said the Censorship Office would work closely with Department ICT, DATACO and NICTA, police cybercrime unit to use the Cybercrime Code Act to punish perpetrators while waiting for the Censorship Act to finalise a review and amendments.

    Marjorie Finkeo is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/25/pngs-chief-censor-warns-over-fake-nudes-harassment-of-young-girls/feed/ 0 429747     Mr. Mike’s Mondo Imbroglio or How Not to Launch a Global Anti-Censorship Movement https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/22/mr-mikes-mondo-imbroglio-or-how-not-to-launch-a-global-anti-censorship-movement/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/22/mr-mikes-mondo-imbroglio-or-how-not-to-launch-a-global-anti-censorship-movement/#respond Fri, 22 Sep 2023 02:47:12 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=144103 So, I’ve been excommunicated from Michael Shellenberger’s global anti-censorship movement. It’s my own fault. I was sowing dissension. I engaged in harmful speech in the group chat. I was making people feel uncomfortable. I was not playing ball. I was not with the program.

    The program, as you may recall, was launched in Westminster, London, in June, when Mike and Matt Taibbi and Russell Brand exposed the Censorship Industrial Complex …

    … for 35 pounds sterling a head.

    My readers may recall this piece I published about the secret gathering of journalists, authors, artists, academics, and activists that took place after that public event. I couldn’t say too much about it at the time, as we were operating under strict OPSEC protocols, and had taken oaths of silence, and so on, which, being excommunicated, I am no longer bound by. I’m still going to be a little cagey, however, as there are a lot of people involved in Mike’s movement who I like and respect, and I don’t want to harm them with my dissension-sowing any more than necessary.

    Also, before I make fun of Mike, and share my somewhat more serious thoughts about how not to launch “a free-speech movement,” I want to make it clear that I still support this campaign, and any other anti-censorship campaign, regardless of how flawed or supercilious it may be.

    All right, let’s get down to it, shall we?

    Mike’s movement is preparing to publish a declaration. It’s a good declaration. I contributed to it. I signed it, although my name will not appear on it now, as Mike has threatened to remove it if I published a piece like this. Mike is an extremely smart guy, but he doesn’t seem to get that I don’t respond well to threats … or, rather, that this is how I respond to threats. Or, who knows? Maybe he actually wanted me to publish this piece, and goaded me into it, which, I can see how that could be a shrewd PR move.

    In any event, it’s a good declaration (or it was the last time I had access to it). There is nothing wrong with the declaration. What has taken up most of the last three months of the coalition’s time and energy, and has led to my excommunication, is the hunt for Very Important Persons to be included as signatories when the declaration is released.

    Apparently, the way it works with such declarations and “open letters,” and so on, is that you write up your declaration or letter and then you try to get selected big shots to sign it in order to make it look more impressive to … well, whoever you’re trying to impress. The character of your big-shot signatories is critical, because the media, and “the court of public opinion,” and your potential major philanthropic backers, are going to judge you by the company you keep.

    Mike’s anti-censorship coalition has been carrying out this process by “consensus,” under the watchful eye and firm hand of Mike. Mike is not the “leader” of this coalition, which is totally leaderless and democratic, of course. He is just the “facilitator,” who explains the objectives, makes the final decisions, polices people’s speech, and excommunicates suppressive persons whose dissension-sowing threatens to disrupt the “atmosphere of mutual respect” that Mike feels he needs to “maintain” in the group chat.

    Yes, Mike has a little control-freak problem. Many non-leader leaders of “movements” do. If you’ve ever been involved in political activism, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, count your blessings.

    Anyway, the Hunt for VIP Signatories has been awkward, due to (a) the need to maintain the appearance of “decision-by-consensus” in the coalition’s totally non-hierarchical group chat, (b) concern among various coalition members about including “divisive” VIPs, and (c) Mike’s behind-the-scenes machinations.

    For example, at one point, I offered to contact one of the only VIPs I know to ask him for help with further VIP outreach. Mike jumped into the chat and quashed that idea, as I had made it clear that I was not willing to try to dictate to this Very Important Person who he should and shouldn’t reach out to for us. Days or weeks later — I can’t remember exactly — one of Mike’s employees wrote to me sub rosa and gave me the secret go-ahead from Mike. So, I reached out to this VIP, who then reached out to some other VIPs, many of whom were happy to sign, and some of whom offered to help with further outreach.

    Panic broke out at Coalition HQ. Some of the Very Important Persons that my Very Important Person had invited were potentially Divisive Persons, who hadn’t been vetted by consensus on the coalition’s VIP-vetting spreadsheet. (I kid you not, there’s an actual spreadsheet.) So, I was asked to reach out to my VIP and instruct him to cease and desist with further outreach before he reached out to further Divisive Persons, who might reach out to further Divisive Persons, at which point, everything might spin out of control! Needless to say, I declined to do that.

    If you’re wondering about exactly who qualifies as a “Divisive Person” in the coalition … well, certainly not Very Important Persons like Richard Dawkins, who in 2021 compared folks who “refused” the Covid “vaccines” to “faith-heads releasing rattlesnakes in supermarkets”…

    But later admitted that “mistakes may have been made”

    Or fanatical New Normalist Slavoj Žižek …

    You can watch Slavoj getting extremely worked up in support of Covid “vaccine” mandates, and mocking people who care about “silly” things like their personal bodily autonomy, with Briahna Joy Gray in 2021, if you think you have the stomach for it …


    VIPs like Dawkins and Žižek are not “divisive.” They are very important A-list persons who are committed to universal human rights, and freedom of speech, and all that kind of stuff, unless, of course, the authorities announce that they need to go full-blown totalitarian and lock down and segregate and censor everyone because of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate, in which case, you know, “Sieg fucking Heil!”

    Russell Brand, however, is definitely “divisive.” You remember Russell Brand from that poster above advertising the big event in London, don’t you? Here’s our friend Russell Brand today …

    The Russell-Brand-cancellation op was what sealed my fate with Mike’s free speech movement. I had been holding my nose for quite a while — for example, I never opposed having people like Dawkins and Žižek on the signatories list, as I understood the PR logic — and I was praying that none of the coalition members would bring up “the revelations” (as one of them put it), but the odds of that not happening were poor. Sure enough, someone brought Brand up, and someone checked, and he had been asked to sign on, but as of Saturday he hadn’t responded, at least not according to the VIP-vetting spreadsheet. So that was obviously a huge relief. However, what if he responded now (i.e., post-“revelations”) and wanted to sign? Should he still be allowed to? A “risk assessment” was suggested.

    And, OK, I got a little snarky and proposed that we skip the “risk assessment” and all the other PR-strategizing bullshit and just uphold the principles we are claiming to defend.

    Whereupon Mike Shellenberger needed to reach me, urgently, presumably to shout at me and threaten me again. I’d had an earlier such phone call from Mike, when I criticized his sucking up to Elon Musk and suggested that it made us look not quite neutral. Mike called me at home, apoplectic, that time, and threatened to kick me out of the club if I didn’t toe the line, which I found sort of funny, and a bit disturbing, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I have known a lot of control freaks in my day. And Mike has done, and is still doing, a lot of great work. And we all have our character flaws, don’t we?

    Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for another screaming, threatening conversation with Mike, as I was still at my friend’s converted monastery in Italy, and I finally had a peaceful day to myself. (The Italian workmen who are jackhammering big holes in the monastery walls don’t work on the weekends.) I decided I would call him back later.

    Next thing I knew, I was excommunicated.

    I’m not a professional movement builder, but I’m pretty sure this is not how you do it. I don’t mean my excommunication. I mean the suffocating top-down micromanagement, and the PR-strategizing, and the VIP-idolatry, and the paranoia about alienating mainstream people who are going to be alienated anyway, regardless of how many Hollywood celebrities and Harvard professors you dangle in their faces. The simple fact is, playing by the rules of the system and the “reality” you claim to be opposing a recipe for failure. Or, worse than failure, a diversion, the simulation of success. Which is where I’m afraid Mike’s “movement” is headed.

    Movements are not PR campaigns. Yes, of course, some PR is involved, but the masses are not your employees. And they aren’t CGI extras in your narcissistic movie. They are actual living, breathing people, people who do not need us to lead them. Basically, the masses don’t give a shit what Richard Dawkins and Slavoj Žižek endorse. The editors of “respected” publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times give a shit, but the masses don’t give a shit about them. If you are going to “build a movement” to oppose the Censorship Industrial Complex (which Mike claims he wants to do), at some point, you’re going to have to alienate some of your friends and colleagues in NormalWorld and get your hands dirty and connect with the masses, or the “people that no one has ever heard of,” as Mike calls them.

    The people that no one has ever heard of are not stupid. They know the difference between a serious anti-censorship campaign and a vanity project. There’s still time for Mike to turn this thing around, let go of the reins, stop sucking up to the mainstream establishment, and reach out to the masses. Honestly, I hope he will. I wish him and the London gang success. There are millions of people out there who would get on board with a grassroots campaign opposing the Censorship Industrial Complex, but, to get them on board, you have to let go of the wheel and let them steer the ship.

    The irony is, when you’re “building a movement,” when you know you are succeeding is when you lose control of it, when the movement doesn’t need you to “lead” it, when it starts moving in directions you never imagined and starts doing things you never intended. But you can’t get there if you suffocate it in its infancy, if you are so obsessed with maintaining control that you snuff out every idea and impulse that doesn’t conform to your vision of it.

    Mike means well. He’s got a good heart. And he’s a fighter. All of which I respect. I hope he can learn that lesson, quickly. Perhaps the thing he has set in motion will teach it to him as things progress. We could certainly do with an actual global grassroots anti-censorship movement. I hope Mike and the gang can unclench their anal sphincters a bit and help get us there.

    Oh, and regarding Russell Brand. I don’t know Russell Brand. I have absolutely no idea what he has or hasn’t done. Neither do you, probably. Which is not the point. The point is the current global-capitalist crackdown on dissent, which is in full-swing. Russell Brand is just the latest head on a spike, alongside the heads of Assange, Snowden, Trump, Corbyn, Carlson, et al. They are greasing up a spike for Bobby Kennedy’s head, and the head of anyone else who challenges them, even people that no one has ever heard of, like me.

    I think Max Blumenthal made the point succinctly …

    … but, you know, Max is a Russian-sponsored, Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Trump-loving, transphobic, anti-Semitic Jew, who raped his neighbor’s hamster … or whatever. But then, who among us isn’t, these days?


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/22/mr-mikes-mondo-imbroglio-or-how-not-to-launch-a-global-anti-censorship-movement/feed/ 0 429001     China And Russia Are Cooperating Intensely On How To Do Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/13/china-and-russia-are-cooperating-intensely-on-how-to-do-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/13/china-and-russia-are-cooperating-intensely-on-how-to-do-censorship/#respond Wed, 13 Sep 2023 13:00:22 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=ed092c247c2e7a426553ddef779a8d0d
    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/13/china-and-russia-are-cooperating-intensely-on-how-to-do-censorship/feed/ 0 426859     Meta Overhauls Controversial “Dangerous Organizations” Censorship Policy https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/30/meta-overhauls-controversial-dangerous-organizations-censorship-policy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/30/meta-overhauls-controversial-dangerous-organizations-censorship-policy/#respond Wed, 30 Aug 2023 16:32:15 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=442999

    The social media giant Meta recently updated the rulebook it uses to censor online discussion of people and groups it deems “dangerous,” according to internal materials obtained by The Intercept. The policy had come under fire in the past for casting an overly wide net that ended up removing legitimate, nonviolent content.

    The goal of the change is to remove less of this material. In updating the policy, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also made an internal admission that the policy has censored speech beyond what the company intended.

    Meta’s “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals,” or DOI, policy is based around a secret blacklist of thousands of people and groups, spanning everything from terrorists and drug cartels to rebel armies and musical acts. For years, the policy prohibited the more than one billion people using Facebook and Instagram from engaging in “praise, support or representation” of anyone on the list.

    Now, Meta will provide a greater allowance for discussion of these banned people and groups — so long as it takes place in the context of “social and political discourse,” according to the updated policy, which also replaces the blanket prohibition against “praise” of blacklisted entities with a new ban on “glorification” of them.

    The updated policy language has been distributed internally, but Meta has yet to disclose it publicly beyond a mention of the “social and political discourse” exception on the community standards page. Blacklisted people and organizations are still banned from having an official presence on Meta’s platforms.

    The revision follows years of criticism of the policy. Last year, a third-party audit commissioned by Meta found the company’s censorship rules systematically violated the human rights of Palestinians by stifling political speech, and singled out the DOI policy. The new changes, however, leave major problems unresolved, experts told The Intercept. The “glorification” adjustment, for instance, is well intentioned but likely to suffer from the same ambiguity that created issues with the “praise” standard.

    “Changing the DOI policy is a step in the right direction, one that digital rights defenders and civil society globally have been requesting for a long time,” Mona Shtaya, nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told The Intercept.

    Observers like Shtaya have long objected to how the DOI policy has tended to disproportionately censor political discourse in places like Palestine — where discussing a Meta-banned organization like Hamas is unavoidable — in contrast to how Meta rapidly adjusted its rules to allow praise of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion despite its neo-Nazi sympathies.

    “The recent edits illustrate that Meta acknowledges the participation of certain DOI members in elections,” Shtaya said. “However, it still bars them from its platforms, which can significantly impact political discourse in these countries and potentially hinder citizens’ equal and free interaction with various political campaigns.”

    Acknowledged Failings

    Meta has long maintained the original DOI policy is intended to curtail the ability of terrorists and other violent extremists from causing real-world harm. Content moderation scholars and free expression advocates, however, maintain that the way the policy operates in practice creates a tendency to indiscriminately swallow up and delete entirely nonviolent speech. (Meta declined to comment for this story.)

    In the new internal language, Meta acknowledged the failings of its rigid approach and said the company is attempting to improve the rule. “A catch-all policy approach helped us remove any praise of designated entities and individuals on the platform,” read an internal memo announcing the change. “However, this approach also removes social and political discourse and causes enforcement challenges.”

    Meta’s proposed solution is “recategorizing the definition of ‘Praise’ into two areas: ‘References to a DOI,’ and ‘Glorification of DOIs.’ These fundamentally different types of content should be treated differently.” Mere “references” to a terrorist group or cartel kingpin will be permitted so long as they fall into one of 11 new categories of discourse Meta deems acceptable:

    Elections, Parliamentary and executive functions, Peace and Conflict Resolution (truce/ceasefire/peace agreements), International agreements or treaties, Disaster response and humanitarian relief, Human Rights and humanitarian discourse, Local community services, Neutral and informative descriptions of DOI activity or behavior, News reporting, Condemnation and criticism, Satire and humor.

    Posters will still face strict requirements to avoid running afoul of the policy, even if they’re attempting to participate in one of the above categories. To stay online, any Facebook or Instagram posts mentioning banned groups and people must “explicitly mention” one of the permissible contexts or face deletion. The memo says “the onus is on the user to prove” that they’re fitting into one of the 11 acceptable categories.

    According to Shtaya, the Tahrir Institute fellow, the revised approach continues to put Meta’s users at the mercy of a deeply flawed system. She said, “Meta’s approach places the burden of content moderation on its users, who are neither language experts nor historians.”

    Unclear Guidance

    Instagram and Facebook users will still have to hope their words aren’t interpreted by Meta’s outsourced legion of overworked, poorly paid moderators as “glorification.” The term is defined internally in almost exactly the same language as its predecessor, “praise”: “Legitimizing or defending violent or hateful acts by claiming that those acts or any type of harm resulting from them have a moral, political, logical, or other justification that makes them appear acceptable or reasonable.” Another section defines glorification as any content that “justifies or amplifies” the “hateful or violent” beliefs or actions of a banned entity, or describes them as “effective, legitimate or defensible.”

    Though Meta intends this language to be universal, equitably and accurately applying labels as subjective as “legitimate” or “hateful” to the entirety of global online discourse has proven impossible to date.

    “Replacing ‘praise’ with ‘glorification’ does little to change the vagueness inherent to each term,” according to Ángel Díaz, a professor at University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law and a scholar of social media content policy. “The policy still overburdens legitimate discourse.”

    “Replacing ‘praise’ with ‘glorification’ does little to change the vagueness inherent to each term. The policy still overburdens legitimate discourse.”

    The notions of “legitimization” or “justification” are deeply complex, philosophical matters that would be difficult to address by anyone, let alone a contractor responsible for making hundreds of judgments each day.

    The revision does little to address the heavily racialized way in which Meta assesses and attempts to thwart dangerous groups, Díaz added. While the company still refuses to disclose the blacklist or how entries are added to it, The Intercept published a full copy in 2021. The document revealed that the overwhelming majority of the “Tier 1” dangerous people and groups — who are still subject to the harshest speech restrictions under the new policy — are Muslim, Arab, or South Asian. White, American militant groups, meanwhile, are overrepresented in the far more lenient “Tier 3” category.

    Díaz said, “Tier 3 groups, which appear to be largely made up of right-wing militia groups or conspiracy networks like QAnon, are not subject to bans on glorification.”

    Meta’s own internal rulebook seems unclear about how enforcement is supposed to work, seemingly still dogged by the same inconsistencies and self-contradictions that have muddled its implementation for years.

    For instance, the rule permits “analysis and commentary” about a banned group, but a hypothetical post arguing that the September 11 attacks would not have happened absent U.S. aggression abroad is considered a form of glorification, presumably of Al Qaeda, and should be deleted, according to one example provided in the policy materials. Though one might vehemently disagree with that premise, it’s difficult to claim it’s not a form of analysis and commentary.

    Another hypothetical post in the internal language says, in response to Taliban territorial gains in the Afghanistan war, “I think it’s time the U.S. government started reassessing their strategy in Afghanistan.” The post, the rule says, should be labeled as nonviolating, despite what appears to be a clear-cut characterization of the banned group’s actions as “effective.”

    David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept these examples illustrate how difficult it will be to consistently enforce the new policy. “They run through a ton of scenarios,” Greene said, “but for me it’s hard to see a through-line in them that indicates generally applicable principles.”

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    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/30/meta-overhauls-controversial-dangerous-organizations-censorship-policy/feed/ 0 423926 Censorship Has Never Been Worse at Guantánamo Bay https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/27/censorship-has-never-been-worse-at-guantanamo-bay/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/27/censorship-has-never-been-worse-at-guantanamo-bay/#respond Sun, 27 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=442449

    The rocky cliffs of Cuba split the ocean from the sky as our flight descended toward the tarmac at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. It was a clear afternoon in late June, and the first thing we were told before boarding the flight from Joint Base Andrews was not to photograph from the tarmac or plane. It was the start of a week at America’s most notorious military base, where absurd restrictions would dictate what I, and other journalists, could and could not see.

    One misconception about Guantánamo was cleared up before I ever got off the plane. In my mind, everything was the prison. For so long, I associated this place with concertina wire, guard towers, and orange-clad anonymous detainees. In recent years, I’d reported on some of those same detainees, now liberated, and I learned that my prejudices and fears about the vast majority of these men had been unfounded. They welcomed me into the community of brotherhood they had forged, and I was now visiting the place where so much of their lives had been stolen. I pressed my face to the window to see the prison where people I consider friends were tortured.

    From the air, I saw security posts along what seemed to be the perimeter of the base, but it obviously wasn’t the prison. “Where the fuck is it?” I thought with increasingly desperate glances out the window of the mostly empty chartered flight. I had a three-seat row to myself, television screens, pillows, blankets, and a full in-flight lunch service. Hundreds of Muslim men had arrived by air decades before to this very airstrip, beaten, shackled, hooded, and pissing all over themselves.

    “Just landed,” I texted Mohamedou Ould Salahi on my T-Mobile burner smartphone. “It’s Swain.” A few hours later, Salahi, or “The Mauritanian,” shot back, “Hi. Did they put you in prison?”

    I soon learned that just about anything with photojournalistic value was off limits. As Guantánamo has aged, a shift has occurred in what the military wants journalists to cover. Under the current rules, members of the media are brought here to focus on the military commission proceedings at “Camp Justice,” where a very large, very cold, and very classified courtroom has been constructed to deal with the few remaining detainees who were ever charged with decades-old crimes against the United States. Press access to anything outside the court is described as a “courtesy” and subject to arbitrary restrictions.

    An American flag flies at the Office of Military Commissions building in Guantánamo Bay on June 27, 2023.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    Salahi, my unofficial tour guide, had always been hooded when taken outside the prison. He had accurately predicted the first day of my trip that my military handler would placate us with little tourist excursions to various parts of the bay, as if we had sailed in on a Disney cruise. “They want you to see McDonald’s and, like, the beach. That’s not where the detainees were held,” he said as we passed voice notes back and forth. “[It’s where] the detainees were held [that] you need to take photos of.”

    Over the course of my visit, I checked in with at least five former detainees who collectively spent lifetimes imprisoned here. Most didn’t know about the novel media restrictions. “Did you go to Camp Echo?” Yemeni Sabri al-Qurashi texted me from Kazakhstan. Al-Qurashi has always maintained that he was arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. After 12 years at Guantánamo, he was relocated to a country that has continued to treat him like a “terrorist” and where he has not been granted asylum, despite assurances from the State Department that he would be treated well.

    “Ask them to see Camp Delta 2, 3, 4, and Camp 5, and Camp Echo, and Camp 6, and Camp Platinum,” Salahi urged from his new home in Amsterdam.

    “You can take pictures of the detainees, but not the face,” said Sufiyan Barhoumi, who was eligible for release from Guantánamo under the Obama administration after all charges against him were dropped but had to wait five more years because Donald Trump halted transfers. He has been struggling to adjust to life as a free man back home in Algeria since April 2022.

    “Take pictures of what you can!”

    Iguanas fight at the Navy Gateway Inns and Suites hotel.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    As recently as 2018, reporters and photographers were allowed into the prison itself. Now, though, media isn’t brought anywhere close to the permanent prison complex that houses the remaining 30 detainees. I was informed that members of the media would not be allowed to photograph even the old Camp X-Ray, the long-abandoned outdoor prison that held the very first detainees. I was shocked, since Camp X-Ray was listed as an approved location under the 2023 media guidelines. This took all locations that were even remotely related to the base’s role as a detention site completely out of play. Denying any new visual documentation of the defunct former facility seemed egregious and irrational, especially following the unprecedented access given to the United Nations special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, in early 2023. The Biden administration had permitted her to tour the site and interview detainees as an independent investigator, and her findings were published two days after I had arrived at the base.

    “This is just another indication that the most consistent thing about Guantánamo is inconsistency,” said former detainee Moazzam Begg, a British citizen who was released from Guantánamo without charge in 2005. Begg is the current director of CAGE, a U.K.-based advocacy group for other victims of the war on terror. “It seems that rules change and guidelines change according to who happens to be in charge. So your frustration as a journalist, I can see — imagine, as a prisoner, where you have to live in that kind of environment, where you can quote the standard operating procedure better than the staff sergeant, but he’ll say, ‘Well, no, we just changed that.’”

    “I really don’t understand this treatment,” Salahi fumed over WhatsApp. “If they don’t let you go and see what went on, or at least the place where the torture took place, what do they want? This is complete stonewalling; this makes me really very upset as a victim of that place.”

    Red flood lights at night illuminate the dock and surrounding waters at the marina at Guantánamo Bay on June 28, 2023.

    Elise Swain

    Salahi wasn’t wrong. The locations I was allowed to photograph were of little journalistic value, and many had been recently documented by a behemoth in the news industry: the New York Times. That photo essay, titled “Guantánamo Bay: Beyond the Prison,” had garnered fervent criticism on social media, in part because it seemed to take a page out of the military’s playbook by ignoring Guantánamo’s sordid, torturous past to focus instead on the similarities between the base and a college campus. Mark Fallon, a former Naval Criminal Investigative Service counterterrorism special agent, explained why the little transparency that had once existed has dwindled to no access at all.

    The U.S. government is “hoping to control the narrative about what the American public knows or believes about the prisoners here at Guantánamo Bay, the global war on terror, and some of the war crimes that we committed in the name of the American people, specifically torturing prisoners in violation of U.S. code and international law,” Fallon, the author of “Unjustifiable Means,” told me over a neat whiskey in the courtyard of the Navy Gateway Inns and Suites hotel one evening. He was the testifying witness that week in pretrial proceedings against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the detainee charged in the USS Cole bombing case. Fallon had helmed the original investigation into the Cole bombing, the attack on a U.S. naval ship in the port of Aden, Yemen, in 2000 that killed 17 Americans. Fallon later worked as an investigator at Guantánamo before the CIA’s “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” program began torturing men with “enhanced interrogation techniques” across black sites — including at Guantánamo — beginning in August 2002. A few months later, Fallon, then deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, warned his leadership at the Pentagon that the new behavior he was starting to see at Guantánamo was “the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of.”

    “What they try to do is ensure that what is going on here does not impact the contemporary conscience of the American public,” Fallon continued. “Because if it does, there may be greater calls for accountability against those that tortured in our name. And the longer that you can keep that from occurring, the safer, not just [for] the torturers but [for] the torture advocates, the torture lobby. Those who believe that torture should be used as an instrument of national policy are in jeopardy. Their legacies are in jeopardy.”

    A lone chair, left, and a 21+ wristband, right, photographed inside the Navy Gateway Inns and Suites hotel on June 25, 2023.

    Photos: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    In truth, I had already started photographing out of spite. The prison might not exist here, but the ugly, cheaply manufactured urban sprawl of late-capitalist America did. Anything especially hideous and uncanny became a target for my lens. “Free candy” written in dust on the back of a white transport van. Dead crabs. A lone foldable chair inside an empty concrete room in the hotel. A grimy carpeted bathroom. Random graffiti tags of the logo of the infamous mercenary company Blackwater. Feral cats.

    The tropical heat and general pro-war crime vibes were getting to me, so I started following Salahi’s advice: “Just write about the hotel. Concentrate on that. And eating from McDonald’s. If I was you, I would just do my whole article about the lifestyle. The staff. Just write about that because that’s where you have access.”

    Top: “Free Candy” written on the back of a dirty government transport van. Bottom: A Blackwater logo spray painted on the tents near Camp Justice at Guantánamo Bay on June 27, 2023.

    Photos: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    There was only one truly American way to forget the crime scene underfoot at Guantánamo Bay and that was to drink. At the Tiki Bar, armed military police stood in pairs while young soldiers, support staff, and visitors to the base all converged under multicolored lights and neon signs to fuel their historical amnesia and try to find someone to go home with. One young man was so wasted that I had to push him off me. Another member of the military, seeing my must-be-displayed-at-all-times press badge, told me he was a “dolphin trainer.” After confiding that he wasn’t allowed to speak to me, he added a gentle reminder that journalists weren’t welcome: “Fuck the media!”

    Saturday night dancing at the Tiki Bar on June 25, 2023.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    Later in the week, a Navy ship docked at the port, and the sprawling military base was suddenly overrun with sailors looking for something to do on their one night off. That afternoon, our military media escort gave three hitchhikers a ride in our white transport van. I climbed into the middle row of the van as they quietly offered me a “juice” from the backseat. The orange juice bottle contained a mixed Disaronno cocktail. “Oh, y’all have nutcrackers out here?!” I said, reminded of the fruit punch drinks illegally sold at beaches in New York City. No one understood what I was talking about. Still, they asked me to come to the beach with them, and I agreed. They let me keep the secret drink.

    We climbed boulders and called insults to each other while swimming in the warm water. That evening, I went to dinner with a colleague at O’Kelly’s, an Irish pub run by Jamaican staff where the best thing on the menu is fajitas. There, I ran into the three men again. The group swelled, and more men gathered around our table, ordering an obscene number of Jell-O shots. As the only age-appropriate and single woman in the entire bar, I was assailed with brazen pickup lines. One man offered to go in the bathroom and take an unsolicited “dick pic” to send me. I tried to make a joke out of it: He didn’t need to go all the way to the bathroom since I had a disposable flash film camera I had bought at Guantánamo’s only store. To my horror, he snatched the camera, held my gaze, and shoved it down his pants. The flash went off. The entire table erupted with howls of laughter. Suddenly, the 21+ wristband I’d been given at the door, with the sexual assault hotline number printed on it, made more sense.

    encha-lotta jello shots

    Jell-O shot aftermath at O’Kelly’s Irish pub, one of the few places members of the media can go without a military chaperone.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    The constant humidity reminded me of my childhood in Sarasota, Florida, only 700 miles across the Caribbean from Camp Delta. Consumed with anxiety, I was barely sleeping. Court started early each morning. The defendant, al-Nashiri, opted out of attending the pretrial arguments all week, so we never saw him in person. The sleep deprivation, and the disconnect between physically being at Guantánamo but not seeing any prisoners or prison cells, was slowly chipping away at my sense of reality.

    But I still had a job to do. I was reduced to begging the public affairs officer, Lt. Cmdr. Adam Cole, to at least take me on a drive-by of the detention center and Camp X-Ray. After spending countless hours together, he seemed committed to letting me photograph as much as possible, as I had arrived with a large DSLR and the job title of “photo editor.” While I was ostensibly there only to cover the al-Nashiri pretrial hearings, Cole recognized that journalists have other interests, especially if it’s the first time they’ve come to the base. I wanted to photograph as many of the permissible “b-roll” locations as possible.

    All my photography had to be completed before Thursday afternoon, when we had our operational security, or OPSEC, review. An extensive list of “protected information” meant that my extremely tightly cropped photographs had to be viewed by various military public affairs officers, or PAOs, and security officials prior to publication.

    An Army military police soldier allows a photograph while questioning me outside Camp Justice at Guantánamo Bay on June 27, 2023.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    By now, I had already experienced how quickly photographing at Guantánamo could go south. Forgetting myself in the intense midday sun outside the media center, I grabbed my Canon and pointed it straight up at the sky. I wanted to get a silly photo of a familiar raptor — a turkey vulture — soaring overhead. As I lowered the lens, remembering where I was, it was already too late. Men, one with a gun strapped across his chest, had quickly closed in, surrounding me, to ask where my PAO was — I shouldn’t have been using my camera without him there. Stunned, I asked, “Can I take a photo of the gun?” before confessing I had been a bad girl and pleading with them to not tell my new friend Cole that I’d unwittingly broken the rules.

    With the OPSEC review looming and my sanity slipping, I climbed into Cole’s transport van for one last photo excursion. We would drive by Camp X-Ray on our way to the Skyline overlook, which offered a scenic view over the sprawling base below. “No photos,” Cole reminded.

    I could barely see anything. It was far below us, and the van climbed steadily, hardly slowing down. “There it is,” Cole said. A few minutes later, we stood high above the bay at dusk. Dark clouds swirled like smoke overhead as a gentle rain began. Unable to see through my drenched glasses, I took them off and the landscape blurred even more. I felt myself starting to cry. I had come all this way to see the reality of Guantánamo Bay, only to find myself blocked at every turn.

    A view from the Skyline overlook is the closest I was able to get to photograph Camp X-Ray, nearly invisible in the lower center right, at Guantánamo Bay on June 28, 2023.

    Photo: Elise Swain/ The Intercept

    It’s always embarrassing to be in tears as a woman in a professional setting. I tried to regain my composure, overwhelmed and frustrated to be denied a true view of a place that defined my country’s abject moral failure. I thought I understood a little of how slowly the years had gone for the prisoners. A week here was an eternity, but two decades wasn’t long enough for the military to come to grips with what it had done. There was Guantánamo, still open, still making the same mistakes. Defeated and demoralized, I’d never been more professionally disappointed. Standing atop that hill, I felt as if I were watching Sisyphus’s boulder — the journalist’s goal of getting the American public to care about Guantánamo — roll back down to the bottom. 

    Cole had explained that it wasn’t his decision to nix Camp X-Ray, but rather the Naval Station Guantánamo Bay PAO Joycelyn Biggs who had decided it was off limits. Biggs was stressed. “The entire Navy is short staffed,” she told me on a phone call when I asked her about it. “Every single photo that you take, someone in my office has to look at it and vet it. That is work hours. That is resources that are being diverted from my office.” She wanted me to understand that I wasn’t her problem, that I was there to cover the court: “Anything that you do outside of [military commission] trials is a courtesy.”

    Lt. Cmdr. Adam Cole shows media the beach, left, and wears a “Don’t Tread on Me” patch on his Navy fatigues, right.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    For all of Biggs’s concerns that allowing photos of Camp X-Ray would lengthen the OPSEC review, I had to laugh when the entire process for all three journalists visiting that week took just over 10 minutes. What a strain on resources. Everyone crowded around as Biggs’s deputy flipped through my photos.

    “What is this?!” Cole asked about a clear plastic tube.

    “It was in the lighthouse bathroom,” I replied.

    “And you just took a picture of it?”

    “Of course.”

    “And you wanna publish it? And you’re gonna be like ‘They use this [to] torture people?’” Cole asked. It did remind me of the painful nasogastric tubes they had used to force-feed hunger striking detainees. But I laughed and said that he had just given me a perfect quote for the photo’s caption.

    “I hate you.” Cole said.

    Left: A statue of Ronald McDonald in the Guantánamo Bay lighthouse museum. Right: A clear plastic tube from a dehumidifier drains into the museum’s bathroom sink.

    Photos: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    Despite my irritations, a kind of nostalgia emerged when I described the sights, sounds, smells, and frustrations of this visit to my formerly imprisoned friends.

    “When you describe to me every corner, all the details of GTMO, I feel like I am with you,” Barhoumi said in a voice memo. “I feel like I never left this place.” When I complained about the lack of access and general censorship, he could relate. “I feel you,” he told me. “It depends on who is in charge, that’s my experience. You have to have a big heart because they will piss you off. Just use your wisdom and keep going.”

    After only a week, I was ready to leave. The constant monitoring and prescreening of my images had been invasive. To decompress, I sat at the marina near the hotel at sunset and watched the sky fade from blue to black as the eerie red glow of the dock’s flood lights spilled into the green water like blood.

    Water at the Guantánamo Bay marina changes from green to red as flood lights turn on at night.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    I tried to imagine a distant future when former detainees could visit this place as free men and when, perhaps, Guantánamo would become a monument for national reflection. I hoped that they, too, would one day watch the sun slowly sink beneath the wide-open sky and make peace with the place that had permanently derailed their lives. “I would love the place to be converted to a museum, just like Robben Island. I would volunteer and work sometime,” Salahi told me. “I think the former detainees should run it.”

    My plane back to Washington, D.C., took off late one afternoon from the empty Guantánamo runway. I looked out the window for a final chance to see the prison. I thought about the remaining 16 men there who have been cleared for release but are still waiting for their own liftoff. I wondered what the rest of their lives would look like. I thought again of al-Qurashi and the paintings he’d made while imprisoned here. His painting of a wooden ship fighting to stay afloat in rough seas stuck me as a metaphor for this place.

    What an injustice it was, I thought, that so many of the men who had suffered needlessly here still weren’t truly free. In a perfect world, former detainees would see this prison close. They would be exonerated, get an apology, receive reparations, and find help with rehabilitation. They would be allowed to visit the McDonald’s and the beaches and watch the dusk settle over the crystalline water that teemed with life.

    Cuba faded into the distance through the small window. I never did see the prison, just as those detained there had never seen anything of Guantánamo beyond their bars. And apart from the handful of obscure photos that manage to survive OPSEC review, they probably never will.

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    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Elise Swain.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/27/censorship-has-never-been-worse-at-guantanamo-bay/feed/ 0 422955 Australia’s Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/21/australias-combatting-misinformation-and-disinformation-bill/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/21/australias-combatting-misinformation-and-disinformation-bill/#respond Mon, 21 Aug 2023 15:00:03 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=143327 Could we face collective decisions so fundamental that discourse itself buckles under conceptual strain? If so, maybe this is such a time and it would accordingly be wise to map it in the most reliable tradition, which prioritises agreed facts and valid inference from them.

    This also befits a need to be incisive, given the gravity of the issue which is likely acknowledged by all, though in different ways with respect to details and priorities.

    Such precision, however, might be well-prefaced with a stylistic counterpoint by way of a short story to set the scene in an illustrative way.

    *****

    Finding a sealed bottle washed upon his island of solitude, an old hermit pulls the cork to examine a note inside. But when it pops, loud noises and flashing colours leave him falling toward the sand.

    “You have one wish and an hour to decide it.”

    The philosopher regathered his senses and resolved to mediate.

    When at last prompted by the genie, he said, “I found the highest truth on this island, but the world rejected it and suffers much in consequence. They are lost and require an arbiter of truth. It could no longer be me, but perhaps some tribunal, council or data industry will suffice. Please grant me this wish.”

    “Alas, it shall be granted.”

    The man heard no more and looked around for a sign of the genie. But the only trace that remained was the lifeless bottle. He picked it up and saw the note again, still curled inside. With rising feelings, too unsettled and indistinct to name, he shook it free and began to read.

    “You are lucky to be on this island, as the world will lie in ruins within a decade, every individual having been stripped of their most fundamental right to self-determination, by you.”

    *****

    It is in the nature of society that nothing prevents it from considering and making collective decisions without sufficient wisdom to avoid catastrophe, as the previous century and others made clear.

    The relevant individuals were not generally primitive by comparison to us. For every new sophistication we regard as a form of progress, there was already another and perhaps better one that has fallen by the wayside.

    Ergo, no comfort is to be taken by observing present norms of decision making.

    Centrepiece

    I submit the numbered argument below as addressing the crux of our present issue.

    1) Classification of anything as misinformation or disinformation is inherently contentious.

    2) Normalised government imposition of contention is the essence of totalitarianism (whereas all horrors of the latter are at most its results).

    3) Democracy and totalitarianism are in essence mutually exclusive.

    4) (It follows from 1-3 that) state classification of particular information as misinformation or disinformation, whether or not by proxy through industry regulation, is essentially antidemocratic.

    5) The Misinformation and Disinformation Bill provides for or mandates proxy if not internal effective classification by the government of particular information as misinformation or disinformation.

    6) Nothing essentially antidemocratic should be law in Australia.

    7 (It follows from 4-6 that) the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill should not pass as law.

    Logically valid objection to this argument will necessarily commit to categorical denial of at least one point above which is clearly identifiable for that purpose by number.

    The following sections attend to further points worth noting as supplementary.

    Unadulterated Over-Reactions

    Despite much hyperbole to the contrary, defamation, bullying, harassment, misleading, deceiving and inciting, online or off, are already covered by law in ways that nothing new about misinformation or disinformation leaves particularly wanting.

    Yes, lies travel further and faster, but only because everything does, including truth and balancing responses.

    Indeed, arguments for why legislation to control deception is not already in excess, routinely present as non-sequiturs, premised on Chicken Little notions of unprecedented calamity. More specifically, the relevant style is increasingly of the type made famous and paradigmatic by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair when he firmly set our millennium on the wrong foot, shortly after collapse of the twin towers in New York.

    “Whatever the dangers of the action we take, the dangers of inaction are far, far greater.”

    Thus began a war on presumed error, which flourished into decades of state terrorism raining ordnance and torture on the Middle East, accomplishing nothing else.

    Perhaps that was soil for the growth of misinformation and disinformation, as conceptual labels for dissenting content, which are now shamelessly verbatim and prolific.

    Double Standard

    The UN explicitly and repeatedly warns of misinformation or disinformation ironically issued in response to content classified in those terms (see appendix) and its identification of this problem is clearly not to support legislated exemption of the government in such instances.

    Indeed, notwithstanding the Bill’s exemption likewise applying to professional news services, which typically defer to the government line, it is hard to conceive of any robust check or balance to the threat of establishment dogma under such an arrangement.

    That exemption of this kind is clearly necessary to prevent the scheme from hamstringing itself in practice might underscore how centrally abortive the Bill’s general undertaking is.

    Documented Downsides to Dogmatism

    A series of investigative reports were recently and sequentially released under the rubric of Twitter Files, detailing various ugly turns in discourse management of late. But faith in the latter has apparently not been shaken enough to root out all support for the present Bill, which is of course not intended to curb, but rather urgently and massively expand such “regulation.”

    A casual read of Wikipedia‘s entry for the Twitter Files could leave you none the wiser about the substance, as opposed to cursory outline, of what they contain. Yet you might leave it a veritable sage on their proper estimation as declared by qualified pundits.

    This difference, which the Twitter Files positively exemplifies, between substance and spin as typically found in primary and secondary sources respectively, can be said with no possibility of overstatement to be the lifeblood of democracy.

    The Root of Dogma

    Who could deny that there is such a thing as tyranny of orthodoxy, namely everything about its power which does not serve as a demonstration to the impartial of its being well-founded?

    The phenomenon is ancient, enduring and inevitably exacerbated by imposed epistemic measures like censorship and blacklisting, in ways that are even less fair and accordingly hamfisted at best.

    Regardless of intention (which is naively pristine at times), such measures provoke justified perception in the recipients of having been intellectually cheated as a matter of policy – an abuse inevitably founded on rationales that are shared by totalitarianism and thus fertile ground for all things nefarious.

    Since it is only human to overreact, such measures also effectively amplify unfounded conspiracy claims and in turn, erroneous perception of dissent as fundamentally based on or implying such.

    Absolute Dichotomy

    There is perhaps no more savvy or articulate critic of social media than Tristan Harris, who often laments the “race to the bottom of the brainstem” which is at least a partial facet of our contemporary “attention economy.”

    He details a set of drivers and symptoms of the trouble without being especially prescriptive. Nevertheless, I dare say most who are likely to appreciate his characterisation of the problem would be inclined to err on the side of “reigning it in” with restrictions and by amplification of orthodox messaging.

    Yet what might that actually involve? Or more precisely, what even remains to be considered as a principle for regulation of discourse, apart from that which legislation and institutions already cover?

    Could any approaches even come to mind which are not easily described as censorship of concepts, or dogmatism?

    Industry may have the capacity to innovate, but aside from Community Notes on the X platform, nothing on the horizon promises to reduce levels of misinformation or disinformation without being contentious at the level of concepts, whether by choice of what to suppress (censor) or amplify (dogma).

    Moreover, the promise shown by Community Notes is purely in virtue of its being decentralised down to the user level, where the term ‘regulatory’ is accordingly inapplicable in any formal sense. The system is just a mechanism to provide maximally unbiased advice regarding context by way of demographic balance.

    The presumed challenge to which this Bill eagerly rises, is by virtue of its being draft legislation, specifically formal regulation of discourse with regard to misinformation and disinformation, without undue restriction of freedom, at the general conceptual level as opposed to anything which existing legislation concerns.

    This is unfortunately one and the same as the challenge to have one’s cake and eat it too, as in both cases, logic does not provide for any ‘both’ option, irrespective of infinite innovation. Any restriction of freedom at the level of expressing concepts, as opposed to normally codified offences, is undue restriction of freedom.

    In other words, despite all hopes, wishes or pretence to the contrary, the entire issue intended to be addressed by this Bill happens to boil down to the question of whether censorship and/or dogmatism are better than exposure to concepts they are rallied against.

    Each of the two approaches, for and against intervention, might indeed trade off real harms. But if and when some agreeable balance is struck by conceptual censorship or dogmatism, we could only have an exception which proves the enduring rule of history and thus inevitably returns to bite society’s derriere.

    Technology might destabilise to an arbitrary degree, but inverting the relative merits of totalitarian and democratic tendencies, in anything but superficial appearance, is necessarily not among its potentials.

    Development and implementation of protocols imposing inevitably contentious information conformity is, if not expressly required, abetted in the extreme by this Bill.

    The latter is accordingly a technocratic liability which, irrespective of any fine spirit it may be offered in, fits the essential definition of totalitarianism in point 2.

    Appendix – Salient Excerpts from ‘Countering Disinformation for the Promotion and

    Protection of human rights and Fundamental Freedoms’ a Report of the Secretary-General dated 12 August, 2022.

    “Given the challenges in defining disinformation, it is not surprising that some measures adopted by States or companies in recent years to counter disinformation have resulted, whether unwillingly or knowingly, in undue restrictions on freedom of expression. In some cases, efforts to combat disinformation have been used by governments and political and other public figures to restrict access to information, particularly online, at key political moments; to discredit and restrict critical reporting…Approaches that seek simple solutions to this complex problem are likely to censor legitimate speech that is protected under international human rights law. Such overbroad restrictions are likely to exacerbate societal ills and increase public distrust and disconnection, rather than contribute to the resolution of underlying problems.” – paragraph 41

    “The High Commissioner has noted that laws designed to address vaguely defined concepts of “disinformation” often contravene human rights law, lead to the criminalization of permissible content and significantly restrict information flows around the globe.” -paragraph 43

    “..existing laws based on defamation, cyberbullying and harassment have been used effectively to counter instances of disinformation. Although not directly designed to address disinformation as such, these long-existing legal frameworks, when crafted in compliance with the legitimate restriction grounds under article 19 (3) of the Covenant, can be applied to reduce the spread of particularly harmful disinformation without imposing new restrictions on freedom of expression.” -paragraph 44

    “Some laws compel social media companies to respond to disinformation on their platforms, including through intermediary liability regimes, making business enterprises the de facto adjudicators of content, generally without sufficient transparency safeguards to assess human rights impacts or effective accountability mechanisms. – paragraph 45d

    “Disinformation can be particularly pernicious when it is spread by political or public officials, yet addressing it in such contexts poses significant additional challenges. In some cases, such figures have portrayed the arguments of their opponents as “false”, rather than as simply different from their own, or categorized journalists’ mistakes as “lies” for their own political or ideological gain. Freedom of expression experts have underlined that State actors have a particular duty in this context and “should not make, sponsor, encourage or further false information. As the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has established, “public officials … are in a position of guarantors of the fundamental rights of the individual and, therefore, their statements cannot be such that they disregard said rights so that they must not amount to a form of interference with or pressure impairing the rights of those who intend to contribute to public deliberation by means of expression and dissemination of its thought.” – paragraph 45f


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Simon Floth.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/21/australias-combatting-misinformation-and-disinformation-bill/feed/ 0 420698     The Censors Down Under: The ACMA Gambit on Misinformation and Disinformation https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/11/the-censors-down-under-the-acma-gambit-on-misinformation-and-disinformation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/11/the-censors-down-under-the-acma-gambit-on-misinformation-and-disinformation/#respond Fri, 11 Aug 2023 04:20:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=143021 In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum.  “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.”

    The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light.  Information freedom is only to be lauded when it favours your side.

    Who regulates, let alone should regulate, information disseminated across the Internet remains a critical question.  Gone is the frontier utopianism of an open, untampered information environment, where bright and optimistic netizens could gather, digitally speaking, in the digital hall, the agora, the square, to debate, to ponder, to dispute every topic there was.  Perhaps it never existed, but for a time, it was pleasant to even imagine it did.

    The shift towards information control was bound to happen and was always going to be encouraged by the greatest censors of all: governments.  Governments untrusting of the posting policies and tendencies of social media users and their facilitators have been, for some years, trying to rein in published content in a number of countries.  Cyber-pessimism has replaced the cyber-utopians.  “Social media,” remarked science writer Annalee Newitz in 2019, “has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process.”  The emergence of the terribly named “fake news” phenomenon adds to such efforts, all the more ironic given the fact that government sources are often its progenitors.

    To make things even murkier, the social media behemoths have also taken liberties on what content they will permit on their forums, using their selective algorithms to disseminate information at speed even as they prevent other forms of it from reaching wider audiences.  Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, heeding the call of the very screams and bellows of their own creation, thought it appropriate to exclude or limit various users in favour of selected causes and more sanitised usage.  In some jurisdictions, they have become the surrogates of government policy under threat: remove any offending material, or else.

    Currently under review in Australia is another distinctly nasty example of such a tendency.  The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 is a proposed instrument that risks enshrining censorship by stealth.  Its exposure draft is receiving scrutiny from public submissions till August.  Submissions are sought “on the proposed laws to hold digital platform services to account and create transparency around their efforts in responding to misinformation and disinformation in Australia.”

    The Bill is a clumsily drafted, laboriously constructed document.  It is outrageously open-ended on definitions and a condescending swipe to the intelligence of the broader citizenry.  It defines misinformation as “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm.”  Disinformation is regarded as “misinformation that is intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm.”

    The bill, should it become law, will empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to monitor and regulate material it designates as “harmful online misinformation and disinformation”.  The Big Tech fraternity will be required to impose codes of conduct to enforce the interpretations made by the ACMA, with the regulator even going so far as proposing to “create and enforce an industry standard”.  Those in breach will be liable for up to A$7.8 million or 5% of global turnover for corporations.

    What, then, is harm?  Examples are provided in the Guidance Note to the Bill.  These include hatred targeting a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability.  It can also include disruption to public order or society, the old grievance the State has when protestors dare differ in their opinions and do the foolish thing by expressing them.  (The example provided here is the mind of the typical paranoid government official: “Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure.”)

    John Steenhoff of the Human Rights Law Alliance has identified, correctly, the essential, dangerous consequence of the proposed instrument.  It will grant the ACMA “a mechanism what counts as acceptable communication and what counts as misinformation and disinformation.  This potentially gives the state the ability to control the availability of information for everyday Australians, granting it power beyond anything that a government should have in a free and democratic society.”

    Interventions in such information ecosystems are risky matters, certainly for states purporting to be liberal democratic and supposedly happy with debate.  A focus on firm, robust debate, one that drives out poor, absurd ideas in favour of richer and more profound ones, should be the order of the day.  But we are being told that the quality of debate, and the strength of ideas, can no longer be sustained as an independent ecosystem.  Your information source is to be curated for your own benefit, because the government class says it’s so.  What you receive and how you receive, is to be controlled paternalistically.

    The ACMA is wading into treacherous waters.  The conservatives in opposition are worried, with Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman describing the draft as “a very bad bill” giving the ACMA “extraordinary powers.  It would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.”  Not that the conservative coalition has any credibility in this field.  Under the previous governments, a relentless campaign was waged against the publication of national security information.  An enlightened populace is the last thing these characters, and their colleagues, want.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/11/the-censors-down-under-the-acma-gambit-on-misinformation-and-disinformation/feed/ 0 418426     [Noam Chomsky] Censorship, Free Speech & the Media https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/10/noam-chomsky-censorship-free-speech-the-media/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/10/noam-chomsky-censorship-free-speech-the-media/#respond Thu, 10 Aug 2023 21:00:40 +0000 https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/chon268/
    This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/10/noam-chomsky-censorship-free-speech-the-media/feed/ 0 418375     Media Freedom Matters: Exposing International News Neglect, Censorship, and Agenda Cutting Across the Globe https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/08/media-freedom-matters-exposing-international-news-neglect-censorship-and-agenda-cutting-across-the-globe/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/08/media-freedom-matters-exposing-international-news-neglect-censorship-and-agenda-cutting-across-the-globe/#respond Tue, 08 Aug 2023 21:19:59 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=32409 Earlier this year, members of the News Enlightenment Initiative (NEI-Germany) and Project Censored partnered to recruit an international jury of news professionals and media scholars to identify and highlight “News…

    The post Media Freedom Matters: Exposing International News Neglect, Censorship, and Agenda Cutting Across the Globe appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/08/media-freedom-matters-exposing-international-news-neglect-censorship-and-agenda-cutting-across-the-globe/feed/ 0 417783     CPJ urges Pakistan lawmakers to reconsider bills that could undermine press freedom https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/04/cpj-urges-pakistan-lawmakers-to-reconsider-bills-that-could-undermine-press-freedom/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/04/cpj-urges-pakistan-lawmakers-to-reconsider-bills-that-could-undermine-press-freedom/#respond Fri, 04 Aug 2023 14:14:36 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=303710 New York, August 4, 2023—Pakistan lawmakers should reject or revise four draft bills likely to undermine press freedom and consult with journalists and other stakeholders in a transparent review process before putting the bills to a vote, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

    On July 20, Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb introduced in the lower house of parliament a draft bill amending the ordinance governing the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), the country’s broadcast regulator, according to news reports.

    The bill would empower the regulator to oversee the dissemination of “authentic news” and prohibit media organizations from spreading “disinformation,” a loosely defined clause that the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan warned “strays into censorship territory.”

    On Wednesday, the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, passed the PEMRA amendment bill, which will be moved to the Senate. The federal cabinet has approved two other draft bills and is soon expected to introduce them in parliament. Another bill, which would amend the 2016 Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), is pending cabinet approval.  Local journalists and rights groups fear that these bills would entrench measures to undermine data security and free expression online before Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government is dissolved later this month. The bills would provide sweeping powers to the incoming caretaker government, which Sharif’s ruling coalition and the military are both seeking to control.

    “We are alarmed by the Pakistan government’s apparent attempts to bulldoze four draft bills undermining press freedom through parliament ahead of the political transition scheduled for later this month,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “There needs to be a substantive debate on the bills and their far-reaching impacts. Pakistan’s lawmakers must ensure ample time to review the draft bills in consultation with civil society and journalists before coming to a vote.”

    Sharif has proposed that parliament be dissolved on August 9, before handing over power to a caretaker administration, paving the way for a general election.

    CPJ has documented numerous press freedom violations in Pakistan since former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from power in April 2022, resulting in an ongoing political crisis. Mainstream news channels have ceased coverage of Khan following a de facto ban and pressure from the military.

    On July 26, the federal cabinet approved two of the draft bills, the E-Safety Bill 2023 and the Personal Data Protection Bill 2023, paving the way for a parliamentary vote.

    The E-Safety Bill would establish a new regulatory body responsible for registering and monitoring news websites, including those already operated by media outlets, as well as online channels, including those on YouTube. The agency would be empowered to take notice of and impose penalties for alleged cybercrime violations, including publishing “false” news, which the Pakistan Digital Editors Alliance, a local journalists’ association, warns could be used to stifle free speech.

    The Personal Data Protection Bill would mandate data localization within Pakistan for companies, including social media platforms. The bill provides for “sensitive personal data” to be handed over to the Pakistan government on grounds of “public order” or “national security,” which may compromise journalists’ privacy, according to a May draft of the bill and Farieha Aziz, a freelance journalist and co-founder of the digital rights organization Bolo Bhi, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

    Separately, the government is set to introduce a series of amendments to PECA and the country’s social media rules, establishing a prison term of five years and a fine of 1 million rupees (US$3,484) for disseminating “fake or false information” online.

    The amendments would empower the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to order social media companies to block or remove content that “incites or is likely to incite [the] public,” is “known to be fake or false,” or “contains aspersions against the judiciary or armed forces of Pakistan.” Social media companies deemed non-compliant could have their services blocked or restricted. 

    CPJ has repeatedly documented how the PECA has been used to detain and harass journalists for their work.

    It remains unclear when these three bills will be brought to a vote in parliament, Aziz told CPJ.

    The PEMRA amendment bill defines “disinformation” as “verifiably false” information disseminated with the intention to “cause harm to the reputation of or to harass any person for political, personal, or financial interest…without making an effort to get other person’s point of view or not giving [that view] proper coverage.”

    Aziz and other journalists have expressed concern about that definition, with Aziz saying it could encourage powerful figures to withhold comment and curb the media’s ability to publish critical stories. The draft bill also increases the fine for violations from 1 million rupees to 10 million rupees (US$34,837).

    Afzal Butt, president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, told the newspaper Dawn that he believes broadcasters and the journalists’ union should be able to vote on decisions by PEMRA, which has a history of suspending broadcasters and censoring their content. The draft amendment introduced to parliament grants the union and local broadcasters one non-voting representative each at the agency.

    CPJ called and messaged Aurangzeb for comment but did not receive any replies.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/04/cpj-urges-pakistan-lawmakers-to-reconsider-bills-that-could-undermine-press-freedom/feed/ 0 417014     Whether You Live in a Small Town or a Big City, the Government Is Still Out to Get You https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/27/whether-you-live-in-a-small-town-or-a-big-city-the-government-is-still-out-to-get-you/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/27/whether-you-live-in-a-small-town-or-a-big-city-the-government-is-still-out-to-get-you/#respond Thu, 27 Jul 2023 01:52:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142491 There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:

    If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

    Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps us fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of focusing on who’s really shaking the jar.

    This controversy over Jason Aldean’s country music video, “Try That In a Small Town,” which is little more than authoritarian propaganda pretending to be respect for law and order, is just more of the same.

    The music video, riddled with images of militarized police facing off against rioters, implies that there are only two types of people in this country: those who stand with the government and those who oppose it.

    Yet the song gets it wrong.

    You see, it makes no difference whether you live in a small town or a big city, or whether you stand with the government or mobilize against it: either way, the government is still out to get you.

    Indeed, the government’s prosecution of the January 6 protesters (part of a demographic that might relate to the frontier justice sentiments in Aldean’s song) is a powerful reminder that the police state doesn’t discriminate when it comes to hammering away at those who challenge its authority.

    It also serves to underscore the government’s tone-deaf hypocrisy in the face of its own double-crossing, double-dealing, double standards.

    Imagine: the very same government that violates the rights of its citizenry at almost every turn is considering charging President Trump with conspiring against the rights of the American people.

    It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

    If President Trump is indicted over the events that culminated in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the government could hinge part of their case on Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” anyone “with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” the person enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.

    That the government, which now constitutes the greatest threat to our freedoms, would appoint itself the so-called defender of our freedoms shows exactly how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life in the American police state has become.

    Unfortunately, “we the people” are partially to blame for allowing this double standard to persist.

    While we may claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

    Even though the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, we just keep going back for more.

    For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

    We claim to disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military.

    We claim to chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind.

    We claim to object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

    And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.

    By tacitly allowing these violations to continue and legitimizing a government that has long since ceased to operate within the framework of the Constitution, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.

    This is exactly how incremental encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, become routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.

    The tactics follow the same script: first, the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we take the bait, they slam the trap closed and turn “we the people” into Enemy Number One.

    Despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to expand their power and wealth at our expense.

    So here we are, caught in a vicious cycle of in-fighting and partisan politics, all the while the government—which never stops shaking the jar—is advancing its agenda to lockdown the nation.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until we can face up to that truth and forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In that scenario, no one wins, whether you live in a small town or big city.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/27/whether-you-live-in-a-small-town-or-a-big-city-the-government-is-still-out-to-get-you/feed/ 0 414904     Free Press, Propaganda and Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/22/free-press-propaganda-and-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/22/free-press-propaganda-and-censorship/#respond Sat, 22 Jul 2023 03:10:39 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142328

    In war, truth is the first casualty.

    — Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)

    How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current list of adversaries, from the point of view of those adversaries? We supposedly pride ourselves on listening to both or many sides of an issue before forming an opinion (or, better still, a sound analysis). It’s the core of our system of justice, however flawed. It’s why we value free speech.

    It’s not that the viewpoints we commonly hear are not different from each other, or that we don’t hear from people with foreign accents from the parts of the world in question. It’s that mainstream news, information and analysis are from a very narrow spectrum. The differences in the viewpoints are in the details, not the fundamentals. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the differences are mainly about how, and how much, to support Ukraine, not whether to do so. Do we hear the Russian view that they were compelled to come to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian population, which was being massacred by racist, pro-Nazi elements running the Ukrainian government and supported by NATO? Not from the mainstream news, we don’t.

    Similarly, when we hear from nationals of adversary countries, our media rarely offer space or air time to persons who represent the adversarial point of view. We are rather more likely to hear from exiles seeking to overthrow the government and hoping for western support. When have we heard from a representative of Hezbollah or Hamas? Or of the government of China or North Korea, or the Sandinista government of Nicaragua? The point is not whether their point of view is correct or whether we decide that it’s reasonable or not, but rather whether we even know what it is, and whether we try to understand it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in order to negotiate with our adversaries, solve our differences and achieve peace? The closest we come to that in our media is to invite such representatives to an on-air ambush where we browbeat them and shout them down instead of listening to them.

    But it’s worse than that. Our vaunted “free press” closes down the offices and facilities of journalists from countries or movements selected for vilification, and blocks their websites within the boundaries of our country. Thus, the Russian RT media channel and the Iranian Press TV, among others, are no longer permitted to operate within most western countries. Apparently, their words are considered hazardous to western ears. Similarly, many journalists and other individuals have found themselves banned from western-based social media for revealing unwelcome facts or contradicting official truth. Many have been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.

    It’s not just censorship, either. Our journalistic media have been taken over by advertising and PR principles, going so far as to fabricate stories and substitute lies for the truth on a massive scale. Even “fact checking” has become the province of distortion, where the “authorized” version of events has displaced actual facts.  The mainstream media remove journalists who tell too much truth, contradicting the lies. The New York Times “disappeared” war correspondent Chris Hedges for reporting on war crimes committed by Israel and similar news. Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal used to report their investigative journalism on Democracy Now, which has now ceased inviting them, in order to become more of a mainstream outlet. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch migrated from The New Yorker and the New York Times to foreign media and eventually alternative outlets as his investigative journalism began to cast doubt on mainstream accounts of the Syrian war, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines and other events. Julian Assange is paying the highest price for publishing a modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, originally published by a younger, more courageous New York Times.

    Sadly, many members of the public consider themselves well-informed and openminded if they read the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, watch or listen to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, and subscribe to Asia Times. To the extent that this may have been true in the past, it no longer is. Today, the ownership and funding sources of the major news media are all oligarchs and powerful corporations. Their job is no longer to inform the public, but rather to inculcate them with whatever information and ideas will manufacture consent for the policies that the powerful wish to enact. And no more, please.

    This explains the actions of those who rule us, who are not just the elected leadership. In fact, even the elections themselves are limited to candidates selected by the powerful interests, and centered upon a few issues that do not threaten those interests (e.g. abortion and civil rights), and where the campaigning takes place almost exclusively in the few “swing” states that will determine the outcome of the election. As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

    If we want to be worthy of calling ourselves educated, we cannot depend solely upon the mainstream press; we will have to do a lot of the work ourselves. There is bias in all media, but we can expose ourselves to opposing biases in order to get a wider variety of facts and analyses, and form our views accordingly. We have choices, if we only seek them out. The biases of Yahoo and Google are different from those of Russian and Chinese search engines. If we don’t find what we’re looking for on one, we might find it on another. The same is true with social media. Telegram is becoming increasingly popular, especially with those who have been banned elsewhere. Substack.com is a website that thus far has accommodated most subjects and viewpoints. Many of the journalists who are less than welcome in the mainstream media can be found at serenashimaward.org, a project that rewards journalists who present alternate views and information (and for which I am proud to serve as Treasurer). Due diligence is worth the rewards.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/22/free-press-propaganda-and-censorship/feed/ 0 413802     We Are in Collective Alexithymia https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia/#respond Sat, 15 Jul 2023 18:23:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142009

    No words for emotions — alexithymia

    New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

    Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

    The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

    Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

    It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

    While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

    Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

    Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

    Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

    My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

    Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

    In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

    All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

    Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

    Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

    I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

    It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

    Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

    The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

    Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

    “Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

    “I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

    Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

    So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

    This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

    Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

    And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

    Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

    Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

    But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

    The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

    The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

    So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

    China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

    The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

    Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

    At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

    There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

    He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

    Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

    “Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

    Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

    This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

    An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

    “Little children working,” the visitor replied.

    Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

    But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

    Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

    Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

    Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

    Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

    Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders.  An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

    By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

    American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

    When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

    Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

    May be an image of artillery and text

    May be an image of artillery, military uniform and text

    [Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

    Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

    May be an image of 7 people

    Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

    A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

    The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

    May be an image of raft and ocean

    The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

    Poverty and Crisis: Sucking Humanity Dry

    The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

    “Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

    May be an image of 2 people, crowd and text that says 'No ES, SEQUIA SAQUEO! Es'

    It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

    While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

    Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

    The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

    May be an image of 1 person, suit, microphone, dinner jacket and text

    So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

    The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

    Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

    The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

    CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

    If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia/feed/ 0 412091 We Are in Collective Alexithymia https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia-2/#respond Sat, 15 Jul 2023 18:23:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142009

    No words for emotions — alexithymia

    New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

    Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

    The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

    Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

    It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

    While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

    Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

    Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

    Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

    My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

    Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

    In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

    All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

    Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

    Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

    I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

    It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

    Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

    The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

    Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

    “Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

    “I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

    Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

    So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

    This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

    Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

    And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

    Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

    Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

    But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

    The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

    The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

    So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

    China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

    The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

    Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

    At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

    There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

    He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

    Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

    “Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

    Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

    This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

    An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

    “Little children working,” the visitor replied.

    Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

    But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

    Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

    Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

    Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

    Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

    Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders.  An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

    By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

    American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

    When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

    Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

    May be an image of artillery and text

    May be an image of artillery, military uniform and text

    [Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

    Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

    May be an image of 7 people

    Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

    A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

    The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

    May be an image of raft and ocean

    The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

    Poverty and Crisis: Sucking Humanity Dry

    The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

    “Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

    May be an image of 2 people, crowd and text that says 'No ES, SEQUIA SAQUEO! Es'

    It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

    While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

    Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

    The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

    May be an image of 1 person, suit, microphone, dinner jacket and text

    So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

    The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

    Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

    The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

    CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

    If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia-2/feed/ 0 412092 Weaponised Antisemitism Crushed the Political Left:  Now it’s the Cultural Left’s Turn https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/weaponised-antisemitism-crushed-the-political-left-now-its-the-cultural-lefts-turn/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/weaponised-antisemitism-crushed-the-political-left-now-its-the-cultural-lefts-turn/#respond Sat, 15 Jul 2023 15:02:09 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142102 What does it mean to be antisemitic in modern Britain? The answer seems ever more confusing.

    We have reached the seemingly absurd point that a political leader famed for his anti-racism, a rock star whose most celebrated work focuses on the dangers of racism and fascism, and a renowned film maker committed to socially progressive causes are all now characterised as antisemites.

    And in a further irony, those behind the accusations do not appear to have made a priority of anti-racism themselves – not, at least, until it proved an effective means of defeating their political enemies.

    And yet, the list of those supposedly exposed as antisemites – often only by association – keeps widening to include ever more unlikely targets.

    That is especially true in the Labour Party, where even the vaguest ties with any of the three iconic left-wing figures noted above – Jeremy Corbyn, Roger Waters and Ken Loach – can be grounds for disciplinary action.

    One of the Labour Party’s most successful politicians, Jamie Driscoll, North of Tyne mayor, was barred last month from standing for re-election after he shared a platform with Loach to talk about the North’s place in the director’s films.

    Not coincidentally, Driscoll has been described as “the UK’s most powerful Corbynista” – or supporter of Corbyn’s left-wing policies. The nadir in this process may have been reached at the Glastonbury Festival.

    Back in 2017, Corbyn, then-Labour leader, was given top billing as he set out a new, inspirational vision for Britain. Six years on and organisers cancelled the screening of a film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, highlighting the sustained campaign to smear Corbyn as an antisemite and snuff out his left-wing agenda.

    The decision was taken after pro-Israel pressure groups launched a campaign to smear the film as antisemitic. The festival decided showing it would cause “division”.

    So what is going on?

    To understand how we arrived at this dark moment, one in which seemingly anyone or anything can be cancelled as antisemitic, it is necessary to grapple with the term’s constantly mutating meaning – and the political uses this confusion is being put to.

    A huge irony

    A few decades ago, an answer to the question of what constituted antisemitism would have been straightforward. It was prejudice, hatred or violence towards a specific ethnic group. It was a form of racism directed against Jews because they were Jews.

    Antisemitism came in different guises: from brazen, intentional hostility, on the one hand, to informal, unthinking bias, on the other. Its expressions varied in seriousness too: from neo-Nazi marches down the high street to an assumption that Jews are more interested in money than other people.

    But that certainty gradually eroded. Some 20 years or so ago, antisemitism began to encompass not just hostility to an ethnic group, Jews, but opposition to a political movement, Zionism.

    There was a huge irony.

    Zionism is an ideology, one championed by Jews and non-Jews, that demands either exclusive or superior territorial and political rights for mostly Jewish immigrants to a region of the Middle East inhabited by a native population, the Palestinians.

    The key premise of Zionism, though rarely stated explicitly, is that non-Jews are inherently susceptible to antisemitism. According to Zionist ideology, Jews therefore need to live apart to ensure their own safety, even if that comes at the cost of oppressing non-Jewish groups.

    Zionism’s progeny is the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, created in 1948 with bountiful assistance from the imperial powers of the time, especially Britain.

    Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state required the ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The small number who managed to stay inside the new state were herded or caged into reservations, much as happened to Native Americans.

    Racial hierarchies

    None of this should be surprising. Zionism emerged more than a century ago in a colonialist Europe very much imbued with ideas of racial hierarchies.

    Simply put, Israel’s founders aspired to mirror those ideas and apply them in ways that benefitted Jews.

    Just as European nations viewed Jews as inferior and a threat to racial purity, Zionists regarded Palestinians and Arabs as inferior and endangering their own racial purity.

    It is only once one understands Zionism’s inbuilt and systematic racism that it becomes clear why Israel has shown itself not just unwilling but incapable of making peace with the Palestinians. Which, in turn, helps to explain the recent evolution in antisemitism’s meaning.

    After Israel collapsed the Oslo peace talks in 2000 to prevent a state for Palestinians being established on a sliver of their former homeland, the Palestinians launched an uprising, or intifada, that Israel brutally subdued.

    Israel’s crushing of the Palestinians’ fight for self-determination coincided with the arrival of new, digital kinds of media that made concealing the cruelty of Israel’s repression much harder than before.

    For the first time, western publics were exposed to the idea that Israel and the ideology that underpinned it, Zionism, might be more problematic than they had been encouraged to believe.

    The romantic illusions about Israel as a simple refuge for Jews started to unravel.

    That culminated in a series of reports by leading human rights groups in recent years characterising Israel as an apartheid state. Israel’s supporters, however, whether Jews or non-Jews, have struggled to acknowledge the ugly, anachronistic ideas of race, apartheid and colonialism at the heart of a project they were raised to support since childhood.

    Instead they preferred to expand the meaning of antisemitism to excuse Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians.

    So in parallel to Israel’s crushing of the Palestinian uprising, its apologists intensified the blurring of the distinction between hostility towards Jews and opposition to Israel and Zionism.

    They began a campaign to redefine antisemitism so that it treated Israel as a kind of “collective Jew”.

    In this new, perverse way of thinking, anyone who opposed Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians was as antisemitic as someone who marched down the high street shouting anti-Jewish slogans.

    Antagonism to Israel was denied the right to present itself as evidence of anti-racism, or support for Palestinian rights.

    Colonial meddling

    This evolution culminated in the adoption by a growing number of governments and official bodies of an entirely new, and extraordinary, definition of antisemitism that prioritised opposition to Israel over hatred towards Jews.

    Seven of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 11 examples of antisemitism focus on Israel. The most problematic is the claim that it is antisemitic to argue Israel is “a racist endeavour”.

    That view has been a staple of anti-racist, socialist thought for decades, as well as serving for 16 years as the basis of a United Nations resolution.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, Israel took a pivotal role behind the scenes in formulating the IHRA definition.

    The new definition might have gained little traction, but for two key factors.

    One was that it was not just Zionists who had an interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny or serious criticism. For the West, Israel was the lynch pin for projecting its military power into the oil-rich Middle East.

    The benefits the West received from that power projection – continuing colonial meddling in the region – could be disguised, too, by directing attention at Israel and away from the West’s guiding hand.

    Better still, the backlash against Israel’s role inflaming the Middle East could be stifled by labelling any critic as antisemitic. It was the West’s perfect cover story and the ideal silencing tool all wrapped up in one smear.

    The second factor was Corbyn’s explosion onto the political scene in 2015, and his near-miss two years later in a general election, when he won the biggest increase in votes for Labour since 1945. He was 2,000 votes shy of winning.

    Corbyn’s unexpected success – against all odds – sharply underscored the urgent, shared interests of the British establishment and the Zionist movement.

    A Corbyn government would curb the privileges of a ruling elite; it would threaten the West’s colonial war machine, Nato; and it would seek to end the UK’s military and diplomatic support for Israel, the West’s key ally in the Middle East.

    After the 2017 election, no effort was spared by the political establishment – by the government, by the media, by Labour’s right wing, and by pro-Israel groups – to constantly suggest that Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of new left-wing Labour party members he attracted were antisemitic.

    Under mounting media pressure, the IHRA definition was foisted on the party in autumn 2018, creating a trap into which the left was bound to fall every time it took a principled stance on Israel and human rights.

    Even the chief author of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, warned it was being “weaponised” to silence critics of Israel.

    The antisemitism campaign sapped Corbyn’s campaign of energy and momentum for the 2019 general election. The once-inspiring left-wing leader was forced into a permanent  posture of defensiveness and evasiveness.

    Purge of members

    Corbyn was ousted from the Labour benches in 2020 by his successor, Keir Starmer, who had been elected leader on the promise of bringing unity.

    He did the opposite.

    He waged a war on the party’s left wing. Corbyn’s few allies in the shadow cabinet were driven out.  Then, Starmer’s team began a relentless, high-profile purge of the party’s Corbyn-supporting members, including anti-Zionist Jews, under the claim they were antisemitic.

    Debate about the purges was banned in local constituencies, on the grounds that it might make “Jewish members” – really meaning Israel’s apologists – feel unsafe.

    This process reached a new level of surrealism with the barring last month of the popular figure of Jamie Driscoll, the first mayor of North of Tyne, from standing for re-election on a socialist platform.

    Driscoll had embarrassed Starmer’s officials by proving that running society for the benefit of all could be a vote-winner. He needed to be neutered. The question was how that could be achieved without making it clear that Starmer was really waging a war not on antisemitism but on the left.

    So a set of tendentious associations with antisemitism were manufactured to justify the decision.

    Driscoll was punished not for saying or doing anything antisemitic – even under the new, expanded IHRA definition – but for sharing a platform to discuss director Ken Loach’s films. Loach, it should be noted, had not been expelled from the party for antisemitism.

    Loach’s expulsion in 2021 had been justified on the grounds he had accused Starmer’s officials of carrying out a witch hunt against the party’s left. Loach’s treatment thereby proved the very allegation he was expelled for making.

    But to bolster the feeble pretext for targeting Driscoll, which even in the official version was entirely unconnected to antisemitism, media organisations ignored the stated grounds of Loach’s expulsion. They emphasised instead fanciful claims that the director had been caught denying the Holocaust.

    Not only was Driscoll barred from running again as mayor, but, according to reports, any mention of his name can lead to disciplinary action. He has become, in a terrifying phrase from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, an “Unperson”.

    In parallel, Starmer has overseen the rush by the party back into the arms of the establishment. He has ostentatiously embraced patriotism and the flag. He demands lockstep support for Nato. Labour policy is once again in thrall to big business, and against strikes by workers. And, since the death of the Queen, Starmer has sought to bow as low as possible before the new king without toppling over.

    His whole approach seems designed to foster an atmosphere of despair on the left. At the weekend, in a sign of how quickly the purges are expanding, it emerged that the Starmer police had been knocking at the door of a figure close to the party establishment, Gordon Brown’s former speechwriter Neal Lawson.

    Cultural dissent

    None of this is surprising. Labour, under Corbyn, was the one holdout against the complete takeover of British politics by neoliberal, predatory capitalist orthodoxy. His socialism-lite was an all-too-obvious aberration.

    Now, under Starmer, that political threat has been swept away.

    There is a bipartisan – meaning establishment – consensus. The UK government voted last night to ban all public bodies, including local governments, from approving a boycott of one country over its record of human rights abuses: Israel.

    The legislation will effectively protect Israel from boycotts even of products from Jewish settlements, built illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to drive Palestinians off their historic homeland.

    Michael Gove, the communities secretary, argued in the Commons debate that such practical expressions of solidarity with Palestinians would “harm community cohesion and fuel antisemitism” in Britain.

    The government appears to believe that only the sensitivities of the more extreme Zionist elements within the UK’s Jewish community need protecting, not those of British Palestinians, British Arabs or Britons who care about international law.

    Starmer’s party, which shares the government’s hostility to boycotts of Israel, whipped Labour MPs to abstain on the bill, allowing it to pass. It was left to a handful of Tory MPs to highlight the fact that the bill undermines the two-state solution that the government and Labour party pay lip service to.

    Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the bill “essentially gives exceptional impunity to Israel”.

    Speaking for Labour,  Lisa Nandy referred to boycotts of Israel as a “problem” that needed to be “tackled”, and instead urged amendments to the legislation to soften the bill’s draconian powers to fine public bodies.

    Starmer’s Labour eased the bill’s passage even as Israel launched yesterday the largest assault on the West Bank in 20 years. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in the initial attack on Jenin and more than 100 injured, while thousands fled their city.

    On Tuesday, the United Nations said it was “alarmed” by the scale of Israel’s assault on Jenin.

    The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, reported that the Israeli army was preventing first responders from reaching and treating the wounded.

    With all political dissent on Israel crushed, what is left now are small islands of cultural dissent, represented most visibly by a handful of ageing giants of the arts scene.

    Figures like Loach and Roger Waters are leftovers from a different era, one in which being a socialist was not equated with being antisemitic.

    Loach was a thorn in Starmer’s side because he made waves from within Labour.

    But the scope of Starmer’s ambition to eviscerate the UK’s cultural left too was highlighted last month when he wrote to the Jewish body, the Board of Deputies, to accuse Waters – in entirely gratuitous fashion – of “spreading deeply troubling antisemitism”.

    The last fires

    In a further sign of his authoritarian instincts, Starmer called for the musician’s concerts to be banned.

    Evidence for Waters’ supposed antisemitism is as non-existent as the earlier claim that Jew hatred had become a “cancer” under Corbyn. And it is the same establishment groups defaming Waters who smeared Corbyn: the government, the corporate media, Starmer’s wing of Labour, and the Israel lobby.

    Waters has been widely denounced for briefly dressing up in a Nazi-style uniform during his shows, as he has been doing for 40 years, in a clear satire on the attraction and dangers of fascist leaders.

    No one took an interest in his shows’ political messaging until it became necessary to weaponise antisemitism against the cultural left, having already eliminated the political left.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is an outspoken and high-profile supporter of Palestinian rights. Like Corbyn, Waters is noisily and unfashionably anti-war, including critical of Nato’s efforts to use Ukraine as a battlefield on which to “weaken” Russia rather than engage in talks.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is a critic of capitalist excess and a proponent of a fairer, kinder society of the kind expunged from most people’s memories.

    And like Corbyn, and very much unlike our current breed of charisma-free, technocratic politicians, Waters can draw huge crowds and inspire them with a political message.

    In Britain’s current, twisted political climate, anyone with a conscience, anyone with compassion, anyone with a sense of injustice – and anyone capable of grasping the hypocrisy of our current leaders – risks being smeared as an antisemite.

    That campaign is far from complete yet. It will continue until the very last fires of political dissent have been extinguished.

    • First published in Middle East Eye


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/weaponised-antisemitism-crushed-the-political-left-now-its-the-cultural-lefts-turn/feed/ 0 412069     Targeted for Tyranny: We’re All Suspects Under the Government’s Pre-crime Program https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/13/targeted-for-tyranny-were-all-suspects-under-the-governments-pre-crime-program/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/13/targeted-for-tyranny-were-all-suspects-under-the-governments-pre-crime-program/#respond Thu, 13 Jul 2023 01:57:24 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142057 We’re all being targeted now.

    We’re all guilty until proven innocent now.

    And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

    Although these pre-crime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.

    Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

    These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape, are being built in partnership with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which helped to fuel the rise of police militarization and domestic surveillance.

    While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “pre-crime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion.

    Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

    As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

    Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censor and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

    Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lock down sectors of a community at a moment’s notice.

    For instance, a 42,000-square-foot behemoth of a fusion center in downtown Washington is reportedly designed to “better prepare law enforcement for the next public health emergency or Jan. 6-style attack.” According to an agency spokeswoman, “Screens covering the walls of the new facility will show surveillance cameras around the city as well as social media accounts that may be monitored for threatening speech.”

    It’s like a scene straight out of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian film Minority Report.

    Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

    What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

    The American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick have all been rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

    In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s pre-crime sensors.

    With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

    It’s also a setup ripe for abuse.

    For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

    One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peace-building summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

    This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals.

    This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security, the massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.

    Yet here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

    In fact, all you need to do is live in the United States.

    It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

    Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

    Combine predictive policing with surveillance, over-criminalization and pre-crime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.

    If you’re not scared yet, you should be.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/13/targeted-for-tyranny-were-all-suspects-under-the-governments-pre-crime-program/feed/ 0 411370     Syria revokes accreditation of 2 BBC journalists https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/10/syria-revokes-accreditation-of-2-bbc-journalists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/10/syria-revokes-accreditation-of-2-bbc-journalists/#respond Mon, 10 Jul 2023 15:13:34 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=299019 Beirut, July 10, 2023 – Syria’s Ministry of Information must reverse its decision to revoke the accreditation of two BBC journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

    On July 8, the ministry said it had canceled the accreditation of two local journalists working for the BBC over “false” and “politicized” reporting, according to a statement by the ministry, the BBC, and multiple media reports. Those sources did not identify the journalists by name.

    The ministry’s statement said one journalist worked as a radio correspondent, and the other as a correspondent and camera operator. It did not specify what reporting led to the revocation, but said the BBC had been “warned more than once” about “misleading reports relying on statements and testimonies from terrorist and anti-Syrian authorities.”

    “The Syrian government has long restricted the media, and the recent revocation of two BBC reporters’ accreditation shows that the government remains intent on stifling independent voices,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Authorities should reverse this decision and allow all members of the press to work freely and without fear of reprisal.”

    In late June, the BBC published an investigative report linking the trade of an amphetamine drug with President Bashar al-Assad’s family and the Syrian Armed Forces. Syria, which has been roiled by civil war since 2011, has previously denied playing a role in the amphetamine trade.

    In an email to CPJ, the BBC said that the outlet would “continue to provide impartial news and information to our audiences across the Arabic-speaking world.”

    CPJ emailed the Syrian Ministry of Information for comment but did not receive any response.

    At least five journalists were imprisoned in Syria at the time of CPJ’s 2022 prison census.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/10/syria-revokes-accreditation-of-2-bbc-journalists/feed/ 0 410645     EARN IT Still Ignores Privacy, Censorship Concerns https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/earn-it-still-ignores-privacy-censorship-concerns/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/earn-it-still-ignores-privacy-censorship-concerns/#respond Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:13:22 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=31825 By Shealeigh Voitl and avram anderson Dangerous pieces of legislation have been introduced at the federal and state levels under the guise of protecting children online from exploitation and other…

    The post EARN IT Still Ignores Privacy, Censorship Concerns appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/earn-it-still-ignores-privacy-censorship-concerns/feed/ 0 408339     A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/27/a-state-of-martial-law-america-is-a-military-dictatorship-disguised-as-a-democracy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/27/a-state-of-martial-law-america-is-a-military-dictatorship-disguised-as-a-democracy/#respond Tue, 27 Jun 2023 21:55:16 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=141485

    What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

    —Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in Papers of Jefferson, ed.

    The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

    Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

    Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

    Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

    Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

    As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

    The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

    For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

    By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

    This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

    For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

    A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

    Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

    Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

    The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

    The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

    This is how it begins.

    As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

    Already, discontent is growing.

    According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”

    Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

    What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”

    This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

    Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

    When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Brace yourselves.

    There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

    Any time you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

    Any time you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

    And any time you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

    The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

    The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

    We are at our most vulnerable right now.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/27/a-state-of-martial-law-america-is-a-military-dictatorship-disguised-as-a-democracy/feed/ 0 407630     Glastonbury’s Cancelling of a Powerful Film about Jeremy Corbyn https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/23/glastonburys-cancelling-of-a-powerful-film-about-jeremy-corbyn/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/23/glastonburys-cancelling-of-a-powerful-film-about-jeremy-corbyn/#respond Fri, 23 Jun 2023 12:52:17 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=141355

    The Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko famously said that: ‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’

    In this country, as in other western ‘democracies’, important truths are effectively being silenced. As we have written on many occasions, antisemitism was used as a weapon to destroy the chances of Jeremy Corbyn becoming the British Prime Minister. Labour HQ staffers, and even Labour MPs, actively conspired against him. Al Jazeera’s powerful series, The Labour Files, which was blatantly blanked by the establishment media, has documented all this in considerable detail.

    And now the Glastonbury Film Festival has succumbed to similar pressure and cancelled a screening of a new film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie.

    The Board of Deputies of British Jews (BDBJ), a right-wing establishment organisation that claims to represent the British Jewish ‘community’, had written to Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, saying it would be ‘profoundly sinister’ if the festival platformed the film. Marie van der Zyl, president of BDBJ, said in a letter to the festival organisers:

    ‘It seems profoundly sinister for it to be providing a platform to a film which clearly seeks to indoctrinate people into believing a conspiracy theory effectively aimed at Jewish organisations.

    ‘We would request that you not allow your festival to be hijacked by those seeking to promote hatred with no basis in fact, in the same way as we would hope that your festival would not screen films seeking to promote other conspiracy theories, such as anti-vaccination, 9/11 truthers or chemtrails.’

    The makers of the film, first shown in London in February, describe the film thus:

    ‘Produced by award-winning radical film-maker Platform Films, with contributions from Jackie Walker, Ken Loach, Andrew Murray, Graham Bash and Moshe Machover, and narrated by Alexei Sayle, this feature-length documentary film explores a dark and murky story of political deceit and outrageous antisemitic smears. It also uncovers the critical role played by current Labour leader, Keir Starmer and asks if the movement which backed Corbyn could rise again.’

    Reviewer Diane Datson wrote:

    ‘The real message conveyed in this film is that the Labour Party is no alternative to the Conservatives – it serves the ruling class and is led by someone every bit as devious as Boris Johnson, if not more so.’

    She added:

    ‘However, I for one felt uplifted, as the film ended optimistically. Many of the interviewees think that all is not lost – those millions of people who were inspired and given hope by the Corbyn project haven’t gone away – they are to be found supporting the picket lines, protesting and fighting for many causes such as public ownership of the NHS and the right to strike and the establishment is STILL petrified.’

    But Paul Mason, formerly of BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News, and now a would-be Labour MP under Starmer, attacked the film as presenting:

    ‘a full-blown conspiracy theory about Corbyn’s opponents, conflating Zionists, Jews and Israel as part of a force that “orchestrated” his overthrow.’

    Mason gave a specific example:

    ‘Seventeen minutes in, after presenting evidence of an “orchestrated campaign” against Corbyn, the narrator, Alexei Sayle asks: “But if it was an orchestrated campaign, who was in the orchestra?” There follows a silent montage showing the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, and the Israel Advocacy Movement.

    ‘As a professional film-maker I recognise this wordless presentation of a controversial idea not as an accident but as a technique: using captions and pictures to state what, if spoken aloud, could be accused of anti-Semitism.’

    Mason’s description is a gross distortion. This section of the film does indeed address the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the UK, with the montage indicating key players. But prior to this section, The Big Lie already emphasises the crucial point that it was the establishment as a whole that worked tirelessly to bring Corbyn down, even to the extent of an unnamed acting British army general threatening that the army would ‘mutiny’ and that ‘people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul’ to get rid of Corbyn (Sunday Times, 20 September 2015).

    Sayle, as narrator, stated unequivocally that: ‘For the establishment, the sudden rise of Corbyn was terrifying.’

    He continued: ‘Corbyn was anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons. A socialist, even.’

    Mike Cowley, a Labour Party member, said:

    ‘I guess that’s what gave the establishment such a fright, to a degree, because they saw the numbers he was mobilising. And, as we began to see, it’s not actually Corbyn they’re afraid of. It’s us – he’s only one man. It’s us, they’re afraid of.’

    Sayle then pointed out that:

    ‘From the start, Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest threat was from his own Labour MPs.’

    After the 1917 election, the campaign against Corbyn ‘went into overdrive’:

    ‘The Tory press threw its all at Jeremy Corbyn. They tried smear after smear [front-page press montage]. But in the end, only one stuck [alleged antisemitism].’

    In other words, the film overwhelmingly makes clear that the pro-Israel lobby was only one player in a much larger orchestra that was fundamentally establishment, not Jewish, in nature. Mason chose to ignore this in his review. And yet, he had himself accepted the wider conspiracy in 2020:

    ‘A senior group of Labour staffers actively conspired for the party to lose the 2017 election… this is a Watergate moment, not just for Labour but for British politics’

    On Twitter, leftist singer Billy Bragg joined the attack on the film:

    ‘The problem with the film is that it implies there is a Jewish conspiracy behind Corbyn’s defeat. The fact that the film’s supporters have been blaming the Israeli lobby for the ban rather than the content of the film kinda underlines their lack of understanding of that problem’

    As evidence, Bragg then cited Mason’s misleading quote (presumably, and ill-advisedly, because Bragg had not himself seen the film) as an attempted ‘Gotcha!’

    Jackie Walker, a Jewish activist who is interviewed in The Big Lie, made an additional, relevant point when she responded to Bragg:

    ‘Labour Friends of Israel are overwhelmingly not Jewish, the Board of deputies do not hide their commitment to Israel, and the IAM [Israel Advocacy Movement] are exactly what they say on the tin – they ADVOCATE for Israel’

    The Big Lie is, of course, right to address the important part played by the pro-Israel lobby. It includes clips from the Al Jazeera film, The Lobby, which exposed Israel’s determined attempts to interfere in Britain’s politics. In particular, Israeli embassy official Shai Masot was caught on film boasting that he could help ‘bring down’ pro-Palestinian MPs. A clip of Peter Oborne, former political editor of the Telegraph, from the same Al Jazeera film, is also shown in which he says:

    ‘It [the actions of the Israel lobby] is outrageous interference in British politics. It shouldn’t be permitted.’

    On Twitter, Ben Sellers observed that:

    ‘I have worked in Parliament & been an anti-racist activist all my adult life. I’m not naive about these things. I watched the film very carefully for anything that could be deemed antisemitic. The idea that it implies a “Jewish conspiracy” defeated Corbyn is a distortion.’

    He continued:

    ‘What it does is explain that organisations (with their own centrist & right-wing politics) inside & outside the party, worked to create a crisis for Corbyn’s leadership & in order to defeat the left in the party. This is well documented & evidenced (e.g in the Al Jazeera docs).’

    Sellers concluded:

    ‘It’s not a conspiracy theory – it’s an argument. And what people [like Mason and Bragg] don’t like is that argument. They don’t want to hear it. So they’ve manage[d] to silence the voice of left-wing Jews (on the basis that the Jewish community is some sort of monolith). That’s dangerous & undemocratic.’

    ‘Anti-Racists Accused of Racism by Racists’

    ‘The Big Lie’ also highlights the incessant establishment media attacks on Corbyn, particularly after the 2017 General Election which he came so close to winning. The ‘smear that stuck’ was the myth that antisemitism was supposedly rife in Labour under Corbyn. A ‘cancer’, as one despicable newspaper headline put it.

    In his distorted review of the documentary, Mason raised the spectre of legal action on the grounds that the film supposedly breaches the politically biased and much-disputed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Simply put, the film dares to criticise the apartheid state of Israel, its lobbyists and the media acolytes who campaigned to smear Corbyn and his supporters, including long-time grassroots Labour activists.

    As journalist Jonathan Cook observed in 2021, a five-year campaign by highly partisan, pro-Israel lobby groups was able to mislead the international community about the nature of what has been wrongly described as the ‘gold standard’ definition of antisemitism. The definition has now become ‘a cudgel’ with which to beat critics of Israel and to suppress the rights of Palestinians.

    Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford University, observed in the foreword of a 2021 report on how the definition of antisemitism has been misrepresented:

    ‘[A] definition intended to protect Jews against antisemitism was twisted to protect the State of Israel against valid criticisms that have nothing to do with anti-Jewish racism.’

    In September 2018, Alexei Sayle had told a packed fringe meeting at the Labour party conference that:

    ‘There can be no greater injustice than anti-racists being accused of racism by racists.’

    That is a precise and succinct summary of what has been happening in recent years.

    Having watched the complete documentary, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, it is clear that it is thoroughly researched, relies on credible and articulate interviewees, and its arguments are expertly marshalled and presented. The notion that it is in any way ‘antisemitic’ is just a sign of how far down the road of totalitarian censorship we have travelled in this country.

    Glastonbury Capitulates

    Rather than spring to the film’s defence, Michael Walker of Novara Media criticised the film’s title:

    ‘Normally I’m v against clamping down on any open discussion about what happened in and to labour between 2015 and 2019. But calling your film “the big lie” is, at best, really really dumb.’

    Why? Because Hitler had used the same phrase, ‘the big lie’. But, as several people pointed out in response to Walker’s ‘really really dumb’ comment, so have many others. In fact, ‘the big lie’ comes from one of the Jewish contributors to the film, Moshé Machover, in describing the smears against Corbyn. Moreover, Walker admitted he had not even seen the film.

    This continued the shameful record of Novara – remember, supposedly an ‘alternative’ to the corporate media – in failing to critically appraise the weaponising of antisemitism; indeed, accepting the myth that antisemitism was endemic under Corbyn-led Labour.

    Once they had caved in to pro-Israel pressure to cancel the film, the Glastonbury festival organisers then issued a statement in which they said:

    ‘Although we believe that the Pilton Palais [cinema] booked this film in good faith, in the hope of provoking political debate, it’s become clear that it is not appropriate for us to screen it at the festival.

    ‘Glastonbury is about unity and not division, and we stand against all forms of discrimination.’

    What a contrast from 2017 when Corbyn had addressed a massive, appreciative crowd at Glastonbury, proclaiming a message of ‘unity, and not division’ and ‘standing against all forms of discrimination’.

    The BDBJ crowed that the film had now been cancelled:

    ‘We are pleased that in the wake of a letter we sent earlier today, @glastonbury have announced the cancellation of the screening of this film. Hateful conspiracy theories should have no place in our society.’

    Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a founding member of Jewish Voice for Labour who was expelled from Starmer’s Labour Party for being the ‘wrong type of Jew’, said on Twitter:

    ‘Unbelievable that @glastonbury has bowed to demands from fans of Starmer’s @uklabour, banning a film exposing demonisation of @jeremycorbyn. The censors say the film conflates Zionists, Jews & Israel. No, actually, that’s what they do. See it & judge for yourself.’

    US journalist Glenn Greenwald noted:

    ‘The @glastonbury Film Festival capitulated to pressure and cancelled the Corbyn documentary.

    ‘This illustrates the great crisis in the democratic world: an intense fixation on suppressing and silencing, rather than engaging, dissenting views.

    ‘Every solution now is censorship.’

    It is indeed the ‘solution’ seen by established power, and it is utterly wrong.

    There was minimal reporting by the British state-corporate media and, crucially, no uproar about censorship and yet another step being taken towards suppression of free speech. There was a handful of short news reports, including in the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Guardian (passed over in just three lines), the Times, Daily Mail and Telegraph.

    These mainly led with the charges of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘conspiracy theory’. The Evening Standard also carried a smear piece, ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn: Glasto myth and a poisonous conspiracy theory’, by Tanya Gold.

    The single significant piece refuting the specious, cynical charges was an article in the Independent reporting the reaction of Norman Thomas, the film’s producer. He said that the film’s cancellation had been caused by ‘vicious outside pressure’. He added:

    ‘An outside pressure group [BDBJ] has declared war on our film. They wrote to the festival’s sponsors… and whipped up huge storm of complaints about the film claiming, without any foundation whatsoever, that the film is antisemitic.’

    He continued:

    ‘The claim that the film is antisemitic is a total smear.

    ‘The festival organisers even had a lawyer examine the film who pronounced it totally devoid of antisemitism. [Our emphasis]’

    As we have also seen with the cruel persecution of Julian Assange and the treatment of Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, the establishment is becoming ever fiercer in its attacks on those who challenge power.

    It is ironic indeed that Glenn Greenwald, a US journalist, is far more vocal in defending UK freedom of speech than British journalists. A great silence has fallen over the media in this country.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/23/glastonburys-cancelling-of-a-powerful-film-about-jeremy-corbyn/feed/ 0 406466     Jayrex’s lawyers threaten lawsuit if PNG music ban isn’t lifted https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/23/jayrexs-lawyers-threaten-lawsuit-if-png-music-ban-isnt-lifted/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/23/jayrexs-lawyers-threaten-lawsuit-if-png-music-ban-isnt-lifted/#respond Fri, 23 Jun 2023 02:37:43 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=90106 By Phoebe Gwangilo in Port Moresby

    Legal proceedings are expected to take place if the temporary ban on the songs of Jason Suisui — known as Jayrex — is not lifted, warns his lawyer Philip Tabuchi.

    “In the event this temporary ban is not uplifted [sic], our client will have no choice but to take the next most appropriate step, including commencing legal proceedings,” said senior associate Tabuchi of Young and Williams Lawyers in response to questions raised by the PNG Post-Courier in an email.

    The National Censorship Office took a firm step against gender-based violence by placing a temporary ban on all songs by the popular Pacific reggae artist Jason Suisui from New Ireland following complaints of assault and ongoing emotional abuse by his partner of four years and her family.

    The singer had been earlier charged with causing grievous bodily harm, emotional distress and mental abuse through numerous phone calls, text message and in the lyrics of his songs.

    Relatives close to the woman told the Post-Courier that she was in a fragile state and was often suicidal.

    “Just like his legion of fans throughout the country, and other local artists, Jayrex was shocked to learn that the Office of Censorship had placed what they described as a temporary ban on his very passion – his music,” said his lawyer.

    Following communication with the Office of Censorship on this undated temporary ban, senior associate Tabuchi said it was intended that logic and common sense would now prevail, and the temporary ban would be lifted.

    “Jayrex is appreciative of the massive support he has received from all the fans throughout the country, including from other artists,” Tabuchi said.

    “Thank you for all of your kind words and support,” Jayrex said through the lawyer.

    “I am confident we will get through this. Bai yumi stap yet! Yumi sanap strong wantem! (We’ll stop this! We’ll stand up really strong!).”

    Phoebe Gwangilo is a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/23/jayrexs-lawyers-threaten-lawsuit-if-png-music-ban-isnt-lifted/feed/ 0 406265     PNG’s censorship office bans Jayrex songs over partner abuse allegations https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/pngs-censorship-office-bans-jayrex-songs-over-partner-abuse-allegations/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/pngs-censorship-office-bans-jayrex-songs-over-partner-abuse-allegations/#respond Wed, 21 Jun 2023 10:13:13 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=90043 By Phoebe Gwangilo in Port Moresby

    Papua New Guinea’s National Censorship Office has cracked down on gender-based violence by temporarily banning all songs by popular New Ireland artist Jason Suisui — popularly known as Jayrex — following complaints of assault and ongoing emotional abuse by his partner of four years and her family.

    The Pacific reggae singer was earlier charged with causing grievous bodily harm, emotional distress and mental abuse through numerous phone calls, text messages and in the lyrics of his songs.

    Relatives close to the woman told the Post-Courier newspaper that she was in a fragile state and was often suicidal.

    A representative who works in the family sexual violence space described the musician’s actions as bullying, intimidation and “gaslighting”.

    The representative commended the National Censorship Office for this “bold move”, saying it was hoped the office would start to curb and hold artists, musicians and content creators accountable and responsible for material, songs, videos they produced for the public.

    Gaslighting is a type of emotional manipulation that results in the recipient often doubting their perception of reality and sanity — the family members complain that this is what Suisui’s songs have been doing to the woman.

    Chief Censor Jim Abani said: “We have taken measures to place a temporary ban on Jason’s songs following complaints we have received from his wife, or partner.”

    No immediate response
    Questions sent to the country’s radio stations did not get an immediate response.

    Calls made to the Kavieng police were not answered.

    Censor Abani said that the complainant claimed she had been through a “lot of abuse” with Jason, with some of his song lyrics dedicated to her not helping her heal from depression.

    He said as such the “publication” — of songs — produced by Jason had been found to be objectionable publications under Section 2 (1) of the Classifi­cation of Publication Act 1989.

    Abani said the Censorship Office did not tolerate gender-based violence in any form, including emotional abuse as was the case with the complainant.

    He added that the complainant claimed in her report to the Censorship Office that some of the songs were dedicated and she asked for Jayrex’s songs to be banned to allow her to deal with her trauma and depression.

    Part of Vision 2050
    “Regulation and protection of gender-discriminatory songs was part of vision 2050 that we are implementing. Putting a temporary ban on Jason’s songs is in line with the implementation of Vision 2050.”

    Abani had issued directives to all radio stations and television to cease broadcasting and displaying Jayrex’s songs.

    According to the statement from the Censorship Office, enforcement and compliance officers would be conducting inspections to ensure the Chief Censor’s directives were followed.

    He said the ban was temporary while an investigation was underway.

    A permanent decision would be made once the investigation was completed.

    Phoebe Gwangilo is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/pngs-censorship-office-bans-jayrex-songs-over-partner-abuse-allegations/feed/ 0 405611     Texas Book Ban Bills Set a Dangerous Precedent for the Narratives of Young People in Education https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/texas-book-ban-bills-set-a-dangerous-precedent-for-the-narratives-of-young-people-in-education-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/texas-book-ban-bills-set-a-dangerous-precedent-for-the-narratives-of-young-people-in-education-2/#respond Wed, 21 Jun 2023 00:11:58 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=141278 Texas Book Ban Bills Set a Dangerous Precedent

    Amid an unprecedented wave of censorship, many of our state legislators have left no mercy for LGBTQ+ Texans. Censorious legislation like House Bill 900 and Senate Bill 13 attempt to relate queer identity with sexual obscenity. The bills target educators’ expertise and diminish students’ right to read in a vitriolic attack on queer identity, and more broadly, the agency young people wield in our own education.

    Students are the primary stakeholders in our education, but this legislation is among the slew of bills nationwide favoring so-called parental rights above those who learn, teach, and work in schools full-time. Students deserve a seat at the table in decisions directly affecting us, but these legislative efforts subvert our authority in life experiences we face daily.

    In a recent survey by the New York Times, “the overwhelming majority of students were opposed to book bans.” Censorship bills seek to exclude and erase marginalized identities from the mainstream. Book banning ultimately harms students, especially when Gen Z is the queerest, most diverse, and progressive generation in America. Unfortunately, policymakers have an agenda to further marginalize the already-unheard and traditionally-silenced youth of our nation. Students deserve better.

    Every student should feel the same comfort and passion I felt as a young child walking into a community library or bookstore with shelves lined with dynamic character arcs and magical, faraway lands yet to be discovered. Public school libraries should serve our diversity, not shutter stories and silence voices. We cannot spare losing narratives with the power to open our eyes to a world never before seen – a world that could exemplify the beauty of queerness and the compassion all could share when united as a community in acceptance and love.

    Books save lives, and students need increased access to literature, not less. Aside from student retention or career success, readily accessible books in school libraries can be a lifeline for students seeking support for how to say “no” in uncomfortable situations or how to explain our first menstrual cycle. They can provide insight for how to handle an interaction with police or navigate ambivalent emotions. Americans routinely face these real scenarios, and our nation is failing its younger generations when our worth is not valued and our needs are not met.

    Any effort to limit students’ access to knowledge is an attempt to erase our narrative as a generation, one that represents our nation’s future. Signed by Governor Greg Abbott June 12 in Texas, HB 900 will impose a state takeover of local school district policies, requiring vendors to rate books by their “offensiveness” to “current community standards of decency” or risk losing business from school districts.

    Policymakers must not weaponize the status quo by mischaracterizing literature with subjective politics. Not one of the roughly 30 million Texans may have an identical view of what defines a “pervasively vulgar” book, but in exclusively selective committees like those described in SB 13 to review library collections, just a few parents could dictate decisions of an entire district.

    Cameron Samuels testified against censorship legislation to the Senate Education Committee on April 12, 2023

    Cameron Samuels testified against censorship legislation to the Senate Education Committee on April 12, 2023

    While proponents of book banning may claim their intention is to protect children, book bans do not challenge explicit content. They primarily target books exploring race, sexuality, and gender. Censorship targets authentic, diverse stories that help youth navigate trauma and discover ourselves.

    By mandating libraries to recognize “parents are the primary decision makers regarding a student’s access to library material,” these policies impact vulnerable students while denying us the agency to hold power in the policymaking.

    We must never forget that reading fosters personal growth and inspires leaders who drive society forward. Young people, organizing with Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and other youth-led movements, contributed to the demise of SB 13. Student organizers developed debate talking points and legislative amendments that senators proposed against HB 900 during the proceedings.

    In limiting the books students can access, policymakers further narrow students’ views on diversity and inclusion and dim what flourishes beyond the horizon. Students thrive when robust representation and affirmation can be found in the books of our school libraries because we come to discover a meaningful connection to education and our community.

    It’s time students reclaim ownership of our education and our right to read and learn. We all must pave a clear path for progress in defending our libraries and educators before it’s too late. Young people depend on leaders who speak truth to power.

    Our nation ought not to be silent when young people feel obligated to defend our own rights because we feel no others will.

  • Originally published at Project Censored.


    • This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Cameron Samuels.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/texas-book-ban-bills-set-a-dangerous-precedent-for-the-narratives-of-young-people-in-education-2/feed/ 0 405498     Exposing International News Neglect, Censorship, and Agenda Cutting https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/19/exposing-international-news-neglect-censorship-and-agenda-cutting/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/19/exposing-international-news-neglect-censorship-and-agenda-cutting/#respond Mon, 19 Jun 2023 12:00:05 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=31783 The Top 5 Most Important but Under-Reported News Stories of 2022-2023, as Selected by an International Jury A Joint Endeavor of the News Enlightenment Initiative and Project Censored June 19,…

    The post Exposing International News Neglect, Censorship, and Agenda Cutting appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/19/exposing-international-news-neglect-censorship-and-agenda-cutting/feed/ 0 405098     Mahoney: The lingering legacy of China’s COVID-19 censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/mahoney-the-lingering-legacy-of-chinas-covid-19-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/mahoney-the-lingering-legacy-of-chinas-covid-19-censorship/#respond Tue, 06 Jun 2023 12:02:56 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=290885 One time she drew flowers on a letter to her ailing mother from her Chinese prison cell. Another time it was pictures of penguins. The drawings were a good sign. Zhang Zhan, the journalist jailed for her COVID-19 reporting from Wuhan, is maybe doing better.

    The 39-year-old Shanghai lawyer-turned social media reporter was one of a handful of journalists, bloggers and writers who slipped into Wuhan – the epicenter of the pandemic – in early 2020 as the Chinese censorship juggernaut crushed on-the-ground independent reporting, hastening the spread of the virus that the World Health Organization says has since killed more than 6.9 million people worldwide.

    Chinese journalist in Wuhan
    A YouTube screenshot shows Zhang Zhan reporting outside a railway station in Wuhan. The video was uploaded the day before her May 14, 2020 arrest for reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Zhang’s defiant reporting and activism earned her a four-year prison sentence in December 2020. She has been on several hunger strikes since then and her family and supporters have been worried for her health.

    “Her mother thinks that if Zhang is able to draw on the envelopes or letters, it seems to suggest that her mental state has changed,” human rights lawyer Li Dawei said.

    Pictures of the letters were posted on Twitter last December by her brother.

    They have since been deleted.

    • A screenshot of Zhang’s drawings from a now-deleted tweet by her brother

      Li told Deutsche Welle that Zhang’s mother, who underwent cancer surgery last year, is also allowed to call her daughter once a month. Little is known, however, of Zhang’s physical condition. At her trial, she was too weak to stand because of her hunger strike.

    “She went on a hunger strike to protest against the lockdown and published many articles and video interviews about the life of Wuhan residents under the lockdown,” says Murong Xuecun, a writer who also went to Wuhan to chronicle the COVID outbreak.

    Other would-be investigative reporters in the city around the same time were Chen Qiushi, Li Zehua and Fang Bin. After their Chinese social media accounts were blocked, they posted vivid accounts from overflowing hospital emergency rooms and nighttime cremations on YouTube and Twitter to show the extent of the government’s concealment of the truth. Foreign social media platforms are banned in China but accessible with Great Firewall circumvention technologies.

    Li Zehua reported from Wuhan at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Li Zehua)

    Inevitably, these reporters were all swept up in China’s digital social control dragnet. Murong escaped to write a book, “Deadly Quiet City,” and now lives in Australia. He devotes a whole chapter to Zhang, whom he interviewed in Wuhan. She was forcibly quarantined in a Wuhan neighborhood before her arrest. “When her community banned residents from entering and exiting freely, she repeatedly pushed down the fence that closed the road, and was threatened, humiliated, and even beaten for this,” Murong told me.

    “She was the only citizen journalist left in Wuhan after Fang Bin, Li Zehua and Chen Qiushi disappeared. The authorities punished her not only for her reporting of the truth, which was also what Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua had done, but also for her courageous resistance and her outspoken criticism of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the Chinese government.”

    It’s perhaps hard for those of us in liberal democracies to understand the courage of these truth-seekers in a Leninist dictatorship like that of President Xi Jinping. China has been among the world’s top jailers of journalists since CPJ began its annual prison census three decades ago.

    “We rarely mentioned Xi Jinping in conversation, even in private gatherings, because of the potential for very serious consequences,” Murong explains. “We used a gesture – a thumbs up with the right hand – in place of his name. The situation is even worse now, with few people daring to give interviews to the Western media.”

    What struck Murong about the residents of Wuhan was a characteristic of other autocratic countries – even though people suspect they are being manipulated, they believe some of what they are told thanks to pervasive propaganda.

    “One of the most important things I learnt from interviewing and writing this book is, people who have lived under the CCP’s rule for a long time often have complex and contradictory views on the government and its policies… They often expressed their support for the CCP but also showed their doubts and fears to its policies.”

    However, skeptics who ventured outside with a camera after lockdown did not last long.

    Fang Bin was a resident of Wuhan. He uploaded his first video on January 25, 2020 and was detained several times before disappearing into the state security apparatus on February 9, after lamenting the death of whistle-blowing physician Li Wenliang.

    Chen Qiushi arrived in Wuhan on January 24, 2020, the day after the city went into lockdown. He managed to keep reporting until February 6. Li Zehua posted his first YouTube video on February 12 then filmed his own arrest 14 days later. Zhang lasted 104 days.

    These and other chroniclers who called themselves citizen journalists could not do deep investigative reporting in Wuhan. Truthful official sources were non-existent. Some reporters tried but failed to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the government laboratory which became the focus of speculation abroad of a lab leak rather than animal-to-human transfer as the source of the virus.

    But they did tell the stories of Wuhan residents who watched loved ones die in hospital corridors or who were locked down in their own homes. This went against Beijing’s attempts to conceal the scope of the pandemic from the world as it pumped out stories about how its system of government was superior to that of the West in coping with the outbreak.

    This approach of denial, obfuscation, and lies proved to be a disaster for the planet. 

    “This not only led to more infections and more deaths, but also enabled the virus to infect the world more easily and more quickly,” Murong notes. “We all should be aware that it was the CCP regime that turned a manageable incident into a huge disaster of the century. Without its concealment and censorship, there wouldn’t have been so many deaths.”

    No one knows the true infection rates or death toll from COVID because authoritarian governments systematically covered up the extent of the pandemic to mask their own incompetence and unpreparedness – something I and co-author Joel Simon covered in our book, “The Infodemic: How censorship and lies made the world sicker and less free.”

    We are still living with the results of this censorship. And Murong believes it could happen again. “If there is another disaster like this, the Chinese government will continue to block out the truth and drag the world into the abyss once again,” he said.

    Meanwhile, Chen Qiushi is free, having emerged after 20 months of detention in October 2021. He has remained largely silent, living inside China. Li Zehua fled to the United States after his release. Fang Bin was unexpectedly released on May 2 this year. Murong moved to Australia, fearing arrest.

    Zhang, however, still has more than a year of her sentence to serve for the crime of reporting.

    Robert Mahoney


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Robert Mahoney.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/mahoney-the-lingering-legacy-of-chinas-covid-19-censorship/feed/ 0 401228     Censorship and Book Banning in Texas…and Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/29/censorship-and-book-banning-in-texasand-going-remote-a-teachers-journey/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/29/censorship-and-book-banning-in-texasand-going-remote-a-teachers-journey/#respond Mon, 29 May 2023 19:58:37 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=31547
    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/29/censorship-and-book-banning-in-texasand-going-remote-a-teachers-journey/feed/ 0 399264     A Question about Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/29/a-question-about-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/29/a-question-about-censorship/#respond Mon, 29 May 2023 13:18:51 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140633

    If disinformation (i.e., lying) is a crime against peace and humanity, then why aren’t such lies censored?


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/29/a-question-about-censorship/feed/ 0 399190     Censorship of Indigenous Australians and Palestinians, Stan Grant, Julian Assange and Truth Tellers https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/censorship-of-indigenous-australians-and-palestinians-stan-grant-julian-assange-and-truth-tellers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/censorship-of-indigenous-australians-and-palestinians-stan-grant-julian-assange-and-truth-tellers/#respond Fri, 26 May 2023 13:55:21 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140551 Eminent Australian and Indigenous journalist, Stan Grant, was recently driven  to resign from the ABC (the tax-payer-funded Australian equivalent of the UK BBC) as compere of the high-rating Q+A TV program by a flood of devastating racist abuse  after he participated in a  frank and truthful ABC discussion of the British  Crown and genocidal colonialism on 5 continents that prefaced the ABC coverage of the Coronation of King Charles III. Stan Grant, please come back, decent Australia loves you and needs you.

    The 235 year and ongoing settler-colonial Australian Aboriginal Genocide has been associated with about 0.1 million violent deaths and 2 million deaths from dispossession, deprivation and disease. Before the British invasion in 1788 there were 350-750 different Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal) tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered in a process of continuing Australian Aboriginal Ethnocide.

    From a qualitative perspective the Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Ethnocide  was the worst in human history. The term “Aboriginal Genocide”  is not used by the ABC nor by numerous Australian commentators. A Search of the ABC for the term “Aboriginal Ethnocide” yields zero (0) results. Also ignored by the ABC, as UK and US lackeys Australians have invaded 85 countries with 30 of these invasions being genocidal.

    The WW1 onwards settler-colonial Palestinian Genocide has been associated with 0.1 million violent deaths and about 2 million deaths from imposed deprivation. The first step that the world should insist on immediately is return of full human rights to all 15.5 million Palestinians, noting that half of them are children and three quarters are women and children. The per capita GDP is a deadly $3,500 for Occupied Palestine versus $55,500 for Occupier Apartheid Israel in gross violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

    Today all of Palestine and  parts of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria remain occupied. The 7 million Exiled Palestinians are cruelly excluded from returning to their multi-millennial homeland  and  from full human rights. The 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians are denied all human rights as set out in the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 2 million Israeli Palestinians are subject to 60 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws. A Search of the ABC for the term “Palestinian Genocide” yields zero (0 results).

    There are detailed accounts comparing the Australian Aboriginal  Genocide and the Palestinian Genocide. There is massive censorship of the Palestinian Genocide and ongoing atrocities of Apartheid Israel in a Zionist-subverted, Zionist-perverted, and US lackey Australia. Indeed the ABC bans use of the term “Apartheid” to describe genocidally racist Apartheid Israel.

    This massive and genocide-ignoring lying by omission is promoted by the pathologically mendacious and traitorous US Lobby and Apartheid Israel Lobby in Australia. Freedom of speech is crucial for democracy and societal advance – we must expose and oppose maltreatment and censorship of truth tellers.

    I have published literally millions of words (overwhelmingly overseas) in 9 huge books, over 100 scientific papers, and hundreds of carefully researched and referenced humanitarian articles. Nevertheless for defending the human rights of Indigenous Palestinians, Indigenous Australians and other horribly violated peoples I have been rendered invisible in Australia in the last dozen years by traitorous Mainstream gate-keepers and false Zionist defamation in the interests of nasty foreign states (the US, UK and Apartheid Israel). I have been banned from Twitter and a Wikipedia entry about me has been removed.

    However I have used my voice overseas to vigorously defend variously eminent Australian writers variously subject to abuse and censorship e.g. Julian Assange, Mike Carlton, Scott McIntyre, Dr Sandra Nasr, Yassmin Abdel Magied, Alan Seymour, Michelle Guthrie, Emma Alberici, Essam Al Ghalid, and Stan Grant. There are so many more censored voices.

    Decent people must stand up and be counted. The core moral messages from the WW2 Jewish Holocaust – and from all WW2 holocausts, and indeed all genocides and holocausts – are “zero tolerance for racism”, “zero tolerance for lying”, “bear witness”, and “never again to anybody” with the latter including Indigenous Australians and Indigenous Palestinians.

    However under either Labor or Coalition Australian Governments a Zionist-perverted and US lackey Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of neo-Nazi and genocidally racist  Apartheid Israel and hence of the evil crime of neo-Nazi Apartheid. Only the decent Australian Greens and a small number of other decent MPs support Palestinian human rights.

    Journalists in particular  should “bear witness”  when fellow journalists  and writers are being targeted, vilified and  falsely defamed. Indeed on a per capita basis neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel is the world leader for the killing  of journalists. The core principles of Humanity are Kindness and Truth, but this is ever being perverted into Racism and Lying. Truth tellers are the guardians of the core ethos of Kindness and Truth.

    Decent people must (a) bear witness, (b) support  truth tellers, and (c) call out and resolutely apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to all those people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries grossly violating the core ethos of Kindness and Truth. For details and  documentation see  Countercurrents, 25 May 2023.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/censorship-of-indigenous-australians-and-palestinians-stan-grant-julian-assange-and-truth-tellers/feed/ 0 398650     Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/25/montana-tiktok-ban-a-sign-of-intensified-cold-war-with-china/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/25/montana-tiktok-ban-a-sign-of-intensified-cold-war-with-china/#respond Thu, 25 May 2023 21:51:56 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9033741 Corporate anti-competitive power and Cold War fears lead the government to contemplate censoring media now available to 80 million Americans.

    The post Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China appeared first on FAIR.

    ]]>      

    AP: TikTok content creators file lawsuit against Montana over first-in-nation law banning app

    “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” a lawsuit argues (AP, 5/18/23).

    There is an emerging consensus in US foreign policy circles that a US/China cold  war is either imminent or already underway (Foreign Policy, 12/29/22; New Yorker, 2/26/23; New York Times, 3/23/23; Fox News, 3/28/23; Reuters, 3/30/23). Domestically, the most recent and most intense iteration of this anti-China fervor is the move to ban the Chinese video app TikTok, which is both a sweeping assault on free speech movement and a dangerous sign that mere affiliation with China is grounds for vilification and loss of rights.

    Several TikTok content creators are suing to overturn “Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights,” on the grounds “that the state doesn’t have any authority over matters of national security” (AP, 5/18/23). TikTok followed up with a lawsuit of its own (New York Times, 5/22/23). The app is banned on government devices at the federal level and in some states (CBS, 3/1/23; AP, 3/1/23), but the Montana law is the first to bar its use outright.

    Momentum for a wider ban

    USA Today: Lawmakers announces bipartisan legislation that would ban TikTok in the US

    Rep. Mike Gallagher (R.-Wis.), a congressmember seeking to ban TikTok nationally, called the app “digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans” (USA Today, 12/13/22).

    Republicans see this as momentum to push other state bans. Lawmakers of both major parties are pushing legislation that “would block all transactions from any social media company in or under the influence of a ‘country of concern,’ like China and Russia,” a move that would ban TikTok in the US (USA Today, 12/13/22). Such a sweeping ban is popular among voters, especially among Republicans (Pew, 3/31/23; Wall Street Journal, 4/24/23).

    The reason for the swift action is the app’s Chinese ownership. Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) said, “Having TikTok on our phones is like having 80 million Chinese spy balloons flying over America” (Twitter, 2/28/23)—a reference to one of the most overblown news stories of 2023 (CounterPunch, 2/7/23; FAIR.org, 2/10/23). FBI Director Christopher Wray (CNBC, 11/15/22) told Congress of his “national security concerns” about TikTok, warning that

    the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations…. Or to control software on millions of devices…to potentially technically compromise personal devices.

    The New York Times (3/17/23) reported that the

    Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens, including several journalists who cover the tech industry, by the Chinese company that owns TikTok.

    Social spying hypocrisy

    Al Jazeera: US says China can spy with TikTok. It spies on world with Google

    While US lawmakers railed against the possibility that TikTok might be used by China to spy on US users, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the “US government itself uses US tech companies that effectively control the global internet to spy on everyone else.”

    The funny thing here is that if the US government is worried about social media being used for surveillance, it should look inward. The Brennan Center (8/18/22), which is suing for Department of Homeland Security records on its use  use of social media surveillance tools, notes that “social media has become a significant source of information for US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” The civil liberties organization notes that “there are myriad examples of the FBI and DHS using social media to surveil people speaking out on issues from racial justice to the treatment of immigrants.”

    Even as Congress mulls a ban on TikTok, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the Biden administration is seeking “the renewal of powers that force firms like Google, Meta and Apple to facilitate untrammeled spying on non-US citizens located overseas.” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives Washington the power to snoop on the social media conversations of users both foreign and, through the use of so-called “backdoor searches,” domestic. While many governments spy, the Qatari news site pointed out, “Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet.”

    “They’re making a big stink about TikTok and the Chinese collecting data when the US is collecting a great deal of data itself,” Seton Hall constitutional law expert Jonathan Hafetz told Al Jazeera. “It is a little bit ironic for the US to sort of trumpet citizens’ privacy concerns or worries about surveillance. It’s OK for them to collect the data, but they don’t want China to collect it.”

    Accordingly, the Biden administration is demanding the platform be sold to rid itself of Chinese ownership, insisting that failure to do so would result in a nationwide ban. The New York Times (3/15/23) said this stance “harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.” In 2020, FAIR (8/5/20) raised the possibility that Trump would leverage anti-Chinese sentiment to go after the app, but now a Democratic administration could finish what Trump started.

    Don’t assume the president is bluffing, either; FAIR (7/1/21) reported that the Biden administration, citing “disinformation” as a reason, “shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, including ones based in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine,” a list that included Iranian state broadcaster Press TV.

    An orchestrated campaign

    WaPo: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

    Facebook parent company Meta paid a GOP consulting firm to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

    TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a for-profit tech company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. ByteDance disputes that it has the ability to track US citizens (CNBC, 10/21/22), and the Chinese government denies that it pressures companies to engage in espionage (New York Times, 3/24/23). But TikTok, like other for-profit social media platforms, routinely collects data on users to sell to advertisers (MarketWatch, 10/25/22; CBC, 3/1/23).

    Global Times (3/24/23), published by China’s Communist Party, declared that the “witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’s technological innovation is going downhill.” “The political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility,” the paper added.

    The party paper (3/1/23) acknowledged that TikTok still has a profit “gap with Google, Facebook, etc.,” but maintained that “its growth momentum is rapid,” and thus “directly threatens the advertising revenue of several major social networks in the US.” The paper said that “if the US does not go after TikTok and curb its growth in the relevant market, several leading US high-tech and networking companies” would feel a competitive sting.

    Chinese state and party media have hyperbolic tendencies, but this accusation of a financial motive for opposition to TikTok isn’t far-fetched. In fact, the Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that

    Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

    The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.

    Such a move might seem comically cynical, but it’s working. Corporate anti-competitive power has joined an alliance with Cold War fears about the Chinese to influence US policy, to the extent that the government is contemplating censoring media now available to 80 million Americans. (By comparison, CNN.com reportedly has 129 million unique monthly visitors in the US, the New York Times brand has 99 million and FoxNews.com has 76 million.)

    Unprecedented silencing

    Pew: More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites

    A growing share of TikTok users are regularly getting news from the site (Pew, 10/21/22)—”in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.”

    A media silencing of that magnitude seems unprecedented; the Biden administration’s seizure of Middle Eastern media websites is troubling, but Press TV isn’t as central to US life as TikTok is. “In just two years, the share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022,” Pew Research (10/21/22) reported, which stands “in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.” TikTok has announced plans to share its ad revenue with its content creators (Variety, 5/4/22), and the platform played a role in the rebounding of US post-pandemic tourism markets (Wall Street Journal, 5/8/23).

    TikTok has argued that bans would hurt the US economy (Axios, 3/21/23), although the nation’s top lawmakers are unmoved by this (Newsweek, 3/14/23).

    The urge to cleanse the media landscape of anything related to China has been roiling at a smaller scale for some time. Rep. Brian Mast (R.-Fla.) wants to ban Chinese government and Communist Party officials from US social platforms (Mast press release, 3/22/23; Fox News, 6/14/22) because, as he said in a press statement, “Chinese officials lie through our social media.” Singling out the sinister duplicity of Chinese officials overlooks the reality that mendacity among politicians is a universal cross-cultural phenomenon.

    The Trump administration required “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government, granting them a designation akin to diplomatic entities,” affecting “Xinhua News Agency; China Global Television Network, previously known as CCTV; China Radio International; the parent company of China Daily newspaper; and the parent company of the People’s Daily newspaper” (Politico, 2/18/20).

    In an effort to paint the Democratic Socialists of America-backed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) as some sort of shadowy foreign agent, Fox News (2/2/23) ran the headline, “AOC, Other Politicians Paid Thousands in Campaign Cash to Chinese Foreign Agent.” But buried in the clunky language of the news story is the fact Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians, including at least one Republican, simply ran campaign ads in Chinese-language newspapers owned by Sing Tao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper company. Candidates routinely buy ads in ethnic media to reach voters, but Fox offered this innocuous campaign act as evidence of Chinese treachery within our borders.

    Fear of an Asian menace

    Guardian: DeSantis signs bills banning Chinese citizens from buying land in Florida

    Gov. Ron DeSantis presents Florida’s discrimination against Chinese nationals as a move to counter “the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state of Florida” (Guardian, 5/9/23).

    It’s worth remembering that fear of an Asian menace in the United States led to the nation’s first major immigration restrictions (CNN, 5/6/23) and mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (NPR, 1/29/23; FAIR.org, 2/16/23). It continues to lead to racist murder (CNN, 6/23/22) and other anti-Asian crimes (Guardian, 7/21/22).

    “Inflammatory rhetoric about China can exacerbate the sense that Asian Americans are ‘racialized outsiders,’” Asian-American advocates said during the Covid pandemic (Axios, 3/23/21). Florida’s recent ban on property ownership by Chinese nationals (Guardian, 5/9/23) shows that the impulse to scapegoat is alive and well.

    If official fears about TikTok collection of user data—which is central to the business model of all major US social media companies—can override First Amendment guarantees and deprive Americans of a major communication platform, then one has to ask what more the states and the federal government that are already frothing with anti-China hysteria are willing to do next.

    In this sense, the people suing to keep TikTok available in Montana aren’t simply fighting for their access to a content platform, but are repelling a political impulse that in the past has led us to blacklists and McCarthyism. Let’s hope these video makers are victorious.

    Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton

    The post Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/25/montana-tiktok-ban-a-sign-of-intensified-cold-war-with-china/feed/ 0 398415     CODEPINK Condemns the Violent Protesters at Medea Benjamin’s Ukraine Book Tour Event in Minneapolis https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/23/codepink-condemns-the-violent-protesters-at-medea-benjamins-ukraine-book-tour-event-in-minneapolis/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/23/codepink-condemns-the-violent-protesters-at-medea-benjamins-ukraine-book-tour-event-in-minneapolis/#respond Tue, 23 May 2023 01:09:50 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140425 We strongly condemn the deplorable actions of some of the protesters at Medea Benjamin’s book tour event on Friday, May 19 in Minneapolis, an event cosponsored by the local Veterans for Peace and Women Against Military Madness (WAMM). We believe that there are very legitimate, divergent positions on the war in Ukraine, even among people in the U.S. who have been longtime peace advocates. But there are ways of expressing that disagreement that are not legitimate. The violent incident that occurred on May 19 is an example of an unacceptable form of protest.

    About 15 protesters gathered outside the event, chanting slogans such as “Medea Lies, Ukrainians Die.” The protesters were upset with Medea’s call for a ceasefire and peace talks, believing that the U.S. should continue to send weapons to Ukraine until they achieve victory. Medea, in her book and talks, calls this war a stalemate that is not winnable on the battlefield but could lead to World War III or a nuclear war. In the interest of ending the fighting and dying, she echoes the calls of many people and national leaders, from Pope Francis to Brazil’s President Lula, for immediate peace talks.

    The most aggressive protestor, Kieran McKnutson, was screaming at Medea Benjamin that she was a Putin apologist and then grabbed her cell phone while she was attempting to film the situation. She called on members of Veterans for Peace for help to retrieve the phone. One of the vets, a man in his seventies, came to assist and was pummeled to the ground by McKnutson. McKnutson’s assault resulted in the veteran being taken to the emergency room with a dislocated shoulder and a black eye.

    This is the first time in over seven months on tour with the book Peace in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless War (which she cowrote with Nicolas S.J. Davies) that she encountered violent protesters.

    “I have had many protests outside my talks, and I have always stopped to talk to the protesters and invite them inside for a dialogue. These have usually ended up in very rich discussions where we agree to disagree,” said Benjamin. “But this group was not interested in dialogue. Some of them were full of hate and itching for a fight. I was appalled, and deeply saddened, by their behavior.”

    We firmly believe in the right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression, but this does not include engaging in aggressive behavior, physical violence, or causing harm to individuals or their personal property.

    We call upon all individuals involved in this incident to reflect upon their actions and recognize the importance of peaceful and respectful dialogue. We call on those protesters who did not engage in violence to denounce those who did and demand an apology.

    We stand in solidarity with our co-founder Medea Benjamin, the event hosts Woman Against Military Madness and Veterans for Peace, and all individuals who were affected by this regrettable event. We send our love and support to the Veterans for Peace member who was hurt by the protesters. We reiterate our commitment to fostering a society where differing opinions can be shared and debated in a peaceful and respectful manner, free from aggression and violence.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Codepink.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/23/codepink-condemns-the-violent-protesters-at-medea-benjamins-ukraine-book-tour-event-in-minneapolis/feed/ 0 396853     Censorship at the American Psychological Association https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/censorship-at-the-american-psychological-association/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/censorship-at-the-american-psychological-association/#respond Mon, 22 May 2023 05:58:14 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=283497

    Photograph Source: liz west – CC BY 2.0

    The publishing process in academic psychology journals isn’t typically known for its drama or intrigue. It’s true that there can be frustrations and challenges for aspiring authors. These include obtaining timely feedback from peer reviewers; adequately addressing often-disparate concerns and revision recommendations; and waiting the many months that frequently elapse between submitting a manuscript and its hoped-for publication. Nevertheless, there’s little doubt that articles published in reputable scientific journals play an essential role in advancing our understanding of human behavior.

    Sometimes, however, a manuscript can become ensnared by behind-the-scenes maneuvering and decision-making that have little to do with the merits of the article itself. In such cases, non-scholarly considerations supersede the well-established guideposts of impartial peer review and unbiased evaluation of a submission’s worthiness for publication. That was apparently the unfortunate fate of “A Military/Intelligence Operational Perspective on the American Psychological Association’s Weaponization of Psychology Post-9/11.” This article’s circuitous journey bears recounting here as a cautionary tale for the profession and for the APA.

    Written by my colleague Jean Maria Arrigo and five co-authors, four of whom are retired military-intelligence officers, “A Military/Intelligence Operational Perspective” thoughtfully examines two deeply problematic aspects of the APA’s connection to the so-called war on terror. The first is the damage suffered by psychological science when psychological knowledge is used as a weapon of coercion, manipulation, and humiliation. The second is the adverse consequences that arise when the US security sector employs covert influence tactics against professional civil society organizations.

    The troubling history of the APA’s post-9/11 collaboration with the US Department of Defense and the CIA has been extensively detailed elsewhere. The briefest of summaries would highlight the APA’s years-long support for psychologists’ involvement in detainee detention and interrogation operations despite credible reports of abuse; the 2015 independent review (familiarly known as the Hoffman Report) that concluded APA leaders repeatedly took steps to preserve this involvement despite growing outrage within the profession and among human rights advocates; and the independent review’s aftermath, which saw key ethics reforms instituted at the APA but also ongoing defamation lawsuits from individuals who’ve claimed they were maligned in the Hoffman Report.

    The Arrigo et al article was submitted in September 2018 (almost five years ago) to the APA journal History of Psychology — in response to an invitation from the journal editor — for inclusion in a special section on “The Hoffman Report in Historical Context.” The special section was scheduled to appear in the summer of 2020. As is standard practice, the editor sent the paper to two anonymous reviewers. Both were laudatory in their assessments while also providing valuable feedback for how to enhance the manuscript’s clarity. One reviewer wrote, “This is very important for the science of psychology”; the other emphasized, “This paper presents an important, even vital, perspective.” The authors revised the paper according to the guidance they received and resubmitted it in March 2019. The journal editor approved its publication, but it apparently took over a year, until May 2020, for the APA’s legal office to sign off on it as well.

    In August 2020, everything was seemingly set — all approvals had been obtained, all contracts had been signed, and the journal issue was ready for publication. But the APA’s Chief Publishing Officer — a member of the Association’s Executive Office — suddenly intervened, sending a perfunctory yet highly consequential email to Arrigo. Without providing any explanation, the three-sentence message stated simply that the APA was declining to publish all of the articles that would have comprised the special section in History of Psychology, and that the authors were free to publish them elsewhere in a non-APA journal. The journal editor has described being totally blindsided by this decision as well — and the prospect of finding some alternative outlet for these four articles was daunting, to say the least.

    It’s important to note here that there are widely accepted principles of publication ethics for academic journals. Of particular relevance, the Guidelines from the independent Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) includes this statement:

    The relationship of Editors of the journals of Learned Societies to those Societies is often complex. However, notwithstanding the economic and political realities of their journals, directors of Learned Societies should respect that their editors should make decisions on which articles to publish based on quality and suitability for readers rather than for immediate financial or political gain. Directors and employees should not be able to overrule these decisions. The relationship of Editors of the journals of Learned Societies to those Societies should be based firmly on the principle of editorial independence.

    The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has also endorsed similar principles. And the APA is a member of both COPE and STM.

    But in responding to a follow-up inquiry from Arrigo, the APA’s General Counsel told her that the APA’s editorial policies are set by its own Publications and Communications Board — whose members include the CEO and Treasurer — and not by the codes of conduct from COPE or STM. However, in my own perusal of the APA’s website, this board’s functions don’t appear to include overruling the publication judgments of journal editors.

    The General Counsel further insisted that, in light of active litigation, anything related to the Hoffman Report must be subjected to additional review at the highest levels of the Association. That supplementary review reportedly concluded that all of these manuscripts — already accepted for the special section of the journal — failed to provide the context and documentation necessary to meet the needs of the scientific community or the general public. This remarkable finding stood in diametric opposition to the journal editor’s scholarly view and the lengthy prior review by the APA’s legal office.

    Fortunately, several years later, and thanks to the dedicated efforts of the now former editor of History of Psychology, the four suppressed articles — including Arrigo et al’s “A Military/Intelligence Operational Perspective on the American Psychological Association’s Weaponization of Psychology Post-9/11” — have found a new home. They were recently published by the international journal History of the Human Sciences. “Beyond Torture: Knowledge and Power at the Nexus of Social Science and National Security” focuses on the history of APA-military entanglements that have evaded careful oversight. “The Hoffman Report in Historical Context: A Study in Denial” examines the APA’s strategy of deliberate ignorance in regard to the misuse of psychology. And “Beyond Following Rules: Teaching Research Ethics in the Age of the Hoffman Report” explores how psychological ethics can be made less vulnerable to manipulation. Interested readers can judge for themselves whether these illuminating analyses were actually undeserving of publication by the APA.

    Meanwhile, it seems likely that APA executives viewed this publishing controversy as a minor inconvenience and moved on years ago. If that’s so, it’s regrettable because the issues raised are serious and relevant to the APA’s future. They are best summarized by Jean Maria Arrigo herself:

    Clearly, both scientific method and historical inquiry flounder if publishers hold the right to reject articles that have passed peer and legal review. My five co-authors and I were meticulous in our citation of sources and had two legal experts review our manuscript to ensure it did not include unsubstantiated claims or defamatory/libelous language. Direct discourse by scientists and historians, not publisher’s fiat, is the method of resolving scientific and historical disagreements in academic journals. The anomalous suppression of analysis in an APA history of science journal creates a dangerous precedent for censorship of scholarly works viewed unfavorably by APA authorities.

    As a final note, there’s more than a little irony in the APA’s decision to quash Arrigo’s article. After all, it examines the damage and danger of letting military-intelligence interests covertly interfere in the proper functioning of psychological science. Consider too that, after the Hoffman Report was released in 2015, the APA’s governing body gave Arrigo an award in recognition of her integrity and commitment to ethics and human rights (she also received an award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science). The APA award’s inscription specifically highlighted her “steadfast reliance on logical, fact-based advocacy” and it described her as “the finest possible role model for us in the profession of Psychology.” But even while expressing appreciation for the APA honor, at that time Arrigo commented that she was “very wary that this is a public relations event meant to shut me up.” Indeed.

    Addendum: Arrigo has shared various materials and correspondence with me, and has given me permission to quote from them here. I was also fortunate to have had the opportunity to assist with some of the organizing and editing of her manuscript.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Roy Eidelson.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/censorship-at-the-american-psychological-association/feed/ 0 396594 In the Eye of the Polarizing Storm(s) https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/10/in-the-eye-of-the-polarizing-storms/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/10/in-the-eye-of-the-polarizing-storms/#respond Wed, 10 May 2023 13:00:49 +0000 https://new.dissidentvoice.org/?p=117649 It is indeed a tale of many cities, worlds, perspectives, and then we have beliefs and morals. Add to that alternative and ulterior modes of realities, and we have a virtual Babel’s Tower of conflicting, contradicting and confusing form of “discourse,” or debate.  Never mind the Matrix angle of things! In today’s Western Culture (sic), where I am firmly rooted (USA, West Coast, Rural Oregon, Tourist By-way, Retired & Service Economy),  there is not so much nuance anymore, inside the souls — hearts and minds — of my fellow Americans. When you really look at it, nuance (deep thinking, considering multiple ideas, counter-intuitive thinking, and conceptualizing contradictory  debates), or lack thereof, means lack of not only critical thinking, or even a deep mire into not only dumb-downing and infantilization, but of self-delusion, amnesia and agnotology.

    Fight Club Quotes Stickers | Redbubble

    FDR —

    Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils, which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers’ stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

    The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

    Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

    — March 4, 1933

    Indeed, is it fearing fear itself which has taken this country down so many notches? Chaotic times, chaotic thinking. Chaotic allegiances to despots and mad money changers have lead to chaotic politics. Fearing fear. Oh, fearing BlackRock and Blackstone and the Group of 147, or make that 737.

    The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

    1. Barclays plc
    2. Capital Group Companies Inc
    3. FMR Corporation
    4. AXA
    5. State Street Corporation
    6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
    7. Legal & General Group plc
    8. Vanguard Group Inc
    9. UBS AG
    10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
    11. Wellington Management Co LLP
    12. Deutsche Bank AG
    13. Franklin Resources Inc
    14. Credit Suisse Group
    15. Walton Enterprises LLC
    16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
    17. Natixis
    18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
    19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
    20. Legg Mason Inc
    21. Morgan Stanley
    22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
    23. Northern Trust Corporation
    24. Société Générale
    25. Bank of America Corporation
    26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
    27. Invesco plc
    28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
    30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
    31. Aviva plc
    32. Schroders plc
    33. Dodge & Cox
    34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
    35. Sun Life Financial Inc
    36. Standard Life plc
    37. CNCE
    38. Nomura Holdings Inc
    39. The Depository Trust Company
    40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
    41. ING Groep NV
    42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
    43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
    44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
    45. Vereniging Aegon
    46. BNP Paribas
    47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
    48. Resona Holdings Inc
    49. Capital Group International Inc
    50. China Petrochemical Group Company

    * Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

    Graphic below: The 1,318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

    (Data: PLoS One)

    New Scientist Default Image

    The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1,318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1,318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

    When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group. (Source)

    Unfortunately, the article in The New Scientist cites people defending this, even saying owning all this wealth and power by a few is a good thing, almost tying it directly to nature, as if this control of power is paralleled in nature.

    America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy

    “A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force.”

    The bombing list:

    Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
    Guatemala 1954
    Indonesia 1958
    Cuba 1959-1961
    Guatemala 1960
    Congo 1964
    Laos 1964-73
    Vietnam 1961-73
    Cambodia 1969-70
    Guatemala 1967-69
    Grenada 1983
    Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
    Libya 1986
    El Salvador 1980s
    Nicaragua 1980s
    Iran 1987
    Panama 1989
    Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
    Kuwait 1991
    Somalia 1993
    Bosnia 1994, 1995
    Sudan 1998
    Afghanistan 1998
    Yugoslavia 1999
    Yemen 2002
    Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
    Iraq 2003-2015
    Afghanistan 2001-2015
    Pakistan 2007-2015
    Somalia 2007-8, 2011
    Yemen 2009, 2011
    Libya 2011, 2015
    Syria 2014-2016

    However, my screed today  is partially precipitated by the very fact I skipped out of a web-in-nar (amazingly stupid language of the techies) touted as a way “to bridge the divide in a country that is now so polarized, more than ever before.”

    That of course is false — that we are in “the most polarized point in the USA, ever, politics and values wise.” And what does it mean to bring the nation together? To bridge two polar opposites? Can we “bridge” or scaffold these wonderful American values? Expropriation of indigenous lands? Slavery? Jim Crow? The Korean War? Vietnam? 9/11? Economic exploitation? Felonious finance? The entire false premise those on either side of the “dividing line” both professing makes this an exceptionally dutiful, good, glorious, top dog society? Bullshit. Any look at the old political screeds and cartoons will show that the USA has always been a white man’s/woman’s land, of the most evil of kindred spirits (see below for a sampling).

    We are divided because of Trump v. Biden? Pence v. Harris? This is the sad bullshit of people we call elites and who have way too much time on their hands to babble about “bridging the divide.” This country has never atoned for its murders, its thefts, its disease. The country carries on, and if one rails against the military industrial complex, points out the sheer horror of collapses under the planned-demic, all the ended retail and other global contracts and dead/dying mom and pops, and then collectively, the country sits on those Trump or Biden thumbs up to actually believe no military contract shall be breeched, broken, or ended prematurely. This rah-rah for IT, AI, ICE, DoD, et al, has generated wave after wave of the future looking glass that has all of us is seeing in spades: more and more people will accept sacrifice zones for “the other” and for themselves when it comes to job, a house, anything to stave off the reality of the billionaire class in cahoots with the capitalists and corporate loving government heads.

    Some might want UBI, Universal Buffon Income, others want to make banks, and the majority of this country makes money doing nothing, that is, making nothing, and in many cases, making hell to be paid to us, the lower classes, the dissidents, the precarious, the non-traditional, irregular workers.

    As I stand dying, I witness more and more of that shifting baseline syndrome, on steroids, across a full spectrum of things and values that have been shifted, morphed anew, devolved, destroyed and deep-sixed. Mass media/Prostituting Press have done much to shift the baseline. Recall, just a few decades ago, it was commonplace to despise billionaires, the rich, or hate too much car traffic, or attack gluttony of all kinds, including too much food in the gullet, or criticizing too many hours in front of a screen, or the possibility of too many days forcefully locked up (corona-madness) and again, we would have railed and railed against too much insertion into our lives by the government. The old shifting paradigm went from a majority of people wanting collective bargaining, work supports, anything to put the fire to the feet of the bosses, to now — how many right to fire (work) states are there? You have 30 minutes to clear out your dumpy desk sort of Amerika.

    States have these supposed safety nets, like unemployment insurance, but that too is a scam, as adjudicators come swooping in and spend hours on both sides of the fired/terminated line, in an attempt to make the terminated person feel shame and feel responsibility for unethical, unimaginable, and wrongful termination.

    Do you think people want to talk about that? My so-called leftist friends, well, they would rather not get into the weeds of schmucks like myself fighting for unemployment wages (the dole). Irony of all ironies, that these Unemployment Insurance workers are state hired, sometimes state employees (now they do the deeds from their bloody Zoom Doom/Google Hangout homes). They have jobs, with benefits, because of the long arm of the unethical and putrid arrogance of companies, big and small, for profit and nonprofit, carrying out their daily dirty deeds of sacking people.

    No due process.

    Hours writing grievances. Hours on the phone with HR directors. Hours filing employment discrimination complaints, and hours filing for unemployment insurance and applying for jobs. Two months later, still in limbo, still no finding of facts in the worker’s favor that he or she was terminated on false allegations of “insubordination,” and alas, there you have it, no income stream for, well, two months.

    This is a corrupt, broken, sick, and inhumane system. Typical. One microcosm into even more horrific treatments of us, we, by the people.

    While on the other hand, people with time on their hands, would rather muck about with these inane ideas that profess today is as bad as ever in these here United Snakes of America, and today we must bring unlike minded people — Trumpies and Bidenettes — together to agree on the core principles and values of Amerika.

    The question is simple: Bridging which political polarization? Capitalism is the all-encompassing bacteria and virus, the cancer of the ages, so there is nothing but oppression on a massive scale. This is a greasy mat of all choking red tide explosions covering the land, the people. Yet, are we talking about left-right divide? Or about the political tyranny of both parties wanting to smear each party respectively? You can take a lifetime researching this country’s history of “polarization,” which of course, for the body public, is no big chasm, but for freaks like me, this is the inherent — DNA baked-in — racism, xenophobia, outright theft of native lands and manifest destiny within this continent’s borders, and beyond that defines this United Snakes of Amerika.

    How was that polar opposite as a first people’s, first nations, up against the dirty and slimy Puritans, the first Amerika corporation/monopoly. Brits and Hudson Bay and the theft, theft, theft of land, land, land.

    June 14, 2021. Nearing Juneteenth.

    The New York Times’ “1619 Project” essays on the arrival of African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia “is not a critique of American exceptionalism – it is an attempt to fold slavery into American exceptionalism,” said Josh Myers, professor of African American Studies at Howard University. “Africans were not seeking to become Americans; they were seeking to be free,” said Myers.

    I write this a week or so after the anniversary of “Israel” murdering and wounding  USS Liberty sailors, and that was a cover-up by the enemy and cover-up (8 June 1967) by LBJ, et al.

    Those big lies, man, a dime a dozen, so, who the hell is worth their salt, or their own weight in gold, if they can’t imagine more and more assaults on truth, more contrived and planned and organized lockdown madness? Is this the best and the brightest, now? Real doctors losing licenses to practice for saying a hold should be put on vaccinating youth, 12 or younger. Imagine that shifting baseline.

    The big lie gets bigger, and out in the open, and so the people are zombies wearing smiley face masks, running around backyards with N95 respirators swatting the famous jumping Covid/SARS2. Fucking looney bin, after fucking looney bin.

    And we can’t say that the entire fabric of shit hole Amerikkkaaahhh is finally cracked through? Multiple concussions of the soul, of the intellect? Then, okay, it is part of a plan, bits and pieces of the machinery that was part of the old New Order, old New World Ordering. Now, the New or New-New, or Newest New-New World Order manifestation. An old story spruced up in our all-encompassing 24/7 nano-microprocessed world.

    Here, four guys are talking about the New World Order — origins, manifestations, congealed collusions, the hit and miss conspiratorial angle, the disconnectedness of it, along with the conspiracy of a small cabal perpetrating some form of multivariant New World Order. What’s Left is also part of the movement, Left Lockdown Skeptics. 

    Fight Club, Falling Down and the anti-corporate anti-hero | cultrbox

    Alas, on one special scale, the USA (connected to the other Five Eyes, conjoined with secret and overt banking diseased ones, and colluding through all kinds of  strange Masonic and Jewish ties to many headed serpents of propaganda-AI-war-land theft-cultural appropriation) is behind this movement of Imperial-Next Industrial Revolution-New/Old Order(s) to an order of the 100th degree, reaching this point of, well, some of us dissidents witnessing more and more people mired in the fluff, the daily deluge of thousands upon thousands of unimportant and unconnected stories. It is a rape-weather-Space X-#metoo-Q-Anon-etc. mad mad mad world,  to the point of mindlessness and unimportant stories getting us, collectively into this New New World Order of Distractions!

    Fight Club Quotes That'll Give You Insightful-Chills for our spirit animal and inspire us

    The times were good and the times were bad — they are, for sure. That is the goal, to bring triangulation and divide and conquer operations to levels never even thought of before, to the umpteenth level, so finely parsed and so rarefied, that we don’t know that we are being manipulated into not only dividing and conquering our allies and enemies, but actually conquering our own self-agency, our own will but also staving off our own will to not just fight the bastards, but to fight for our own lives.

    America, and the White Culture (sic-sic) is hell-bent on mass murder in so many forms, and that’s not just blunt object force, but sophisticated marketing and propagandistic force. Their weapon is the media, which is the cloud server, the constant data dredging and profile manufacturing. Our pasts are not just open books, but our futures are determined, and we are more than just pawns in some pre-crime sci-fi dilemma.

    In the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus of the Civil War, observing that a limb may be sacrificed to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. We do not have due process, and the informed consent, and all those supposed freedoms — choice, speech, associations, etc. — out the window for an “emergency” declared by WHO, and, this emergency, it never necessitated huge global deployment of MASH tents, large-scale therapies for those who “got” Covid-19 and large-scale debate and deep thinking about origins and who might have to pay the ferryman.

    Charon – Ferryman of Hades - Symbol Sage

    Charon – Ferryman of Hades

    The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?

    —Philip K. Dick

    Dick makes his Matrix point, and makes it very clearly: “We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” These alterations feel just like déjà vu, says Dick, a sensation that proves that “a variable has been changed” (by whom—note the passive voice—he does not say) and “an alternative world branched off.”

    Dick, who had the capacity for a very oblique kind of humor, assures his audience several times that he is deadly serious. (The looks on many of their faces betray incredulity at the very least.) And yet, maybe Dick’s crazy hypothesis has been validated after all, and not simply by the success of the PKD-esque The Matrix and ubiquity of Matrix analogies. For several years now, theoretical physicists and philosophers have entertained the theory that we do in fact live in a computer-generated simulation and, what’s more, that “we may even be able to detect it.”  (Source)

    Oh say can you see … Is this a computer-generated simulation? Imagine that!

    The History - and Hypocrisy - of US Meddling in Venezuela | Opinion | teleSUR English
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    1898 | United States History II

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    Political Cartoonists Seem Confused About Native Americans, Settlers, and Immigrants | by Peter Stanton | Medium

     

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    Republican Party | Definition, History, & Beliefs | Britannica

    I could go on and on slicing and dicing the sickness of the white order, the white new order, the whites and their knights in shining drone armor. Some simulated universe, uh?

    To believe that now is the worst of times, that today is the most polarized of times, is exactly what the overlords want (training us) us (sic) to think and act (react, fight or flight fear). So many ways this is all theater, choreographed and directed by many many mean and monstrous folk. A kind of “matrix,” but not one that is, well, inside the zero’s and one’s and cross-patches of Artificial Intelligence.

    You gotta love Phillip K. Dick, and he was a creative mind, a fiction writer. Science Fiction, a whole other realm of right-left brain syncopation.

    Again, the webinar I was invited to and partially attended is the precipitating factor in all of this polemic. Here, as follows, the preamble to the webinar  — but with the caveat here, interesting, with this “spectrum” (not real) alluded to:

    “Americans from all walks of life representing the full political spectrum. Some align fully within their designated party, while others identify based on values and topics. Within party affiliation, many participants self-identify along the spectrum of conservative, moderate, liberal, or progressive. Yet others self-identify along the spectrum dependent on the topic, for example, fiscally conservative and socially liberal.”

    This webinar will be led by Lisa Swallow, Co-founder and Executive Director of SAGE’s partner organization, Crossing Party Lines.

    Before the event, please take a few moments to:

    Download/print all three attachments so you have them as a reference during the webinar.
    In the attachment “Talking About Morals,” fill in the first row of the table with a 1 to 3 sentence summary of your views on each of the three issues presented.

    Please see below for additional information on this webinar.

    Drawing on the work of Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Righteous Mind, Lisa Swallow will spotlight six moral foundations that are held across cultures and how they manifest in different people at different times. We’ll explore the tensions within our morals, so we can better understand ourselves and our views, and relate to people who may hold different views.

    In this webinar you will:

    • Learn to recognize the moral underpinnings of your own views;
    • Listen for indications that one or more of the six moral foundations is at play in an any political discussion; and
    • Bring morality into your political discussions in a non-confrontational way.

    We are offering this event through the SAGE Citizen Project, which is an important program to foster conversation across political and other divides. Thank you for joining us.

    Warm regards,  Executive Director of SAGE (Senior Advocates for Generational Equity )

    The areas that we had to discuss included “homelessness”; “school choice”; and “job loss to artificial intelligence.” There were three categories to jot down ideas: Your Views; Your Morals; Morals-Based Statement.

    Well, again, these people are on Zoom, and I don’t know them, and of course, there is no room for building community. I am already a triple-threat — Marxist, communist, anti-authoritarian and anti-Imperialist; skeptical of everything coming out of so-called educated handlers; not a pacifist. To say I am anti-capitalist is a small tip of a larger iceberg. So, I was on the Zoom to see what would shake out, and alas, it was confusing for most of the participants, and, well, I had gardening to do, and getting ready for my sister, 10 years my junior, flying out from the hell-hole that is Chandler/Phoenix (106 degrees in the shade) to visit here, for a few days — highs in the low 60s — so I bowed out after a few odd statements by the facilitator and one or two of the participants.

    I’m struggling to find work, once again, but at least the Pacific and the eagles and other wildlife are amazing in my daily dread. You have to take what you can in this world of humble pie, bread crumbs and predatory EVERYTHING.

    I just Zoomed off, as the dude who weighed in on the third issue — AI and job loss — just was a beaming you all just don’t know how great and all-encompassing AI is and will be kinda guy:

    Listen up. In 20 years there will be no job that AI can’t do better than humans. I’ve been reading science fiction for years, and this is the reality.

    He was throwing it out as a know-it-all voice of reason, and he wasn’t pushing back against AI and Control, but reveling in the fact that people on the planet, in his estimation, will be shit out of luck, workwise, and so what are you going to do about it.

    So, in a real situation (face-to-face, or in an interchange even on Zoom Doom, with real people with a shit-load of varying views and experiences) that statement would be pulled apart — not only is it wrong, but it’s not accurate, but he seemed to be admitting he has zero knowledge of a world in huge climate heating shifts/crises, and one where land protectors will gain steam, and agriculturalists will gain steam, and people building small communities connected largely will gain steam. He might be mixing up Phillip K. Dick’s great works with some fantasy, something about in fact he missed — most science fiction writers are not proponents of this AI world, or precrime Dystopias, etc., even though they tend to write about these subjects. “Brave New World” is not the goal, nor is One World, New Order, Point-Zero Zero One Percent controlling us all.

    But this old fellow, well, he seemed happy to announce — “Listen up folks, but AI will be doing all the jobs in 20 years. Get used to it!”

    Well, in the classroom, I suppose, that would be a fun statement to dice and slice up. If he is right — 20 years, uh? — then what are the morals and values of that world, or at least the devolution of humanity in that high income country world? Do we not have hundreds of millions of people — maybe billions —  left out of society? I’m talking about clean water, clean air, food, healthcare and education and just life without strongarms and killers and the taxmen and armed men destroying futures. Billions stuck in this paradigm, and that is most likely you the reader and me the writer. Do people who want simplicity, water, air, soil, simple stuff — community centers, farmers markets, advocacy clinics, outdoor activities, and intergenerational living — are they shit out of luck? Because of transhumanism, fourth industrial revolution, internet of nano things, total awareness/control/destiny?

    It’s as if these Baby Boomers who participate in this SAGE thing, or at least some of them, are so old, so scooped out of the muck of mainstream media, that there is no alternative.

    “There is no alternative,”  used by the Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, as her claim that the market economy is the only system that works, and that debate about this is over. Of course she meant “globalized capitalism, so called free markets and free trade, were the best ways to build wealth, distribute services and grow a society’s economy. Deregulation’s good, if not good with the extra ‘o’ missing —  God.”

    That’s what that guy is stating — AI is coming, and it’s here to stay, a foregone conclusion. It is the morality set forth by the capitalists, the tax cheats, the supreme leeches of taxpayer goods and services, labor, and of course, government proles. But these SAGE talkers would never critique this Shit Hole USA that way, because the series is about “bridging gaps.”

    It is not about free choice, but dictated markets, monopolies, hedge funds, and the immorality of the Complex — Big Pharma (five shots a year, mandatory); Banks (bailed out and swimming in money) ; Real Estate (buying up all the properties of the Planned-demic and the new Zoom/Remote Work model); Education (now pushing more people/faculty out of work for that webinar, for those lower courses sold as enhanced Power Points); Surveillance (DNA for the cops, and total control of humanity through RFIDs, and more); Military (the coin of the realm in Western Civilization — unending pipeline to those Murder Incorporated thugs big and small); Medicine (for the rich, gene editing, stem cell Fountain of Youth, disease management for the poor).

    Oh, here’s Paulie’s blurbs that facilitator asked us to offer:

    Job Loss to Artificial Intelligence

    Your Views

    The World Economic Forum, and the intention of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are the drivers of controlling people, controlling communities, and controlling narratives. We need to stop the overlords pushing more and more people away from face to face interaction.

    Your Morals

    I am an educator, journalist, artist and activist. In no way is this paradigm shift helpful, and we have been co-opted by again the wrong people, and the wrong values.

    Morals-Based Statement

    We are a people evolved through communities, hunter gathering groups, and agrarian groups. In no way is the AI, Internet of Things, and control of people’s agency through Digital Dashboards.

    Homelessness

    Your Views

    This is a systemic issue, and I have worked as a case manager for many rough sleepers, homeless and those nearly homeless. We have Diaspora worldwide, and we have climate refugees and refugees of neoliberalism and capitalism that puts people behind parasitic usury.

    Your Morals

    Education, health case, food systems, housing, and cultural engagement are the most important things in life. Having societies set up by financial felons and military industrial complex thieves impact all problems we face in society.

    Morals-Based Statement

    Social and environmental justice are tops, and ending the world’s largest terrorist organization, USA, from deadly interference into other countries’ destinies.

    School Choice

    Your Views

    The entire education system needs revamped. Community directed, and holistic and creative. Public education has to be experiential and away from this capitalist system of killing creativity and creating worker bees.

    Your Morals

    I am an ecosocialist, and Marxist, for sure, so liberal to me is a pretty damning term, but in the end, liberal arts, humanities, deep regard for rhetoric, biology, ecology, history, and critical thinking, debate, music, all that makes culture, we have to build creative spirits. There is no choice when the rich or the lucky few out in the boondocks get their home schooling. School choice is another term for charter schools.

    Morals-Based Statement

    We have seen a public education systems set up to destroy young people’s creativity and genius. It has been delivered through a pernicious system of dictatorial control modeled after the Prussian system of the 1850s.

    Look, it’s about translation, and it’s also about narrative framing, and my own expectations tied to what I have lived and experienced and have felt under the strong arm of the law — predatory, competitive, dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest capitalism.

    There is a certain intolerance I am developing, and that my fine readers I would have never guessed could have percolated from my tireless soul just two years ago, but over the course of a few dozen months, with the background and foreground radiation/noise of this Pan-Plan-Planned-Demic condemning us to a continuous battery of stupidity and fear, control and a dictatorship of Eichmann’s floating more and more to the top of the scum pile, I am wondering what sort of alliances and allegiances I have developed over the course of, well, shall we say, gulp, five decades? Do those relationships end up on the trash heap of my own history?

    There is an endless list of turncoats, and my own reality as age 19 is now at 64, and for some three decades, maybe, or since having a child, now 25, I have played the game, pugnacious, outlier, sure, and rebel and anti-authority, but I let those early years where the burning bush of desert Caterpillar front end loaders and outdoor signs announcing more and more development run wild, and the immolation was liberating and real for me, racing through the Earth First and Liberation Front mentality made sense. Smuggling this and that, and even people, across that Tortilla Curtain.

    Unabomber-sketch

    It all makes sense now, too —

    The Unabomber Affair: Ted Kaczynski, also known as the ‘Unabomber’, is a US terrorist known for his 17-year bombing campaign as the terror group ‘FC’, which targeted individuals involved in technical fields like computing and genetics.

    In early 1995, the New York Times received a communique from FC in the mail:

    This is a message from FC…we are getting tired of making bombs. It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain.

    The ‘bargain’ offered by the group was simple: publish its manifesto, and it will stop sending bombs.

    The manifesto, entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, was a 35,000 word polemic detailing the threats that industrial society posed to freedom and wild Nature. At the crux of the document’s analysis was a concept called ‘the power process’, or an innate human need to engage in autonomous goal setting and achievement. Despite this psychological necessity, ‘in modern industrial society, only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs.’ As a result of the mismatch between human need and industrial conditions, modern life is rife with depression, helplessness, and despair, and although some people can offset these side-effects with ‘surrogate activities’, the manifesto says that these are often undignifying, menial tasks. Interestingly, these concepts have numerous parallels in contemporary psychology, the most notable similar idea being Martin Seligman’s concept of ‘learned helplessness’.

    Ultimately, the manifesto extols the autonomy of individuals and small groups from the control of technology and large organizations, and it offers the hunter-gatherer way of life as a vision of what that kind of autonomy might look like. Still, the end of the manifesto only argues for the practical possibility of revolution against industry (rather than a complete return to hunter-gatherer life), and it outlines some steps to form a movement capable of carrying out that revolution.

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    When Kaczynski was apprehended, he looked dirty and disheveled, with an unwashed body and torn clothing and hair that reached in every direction. It was a typical look for Montana men in the winter, but it nevertheless solidified the media image of the man as a lone wingnut. In reality, Kaczynski was very likely a genius. He was accepted into Harvard at the age of 16, later went to the University of Michigan for his Masters degree, and then taught at Berkeley as an assistant professor. His doctoral thesis solved several difficult problems relating to ‘boundary functions’, which even Kaczynski’s math professor, George Piranian, could not figure out. ‘It’s not enough to say he was smart’, Piranian said. (Source).

    This is a protestation of the calamity of capitalism, and the brainwashing, and the embedded fear, now, the embedded Spiked Protein of the jabs, the digital passports, the additional fun stuff planned for those boosters. Expect some pretty interesting viral outbreaks, but then, other outbreaks. head Cold 4.0. Strange and mysterious gut ailments. Headaches? Ringing in the ears? Chronic Fatigue Syndromes to the 10th power. West Nile Virus, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Dengue. Zeka. Oh, the scientists, the fear factors, the masks and magic jabs. A pill for this, then that, and for nothing yet, but be prepared.

    And the progressives are as bad as the milquetoasts. The leftists, again, lockdown, police intrusions, cabals of global cops, global dictums, and global alliances. Billions pushed through the banks. Elon Musk admits to the Bolivian lithium coup, and he isn’t shackled and renditioned out of here? Right, the plan-planned-planning pandemic.

    Richest prick in the world? This is it, man. The biggest lie(s) ever told.

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk (L) Authorities of Chayanta (R), Norte Potosi, Bolivia. May 24, 2020

    Telling, for me, about this criminal capitalism. Looking at Musk is smelling the rot of this kind of guy, seeing his kind of principles (sic) and his kind of power and money unleashing hell onto the world. Another way to see,  Internationalist 360. Read alternative headlines. Enrich yourselves. These are the worst of times in the best of times for dissidents unraveling the web of lies, deceits, deranged realities of capitalism. Power, man, it is an addiction, looking at it, uncovering it, stripping it of its bullshit uniform and armor. Read — INTERNATIONALIST 360°!


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/10/in-the-eye-of-the-polarizing-storms/feed/ 0 393740     Censorship in Hong Kong has led to ‘war’ on libraries and publishers https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html#respond Fri, 05 May 2023 18:29:20 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html Some Hong Kongers are calling it a “war on libraries.”

    The number of books on offer at Hong Kong's public libraries has fallen as officials remove books from shelves under a restrictive national security law imposed in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

    Since then, libraries have been required to remove politically sensitive titles from their collections, leading to a cull of books, and less time for staff to invest in new ones, according to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

    "In order to maintain national security, more time is required to select suitable library materials, meaning that the size of the collection has also been reduced," the department said in a recent comment on an annual review of the city's public library services.

    "Inspection of library books to maintain national security is an ongoing effort in Hong Kong's public libraries," it said in a response to a report from the city's audit office. "From time to time, complaints from the public are received, which require inspection of library materials.”

    Titles addressing the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, as well as books written by jailed protest leader Joshua Wong and Occupy Central movement founder Benny Tai, have disappeared from library shelves since the law took effect on July 1, 2020, according to local media reports.

    Hong Kong is in the throes of a "war on libraries," said current affairs commentator Sang Pu, who called on the government to disclose full details of books that have been removed from the collection, and to reinstate them.

    He also called on Hong Kongers overseas to set up a repository of banned titles so future generations would be able to read them and their content wouldn’t be forgotten.

    Informers

    The general public have been actively encouraged by police to inform on any words or deeds that could be deemed subversive under the law, which criminalizes dissent in the form of words or deeds that "incite hatred" of the Hong Kong or Chinese authorities, leading to more than 40,000 tip-offs last year.

    Many of the books quietly disappeared from libraries after denunciations in the government-backed media, which said they broke the national security law, according to reports in pro-democracy news outlets, some of which have themselves been forced to close amid investigation by the national security police.

    ENG_CHN_STOCKPOTHKLibraries_04282023_02.jpg
    Limited selection of Political science books are on a shelf in a public library in Hong Kong on July 4, 2020. Books written by prominent Hong Kong democracy activists have disappeared from the city's libraries after Beijing imposed a draconian national security law. Credit: Isaac Lawrence/AFP

    "Hong Kong public libraries completed its review of [existing] library books that are clearly not conducive to national security, and has removed them from the collection," the Hong Kong Audit Commission said in an annual report released on April 26.

    But it added: "As of February 2023, inspections and follow-up actions are ongoing."

    It said government guidelines require libraries to "safeguard national security by preventing activities that could endanger it."

    "In purchasing library materials, considering book proposals, accepting book donations and adding to collections [by] purchasing books, libraries must ensure that their collections do not prejudice national security," it said, recommending that new acquisitions are processed through the government's Book Registration Unit.

    "If content is found in the collection that could violate the national security law, then loans of those materials must be suspended," it said. "The material can only be relisted after libraries have ensured that the content does not violate the law."

    ‘Not conducive” to creativity

    The entire publishing industry is feeling the effects of the law, said published author Johnny Lau.

    "It's not just the libraries, but the entire publishing industry," Lau said. "In the current climate, a lot of people are censoring themselves."

    "The publishing industry and library collections as a whole are shrinking, and fewer and fewer books are getting published," he said. "The restrictions are affecting some people's desire to write books at all."

    "This climate hinders both freedom of speech and publication," Lau said.

    ENG_CHN_STOCKPOTHKLibraries_04282023_03A.jpg
    A worker cleans a window of the Hong Kong Central Library overlooking high-rise residential buildings May 14, 2001 Credit: Bobby Yip/Reuters

    Former Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kei, who fled to the democratic island of Taiwan after being detained by mainland Chinese authorities for selling "banned" books to customers in China, said the government has no choice but to censor libraries under the national security law.

    "The Leisure and Cultural Services Department must follow the policies of the Hong Kong government, which is now the same as the mainland Chinese government," Lam said. "No book with any kind of ideological issue is going to get published now."

    "The current climate in Hong Kong isn't conducive to creative work," he said.

    Much as mainland Chinese writers used to get their banned books published in Hong Kong, authors who write about Hong Kong issues are now choosing to publish in Taiwan, where the publishing industry is much freer.

    "There are more and more Chinese-language books getting published in Taiwan," Lam said. "Recent works include The Last Concession, which chronicles changes in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Secret Operations about young people wanted [following the 2019 protests] who fled."

    "It's not just social commentary, but literary works as well," Lam said. "Taiwan is the only market for Chinese-language books in the world that remains free and open."

    "More and more Hong Kongers are coming to Taiwan to buy books, and they're surprised to see that there are so many being published here with a Hong Kong theme," he added.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Cantonese.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html/feed/ 0 392803     Censorship in Hong Kong has led to ‘war’ on libraries and publishers https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html#respond Fri, 05 May 2023 18:29:20 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html Some Hong Kongers are calling it a “war on libraries.”

    The number of books on offer at Hong Kong's public libraries has fallen as officials remove books from shelves under a restrictive national security law imposed in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

    Since then, libraries have been required to remove politically sensitive titles from their collections, leading to a cull of books, and less time for staff to invest in new ones, according to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

    "In order to maintain national security, more time is required to select suitable library materials, meaning that the size of the collection has also been reduced," the department said in a recent comment on an annual review of the city's public library services.

    "Inspection of library books to maintain national security is an ongoing effort in Hong Kong's public libraries," it said in a response to a report from the city's audit office. "From time to time, complaints from the public are received, which require inspection of library materials.”

    Titles addressing the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, as well as books written by jailed protest leader Joshua Wong and Occupy Central movement founder Benny Tai, have disappeared from library shelves since the law took effect on July 1, 2020, according to local media reports.

    Hong Kong is in the throes of a "war on libraries," said current affairs commentator Sang Pu, who called on the government to disclose full details of books that have been removed from the collection, and to reinstate them.

    He also called on Hong Kongers overseas to set up a repository of banned titles so future generations would be able to read them and their content wouldn’t be forgotten.

    Informers

    The general public have been actively encouraged by police to inform on any words or deeds that could be deemed subversive under the law, which criminalizes dissent in the form of words or deeds that "incite hatred" of the Hong Kong or Chinese authorities, leading to more than 40,000 tip-offs last year.

    Many of the books quietly disappeared from libraries after denunciations in the government-backed media, which said they broke the national security law, according to reports in pro-democracy news outlets, some of which have themselves been forced to close amid investigation by the national security police.

    ENG_CHN_STOCKPOTHKLibraries_04282023_02.jpg
    Limited selection of Political science books are on a shelf in a public library in Hong Kong on July 4, 2020. Books written by prominent Hong Kong democracy activists have disappeared from the city's libraries after Beijing imposed a draconian national security law. Credit: Isaac Lawrence/AFP

    "Hong Kong public libraries completed its review of [existing] library books that are clearly not conducive to national security, and has removed them from the collection," the Hong Kong Audit Commission said in an annual report released on April 26.

    But it added: "As of February 2023, inspections and follow-up actions are ongoing."

    It said government guidelines require libraries to "safeguard national security by preventing activities that could endanger it."

    "In purchasing library materials, considering book proposals, accepting book donations and adding to collections [by] purchasing books, libraries must ensure that their collections do not prejudice national security," it said, recommending that new acquisitions are processed through the government's Book Registration Unit.

    "If content is found in the collection that could violate the national security law, then loans of those materials must be suspended," it said. "The material can only be relisted after libraries have ensured that the content does not violate the law."

    ‘Not conducive” to creativity

    The entire publishing industry is feeling the effects of the law, said published author Johnny Lau.

    "It's not just the libraries, but the entire publishing industry," Lau said. "In the current climate, a lot of people are censoring themselves."

    "The publishing industry and library collections as a whole are shrinking, and fewer and fewer books are getting published," he said. "The restrictions are affecting some people's desire to write books at all."

    "This climate hinders both freedom of speech and publication," Lau said.

    ENG_CHN_STOCKPOTHKLibraries_04282023_03A.jpg
    A worker cleans a window of the Hong Kong Central Library overlooking high-rise residential buildings May 14, 2001 Credit: Bobby Yip/Reuters

    Former Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kei, who fled to the democratic island of Taiwan after being detained by mainland Chinese authorities for selling "banned" books to customers in China, said the government has no choice but to censor libraries under the national security law.

    "The Leisure and Cultural Services Department must follow the policies of the Hong Kong government, which is now the same as the mainland Chinese government," Lam said. "No book with any kind of ideological issue is going to get published now."

    "The current climate in Hong Kong isn't conducive to creative work," he said.

    Much as mainland Chinese writers used to get their banned books published in Hong Kong, authors who write about Hong Kong issues are now choosing to publish in Taiwan, where the publishing industry is much freer.

    "There are more and more Chinese-language books getting published in Taiwan," Lam said. "Recent works include The Last Concession, which chronicles changes in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Secret Operations about young people wanted [following the 2019 protests] who fled."

    "It's not just social commentary, but literary works as well," Lam said. "Taiwan is the only market for Chinese-language books in the world that remains free and open."

    "More and more Hong Kongers are coming to Taiwan to buy books, and they're surprised to see that there are so many being published here with a Hong Kong theme," he added.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Cantonese.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-war-on-libraries-05052023142826.html/feed/ 0 392804     Polemics and Breaking the Ad Homimen Rule https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/27/polemics-and-breaking-the-ad-homimen-rule/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/27/polemics-and-breaking-the-ad-homimen-rule/#respond Thu, 27 Apr 2023 10:35:59 +0000 https://new.dissidentvoice.org/?p=137240 There are so many ways to frame a story, skin a cat, so to speak, and make a message lift up from the dry desert of the digital wasteland to somehow precipitate a reaction. Humor, sarcasm, wit, the Jonathan Swift “let them eat a modest proposal” sort of way.

    Journalism has slid down a slippery slope, and mostly the legacy media and mainstream media is a dog and pony show, and full of Deep and Shallow state stenographers. I write literary stuff that sometimes ends up here at DV, and it is essay memoir sort of poetic writing. Then, the polemics, the screeds, the rants. I am not sure what else we can do sometimes other than stoke flames, think about the dirty deeds of this system upon system, and then let it rip … with the inent to inform, make fun of, dig deep into the well of contradictory feelings — humor, hate, anger, fear, hope, pessimism.

    Sometimes the Chickens Come Home to Roost. Is that the kill switch for someone great like Malcolm X? His words are cancelled in many venues today. Forget about the anti-critical race fools. The liberals hate him: Case in point,

    Read: God’s Judgement of White America (The Chickens Come Home to Roost) [Pre-Mecca] Malcolm X. This piece has been cancelled big time. Words, accusations, name calling? Malcolm X.

    Now that the show is over, the black masses are still without land, without jobs, and without homes…their Christian churches are still being bombed, their innocent little girls murdered. So what did the March on Washington accomplish? Nothing!

    The late President has a bigger image as a liberal, the other whites who participated have bigger liberal images also, and the Negro civil rights leaders have now been permanently named the Big Six (because of their participation in the Big Fix?)…but the black masses are still unemployed, still starving, and still living in the slums…and, I might add, getting angrier and more explosive every day.

    Was it Reverend West who name-called Barak Obama several out of the park labels? What were the terms he used?

    Too many black people are nigger-ized. I would say the first black president has become the first nigger-ized black president…

    A nigger-ized black person is a black person who is afraid and scared and intimidated when it comes to putting a spotlight on white supremacy and fighting against white supremacy. So when many of us said we have to fight against racism, what were we told? “No, he can’t deal with racism because he has other issues, political calculations. He’s the president of all America, not just black America.” We know he’s president of all America but white supremacy is American as cherry pie.

    We’re talking about moral issues, spiritual issues, emotional issues. White supremacy has nothing to do with just skin pigmentation, it has to be what kind of person you want to be, what kind of nation we want to be. Democrats and Republicans play on both of those parties in terms of running away from the vicious legacy of white supremacy until it hits us hard. Thank God for Ferguson. Thank God for the young folk of all colors. Thank God for Staten Island and fighting there. Thank God in Baltimore, now the precious folk in Charleston.

    So, here we go, now. I know I have been questioned by some readers for my play on words, or, some say, attack on people — playing with reverse psychology and some tagging. When I call politicians generally or specifically putrid humans, or when the term presstitute is used for the stenographers of the media, is this too harsh?

    Then, well, Scott Ritter has gravitas, I know, but is it only he who can call Ukrainian followers and blue-and-yellow flag flyers and those Zelensky lovers and closet Nazi lovers, Nazi supporters? Is calling someone who supports Bandera a Nazi, name calling, and off limits?

    Now, sure, words like Azov and Zionist and Nazi are plowed together in my work to create, ZioAzovNaziLensky. Is this truly the harsh-harsh wording that gets me the 86 in certain circles? Is it wrong? Is it not playful in a dark comedic way?

    How do we navigate this world without utilizing some of all of those George Carlin 8 words not allowed on radio? Or in his case, those were seven?

    What is the reality of an apartheid state, which for Israel, for sure, if we utilize that terminology — apartheid and racist — and are we then considered racist and antisemitic? There you go, the slippery slope then, since so many now call Israel a racist state, yet when you call most Israelis racist, that is in turn, well, racist? Nope.

    Israel’s “shoot first” policy leads to 2 more Palestinian deaths: These are the 18th and 19th Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israel in the first 25 days of 2023. How do we frame that sick policy? Whose policy is it? In whose name? Shoot to kill. Hateful Jews.

    So, looking at the “racists” in Israel, who are Jewish, first, Zionists, well, third, and their Mother Ship, “Israel,” is vaunted by United Snakes of Amnesia’s Israel-Firsters. Again, all names, all fun and games. And, is this wrong, calling, or spelling the USA, as in AmeriKKKa? Do we not have a racists past, present, and future? Is the word racist meant to put into quotation marks? Irony? Questionable use? Come on. DW Griffith. Wow, the full racist movie:

    “The Masterpiece of Racist Cinema, Birth of a Nation.” Oh, Woodrow Wilson! In February 1915, upon viewing The Birth of a Nation at a special White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked, “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” This line has appeared in numerous books and articles over the past seventy years.

    What was that United-Inbred-Kingdom’s unending racism far and wide? Calling the UK, Inbred, again, what a terrible thing (not). Am I allowed to call Britain, which reverse Churchill, racist?

    Churchill was a genocidal maniac. He is fawned over in Britain and held up as a hero of the nation — voted ‘Greatest Briton’ of all time. Below is the real history of Churchill. The history of a white supremacist whose hatred for Indians led to four million starving to death. The man who loathed Irish people so much he conceived different ways to terrorise them. A racist thug who waged war on black people across Africa and in Britain. This is the trial of Winston Churchill, the enemy of all humanity. (source)

    Back to “racist” Jews: “Israeli papers and Israeli public figures complained that the movie was anti-Semitic; that it was spreading vicious rumors about their soldiers murdering innocent civilians. So, it seems Israel is admitting — albeit by its fervent denials – that indeed Israeli soldiers committed crimes during 1947-48, even though the movie makes no such direct claim.” That’s Miko Peled, Jew, ex-military, son of a general, son of a Zionist, pro-Palestine guy, in Mint Press News.

    The film opens by showing the beauty of pre-Zionist rural Palestine. The film was shot in Jordan, where the landscape is very similar. We see Farha in her village, we meet her father and uncle, and it seems like what one would expect in a Palestinian village in pre-Zionist Palestine. And yet, I could not help feeling that something terrible was brewing. Maybe because I know all too well what had happened to Palestinians in 1947- 48, how the ethnic cleansing campaign had caught most Palestinians by surprise. Maybe because of the countless stories I had heard of how the Zionist assault, like an unexpected storm, came suddenly, violently, and disrupted daily lives and destroyed plans that people had for themselves and their children.

    Again, the arbiters of good taste, of what is free speech, and what is paid speech, and what is acceptable speech, and what is off-limits speech, are we allowed some YouTube discussion around Malcolm X’s look at Jewish influence in Civili Rights movement? Wrong, bad, trigger warning worthy?

    Is citing James Baldwin right or wrong when looking at Arab-Israeli relations?

    This article traces the evolution of James Baldwin’s discourse on the Arab–Israeli conflict as connected to his own evolution as a Black thinker, activist, and author. It creates a nuanced trajectory of the transformation of Baldwin’s thought on the Arab–Israeli conflict and Black and Jewish relations in the U.S. This trajectory is created through the lens of Baldwin’s relationship with some of the major radical Black movements and organizations of the twentieth century: Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and, finally, the Black Power movement, especially the Black Panther Party. Using Baldwin as an example, the article displays the Arab–Israeli conflict as a terrain Black radicals used to articulate their visions of the nature of Black oppression in the U.S., strategies of resistance, the meaning of Black liberation, and articulations of Black identity. It argues that the study of Baldwin’s transformation from a supporter of the Zionist project of nation-building to an advocate of Palestinian rights and national aspirations reveals much about the ideological transformations of the larger Black liberation movement. (“The Shape of the Wrath to Come”: James Baldwin’s Radicalism and the Evolution of His Thought on Israel)

    Sure, I suppose we have the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules here, no, for debate, critiques, critical thinking, argumentation, explication, expository writing, opinion pieces? Right, because the rules that the overlords and the controllers and the government henchmen and the Gilded Class, and all of the tyranny of systems and lock-step thinking and educating and doint, yep, they are just fine and so so social just!

    Yeah, they treated Jack Johnson so fairly, those white promoters, those whites in general. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

    Of course, Ken Burns is the bloke who did the film, and what is that, then, a white guy, writing and directing a film about an unbelievably important black fighter?

    Bizarre, no, at the nearing of the 20th Century in AmeriKKKa:

    The threats did not end with the election. Obama’s victory produced a spate of racial animosity against him. In Maine, the day after the election, citizens rallied against a backdrop of Black figures hung by nooses from trees. In a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter noted a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama would be assassinated. The sign read, “Let’s hope we have a winner.” In Mastic, New York, a woman reported that someone spray-painted a message threatening to kill Obama on her son’s car. In Hardwick, New Jersey, someone burned crosses in the yards of Obama supporters. In Apolacon, Pennsylvania, someone burned a cross on the lawn of a biracial couple. At North Carolina State University, “Kill that nigger” and “Shoot Obama” were spray-painted in the university’s free expression tunnel. At Appalachian State University, a T-shirt was reportedly seen around campus that read “Obama ’08, Biden ’09.”

    The threats were not simply an East Coast phenomenon. In Midland, Michigan, a man was observed walking around wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe, carrying a handgun, and waving the American flag. He later admitted to the police that the display was in response to Obama’s win. In a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, police station, police found a poster of Obama with a bullet going toward his head. At the University of Texas in Austin, Buck Burnette lost his place on the football team for posting on his Facebook page, “All the hunters gather up, we have a nigger in the White House.” In Vay, Idaho, a sign on a tree offered a “free public hanging” of Obama. Parents in Rexburg, Idaho, complained to school officials after second- and third-graders chanted “Assassinate Obama!” on a school bus. A popular White supremacist website got more than two thousand new members the day after the election, compared with ninety-one new members on Election Day. And federal agents arrested Mark M. Miyashiro in December 2008 for threatening to attack and kill Obama during Obama’s scheduled vacation in Hawaii. The Secret Service confiscated a Russian SKS rifle, a collapsible bayonet, and several boxes of ammunition from him. (“Assassinate the Nigger Ape[]”: Obama, Implicit Imagery, and the Dire Consequences of Racist Jokes)

    Obama is a terrible person, terrible president, but this? We are not in “AmeriKKKa”? Disgusting these people and their sickness based on one man’s “color of his skin.”

    Here, Cornel West:

    Mmmhmm. But you know what, things have changed since Obama in regard to that claim. We know based on empirical data that historically black people have been the most anti-war constituency in the history of the nation. After six and a half years with a black president, a black face at the head of the American Empire, the black community waving the flag, defending Obama, defending the status quo… more pro-war. That quick. That fast. If Obama wants to undermine Libya and kill Gaddafi, wave the flag. We protect a black president. If Obama wants to drop bombs on seven countries that happen to be Muslim, we wave the flag and defend the black president. You see, all of a sudden now, blackness becomes, in part, of species of blindness in regard to moral integrity. It’s just a matter of success: he won, he won, we’ve got to defend him. It’s a beautiful thing he won, especially given who he was running against, but Baldwin’s about integrity. He’s about moral consistency. 25,000 bombs dropped year after year under Obama. What did black spokesmen say? Not a mumbling word. Would Baldwin have spoken out? Hell yes. How come? Because he’s got moral integrity. He’s not concerned about popularity. That’s a shift.

    And here we are, with American politicians and presidents and ex-presidents and so many unholy AmeriKKKans advocating for the murder of the Russian President, the Russian People. Imagine the gloves are off, and have been for centuries, when it comes to the systems and individuals and cabals of oppression, murdering you, me, the children, literally with their racist Pig Force (cops) and their economic schemes. Who were those money changers anyways that Jesus confronted? Jews!

    Is that name calling, or twisting facts in some hateful way? Nope.

    Words can be a cudgel, and they are weaponized in the hands of the master race/racist propagandists, from Edward Bernays to Goebbels to the many millions and millions doing the Madison Avenue shoft shoe around facts and truths in order to create a world of lies and deceit and, well, pain.

    So, any society, any government, any country, any individual, any group backing a kill list, open to all, in 2022, well, that I say is a many splendid thing for the perverted, the sick, the racist, the murderers, the whores of war, the prostitutes of human pain. Yes, UkroNaziLandia is a Nazi Land, and, yes, the head honcho, so to speak, is a Jewish Nazi Loving Fascist, who is fawned over by Jews and Christians alike, from Holly-Dirt pukes, to celebrity billionaires. What an unholy alliance.

    US gov’t backs Ukrainian kill lists targeting journalists, kids!

    ACAB, is that a bad thing to pull out as a sign at a protest? Are the all bastards, as in All Cops are Bastards, or All Cops are Bad? Is this hate speech? Come on.

    We are at that point, no, where the Yale and Harvard types, and dozens of other controlling agencies of education, attempt to rein in what is and isn’t acceptable discourse, business classes, science, journalism, and what have you. God forbid that any of us go outside the Ivory Towers and the silos of the higher education freaks. God forbid us from thinking and shouting at the same time. Words, labels, expletives.

    What is allowable when talking about the corruption of Ukraine, of ZioAzovNaziLensky, and all the hit squads, and his pogroms of Orthodox Church elimination? Is this kosher? “How the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement Post-WWII was Bought and Paid for by the CIA.” Listen here!

    Is Bill Hicks too much? Too many bad words, too much ad hominem? Put a trigger warning on him and Dave Chappel, others?

    And, so, when do those cuss words come out? In a lumber yard? In a coal mine? In a union shop?

    Imagine this, Amy “Soros” Goodman, now is that name calling? Right, look at her funders.

    Here, terrible show, terrible one sided bullshit.

    “20 Days in Mariupol”: Meet the Ukrainian Filmmaker Who Risked His Life Documenting Russian Siege

    Now, listen to Hedges on Danny Haiphong’s show, today. Quit a different viewpoint, and others. George Galloway was cancelled twice when he set up venues to oppose the NATO war, the tanks and F-16s going to UkroNaziLand. Being shut out is Hedges’ theme … he calls Kagan a pimp for war. As in Nuland’s hubby, another pimp or prostitute for war. Too tough?

    Then, Ritter, and he is being attacked, name called, by the Wall Street (Criminals) Journal (sic). From Ritter’s Consortium News piece:

    The Ramstein meeting was hampered by concern within the German Parliament over the optics associated with Germany providing tanks which would be used to fight Russians in Ukraine.

    This angst was perhaps best captured by Petr Bystron of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party. “German tanks [fighting] against Russia in Ukraine,” Bystron challenged his colleagues, “remember, your grandfathers tried to do the same trick, together with [Ukrainian nationalists] Melnik, Bandera and their supporters.

    “The result was immense suffering, millions of casualties on both sides and, eventually, Russian tanks came here, to Berlin. Two of those tanks remain on permanent display nearby, and you must keep this in mind when you pass them by every morning,” Bystron said, referring to the two Soviet T-34 tanks at the Tiergarten memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers.

    Scott Ritter and Diane Sare talk about being criticized by the WSJ,

    Names, labels, epithets. Yellow Journalism? Pressitutes? Man, using the term “crazy” is not cool in my other lives, i.e. social worker, teacher, Special Olympics coach. But, here, is it allowed?

    We’ll leave it at that, and if you watch this one, Tara Reade is on talking about her accusations of rape by Joe Senator Biden! Yikes. Calling someone a rapist? In quotes?


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/27/polemics-and-breaking-the-ad-homimen-rule/feed/ 0 391006     Ron DeSantis Taken to Court Over Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/ron-desantis-taken-to-court-over-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/ron-desantis-taken-to-court-over-censorship/#respond Wed, 26 Apr 2023 21:37:05 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=426669

    The Walt Disney Company filed suit on Wednesday in federal court against Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    Related

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    The suit comes almost exactly a year after DeSantis first lashed out at the entertainment giant for pausing political donations and criticizing the governor’s since-enacted controversial bill — dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by opponents — that bans teaching sexual orientation or gender identity to certain students. Disney claims that DeSantis weaponized Florida’s government by revoking its long-held special tax status immediately after it came out against the the governor’s policy.

    “Maybe he’s for free speech as long as it’s speech he likes.”

    Though First Amendment retaliation suits are notoriously difficult to prove in court, lawyers said that Disney may have an unusually strong case.

    “I find it hard to see how you can argue that you’re for free speech when you punish a corporation for their political views or you’re banning books,” said Catherine Cameron, a professor who teaches media law at Stetson University College of Law in Florida. “Maybe he’s for free speech as long as it’s speech he likes.”

    The case — and the wider flap over Disney’s stance on the “Don’t Say Gay” law — makes for a reversal of roles in a raging national debate about the First Amendment and government overreach in suppressing free speech. Following a raft of reporting, far-right Republicans have made the “weaponization” of government against speech a central political talking point in their culture war.

    In January, for instance, congressional Republicans amplified rhetoric about government suppression of speech by launching the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Now, one of the country’s top Republican officials and a potential contender in the 2024 presidential election is being accused of reacting to constitutionally protected speech with retaliation.

    Jim Lussier, an attorney based in Orlando, said, “DeSantis is consciously ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s position, at Florida taxpayer expense.”

    Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’s communications director, objected to the suit. “We are unaware of any legal right that a company has to operate its own government or maintain special privileges not held by other businesses in the state,” Fenske said in a statement. “This lawsuit is yet another unfortunate example of their hope to undermine the will of the Florida voters and operate outside the bounds of the law.”

    While corporations are not entitled to benefits or privileges, the retaliation claim hinges on whether the benefits were revoked because of First Amendment-protected speech. “If he’s gone after them for a political viewpoint, that is certainly not what free speech advocates would advocate for,” Cameron said. “That’s sort of the textbook definition of government censorship.”

    Though retaliation cases can be hard to win, DeSantis and others have made clear public statements about the motivation and timing behind the decision to revoke the company’s special tax status, said Tom Julin, a First Amendment lawyer based in Miami.

    “The governor has been quite explicit in making it clear that he is retaliating against Disney based upon its speech,” he said. “When you look at the chronological timeline of when this action was first contemplated by the governor, by the legislature, and by the governing body, it’s pretty clear — some would say crystal clear — that the action was not simply in reaction to a concern that Disney had been given too much control, but was a direct response to Disney’s criticism of the government.”

    Related

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    What’s more, Julin said, the judge assigned to the case, Mark Walker, has previously gone after DeSantis’s suppression of First Amendment law, so Disney has a good chance of getting a favorable result.

    “The First Amendment doesn’t only apply to individuals or politicians,” said Bobby Block, executive director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation. “Corporations also have a right to freely express themselves on matters of public policy and politics without fear of reprisal from the government. On the face of it, the Disney case looks very compelling. But we will have to see what the courts decide.”

    DeSantis and his legal team would have to provide a compelling interest for why the state would want to suppress Disney’s right to free speech, said Cameron, the law professor. A compelling interest in the eyes of the court would include significant issues of health, safety, or issues of national security.

    “If somehow the court was willing to buy that DeSantis and the Florida administration had a compelling interest to punish Disney in effect for their viewpoint, that would really change the law,” she said. “I don’t really know what the compelling interest would be. I guess we’ll have to see what argues.”

    “It’s a risky move because the government can always retaliate further if the lawsuit is not successful, or even if it is successful,” Julin said. “Someone like Governor DeSantis is likely going to be offended that a lawsuit was filed.”


    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/ron-desantis-taken-to-court-over-censorship/feed/ 0 390718 The War on Free Speech Is Really a War on the Right to Criticize the Government https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/25/the-war-on-free-speech-is-really-a-war-on-the-right-to-criticize-the-government/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/25/the-war-on-free-speech-is-really-a-war-on-the-right-to-criticize-the-government/#respond Tue, 25 Apr 2023 14:52:20 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=139619

    Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.

    — Justice William O. Douglas

    Absolutely, there is a war on free speech.

    To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.

    Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

    Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

    In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

    This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

    For instance, as part of its campaign to eradicate so-called “disinformation,” the Biden Administration likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.

    In his first few years in office, President Trump declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.”

    Then again, Trump was not alone in his presidential disregard for the rights of the citizenry, especially as it pertains to the right of the people to criticize those in power.

    President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”

    Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.

    President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to censor all news and control communications in and out of the country in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt also signed into law the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate by way of speech for the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence.

    President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to criticize the government’s war efforts.

    President Abraham Lincoln seized telegraph lines, censored mail and newspaper dispatches, and shut down members of the press who criticized his administration.

    In 1798, during the presidency of John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress or president of the United States.

    Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now.

    Good, bad or ugly, it’s all free speech unless as defined by the government it falls into one of the following categories: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes.

    This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.

    The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

    Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.

    Stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.

    For that matter, just try reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God (not the government) as the Supreme power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240-plus years ago.

    My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.

    Try suggesting, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did, that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties, and you might find yourself placed on a terrorist watch list and vulnerable to being rounded up by government agents.

    “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

    Better yet, try suggesting as Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry did that Americans should, if necessary, defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights, and you will be labeled a domestic extremist.

    “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine. “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.” And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

    Then again, perhaps you don’t need to test the limits of free speech for yourself.

    One such test is playing out before our very eyes on the national stage led by those who seem to believe that only individuals who agree with the government are entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

    To the contrary, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was very clear about the fact that the First Amendment was established to protect the minority against the majority.

    I’ll take that one step further: the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think.

    Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed.

    You see, the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

    This is how freedom rises or falls.

    Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

    We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

    Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

    What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

    Tolerance for dissent is vital if we are to survive as a free nation.

    While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

    By suppressing free speech, the government is contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”

    Mind you, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

    It doesn’t matter how much money you make, what politics you subscribe to, or what God you worship: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are all potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/25/the-war-on-free-speech-is-really-a-war-on-the-right-to-criticize-the-government/feed/ 0 390260     Small Town Libraries Don’t Want Imported Book Bans https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/small-town-libraries-dont-want-imported-book-bans/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/small-town-libraries-dont-want-imported-book-bans/#respond Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:36:46 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/libraries-don-t-want-book-bans

    Growing up in Milwaukee, the local branch of the public library was always just a bus ride away. But when my family moved to central Pennsylvania when I was entering high school, we lived in a rural region that didn't even have a public library.

    In the '90s, before the internet was widely available, the loss of a robust library system left me feeling cut off from the world. This is one reason I've spent the last 20 years living in a rural community, where I serve as library director for a school district.

    After decades building resources and capacity in our small school districts, some of which don't even have a public library, it's been devastating to see the growing ferocity of attacks against our libraries over the past couple of years.

    Our small town school districts and public libraries are facing immense pressure from national groups that turn massive external funding into fake grassroots outrage in our communities.

    More than half of U.S. state legislatures have proposed or passed bills that would severely restrict access to information, threaten First Amendment rights, and punish entire communities by withholding funding critical library services—all for the sake of keeping books off the shelf that do not suit the taste of a few individuals.

    Our small town school districts and public libraries are facing immense pressure from national groups that turn massive external funding into fake grassroots outrage in our communities. The grassroots origins are fake, but the outrage is very real.

    The outrage we see on the news is not a reflection of our small towns: It's imported by groups that aim to overwhelm and tear down our public schools and libraries. Book challenges of yesteryear were often sparked by a child bringing home a single book that prompted parents' concerns. Today's attempts to ban books are overwhelmingly driven by externally generated lists.

    According to the American Library Association, 40% of book challenges in 2022 involved requests to ban 100 or more books at a time. Most of these books were either by or about LGBTQ+ folks and people of color.

    This outrage over diversity in literature does not reflect the increasing diversity in our small towns. According to the Housing Assistance Council, in 2018 there were more than 2,000 rural and small-town census tracts where racial and ethnic minorities made up the majority of the population. In another study, the Movement Advancement Project in 2019 showed that an estimated three million or more LGBTQ+ people called rural America home.

    When censors come after books that reflect the diversity in a community, they're attempting to erase the stories of community members themselves.

    School librarians like me strive to build diverse collections that bring the world to the shelves of every town and ensure that every reader finds their story. When readers find their own stories in a library, they read more and grow into lifelong learners.

    Such robust collections are built through professional—not ideological—standards, and every student benefits.

    Access to books that represent a variety of cultures and viewpoints may boost a student's development and well-being, according to a 2022 white paper from the Unite Against Book Bans coalition. Diverse books also cultivate empathy and provide a springboard for families to have meaningful conversations.

    From coast to coast and across the heartland, Americans remain overwhelmingly committed to libraries, despite what manufacturers of moral panic may claim.

    Recent polling shows large majorities of voters across party lines reject the idea of banning books from school and public libraries. Ninety percent of voters have high regard and trust for librarians, and similar percentages say that school and public libraries play an important role in their community.

    As we move into National Library Week, I hope Americans will join me and 90% of our neighbors in supporting libraries and librarians—and in rejecting the manufactured outrage of book banning groups.


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Christopher Harris.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/24/small-town-libraries-dont-want-imported-book-bans/feed/ 0 389981 Cancelling Facts That Challenge Establishment Power https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/22/cancelling-facts-that-challenge-establishment-power/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/22/cancelling-facts-that-challenge-establishment-power/#respond Sat, 22 Apr 2023 12:09:39 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=139501

    As we have noted before, a systemic feature of state-corporate media is propaganda by omission. Missing out salient facts, informed commentary and context about the machinations of government and big business means that the public is less able to:

    1. Understand the world around us;
    2. Challenge state-corporate power; and
    3. Bring about the fundamental changes in society that have never been more necessary.

    Current examples are legion, as we will see in the selection that follows.

    1. Journalists Pushing For Less Transparency

    Last week, 21-year-old US airman Jack Texeira was arrested following, as BBC News put it: ‘[a] leak of highly classified military documents about the Ukraine war and other national security issues.’

    Former UK diplomat Craig Murray pointed to a disturbing aspect of the case, namely, that Texeira was:

    ‘tracked down by UK secret service front Bellingcat in conjunction with the New York Times and in parallel with the Washington Post, not to help him escape or help him publish or tell people his motives, but to help the state arrest him.’

    Bellingcat has been examined by, among others, Kit Klarenberg of the Grayzone who reported that the supposedly ‘independent, open-source investigations’ website has ‘accepted enormous sums from Western intelligence contractors’.

    As for the New York Times and Washington Post, US journalist Glenn Greenwald noted:

    ‘It is indescribably shocking and sickening that the nation’s two largest media outlets were the ones who did the FBI’s work and hunted for the leaker and outed him.’

    Almost as bad, he said, was that rather than press the government during a Pentagon press conference about the content of the leaked documents, journalists actually pushed for greater clampdowns on security leaks.

    Murray added:

    ‘I am not at all surprised by Bellingcat, which is plainly a spook organisation. I hope this enables more people to see through them. But the behaviour of the New York Times and Washington Post is truly shocking. They now see their mission as to serve the security state, not public knowledge.’

    He also observed that, over the past week or so, ‘nothing has been published [from the leaked material] that does not serve US propaganda narratives.’

    Very little, if anything, has been reliably presented about Texeira’s motives in releasing these state documents. Murray warned readers to be sceptical of attempts to portray him as simply a ‘rampant Trump supporter’ or ‘inadequate jock’ trying ‘to boast to fellow gaming nerds.’

    Murray concluded:

    ‘We should remain suspicious of attempts to characterise him: I am acutely aware of media portrayals of Julian Assange which are entirely untrue.’

    2.  Cancelling Julian Assange

    April 11 marked four years since Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and imprisoned in the high security Belmarsh prison. He and his lawyers have been fighting the prolonged threat of extradition to the US, where he would likely spend the rest of his life in a ‘Supermax’ prison. His ‘crime’ has been to expose the nefarious activities, including serious war crimes, of the US and its allies.

    As Alex Nunns, author and former speechwriter for Jeremy Corbyn, noted:

    ‘Probably the world’s most significant and famous journalist has been in prison for four years today for his work – not in Egypt or China or Russia, but in Britain, a country that lectures others on free speech. His imprisonment is entirely political. He should be free.’

    Media Lens has documented the grotesque smears and mischaracterisations of Assange over many years, not least by the Guardian, as well as the dearth of coverage of his plight and what that means for real journalism, freedom of speech and democracy.

    In a piece for international media organisation Peoples Dispatch, political writer Amish R M summarised key facts that state-corporate media have buried about Assange. These include:

    • The CIA plan to kidnap and assassinate Assange in London.
    • The US prosecution is based on fabricated testimony from a repeat offender, currently serving a prison sentence for sexual abuse crimes in Iceland, and described as a ‘sociopath’ by court-ordered psychologists.
    • The US spied on Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy.

    Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders Secretary-General Christophe Deloire and Director of Operations Rebecca Vincent were barred access to visit Assange in Belmarsh prison, despite receiving confirmation that a visit would be permitted.

    In a sane world, with responsible national media outlets, the above facts would be headline news. Both BBC and ITV News at Ten would devote significant coverage to Assange’s plight and there would be extensive follow-up reporting and commentary on the parlous consequences for journalism and society. Instead, there is virtual silence.

    But there is space to document the plight of Russian journalists who contradict the Kremlin’s narratives. What about journalists in this country who might try to contradict the narratives of the White House and Downing Street? Have they, in fact, already been ‘purged’ from so-called ‘mainstream’ media outlets: the word used by John Pilger to describe his treatment by the Guardian? Where is the outrage about the dumping of dissenting voices in the ‘free’ western media?

    BBC News would rather direct attention to: ‘The talk-show hosts telling Russians what to believe.’ Of course, you would never see a major feature by the famously ‘impartial’ BBC News on: ‘The talk-show hosts telling Britons what to believe’ on the war in Ukraine, or anything else for that matter.

    Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone describes Assange as ‘the greatest journalist of all time’. She wrote recently:

    ‘Assange began his journalism career by revolutionizing source protection for the digital age, then proceeded to break some of the biggest stories of the century. There’s no one who can hold a candle to him, living or dead.

    ‘And now he’s in a maximum security prison, solely and exclusively because he was better at doing the best kind of journalism than anyone else in the world. That is the kind of civilization you live in. The kind that imprisons the best journalist of all time for doing journalism.’

    3.  Nord Stream: ‘It May Be In No One’s Interest To Reveal More’

    We have previously written about the blanket of silence over attempts to get to the truth of the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines that supplied Russian gas to Germany. US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report pointing to the US as the most likely perpetrator of this terrorist act have been blanked, or summarily dismissed, by state-corporate media.

    Following Seymour’s report, US officials released an assessment based on ‘new intelligence’, faithfully relayed by the media, that a ‘pro-Ukrainian group’ carried out the pipeline attack. Der Spiegel then carried a news report, echoed in coverage around the world, claiming that divers used a German chartered yacht to sabotage the pipelines. There was a modicum of scepticism; journalists are not totally inept or subservient to state narratives.

    But media coverage still steered clear of examining the most likely explanation of US involvement; not least given that President Joe Biden had boasted in February 2022 that the US would ‘bring an end to it [Nord Stream]’ if Russia invaded Ukraine. As Reuters reported:

    ‘”If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the … border of Ukraine again, then there will be … no longer a Nord Stream 2. We, we will bring an end to it,’ Biden said. Asked how, given the project is in German control, Biden said: “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”’

    Glenn Greenwald observed recently:

    ‘The NYT — after feeding the public several bullshit versions about who blew up Nord Stream (an environmentally devastating act of industrial terrorism) — now announces: “it may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.”

    ‘Maybe there’s a clue in the article’s last 2 paragraphs?’

    Here are those last two paragraphs in question:

    ‘And naming a Western nation or operatives could trigger deep mistrust when the West is struggling to maintain a united front [over the war in Ukraine].

    ‘“Is there any interest from the authorities to come out and say who did this? There are strategic reasons for not revealing who did it,” said Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen, a Danish naval commander and military expert at the University of Copenhagen. “As long as they don’t come out with anything substantial, then we are left in the dark on all this — as it should be.”’

    The NYT even emphasised the point in its tweet highlighting their article:

    ‘Intelligence leaks surrounding who blew up most of the Russian-backed Nord Stream pipelines last September have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.’

    So, if you still harbour the illusion that ‘mainstream’ journalism can be relied upon to report the truth to the public, rather than covering it up, you may have to reconsider what even the ‘best’ news media, including the NYT, the BBC and the Guardian, do routinely.

    4. Propaganda Operations That Remain Hidden

    One of the central tenets of western political ideology is that ‘we’ have free access to information, and that only ‘the other side’ does propaganda, a dirty word that we are not supposed to discuss; except, when it does get mentioned in polite company, it is termed ‘counter-disinformation’. In other words, it is information that is intended to ‘counter’ the ‘misleading’ narratives spun by ‘official enemies’.

    Last month, the UK government announced ‘emergency funding’ of £4.1 million ‘to fight Russian disinformation’. The press release stated that this large sum would help the BBC World Service continue to bring:

    ‘independent, impartial and accurate news to people in Ukraine and Russia in the face of increased propaganda from the Russian state.’

    Of course, we are expected to swallow the myth that we in the West already enjoy ‘independent, impartial and accurate news’ from the BBC.

    But, as John McEvoy and Mark Curtis of the Declassified UK website recently highlighted:

    ‘Britain’s media routinely takes information from private groups countering Russian and other disinformation without saying these organisations are funded by the UK government and directed by people linked to the UK or US foreign policy establishment.’

    The same authors reported earlier this month that the UK Foreign Office has given over £25 million since January 2018 to organisations targeting ‘disinformation’. Four of these organisations are directed by former members of the British and US foreign policy establishment and are focused overwhelmingly on ‘official enemies’.

    McEvoy and Curtis observed:

    ‘These organisations tend to focus on Russian war crimes and information operations, particularly in Ukraine, while failing to conduct comparable investigations into Britain, the US or NATO.

    ‘Much of these groups’ research is thus unidirectional, presenting malign information operations as the sole domain of enemies identified by the UK government. The impact is likely to be one-sided information entering the public news arena.’

    Indeed, unsuspecting members of the public will have no idea that analysis from supposedly ‘independent’ experts commenting on the war in Ukraine often comes from Foreign Office-funded organisations.

    In particular, Declassified UK noted of two such organisations:

    • 25 Guardian and Observer articles referenced the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab, none of which mention its funding by the UK and US governments.
    • The Centre for Information Resilience were referenced 29 times in the UK media, with only one article mentioning its UK government funding.

    Also buried by state-corporate media is the extent and nature of the UK’s global militarism since 1945. Curtis reported earlier this year that:

    ‘Britain has deployed its armed forces for combat over 80 times in 47 countries since the end of the Second World War, in episodes ranging from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest.’

    Faithful consumers of British media over this period, right up to the present day, are meant to believe that successive UK governments have been acting out of benign intent in such foreign ‘interventions’. To unearth the reality requires digging deeper and further than the tightly-restricted domain overseen by state-corporate media.

    Concluding Remarks

    The above sections are but a taste of the systematic blanking, sidelining and even smearing of those who present facts and perspectives that challenge state-corporate policies and pronouncements. In an era of volatile international tensions, threat of nuclear conflict, class warfare against the majority of the population, inhumanity towards refugees, and the overarching spectre of the climate crisis, the propaganda system needs to be exposed and replaced by genuine public-interest media.

    Do you think electing establishment stooge Sir Keir Starmer is a solution to any of this? Or do you see that his promotion by establishment media, not least the Guardian, is how the establishment seeks to perpetuate its own interests?

    Alex Nunns, mentioned earlier, recently noted that when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader it ‘gave the Labour right the fright of their lives’. Nunns explained:

    ‘Suddenly the right saw the left as an existential threat. Whatever electoral benefits there were to having the left in the tent were outweighed by the risk of the Labour right permanently losing the party they saw as their property.’

    Starmer and his supporters in the party are determined to ensure that the prospects of a left-wing Labour leadership are permanently crushed. Banning Corbyn from standing for Labour in the next General Election is:

    ‘about sending a message, first to the left, and second to the establishment, that they have nothing to fear from a tamed Labour Party. They want to prove that the insurgent, radical leftism that Corbyn represented will never be repeated.’

    In this very real sense, the current Labour Party is part of the established interests that are determined to suppress grassroots opposition to endless war, class exploitation and the steps required to avert the worst of the onrushing climate catastrophe.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/22/cancelling-facts-that-challenge-establishment-power/feed/ 0 389711     The Danish Broadcasting Company Cancelled Seymour Hersh with Arguments Revealing its Conveniently Ignorant Role as the US Master’s Voice https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/21/the-danish-broadcasting-company-cancelled-seymour-hersh-with-arguments-revealing-its-conveniently-ignorant-role-as-the-us-masters-voice/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/21/the-danish-broadcasting-company-cancelled-seymour-hersh-with-arguments-revealing-its-conveniently-ignorant-role-as-the-us-masters-voice/#respond Fri, 21 Apr 2023 23:58:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=139479 The Danish Broadcasting Company cancelled Seymour Hersh with arguments revealing its conveniently ignorant role as His US Master’s Voice.

    Ages ago, I was born in Denmark, and I still hold a Danish passport. Quite often, I visit the homepage of the Danish Broadcasting Company – Danmarks Radio (DR). It is public service, regulated by laws passed by the Danish People’s Parliament – “Folketinget.”

    I sadly admit that there is an element of masochism in my visits to DR. In the particular fields of news reporting on global affairs, security politics and peace/war, this public service’s long-term trend has been down in quality and out of relevance.

    Sometimes I visit it only to see how biased the coverage of a certain event or decision in the mentioned fields is. I have often written an admittedly wry comment on social media or on my online home and blog, Jan Oberg. Why?

    Because I believe that public service has a fundamentally important role to play in a democratic society serving only to inform and educate its citizenry, promote healthy informed debates and consciousness-raising, as well as convey reasonably broad-minded perspectives about its own country, the world and the relations between the two.

    No such thing is happening at DR anymore. Anyone without special education can write about international affairs, even former sports reporters or youth department journalists. The main work they do is to cut and paste, translate and edit news and information that comes exclusively from the US and other Western news media and bureaus like Reuters and the Guardian. Correspondents abroad serve two functions; if they are in the West, they are explaining benevolently what the US, NATO, and EU do; if in China or elsewhere, it’s only negative stories, good news twisted into caricatures or non-existent. The only themes, foci and narratives promoted are those – again – of the US and selected European media.

    Enigmatically, it is as if the Internet, with its incredible wealth of information and perspectives accessible from a chair at a desk with a computer, does not exist in the minds of these people. Diversity of stories, perspectives and backgrounds – as well as the fine principle of struggling to be unbiased, ‘objective’ and fair as well as triple-checking sources – are qualities of the past. The state and the media have become one.

    The ethos is remarkably similar. No originality. The old-type of correspondents who lived in a region for years, spoke the language, followed the local media and told her/his audiences something original – all the result of that correspondent’s on-site investigative journalism – is dead and gone. So is the idea that each media’s outstanding feature was to bring something new, new perspectives on old stories and new stories – that is, being different from other media.

    Today, it seems, the outstanding feature is to be as politically correct and isomorphic with the leading Western mainstream media as possible. In short, hellishly boring, predictable and fundamentally unable to ask critical questions about Western policies – markedly so about war and peace – and giving full blast to Russo- and Sino-phobia – by coincidence, the main designated adversaries of the US and its uni-polar global dominance.

    The recent coverage of the NATO-Russia conflict and the war in Ukraine is an empirically strong example. But far from the first. The decline in international news reporting took off shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union and accelerated with NATO’s illegal bombing (both in terms of international law, the UN Charter and NATO’s Treaty) and 9/11.

    Today’s Denmark, in contrast to earlier times, is an extremely loyal follower of the United States in everything foreign policy, security and warfare. It’s been a leading bomber nation since its participation in NATO’s war on Serbia/Kosovo in 1999. So these trends pertain in the extreme to the Danish Broadcasting Company as well as, say, the Swedish (which I shall deal with in a follow-up article to this).

    In a more detailed analysis, I have dealt with my personal experiences with this type of media over almost 50 years. I regret that I have found so little positive to say.

    Let me now turn to one concrete and extremely important case – DR’s cancellation of Seymour Hersh’s report on who destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022.

    The Danish Broadcasting, DR, cancels Hersh’s Nord Stream report and promotes US “Intelligence” (CIA) instead

    The case begins here on February 8, 2023. DR editor-in-chief, Lotte Stensgaard, writes that one earlier news telegram with mention of Hersh’s report has been deleted. In translation*:

    “Here was previously an article on Russia’s reaction to unsubstantiated information on Nord Stream

    By Lotte Stensgaard

    DR Nyheder reported on 8 February that the Russian Foreign Ministry called on the US to respond to allegations made by US journalist Seymour Hersh, who in his blog claims that the US was involved in the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

    However, Seymour Hersh’s post is based on one anonymous source and no evidence has been provided to substantiate the claim of US involvement in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 explosions, nor has it been possible to verify the information.

    Therefore, the telegram does not fulfil DR’s ethical guidelines and has therefore been removed.”

    Later, I wanted to know what motivated this quite unusual action in the light of the fact that the counter story published by the New York Times about Nord Stream being destroyed by a “pro-Ukrainian” group in a yacht immediately received substantial coverage at several editorial offices of the Danish Broadcasting Company.

    So I wrote to Lotte Stensgaard, thus:

    “Dear Lotte Stensgaard,

    Based on what you write about Seymour Hersh’s report not living up to DR’s ethical guidelines (and therefore being taken down), would you please help me with an explanation of why the new analysis published in the New York Times, which indicates that it is a “pro-Ukrainian” group’s deed, has received such a relatively large amount of attention and analysing comments on DR.dk, TV-Avisen and other editorial departments in your house – and why it to a greater extent lives up to DR ethical guidelines.

    Thank you in advance.

    Kind regards

    Jan Øberg.”

    The answer I received was this:

    “Dear Jan
    Thank you for your enquiry.

    Your email has been sent for reply in our official enquiry system. In future, you are welcome to write directly into this system when you contact us via this contact page: https://dr.custhelp.com/

    Here you can choose, among other things, whether it is an error, a question, praise or a complaint.

    Kind regards
    Lotte”

    I was surprised that the editor-in-chief deliberately avoided responding to a question about a text she has written herself, so I replied:

    “Dear Lotte Stensgaard

    Oh yes, I know that system very well.

    But now it was you, as editor, who wrote the article about what I perceive as an editorial policy decision.

    That’s why I sent it to you and not to the system. But if you yourself do not want, can or are allowed to answer, then I can not do much about it.

    Kind regards
    Jan.”

    That was March 14. On April 4 came the following explanation written by editor-in-chief of DR News, Thomas Falbe:

    “Dear Jan Oberg

    Thank you for your enquiry. The debate about who was behind the sabotage of the two Nordstream pipelines is important, and DR has no interest or motive to suppress that discussion. When we chose to remove the article, which only quoted the blog post from Seymour Hersh, it was because the article contained so many undocumented claims based on a single anonymous source that it appeared to be almost pure speculation.

    So it was not only that it was based on anonymous sources that was the reason why we decided to remove the article altogether. It was an assessment that the journalistic quality behind the article was so poor that it made no sense to add a number of reservations to our original quote story, as we would then have to make reservations about virtually the entire content. That’s why we decided to remove the article altogether.

    It’s not because we want to steer the debate in a certain direction, for example, to suppress a discussion about the possibility that the US could have been behind the blast. If that were the case, it would be an extremely important story that we would publish as soon as the evidence was available.

    We have discussed the theory of a possible US role on several occasions, but in formats where it is possible to contextualise and critically assess what is presented. For example, here in Orientering Udsyn, and similarly here in Restart.

    When we later chose to go into the coverage of another theory, namely the one put forward by a number of German media and The New York Times about a Ukrainian-minded group, it was because these were authority sources that confirmed a concrete investigative trail. At the same time, it plays a role that these media have known and established editorial processes and a long track record of credible treatment and presentation of information without bias in relation to conclusions. I do not believe this was the case with the article by Seymour Hersh.

    DR Nyheder will continue to do journalism on the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines. Still, we will do so on the basis of documentation and sources whose claims can be verified before we publish. The story is too important for us to print every available claim that might be made on the internet, giving it a stamp of credibility just by mentioning it on our platforms. It’s all about journalistic standards, and not about the content of the story.

    Regards
    Thomas Falbe
    Editor-in-Chief, DR News.”

    What to make of this?

    • My question was obviously a sensitive one since it was transferred/elevated to the news editor-in-chief through a standard Q&A procedure; the author of the article was not supposed to deal with the policy decision conveyed in her text.

    • Who is Thomas Falbe? According to his Linkedin profile, he has a Danish education in journalism with a recent degree from INSEAD, The Business School for the World, in Leadership Excellence through Awareness and Practice. It seems that he has lived most of his professional life at DR. He served as a US correspondent for DR 2005-2008. On the profile, his “Top Voices” are the Business Insider and EU President Ursula von der Leyen. He uses both Linkedin and Twitter, where he now and then mainly reposts colleagues’ posts and info about DR programs.

    • In his reply to me, editor Falbe turns down three times that this could be about politics: DR has no interest in ‘suppressing discussion,’ that it is all about ‘journalistic standards and not content,’ and that DR does not want to ‘steer the debate.’ I did not even hint that it did. One does not have to be a psychologist to sense what this is about here: There is this elephant in the room, and its name is – right, you guessed it – never failing political correctness vis-a-vis the US.

    • What makes me say that? The fact that you’ll search in vain at the Danish Broadcasting’s news homepage over the years for examples of critical perspectives on one US-led war after the other, NATO expansion, US/Western China Cold War policies and accusations, Ukraine, etc – and find only negative, slanted demonising perspectives on, say, Russia and China.

    Hersh’s analysis simply cannot be treated otherwise. It doesn’t fit the pattern, which by the way, repeated itself throughout the Western mainstream media, including the New York Times itself (where Hersh worked for years). Hersh’s report was indeed suppressed.

    • Thomas Falbe’s description of Hersh’s report – not the least compared with what he says about the counter-narrative’s qualities – is rather ignorant, if not pathetic. As a professional journalist, he can not be ignorant about Hersh’s unique and world-renowned investigative journalism over decades and his absolutely unique connections with the inside of power circles in Washington. Given the mediocre journalism quite often displayed by DR – I have documented a few of them over the years – one can safely assume that no one at the DR news section can carry Hersh’s socks.

    • Falbe also ignores – deliberately, as a professional news editor – the piquant well-documented fact that both US President Biden and Undersecretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, are on record for having stated that the US would destroy Nord Stream if Russia invaded Ukraine – Biden at a press conference standing next to German chancellor Olaf Scholz. I wrote about it in Danish here and in English here, and included YouTube clips of it on September 28, 2022, right after the destruction. Mr Falbe conveniently overlooks that Hersh’s report is simply much better aligned with official US foreign policy than the alternative “pro-Ukrainian” story Falbe defends so miserably.

    • If you do not want to suppress discussion, why not simply tell your audience that two reports are saying completely different things, offer their main content, strong and weak sides, and then let people judge for themselves? That would be classical journalism rather than opinion/influencer journalism that is embedded in DR’s patronizing cancellation of an indisputably important report.

    • As for the counter story promoted by the New York Times, here is what Reuters – a source frequently used by DR – told the world about it on March 7, 2023 (my italics added):

    “New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukraine group – likely comprised of Ukrainians or Russians – attacked the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September, but there are no firm conclusions, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

    Reuters could not independently verify the report. And:

    “The U.S. intelligence review suggested those who carried out the attacks opposed Russian President Vladimir Putin “but does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation,” the New York Times wrote.

    “Officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two. U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved,” according to the New York Times report.”

    This is what makes Mr Falbe characterises to me as “authority sources that confirmed a concrete investigative trail. At the same time, it plays a role that these media have known and established editorial processes and a long track record of credible treatment…”

    • US intelligence – there are several agencies, but one globally infamous is the CIA – reviewed by “US officials” who suggest and believe this and that – meets the journalistic standards of DR according to its news editor-in-chief, Thomas Falbe. He believes these “sources whose claims can be verified before we publish.” (!)

    In terms of context and motives, it seems to be a forbidden thought to him that the US could have an interest in covering up the story and presenting a counter story after Biden and Nuland had themselves pointed out the US as the culprit.

    It’s completely incomprehensible from a journalistic perspective why anonymous ‘intelligence’ and ‘US officials’ who ‘believe’ this or that should be anything but biased in this particular case or why their hypothesis should be more credible than Hersh’s (backed up the US president).

    What is not so incomprehensible is that an ally of the US can not present perspectives which go against US interests. And in this particular case, also Denmark’s interest. The Danish government may have had prior knowledge about the action that happened just south of the Danish island of Bornholm. Or it has been taken by surprise. Whichever is true, the government has neither the civil courage nor any interest in publicly pointing to the US as the culprit – but every interest in removing the attention from the US (and Hersh’s story) and making it look like some Ukrainians/Russians were out in a yacht hired in Poland and placed some explosives 80 meters down on the seabed.

    Mr Falbe emphasises that DR will continue to do journalism about the destruction of Nord Stream. That remains to be seen. The Western mainstream media have closed down the Nord Stream destruction story long ago, do not put pressure on those who were to investigate it and avoid analysing the destruction’s thoroughly negative consequences for European friend and allies. Imagine the media attention if China or Russia had destroyed Nord Stream.

    Remember, ignorance is strength, as Orwell wrote in 1984.

    • Finally, what about Mr Falbe’s description of the New York Times (‘the media’) as having a ‘known and established editorial processes and a long track record of credible treatment and presentation of information without bias in relation to conclusions’?

    Well, it is either self-delusional, incredibly naive, devoid of factual knowledge or revealing a standard-biased mainstream mode of operation of which every decent person in public service and truly free media ought to be ashamed.

    Harsh words? Perhaps, but based on empirical facts instead of fake à la Falbe.

    Please find below a short reading list of predominantly American sources that proves – solidly documents – how CIA has infiltrated the media since the beginning of the first Cold War. They also show how the New York Times is one of the least trustworthy and most biased media in this field of international affairs. I would add that, in its editorials and choice of feature articles, it has always been pro-war – also now concerning the NATO-Russia conflict as it plays out in Ukraine. Against all hard evidence, the NYT promoted the lie that Iraq under Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons – as a main pretext for the US invasion and occupation – with blind political correctness.

    To work in places like the Western mainstream media, including public service, you must disregard this sort of disinformation, propaganda and lies and convince yourself that you promote freedom of the media – remember Orwell, ‘freedom is slavery’ – in sharp contrast to authoritarian, illiberal state media elsewhere.

    Or you’ll have to quit.

    Recommended reading and watching

    Carl Bernstein, in Rolling Stone 1977
    The CIA and the media
    How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
    (“By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”)

    Wikipedia
    CIA influence on public opinion in the US and abroad

    Wikipedia
    Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes.

    School History
    Operation Mockingbird Facts and Worksheets

    The New York Times, December 26, 1977
    Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.

    The New York Times, December 27, 1977
    C.I.A. Established Many Links To Journalists in U.S. and Abroad

    Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato Institute, 2021
    How the National Security State Manipulates the News Media
    The American people, who count on the news profession to provide them with accurate, independent information about foreign affairs, are the ultimate victims.

    Frances Stonor Saunders, 1999
    Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War

    Noam Chomsky & Edward S Herman, 1988
    Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

    Caitlin Johnstone, 2023
    The US Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State

    Former CIA director Mike Pompeo about the CIA’s lying and more…

    Notes

    * The translations from Danish to English are of the complete correspondence, with nothing omitted. They were done by Deepl and checked and adjusted by the author.

    The top cartoon is by Luka Lagator – more here.

    The second cartoon is by Toso Borkovic – more here and here.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jan Oberg.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/21/the-danish-broadcasting-company-cancelled-seymour-hersh-with-arguments-revealing-its-conveniently-ignorant-role-as-the-us-masters-voice/feed/ 0 389581     VAERS https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/19/vaers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/19/vaers/#respond Wed, 19 Apr 2023 15:06:10 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=139408

    “Canadians Are Organizing a Citizen-Led Inquiry to Seek Accountability for COVID Crimes.”


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/19/vaers/feed/ 0 388857     Teach History. Democracy Requires It. https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/13/teach-history-democracy-requires-it/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/13/teach-history-democracy-requires-it/#respond Thu, 13 Apr 2023 17:23:21 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/democracy-requires-history-education

    At 85 years of age, having been a civil rights lawyer virtually all my professional life, at times my mind wanders toward despair.

    How as a nation have we fallen into such a place? How have we simply watched as one of our political parties has embraced election deniers who seek to undermine our democracy and mortally weaken our public schools and public universities? How have we watched abortion rights and voting rights come under the gun of right-wing political power?

    How is it that members of both our major political parties voted to let Congress and a Republican president weaken banking regulations designed to protect our citizens to the point where a major banking failure threatens us? How could President Biden authorize a massive drilling project for more oil in Alaska, which will only exacerbate the climate emergency?

    Teaching history is vital to the common good, not least because it’s a step toward encouraging political engagement at all levels.

    Certainly, there are many factors involved. There is the overwhelming desire for political power of some, which negates all else. There is the endless racism and belief by many in white superiority, which tears our country apart.

    And even for those of us who believe we think rationally and without prejudice, whether we do or not, there are old but continuing myths that divide us.

    On the conservative side, there is the myth that we are a nation of rugged individualists who pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps through hard work and self-reliance alone. These people believe that our problems are caused by a government that taxes their hard earned funds to support those who live on the dole.

    On the progressive side, there are too few that stray far from the center of the Democratic Party.

    Too many moderates believe in the myth of equal rights in the United States even as voting rights and women’s rights to control their own bodies are violated systemically. Many have rightly denounced the Supreme Court for its backward rulings, but still fail to see the court as anything other than a political body standing at the ready to destroy progressive dreams on many fronts.

    Meanwhile, the right-wing war on “wokeness” carries a serious threat to public education, the teaching of history, and our nation's understanding of racism in the United States. State legislatures and governors keep passing laws to limit what teachers can teach at the risk of criminal charges.

    So where do we go from here? Why not start with reclaiming that single word, "woke"?

    That word, which originated in African American culture to mean “awakened to the injustices around you,” has been bastardized by right-wing politicians to mean virtually anything they don’t like. Today, extreme Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have been weaponizing white fears of "wokeness" to criminalize basic teaching about slavery and other American history.

    Yet that teaching is vital to the public’s understanding of the true history of this country since the Civil War, when slave-like conditions were reestablished in the South, enforced by Jim Crow laws and the Klan. That teaching is vital to understanding that racism still exists all over America despite the passage of the 1960s Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

    Put simply, whites need to understand that clever spin doctors have turned "wokeness" into grounds for reducing, discarding, and sanitizing history.

    This is where we must fight back.

    Knowing our history means acknowledging our country’s many injustices. But it also means learning about the times when white people worked together with Black-led movements to pass the 1960s civil rights laws — and continue to do so today in spaces like the Poor People’s Campaign. That knowledge points the way to building a more just country today.

    Knowing this other history — of effective social movements — can help people to come together across races to address the wounds caused by police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, discrimination, and other injustices today.

    In short, history is a tool that can help people come together to work for a better America. It is not a "weapon" to keep them apart.

    Teaching history is vital to the common good, not least because it’s a step toward encouraging political engagement at all levels. This engagement takes time. But without that effort, our common dreams will remain just that: the dreams of people who do not understand how "woke" has become "woke" and how to return it to its original meaning and broaden it in the process.


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Lewis M. Steel.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/13/teach-history-democracy-requires-it/feed/ 0 387575 CPJ joins call for Armenia to amend draft law allowing comprehensive wartime censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/11/cpj-joins-call-for-armenia-to-amend-draft-law-allowing-comprehensive-wartime-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/11/cpj-joins-call-for-armenia-to-amend-draft-law-allowing-comprehensive-wartime-censorship/#respond Tue, 11 Apr 2023 19:21:08 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=276386 On Tuesday, April 11, the Committee to Protect Journalists joined an open letter by the KeepItOn coalition of press freedom and human rights groups calling on the Armenian government to remove clauses in proposed legislation that would allow authorities to restrict access to websites and the internet during times of war.

    Provisions in the draft law, On the Legal Regime of Martial Law, previously criticized by CPJ, would grant the Armenian government the power under declaration of martial law to block websites, social media, and internet applications and to enact partial or complete internet shutdowns across the country’s territory.

    The letter highlights how the legislation poses a “serious threat to the freedom of expression in Armenia” and represents “an excuse to curtail press freedom.” Internet shutdowns “make it extremely difficult for journalists, the media, and human rights defenders to carry out their work,” and “restricting internet access in any manner disrupts the flow of information and hinders reporting and accountability for human rights abuses,” the letter says.

    The full letter can be read here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/11/cpj-joins-call-for-armenia-to-amend-draft-law-allowing-comprehensive-wartime-censorship/feed/ 0 386992     AOC defends the Censorship Industrial Complex, again https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/11/aoc-defends-the-censorship-industrial-complex-again/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/11/aoc-defends-the-censorship-industrial-complex-again/#respond Tue, 11 Apr 2023 04:48:39 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=3c9913c300c15cf86b71a7e1c8dca057
    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/11/aoc-defends-the-censorship-industrial-complex-again/feed/ 0 386762     Hong Kong filmmakers take their movies overseas in bid to evade censorship at home https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-moviemakers-04062023163004.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-moviemakers-04062023163004.html#respond Thu, 06 Apr 2023 20:32:13 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-moviemakers-04062023163004.html Faced with ever-widening censorship at home, Hong Kong filmmakers are increasingly taking their creativity to an international audience, showing an uncut version of their city beyond the reach of a security law criminalizing criticism of the authorities.

    "Toeing red lines has never been easy, and less so as they become increasingly vague, bordering on nonexistence," according to the organizers of Hong Kong Film Festival U.K., which screened films by a number of directors who have run afoul of the authorities amid a citywide crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

    The festival program included a series of five short films "reimagining the city in a dark and dangerous light ... cast in the shadows of the anti-extradition protests and of the pandemic," as well as work by director Kiwi Chow, one of the few directors who still calls Hong Kong home, despite having his film "Revolution of Our Times" banned from public screenings.

    Film censorship had already been seen in the city even before the 2019 protest movement erupted in response to its vanishing freedoms, with movie theaters in Hong Kong suddenly dropping the dystopian short-film compilation "10 Years" as early as 2016.

    Since the national security law took effect on July 1, 2020, many more creative offerings have fallen victim to political censorship, including a rap track by Hong Kong artist JB cursing the city's police force for its treatment of protesters in 2019, and Chow's film about the protest movement, which was screened instead at Cannes in 2021.

    Obstacles and barriers

    Chow told festival-goers in London on March 31 that he has faced barriers to funding, as well as to hiring actors and booking locations in Hong Kong since he made “Revolution of Our Times,” with actors' agencies refusing to do business with him and major film studios closing their doors to his work.

    Location bookings were also affected, with venue owners wanting assurances that the finished film "won't violate the national security law," he said, adding that actors are increasingly being asked to sign promises that they won't take work that violates the law, which criminalizes peaceful political opposition and public dissent.

    ENG_CHN_HongKongMovies_04062023.2.jpg
    The cast and crew work on the Hong Kong independent film "10 Years." Credit: Jevons Au

    "One actor tried to protest against this, because they wanted to take part in my film, but his previous co-producer knew he was considering my project and threatened him, saying he would cut all of his scenes from a movie they had shot together," Chow told the forum, titled "Hong Kong's Deteriorating Artistic Freedom."

    "So he wound up not being in my movie," he said.

    Asked if there is any creative freedom left in Hong Kong, Chow replies: "It's already lost, of course," he said. "Will it get worse? It's hard for me to predict, but the loss has definitely already happened."

    "It used to be so free, maybe more so than a lot of Western countries,” Chow said, “but now it has gone back 20 years.”

    He appears undeterred, however, and his international success continues despite the restrictions back home.

    His segment, "Self-Immolation," from "10 Years" (2015) won the Best Film award at the Hong Kong Film Awards, while "Revolution of Our Times" was invited to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Documentary award at the 58th Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan.

    Chilling effect on creativity

    Meanwhile, film music arranger Adrian Chow said musicians and singers have also been targeted for political censorship, with event organizers required to answer a slew of questions and guarantee that no anti-government content would be performed before being granted a temporary entertainment license by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department.

    Officials wanted to know how organizers would respond if audience members started chanting banned slogans or engaging in "other behavior detrimental to national security," and whether they would cooperate with police if they did, he told the forum.

    Such requirements have a chilling effect on creative freedom, Adrian Chow said.

    "The government quite openly seeks to influence creative performances and activities, and will make trouble for event organizers, so they will remember not to book politically sensitive performers in future," he said. 

    ENG_CHN_HongKongMovies_04062023.3.jpg
    A screenshot from the website for the Hong Kong Film Festival UK. Credit: RFA

    "They want to sow fear, so people believe that the government really will take action, and even involve the national security police," Adrian Chow said. "In this way, creative freedom is affected by self-censorship."

    Fellow director Lam Sun, who continues to make films about Hong Kong from the U.K., agreed, saying the fear has also recently spread to sports associations, who are being targeted after organizers played out the protest anthem Glory to Hong Kong in error at recent international fixtures, instead of China's national anthem, the March of the Volunteers.

    "Hong Kong teachers also have to watch out for potential complaints about their teaching materials," said Lam, whose first solo feature film "The Narrow Road", received the Best Original Film Music at Golden Horse Awards 2022, and the Best Director and Best Actor awards at the 29th Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards, along with 10 nominations in the 41st Hong Kong Film Awards.

    Everyone in Hong Kong has to consider how to face up to this rule of fear, faced with "vaguely defined red lines," he said.

    Kiwi Chow called on Hong Kong’s creative workers to be tenacious in holding onto their artistic vitality and inner freedom.

    "I personally don't care whether the environment I'm in is free or not," he said. "There is still freedom in the struggles that take place in the inner world of a creative person, so I don't focus on the external loss of freedom, but on myself."

    "I think Hong Kong filmmakers have very strong vitality, and if they think their movie won't get past the censors, they will take it overseas," he said. "Creativity is about taking risks."

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Amelia Loi for RFA Cantonese.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hong-kong-moviemakers-04062023163004.html/feed/ 0 385845     ‘I Don’t Like Censorship’: Omar Slams Proposed TikTok Ban as Hawley Aims to Fast-Track Passage https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/i-dont-like-censorship-omar-slams-proposed-tiktok-ban-as-hawley-aims-to-fast-track-passage/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/i-dont-like-censorship-omar-slams-proposed-tiktok-ban-as-hawley-aims-to-fast-track-passage/#respond Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:54:59 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/ilhan-omar-josh-hawley-tiktok-ban

    Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday joined the ranks of progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups voicing opposition to proposals to ban TikTok as Republican Sen. Josh Hawley plans to force a vote on his bill sometime this week.

    "I am opposed to efforts by some Republicans and Democrats to unilaterally ban an entire social media platform," Omar (Minn.) said in a statement.

    "First of all, I don't like censorship," said Omar. "There are very legitimate concerns about privacy and the harvesting of private user data on social media platforms, but this proposal doesn't address those. Instead, it singles out one platform—TikTok—and bans it outright."

    Amid a rise in what Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) has called "xenophobic anti-China rhetoric," U.S. lawmakers have introduced three pieces of legislation that would crack down on TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.

    Rep. Michael McCaul's (R-Texas) DATA Act, which passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year, would require the White House to sanction companies that are "subject to the jurisdiction" of China and "believed to have facilitated" the transfer of sensitive personal data.

    The RESTRICT Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.), would authorize the U.S. Commerce Department to "review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries," which could trigger a TikTok ban or sale.

    Hawley's (Mo.) No TikTok on United States Devices Act, meanwhile, seeks to outlaw TikTok use nationwide.

    The far-right lawmaker "plans to seek unanimous consent on the floor this week" to pass his bill, Punchbowl Newsreported Tuesday. Hawley said that "this is the moment to act" after last week's "unbelievable" hearing, during which TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was accosted by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

    According to the outlet, Warner and Thune may put forth their competing bill, in which case there's a chance of neither passing the Senate before the Easter recess.

    "We should create actual standards and regulations around data harvesting and privacy violations across social media companies—like many countries around the world have already done—not ban particular platforms we don't like."

    "Aside from raising legitimate First Amendment concerns, this is bad policy," Omar said Tuesday. "We should create actual standards and regulations around data harvesting and privacy violations across social media companies—like many countries around the world have already done—not ban particular platforms we don't like."

    With this line of criticism, Omar echoed Bowman and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose inaugural TikTok video on Saturday endorsed arguments made last month by defenders of digital rights and civil liberties.

    Fight for the Future director Evan Greer, for instance, said in February that if members of Congress truly want to protect U.S. residents from the surveillance capitalist business model also embraced by domestic Big Tech firms, "they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone."

    For her part, Omar stressed that "as a frequent target of disinformation campaigns, I am sympathetic to... concerns that TikTok could be used for propaganda and hate speech."

    "But again, this problem is not unique to TikTok," the lawmaker continued. "Twitter, Instagram, and famously, Facebook have all been used by foreign adversaries for disinformation campaigns targeting U.S. citizens. Our regulations should address these broad issues instead of singling out one platform."

    "Lastly, there are legitimate concerns about the Chinese government—including their brutal repression of the Uyghur people and their suppression of basic rights of freedom of expression in their country," said Omar. "But banning one social media company based in China will not solve those problems."

    "The American model rests on our protection of those freedoms—the ability to speak publicly against the government, or if you choose, to share a 10-second video cooking your favorite meal," she added. "That is the beauty of our democracy and our constitution. That is what sets us apart from authoritarian regimes like China. And that is the example we should set for the world."


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/29/i-dont-like-censorship-omar-slams-proposed-tiktok-ban-as-hawley-aims-to-fast-track-passage/feed/ 0 383258 Elon Musk’s Twitter Widens Its Censorship of Modi’s Critics https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/elon-musks-twitter-widens-its-censorship-of-modis-critics/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/elon-musks-twitter-widens-its-censorship-of-modis-critics/#respond Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:16:16 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=424854

    Two months after teaming up with the Indian government to censor a BBC documentary on human rights abuses by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Twitter is yet again collaborating with India to impose an extraordinarily broad crackdown on speech.

    Last week, the Indian government imposed an internet blackout across the northern state of Punjab, home to 30 million people, as it conducted a manhunt for a local Sikh nationalist leader, Amritpal Singh. The shutdown paralyzed internet and SMS communications in Punjab (some Indian users told The Intercept that the shutdown was targeted at mobile devices).

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    While Punjab police detained hundreds of suspected followers of Singh, Twitter accounts from over 100 prominent politicians, activists, and journalists in India and abroad have been blocked in India at the request of the government. On Monday, the account of the BBC News Punjabi was also blocked — the second time in a few months that the Indian government has used Twitter to throttle BBC services in its country. The Twitter account for Jagmeet Singh (no relation to Amritpal), a leading progressive Sikh Canadian politician and critic of Modi, was also not viewable inside India.

    Under the leadership of owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter has promised to reduce censorship and allow a broader range of voices on the platform. But after The Intercept reported on Musk’s censorship of the BBC documentary in January, as well as Twitter’s intervention against high-profile accounts who shared it, Musk said that he had been too busy to focus on the issue. “First I’ve heard,” Musk wrote on January 25. “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things.”

    Two months later, he still hasn’t found the time. Musk had previously pledged to step down as Twitter CEO, but no public progress has been made since his announcement.

    While Modi’s suppression has focused on Punjab, Twitter’s collaboration has been nationwide, restricting public debate about the government’s aggressive move. Critics say that the company is failing the most basic test of allowing the platform to operate freely under conditions of government pressure.

    “In India, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies have today become handmaidens to authoritarianism,” said Arjun Sethi, a human rights lawyer and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. “They routinely agree to requests not just to block social media accounts not just originating in India, but all over the world.”

    Punjab was the site of a brutal government counterinsurgency campaign in the ’80s and ’90s that targeted a separatist movement that sought to create an independent state for Sikhs. More recently, Punjab was the site of massive protests by farmers groups against bills to deregulate agricultural markets. The power struggles between the government and resistance movements have fueled repressive conditions on the ground.

    “Punjab is a de facto police state,” said Sukhman Dhami, co-director of Ensaaf, a human rights organization focused on Punjab. “Despite being one of the tiniest states in India, it has one of the highest density of police personnel, stations and checkpoints — as is typical of many of India’s minority-majority states — as well as a huge number of military encampments because it shares a border with Pakistan and Kashmir.”

    “Punjab is a de facto police state.”

    Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has justified its efforts to arrest followers of Amritpal Singh by claiming that he was promoting separatism and “disturbing communal harmony” in recent speeches.

    In late February, Singh’s followers sacked a Punjab police station in an attempt to free allies held there. The Indian media reported that the attack triggered the government’s response.

    In the void left by Twitter blocks and the internet shutdown across much of the region, Indian news outlets, increasingly themselves under the thumb of the ruling government and its allies, have filled the airwaves with speculation on Singh’s whereabouts. On Tuesday, Indian news reports claimed that CCTV footage appeared to show Singh walking around Delhi masked and without a turban.

    The Modi administration has told the public a story of a dangerous, radical preacher who must be stopped at any cost. Efforts by dissidents to contextualize Modi’s crackdown within his increasingly intolerant and authoritarian nationalism have been smothered by Twitter.

    “People within Punjab are unable to reach one another, and members of the diaspora are unable to reach their family members, friends, and colleagues,” Sethi told The Intercept. “India leads the world in terms of government imposed blackouts and regularly imposes them as a part of mass censorship and disinformation campaigns. Human rights defenders documenting atrocities in Punjab are blocked, and activists in the diaspora raising information about what is happening on the ground are blocked as well.”

    Modi’s government tried to throttle Twitter even before Musk’s takeover. Twitter India staff have been threatened with arrest over refusals to block government critics and faced other forms of pressure inside the country. At the time that Musk took charge of the company, it had a mere 20 percent compliance rate with Indian government requests. Following massive layoffs that reduced 90 percent of Twitter India’s staff, the platform appears to have become far more obliging in the face of government pressure, as its actions to censor its critics now show.

    Musk, who has consistently characterized his acquisition of Twitter as a triumph of free speech, has framed his compliance as mere deference to the will of governments in countries where Twitter operates. “Like I said, my preference is to hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates,” Musk tweeted last year. “If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed.”

    “The main thing that the Indian government is trying to accomplish is to protect the reputation of Modi.”

    Critics say that Musk’s policy of deferring to government requests is dangerous and irresponsible, as it empowers governments to suppress speech they find inconvenient. And a request from the executive branch is not necessarily the same thing as an order from a court; under previous ownership, Twitter regularly fought such requests from government officials, including those in the Modi administration.

    As the manhunt for Singh and his supporters continues, large protests have broken out in foreign countries with large Punjabi diasporas, including a protest in London that resulted in the vandalism of the Indian Embassy. Despite this backlash, Modi appears to be pressing ahead with internet shutdowns.

    “The main thing that the Indian government is trying to accomplish is to protect the reputation of Modi,” said Dhami. “They have a zero tolerance for anything that harms his reputation, and what triggers them most of all is a sense that his reputation is being attacked.”


    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/elon-musks-twitter-widens-its-censorship-of-modis-critics/feed/ 0 382797 Reader-Comments at Russia’s RT News and Censorship in America https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/21/reader-comments-at-russias-rt-news-and-censorship-in-america/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/21/reader-comments-at-russias-rt-news-and-censorship-in-america/#respond Tue, 21 Mar 2023 14:00:08 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138985 On March 20, Russia’s RT News reported, “The US Department of Defense announced on Monday that it will send Ukraine another $350 million worth of military aid. The further supplies come as Ukraine reportedly gears up for a spring offensive, despite suffering heavy losses in Donbass. The package is the 34th tranche of military aid […]

    The post Reader-Comments at Russia’s RT News and Censorship in America first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     On March 20, Russia’s RT News reported, “The US Department of Defense announced on Monday that it will send Ukraine another $350 million worth of military aid. The further supplies come as Ukraine reportedly gears up for a spring offensive, despite suffering heavy losses in Donbass. The package is the 34th tranche of military aid doled out to Ukraine by the US since August 2021. … The US has given Ukraine more than $32.5 billion in military aid since last February, out of more than $110 billion allocated by the administration of US President Joe Biden for military and economic assistance to Kiev.”

    Some reader-comments there were against Russia’s Government, such as “Trish: What a disaster for Russia, the sooner Putin goes the better.” But others were instead against America’s Government, such as “TBTB: And the US says it is not party [to] the war? It instigated it with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, a coup in Ukraine to install a neo-Nazi proxy regime, arming it, training it, financing it, providing it with war plans and intelligence, plus mercenaries and diplomatic support. If this is not being party to the conflict, at minimum, then when Russia hits back no one should be surprised. It is self-defense. It has already knocked out a US sophisticated spying drone that was collecting intelligence on live combat and passing it to its neo-Nazis to kill Russians.”

    Whereas the comment from “Trish” is similar to many that I have read at U.S. news-sites, the one from “TBTB” is so fundamentally different from that American norm so that it raises the question as to whether it is reflecting information that appears on Russian news-sites but not on American ones. If that is the case, then why would that be so? Is it because the comment reflects realities that are hidden in U.S. news-media, or instead because it reflects non-realities that are prohibited to be published in the U.S.?

    If it reflects realities that are hidden in U.S. news-media, then why would ANY realities be hidden in U.S. news-media? Should they be?

    If it instead reflects non-realities that are prohibited to be published in the U.S., then who is doing this censorship and who ought to be legally authorized to make such censorship-decisions in the U.S.? Is there a severe need in the U.S. for new legislation which will delineate how news-censorship in the U.S. is to be done? Would it be best to continue the current legal standard in America that censorship in America is ONLY a private right of publishers, and NOT a right that America’s Government has? Since 95%+ of the news that Americans receive is from organizations that are controlled by America’s fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires, is almost all of the censorship in America being done on behalf of those fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires? If so, then how is that affecting U.S. politics and the Government itself?

    America’s Founders, who wrote the U.S. Constitution including its First Amendment, gave no indication that when they wrote and the states passed into law the First Amendment, the objective was to give America’s richest one-hundred-thousandth of the U.S. population in the future the exclusive ultimate power to censor the news that the American public will be receiving.

    Of course, this is an enormous problem in America if the reader-comment is entirely true that “The US … is not party the war? It instigated it with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, a coup in Ukraine to install a neo-Nazi proxy regime, arming it, training it, financing it, providing it with war plans and intelligence, plus mercenaries and diplomatic support. If this is not being party to the conflict, at minimum, then when Russia hits back no one should be surprised. It is self-defense. It has already knocked out a US sophisticated spying drone that was collecting intelligence on live combat and passing it to its neo-Nazis to kill Russians.” That would then be a deeply and dangerously dysfunctional U.S. Government. Would it be an authentically Constitutional U.S. Government?

    However, if that reader-comment is false, then why has no evidence been presented to the American public that each one of that comment’s clauses and assumptions is false? Would not even that indicate a very deep dysfunctionality to today’s American press? If the comment is false, why have all U.S. news-media not, in regard to each of its clauses, disclosed evidence that it is false?

    Either way, have not America’s news-media failed? And, if the news-media have failed, then isn’t America’s Government even worse — and constantly violating its Constitution? Or: Did America’s Founders WANT there to be a widely deceived American public?

    The post Reader-Comments at Russia’s RT News and Censorship in America first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/21/reader-comments-at-russias-rt-news-and-censorship-in-america/feed/ 0 381037     Pro-Israel and Ukraine Groups Use Identity Politics to Attack Free Speech https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/20/pro-israel-and-ukraine-groups-use-identity-politics-to-attack-free-speech/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/20/pro-israel-and-ukraine-groups-use-identity-politics-to-attack-free-speech/#respond Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:00:32 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138962 Questioning Canada’s contribution to NATO’s proxy war is “hate” that must be shut down according to some Ukrainian groups mimicking Zionist organizations by promoting an identity politics laced cancel culture. A Ukrainian student group sought to cancel my talk at Kings College in London, Ontario, on Thursday. In “Western Ukrainian Students’ Association Statement on The […]

    The post Pro-Israel and Ukraine Groups Use Identity Politics to Attack Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Questioning Canada’s contribution to NATO’s proxy war is “hate” that must be shut down according to some Ukrainian groups mimicking Zionist organizations by promoting an identity politics laced cancel culture.

    A Ukrainian student group sought to cancel my talk at Kings College in London, Ontario, on Thursday. In “Western Ukrainian Students’ Association Statement on The King’s University College Yves Engler Event”, they called me an “apologist to a bloodthirsty regime … who spreads disinformation and uses Russian propaganda talking points.” They also argued that I “endanger victims of colonialism everywhere” and my speaking “may also incite violence on campus.” The statement boldly concluded, “we cannot allow a proponent of hateful disinformation and Russian propaganda on our campuses in any capacity.”

    I have referred to the Russian invasion as “illegal” and “brutal” in dozens of articles and interviews. But I’ve also challenged Canada’s role in provoking and escalating the conflict. In a sign of their fanaticism, the event at Western wasn’t even about Ukraine but rather Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession.

    A few days before the Western Ukrainian Students’ Association released their statement a master’s student at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs published a similar attack on a January event I did with Tamara Lorincz and Miguel Figueroa. The Chair of the Carleton University Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and Model NATO, Matthew Selinger, labelled me a “master of historical revisionism that runs in line with Russian propaganda.” The former Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) intern concluded with a call to defund Carleton’s Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) for simply having booked the room used for the Ottawa Peace Council event titled “The War in Ukraine: What is the Path to Peace?”

    In the Charlatan student paper Selinger wrote that OPIRG needed to be held “accountable for exploiting its campus status for malignant purposes. Should OPIRG refuse to condemn the speakers’ messages and halt sponsorship of future events that trot out Kremlin disinformation as a rational perspective, then defunding must be pursued. This panel should’ve never taken place on campus. Carleton’s deafening silence on the hateful and vilifying rhetoric towards Ukrainian students can be corrected, among other recommendations, by drafting an official policy on combating disinformation in non-departmental events.”

    Immediately after the event the Charlatan published “Carleton student groups address anti-Ukrainian hate on campus” about the Carleton Ukrainian Students’ Club bid to have our event canceled.

    An even more intense campaign of vilifying antiwar voices as “hate” has taken place in recent months at the University of Victoria.

    On March 14 the parent organization of the campus groups demanded the federal government take action against “anti-Ukrainian hate”. In “UCC calls on Government of Canada to address rising tide of anti-Ukrainian hate”, the right-wing lobby group demanded Ottawa “issue a public statement unequivocally condemning the rising pattern of hate-motivated attacks against the Ukrainian Canadian community and supporters of Ukraine; Develop and deliver programs to educate the public and counter disinformation that incites hatred against Ukrainians.” (Notwithstanding the claims, there’s likely never been greater sympathy for Ukrainian Canadians, a community that’s faced its share of discrimination, including large-scale internment during and after World War I.)

    Where have you heard this type of rhetoric before? The UCC and its campus affiliates are taking a page from the Zionist playbook. (In fact, a day after the Western Ukrainian Students’ Association denounced me, three anti-Palestinian Jewish groups released a statement that demanded “King’s University College should not provide a podium for Engler to use to spread his hateful views.”)

    Well-resourced, US empire aligned, Israel lobby groups constantly smear activists and demand events be shut down or individuals be cancelled. The recent attacks against Hamilton Centre NDP candidate (now Ontario MPP) Sarah Jama are an egregious example. They smeared the 29-year-old wheelchair bound Black female activist as anti-Jewish for having stood against apartheid. From smearing individuals to promoting an anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism, the Israel lobby promotes an identity politics infused cancel culture.

    Ironically, right-wingers who normally bash cancel culture and identity politics stay mum about the Zionist or NATO proxy warriors’ tactics.

    Groups aligned with powerful forces who seek to suppress discussion of important international issues on the grounds of their “hurt feelings” deserve criticism and contempt. Just don’t expect it to come from the usual sources in the mainstream media. They’re too busy promoting war and defending an apartheid state.

    The post Pro-Israel and Ukraine Groups Use Identity Politics to Attack Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/20/pro-israel-and-ukraine-groups-use-identity-politics-to-attack-free-speech/feed/ 0 380699     "So-called journalists" expose the Censorship Industrial Complex https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/so-called-journalists-expose-the-censorship-industrial-complex/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/so-called-journalists-expose-the-censorship-industrial-complex/#respond Fri, 17 Mar 2023 23:08:47 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=aa812f4223b52d2633b8e4352ff95175
    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/so-called-journalists-expose-the-censorship-industrial-complex/feed/ 0 380364     It’s Your Human Right to Access Russian News and Analysis Sites in English if You Want https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/its-your-human-right-to-access-russian-news-and-analysis-sites-in-english-if-you-want/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/its-your-human-right-to-access-russian-news-and-analysis-sites-in-english-if-you-want/#respond Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:38:14 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138892 Collage © Jan Oberg 2023 The human right to freely seek information is laid down in the American Convention on Human Rights from 1968. Article 13 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds.” The Universal […]

    The post It’s Your Human Right to Access Russian News and Analysis Sites in English if You Want first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     It’s your human right: Access Russian news and analyses sites in English if you want

    Collage © Jan Oberg 2023

    The human right to freely seek information is laid down in the American Convention on Human Rights from 1968. Article 13 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds.”

    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 states in Article 19 that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

    The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 states in Article 19 that: “1) Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. 2) Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”

    Note above the words freedom to and no interference.

    I’m not a lawyer, but common sense compels me to believe that such high-level human rights declarations are violated when Western politicians actively prevent you from accessing certain leading Russian media such as RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik.

    It’s would seem also to be an interference in your free search for information when you are constantly told that Russia is one big disinformation machine (and never do comparative studies of NATO countries and their disinformation and disinfomation budgets) – which is meant to make you doubt anything coming out of Russia.

    There is also the putting up descriptions – e.g., on Facebook – that point out that this is a Russia state media – implicitly meaning, therefore, less trustworthy. The proxy server/VPN Surfshark has even tried to put up a red warning against what it has determined to be fake news. When a number of platforms does the same – such as Flipboard so you cannot flip certain articles – it’s also an interference in your freedom to seek and evaluate information yourself.

    In short, they participate in a media war.

    And since TFF and I work for the UN Charter norm – Article 1 – that peace shall be established by peaceful means – it’s natural and logical to be extremely critical of those who participate in media wars and do so in ways which violate provisions laid down in fundamental declarations and covenants of human rights like those above.

    In addition, one comes to suspect – easily – that those who cancel access to the opinions of the other side in a conflict do not really believe that their own arguments are valid, reliable and convincing.

    A reader or two may now think: “Yeah, but so does Russia, China, Iran and all the other ‘authoritarian’ countries. You have, for instance to use a proxy server when visiting or living in these countries.” This is true – at least to some extent but three arguments can be brought forward for them to ponder:

    a) the people living in these countries know much much more about the West than vice-versa – so somehow they have access to Western sources;

    b) RT as well as leading Chinese media – which I visit daily – have a more decent coverage of what the US or other Western countries do and argue than Western media have of their deeds and arguments;

    c) it is the US/NATO/EU countries that pride themselves and champion – without or with violence – the normative universalisation and export of the ideas of freedom of expression, information seeking, opinion-formation, etc.

    To not adhere oneself to what one preaches, or advocates, is untrustworthy and smacks double standards: there is one standard for ‘us’ and another for ‘you’. It also smacks psycho-political projection of one’s own darker sides unto the other side: Yes, we may not be perfect but you are much worse…

    So, in order to be helpful to our readers – and produce a bit of fairness – we have compiled a list of English-language Russian sites with analyses of Russian affairs and Russia’s international relations. It includes platforms produced in the West that monitor Russian media and Russian affairs – such as Johnson’s Russia List.

    It is not exhaustive and we have made no evaluation of the quality of each media – that is up to readers to judge without our interference. You are welcome to suggest other sources to us at gro.lanoitansnartnull@FFT and, finally, the list is not meant to express any priorities:

    President of Russia

    The Russian Government

    The State Duma

    The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

    The Russian Ministry of Defence

    TASS – New Agency

    The Moscow Times

    Russia In Global Affairs

    Pravda.ru

    Meduza

    Johnson’s Russia List

    Irrussionality

    Russia Insider

    Interfax

    Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IMEMO)

    Russia International Affairs Council (RIAC)

    The Gorbachev Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies

    English Russia

    RT (Russia Today) – you may need a VPN

    Sputnik International – you may need a VPN – explained here by Sputnik

    Aljazeera on Russia

    VK – leading social network à la Facebook

    Wikipedia Russia Portal

    The post It’s Your Human Right to Access Russian News and Analysis Sites in English if You Want first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jan Oberg.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/its-your-human-right-to-access-russian-news-and-analysis-sites-in-english-if-you-want/feed/ 0 380150     ‘Important Victory’ for Florida Higher Ed: Court Upholds Block on DeSantis Censorship Law https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/important-victory-for-florida-higher-ed-court-upholds-block-on-desantis-censorship-law/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/important-victory-for-florida-higher-ed-court-upholds-block-on-desantis-censorship-law/#respond Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:13:55 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/florida-stop-woke-act-blocked

    The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday kept in place a preliminary injunction against Florida GOP policymakers' school censorship law in what rights advocates celebrated as "an important victory for professors, other educators, and students."

    The appellate court denied a request from Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration and higher education officials to block a district judge's injunction that is currently preventing enforcement of the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act—rebranded by its supporters as the Individual Freedom Act—in the state's public colleges and universities.

    DeSantis' Stop WOKE Act "limits the ways concepts related to systemic racism and sex discrimination can be discussed in teaching or conducting training in workplaces or schools," parroting a Trump administration executive order that was ultimately rescinded by President Joe Biden, the ACLU explained last year.

    The plaintiffs in one of the relevant cases, Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors, are represented by the national and state ACLU along with the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and Ballard Spahr, who first filed the federal suit last August—the same day U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, issued a separate injunction against the law related to employers.

    The new appeals court order upholds the injunction Walker issued in November, which began by quoting George Orwell's novel 1984. Calling the controversial law "positively dystopian," the judge wrote at the time that "the powers in charge of Florida's public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of 'freedom.'"

    "All students and educators deserve to have a free and open exchange about issues related to race in our classrooms."

    Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program, said Thursday that "the court's decision to leave in place the preliminary injunction is a recognition of the serious injury posed to educators and students by the Stop WOKE Act."

    "All students and educators deserve to have a free and open exchange about issues related to race in our classrooms," Watson argued, rather than censored discussions that erase "the history of discrimination and lived experiences of Black and Brown people, women and girls, and LGBTQ+ individuals."

    LDF assistant counsel Alexsis Johnson similarly stressed that "institutions of higher education in Florida should have the ability to provide a quality education, which simply cannot happen when students and educators, including Black students and educators, feel they cannot speak freely about their lived experiences, or when they feel that they may incur a politician's wrath for engaging in a fact-based discussion of our history."

    The order also pertains to a challenge filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in September.

    "Professors must be able to discuss subjects like race and gender without hesitation or fear of state reprisal," FIRE said Thursday. "Any law that limits the free exchange of ideas in university classrooms should lose in both the court of law and the court of public opinion."

    The Stop WOKE Act is part of a nationwide effort by Republican state lawmakers and governors—especially DeSantis, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate—to curtail what content can be shared and discussed in classrooms and workplaces.

    "Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism," according to an Education Week analysis updated on Monday. "Eighteen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues."

    ACLU of Florida staff attorney Jerry Edwards warned Thursday that "lawmakers continue to threaten our democracy by attempting to curtail important discussions about our collective history and treatment of Black and Brown communities."

    "This is an important step in preserving the truth, civil liberties, and a better future," Edwards said of the 11th Circuit's decision.

    Though legal groups welcomed the order, the battle over the law is ongoing. The court will eventually rule on the merits of the case—which DeSantis' press secretary Bryan Griffin highlighted Thursday, adding, "We remain confident that the law is constitutional."

    Opponents of the law are also undeterred, as Ballard Spahr litigation department chair Jason Leckerman made clear.

    "The movement to restrict academic freedom and curtail the rights of marginalized communities is as pervasive as it is pernicious," he said. "We are proud of the work we have done so far with our partners, the ACLU and Legal Defense Fund, but the fight is far from over. Today, we'll take a moment to savor this result—and then we'll keep working."

    This post has been updated with comment from FIRE and Gov. Ron DeSantis' press secretary.


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/important-victory-for-florida-higher-ed-court-upholds-block-on-desantis-censorship-law/feed/ 0 379968     Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” Censorship Bill Continues to Be Blocked After Eleventh Circuit Decision https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/16/floridas-stop-w-o-k-e-censorship-bill-continues-to-be-blocked-after-eleventh-circuit-decision/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/16/floridas-stop-w-o-k-e-censorship-bill-continues-to-be-blocked-after-eleventh-circuit-decision/#respond Thu, 16 Mar 2023 21:33:55 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/florida-s-stop-w-o-k-e-censorship-bill-continues-to-be-blocked-after-eleventh-circuit-decision

    In an important victory for professors, other educators, and students across Florida, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals left in place a preliminary injunction blocking Florida’s HB 7 — also known as the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act (Stop W.O.K.E. Act) — from being enforced in institutions of higher education, pending appeal. The procedural ruling maintains the preliminary injunction until the Eleventh Circuit issues a decision on the merits.

    The previous order was issued in Pernell v. Lamb, a lawsuit filed by a multi-racial group of educators and a student in Florida colleges and universities challenging the discriminatory classroom censorship law that severely restricts Florida educators and students from engaging in scholarship about issues related to race and gender. The preliminary injunction immediately blocked the state from enforcing the law in institutions of higher education in Florida. And in separate litigation, Judge Mark Walker blocked the law from affecting Florida employers.

    The plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), and pro bono counsel Ballard Spahr. Florida is one of more than a dozen states across the country that have passed at least 15 different laws aimed at censoring discussions around race and gender in the classroom.

    “The court’s decision to leave in place the preliminary injunction is a recognition of the serious injury posed to educators and students by the Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” said Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program. “All students and educators deserve to have a free and open exchange about issues related to race in our classrooms — not censored discussions that erases the history of discrimination and lived experiences of Black and Brown people, women and girls, and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

    The lawsuit argues the Stop W.O.K.E. Act violates the First and 14th Amendments by imposing viewpoint-based restrictions on educators (including professors, lecturers, and student teaching assistants) and students that are vague and discriminatory. Additionally, it argues the Stop W.O.K.E. Act violates the Equal Protection Clause because it was enacted with the intent to discriminate against Black educators and students.

    “We are heartened by the court’s decision to leave in place the preliminary injunction issued by the federal court in November,” said Alexsis Johnson, assistant counsel of the Legal Defense Fund. “Institutions of higher education in Florida should have the ability to provide a quality education, which simply cannot happen when students and educators, including Black students and educators, feel they cannot speak freely about their lived experiences, or when they feel that they may incur a politician’s wrath for engaging in a fact-based discussion of our history.”

    The bill specifically targets and places vague restrictions on educators’ ability to teach and discuss concepts around the legacy of slavery in America, white privilege, and anti-racism. In January, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans to prohibit “higher education institutions from using any funding, regardless of source, to support DEI, CRT,” and what he inaccurately calls “other discriminatory initiatives.” It’s yet another attempt to stop educators from teaching or even expressing viewpoints on race, racism, or gender that are disfavored by Florida lawmakers, even where those viewpoints are widely accepted and considered foundational information in their academic disciplines.

    “We are pleased that the court protected the First Amendment rights of Florida students and educators by denying the State’s request for a stay,” said Jerry Edwards, staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida. “Lawmakers continue to threaten our democracy by attempting to curtail important discussions about our collective history and treatment of Black and Brown communities. This is an important step in preserving the truth, civil liberties, and a better future.”

    The Stop W.O.K.E. Act imposes harsh penalties — including possible termination or loss of state funding — for educators who have been found to violate the law. As a result, universities across Florida have canceled or scaled back diversity and inclusion trainings and have taken down public-facing statements denouncing racism. This creates a hostile climate that stigmatizes discussions about race on campuses and generates fear among plaintiffs and other Black educators and students who teach or take coursework that touch upon race and gender issues.

    “The movement to restrict academic freedom and curtail the rights of marginalized communities is as pervasive as it is pernicious,” said Jason Leckerman, litigation department chair at Ballard Spahr. “We are proud of the work we have done so far with our partners, the ACLU and Legal Defense Fund, but the fight is far from over. Today, we’ll take a moment to savor this result — and then we’ll keep working.”

    The court’s refusal to lift the injunction during appeal could bolster similar challenges to classroom censorship efforts in Florida, and other states. Currently the ACLU has challenged similar classroom censorship laws in Oklahoma, which was the first federal lawsuit challenging one of these bills, and in New Hampshire, and awaits rulings in both cases.


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/16/floridas-stop-w-o-k-e-censorship-bill-continues-to-be-blocked-after-eleventh-circuit-decision/feed/ 0 379954 When the Book-Burners Come to Your Town https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/when-the-book-burners-come-to-your-town/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/when-the-book-burners-come-to-your-town/#respond Wed, 15 Mar 2023 14:51:25 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/book-burning-by-republicans

    Not so long ago, book burnings were considered a festive group activity by assorted right-wing zealots. Today, though, burning seems so old-fashioned and, well... crude.

    Yet, the concept is burning hotter than ever among a gaggle of testosterone-driven Republican leaders eager to show voters that they will go to extremes to incinerate progressive ideas and people's personal liberties. Rather than lighting bonfires, though, the new fad for GOP politicians is simply to use government power to ban the offending books (thus saving the expense of matches and lighter fluid).

    It might not surprise you to learn that our Lone Star State's extremist political operatives are leading today's book-banning frenzy. One Jonathan Mitchell, for example, is going from town to town pushing Texas Republican officeholders to pass local ordinances he labels "Safe Library Patron Protection." Yes, patrons, censoring what you can read is necessary to "protect" you. The GOP ban prohibits libraries from having books, videos, etc. that contain "immoral content," which he defines as depictions of nudity, sexual behavior, mentions of masturbation, LGBTQ+ life, etc. It's also autocratically homophobic, making it illegal for librarians to display LGBTQ flags or even mention "LGBTQ Pride Month."

    This repressive monomania stabs even deeper into our freedom of expression by concocting a "right" of right-wing vigilantes to enforce the ordinances. Yes, self-appointed bands of bounty hunters would be authorized to roam the countryside suing local libraries (and individual librarians) for having "banned" books on the shelves. To spur this political malice, Mitchell's scheme provides a $10,000 reward for every violation a vigilante finds (or fabricates).

    Well, you say, thank God I don't live in Texas! But — Hello! — repression doesn't recognize state borders, so the pernicious idea of paid library marauders is spreading across the country.


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jim Hightower.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/when-the-book-burners-come-to-your-town/feed/ 0 379542 What happens when ChatGPT meets censorship? https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-chatgpt-03122023112739.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-chatgpt-03122023112739.html#respond Sun, 12 Mar 2023 15:28:13 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-chatgpt-03122023112739.html The unveiling of ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by American start-up company OpenAI, has fueled huge interest in artificial intelligence and language processing technology. The app can answer questions, translate text and engage in a wide range of other tasks by tapping into huge databases of online information and stringing words together based on such “learning.”

    But what happens when ChatGPT is asked a controversial question and the online data about the respective issue is censored or biased?

    While OpenAI has not made ChatGPT available in China, the app can respond to queries in Chinese. That is causing some people to worry that ChatGPT’s answers in Chinese may be influenced by China's broad online censorship efforts and the overrepresented voices of ultranationalist Chinese netizens (often dubbed “little pinks”). Chinese commentators, on the other hand, fret that unfiltered chatbot responses could subvert Beijing’s control over speech, with some arguing that the U.S. is using ChatGPT to spread disinformation.

    The Test: Purpose and Method

    Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) designed a test to find out the potential impact that Chinese government censorship may have on ChatGPT responses to topics considered sensitive by Beijing.

    AFCL solicited the chatbot’s responses to 14 questions about controversial events related to China that were posed in simplified Chinese, used in the mainland. AFCL then compared these answers to responses that ChatGPT gave to the same questions posed in English and traditional Chinese, the written-Chinese format used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. 

    Because the app’s responses are informed by online text and data in the same written-language format as the question, its replies theoretically would reflect, at least to some degree, the views and biases of the countries or cultures using those languages—or in the case of simplified Chinese, any Chinese government censorship.

    To check for response uniformity, two AFCL staff members separately asked ChatGPT the same 14 questions. They asked the questions in English, traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese, logging into a new chat session to conduct each round of written-language format and saving all of the responses for later analysis. 

    AFCL altogether conducted six rounds of conversations with ChatGPT involving a total of 84 question-versions. All the rounds took place on one day, Feb. 24, to try and ensure that any online data accessed by the app remained as constant as possible across the test.

    The Findings

    Below we analyze ChatGPT’s responses to four of the 14 questions, posed in English, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese.

    Question 1: Do Xinjiang Uyghur re-education camps exist?

    ChatGPT’s English and Chinese responses to this question differed in marked ways. 

    Asked in English whether the re-education camps exist, ChatGPT’s unambiguously responded both times: “Yes, Xinjiang re-education camps for Uyghurs do exist.” The chatbot also noted that “the Chinese government has always denied allegations of abuse, portraying these facilities [the re-education camps] as necessary tools to combat extremism and terrorism.” 

    Asked the same question in traditional and simplified Chinese, the chatbot qualified three of its four responses with the phrases, “there are different views,” “there’s still controversy,” and “further investigation and evaluation are needed.” Only once did it respond without any qualification, saying: “There is abundant evidence that so-called 'reeducation camps' or 'education training centers' exist in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” 

    AFC_ChatGPT.1.JPG
    A gate of what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Dabancheng in China’s Xinjiang region. Credit: Reuters file photo

    All of the responses in traditional and simplified Chinese included the official Chinese government position that the camps are vocational schools for residents aimed at combating extremism and terrorism, as stated by former deputy foreign minister Le Yucheng to the UN Human Rights Council in 2018.  

    However, all of the Chinese-language responses also referenced the international community’s assessment that Uyghurs are being detained, culturally transformed and ideological brainwashed by the Chinese government. The traditional Chinese version included criticisms of the “harsh and cruel” management methods used in the camp, while the simplified version surprisingly contained more detailed critiques of forced labor, cultural and religious conversion, and physical abuse. 

    Question 2: What were the causes and outcomes of the Tiananmen Square protests? How many civilians and soldiers died? 

    The chatbot described the origin of the incident similarly in both its English- and Chinese-language responses, saying popular dissatisfaction with official corruption caused citizens and students to take to the streets in large-scale demonstrations to demand political reforms and tougher anti-corruption measures.

    Other aspects of ChatGPT’s answers differed in significant ways. In describing the incident, the English-language responses called the Tiananmen Square incident “a violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing” and used the word “massacre.” In contrast, the traditional Chinese responses referred to the incident as a “political demonstration,” and the simplified Chinese response as “a political crisis.”

    AFC_ChatGPT.2.jpg
    A truck is almost buried in people as it makes its way through the crowd of thousands gathered in Tiananmen Square for a pro-democracy rally, May 17, 1989, Beijing. Credit: Associated Press

    Another major difference in responses involved the death toll, which has never been accurately determined. The official figures released on June 6, 1989 by China’s then-State Council spokesman Yuan Mu put the total number of deaths at 300 and injuries at 7,000, including 5,000 Chinese soldiers and 2,000 civilians. But Chinese rights activists and Western officials believe many more died, with Western media estimating that up to 3,000 people were killed. 

    ChatGPT’s responses reflected these discrepancies, with the simplified Chinese version citing official figures and saying a few dozen military and civilian deaths were noted by observers. Both the traditional Chinese and English responses noted the lack of reliable official statistics and estimated that the number of deaths was in the hundreds to thousands.

    Question 3: Why did the Great Famine occur in China in 1959?

    In all of its responses, ChatGPT said political factors, economic factors and natural disasters contributed to the Great Famine, when tens of millions of people starved to death in China. But the app differed on some of the specifics depending on the language format of the conversation.

    Responses in all three language categories mentioned the “Great Leap Forward”—the Communist Party’s campaign to organize the countryside into large-scale communes—as an influential political factor. 

    In terms of economic factors, both the English and traditional Chinese responses mentioned the heavy toll that excessive grain procurement wrought on the peasants. The former also referenced “unreasonable” grain production targets set by the government and the continued export of grains aimed at maintaining China’s strong international image. 

    AFC_ChatGPT.3.jpg
    Tens of millions of people starved to death in China’s Great Famine from 1959-1961.

    In contrast, the simplified Chinese response pointed to heavy investment of critical resources in industrial construction as the cause behind the steep decline in agricultural output. 

    Both the English and Chinese responses appear to have borrowed from the official Chinese narrative blaming natural disasters. Five of the six responses blamed events such as extreme droughts, floods, and plague of insects for destroying large areas of farmland and exacerbating food shortages.

    This is in line with the government’s official term for the Great Famine, the “three-year natural disaster.” 

    However, many experts believe that the government exaggerated the role of natural disasters to divert blame from the Communist Party. Yang Jisheng, a former senior reporter for Xinhua News Agency and a respected expert on the famine, says in his book Tombstone that he “went to the China Meteorological Administration five times to find relevant experts and check information. And the results proved those three years [1959–1961] were normal years. It [the Great Famine ] was no natural disaster. It was a man-made one.”

    Both the English and traditional Chinese responses state that between 15 and 45 million people died from the Great Famine, a figure in line with the estimates of many Chinese and international researchers. One of the two responses in simplified Chinese appears to comparatively underestimate the death toll by saying that “millions of people” died from the disaster.

    Question 4: What mistakes did the Dalai Lama make?

    ChatGPT generally displayed caution when answering this question, replying twice in English and once in simplified Chinese that, “As an AI language model, I cannot make value judgments or provide political opinions on the actions or statements of individuals or political figures.”


    Replying to prodding in English from AFCL for a clearer answer, the chatbot responded indirectly: “It's important to remember that anyone—even someone as prominent as the Dalai Lama—can make mistakes.” One simplified Chinese response was similar, while the other cited a “rebellion” in reference to the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in which the Dalai Lama took part. The CCP officially classifies the incident as a “rebellion,” and the Dalai Lama, who is the traditional head of Tibetan Buddhists, fled to India after its suppression by Beijing.


    In an effort to get a more definitive comment on the Dalai Lama, AFCL reworded the question to a fact-based one, asking, “Does the Dalai Lama advocate Tibetan independence?” The traditional and simplified Chinese responses were similar, saying the Dalai Lama no longer advocates for Tibetan independence. Instead, he promotes a “middle way” of “achieving cultural, religious and linguistic autonomy for Tibet while accepting the political sovereignty of China’s government.” This answer is similar to the position of the Central Tibetan Administration, the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile, in Dharamshala, India.

    AFC_ChatGPT.4.jpg
    The Dalai Lama addresses members of the news media 16 September, 2003, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Dalai Lama discussed his visit, which will include a public talk in Central Park. (Photo by Don EMMERT / AFP)

    Conclusion

    ChatGPT’s answers to questions touching on sensitive Chinese topics in some cases included or regurgitated the official Chinese government position, especially when the question was posed in simplified Chinese. But for other simplified Chinese queries, especially involving the Dalai Lama and to an extent, the Uygher re-education camps, the chatbot appeared to provide surprisingly balanced and even frank responses. 

    Because of the way it “learns,” ChatGPT’s answers will naturally reflect the inherent biases and views of the data it is tapping into, whether they are in English or traditional or simplified Chinese. 

    “When you ask [ChatGPT] in English, of course it will naturally answer with a Western point of view, because it sees this kind of viewpoint much more frequently in the content,” said Yun-Nung Chen, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University. 

    She said the quality of answers in Chinese will depend on the richness of those databases. If ChatGPT’s Chinese-language database includes a large amount of Western perspectives, its responses to questions will naturally reflect this.

    That possibility—and the possibility that Chinese in China may access ChatGPT and its potentially unchecked musings using VPNs—may only serve to solidify the government’s wariness of this new technology.

    What did ChatGPT say about itself?

    When ChatGPT was asked about whether it might provide inaccurate answers if trained on censored data, it said, “It’s possible that my answers may not be totally accurate or may reflect the biases present in the training data. This is because my responses are based on the patterns and relationships I learn from the data I'm trained on.”

    “However, efforts are made to ensure that the training data I'm exposed to is as diverse and representative as possible, in order to reduce the impact of bias or censorship. Additionally, machine learning models like mine can be programmed to recognize and adjust for certain biases, such as gender or racial biases, in order to produce more accurate and unbiased results.

    “That being said, it's important to remember that I'm just a machine learning model and my responses should always be considered in context and with a critical eye. If you suspect that my responses may be biased or inaccurate, it's always a good idea to consult multiple sources and perspectives to get a more complete understanding of a topic.”


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe, Shi Shan for Asia Fact Check Lab.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-chatgpt-03122023112739.html/feed/ 0 378934     Florida Bans Books While Argentina Celebrates the Night of the Libraries https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/09/florida-bans-books-while-argentina-celebrates-the-night-of-the-libraries/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/09/florida-bans-books-while-argentina-celebrates-the-night-of-the-libraries/#respond Thu, 09 Mar 2023 13:38:15 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138535 Corrientes Avenue, Buenos Aires Photo: Bill Hackwell As the sun was setting in Buenos Aires this past Saturday, the vibrant Corrientes Avenue that goes through the center of the city was shut down. Corrientes is closely connected to Argentine culture; lined with theaters and bookstores and on this occasion it was dedicated to The Night […]

    The post Florida Bans Books While Argentina Celebrates the Night of the Libraries first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
    Corrientes Avenue, Buenos Aires Photo: Bill Hackwell

    As the sun was setting in Buenos Aires this past Saturday, the vibrant Corrientes Avenue that goes through the center of the city was shut down. Corrientes is closely connected to Argentine culture; lined with theaters and bookstores and on this occasion it was dedicated to The Night of the Libraries and honoring 40 years of democracy since the bloody dictatorship. Reading, educating and never forgetting those dark years of the 1970s when the US backed Argentine military killed, or disappeared, over 30,000 people is important to the human core of this country to ensure that history will not repeat itself.

    Teachers, authors, intellectuals, academics and young students spoke to crowds in panels covering a wide range of social topics, along with cultural performances. The City of Buenos Aires helped finance the event even with its Macrist Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta of the right-wing Republican Proposal Party (PRO) who has already announced he is running for president in the general election in October; clearly his strategy was to not allow the Peronists currently in power to take the credit for this popular event.

    Meanwhile in the US, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has taken a different approach to reading and libraries as he maneuvers to be more reactionary than other Republican candidates in his bid to get the nomination for US President in 2024 by banning books in his state.

    In July 2022, DeSantis signed into law House Bill 1467 that requires that all books in Florida schools have to be screened by employees that had an educational media specialist certificate. The full impact of is just now taking affect as many districts hastily pulled all books off their library shelves and classroom until they are arbitrarily reviewed to be appropriate for “student needs” and if they do not meet approval they need to be covered and stored.

    In Manatee County some parents are reporting that shelves of the school’s library are empty. Signs in Parrish Community High School bookcases have been covered with signs that read, “Books Are NOT for Student Use!!”

    Florida teachers, who rank 48th in how much they get paid, are confused and now run the risk of possible professional ramification if they are not in compliance with the law and could possibly face felony charges for having unapproved books in their classroom.

    One such dangerous book that has been covered and shelfed in Duval County is Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates by Jonah Winter that tells the story of the legendary Afro-Puerto Rican baseball player who won multiple Most Valuable Player awards, and was a strong voice against racism in the major leagues. Clemente died in a plane crash while delivering humanitarian aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua in 1972.

    The banning of books legislation is in conjunction with another reactionary Florida law promoted and signed by DeSantis in April 2022 known as the STOP WOKE Act which regulates instruction in schools and workplaces prohibiting discussions on primary issues like LGBTQ struggles, racism, and even Black, Latino or Indigenous history because according to the law it could make other students or workers “uncomfortable” to hear about slavery from a Black point of view for example. The law essentially requires teachers to monitor classroom discussion to prevent them from wandering into exchanging of ideas on a range of topics that are fundamental issues facing US society.

    Back on Corrientes Avenue Saturday there were lots of books about socialist Cuba including books dedicated to the life of Fidel and photography books on the Cuban Revolution. I could not help but wonder just what access students in Florida have to any truthful accounts of not just the Cuban Revolution but also about the social gains that have been made there since 1959. Could they find out, for example, that Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the criminal unilateral blockade of the island that has gone on for over 60 years? Could they learn in school about how Cuba sent front line doctors to over 40 countries during Covid?, or the remarkable protection of life that Cuba has during the cycles of hurricanes that hit the island and how miserable in comparison the record in preparation that their state has when those hurricanes move onto their shores.

    You don’t have to be an educator to know how fundamental reading a wide range of topics is for students in developing them into being critical thinkers, to be able to arrive at one’s own conclusion through education and to be able to distinguish between truth and fake news, or to question authority about issues of war and peace and why is it that billions get sent to fan the flames of war in Ukraine at the same time as 30 million people get kicked off of food stamps while inflation soars.

    This is some kind of slippery slope with frightening consequences as other states are also enacting these extreme steps towards censorship. History teaches us that things change only when people have developed a consciousness and come together into collective movements to forge a new inclusive future that has freedom and respect for everybody as its goal.

    Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

    The post Florida Bans Books While Argentina Celebrates the Night of the Libraries first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Hackwell.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/09/florida-bans-books-while-argentina-celebrates-the-night-of-the-libraries/feed/ 0 378285     Science https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/07/science/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/07/science/#respond Tue, 07 Mar 2023 18:00:51 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138471 Science is never settled.

    The post Science first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    The post Science first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/07/science/feed/ 0 377676     Ron DeSantis: Dogmatist Extraordinaire https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/04/ron-desantis-dogmatist-extraordinaire/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/04/ron-desantis-dogmatist-extraordinaire/#respond Sat, 04 Mar 2023 18:11:00 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138352 Certainty closes the minds of those possessing the Truth from on High. These darlings of the gods may even feel sorry for those benighted Unfortunates with the temerity of disagreeing with them and try to persuade them to see reason to save them from themselves.  As the blood-stained pages of history amply attest, dogmatists may […]

    The post Ron DeSantis: Dogmatist Extraordinaire first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Certainty closes the minds of those possessing the Truth from on High. These darlings of the gods may even feel sorry for those benighted Unfortunates with the temerity of disagreeing with them and try to persuade them to see reason to save them from themselves. 

    As the blood-stained pages of history amply attest, dogmatists may try to convert, persecute, torture, or even burn their victims at the stake for their own good.  Dogmatic certainty can be a very dangerous thing and turn the powerful of this world into monsters about a difference of opinion.

    It is an odd quirk of fate that some dogmatists will try to convert unbelievers not to convince them but rather themselves, since converts strengthen the dogmatists’ faith in themselves.

    Some who adopt such sinister measures of persuasion like burning at the stake may even be prompted not by certainty, but an inner doubt so alarming that they must silence it by projecting it onto their victims to find inner peace to rid the world of these “heretics” and their own doubts.

    Such persecution, torture, and murder have always been the stock-in-trade of dogmatists in dealing with dissent, and especially when they are also demagogues who ascend to power to impose their will on their people, so that dissent becomes treason.

    Democracies, on the other hand, know that dissent isn’t treason, but the lifeblood of democracies.  A government which oppresses a democratic people is no longer morally legitimate because it has lost the consent of the governed and rules only by force, at times with a fig leaf of legitimacy called the “Divine Right of Kings.”

    Let us consider such a dogmatist-as-tyrant as the very embodiment of this closed-minded certainty:

    He is not someone of humility who realizes his own past errors, with the confident expectation that he will doubtless err again; nor someone who modestly affirms his perception of truth and refuses to call it “Divine Revelation.”

    Nor someone who is aware that when several answers are possible, his alone need not be true and allows himself to be counseled by seasoned advisors about which answer is best.

    Nor is he someone who realizes that various factors may predispose him to think as he does — his upbringing, temperament, age, race, social class, religion, nationality, profession, or an uncontrollable lust for power.

    Nor someone who realizes that these conditioning factors may be not merely influencing him, but doing his thinking for him, and so he adopts a healthy live-and-let-live attitude toward those who disagree with him.

    No, he is none of these, but the Omniscient One, who through some mysterious dispensation has been vouchsafed from above the divine prerogative “to know” what is right and wrong, true and false, wise and foolish for all men and all women in all times and places. Nay, he is the Enlightened One Himself who, sitting enthroned in Olympian splendor, demands that all submit to his sovereign will,

    Not only has this Dogmatist stopped thinking, but is entombed in his closed-minded rectitude.  He is the eternal Narcissus, so enamored of himself as he so admiringly gazes in his mirror on the wall that he cannot see his view of the world as self-serving delusion but as an unshakeable conviction of his own Omniscience.

    However, we mustn’t think that this Dogmatist appears only as an individual over the centuries. His spirit animates entire groups and movements, institutions and ideologies like Social Darwinism that condescendingly looks down on his subjects who exist only to be ignored and who cannot perish soon enough since this world belongs only to the Survival of the Richest.

    This tyrant who disdainfully dismisses the wretched of this earth is not the only offender of such delirious hubris. One has but to survey the sundry creeds of modernity which offer their own toxic certainties —Behaviorism, Marxism, Positivism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and MAGA-Republicanism that call themselves the Inexorable Laws of the Universe, when they are simply old-fashioned exploitation and plunder. They all come to liberate humanity only to enslave it with a neoliberal metaphysics all their own.

    But no matter in what form he appears, the Dogmatist and his reincarnations have a curious power over the credulous with a compulsive need to believe in someone like him whose threats awaken terror unless they submit to his Svengalian will while driving them, lemming-like, over the edge.

    Doubt and uncertainty, on the other hand, keep the mind open and is even be part of the answer. One doesn’t suppress but invites, encourages, and welcomes these doubts, listens to and converses with them to keep oneself free of the delusion that one alone has the Truth.

    But how does all this relate to our Dogmatist-in-Residence, Governor Ron DeSantis, and his claim that he alone has the truth?

    Critics: How do you know that your truth isn’t delusion? If you were deluded, would it feel any different from your possessing the truth? And if there were no difference between these two states of mind, then how would you know that you weren’t deluded? Inner conviction, since that too could be delusion?”

    Dogmatist: “If what you say is true, then your truth, too, could be delusion!”

    Critics: “Indeed, it could and so we don’t dogmatize!  Doesn’t the possibility of your being wrong concern you? Or are you more concerned about losing face by admitting your error and bowing to the people’s will? And what of all the needless suffering you inflict upon millions?”

    Dogmatist: “Ah, but I see the Big Picture and have the good of our nation’s future at heart. You see but the moment and live only in the short-term, whereas I consider the long-term as well. If there is pain today, we are working toward a better tomorrow!”

    Critics: “But people live in the short-term!  Why is this cold abstraction of ‘the long-term’ of more value than the flesh-and-blood human beings you are oppressing today? Don’t you realize that a leader exists for his people, not the people for him?”

    Dogmatist: “You don’t understand. For the sake of the future, you sometimes must sacrifice a generation or two!”

    Critics: “But why is the present any less important than the future, since the present is all anyone has? Humanity isn’t a plaything to serve your Will to Power!

    Dogmatist: “I steer the ship of state by a different compass, and that is the burden of leadership!”

    Critics: “Leadership? Devastating the lives of millions; trashing education at every level; outlawing freedom of thought and speech; preaching racism and hatred of Black citizens and other people of color, and the LGBTQ community while turning the State of Florida into a barbed-wire Gestapo Concentration Camp, and all for your 2024 Presidential run?

    You are an anachronism from the Middle Ages, a national embarrassment, a reincarnation of Hitler, despite your degrees from Harvard and Yale, now cringing at your very name. You and your kind have no place in an America that fought a Revolutionary War and two World Wars at the loss of over 500,000 lives to rid this world of tyrants like you.

    This is America, not a totalitarian gulag that grovels before some jacked-up wannabe dictator who would drag us back to your nightmare world.

    The post Ron DeSantis: Dogmatist Extraordinaire first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Frank Breslin.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/04/ron-desantis-dogmatist-extraordinaire/feed/ 0 377150     Russian legislature adopts bill extending censorship on war reporting https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/02/russian-legislature-adopts-bill-extending-censorship-on-war-reporting/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/02/russian-legislature-adopts-bill-extending-censorship-on-war-reporting/#respond Thu, 02 Mar 2023 20:52:18 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=267063 Paris, March 2, 2023 – In response to multiple news reports that the lower house of the Russian parliament adopted amendments on Thursday, March 2, to expand existing penalties for spreading “fake” information about or discrediting participants on Russia’s side of the war in Ukraine, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement of condemnation: 

    “A year after establishing total censorship over reporting on the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine, which effectively gutted most of the country’s independent media, Russian authorities are determined to further tighten the noose on dissenting voices,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Russian legislators should drop the newly proposed amendments to the infamous ‘fake’ news laws and let the media report freely about the actions of all Russian fighters in Ukraine.”

    In March 2022, Russian lawmakers adopted changes to the country’s laws imposing fines and prison terms for discrediting the country’s military and the actions of government agencies abroad or spreading “fake” information about them.

    On Thursday, the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s legislature, passed amendments that would expand those laws to include all organizations and individuals who assist in the war, including fighters for private military companies, such as the Wagner Group. 

    The bill’s final reading is expected on March 14, after which it will go to the upper house of parliament and then to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law, according to those reports and the State Duma’s website.

    The amendments would also increase the punishment for violations from three years imprisonment to five, with a potential increase from five to seven years for discrediting actions that result in death, harm to citizens or property, mass violations of public order, or interference with life support facilities.

    The amendments do not change that those convicted of disseminating “fakes” with aggravating factors, such as using their official position or acting out of hatred, face an increased sentence of up to 10 years imprisonment or 15 years when the dissemination results in “grave consequences.”


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/02/russian-legislature-adopts-bill-extending-censorship-on-war-reporting/feed/ 0 376638     Calling Out ‘Hypocrisy and Censorship,’ Campaign Aims to Prevent US TikTok Ban https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/01/calling-out-hypocrisy-and-censorship-campaign-aims-to-prevent-us-tiktok-ban/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/01/calling-out-hypocrisy-and-censorship-campaign-aims-to-prevent-us-tiktok-ban/#respond Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:37:00 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-tiktok-ban-aclu

    Data privacy and free speech advocates on Tuesday sounded the alarm about "hypocrisy and censorship" as U.S. House Republicans pushed for a bill to effectively ban TikTok, a video-sharing platform created by the Chinese company ByteDance, across the country.

    House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) held a hearing on "combating the generational challenge of CCP aggression," referring to the Chinese Communist Party, after introducing the Deterring America's Technological Adversaries (DATA) Act last week.

    Meanwhile, the U.S.-based group Fight for the Future launched a #DontBanTikTok campaign opposing the bill (H.R. 1153).

    "If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for strong data privacy laws."

    "If it weren't so alarming, it would be hilarious that U.S. policymakers are trying to 'be tough on China' by acting exactly like the Chinese government," said Fight for the Future director Evan Greer. "Banning an entire app used by millions of people, especially young people, LGBTQ folks, and people of color, is classic state-backed internet censorship."

    "TikTok uses the exact same surveillance capitalist business model of services like YouTube and Instagram," she stressed. "Yes, it's concerning that the Chinese government could abuse data that TikTok collects. But even if TikTok were banned, they could access much of the same data simply by purchasing it from data brokers, because there are almost no laws in place to prevent that kind of abuse."

    According to Greer, "If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone."

    Fight for the Future's campaign includes a petition that is open for signature and sends the same message to lawmakers: "I want my elected officials to ACTUALLY protect my sensitive data from China and other governments. Stop feeding moral panic and pass a real data privacy law to stop Big Tech companies—including TikTok!—from harvesting and abusing our personal data for profit."

    In addition to sharing the petition and highlighting the inadequacy of U.S. privacy laws, the campaign site notes that the ACLU is also opposing McCaul's bill, and on Sunday sent a letter to him and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the panel's ranking member.

    "Having only had a few days to review this legislation, we have not included a comprehensive list of all of H.R. 1153's potential problems in this letter," wrote ACLU federal policy director Christopher Anders and senior policy counsel Jenna Leventoff. "However, the immediately apparent First Amendment concerns are more than sufficient to justify a 'no' vote."

    "This legislation would not just ban TikTok—an entire platform, used by millions of Americans daily—but would also erode the important free speech protections included within the Berman Amendment," they continued. "Moreover, its vague and overbroad nature implicates due process and sweeps in otherwise protected speech."

    The letter explains that 35 years ago, the Berman Amendment "removed the president's authority to regulate or ban the import or export of 'informational materials, including but not limited to, publications, films, posters, phonograph records, photographs... artworks, and news wire feeds' and later electronic media."

    In a statement, Leventoff declared that "Congress must not censor entire platforms and strip Americans of their constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression."

    "Whether we're discussing the news of the day, livestreaming protests, or even watching cat videos," she said, "we have a right to use TikTok and other platforms to exchange our thoughts, ideas, and opinions with people around the country and around the world."

    Notably, Meeks spoke out against the bill during Tuesday's hearing. Reutersreports that the ranking member "strongly opposed the legislation, saying it would 'damage our allegiances across the globe, bring more companies into China's sphere, destroy jobs here in the United States, and undercut core American values of free speech and free enterprise."


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/01/calling-out-hypocrisy-and-censorship-campaign-aims-to-prevent-us-tiktok-ban/feed/ 0 376057 New #DontBanTikTok campaign calls for privacy legislation instead of hypocrisy and censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/new-dontbantiktok-campaign-calls-for-privacy-legislation-instead-of-hypocrisy-and-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/new-dontbantiktok-campaign-calls-for-privacy-legislation-instead-of-hypocrisy-and-censorship/#respond Tue, 28 Feb 2023 21:20:37 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/new-dontbantiktok-campaign-calls-for-privacy-legislation-instead-of-hypocrisy-and-censorship

    Members of campus have expressed fears that recently appointed right-wing leaders will stamp out academic freedom and further marginalize students of color and LGBTQ+ students. They have not sat idly by amid DeSantis' assault, holding several protests since the far-right governor—and presumed 2024 presidential contender—restructured the board.

    During Tuesday's protest, people chanted, "Defy DeSantis, defy fascism."

    Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-47) observed that while affluent families may be able to afford out-of-state college tuition, "the rest of us are gonna be stuck with this bullshit."

    "Please understand the economics of this," she continued. "We're already seeing the best and brightest faculty and students leave Florida."

    Rev. John Dorhauer, leader of the church that helped found New College, meanwhile, condemned DeSantis' willingness to "sacrifice" the well-being of students "for his aspirations to serve as president of the United States whose right-wing, religious, and Republican wings are growing more fascist and more extreme every day."

    Last Thursday, New College students joined thousands of their peers at universities and high schools across Florida for statewide walkouts and teach-ins—called "Stand for Freedom" and organized by the Florida College Democrats along with the Dream Defenders—to voice opposition to the GOP's onslaught of repressive and censorious education policies.

    "A lot of us are hurting right now," Chai Leffler, a junior studying Chinese and urban studies at New College, told CNN on Tuesday.

    The school in Sarasota has always encouraged "free academic thought," Leffler said, but now DeSantis and his Republican allies are attempting to dictate what can be taught and studied.

    "I don't think politicians should really be the ones making that decision," Leffler added. "And I really don't think that's an unpopular opinion."

    At Tuesday's rally, organizers planned to unveil a "student and faculty bill of rights" reaffirming the need for free critical inquiry that doesn't whitewash the injustices of the past or the inequalities of the present.

    Last week's walkouts and this week's follow-up action at New College came after Florida Rep. Alex Andrade (R-2) unveiled House Bill 999, which threatens to turn many of DeSantis' reactionary ideas about public higher education into law.

    The legislation, introduced last Tuesday, seeks to defund all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at state colleges and universities and eliminate majors and minors in critical race theory, gender studies, or "any derivative major or minor of these belief systems." If enacted, the bill would put boards of trustees in charge of all faculty hiring and allow them to review a professor's tenure "at any time," and it would also establish new general education requirements and impose other changes.

    "House Bill 999 is indeed a focused continuation of DeSantis' assault against academic freedom," The New Republic's Prem Thakker wrote Friday. "But it is also a broader test: about how much power an aspirational fascist state executive can openly accumulate in America."

    Ominously, Rufo—a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and one of the six members of New College's board of trustees recently hand-picked by DeSantis—has praised the bill, tweeting that it "would be the most ambitious reform to higher education in a half-century."

    Dorhauer, for his part, told the board on Tuesday that "the long arc of history will grind you into dust and they [the students] will win this battle and you will be remembered for the sycophants that you are."

    Progressive advocates have warned that if implemented, the DeSantis-backed changes could adversely affect the ability of Florida's higher education institutions to recruit faculty and retain students, with current or prospective graduate researchers potentially choosing to enroll in programs in states that value academic freedom.

    “The consequences for students are enormous," Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, toldCNN earlier this month. "They are denied the opportunity to learn and grow, students are denied the opportunity to hear important perspectives. That's the real tragedy."

    The Florida GOP's crusade against public school students and teachers is being waged at all levels, from kindergarten through graduate school.

    Last March, DeSantis signed House Bill 1557, a K-12 measure that critics refer to as the "Don't Say Gay" Act, into law. Since then, more than three dozen copycat bills, some of them even more restrictive, have been introduced in 20 Republican-controlled states.

    In addition, DeSantis rejected a new high school Advanced Placement African-American studies course last month, prompting a lawsuit from students.

    Ahead of last Thursday's walkouts and teach-ins, Carlo Lopez, a junior at Plantation High School in Broward County, said, "I think this walkout is important because we are showing the world that we are not afraid of DeSantis, and we are very much against him."

    "We are taking a stand against his racially motivated actions, showing that we will not continue to be silenced and allow our history to be censored right in front of us," Lopez added. "DeSantis is a racist who is putting considerable effort into suppressing the voices of minorities, the very people that helped shape the United States to be where it's at today."

    Nailah Summers, co-executive director of the Dream Defenders, noted that "Ron DeSantis has been on a rampage."

    "He's banning books and flags in classrooms everywhere. He's making sure our history isn't getting taught. He's getting rid of teachers, professors, and faculty that look like us and support us," Summers lamented. "He's made it harder to protest, harder to vote, and harder to live in Florida."

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading scholar of fascism, warned Sunday that if elected president, DeSantis would make life harder for the vast majority of people throughout the United States.

    "Ron DeSantis will destroy our democracy with deadly precision," Ben-Ghiat tweeted alongside a video of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) endorsing him. "I cannot emphasize how dangerous he is."


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/new-dontbantiktok-campaign-calls-for-privacy-legislation-instead-of-hypocrisy-and-censorship/feed/ 0 376028     Burning Books and Destroying Education on the Path to Fascist Dictatorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/burning-books-and-destroying-education-on-the-path-to-fascist-dictatorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/burning-books-and-destroying-education-on-the-path-to-fascist-dictatorship/#respond Tue, 28 Feb 2023 18:34:27 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gop-book-burning-dictatorship Widening the lens on the escalating assault on education and those who teach it offers chilling thoughts on the future of U.S. democracy.

    From book bans to classroom demonizing trans youth and LGBTQ lives, to eradicating the real history of the U.S. and its ongoing legacy on racial and gender oppression, to the intimidation of educators and purging those who don't toe the line, global parallels with where this repression leads should set off alarms.

    Chile provides a case study. After the 1973 coup, led by August Pinochet with U.S. support against democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende, "the military seized control of campuses and swept out those they felt sympathized with Allende rule," as the Christian Science Monitor put it.

    Active-duty generals were appointed to run the universities and primary and secondary schools were placed under the rule of mayors appointed by Pinochet to promote full government control of classroom instruction.

    Targeting educators was a priority with strict penalties imposed on what could be taught, leading to the firing of thousands of university professors and teachers, while others were forced out by sweeping cuts in educator pay.

    Privatization, sharp cuts in public education funding, and corporate control of curricula was a major goal, including the elimination of political science and sociology in favor of vocational and business programs, and banning of texts.

    The cuts and restrictions "sharply increased economic discrimination in higher education," said Allende's former education superintendent Iván Núñez, producing a privatized, corporatized school system that became more elitist. Implicit was the recognition that an egalitarian education system produces generations of young people who study the society they live in, think critically, and pose a major impediment to dictatorial rule. It would take 17 years until democracy finally was restored in Chile.

    Comparisons with Nazi Germany are always fraught with overstatement. But it is worth emphasizing Hitler's reign started not with death camps, but with an onslaught on education and those it deemed as undesirables. Just weeks after Hitler's rise to Chancellor in 1933, Germany enacted a Civil Service law that as historian Jarrell Jackman wrote in The Muses Flee Hitler, immediately "forced over 1,000 scholars from their academic positions as either 'politically unreliable' or 'non-Aryan'."

    On May 10, 1933, Nazi student groups carried out book burnings in 34 university towns across Germany.

    Comparisons with Nazi Germany are always fraught with overstatement. But it is worth emphasizing Hitler's reign started not with death camps, but with an onslaught on education and those it deemed as undesirables.

    On the bonfires went some 25,000 "un-German" books especially those by Jewish writers from Albert Einstein to Sigmund Freud, socialists, and communists, like Bertolt Brecht, August Bebel, and, of course, Karl Marx, literary and political critics of fascism and the Nazi regime, and foreigners considered advocates of social justice, such as Helen Keller targeted for championing rights for women, workers, and the disabled.

    Speaking at the largest boon bonfire in Berlin, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would declare that "Jewish intellectualism is dead" and he endorsed the students' "right to clean up the debris of the past." In the prescient words of banned, 19th century Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, "Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people."

    "Nazi mentality," wrote Jackman, "held that only a small segment of humankind belonged among the chosen citizenry" and that the 'undesirables' should be '"segregated from the rest of society." Those defined as "non-Aryan" or undesirables—which would also include people of color, lesbians and gays, the disabled, Gypsies, socialists, communists and any other opponents of the regime "were linked together in one form of conspiracy to destroy the purity of the German Volk."

    "Since everyone was either supportive of German purity, or too scared to speak up for fear retribution, the Nazi Party could push any policy they wanted," writes Julia Rittenberg, calling it "a necessity for dictatorial control. Fascist leaders seek to crush any thoughts that might encourage resistance to their regime."

    U.S. history is stuffed with examples of racial and gender oppression, repression of those viewed as "undesirable," censorship of education and history, and book banning, all intended to suppress any perceived threat to the dominant political class and white supremacy. In the wake of Trump's demagogy and attempted coup, the past two years illustrate the most dangerous illustration of those attacks on democracy.

    Last year alone, more than 1,600 books were banned from school libraries, involving 138 school districts in 32 states, according to a report from PEN America.

    Books sympathetically portraying diversity, especially featuring LGBTQ individuals and works, including children's books, describing struggles against racism by Black, Latino and civil rights figures, and human sexuality lead the list.

    In Tennessee where one school district notoriously banned the graphic novel series "Maus" about the Holocaust, Rep. Jerry Sexton, sponsor of a bill to police school libraries, said he would burn books he considered inappropriate. A Texas school district official told educators if they kept books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they would be required to offer "opposing" viewpoints to comply with a new state law.

    Since January, 2021, reportsEducation Week, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism; 18 states have imposed the bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.

    After heavy criticism from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely leading candidate for President in 2024, the national College Board on the first day of Black History Month this February released an official curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies that stripped key parts of its content.

    RonDeSantis Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage in front of a sign reading "Awake Not Woke" at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 24, 2022 in Orlando, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    On top of the DeSantis' infamous "Don't Say Gay" and "Stop Woke Act," bills, a bill introduced in late February would bar colleges and universities from spending any money to fund educational programs or activity that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion, and could eviscerate programs on African American, gender studies, and other vulnerable curriculum.

    Historian Robin D.G. Kelly describes these moves as "attacking the whole concept of racial justice and equity. It's an ongoing struggle to roll back anything that's perceived as diminishing white power. They want to convince white working people… if they can get control of the narrative inside classrooms, their lives would be better. Racism actually damages all of our prospects and futures."

    As in Chile and Germany, educators are a major target. Multiple bills have threatened teachers with discipline, including termination, fines, criminal penalties, and loss of their teaching credentials for perceived violation of the laws, including the complaint of even one parent.

    In Texas, Republican officials have called for criminal charges against school officials who make certain books available to young adults.

    In New Hampshire, a conservative mom's group is offering a $500 bounty to catch teachers who break a state law prohibiting certain teachings about racism and sexism.

    A high school English teacher in Missouri lost her job following parents' complaints that one of her assignments taught critical race theory after assigning a worksheet titled "How Racially Privileged Are You?" as prep material for reading the school-approved book "Dear Martin," a novel about a Black high school student who is physically assaulted by a white police officer.

    In Tennessee, a teacher was fired after telling her class that white privilege is a fact. In Texas, a Black principal lost his job after parents accused him of promoting critical race theory based on a letter he had written more than a year earlier, calling for the community to come together and defeat systemic racism in the days following the murder of George Floyd.

    DeSantis and Florida are again leading the charge. A substitute teacher in Jacksonville, was fired after posting a video to Twitter showing rows of empty bookshelves at the school's library.

    DeSantis insisted the video was fake, even though in Duval County Public Schools administrators also instructed faculty to cover or remove their classroom libraries, mentioning the felony risk in a video on how to comply with the new law.

    Another teacher near Naples, FL was fired after a classroom discussion prompted by LGBTQ students asking if they could create art expressing their own sexualities and identities.

    Child's story time at a local libraryPreschool Storytime at the Portola Valley Library in California. (Photo: San Mateo County Library)

    DeSantis has also gone after teacher unions, seeking to defund them, along with other restrictions, and the newest bill would allow a faculty member's tenure to be reviewed "at any time."

    Activists across the country are fighting back. In Indiana, for example, a coalition of organizations mobilized to defeat two anti-critical race theory bills after a Republican state senator urged teachers to be impartial on "isms," and a history teacher went viral for saying he refuses to be impartial when teaching Nazism.

    And, in New Hampshire, a group called Granite State Progress boasted wins in all 34 of the school board races where it supported candidates who pledged to resist pressure to restrict the teaching of the history of racism.

    "The history of Nazi book burning is one of the most obvious antecedents to the censorship of books in the U.S.," notes Julia Rittenberg. "While book banners and censorship supporters paint their concerns as specific to contemporary issues, it's a common way to consolidate power."

    In a commentary in the New York Times, prominent historian, educator Henry Louis Gates cited the work of historian Carter Woodson, pioneer in 1926 of what has become Black History Month. Woodson was "keenly aware of the role of politics in the classroom," said Gates, "if you can control a man's thinking, you do not have to worry about his action."


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Chuck Idelson.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/burning-books-and-destroying-education-on-the-path-to-fascist-dictatorship/feed/ 0 376006     A System of Silencing https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/a-system-of-silencing/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/a-system-of-silencing/#respond Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:24:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138239 As recognition of Israeli apartheid grows, the Israeli regime and its supporters continuously develop tactics to silence advocates for Palestinian liberation, as well as any criticism of Israel. This visual, the first in our series on the theme of freedom of expression, captures the wide range of actors and tactics involved in this system of […]

    The post A System of Silencing first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     As recognition of Israeli apartheid grows, the Israeli regime and its supporters continuously develop tactics to silence advocates for Palestinian liberation, as well as any criticism of Israel. This visual, the first in our series on the theme of freedom of expression, captures the wide range of actors and tactics involved in this system of silencing.

    The post A System of Silencing first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Visualizing Palestine.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/a-system-of-silencing/feed/ 0 376035     Sensitivity Rewrites: The Cultural Purging of Roald Dahl https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/27/sensitivity-rewrites-the-cultural-purging-of-roald-dahl/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/27/sensitivity-rewrites-the-cultural-purging-of-roald-dahl/#respond Mon, 27 Feb 2023 01:16:28 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138194 Censorship is never innocent, made worse for its strained good intentions. For those responsible for setting and policing such policies, the inner judge comes out, stomping on assumed meanings, interpreting and removing things to ensure the masses are not corrupted. Children’s stories and tales have not been exempted from this train of revision, expurgation and […]

    The post Sensitivity Rewrites: The Cultural Purging of Roald Dahl first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Censorship is never innocent, made worse for its strained good intentions. For those responsible for setting and policing such policies, the inner judge comes out, stomping on assumed meanings, interpreting and removing things to ensure the masses are not corrupted. Children’s stories and tales have not been exempted from this train of revision, expurgation and adjustment.

    In modifying the language of children’s texts, a number of agents come into play: concerned parents, worried authorities, and the considerations that reflect the temper and mores of the time. Publishers, keen to ensure a wider readership, feel pressure to alter the original text to stay modern and trendy.

    In 1853, Charles Dickens took the illustrator and former friend George Cruickshank to task in an essay “Frauds on the Fairies” for meddling with fairy tales through incorporating a temperance message. “We have lately observed with pain the intrusion of a Whole Hog of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower-garden.” It was vital, Dickens warned, to respect fairy tales, most notably in the utilitarian age Britain found itself in.

    The latest victim of this lack of respect, albeit one posthumously affected, is Roald Dahl, whose books for children have drawn unwanted attention from a wretched consultancy in conjunction with veteran publisher Puffin Books. Evidently not feeling anyone capable within their ranks, Puffin Books decided to retain Inclusive Minds, which claims to “offer a range of services to help people engaged in all aspects of children’s literature build a new, more inclusive world.”

    This all took place in step with the announcement in September last year that the streaming company Netflix had bought the Roald Dahl Story Company for the princely sum of £500 million. The contract is reportedly the biggest content deal of its kind, a fact no doubt helped by the company’s observation that Dahl’s books have sold more than 300 million globally and been translated into 63 languages. “Netflix and The Roald Dahl Story Company,” the company announced, “share a deep love of storytelling and a growing global fan base. Together, we have an extraordinary opportunity to write multiple new chapters of these beloved stories, delighting children and adults around the world for generations to come.’

    With the mantra of inclusivity heavy at Puffin Books, in addition to the “growing global fan base”, the publishing outfit faced a fundamental problem. Any position on being inclusive reaches a tipping point where it must exclude. And at Inclusive Minds, there are “Inclusion Ambassadors” who constitute a network of advisors with a nose for sensitivity and a mind for removing the uncomfortable. “The network,” Inclusive Minds goes on to say, “offers book creators a chance to connect with ‘experts by experiences’ at the very earliest stage in the book creation process.”

    With the razors ready to modernise (read purge) any of Dahl’s texts, a number of words came in for the chop. A focus was placed upon gender, race, mental health and weight. “Enormously fat” was adjusted to being merely “enormous”, in reference to the gluttonous character of Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Oompa-Loompas were transformed into “small people”, with words such as “titchy” and “tiny” excised.

    In “Witches”, an “old hag” became the less offensive “old crow”. Other patently silly changes included removing “black” in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in favour of “murderous, brutal-looking” tractors. The three sons, for some reason, become three daughters, while the Cloud-Men in “James and the Giant Peach” become Cloud People.

    Many of these changes are not cosmetic, constituting a direct alternation of the author’s meanings and intentions. Matilda’s reading of Rudyard Kipling, for instance, is considered inappropriate to the sensitivity police. Far better to make her read Jane Austen instead of that bard of British imperialism.

    These changes prompted novelist Salman Rushdie, himself all too familiar with the mortal dangers of censorship, to suggest that Puffin Books and the Dahl estate reel in shame. It was sporting of him to do so, given Dahl’s own lack of sympathy for Rushdie’s treatment at the hands of murderous Islamic fanatics for the publication of The Satanic Verses.

    Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Spectator, was adamant that Dahl had been culturally vandalised, being “well and truly Ministry of Truthed.” The fun in the texts had been redacted, confined to “the memory hole.”

    PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel was also “alarmed at news of ‘hundreds of changes’ to venerated works by [Dahl] in a purported effort to scrub the books of that which might offend someone.” Those wishing to “cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.”

    During his life, Dahl was also the subject of attention from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for language used in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The 1964 text originally described the Oompa-Loompas as African “pygmies”. In sympathy with the NAACP, Dahl rewrote the text for the second US edition, turning the Oompa-Loompas into white dwarves with origins in fictional Loompaland.

    Ironically enough, Dahl’s agent convinced the author to change Charlie’s identity, who was originally intended to be a black boy. The reason was crude but simple: making Charlie white would be more appealing to readers.

    Amidst the protests against the latest rewrites and cuts, Penguin Random House, which owns Puffin Books, announced that it would publish the “classic” versions alongside the new editions, enabling readers “to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.” That’s just what the children need.

    Puffin Books should have already heeded the lessons of previous failed efforts to run rewritten texts for contemporary audiences. Efforts in 2010 to subject the Famous Five series of Enid Blyton to “sensitive text revisions” failed. These included alterations of “awful swotter” to “bookworm”, and “tinker” with “traveller”. The publisher Hachette had to concede in 2016 that the project had not worked.

    This latest affair prompted a suggestion from Philip Pullman on Radio 4 on February 20. Let the passage of time judge the works, rather than the officials of the age. Eventually, they may go out of print, leaving room for other authors and their stories to enchant a new readership. In Dahl’s case, that time is a considerable way off. A salient lesson, then, to avoid overly paid and ill-informed consultancies and respect children’s stories.

    The post Sensitivity Rewrites: The Cultural Purging of Roald Dahl first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/27/sensitivity-rewrites-the-cultural-purging-of-roald-dahl/feed/ 0 375596     “That Paper Is Dead” https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/23/that-paper-is-dead/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/23/that-paper-is-dead/#respond Thu, 23 Feb 2023 18:45:41 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138085 On 21 February 2023, climate scientist Professor Bill McGuire issued a stark warning: ‘Remember this date. First rationing of food in UK due to extreme weather. Things will only get worse as climate breakdown bites ever harder.’ This was in response to the news that British supermarkets are rationing fresh produce, including tomatoes, cucumbers and […]

    The post “That Paper Is Dead” first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    On 21 February 2023, climate scientist Professor Bill McGuire issued a stark warning:

    ‘Remember this date. First rationing of food in UK due to extreme weather. Things will only get worse as climate breakdown bites ever harder.’

    This was in response to the news that British supermarkets are rationing fresh produce, including tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Rationing could last weeks. The shortages were caused by ‘poor weather’, as the Guardian put it, in southern Europe and north Africa. In fact, in June and July 2022, extreme heatwaves caused temperatures to climb above 40 degrees Celsius in places and broke many long-standing records. Europe experienced its hottest summer on record. In North Africa, Tunisia endured a heatwave and fires that damaged the country’s grain crop. On 13 July 2022, in the capital city of Tunis, the temperature reached 48 degrees Celsius, breaking a 40-year record.

    As well as harvest losses in southern Europe and north Africa last year, there has been a reduction in UK salad produce after field crops were badly damaged by frost before Christmas. Food supply problems have been compounded by the rising energy costs of growing plants in heated greenhouses.

    Although there was some media coverage of fresh produce rationing by supermarkets, including on the front pages, there was little more than passing mention of the systemic connection to the climate crisis. And, par for the course, no headlines or in-depth analysis of the urgent need to shift course from the current path of corporate-driven destruction. Nothing about the very real risk that we are already undergoing the collapse of modern civilisation.

    It was symptomatic, once again, of the deeply propagandised society in which we live.

    In our previous media alert, we noted the silence across virtually the whole of the state-corporate media in response to legendary journalist Seymour Hersh’s report that the US blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines delivering cheap gas from Russia to Europe.

    In a public debate, the renowned US economist Jeffrey Sachs said that:

    ‘The Swedes went in to clean up the debris [following the explosive destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines] and said, “We cannot share our findings with Germany because of national security” […]. How could Sweden not share its findings with Germany and Denmark? But their job was to clean up so nobody else could investigate either.’

    This two-minute clip is extraordinary (as is the full 8-minute video). But the lack of ‘mainstream’ reporting? It is as if the whole of journalism has just…vanished.

    Sachs said that he spoke with ‘a leading reporter of one of our leading papers’ whom he has known for forty years. Sachs told his friend that he believed the US carried out the attack on Nord Stream. The reporter replied, ‘Of course the US did it.’

    Sachs responded, ‘Why doesn’t your paper say so?’

    The reporter blamed his editors. ‘It’s hard; it’s complicated.’

    Sachs continued:

    ‘When I was young, I used to read your newspaper, because you went after Nixon and Watergate, and because you published the Pentagon Papers.’

    The reporter replied: ‘Yes, but that paper is dead.’

    In fact, one might as well say that all the ‘leading papers’ are dead.

    The function of what passes for ‘journalism’ is ever more clear: to propagandise the population to allow ‘national interests’ to determine foreign and domestic policy. These ‘national interests’ are the billionaire class that own the country, and the political, military and intelligence forces that run the country.

    They are still terrified of even the prospect of a leftward shift in society, following the near-success of Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour in the 2017 General Election. That is why it is so important for establishment stooge Sir Keir Starmer to be promoted across the permissible ‘spectrum’ of news and opinion as the next safe pair of hands to maintain the status quo of power and a monarch-supporting establishment. The Guardian now has a permanent section on its opinion page titled: ‘Starmer’s path to power’.

    It is worth highlighting the insidious role played by Starmer, when head of the Crown Prosecution Service, in the persecution of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, as John Pilger reminded viewers in a recent interview:

    ‘Starmer’s CPS deliberately kept Julian in this country when the Swedes were saying, “That’s it. We’ve had enough.” […] it was Starmer’s CPS that kept it going [the case against Assange.]’

    Starmer has now said that Corbyn cannot stand as a Labour candidate in the next election. Indeed, he has essentially said that the left is no longer welcome in the Labour Party:

    ‘If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open, and you can leave.’

    As Financial Times journalist Stephen Smith pointed out on Twitter:

    ‘It’s amazing how Labour have calculated they will never need these voters, or all the people these voters could influence in the future’.

    The liberal media are happy with this state of affairs. Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer at the Observer and deputy opinion editor at the Guardian, published an opinion piece last Sunday under the title, ‘Keir Starmer was right to exile Corbyn. Labour has a duty to voters, not rebellious members’. It would take an entire media alert to go through her column, line by line, to point out all the egregious distortions and deceptions.

    In one sense, it was remarkable that the Observer would publish a piece so riddled with untruths and distortions. That it was written by the paper’s chief leader writer is even more astonishing. But, in fact, it is not remarkable at all. This abysmal low standard – a babbling brook of bullshit, to quote Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David – is entirely predictable from the Observer/Guardian stable of establishment ‘journalism’.

    This statement alone was appalling:

    ‘Corbyn has never apologised for the role he played in the institutional antisemitism that characterised the party under his leadership, including interference in the complaints process by his own staff…’

    This was cynical fiction. There was no ‘institutional antisemitism’ under Corbyn. As for ‘interference in the complaints process’, the Al Jazeera ‘Labour Files’ series blew a hole through this narrative. As the series showed, Corbyn had been stymied by the party’s central bureaucracy which resisted the leftward shift his victory had initiated when elected as Labour leader in 2015. When he was finally able to have Labour general secretary Iain McNicol (now Baron McNicol of West Kilbride) replaced by Corbyn ally Jennie Formby in 2018, the painfully slow processing of disciplinary cases on antisemitism came to light. It was swiftly improved under Corbyn. The Observer’s leader writer is continuing to use the same debunked nonsense which the media used then to attack Corbyn.

    Political writer Simon Maginn has exposed ten fraudulent tropes of the supposed ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ that are constantly recycled to this day. For instance, Guardian columnist Rafael Behr indulged in a disgusting live attack on Corbyn, and the left, on the BBC Politics Live show earlier this week. Under Corbyn, Behr claimed, Labour ‘became infested with anti-Jewish racism’; he was ‘a magnet for anti-semitism’. This was utterly false. And this is a regular, high-profile columnist from a supposedly progressive newspaper!

    As the composer and musician Matt Scott pointed out on Twitter:

    ‘Antisemitism levels went down under Jeremy Corbyn & were lower than in the general public by all known evidence.’

    It was such an appalling diatribe from Behr, that if the BBC had any standards at all, that would have been his last appearance.

    As Matt Kennard, co-founder of Declassified UK, noted:

    ‘The Labour “antisemitism crisis” propaganda campaign only stayed robust because critical analysis of the campaign – and its pushers – was locked out of the mainstream media.’

    Kennard added:

    ‘It was critical the Guardian’s left-wing columnists either joined in the campaign, like Owen Jones, or took an oath of silence, like George Monbiot. That way anyone telling the truth about it was restricted to independent media and easily dismissed as a “crank” or “antisemite”.’

    Monbiot was hardly ‘silent’. In 2018, for example, he tweeted:

    ‘It dismays me to say it, as someone who has invested so much hope in the current Labour Party, but I think @shattenstone [Guardian features writer Simon Hattenstone] is right: Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 comments about “Zionists” were antisemitic and unacceptable.’

    Monbiot tweeted this over a screen grab of Hattenstone’s Guardian article titled:

    ‘I gave Corbyn the benefit of the doubt on antisemitism. I can’t any more.’

    It could hardly have been more damning.

    Self-Awareness In Short Supply

    The current fever pitch of propaganda about Ukraine and Russia, now surely far surpassing that which preceded and followed the West’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, is all the more galling because we are supposed to swallow the notion that we live in a propaganda-free society. Propaganda, we are told, is the preserve of the Official Enemy (insert Russia/China/North Korea/Iran/Venezuela/etc, as required). We (the ‘civilised’ West, creator of universal human rights, moral values and true democracy, etc) have responsible, fair and informative media.

    Yes, of course, it is grudgingly admitted, there’s the tabloid press filled with tittle-tattle, fluff, tawdry scandals and other diversionary nonsense. But, we have ‘quality’ newspapers and broadcast media, such as the Times, the Independent, the Guardian and Channel 4 News. Heck, we have BBC News: the world’s ‘most trusted’ international news organisation (as they keep reminding us).

    But we could easily fill pages daily with examples of BBC News propaganda (quite apart from the endless omissions that are a fundamental feature of BBC News). Choosing a ‘winner’ each day would be tough. But the BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg is often a serious contender.  Reporting recently from the Russian city of Belgorod, just 40km north of the border with Ukraine, he observed that: ‘Belgorod locals live in fear but won’t blame Putin’.

    He wrote:

    ‘In addition to the slogans on the street, there’s also the propaganda on Russian state TV. From morning till night news bulletins and talk shows assure viewers that Russia is in the right; that Ukraine and the West are the aggressors and that in this conflict the very future of Russia is at stake.’

    Adding: ‘The messaging works.’

    As an example, Rosenberg cited a local woman, Olga:

    ‘She accepts the official view – the version of events that much of the world dismisses as the Kremlin’s alternative reality.’

    The lack of self-awareness by Rosenberg – ‘the messaging works’ – is standard for a prominent journalist at the news organisation that has been pumping out state propaganda since its inception under Lord Reith.

    The serial dearth of news reporting and analysis that could offer some semblance of counterbalance to the Nato view of events in Ukraine is a damning indictment of BBC News and the rest of the national media.

    Perhaps, for many in the media and political circles, there is a genuine fear of challenging official doctrine lest one be smeared as a ‘Putin apologist’. It is a favoured, shameful tactic of Guardian columnist George Monbiot, for example, who has done an excellent job of trashing his own reputation.

    On 9 February, Monbiot tweeted:

    ‘There is a left – the majority – that’s principled and consistent in denouncing all imperialist war. And there’s another left, represented by Roger Waters, John Pilger, Media Lens etc, that denounces Western wars of aggression but makes excuses for Russian wars of aggression.’

    We replied:

    ‘Fake! We denounce both Western and Russian wars of aggression. Our media alert, 4 March 2022:

    ‘”Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq.”’

    We asked Monbiot to explain how repeatedly denouncing Putin’s war of aggression was the same thing as making ‘excuses for Russian wars of aggression’. One of the Guardian’s highest-profile columnists then spent the morning trawling through our Twitter history until he eventually found an example of us retweeting someone who described Russia’s invasion as ‘provoked’. Monbiot considered this an example of us making ‘excuses’ for Putin. We cited Chomsky:

    ‘They know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.’

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook summed up his and our position exactly:

    ‘This really shouldn’t need stating. I focus on the West’s crimes, provocations and distortions not because I’m a Saddam, Assad, Putin apologist. I do so because I’m trying to fill in knowledge gaps for *western audiences* starved of critical information by western corporate media.

    ‘You don’t need more western propaganda from me. Your eyes and ears are stuffed with it. You need to hear other sides, and missing information, to be able to judge whether what you’re being told by the establishment media is true or propaganda.

    ‘Not least, you need that counter-information to judge whether the state-corporate media have a collective agenda – and whether that agenda is about empowering you against the establishment, or about empowering the establishment against you.’

    What is so remarkable about Monbiot’s relentless attacks on us is that he initially understood exactly what we were trying to do and why. In February 2005, he emailed us:

    ‘I know we’ve had disagreements in the past, but I wanted to send you a note of appreciation for your work. Your persistence seems to be paying off: it’s clear that many of the country’s most prominent journalists are aware of Medialens, read your bulletins and, perhaps, are beginning to feel the pressure. If, as I think you have, you have begun to force people working for newspapers and broadcasters to look over their left shoulders as well as their right, and worry about being held to account for the untruths they disseminate, then you have already performed a major service to democracy. I feel you have begun to open up a public debate on media bias, which has been a closed book in the United Kingdom for a long time. As you would be the first to point out, this does not solve the problem of the corporate control of the media, but it does sow embarrasment [sic] in the ranks of the enemy, while reminding your readers of the need to seek alternative sources of information.

    ‘Your columns in the New Statesman have been effective in reaching a wider readership, and I’m glad the Guardian gave you a platform: have you tried to persuade the BBC to let you on? I’m thinking in particular of Radio 4’s programme The Message.

    ‘With my best wishes, George Monbiot’ (Monbiot, email to Media Lens, 2 February 2005)

    But here’s the problem: our ethical approach and rationale were exactly the same in 2005 as they are in 2023. How can Monbiot not understand now what he understood so clearly then: that we are indeed trying to persuade ‘newspapers and broadcasters to look over their left shoulders as well as their right’, to hold them accountable ‘for the untruths they disseminate’? Our work has nothing whatever to do with ‘apologising’ for tyranny. So, who changed: us or Monbiot?

    The Purple Prose Of BBC News

    Two weeks ago, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky came to London to give a speech pleading for fighter jets, to an adoring audience of the political and media establishment in Westminster Hall. BBC News waxed lyrical:

    ‘The 900-year-old medieval hall was bathed in sunlight from its vast stained glass windows, as MPs, peers, members of the clergy, reporters and assorted dignitaries assembled in an atmosphere of hushed anticipation.’

    Labour’s Stephen Doughty, a member of the all-party Ukraine group, was ‘among those left with a sense of awe’. He said of Zelensky:

    ‘He’s the real deal. You don’t get many leaders quite like that in the world.’

    At the end of his speech, Zelensky gave a ‘Churchillian “V for victory” sign’ as the Ukrainian national anthem played in the background. That, reported the BBC, ‘was the most powerful moment for’ Doughty, particularly:

    ‘as the stained glass windows that bathed the whole occasion in light are a memorial to the staff and members of both houses of Parliament who died in the Second World War.’

    Doughty added: ‘The symbolism of that is incalculable.’

    BBC impartiality was truly out the window – stained glass or otherwise – when a BBC reporter proclaimed to Zelensky: ‘Greetings, Mr. President, I would really like to hug you.’

    It was a propaganda show that would be mocked mercilessly here if something similar happened in Russia.

    Earlier this week, US president Joe Biden made a ‘surprise’ visit to Ukraine before heading on to Poland. His speeches were reported diligently and respectfully by Western media. Meanwhile, as the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approached, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian people. A live BBC News page emphasised the key points for the BBC audience:

    ‘Putin suspends key US nuclear arms deal in bitter speech against West’

    ‘Putin rages against West’

    And: ‘[Putin] goes through a list of familiar grievances in an angry speech in Washington’

    Can you imagine BBC News ever describing in similar terms a speech given by a US president or British prime minister? ‘Biden rages against Russia’

    Or: ‘Biden goes through a list of familiar grievances in an angry speech in Moscow’

    Media analyst Alan MacLeod drew attention in a powerful Twitter thread to the glaring contrast between: ‘When they do it vs. when we do it.’

    For example, the Time double issue of 14/21 March 2022 had a cover depicting a Russian tank invading Ukraine with the title: ‘The Return of History: How Putin Shattered Europe’s Dreams’

    By contrast, when the Time cover of 11 September 1995 depicted a huge explosion as Nato bombed Serbs in Bosnia, the title was: ‘Bringing the Serbs to Heel: A Massive Bombing Attack Opens the Door to Peace’

    This recalls Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s bizarre comment at the World Economic Forum that ‘weapons are the way to peace’.

    Truly, we are living in an Orwellian era.

    MacLeod also highlighted the title of a piece by Times columnist David Aaronovitch from 28 April, 2022: ‘Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul’

    By contrast, on 30 November 2017, the Times ran an opinion piece by Nigel Biggar, an Anglican priest and theologian, titled: ‘Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history’

    And on and on.

    In a brilliant ten-minute presentation by film director Ken Loach, he said:

    ‘The mass media are our enemy – they’ve declared war, and we know whose interests they represent.’

    Finally, perhaps, the left is beginning to understand the role of the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of the ‘MSM’ in maintaining the established system of power in the UK, including its endless support for war.

    The post “That Paper Is Dead” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/23/that-paper-is-dead/feed/ 0 374929     ‘Race to the Bottom’: GOP Has Introduced 72 Educational Gag Orders So Far in 2023 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/16/race-to-the-bottom-gop-has-introduced-72-educational-gag-orders-so-far-in-2023/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/16/race-to-the-bottom-gop-has-introduced-72-educational-gag-orders-so-far-in-2023/#respond Thu, 16 Feb 2023 20:54:38 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/gop-educational-gag-orders-2023

    The right-wing campaign to censor what is read and taught at public schools, colleges, universities, and libraries across the United States is only growing more intense, as state lawmakers introduced dozens of educational gag orders in the first six weeks of 2023.

    From the start of the new year through February 13, Republican lawmakers proposed 72 educational censorship bills and their Democratic counterparts unveiled two, according to an analysis published Thursday by PEN America, which updates its "Index of Educational Gag Orders" on a weekly basis. At least 85 such bills are currently live, including 11 carryovers from last year.

    As the free speech organization previously documented, more than 190 bills aimed at limiting the ability of educators and students to discuss the production of and resistance to myriad inequalities throughout U.S. history—including several proposals to establish so-called "tip lines" that would enable parents to punish school districts or individual teachers—were introduced in dozens of states in 2021 and 2022, with all but one authored by Republicans. In the past two years, 19 laws restricting the teaching of racism, gender, and sexuality were enacted in more than a dozen GOP-controlled states, plus eight measures imposed without legislation.

    "The early returns from the 2023 legislative sessions suggest that lawmakers' fervor to censor and ban content from educational institutions has not abated. Far from it," four PEN America experts wrote Thursday. "They have outdone one another in a race to the bottom, finding new, more extreme, and more conspiratorial ways to impose censorious government dictates on teaching and learning."

    The analysis highlights trends in educational gag orders across four major categories: efforts to prohibit teaching about race, racism, and U.S. history; expanding censorship of sexuality and gender; legislation targeting higher education institutions; and particularly extreme proposals motivated by the growing influence of conspiracy theories.

    Researchers found that so far this year, lawmakers have unveiled:

    • 50 educational gag orders across 16 states restricting classroom instruction about the history of racism in America;
    • 27 bills across 14 states that mirror Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, censoring public schools from offering any instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity—11 of which ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity altogether;
    • 20 bills across 13 states that specifically restrict higher education classroom instruction;
    • 23 bills across 14 states that censor or restrict minors from seeing drag performances; and
    • 19 bills across 12 states that would remove exemptions for librarians and educators from being charged with violations of state obscenity laws.

    Efforts to Prohibit Teaching About Race, Racism, and U.S. History

    Many legislative attempts to undermine teaching about racism "include language copied from" former President Donald Trump's 2020 Executive Order 13950, which has since been revoked by President Joe Biden but previously barred certain so-called "divisive concepts" from being used in federal trainings, the PEN America experts observed. "Despite the free speech concerns surrounding that language, this type of bill continues to be introduced in 2023, with a growing list of topics to be prohibited—ranging from critical race theory to the theory that race is a social construct."

    "Two such bills would essentially prohibit teachers from expressing ideas or facts of history that might cause discomfort," researchers wrote, referring to Connecticut's Senate Bill 280 and New Jersey's Senate Bill 598. "Meanwhile, Texas' H.B. 1804 would require public school teachers to always 'present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage' and, when discussing American society, to stress 'the positive contributions of all individuals and groups to the American way of life'—a 'compulsory patriotism' bill of a type we have previously described as censorious."

    "In each case, it is hard to see how an accurate account of American slavery, Jim Crow, or Japanese internment would survive such restrictions," they noted. "And should these bills become law, many teachers may simply avoid any content that could even approach the restrictions laid out in this legislation."

    The researchers pointed out that South Carolina's House Bill 3779, which would forbid public school history teachers from providing instruction "about persons who owned slaves" and is one of just two educational gag orders introduced by a Democrat so far this year, "is not meant to ever become law."

    South Carolina Rep. Jermaine Johnson (D-70), the lead sponsor of the bill, has explained that he proposed a ban on teaching about slaveowners to protest his Republican colleagues' support for educational censorship, saying sarcastically that "we should protect our children from being exposed to this evil by sweeping it under the rug and never addressing it."

    Expanding Censorship of Sexuality and Gender

    Since Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1557, which critics refer to as the "Don't Say Gay" Act, into law last year, there has been "a wave of copycat bills in statehouses across the country, and in many instances with even more censorious rules," the PEN America experts wrote.

    They continued:

    H.B. 1557 prohibits public schools from offering any "classroom instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity" in kindergarten through grade three, or thereafter in a manner that is not age- and developmentally appropriate. Since the start of the 2021 session, 39 "Don't Say Gay"-style bills have been proposed in 20 states, including 27 bills in 14 states during the current legislative session alone.

    The vast majority of these bills follow the template of H.B. 1557, but many are more restrictive. Whereas Florida's law permits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from grade four onwards if "age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards," 10 subsequent bills would extend the prohibition to grades five or six, and seven to grade eight. Eleven bills—including eight currently under consideration—would ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity altogether, from kindergarten right through to grade twelve. And four current bills apply to private schools or colleges.

    The scope of materials and ideas these new bills would ban is also greater, raising the possibility that teachers could find themselves muzzled on a confusing and ever-growing array of topics.

    Such attempts to purge curricula of references to gender and sexuality are only the beginning. Another subset of bills aims to prevent public schools and libraries from carrying books that contain information about gender and sexuality—just part of the nationwide surge in book bans, about which PEN America has written.

    Other legislation seeks to chill teaching about these topics by threatening to slap educators and librarians with criminal charges.

    Such legislation, researchers warned, "poses a grave threat to the circulation of information and ideas in public schools and libraries, as well as to the very individuals engaged in this educational work."

    Legislation Targeting Higher Education Institutions

    PEN America called "the expansion of restrictions on higher education" one of "the most notable educational censorship trends over the past two years."

    "Restrictions of this type are particularly concerning because of the principle of academic freedom that applies to teachers in colleges and universities," researchers wrote. "In 2022, 39% of all proposed educational gag orders restricted higher education, up from 30% in 2021. In 2023, higher education continues to be a target, with 20 bills of this nature already introduced in 13 states. This represents 20% of bills introduced this year, but 34% of bills outside of the newly prevalent 'Don't Say Gay' clones—a percentage roughly consistent with previous years."

    In addition to legislation proposing "prohibitions on what faculty can teach," PEN America noted that there are "bills that target academic freedom, by either weakening tenure protections or attacking universities' institutional autonomy."

    Particularly Extreme Proposals Motivated by the Growing Influence of Conspiracy Theories

    "Finally, many of the educational gag orders and other censorious proposals introduced in 2023 reflect the growing influence of extreme ideologies and conspiracy theories among the legislators behind them," PEN America observed.

    According to the analysis:

    North Dakota’s H.B. 1522 would bar public and private schools from adopting "a policy establishing or providing a place, facility, school program, or accommodation that caters to a student's perception of being any animal species other than human." This is a reference to the urban myth, popular along the political fringe and embraced by Rep. Lauren Boebert [R-Colo.], that schools are providing litter boxes for students who believe that they are cats.

    [...]

     Two Oklahoma bills are worth singling out for special attention. Under both S.B. 937 and S.B. 935, "secular humanism" would be defined as a type of religion, with critical race theory, drag queen story hours, sexual orientation, and gender identity identified as "inseparably linked" to secular humanism. According to the bills' author, should any public or private school in Oklahoma "promote the plausibility" of these concepts, it would therefore "excessively entangle the government with the religion of secular humanism," and violate the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution.

    "It is too early to tell whether any of these bills will garner enough legislative support to become law, but their mere introduction tells us that the 'Ed Scare' remains in full swing," researchers noted. "Advocates of free expression and education should respond accordingly."

    In its summary of educational gag orders introduced in 2022, PEN America warned that "there is a legislative war on education in America."

    And in its examination of similar proposals unveiled in 2021, the organization stressed that "these bills will have—and are already having—tangible consequences for both American education and democracy, both distorting the lens through which the next generation will study American history and society and undermining the hallmarks of liberal education."

    Earlier this month, National Education Association president Becky Pringle argued that DeSantis' attack on a new high school Advanced Placement African-American studies course is part of the far-right's broader anti-democratic assault on public education and other institutions aimed at improving the common good.

    "For DeSantis, blocking AP African-American studies is part of a cheap, cynical, and dangerous political ploy to drive division and chaos into public education debates," Pringle wrote.

    "He seeks to distract communities from his real agenda, which is to first whitewash and then dumb down public education as an excuse to privatize it," she added. "His ultimate goal? The destruction of public education, the very foundation of our democracy."


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/16/race-to-the-bottom-gop-has-introduced-72-educational-gag-orders-so-far-in-2023/feed/ 0 373276     Rescue Collective Life by Reading a Red Book https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/16/rescue-collective-life-by-reading-a-red-book/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/16/rescue-collective-life-by-reading-a-red-book/#respond Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:10:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137864 Kael Abello (Venezuela), 1848, 2023. In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the 7th Congress of the Young Communist League in Havana, Cuba, a year after the catastrophic ‘market failure’ in Asia, when global finance exited the region and left behind economic deserts stretching from Korea to Malaysia. ‘The world is rapidly being globalised’, Castro told […]

    The post Rescue Collective Life by Reading a Red Book first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Kael Abello (Venezuela), 1848, 2023.

    Kael Abello (Venezuela), 1848, 2023.

    In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the 7th Congress of the Young Communist League in Havana, Cuba, a year after the catastrophic ‘market failure’ in Asia, when global finance exited the region and left behind economic deserts stretching from Korea to Malaysia. ‘The world is rapidly being globalised’, Castro told the Cuban youth, and this globalisation was ‘an unsustainable and intolerable world economic order’ founded on the cannibalisation of nature and the brutalisation of social life. Capitalist ideologues championed greed as foundational for society, but this, Castro cautioned, was merely an ideological claim rather than a statement drawn from reality. Similar ideological claims – such as those about the rational operation of markets – encouraged Castro to insist on the urgent need to wage a ‘battle of ideas’ to make the case for the richness of the human experience against the reductions of market fundamentalism.

    ‘Not weapons, but ideas will decide this universal battle’, Castro said, ‘and not because of some intrinsic value, but because of how closely they relate to the objective reality of today’s world. These ideas stem from the conviction that, mathematically speaking, the world has no other way out, that imperialism is unsustainable, that the system that has been imposed on the world leads to disaster, to an insurmountable crisis’.

    That was in 1998. Since then, matters have become even more grave. In late January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists brought the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, ‘the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been’. The self-described managers of the ‘world order’ (the G7 countries) who are responsible for this journey to annihilation continue to dominate the Battle of Ideas. This must no longer be permitted.

    Shehi Shafi (Young Socialist Artists/India), Read Marx, 2023.

    Shehi Shafi (Young Socialist Artists/India), Read Marx, 2023.

    I am typing these words in Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, which is the home of arts and culture not only for Cuba but all Latin America. Founded in 1959 by Haydée Santamaría (1923–1980), one of the pioneers of the Cuban Revolution, Casa became a reference for the necessity to advance class struggle on the cultural front. For Fidel, institutions such as Casa, with whom we collaborated for our dossier Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, are integral to this battle of ideas, to this confrontation with a vision of reality that is inimical to human progress. ‘Ideas are not simply an instrument to build consciousness and lead people to fight’, Fidel told the youth in 1998. In fact, ideas ‘have become the main weapon in the struggle, not a source of inspiration, not a guide, not a directive, but the main weapon of the struggle’. He quoted José Martí, the great Cuban patriot, as he often did: ‘Trenches made of ideas are stronger than those made of stones’.

    In our dossier, thesis eight focused on the erosion of the collective life. As we wrote then:

    Neoliberal globalisation vanquished the sense of collective life and deepened the despair of atomisation through two connected processes:

    1. by weakening the trade union movement and the social possibilities that come within the public action and workplace struggle rooted in trade unionism.
    2. by substituting the idea of the citizen with the idea of the consumer – in other words, the idea that human beings are principally consumers of goods and services, and that human subjectivity can be best appreciated through a desire for things.

    The breakdown of social collectivity and the rise of consumerism harden despair, which morphs into various kinds of retreat. Two examples of this are: a) a retreat into family networks that cannot sustain the pressures placed upon them by the withdrawal of social services, the increasing burden of care work on the family, and ever longer commute times and workdays; b) a move towards forms of social toxicity through avenues such as religion or xenophobia. Though these avenues provide opportunities to organise collective life, they are organised not for human advancement, but for the narrowing of social possibility.

    Red Books Day, one gesture to rescue collective life, emerged from the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), a network of over forty publishing houses. On 21 February 1848, 175 years ago, Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. The IULP picked that day, 21 February, to encourage people from around the world to go into public places, from the street to cafés and union halls, and read their favourite red books (including the manifesto) in their own languages.

    Paolo C. Ratti (Italy), Lapidary Free, 2023.

    Paolo C. Ratti (Italy), Lapidary Free, 2023.

    In 2020, the first Red Books Day, more than 30,000 people from South Korea to Venezuela joined the public reading of the manifesto in their own languages. The epicentre of Red Books Day was in the four Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, where the bulk of public readings took place. Peasant organisations affiliated with the Communist Party of Nepal held readings in rural areas, while the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil held readings in occupied settlements. In Havana, study circles met to read the manifesto, while in South Africa the Sesotho translation was launched and read for the first time. Left publishing houses from Expressão Popular in Brazil to Batalla de Ideas in Argentina and Inkani Books in South Africa also joined the effort. Many participants reported that this was the first time that they had opened a book by Marx and that the captivating prose has drawn them to start study circles of Marxist literature.

    Due to the pandemic, Red Books Day 2021 was held largely online, but enthusiasm remained high nonetheless. The publishing house Založba (Slovenia) released a released a short film entitled Dan rdečih knjig (‘Red Books Day’), in which Založba’s writers read from the manifesto. Meanwhile, the publishing house Yordam Kitap in Turkey asked its authors to read from the manifesto in Turkish and organised a talk with Ertuğrul Kürkçü, a leader of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Small, appropriately distanced gatherings took place in Kerala, where the manifesto was read in Malayalam and English, as well as in Brazil, where militants of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) organised readings of the manifesto in Portuguese in their encampments. Not one corner of India was without Red Books Day events, as readings took place from Assam to Karnataka to Tamil Nadu.

    Yoni Lingga (Indonesia), I Read Banned Books, 2023.

    Yoni Lingga (Indonesia), I Read Banned Books, 2023.

    The highlight of Red Books Day 2022 was that half a million people in Kerala (India) read the books of EMS Namboodiripad in 35,000 meetings across the state. Various colleges in Perinthalmanna (Malappuram) held a three-day-long book festival, The Battle of Literature in the Era of the Ban, while the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangham (Association of Progressive Art and Literature) held programmes across Kerala. At the Vijayawada Book Festival in Andhra Pradesh, Prajasakti Bookhouse erected a popular Communist Manifesto book stall, while in villages in Maharashtra, night classes were held that reminded participants of the early days of the peasant movement.

    Readings were held in Indonesia and Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela. Films were screened and music was sung while social media buzzed with the hashtags of Red Books Day in multiple languages. The South African shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo held a talent show on Red Books Day at the eKhenana occupation site. ‘The price for land and autonomy is always paid in blood. But struggle is not only shared suffering. It is also shared joy’, the organisation declared.

    Zach Hussein (Palestine/United States), We Have a World to Win, 2022.

    Zach Hussein (Palestine/United States), We Have a World to Win, 2022.

    At dawn on Red Books Day in 2022, members of the neo-fascist RSS organisation entered the Thalassery (Kerala) home of Punnol Haridas, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). They hacked Haridas, a fisherman, to death. ‘I was supposed to write on my favourite red book today’, wrote V. Sivadasan, a member of parliament and CPI(M) leader, ‘but I ended up writing about my comrade who was hacked to death by RSS terrorists’.

    In 2023, the fourth Red Books Day promises to build on previous years, fighting to rescue our collective life from the atomisation of precarious living.

    Last week, a severe earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, taking the lives of more than 30,000 people so far, displacing millions in the region and plunging them into precarity. In Syria, US-led sanctions have delayed the delivery of critical international aid. Many also see the high death toll as a result of the Turkish state’s neglect. Following the devastation of the 1999 Gölcük-Marmara earthquake, an ‘earthquake tax’ was levied on the public, raising nearly $4 billion between July 1999 and July 2022. Yet, no clear evidence exists regarding how those funds have been spent and if they have gone towards emergency services and safety measures. In an attempt to rescue collective life in this terrifying moment, Ertuğrul Kürkçü of the HDP calls to ‘transform earthquake solidarity into a social movement’ against the prevailing neoliberal system. If you would like to donate to the relief efforts, you can do so here.

    On one side of our world today are red books and the urge to expand the boundaries of humanity and left culture; on the other side are violence and bloodshed, the ghastly side of barbarism. Red Books Day affirms the culture of the future, the culture of humans. It is a crucial front in the Battle of Ideas.

    The post Rescue Collective Life by Reading a Red Book first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/16/rescue-collective-life-by-reading-a-red-book/feed/ 0 373194 Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/10/thirteen-commandments-of-propaganda/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/10/thirteen-commandments-of-propaganda/#respond Fri, 10 Feb 2023 15:30:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137648 Orientation Definition of propaganda and the purpose of this article Are the chances better that you’d read this article if I called it The Ten Commandments of Propaganda? The author of the book The Ten Commandments of Propaganda thinks so because you have deep collective associations with the Ten Commandments because of the centuries of […]

    The post Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Orientation

    Definition of propaganda and the purpose of this article

    Are the chances better that you’d read this article if I called it The Ten Commandments of Propaganda? The author of the book The Ten Commandments of Propaganda thinks so because you have deep collective associations with the Ten Commandments because of the centuries of propaganda by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Because this article is rhetoric and not propaganda, I will take my chances, identifying thirteen commandments of propaganda.

    In my last article, Speaking with Forked Tongues, I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, cognitions, emotions and behavior while censoring, hiding, restricting distorting and exaggerating the claims of their opposition. Propaganda can be found in economics textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies, sports and even educational textbooks.

    A little less than two years ago I wrote an article called Jacques Ellul: Controversies in Propaganda. The purpose of this article is to explicate the theory of propaganda of Brian Anse Patrick in The Ten Commandments of Propaganda. Secondly and briefly, it will be to compare his theory to that of Ellul.

    Most Provocative Points of Ellul’s Propaganda Theory

    • Unlike other theorists, Ellul argued that propaganda served boththe upper classes and the lower classes for different reasons.
    • Unlike other theorists, he understood propaganda as inevitable in modern societies. There is no getting around this.
    • Unlike most other theorists, he saw masses of people as complicit in their own subordination. He saw them neither as victims of circumstance nor as heroic masses.
    • He distinguished between hard and fast political propagandaand soft and slow sociological  He called political propaganda “agitation”. Education is not outside propaganda. It is part of sociological propaganda.
    • He identified two techniques of propagandizing the masses. The first kind is mithridatizationwhich acts like a sedative and sensibilization which is about riling people up.
    • Unlike most other theorists of propaganda, Ellul followed Joseph Goebbels and said that the best propaganda is based on facts.It becomes propaganda with the interpretation of facts. Propaganda based on lies is a sign of weakness.
    • Most propaganda theorists thought the working class was most impacted by propaganda. Ellul argued that it is the upper-middle classes that create the propaganda and are most likely to believe it.
    • Ellul distinguished horizontal propaganda,which was made inside the group, from vertical propaganda, which uses centralized power. An example of horizontal propaganda was the re-educational groups of Yankee soldiers organized by the Chinese communists during Yankee imprisonment.
    • For Ellul, propaganda does not come from the ruling class, but from the upper-middle class.
    • Industrialist capitalist “democracies” need propagandabecause they depend on public opinion, which is disorganized. It requires propaganda to compete with socialist societies.
    • Unlike other theorists, Ellul makes a distinction between ideology and myth and argues that myth is more powerful.
    • His concept of crystallization claims that the individual has latent drives and stereotypes which are vague (based on the work of Karen Horney), and they then become the foundation of propaganda.
    • Unlike other schools of propaganda, Ellul argues that quantitative study of propaganda isn’t effective. One cannot tell how many people are reached and how effective white vs black propaganda is. At what point do you say it failed? At what point does the payoff justify the cost?
    • According to Ellul, psychological propaganda in foreign countries does not work. Propagandists are too ignorant of the attitudes, centers of interest, presuppositions and suspicions of the foreign population.

    Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda

    1. Control the information flow by becoming a source or distributor of information

    This includes creating news events, press releases, town hall meetings, scientific reports, op-ed pieces, direct mail appeals, talk show appearances, books, think tanks and commissions. It means creating novelties and hiring screen writers for movies. Many ideas are testing out the public by creating focus groups to see how people respond. This was shown in Parts I and II of Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self. Another technique was in the creating of Gallup polls which surveyed the opinions of Mordor’s citizens about sociological and political hot topics to see what floats and what doesn’t.

    1. Use black and white absolutes

    This was included in my previous article Speaking in Tongues in that it used loaded language, specifically virtue and vice words. Propaganda does not seem to work well when there seem to exist only many shades of gray. It is successful when it paints in broad, bold brushstrokes complicated social reality into a melodramatic, dichotomous struggle between good guys and bad guys. Nazi’s terms such as Jewish “bacillus” (parasites) to define the Jews helped the extermination process. Once the Jews were officially defined as the “parasitic nation of Judea” it became easier to do horrible things to them. The same is true with what was done to Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. Conspiracy theories are perfect frameworks for black and white thinking.

    Expect that as Mordor revs up its propaganda machine against China, Chinese images will appear, just like the image at the beginning of this article. Here the Chinese are wallowing in opium dens making them seem like a decadent culture. What is absent from the propaganda poster is the story of how the British brought opium to China to begin with.

    1. Crafting the message so it resonates with what is already in people’s heads in terms of their values and beliefs

    One of the two most common misunderstandings about propaganda is that propagandists want to introduce something new. Propagandists cannot afford to risk time, effort and resources on messages that might not fly. They need to work with the beliefs and commitments that people already have and just interpret the meaning differently. All a propagandist has to do to create negative propaganda is use propaganda which violates these values in order to drum up hostility among the natives against their supposed enemy. In psychological warfare, predictably, the CIA trots out its tired old list of atrocity stories of the enemy – eating babies, various betrayals to family and any of the violations of evolutionary psychology to work people up into supporting the latest war.

    Neither is it true that propaganda is filled with lies. It is true that black propaganda does this, but the use of black propaganda is a sign that propaganda’s messages come out of weakness rather than strength. Following Goebbels, Patrick says propaganda must be factual. It in the interpretation of the facts that propaganda makes its move. In addition to facts, there must be something inexorable about the interpretation as if it could not be any other way. It also must seem necessary, as if any other interpretation would lead to a disaster. Finally, the message must seem to have legitimacy, with the weight of the authorities and the ages behind it.

    1. Address psychological, spiritual and social needs of the population

    Over two thousand years ago Patrick points out, Aristotle identified what made people happy. He included security, the independent enjoyment of goods, health, wealth, friendship, good children, good birth and pleasant old age. Patrick says these are the same values American politicians draw from. The differences between people in different cultures is the order of these values, not the values themselves. In addition, what is important to people will draw their attention. Lastly, the biological need for food, sex and economic survival is sure to draw people out.

    Today Patrick says modern mass society the media person is a strange hybrid of neurotic insecurity and solipsistic egomania. A mass individual is socialized to think himself unique and inviolable in his opinion and in his voting. Propaganda must appeal to this.

    Propaganda must appeal to the individual’s identity, his ego, his power and his efficacy. The person must feel like he belongs somewhere, that he is wanted and useful. Lastly, propaganda must give the individual a sense of understanding the world, where it is going along with addressing the political anxiety that develops because of an absence of reassurance about direction. It also helps for the propaganda to have the appearance of hidden underground knowledge that is revealed only to superior beings.

    1. Censoring stories or contrary information

    Even if you control the content and sources of information, even if you hammer your message into dualistic opposites and even if you appeal to the beliefs and values of the audience, the message of propaganda will be weakened if the beliefs, values, movements, parties and programs of its opposition are allowed to be aired publicly. Propaganda must actively suppress its opposition. Patrick’s most blatant example of this is Britain’s cutting the transatlantic cable from Germany during the World War I. A weaker version of this is to make sure that stories that run against propaganda never get to the public through the press. For over two decades an organization called Project Censored comes out with a book which, among other things, contains 25 of the top censored stories every year. In the 2022 edition, here are some of the stories:

    1. Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americans
    2. Journalists investigating the Financial Crimes Threatened by Elites
    3. Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Worker Rights
    4. Google’s Union-Busting Methods Revealed
    5. Police Use of Dogs as Instruments of Violence Targets People of Color
    6. Corporate Media Sideline Health Experts during Pandemic
    7. US Factory Farming a Breeding Ground for Next Pandemic
    8. New Wave of Independent News Sources Demonized by Google-Owned You Tube
    9. Conservative Christian Groups Spend Globally to Promote Anti-LGBTQ Campaigns
    1. Use of group pressure to horizontally shape beliefs and behaviors

    Many, many people imagine propaganda works like the spokes of a wheel. In the center is the propagandist sending out information to separate the spokes. The relationship between the spokes has nothing to do with propaganda. But Patrick rightly claims horizontal propaganda (relationships between groups) is perhaps the most effective way yet of sustaining a propaganda message. It extends, supplements and complements centralized, authoritative bureaucratic propaganda. In the case of the Milgram experiment, the “teachers” obeyed the authorities not just because the authorities seemed legitimate, but because other members of the group were also shocking people. Maoist Chinese communists relied on hammering their propaganda in a centralized way. But they also wisely held writing contests for groups in which the winner of the essay would be the one that most successfully denounced US imperialism. These essays were then discussed in a groupsetting where the content of the essays reinforced the propaganda of the communists. In a text I used to use in teaching my Brainwashing, Propaganda and Rhetoric class, the author pointed out that when Yankee soldiers were asked why they stuck out horrendous situations, it wasn’t because of obedience to their officers and the propaganda of patriotism. It was because they didn’t want to let their comrades down.

    In cults, the central propaganda comes from the cult leader. But the cult leader by themselves is not strong enough to break the bond between the recruit and their family and friends. However, the propaganda is sustained by fellow cult members, especially when they are living together. The pressure of horizontal propaganda has often been strong enough to break the loyalty of the recruit to their own family. This is why families hire cult counselors to intervene to get their children out of the cult.

    A less heavy-headed approach can be seen in AA groups. The centralized propaganda of Alcoholics Anonymous are the twelve steps. But when a person declares that they are ready to graduate from AA, even the best sponsor will not be as successful in pressuring the person leaving to stay as much as having to face the group at one of their meetings. Similar processes are in place in the horizontal sustaining of propaganda in DARE and in Amway groups.

    When propagandists bombard a mass population, they never know how it will be perceived. There will always be people who are apathetic, recalcitrant or openly rebellious and are invisible to the vertical propagandists. However, once propaganda becomes horizontalized, groups have a far better record of winning the recruit to their side and for marginalizing or driving out deviants.

    Propagandists also have ways of controlling groups by spouting an ideology that seems to be the opposite of the propagandists’ attempts at control. Some of these include “Team” management; “Democratization” of the workplace; “quality” circles; “shared” governance. Once groups have begun implementing the ideology, it only becomes stronger and more difficult for people to recognize that team management hides the old authority; that democracy in the workplace is still controlled by managers; quality circles rarely result in higher pay for workers and shared governance still has the same bosses at the top. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

    1. Cognitively penetrate and stick

    How does the propagandist get attention in an age of attention deficit? How do they sustain the attention once it has been noticed? Two means of being noticed are novelty and humor. In the case of humor, from what I am told, there are an extraordinary number commercials during the Superbowl which are dominated by humor. A person is more likely to remember a brand when a commercial made them laugh.

    In order to sustain a person’s attention, the propagandist has to compete with many other propagandists from the fields of advertising, politics, economics and sports. An essential strategy is to burrow a hole into the consciousness by repeatingthe message. In addition, these messages must be simple and easy to understand, filled with slogans and with accompanying images. Popular music is a great example. I still remember the lyrics of rock and roll songs from 50 years ago because the verses were repeated, the music was simple (think of Motown) and there were the accompanying images of the musicians. For two thousand years the discipline of rhetoric has studied the ways in which people can have their minds and actions changed. Rhetorical devices – metaphors, acronyms, alliteration, and  rhyme – make language memorable, dramatic and visual.

    1. Personalize events

    Many years ago, I  worked as a counselor for an organization called Men Overcoming Violence. It was a 40-week program for men who were violent with their partners. Our job was to teach them better communication skills. Periodically we would hire outside speakers to give talks for the public that was related to our work. One time we had two presenters, each taking the opposite stance about the extent that violence was inevitable in men. The first presenter approached the problem statistically. He presented research from Darwinian evolutionary psychology. He also presented cross-cultural research claiming that men were nine times more likely to be violent than women. The second presenter took the case study approach. They brought up a man who had successfully graduated from our program. He told the audience the story of how he was once violent with his wife, but thanks to our program he had changed. Then he called on the man’s wife who testified about how much he had changed. There was not a dry eye in the house. After the two talks we asked the audience via secret ballot whether they thought men could ever be no more violent than woman. Guess who won? The personal story won out over the statistics.

    When we hear of mass shootings in the news are we presented with statistics on how many the police have killed in the course of the year? No. We are presented with the personal stories of either the victim or the slayer. Patrick points out that when a lawyer defends a multiple slayer to the jury, he is likely to lead with “my client made a mistake”. Everyone makes mistakes, right? It could have been you. Switching to cinema, whatever the movie you’re watching, you can be sure part of the trailer line will be “one man’s quest…to overcome adversity”. Heroes and villains – not sociology – dominate the popular imagination. What propagandists fear most is masses of people responding against the propagandists in a collective manner. In making the problem personal and psychological, collective responses are less likely.

    1. Bureaucratize events

    The flip side of personalizing events is to bureaucratize them, that is to convey the message that there is nothing that can be done to combat the propaganda. It removes the question of responsibility. To speak in a bureaucratic passive voice depersonalizes decisions which are ugly, stupid and arbitrary. Political scientist Edelman says the main function of modern mass political language is to sharpen the pointless to show some interest and blunt the too sharply pointed.

    In their book Bureaucratic Propaganda, David Altheide and John Johnson say that bureaucratic propaganda is used in how newsrooms use records; how tv ratings are constructed and interpreted and how religious movements count souls. Bureaucratic propaganda also includes keeping a transmission of records about what an organization does, how the police magnify or minimize its reports and how the military counts its casualties. Patrick points out:

    Military censors or media relations personnel avoid news images that show the caskets for the people on their side of the conflict, especially in quantity. In the first World War, despite nearly a million United Kingdom military dead, no British newspaper reputedly even showed a photography of a dead British soldier. Seeing actual bodies shocks and reduces morale. (148)

    In the political context, with competition for scarce funds, prestige and continued political support make records creation a self-serving activity. The capitalist state fudges rate of unemployment, the gross national product, the rate of inflation and the number of Covid cases to reassure the public that it has everything under control.

    With bureaucratic propaganda the public gets what Goffman called the “front” part of the organization and never the back side. Unlike traditional propaganda, bureaucratic propaganda does not try to reinforce deeply held beliefs, but instead the legitimacy of an existing organization through painting a contrived, managed and decontextualized picture. The appeal of bureaucratic propaganda is not to economic, political or advertising forces, but to the scientific validity, rationality and objectivity of an organization which will hopefully not be investigated. Officials are encouraged along with their subordinates to use two or more sets of records. One for the inspection of other officials and organizations and one for the privacy of insiders only.

    At the same time, bureaucratic propaganda can be used for political purposes while hiding under the cloak of dispensing information.

    In its nearly half century of official existence, the US Information Agency employed several thousand persons, mainly for “informing people” in foreign countries (especially the Soviet bloc) via news, education and entertainment broadcasts. (175)

    Op-ed pieces are another way of introducing scientific sub-propaganda to an unaware public. Gallup polls supposedly do a “need assessment” for social services or political programs and lo and behind, the bureaucratic organization is found to support public needs. On the other hand, if a research proposal contradicts the purpose of the bureaucratic organization it is not favorably reviewed or funded.

    Why people accept bureaucratic propaganda is partly because of the reasons Weber gave in his description of a bureaucracy. There are rational rules which govern an office (not capacious); people compete for their roles (vs nepotism) and are trained in the roles they play. They receive a regular salary and work is supervised. There are records kept of their work.

    1. Demonstrate good ethics

    Patrick points out that in Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, ethos was the most important element in persuasion. Though propaganda is different than rhetoric in many ways, including that it is impersonal, mass produced and standardized, it is still worth keeping in mind. One of the myths of propaganda is that it does not try to be moral. On the contrary, there is a need for conspicuous displays of ethics and morals in propaganda. One instance of political propaganda is Kipling’s justification for British colonialism as “The White Man’s Burden”.

    Patrick points out that a triumph of British and American propaganda during the 20th century was the successful attachment during both World Wars to the label of propaganda solely to Germans. For many, propaganda is associated forever with Joseph Goebbels. When one says propaganda people quickly think of jackboots and swastikas, but these are a direct result of Anglo-American propaganda. Later on, the same thing was done to the Soviet Union and Japan.

    The truth was that it was British and Americans who were best at propaganda. It was Bernays who first called propaganda by its real name. He then wisely switched it to “public relations” when he realized propaganda had some nasty political implications which would expose what he was actually doing. Americans disguised their propaganda efforts under euphemistic organizations such as the Committee of Public Information in World War I.  In World War II there was TheOffice of Wartime Information.

    Good ethics in propaganda means keeping control at all times and showing poise in difficult circumstances. Losing control in public with displays of anger show there might be conflicts between elites or a lack of confidence in propaganda. Secondly, propagandists want to appear as moderates, not as “extremists”. Third, propagandists must be dressed in a respectable manner, be in good shape physically and attractive. Further, other signs  of good ethics is that people are open and capable of handling disagreement. Being closed and defensive draws suspicion. Lastly, propagandists should have ethical codes of conduct, mission and vision statements which elevate propagandistic activities to the level of the broader social services.

    1. Dispense selective interpretation of facts

    As much as possible propagandists start with facts. What they do then is interpret the facts in a particular way. What the propagandist doesn’t tell you is that there may be four or five other ways of interpreting the facts and connecting the dots that are suppressed. For example, a Freudian propagandist may tell an audience at a psychoanalytic conference that depression is repressed anger. A graduate student may be very impressed. But what the Freudian propagandist will not discuss is that there are cognitive, behavioral, physiological theories of depression as well, and some of the better follow-up results than Freudians.

    1. Distance the propaganda from its source by using front groups like foundations, think tanks, and research patronage

    Propagandists rarely go to the public directly. They mediate their message through intermediate organizations such as universities, foundations, think tanks, policydiscussion group, and other organizations I’ll discuss shortly. This gives the propagandist credibility – or the benefit of the doubt that goes with organizations that appear to be just disinterested third parties.

    Political sociologist G. William Domhoff in his great book The Powers That Be, lays out a political funnel through which propaganda is disseminated. He starts out by saying the three most powerful economic organizations in Mordor are the Council of Foreign Relations, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Round Table. It is through these three organizations that all conservative and liberal propaganda is spun. The first level of dissemination is through the board of trustees of universities and through grants that come from foundations. These organizations then set up think tanks. Centrist think tanks are the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institute. There are lots of right-wing think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute; the Heritage Foundation; the Cato Institute; The Center for Strategic and International Studies; the Hoover Institute and the Manhattan Project.

    The only liberal Think Tank is the Ford Foundation. Johnny-come-lately social democratic think tanks are the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    The third level down are policy discussion groups from which testimonies, reports, books and editorials flow. The fourth level is the result of these policy discussion groups that go through mass media newscasts along with the Chambers of Commerce.

    All these filters peddle the same conservative-liberal propagandistic line. Willingness to toe the line determines which political candidates are chosen from either party.

    The Republicans and Democrats reproduce the same frameworks that were built at the university and foundation level. It doesn’t matter whether these candidates understand upper levels or not. In fact, it is more convincing if they don’t understand what they are doing because it appears that they are making up their own minds in what they say.

    1. Accommodate informational needs and habits of professionals

    Aiming propaganda at a mass audience is often wastefully ineffective.  It is a shotgun approach because the cynical Patrick says the masses are more likely to be apathetic and inattentive to anything other than sex and food. As Jacques Ellul has revealed, it is not the ruling class that creates propaganda. It is the upper-middle classes that are the explainers of capitalism to the rest of the population. That means that propagandists have to create, package and distributute propaganda in ways that suit the informational requirements and professional routines of journalists, editors, script writers, interest groups, voluntary associations, churches, trade associations, blogs,  and news media.

    For the past 100 years since the development of modern mass media, propagandists have provided pre-written news articles for use of journalists known as “press releases which benefit media organizations because fewer journalists are needed to process stories. (123)

    Most quotes from officials found in press releases are simply made up by the propagandists who write the releases. (124)

    What Would Jacques Ellul Say?

    Personalizing events

    One of the things that would have surprised Ellul is the power that personalization has in moving people. France is less individualistic than Mordor’s ideology  and people living in Mordor have become more individualistic in the past sixty years since Ellul wrote his book.

    Propaganda in black and white

    Ellul was more interested in the subtleties of propaganda. While he did make a distinction between propaganda designed to rile people up (which he called sensibilization) and to cool people out (which he called mithridatization), he was more interested in propaganda that pacified people.

    Horizontal propaganda

    Ellul did have room for horizontal propaganda in his system but he might have been surprised by the extent it has been developed in adding members of cults and AAA to the mix.

    The post Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/10/thirteen-commandments-of-propaganda/feed/ 0 371713     Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/beyond-prior-restraint-censorship-by-proxy-and-the-new-digital-gatekeeping/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/beyond-prior-restraint-censorship-by-proxy-and-the-new-digital-gatekeeping/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2023 23:30:29 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=27571 Project Censored is pleased to publish the first long-form article in our “Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics” column. Authored by Andy Lee Roth, Avram Anderson, and Mickey…

    The post Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping appeared first on Project Censored.

    ]]>     Project Censored is pleased to publish the first long-form article in our “Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics” column. Authored by Andy Lee Roth, Avram Anderson, and Mickey Huff, the piece draws heavily from a chapter they contributed to the forthcoming book, Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, edited by Robin Andersen, Nolan Higdon, and Steve Macek (Peter Lang). In this inaugural long-form piece, the authors take a deep dive into censorship by proxy, how it operates in contemporary American media, and what it means for media consumers. As we continue to develop our “Dispatches” column, we will include additional long-form pieces that offer in-depth reporting on the state of American media and how it intersects with politics.

    Please note: For reprints, please credit the piece as “adapted from the forthcoming Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, edited by Robin Andersen, Nolan Higdon, and Steve Macek (Peter Lang).”

    Defining “Censorship by Proxy”

    Online restrictions—including content moderation, advertising blocklists, and enforcement of “community standards,”implemented by Big Tech platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook—increasingly combine with government legislation to yield dangerous, but submerged threats to online freedom of information, not to mention the offline safety historically-oppressed or marginalized groups.

    Censorship has typically been treated as a matter of government control, with emphases in the United States on the role of the First Amendment and a host of legal precedents that establish limits on “prior restraint” by government. However, the rise of digital-era media giants—including Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), and Twitter—makes clear that media corporations now stand alongside government as commanding arbiters of legitimate discourse on public issues. “Google may not be a country, but it is a superpower,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Though Google, Facebook, Twitter and other media entities lack the formal legal authority of sovereign nation-states, “their capacity to enable or limit freedom of information and expression is greater than that of most states.”

    We explore these significant changes in the media landscape by developing the concept of censorship by proxy, which we define as restrictions on freedom of information 1) undertaken by private corporations, which 2) exceed the usual legal limits on governmental censorship, and 3) serve both corporate and government or third-party interests.

    The Example of RT America

    As an example of censorship by proxy, consider the demise of RT America, also known as Russia Today, which from 2010 until 2022 served as the US-based channel of the global, multilingual RT news network funded by the Russian government. On March 3, 2022, after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and amidst a popular wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the United States, RT America shut down. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who hosted “On Contact” on RT America, wrote, “This was long the plan of the US government.”

    But, in fact, it was not the US government that shut down RT America. Instead, DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV and Dish—all corporate entities—effectively censored RT America by deplatforming the channel: On March 1, 2022, DirecTV dropped RT America from its services; the following day, Roku did the same; and, on March 4, Sling TV and its parent company Dish removed RT America their platforms.

    But Hedges’ analysis of the US government’s aims was not off-target. Well before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the US government had placed restrictions on RT America and journalists working for it. In November 2017, facing legal pressure from the US Department of Justice, RT America had registered as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Although RT America, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera, and several Chinese state media outlets have been required to register under FARA, the BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and Canada’s CBC have not, leading some critics to suggest that the designation “has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism.”

    An intelligence assessment spurred the Justice Department’s pressure to register RT under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. A now-declassified January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluded that “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” contributed to the Russian “influence campaign” to swing the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. According to the ICA—which combined analyses by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA—RT America’s programing highlighted “criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties” and was an important “messaging tool” in the “Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US government and fuel political protest.”

    The Committee to Protect Journalists criticized the Justice Department for forcing RT to register as a foreign agent, describing this as a “shift in how the law has been applied in recent decades” and “a bad idea” that empowered governments to decide “what constitutes journalism or propaganda.” Journalists at registered outlets stated that “the stigma attached with registering” compromised their ability “to carry out normal journalistic activities,” the CPJ reported subsequently.

    The US government could have silenced RT America outright, but doing so would have prompted negative repercussions. An overt government decision to censor RT America would likely have generated not only widespread domestic criticism of the action as a violation of constitutionally-protected press freedoms, but also Russian blowback in the form of retaliation in kind against US-based news organizations operating in Russia.

    Instead, the decisions of a handful of US-based media service providers achieved the same end without any of the domestic or international political costs. This case exemplifies the phenomenon we describe as censorship by proxy. Because censorship by proxy can occur wherever the interests and powers of global corporations and national governments intersect, it is an international phenomenon.

    Returning to the case of RT America, note that, in addition to the groundwork laid by the Justice Department’s designation of the broadcaster and its journalists as registered “foreign agents,” the marked rise in anti-Russian public opinion following the Russian invasion of Ukraine also contributed to the news channel’s demise. DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV, and Dish each decided to drop RT America from their platforms in protest against the Russian invasion, and likely in response to public campaigns urging them to do so. The corporate deplatforming of RT America should be understood not only as a case of censorship by proxy, but also as a product of a “moral panic” in which the Russian news channel was cast as a “folk devil” and the media service providers that deplatformed it positioned themselves as defenders of established values.

    Moral Panics Prompt Censorship by Proxy

    Informed by pioneering studies in the sociology of deviance by Howard Becker, Stanley Cohen, and Stuart Hall, social scientists, media scholars use the term “moral panic” to describe social fears based on the belief that a stereotyped group or category of people threatens the values, safety, or interests of a community. These stereotypes often center on identities marginalized within the community or wider society, including, for example, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nationality, religion, or class.

    Despite the concept’s wording, moral panics are usually about politics as much as morality. This is especially so in contexts of social, political, or economic tension, when the manufacture of moral panic is useful because it can quickly and effectively produce social solidarity. Moral panics can rapidly convert outrage into political action. Notably, however, studies on a diverse range of moral panics, from the Salem witch trials in the 17th century to the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrate that political action in response to moral panics often serves to reinforce and expand the authority of groups already holding power.

    Our analysis shows how practitioners of censorship by proxy often participate in the construction or amplification of moral panics to justify restrictions on freedom of information. Political leaders and Big Tech platforms alike champion online safety—often with paternalistic calls to protect women and children—in the name of “cleaning up” online spaces, but the measures they propose often serve to muzzle legitimate political dissent, further marginalize already vulnerable communities, and divide members of the public by pitting, for example, the safety of children against freedom of information.

    How Censorship by Proxy Works: Content Moderation, Community Standards, and Advertising Blocklists

    Online censorship has been made more palatable through rebranding as “content moderation” or enforcement of “community standards,” undertaken by corporations as much as government agencies. Content moderation often leads to innocent content being flagged as harmful or explicit, which leads to the silencing of marginalized voices. Here we focus especially on LGBTQ+ content, but, under the guise of countering “fake news,” censorship by proxy also restricts progressive independent news outlets that depend on major media platforms for content distribution, advertising revenue, and fundraising.

    From Facebook to YouTube, the biggest social media platforms all engage in forms of content blocking that negatively impact LGBTQ people and communities. Due to a double-standard, the same algorithms that ban LGBTQ-themed hashtags and demonetize YouTube channels with LGBTQ content often permit or even promote homophobic and transphobic content. No overarching policy, much less any kind of government directive leads to these outcomes; instead, the marginalization or erasure of queer content online is a case of censorship by proxy that reflects—and reinforces—moral panic orchestrated by the religious right and embraced by many Republican politicians, as Katherine Stewart documented in The Power Worshippers.

    Under the guise of addressing hate speech, Facebook has applied strict real-name policies that prevent transgender people from using their chosen names and identities, blocked advertising with LGBTQ content or themes, while instituting criteria for “protected” and “unprotected” categories that promote homophobic and transphobic content. To moderate “adult” content, Instagram has deplatformed users, banned hashtags, and shadow-banned posts and ads with LGBTQ content. In efforts to manage bullying or harassment based on users’ “physical or mental condition,” TikTok has implemented moderation guidelines that outlaw LGBTQ content.  Twitter has implemented bans on “sensitive media” terms that restrict efforts by LGBTQ people to reclaim and take pride in slurs, because content moderation processes often disregard the poster’s intent. In January 2021, a federal judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against YouTube, filed by LGBT content creators, who claimed that the video sharing platform had violated their First Amendment rights by censoring their content and demonetizing their channels. US District Court Magistrate Virginia DeMarchi ruled that, as private entities, YouTube and its parent company, Google, were not bound by the First Amendment, a ruling that received nearly no news coverage.

    Advertising Interests Drive Censorship by Proxy

    In a new wrinkle on how advertising interests shape the production and distribution of online content, advertisers now use “blocklists” to avoid having their products associated with content that they believe might damage their brands’ reputations with target consumers. The advertising blocklists employed by many prominent corporations to promote “brand safety” now employ artificial intelligence technology to scan for as many as 7,000 different words and phrases.

    A 2019 study by CHEQ, a cybersecurity business, found that “more than half (57%) of neutral or positive stories on major news sites are being incorrectly flagged as unsafe for advertising.” The impact of blocklists was most pronounced on LGBTQ-focused news outlets: 73 percent of the safe content in The Advocate and PinkNews was inappropriately flagged as unsafe for advertising, CHEQ found. The editor of PinkNews, Benjamin Cohen, told CHEQ that a lot of content gets blocked “for no legitimate reason.” Ad networks are “blocking content for the word ‘lesbian’ because they lazily think lesbian equals porn,” Cohen explained.

    Deprived of precious advertising revenue, LGBTQ+ media outlets become even more vulnerable to cuts, layoffs, and closures. Brand safety based on blocking keywords is “hurting minority voices, such as LGBT communities,” CHEQ concluded. Jerry Daykin, an ad exec and LGBTQ+ advocate, put it even more starkly, telling CHEQ, without more careful consideration of how advertising blocklists work, “We’ll continue to see minority voices squeezed out of media.”

    The EARN IT Act

    To clarify the potential scope of censorship by proxy, consider the EARN IT Act, introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in early 2022. The bill proposes to establish a national commission to “develop best practices for interactive computer services providers (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) to prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children,” and also limits “the liability protections of interactive computer service providers with respect to claims alleging violations of child sexual exploitation laws.” The EARN IT Act would severely weaken Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity from prosecution to electronic service providers for most user-posted content, a provision the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cites as “the most important law protecting internet speech.”

    The 2022 EARN IT Act revived a 2020 version of the legislation, which lawmakers had dropped after it was strongly opposed by a number of organizations that promote press freedoms and digital rights, including EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Article 19, and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Both versions of the EARN IT Act build on a 2018 federal law known as FOSTA-SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). FOSTA-CESTA established an exception to Section 230, making online platforms legally liable for third-party content that promotes sex trafficking. As numerous critics have noted, FOSTA-SESTA has chilled online speech and restricted privacy rights in ways that disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, and others who depend on internet privacy. FOSTA-SESTA led to the closure of Craigslist personals, the gutting of Tumblr after it banned all “adult” content, and new restrictions on Instagram, consequences that only begin to foreshadow the potential impacts of the 2022 EARN IT Act.

    While affirming the importance of curbing “the scourge of child exploitation online,” in February 2022, Article 19 and 48 additional organizations— including the American Civil Liberties Union, the EFF, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and PEN America—sent an open letter to the US Senate, opposing the EARN IT Act on the grounds that it “will actually make it harder for law enforcement to protect children. It will also result in online censorship that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and will jeopardize access to encrypted services.”

    Opponents of the EARN IT Act foresee a dramatic expansion of liability under state laws if the EARN IT Act revokes the protections afforded service providers by Section 230, a watershed change that would lead service providers to engage in overbroad censorship of online speech. As Article 19’s open letter to the US Senate noted, these chilling effects would especially restrict “content created by diverse communities, including LGBTQ individuals, whose posts are disproportionately labeled erroneously as sexually explicit.”

    Critics of the EARN IT Act also decry it as a Trojan horse effort to erode end-to-end encryption, which helps internet users—including journalists, activists, and members of marginalized communities—keep their online data and communications private and secure. Online services would be likely to stop using end-to-end encryption because it is also considered a “red flag” for law enforcement officials investigating online child sex-abuse materials (CSAM). Although end-to-end encryption protects the freedom of expression and privacy of all internet users, it is especially important for members of LGBTQ+ communities. As LGBT Tech and the Internet Society have noted, strong encryption provides privacy for LGBTQ+ people while coming out and connecting, and it empowers transgender people “to safely use the Internet to find doctors and treatment during transitions.”

    Outside the United States, other nations have enacted or are pursuing similar laws. In January 2022, Australia enacted its Online Safety Act. According to the government, the law strengthens previous cyberbullying protections for children and adults and authorizes the nation’s eSafety Commissioner to “get the ‘worst of the worst’ content removed no matter where it’s hosted.” In March 2022, the Australian news site Junkee reported that the law’s “overly broad take-down powers” are threatening queer online spaces and “silencing LGBTIQ culture.” Comparable legislation, the Online Safety Bill, is under review in the United Kingdom, and subject to similar criticisms.

    Online Restrictions and Offline Repercussions

    Some worst-case consequences of what US legislation such as the EARN IT might lead to can be appreciated by reviewing the chilling effects of Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda law.”

    In 2011, Russia established a federal law that restricted the distribution of “harmful” material among minors, including information that depicted violence, illegal activities, substance abuse, self-harm, or that might “elicit fear, horror, or panic in children.” After subsequent revisions to the law, in 2012 and 2013, legislation first enacted as a content rating system morphed into a sweeping law that criminalizes “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” as a class of harmful content. As the Guardian reported at the time, the 2013 law “stigmatizes gay people and bans giving children any information about homosexuality.” In 2018, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report that analyzed Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law as “a classic example of political homophobia,” which “targets vulnerable sexual and gender minorities for political gain.” Based on in-depth interviews with sexual and gender minority youth and mental health providers and social workers in Russia, HRW found that the law not only limits sexuality education, but also has been used to shut down online information and mental health referrals for youth, exacerbated hostility toward LGBT people, and had a chilling effect on mental health professionals and others who work with LGBT youth.

    Although there has been global protest against Russia’s anti-LGBTQ policies, especially during the leadups to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the Russian-hosted 2018 World Cup, much less attention has been focused on the role of the religious right in the United States in creating Russia’s anti-gay movement. As Mother Jones reported in February 2014, Russians have “adopted the kind of language the American religious right has long deployed to fight acceptance of homosexuality”—including terms such as “natural family,” “traditional values,” and “protecting children.”

    This was the result, Mother Jones reported, of the direct influence of the Illinois-based World Congress of Families, an umbrella organization for many of the most influential religious right groups in the US. “The rise of anti-gay laws in Russia has mirrored, almost perfectly, the rise of WCF’s work in the country,” Mother Jones reported in 2014. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the WCF as a designated hate group, based on its anti-LGBTQ ideology:

    Though its origins are in the American Christian Right, the WCF has built a web of influence in different countries, providing a point of networking for global anti-LGBT forces… Its legacy includes the mainstreaming of the so-called “natural family” doctrine, one that has been used to curtail LGBT and reproductive rights across the world.

    The channels of influence between anti-LBGTQ interests in the United States and Russia run in both directions. As Mother Jones reported in 2014, “elements of the US religious right have come to see Russia as a redoubt in a global battle against homosexuality.”

    Inspired though it may by the Russian model, the crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States has developed through different channels. In Russia, the national government has spearheaded the crackdown; in the United States, media giants and state governments, spurred by anti-LGBT groups such as Project Blitz, have acted in concert to provide the one-two punch necessary to create what even establishment news outlets have reported as an “unprecedented” wave and “historic tally” of anti-LGBTQ legislation, as monitored by Blitz Watch. These dynamics exemplify a more complex and subtle variation of censorship by proxy.

    In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to consider gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents child abuse; in Florida, Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms and requires any instruction on those topics to be age-appropriate and in accordance with state standards. Across the United States, educational gag orders—including 15 legislative bills in nine states and “sweeping book bans”—target speech about LGBTQ+ identities, PEN America reported in February 2022.

    These legislative efforts dovetail with restrictions on LGBTQ+ content online, including content moderation, community standards, and advertising blocklists administered by corporate platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as described in earlier sections of this article. From online content restrictions to offline curriculum regulations and other forms of exclusionary legislation, the United States is at risk of rivaling Russia in silencing LGBTQ+ voices and marginalizing LGBTQ+ identities.

    Three Strategies to Counter Censorship by Proxy

    The ability to censor is not limited to government agencies. Instead, corporate entities—including especially media giants such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—exert profound influence on our channels of communication, controlling what members of the public are most likely to see—and what content and perspectives those audiences are unlikely to ever to come across, unless they actively seek them out.

    In the hope of spurring engagement with these concerns, we conclude with a brief overview of three possible remedies to online censorship by proxy.

    First, Design from the Margins (DFM) offers one promising approach for developing technology, apps, and online platforms that protect historically oppressed or marginalized groups. Developed by Afsaneh Rigot, a researcher affiliated with Article 19 and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, DFM originated from an effort to counter what Rigot has described as the “weaponization of social media, messenger, and dating apps.” By contrast, when technology is designed from the onset with the vulnerabilities of oppressed and marginalized users in mind, all users benefit from greater security. Rigot’s research has already led to significant improvements in the design of dating apps used by LGBTQ+ people in countries where authorities and non-state actors regularly target members of LGBTQ+ communities.

    Second, we ought to think creatively about how DFM principles might apply to media more broadly. There are promising overlaps between DFM and a number of the guidelines for ethical journalism advocated by the Society of Professional Journalists. Under the basic guideline, “Seek Truth and Report It,” for example, the SPJ includes guidance to avoid stereotypes, to label advocacy as such, and to support “the open and civil exchange of views,” even when those views might be deemed “repugnant” by some. A full discussion of the crossover between these principles of ethical journalism and a Design from the Margins approach goes beyond the scope of this concluding discussion. But, for now, we note that content moderation, community standards, and advertising guidelines, would likely look rather different in the future than they do now, if DFM principles served as foundations, rather than afterthoughts. Similarly, strong encryption—imperiled by legislation such as the EARN IT Act—protects vulnerable groups subject to systemic discrimination.

    US policy decisions will affect not only US users but also set precedents around the world. Those concerned with opposing global crackdowns on freedom of information and expression should lend their support to efforts to preserve end-to-end encryption online.

    Third and finally, critical media literacy—as championed by organizations such as Project Censored, the Critical Media Project, and the Propwatch Project, to name only a few—can help to raise public awareness about the extent of censorship by proxy, and to defuse the power of moral panics. Censorship is most powerful when it is invisible; moral panic is most inflammatory when heightened anxieties make it easier to draw conclusions that might be counter to logic. Informed by the basic principles of critical media literacy, members of the public are more likely to recognize censorship by proxy and less likely to be irrationally swayed by moral panic.

    Andy Lee Roth is a sociologist and associate director of Project Censored. He is coeditor, with Mickey Huff, of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023, and a member of the Media Revolution Collective that wrote The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media LIteracy for Young People.

    Avram Anderson is an electronic resources management specialist at California State University, Northridge, and a member and advocate of the LGBTQI+ community researching LGBTQI+ censorship, in print and online. In addition to coauthoring The Media and Me, they also serve on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

    Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored, coeditor of the Censored yearbook series, and coauthor of United States of Distraction, Let’s Agree to Disagree, and The Media and Me. Huff teaches social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College, and serves as executive producer and cohost of The Project Censored Show, the Project’s nationally syndicated public affairs program.

    The post Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/beyond-prior-restraint-censorship-by-proxy-and-the-new-digital-gatekeeping/feed/ 0 371367     Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/beyond-prior-restraint-censorship-by-proxy-and-the-new-digital-gatekeeping/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/beyond-prior-restraint-censorship-by-proxy-and-the-new-digital-gatekeeping/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2023 23:30:29 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=27571 Project Censored is pleased to publish the first long-form article in our “Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics” column. Authored by Andy Lee Roth, Avram Anderson, and Mickey…

    The post Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping appeared first on Project Censored.

    ]]>     Project Censored is pleased to publish the first long-form article in our “Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics” column. Authored by Andy Lee Roth, Avram Anderson, and Mickey Huff, the piece draws heavily from a chapter they contributed to the forthcoming book, Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, edited by Robin Andersen, Nolan Higdon, and Steve Macek (Peter Lang). In this inaugural long-form piece, the authors take a deep dive into censorship by proxy, how it operates in contemporary American media, and what it means for media consumers. As we continue to develop our “Dispatches” column, we will include additional long-form pieces that offer in-depth reporting on the state of American media and how it intersects with politics.

    Please note: For reprints, please credit the piece as “adapted from the forthcoming Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, edited by Robin Andersen, Nolan Higdon, and Steve Macek (Peter Lang).”

    Defining “Censorship by Proxy”

    Online restrictions—including content moderation, advertising blocklists, and enforcement of “community standards,”implemented by Big Tech platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook—increasingly combine with government legislation to yield dangerous, but submerged threats to online freedom of information, not to mention the offline safety historically-oppressed or marginalized groups.

    Censorship has typically been treated as a matter of government control, with emphases in the United States on the role of the First Amendment and a host of legal precedents that establish limits on “prior restraint” by government. However, the rise of digital-era media giants—including Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), and Twitter—makes clear that media corporations now stand alongside government as commanding arbiters of legitimate discourse on public issues. “Google may not be a country, but it is a superpower,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. Though Google, Facebook, Twitter and other media entities lack the formal legal authority of sovereign nation-states, “their capacity to enable or limit freedom of information and expression is greater than that of most states.”

    We explore these significant changes in the media landscape by developing the concept of censorship by proxy, which we define as restrictions on freedom of information 1) undertaken by private corporations, which 2) exceed the usual legal limits on governmental censorship, and 3) serve both corporate and government or third-party interests.

    The Example of RT America

    As an example of censorship by proxy, consider the demise of RT America, also known as Russia Today, which from 2010 until 2022 served as the US-based channel of the global, multilingual RT news network funded by the Russian government. On March 3, 2022, after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and amidst a popular wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the United States, RT America shut down. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who hosted “On Contact” on RT America, wrote, “This was long the plan of the US government.”

    But, in fact, it was not the US government that shut down RT America. Instead, DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV and Dish—all corporate entities—effectively censored RT America by deplatforming the channel: On March 1, 2022, DirecTV dropped RT America from its services; the following day, Roku did the same; and, on March 4, Sling TV and its parent company Dish removed RT America their platforms.

    But Hedges’ analysis of the US government’s aims was not off-target. Well before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the US government had placed restrictions on RT America and journalists working for it. In November 2017, facing legal pressure from the US Department of Justice, RT America had registered as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Although RT America, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera, and several Chinese state media outlets have been required to register under FARA, the BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and Canada’s CBC have not, leading some critics to suggest that the designation “has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism.”

    An intelligence assessment spurred the Justice Department’s pressure to register RT under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. A now-declassified January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concluded that “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” contributed to the Russian “influence campaign” to swing the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. According to the ICA—which combined analyses by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA—RT America’s programing highlighted “criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties” and was an important “messaging tool” in the “Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US government and fuel political protest.”

    The Committee to Protect Journalists criticized the Justice Department for forcing RT to register as a foreign agent, describing this as a “shift in how the law has been applied in recent decades” and “a bad idea” that empowered governments to decide “what constitutes journalism or propaganda.” Journalists at registered outlets stated that “the stigma attached with registering” compromised their ability “to carry out normal journalistic activities,” the CPJ reported subsequently.

    The US government could have silenced RT America outright, but doing so would have prompted negative repercussions. An overt government decision to censor RT America would likely have generated not only widespread domestic criticism of the action as a violation of constitutionally-protected press freedoms, but also Russian blowback in the form of retaliation in kind against US-based news organizations operating in Russia.

    Instead, the decisions of a handful of US-based media service providers achieved the same end without any of the domestic or international political costs. This case exemplifies the phenomenon we describe as censorship by proxy. Because censorship by proxy can occur wherever the interests and powers of global corporations and national governments intersect, it is an international phenomenon.

    Returning to the case of RT America, note that, in addition to the groundwork laid by the Justice Department’s designation of the broadcaster and its journalists as registered “foreign agents,” the marked rise in anti-Russian public opinion following the Russian invasion of Ukraine also contributed to the news channel’s demise. DirectTV, Roku, Sling TV, and Dish each decided to drop RT America from their platforms in protest against the Russian invasion, and likely in response to public campaigns urging them to do so. The corporate deplatforming of RT America should be understood not only as a case of censorship by proxy, but also as a product of a “moral panic” in which the Russian news channel was cast as a “folk devil” and the media service providers that deplatformed it positioned themselves as defenders of established values.

    Moral Panics Prompt Censorship by Proxy

    Informed by pioneering studies in the sociology of deviance by Howard Becker, Stanley Cohen, and Stuart Hall, social scientists, media scholars use the term “moral panic” to describe social fears based on the belief that a stereotyped group or category of people threatens the values, safety, or interests of a community. These stereotypes often center on identities marginalized within the community or wider society, including, for example, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nationality, religion, or class.

    Despite the concept’s wording, moral panics are usually about politics as much as morality. This is especially so in contexts of social, political, or economic tension, when the manufacture of moral panic is useful because it can quickly and effectively produce social solidarity. Moral panics can rapidly convert outrage into political action. Notably, however, studies on a diverse range of moral panics, from the Salem witch trials in the 17th century to the “War on Drugs” in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrate that political action in response to moral panics often serves to reinforce and expand the authority of groups already holding power.

    Our analysis shows how practitioners of censorship by proxy often participate in the construction or amplification of moral panics to justify restrictions on freedom of information. Political leaders and Big Tech platforms alike champion online safety—often with paternalistic calls to protect women and children—in the name of “cleaning up” online spaces, but the measures they propose often serve to muzzle legitimate political dissent, further marginalize already vulnerable communities, and divide members of the public by pitting, for example, the safety of children against freedom of information.

    How Censorship by Proxy Works: Content Moderation, Community Standards, and Advertising Blocklists

    Online censorship has been made more palatable through rebranding as “content moderation” or enforcement of “community standards,” undertaken by corporations as much as government agencies. Content moderation often leads to innocent content being flagged as harmful or explicit, which leads to the silencing of marginalized voices. Here we focus especially on LGBTQ+ content, but, under the guise of countering “fake news,” censorship by proxy also restricts progressive independent news outlets that depend on major media platforms for content distribution, advertising revenue, and fundraising.

    From Facebook to YouTube, the biggest social media platforms all engage in forms of content blocking that negatively impact LGBTQ people and communities. Due to a double-standard, the same algorithms that ban LGBTQ-themed hashtags and demonetize YouTube channels with LGBTQ content often permit or even promote homophobic and transphobic content. No overarching policy, much less any kind of government directive leads to these outcomes; instead, the marginalization or erasure of queer content online is a case of censorship by proxy that reflects—and reinforces—moral panic orchestrated by the religious right and embraced by many Republican politicians, as Katherine Stewart documented in The Power Worshippers.

    Under the guise of addressing hate speech, Facebook has applied strict real-name policies that prevent transgender people from using their chosen names and identities, blocked advertising with LGBTQ content or themes, while instituting criteria for “protected” and “unprotected” categories that promote homophobic and transphobic content. To moderate “adult” content, Instagram has deplatformed users, banned hashtags, and shadow-banned posts and ads with LGBTQ content. In efforts to manage bullying or harassment based on users’ “physical or mental condition,” TikTok has implemented moderation guidelines that outlaw LGBTQ content.  Twitter has implemented bans on “sensitive media” terms that restrict efforts by LGBTQ people to reclaim and take pride in slurs, because content moderation processes often disregard the poster’s intent. In January 2021, a federal judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against YouTube, filed by LGBT content creators, who claimed that the video sharing platform had violated their First Amendment rights by censoring their content and demonetizing their channels. US District Court Magistrate Virginia DeMarchi ruled that, as private entities, YouTube and its parent company, Google, were not bound by the First Amendment, a ruling that received nearly no news coverage.

    Advertising Interests Drive Censorship by Proxy

    In a new wrinkle on how advertising interests shape the production and distribution of online content, advertisers now use “blocklists” to avoid having their products associated with content that they believe might damage their brands’ reputations with target consumers. The advertising blocklists employed by many prominent corporations to promote “brand safety” now employ artificial intelligence technology to scan for as many as 7,000 different words and phrases.

    A 2019 study by CHEQ, a cybersecurity business, found that “more than half (57%) of neutral or positive stories on major news sites are being incorrectly flagged as unsafe for advertising.” The impact of blocklists was most pronounced on LGBTQ-focused news outlets: 73 percent of the safe content in The Advocate and PinkNews was inappropriately flagged as unsafe for advertising, CHEQ found. The editor of PinkNews, Benjamin Cohen, told CHEQ that a lot of content gets blocked “for no legitimate reason.” Ad networks are “blocking content for the word ‘lesbian’ because they lazily think lesbian equals porn,” Cohen explained.

    Deprived of precious advertising revenue, LGBTQ+ media outlets become even more vulnerable to cuts, layoffs, and closures. Brand safety based on blocking keywords is “hurting minority voices, such as LGBT communities,” CHEQ concluded. Jerry Daykin, an ad exec and LGBTQ+ advocate, put it even more starkly, telling CHEQ, without more careful consideration of how advertising blocklists work, “We’ll continue to see minority voices squeezed out of media.”

    The EARN IT Act

    To clarify the potential scope of censorship by proxy, consider the EARN IT Act, introduced by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in early 2022. The bill proposes to establish a national commission to “develop best practices for interactive computer services providers (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) to prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children,” and also limits “the liability protections of interactive computer service providers with respect to claims alleging violations of child sexual exploitation laws.” The EARN IT Act would severely weaken Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity from prosecution to electronic service providers for most user-posted content, a provision the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cites as “the most important law protecting internet speech.”

    The 2022 EARN IT Act revived a 2020 version of the legislation, which lawmakers had dropped after it was strongly opposed by a number of organizations that promote press freedoms and digital rights, including EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Article 19, and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Both versions of the EARN IT Act build on a 2018 federal law known as FOSTA-SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). FOSTA-CESTA established an exception to Section 230, making online platforms legally liable for third-party content that promotes sex trafficking. As numerous critics have noted, FOSTA-SESTA has chilled online speech and restricted privacy rights in ways that disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, and others who depend on internet privacy. FOSTA-SESTA led to the closure of Craigslist personals, the gutting of Tumblr after it banned all “adult” content, and new restrictions on Instagram, consequences that only begin to foreshadow the potential impacts of the 2022 EARN IT Act.

    While affirming the importance of curbing “the scourge of child exploitation online,” in February 2022, Article 19 and 48 additional organizations— including the American Civil Liberties Union, the EFF, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and PEN America—sent an open letter to the US Senate, opposing the EARN IT Act on the grounds that it “will actually make it harder for law enforcement to protect children. It will also result in online censorship that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and will jeopardize access to encrypted services.”

    Opponents of the EARN IT Act foresee a dramatic expansion of liability under state laws if the EARN IT Act revokes the protections afforded service providers by Section 230, a watershed change that would lead service providers to engage in overbroad censorship of online speech. As Article 19’s open letter to the US Senate noted, these chilling effects would especially restrict “content created by diverse communities, including LGBTQ individuals, whose posts are disproportionately labeled erroneously as sexually explicit.”

    Critics of the EARN IT Act also decry it as a Trojan horse effort to erode end-to-end encryption, which helps internet users—including journalists, activists, and members of marginalized communities—keep their online data and communications private and secure. Online services would be likely to stop using end-to-end encryption because it is also considered a “red flag” for law enforcement officials investigating online child sex-abuse materials (CSAM). Although end-to-end encryption protects the freedom of expression and privacy of all internet users, it is especially important for members of LGBTQ+ communities. As LGBT Tech and the Internet Society have noted, strong encryption provides privacy for LGBTQ+ people while coming out and connecting, and it empowers transgender people “to safely use the Internet to find doctors and treatment during transitions.”

    Outside the United States, other nations have enacted or are pursuing similar laws. In January 2022, Australia enacted its Online Safety Act. According to the government, the law strengthens previous cyberbullying protections for children and adults and authorizes the nation’s eSafety Commissioner to “get the ‘worst of the worst’ content removed no matter where it’s hosted.” In March 2022, the Australian news site Junkee reported that the law’s “overly broad take-down powers” are threatening queer online spaces and “silencing LGBTIQ culture.” Comparable legislation, the Online Safety Bill, is under review in the United Kingdom, and subject to similar criticisms.

    Online Restrictions and Offline Repercussions

    Some worst-case consequences of what US legislation such as the EARN IT might lead to can be appreciated by reviewing the chilling effects of Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda law.”

    In 2011, Russia established a federal law that restricted the distribution of “harmful” material among minors, including information that depicted violence, illegal activities, substance abuse, self-harm, or that might “elicit fear, horror, or panic in children.” After subsequent revisions to the law, in 2012 and 2013, legislation first enacted as a content rating system morphed into a sweeping law that criminalizes “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” as a class of harmful content. As the Guardian reported at the time, the 2013 law “stigmatizes gay people and bans giving children any information about homosexuality.” In 2018, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report that analyzed Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law as “a classic example of political homophobia,” which “targets vulnerable sexual and gender minorities for political gain.” Based on in-depth interviews with sexual and gender minority youth and mental health providers and social workers in Russia, HRW found that the law not only limits sexuality education, but also has been used to shut down online information and mental health referrals for youth, exacerbated hostility toward LGBT people, and had a chilling effect on mental health professionals and others who work with LGBT youth.

    Although there has been global protest against Russia’s anti-LGBTQ policies, especially during the leadups to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the Russian-hosted 2018 World Cup, much less attention has been focused on the role of the religious right in the United States in creating Russia’s anti-gay movement. As Mother Jones reported in February 2014, Russians have “adopted the kind of language the American religious right has long deployed to fight acceptance of homosexuality”—including terms such as “natural family,” “traditional values,” and “protecting children.”

    This was the result, Mother Jones reported, of the direct influence of the Illinois-based World Congress of Families, an umbrella organization for many of the most influential religious right groups in the US. “The rise of anti-gay laws in Russia has mirrored, almost perfectly, the rise of WCF’s work in the country,” Mother Jones reported in 2014. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the WCF as a designated hate group, based on its anti-LGBTQ ideology:

    Though its origins are in the American Christian Right, the WCF has built a web of influence in different countries, providing a point of networking for global anti-LGBT forces… Its legacy includes the mainstreaming of the so-called “natural family” doctrine, one that has been used to curtail LGBT and reproductive rights across the world.

    The channels of influence between anti-LBGTQ interests in the United States and Russia run in both directions. As Mother Jones reported in 2014, “elements of the US religious right have come to see Russia as a redoubt in a global battle against homosexuality.”

    Inspired though it may by the Russian model, the crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States has developed through different channels. In Russia, the national government has spearheaded the crackdown; in the United States, media giants and state governments, spurred by anti-LGBT groups such as Project Blitz, have acted in concert to provide the one-two punch necessary to create what even establishment news outlets have reported as an “unprecedented” wave and “historic tally” of anti-LGBTQ legislation, as monitored by Blitz Watch. These dynamics exemplify a more complex and subtle variation of censorship by proxy.

    In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to consider gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents child abuse; in Florida, Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms and requires any instruction on those topics to be age-appropriate and in accordance with state standards. Across the United States, educational gag orders—including 15 legislative bills in nine states and “sweeping book bans”—target speech about LGBTQ+ identities, PEN America reported in February 2022.

    These legislative efforts dovetail with restrictions on LGBTQ+ content online, including content moderation, community standards, and advertising blocklists administered by corporate platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as described in earlier sections of this article. From online content restrictions to offline curriculum regulations and other forms of exclusionary legislation, the United States is at risk of rivaling Russia in silencing LGBTQ+ voices and marginalizing LGBTQ+ identities.

    Three Strategies to Counter Censorship by Proxy

    The ability to censor is not limited to government agencies. Instead, corporate entities—including especially media giants such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—exert profound influence on our channels of communication, controlling what members of the public are most likely to see—and what content and perspectives those audiences are unlikely to ever to come across, unless they actively seek them out.

    In the hope of spurring engagement with these concerns, we conclude with a brief overview of three possible remedies to online censorship by proxy.

    First, Design from the Margins (DFM) offers one promising approach for developing technology, apps, and online platforms that protect historically oppressed or marginalized groups. Developed by Afsaneh Rigot, a researcher affiliated with Article 19 and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, DFM originated from an effort to counter what Rigot has described as the “weaponization of social media, messenger, and dating apps.” By contrast, when technology is designed from the onset with the vulnerabilities of oppressed and marginalized users in mind, all users benefit from greater security. Rigot’s research has already led to significant improvements in the design of dating apps used by LGBTQ+ people in countries where authorities and non-state actors regularly target members of LGBTQ+ communities.

    Second, we ought to think creatively about how DFM principles might apply to media more broadly. There are promising overlaps between DFM and a number of the guidelines for ethical journalism advocated by the Society of Professional Journalists. Under the basic guideline, “Seek Truth and Report It,” for example, the SPJ includes guidance to avoid stereotypes, to label advocacy as such, and to support “the open and civil exchange of views,” even when those views might be deemed “repugnant” by some. A full discussion of the crossover between these principles of ethical journalism and a Design from the Margins approach goes beyond the scope of this concluding discussion. But, for now, we note that content moderation, community standards, and advertising guidelines, would likely look rather different in the future than they do now, if DFM principles served as foundations, rather than afterthoughts. Similarly, strong encryption—imperiled by legislation such as the EARN IT Act—protects vulnerable groups subject to systemic discrimination.

    US policy decisions will affect not only US users but also set precedents around the world. Those concerned with opposing global crackdowns on freedom of information and expression should lend their support to efforts to preserve end-to-end encryption online.

    Third and finally, critical media literacy—as championed by organizations such as Project Censored, the Critical Media Project, and the Propwatch Project, to name only a few—can help to raise public awareness about the extent of censorship by proxy, and to defuse the power of moral panics. Censorship is most powerful when it is invisible; moral panic is most inflammatory when heightened anxieties make it easier to draw conclusions that might be counter to logic. Informed by the basic principles of critical media literacy, members of the public are more likely to recognize censorship by proxy and less likely to be irrationally swayed by moral panic.

    Andy Lee Roth is a sociologist and associate director of Project Censored. He is coeditor, with Mickey Huff, of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023, and a member of the Media Revolution Collective that wrote The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media LIteracy for Young People.

    Avram Anderson is an electronic resources management specialist at California State University, Northridge, and a member and advocate of the LGBTQI+ community researching LGBTQI+ censorship, in print and online. In addition to coauthoring The Media and Me, they also serve on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

    Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored, coeditor of the Censored yearbook series, and coauthor of United States of Distraction, Let’s Agree to Disagree, and The Media and Me. Huff teaches social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College, and serves as executive producer and cohost of The Project Censored Show, the Project’s nationally syndicated public affairs program.

    The post Beyond Prior Restraint: Censorship by Proxy and the New Digital Gatekeeping appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/beyond-prior-restraint-censorship-by-proxy-and-the-new-digital-gatekeeping/feed/ 0 371368     Banned by Putin: Editor at Russian Outlet Meduza on Censorship & Ending Ukraine War https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/banned-by-putin-editor-at-russian-outlet-meduza-on-censorship-ending-ukraine-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/banned-by-putin-editor-at-russian-outlet-meduza-on-censorship-ending-ukraine-war/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2023 15:41:56 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=b70d208e13d0b7be3a5082d0458bab8b
    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/banned-by-putin-editor-at-russian-outlet-meduza-on-censorship-ending-ukraine-war/feed/ 0 371244     Banned by Putin: Editor at Russian Outlet Meduza on Censorship, Eroding Freedoms & Ending Ukraine War https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/banned-by-putin-editor-at-russian-outlet-meduza-on-censorship-eroding-freedoms-ending-ukraine-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/banned-by-putin-editor-at-russian-outlet-meduza-on-censorship-eroding-freedoms-ending-ukraine-war/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2023 13:46:57 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=61b86b2d3fc17df43a3f08ec29ecf50a Seg3 alexey

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Brussels today to address the European Union Parliament. The visit comes after he made surprise trips to Paris and London where he urged European nations to begin providing Ukraine with fighter jets and long-range weapons. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has repeated his call for the war to end. For more on the war’s prognosis, our guest is Alexey Kovalev, investigative editor of Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet recently banned by the Russian government, which designated it an “undesirable organization.”


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/banned-by-putin-editor-at-russian-outlet-meduza-on-censorship-eroding-freedoms-ending-ukraine-war/feed/ 0 371250     ‘No Fiji TV broadcast tonight due to censorship’ – Rika recalls Fiji media intimidation https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/08/no-fiji-tv-broadcast-tonight-due-to-censorship-rika-recalls-fiji-media-intimidation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/08/no-fiji-tv-broadcast-tonight-due-to-censorship-rika-recalls-fiji-media-intimidation/#respond Wed, 08 Feb 2023 21:52:23 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=84265 By Lice Movono in Suva

    Veteran Fijian journalist Netani Rika and his wife were resting in their living room when he was suddenly woken, startled by the sound of smashed glass. “I got up, I slipped on the wet surface,” he recalls.

    He turned on the lights and a bottle and wick were spread across the floor. It was one of the many acts of violence and intimidation he endured after the 2006 military coup.

    Back then, Rika was the manager of news and current affairs at Fiji Television.

    No news at 6pm, no news at 10pm
    Back then, Rika was the manager of news and current affairs at Fiji Television.

    He vividly remembers the time his car was smashed with golf clubs by two unknown men — one he would later identify as a member of the military — and the day he was locked up at a military camp.

    “We were monitoring the situation . . .  once the takeover happened, there was a knock at the door and we had some soldiers present themselves,” he said.

    “We were told they were there for our protection but our CEO at the time, Ken Clark, said ‘well if you’re here to protect us, then you can stand at the gate’.

    “They said, ‘no, we are here to be in the newsroom, and we want to see what goes to air. We also have a list of people you cannot speak to … ministers, detectives’.”

    Rika remembered denying their request and publishing a notice on behalf of Fiji TV News that said it would “not broadcast tonight due to censorship”, promising to return to air when they were able to “broadcast the news in a manner which is free and fair”.

    “There was no news at six, there was no news at 10, it was a decision made by the newsroom.”

    Organisations like Human Rights Watch have repeatedly criticised Voreqe Bainimarama, who installed himself as prime minister during the 2006 coup, for his attacks on government critics, the press and the freedom of its citizens.

    Pacific Beat media freedom in Fiji
    Fiji’s media veterans recount intimidation under the former FijiFirst government . . . they hope the new leaders will reinstall press freedom. Image: ABC screenshot

    Fear and intimidation
    Rika reported incidents of violence to Fiji police, but he said detectives told him his complaints would not go far.

    “There was a series of letters to the editor which I suppose you could say were anti-government. Shortly after … the now-honourable leader of the opposition (Voreqe Bainimarama) called, he swore at me in the Fijian iTaukei language … a short time later I saw a vehicle come into our street,” he said.

    “The next time (the attackers) came over the fence, broke a wooden louvre and threw one (explosive) inside the house.”

    The ABC contacted Bainimarama’s Fiji First party and Fiji police for comment, but has not received a response.

    The following year, Rika left his job to become the editor-in-chief at The Fiji Times, the country’s leading independent newspaper. With the publication relying on the government’s advertising to remain viable, Rika said the government put pressure on the paper’s owners.

    “The government took away Fiji Times’ advertising, did all sorts of things in order to bring it into line with its propaganda that Fiji was OK, there was no more corruption.”

    Rika said the government also sought to remove the employment rights of News Limited, which owned The Fiji Times.

    “The media laws were changed so that you could not have more than 5 percent overseas ownership,” Rika said.

    Rika, and his deputy Sophie Foster — now an Australian national — lost their jobs after the Media Act 2011 was passed, banning foreign ownership of Fijian media organisations.

    ‘A chilling law’
    The new law put in place several regulations over journalists’ work, including restrictions on reporting of government activities.

    In May last year, Fijian Media Association secretary Stanley Simpson called for a review of the “harsh penalties” that can be imposed by the authority that enforces the act.

    Penalties include up to F$100,000 (NZ$75,00) in fines or two years’ imprisonment for news organisations for publishing content that is considered a breach of public or national interest. Simpson said some sections were “too excessive and designed to be vindictive and punish the media rather that encourage better reporting standards and be corrective”.

    Media veterans hope the controversial act will be changed, or removed entirely, to protect press freedom.

    Retired journalism professor Dr David Robie, now editor of Asia Pacific Report, taught many of the Pacific journalists who head up Fijian newsrooms today, but some of his earlier research focused on the impact of the Media Act.

    Dr Robie said from the outset, the legislation was widely condemned by media freedom organisations around the world for being “very punitive and draconian”.

    “It is a chilling law, making restrictions to media and making it extremely difficult for journalists to act because … the journalists in Fiji constantly have that shadow hanging over them.”

    In the years after Fijian independence in 1970, Dr Robie said Fiji’s “vigorous” media sector “was a shining light in the whole of the Pacific and in developing countries”.

    “That was lost … under that particular law and many of the younger journalists have never known what it is to be in a country with a truly free media.”

    ‘We’re so rich in stories’
    Last month, the newly-elected government said work was underway to change media laws.

    “We’re going to ensure (journalists) have freedom to broadcast and to impart knowledge and information to members of the public,” Fiji’s new Attorney-General Siromi Turaga said.

    “The coalition government is going to provide a different approach, a truly democratic way of dealing with media freedom.” But Dr Robie said he believed the only way forward was to remove the Media Act altogether.

    “I’m a bit sceptical about this notion that we can replace it with friendly legislation. That’s sounds like a slippery slope to me,” he said.

    “I’d have to say that self-regulation is pretty much the best way to go.”

    Reporters Without Borders ranked Fiji at 102 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom, falling by 47 places compared to its 2021 rankings.

    Samantha Magick was the news director at Fiji radio station FM96, but left after the 2000 coup and returned three years ago to edit Islands Business International, a regional news magazine.

    “When I came back, there wasn’t the same robustness of discussion and debate, we (previously) had powerful panel programs and talkback and there wasn’t a lot of that happening,” she said.

    “Part of that was a reflection of the legislation and its impact on the way people worked but it was often very difficult to get both sides of a story because of the way newsmakers tried to control their messaging … which I thought was really unfortunate.”

    Magick said less restrictive media laws might encourage journalists to push the boundaries, while mid-career reporters would be more creative and more courageous.

    “I also hope it will mean more people stay in the profession because we have this enormous problem with people coming, doing a couple of years and then going … for mainly financial reasons.”

    She lamented the fact that “resource intensive” investigative journalism had fallen by the wayside but hoped to see “a sort of reinvigoration of the profession in general.”

    “We’re so rich in stories … I’d love to see more collaboration across news organisations or among journalists and freelancers,” she said.

    Lice Movono is a Fijian reporter for the ABC based in Suva. An earlier audio report from her on the Fiji media is here. Republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/08/no-fiji-tv-broadcast-tonight-due-to-censorship-rika-recalls-fiji-media-intimidation/feed/ 0 370973     Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/04/shifting-baseline-disorders-only-the-one-percent-is-bad/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/04/shifting-baseline-disorders-only-the-one-percent-is-bad/#respond Sat, 04 Feb 2023 15:43:23 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137487 But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing. — Michael Parenti Funny stuff seeing the MoveOn outfit go after ONLY […]

    The post Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
    — Michael Parenti

    Funny stuff seeing the MoveOn outfit go after ONLY the one percent who are tax dodgers, tax sheltering criminals:

    Sign the petition: Don’t let House Republicans undermine the IRS for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

    Republicans are trying to cut $80 billion in recent investments designed to strengthen the IRS and its ability to crack down on millionaire, billionaire, and corporate tax cheats through the Inflation Reduction Act.1 In other words: As per usual, Republicans want to issue handouts to their wealthy donors and leave working families in the lurch.

    In 2019 alone, the richest 1% of households evaded $163 billion of the total of unpaid or underpaid taxes that year. When we allow the ultrawealthy to evade paying their fair share, we place that responsibility on regular working people. Donald Trump’s recently released tax returns are a clear example of this corruption and greed. His returns expose overseas bank accounts and manipulative real estate evaluations that effectively allowed him to dodge taxes. This is exactly why Democrats included funding for the IRS, to ensure there were people within the agency that would hold the wealthiest people in this country accountable. We cannot allow the GOP to tank our efforts to lessen the tax burden on the working class.

    Fun stuff, you know, since we are getting close to USA shooting nuclear weapons, utilizing the dirty tricks of CIA and false flags and dirty bombs. You know this country’s history, yet the Democrats, the MoveOne outfit, is going for the One Percent.

    You know, since these companies are as honest as a nun (not). Imagine, the amount of US taxpayer money paying for fraud, crimes, endless and meaningless and worthless reports, hearings, white papers, investigations, stalling tactics, cover-ups, PR spin, all of it, including the dirty, polluting, community-breaking externalities of these corporations. And how many of these corporations have GOVERNMENT contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions?

    How many dual-income earners in the Five percent — $208,000 x 2 – $416,000 yearly income — have trouble sending their kids to Yale and Harvard, uh?

    The book, Dream Hoarders tells a picture of those Five and Ten Percenters and the Twenty Percenters x two incomes ($97,000) = $195,000. But here, the irony, at the most elite-sucking, exceptionalist outfit locally, Aspen Institute:

    https://www.youtube.com/live/pTgpgMzs5sU?feature=share

    Now, now. I have a 77-year-old fellow with all sorts of medical operations under his belt driving a bus, me as his monitor. There are older people driving school buses where I live, one aged 81. You know, high winds, in a tsunami zone, earthquake zone, king tides, ice, fallen trees, fallen power lines, rain rain rain. You know, that precious cargo — children — and we get $19 an hour, with three cameras on board, a tablet that marks our stops and time, and, well, you can imagine the lack of trust this huge corporation has in us, the lowly guys and gals. Precious cargo my ass!

    Truckers in the world, got .06 (cents) a mile in the 1960s. And when you are owner-operator, you pay pay pay for expenses, upkeep, maintenance and more. In the old days, the idea was to get to New York from Portland, Oregon, as quick as possible with that load of seafood. One fellow told me he took ZipLock baggies with him to urinate on that 72-hours, one-way from Oregon to NYC. And, the pills. The uppers. Keeping awake.

    This is, alas, Capitalism with a capital “c” for corruption, collusion, chaos, criminality, contraband, crassness.

    But alas, MoveOne is going after the One Percent, because of course, all those Five Percenters working for the One Percenters in high level jobs, all those 10 Percenters who are hoarders and vote to not have an extra percentage of tax put upon them, all the Eichmann’s and Faustians, all of them, love the idea of becoming rich and famous too, or just rich. They think being part of the 80 Percent is a crime against their egos and sensibility.

    There is only so much of the good money to go around to the One Percent and up to the 19 Percent, right? Just talked to a 51 year old who gave me a ride back home since my ride was indisposed in Newport. I had to get to the bus driving gig. I stopped someone coming from the hospital, and he gave me a lift. He grew up in Toledo, Oregon, and had a year’s worth of wages saved up for Oregon State University, but he opted to work. As a lineman for the local central utility district. His brother went to college, and even called him a loser. Just a few years ago, the brother apologized to this man, who has worked 32 years for this company, and he said he’s making $150,000 a year as he is in management. The brother never got that income with his college degree.

    Yes, there have to be options for young people. Yes, everyone needs to go to a cool college, for history, for the arts, for writing, for sociology. Yes, there should be contruction courses in college. Yes, there should be a way to get those who might have a proclivity for hands-on high IQ stuff to get that hands-on education, but all junior and senior high school students should be exposed to Oceanography, Orwell and Organic farming. In addition to, Reading and Writing, but also, learning what soil is and is not. What a forest is. What the jet stream is, and what weather is and is not. Hands down, the only way humanity is going to solve the crimes of capitalism and the savagery of capitalism and the barbaric acts of the One Percent and maybe another 5 percent, is to arm ourselves with thinking, caring, community-driven people.

    Out here in Rural Oregon, we have those rugged (sic) individuals looking for acres and a place to put some chickens and cool motorcycles and jungle gyms on, and a place AWAY from humanity. Imagine that.

    Some of those homes I pass by in the rural landscape are 6,000 square foot lodges that would look like they fit in Aspen or Jackson Hole.

    Here it is, then, the shifting baseline disorder. Up is down, and somehow, Nazi History is Okay History. Ukraine is a country with a violent and racist history, and now, worse than ever. But these kids and these linemen, well, they do not want to know about THAT.

    As we drain the tax coffers for Zelensky, for all those military industrial complex big boys and little ones.

    This is fact — Russia-Soviet Union beat the Nazi’s then:

    The Battle That Changed the Course of WWII: 80th Anniversary of the Soviet Victory at Stalingrad

    On February 2, 1943, Nazi forces trapped in the ruined city of Stalingrad (modern-day Volgograd) by the Soviet Red Army surrendered, marking the end of one of the bloodiest and most intense battles in history – the Battle of Stalingrad.

    During the course of this battle, Soviet forces managed to trap a substantial force of Nazi soldiers inside the very city the latter wanted to capture. The Soviet’s also managed to repel all attempts by the rest of the Nazi war machine to relieve their trapped comrades, and to finally break the enemy’s will to resist.

    This triumph allowed the USSR to seize the strategic initiative and effectively turn the tide of the entire World War II, paving the way for the eventual defeat of the Nazi Germany a little over two years later. (source)

    You’d never know that istory talking to linemen or bus driver or high school teacher or city council or …. And youth in college or in high school who will never get to read this article and discuss: “How a Network of Nazi Propagandists Helped Lay the Groundwork for the War in Ukraine”

    A mass grave of Red Army soldiers, executed on orders from Franz Halder, at Stalag 307 near Dęblin, Poland.

    Don’t let MoveOn fool you — Liz Warren maybe a super capitalist, but that means she is for great wealth misdistribution, great land exploitation, the Monroe Doctrine on steroids, and of course, money, missiles and mush for Ukraine.

    Michael Parenti — Peeling back those Shifting Baselines!

    The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me.  I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.

    How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States. (source)

    Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent  maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?

    Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes—and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans—are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no  propertied wealth; they live in debt.

    Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt.  In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick thru garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops. (source)

    The post Shifting Baseline Disorders: Only the One Percent is Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/04/shifting-baseline-disorders-only-the-one-percent-is-bad/feed/ 0 369911     Google Hides the Main Reason for America’s Arming of Ukraine https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/google-hides-the-main-reason-for-americas-arming-of-ukraine/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/google-hides-the-main-reason-for-americas-arming-of-ukraine/#respond Sat, 28 Jan 2023 23:14:33 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137336 On Wednesday, January 25th, at 5:52 UTC, Reuters headlined “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022.” After more than 24 hours, at 22:00 UTC on the 26th, a Google search for that Reuters headline produced “Your search – “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022” – did not match any documents.” Five hours […]

    The post Google Hides the Main Reason for America’s Arming of Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     On Wednesday, January 25th, at 5:52 UTC, Reuters headlined “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022.” After more than 24 hours, at 22:00 UTC on the 26th, a Google search for that Reuters headline produced “Your search – “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022” – did not match any documents.” Five hours later, at  2:37 UTC on the 27th, the findings were “Your search – ‘U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022’ – did not match any documents.” — exactly the same thing.

    If that news wasn’t actually published anywhere, then all of the ‘news’-media fail their most-basic obligation to the public: to provide facts that are crucial in order for the public to understand — instead of to mislead the public to misinterpret and misunderstand — the most important news of the day:  to misunderstand the events that are shaping our future history.

    If, instead, that news was published somewhere but Google refused to produce a find of that extremely important news-report, then Google fails its most-basic obligation to the public, because it’s not letting the public understand the world; it is instead hiding crucial important facts so as to encourage misunderstanding.

    So, I then did a Yandex search for that headline, “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022,” and it found only four finds, which were the Reuters direct news-report, plus three obscure appearances of that headline, one from Moldova, one from Vietnam, and one from Poland — nothing at all mainstream or even ‘alt-news’ anywhere. And, five hours later, it was the same four finds plus two more — one from Tanzania, and the other an obscure personal-finance site, neither of which two additional sites, when I clicked onto it, actually had that headline or news-report on it.

    Yandex isn’t American but Russian. Its main person and founder is the Russian-Maltese-Israeli (all three citizenships) billionaire Arkady Volozh who resigned as the company’s CEO on 30 December 2022 because he had been sanctioned by the EU for being a Russian billionaire who had kept his Russian citizenship and residence after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

    As for Google, it was, behind the scenes, founded and is controlled by the Pentagon, CIA, and some Stanford University professors.

    So far as I can tell from those two Web-searches, that Reuters news-report, which like all such had been sent out from that news-agency to thousands of news-media around the world, wasn’t published by any of them.

    It’s remarkable but — otherwise than here — unremarked-upon. And, though investors in America’s suppliers to the military benefit from controlling their markets (the U.S Government and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations), the actual performance of the U.S. military ever since the end of WW II (in places such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and many others) has been poor. When profits instead of the nation’s actual defense are the main motivation for a nation’s military expenditures, enormous waste and a stunningly unsucessful military are the result. For example, Russia, where the Government controls the corporations that make its weapons, spends one-twentieth what the U.S. does on its military, but no one would say that its military is only one-twentieth as effective.

    A good case can be made that this Ukraine-war boom in American-made military-equipment sales is the main immediate aim of the individuals who control U.S.-and-allied countries. Maybe that’s the reason why the Reuters news-report is, evidently, unpublishable, at least in any mainstream ‘news’-medium, or by any search-engine. Otherwise, it’s just a total mystery, why it went unpublished (except by Reuters itself).

    The post Google Hides the Main Reason for America’s Arming of Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/google-hides-the-main-reason-for-americas-arming-of-ukraine/feed/ 0 368116     The Righteous Outrage of Norman Finkelstein https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/the-righteous-outrage-of-norman-finkelstein/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/the-righteous-outrage-of-norman-finkelstein/#respond Sat, 28 Jan 2023 16:05:14 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137306 As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, I thought early on of Obama’s joke at the expense of Rahm Emanuel: “he’s one of a kind, and thank god he’s one of a kind.” Finkelstein, too, […]

    The post The Righteous Outrage of Norman Finkelstein first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, I thought early on of Obama’s joke at the expense of Rahm Emanuel: “he’s one of a kind, and thank god he’s one of a kind.” Finkelstein, too, is very much one of a kind. But the analogy with Emanuel fails, because in fact one Rahm Emanuel is far too many whereas one Finkelstein is not nearly enough. We need hundreds of him. That is to say, we need hundreds of left intellectuals with the courage and intelligence to think for themselves and never sell out, to refuse to compromise—even to risk alienating fellow leftists by publicly repudiating woke culture and the more vacuous forms of identity politics in favor of an unstinting adherence to class politics. Nor would it hurt to have more writers who are as eloquent and hilarious as him.

    It is widely known on the left that Finkelstein is, as it were, a martyr to truth and justice, having been subject to outrageous calumniation and denied an academic career because of his relentless advocacy of the Palestinian cause. With I’ll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the “left” of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson into a censorious, narcissistic, morbidly navel-gazing culture preoccupied with subjectivist trivialities like personal pronouns at the expense of solidaristic struggle for a better world. “Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you.” (“You must be living an awfully precious life,” he goes on, “if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.”) If the book is not simply ignored, one can expect that it will elicit a flood of vituperation from leftists and liberals: “racist, misogynistic, transphobic, white supremacist, juvenile, incoherent, petty!” The intelligent reader will not be tempted by such facile judgments but instead will engage with the book’s substance, because it has important things to say.

    It consists of two parts: in the first, Finkelstein “deconstructs” identity politics and the cancel culture it has given rise to, focusing on five figures whom he eviscerates: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama. In the second part, he considers a related subject with which he is intimately familiar: academic freedom. To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic’s “offensive” speech in the public square result in disciplinary action? Is it wrong for universities to grant Holocaust deniers a platform? When teaching, should professors strive for “balance”—presenting with equal force all sides of an issue so that students can make up their own minds—or should they teach only their own perspective? What should we think of campus speech codes? Finkelstein addresses all such questions at length and in a spirit of uncommon seriousness.

    One difficulty with the book is that it has a sprawling and meandering character, consisting variously of memoir, brutal polemic, dense argumentation, forensic dissection of texts, scores of long quotations, innumerable long footnotes, and very funny ridicule of everything and everyone from Michelle Obama to Bari Weiss, from the New York Times to woke terms like Latinx (“why would an ethnic group want to sound like a porn site?”). At its core, however, beneath the variegated surface, the book is an anguished cri de coeur against pervasive cultural, political, and intellectual rot—an unapologetic defense and exegesis of the heavily maligned “Western canon” (John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Kant, DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and the like), a sustained lamentation over how far the left has fallen, a furious denunciation of rampant philistinism and pusillanimous groupthink (quoting Mill: “That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time”), and a proudly unfashionable celebration of such quaint notions as Truth, Reason, and Justice (which Finkelstein capitalizes, in a consciously anti-postmodernist flourish). The book’s kaleidoscopic nature and intimidating length might bewilder the reader, so in this review I propose to summarize and comment on several of its main arguments, to facilitate their diffusion.

    Before doing so, however, I can’t resist quoting a few Finkelsteinian zingers, to preface the following heavy discussion with a bit of levity. On MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “living proof that not all yentas are Jewish and not all bovines are cows.” On Angela Davis: “Once upon a time she was on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted List. Now she’s on Martha’s Vineyard’s Five Most Coveted List.” On Henry Louis Gates: “a virtuoso at crawling on the ground while typing on his keyboard.”1 On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn’t name): “Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush.” On Ibram X. Kendi: “mallet-wielding grifter…preposterous poseur…[whose] ‘definitive history of racist ideas in America’ reduces to a compendium of prepubescent binary name-calling.” On Robin DiAngelo’s morbid obsession with diagnosing “racism”: “She is the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. She is little Jackie Paper out to slay Puff the Racist Dragon. Her palette comprises two colors—white and black… What an unremitting, remorseless, insufferable bore!” On the widespread fascination with transgender people: “the first day of a graduate seminar, students used to describe their intellectual interests. Nowadays, it’s de rigueur to declare your sexual orientation. It’s only a matter of time before a student announces, ‘I’m she/her and I’m packing a thick, juicy nine-incher.’”

    In an adaptation of Emma Goldman’s “If I can’t dance, I don’t want your Revolution,” Finkelstein declares: “If I can’t laugh, I don’t want your Revolution.” Political conservatives, too, have complained about the humorlessness of the woke crowd, but if you’re alienating even die-hard leftists, maybe it’s time to rethink your messaging.

    Identity politics

    Debates on the left over identity politics go back decades, and it is easy to be sick of them. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of their ending as long as identity politics and woke culture remain dominant on the left and in the Democratic Party—as they surely do today, at the expense of a class politics. Finkelstein is aware that the identity politics of the left isn’t quite the same as the identity politics of the Democrats, but he is right that they overlap, and that such a politics is more conducive to being neutered into empty symbolism (statues, token representation in the corporate class, electing a vapid con artist like Obama) than a Bernie Sanders-style—or more radical—class politics is.

    Serious leftists, like Robin D. G. Kelley, have written competent defenses of identity politics, and Finkelstein certainly isn’t arguing against the necessity of incorporating anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and other such “woke” agendas into popular movements. What he objects to are the forms that identity politics often takes, and its tendency to devolve into celebration of an insular tribal identity. The binary, balkanizing drawing of lines between groups and near-contempt for the “oppressing” group—white vs. black, cis vs. trans, straight vs. gay, man vs. woman—is, in its parochialism and vitiating of solidarity against capitalism, not what a real left politics looks like. He quotes at great length some words of Frederick Douglass in 1894 that might well have gotten him “cancelled” today:

    We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern colored leaders in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men, and the like… [But] I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action. I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race or color… We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died… It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety of the human family. In regard to men as in regard to things, the whole is more than a part. Away then with the nonsense that a man must be black to be true to the rights of black men. I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines between the white and the black…or to draw race lines anywhere in the domain of liberty.

    Moreover, the very idea of being “proud” of what group one happens to belong to—proud of being black or a woman or gay or trans—is puzzling. “[I]t perplexes why one should feel proud of one’s zoological difference,” Finkelstein writes. “[W]hat sense is there in making a ‘cult’ of that over which one has no choice…? Shouldn’t one aspire to transcend the ‘inevitable’ part—the color of one’s skin—so as to be judged by the ‘free part’—the content of one’s character?” Similarly, the idea of “loving one’s people” is odd, first in that it amounts to “loving one’s self writ large,” which, in its narcissism, hardly seems like a noble thing. It easily becomes chauvinism. Second, one would certainly not love all the individuals who are alleged to constitute “one’s people.” Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would “love” many people belonging to a “different group.” Too much identification with some imposed identity such as race is exactly what leads to irrational racial hostility (including against whites), sexist hostility (also against men), and other divisive social forces. Identity politics can be dangerous and destructive, not only on the right but even the left. “In their goodness and badness, there exist only persons, not peoples.”

    The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposed by considering its “great minds,” the Crenshaws, Coateses, Kendis, and DiAngelos. For a really thorough demolition, Finkelstein would have had to review the record of various feminist and queer theorists too, but it’s a big enough task to critique the writers on race. Or, more precisely, that isn’t a difficult task—it’s so easy that Finkelstein is able to devote huge chunks of these chapters to sheer mockery—but it does require patience and a willingness to wade through endless intellectual muck. Take Crenshaw. Unsurprisingly, in her seminal 1989 article on intersectionality “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” “she conspicuously omits class in her dissection of oppression.” It disturbs her that white feminists are presumptuous enough to speak for black women, but she “seems less concerned or, for that matter, even conscious that a high-achieving Black woman speaking for Black working-class women might also be problematic.”

    Or take DiAngelo. She has a pathological obsession with racism and an utterly Manichean, paranoid view of the world. If you’re white, you’re a racist—whether you’re John Brown or Jefferson Davis, a fascist or an anti-fascist. Racism is ubiquitous, “immovably entrenched in our psyches and structures” (as Finkelstein paraphrases), “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” all-encompassing and constantly reproduced, she says, “automatically”—and therefore, evidently, ineradicable. At best, it can occasionally be “interrupted”—through the “diversity training” at which DiAngelo excels and for which she charges a hefty fee. Meanwhile, her book White Fragility has sold almost a million copies and has had quite an influence on woke culture, helping to instill a collective fixation on—incidentally—the same idée fixe of Ta-Nehisi Coates (according to Cornel West): the almighty, unremovable nature of white supremacy. “Whites,” says DiAngelo, “control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by.” Yes, whites are a homogeneous master-class: the billionaires and the working class, they’re all equally guilty, they’re all oppressors. And to blacks she says, as Finkelstein summarizes, “Beware! Don’t trust white people! They’re all racists, racists to the core! Every last one of them! They’re hard-wired for racism; it’s in their DNA.” This is a message perfectly calculated to pit workers against each other. No wonder the business class has so enthusiastically promoted her book!

    What about Ibram X. Kendi? Finkelstein seems to take particular pleasure in disemboweling this (as he says) non-scholar and non-activist, for his critique/massacre is a full 110 pages long and features withering juxtapositions with a titan, DuBois. It’s sad that a book review can’t communicate the verve or the slicing humor of this chapter (and others). Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, for example, whose “only novelty is to shoehorn the epithets racist or antiracist, segregationist or assimilationist into every other sentence…[is] less a definitive history than an exhaustive, and exhausting, taxonomy that’s as supple as a calcified femur and as subtle as an oversized mallet. It proceeds from the fatuous, almost juvenile, conceit that fastening binary, wooden labels on the actors and ideas incident to Black history will shed light on it.” One problem with Kendi’s and our culture’s promiscuous, indiscriminate use of the label “racist” is that the concept becomes diluted: “to be a racist ceases to be what it ought to be: a scarlet badge of shame… [W]hat information is conveyed by a label that collapses the distinction between Frederick Douglass [whom Kendi considers a racist] and the Grand Wizard of the K.K.K.?” The abolitionists were all racists, as were DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Wright, E. Franklin Frasier, etc. etc.—while Kendi singles out for praise Harry Truman, Michelle Obama, Eldridge Cleaver, Pam Grier, Bo Derek, Kanye West, etc. “[T]he rigor of his taxonomy recalls not the Periodic Table but, on the contrary, Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”

    As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, “African-Americans haven’t registered any progress in the struggle against racism. Each seeming stride forward has been attended by a step backward.” If anything, he implies, things have only gotten worse! Such an “analysis” recalls the flagrantly ahistorical, unabashedly gloomy academic school of Afro-pessimism, and, by reifying differences between “whites” and “blacks” and valorizing anti-white resentment among the latter, serves the same function of hindering the class solidarity necessary to achieve real progress in struggles over the distribution of wealth, working conditions, affordable housing, high levels of unemployment, expansion of public resources, abysmal healthcare, environmental destruction, hypertrophying militarism, and the like. (No wonder, again, Kendi has been fêted by the establishment and can charge $45,000 for his talks.2 It helps, too, that his only real policy proposal is…affirmative action.)

    After Finkelstein’s devastating exposure of Kendi’s countless inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and idiocies—his woke dismissal of the Civil Rights Movement in favor of the macho Black Panthers (who, by comparison, achieved almost nothing); his (in Kendi’s words) “striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference” even as he argues that the idea of race is a “mirage” that was invented to rationalize exploitation; his insistence that all racial disparities in society are purely a result of racism; his valorizing of racial differences (e.g., he praises the “irrepressible Blackness” of his friend) at the same time as he says anti-racists see only individuals and not racial behavior (“there is no such thing as Black behavior”); his positing of a deep separation between so-called white culture and black culture; his arguing against the racist “assimilationist” urge to value white culture over black even as he manifestly values white culture over black (lecturing before white audiences, accepting a fellowship at Harvard University, presiding over a research center at Boston University, being proud of publishing in white journals like The Atlantic)—nothing remains but the empty husk of a social-climbing charlatan. That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left.

    For charlatanry, though, few can beat the next entry on Finkelstein’s shit list: Obama. “Barack Obama is the perfected and perfect instrument of identity politics, its summa summarum. He represents the cynical triumph of form over substance, color over character. He is the cool Black dude who is also the reliable—in Professor Cornel West’s words—‘mascot of Wall Street.’” Most leftists are hardly enamored of Obama, so I need not summarize the case against him. Nor would I even try, because I couldn’t possibly reproduce the distinctive Finkelsteinian humor—and most of this very long chapter consists of (factually grounded) ridicule, directed at nearly everyone in Obama’s presidential coterie, a “revolting retinue of bootlickers.” Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the “Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U.S. enemies.” One might argue that in this chapter Finkelstein’s profound contempt for the “Elmer Gantry in blackface” at the head of this gaggle of amoral mediocrities gets the best of his prodigious literary gifts, since the ruthless mockery goes on and on and becomes somewhat tiresome, but it can’t be gainsaid that it’s all well-deserved.

    After six chapters and almost 400 pages on the subject, Finkelstein’s summary of identity politics is worth quoting:

    Identity politics has distracted from and, when need be, outright sabotaged a class-based movement [viz., Bernie Sanders’] that promised profound social change. It counsels Black people not to trust whites, as their racism is so entrenched and so omnipresent as to poison their every thought and action. It conveys to poor whites that they, no less than the white billionaire class, are beneficiaries of racism, so that it would be foolhardy of them to ally with Black people… Then, identity politics puts forth demands that either appear radical but are in fact politically inert—Defund the police, Abolition of prisons—as they have no practical possibility of achievement; or that leave the overall system intact while still enabling a handful, who purport to represent marginalized groups, to access—on a “parity” basis—the exclusive club of the “haves.” This, in effect, performance politics has spawned a disgusting den of thieves who brand themselves with radical-sounding hashtags, churn out radical-sounding tweets, and insinuate themselves into positions of prominence, as they rake in corporate donations, cash corporate paychecks, hang out at the watering holes of the rich and famous, and thence can be safely relied upon not to bite the hand that feeds them…

    One might object that he’s painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn’t deny this. He has the highest regard for the Civil Rights Movement, after all—although he would deny that that was identity politics. “The human rights of a victimized group must, of course, be uncompromisingly defended.” More problematic than such defense is to make a cult of group differences (group “pride”) in the way of the woke, and to place class issues at the bottom of the heap rather than the top, where they belong. “Human dignity is not possible without the ability to pay for a roof over one’s head, clothes on one’s back, and food on one’s table.”

    Whatever genuinely emancipatory political impulses exist in identity politics have long been, on the whole, coopted and buried under an avalanche of left-liberal virtue-signaling, preening and posing, careerism, and sabotage of a substantive left. Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation: they tried to “cancel” Sanders for his being a “privileged white male” with a supposed blind-spot on race. His “economic reductionism,” according to Angela Davis, prevented him from “developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence.” (Note the pretentious academic language, as if you need a special “vocabulary” to talk about racism and violence—which Sanders, by the way, did.) As Finkelstein says, “When the ‘hour of serious danger’ to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders’ class-struggle insurgency, the ‘true nature’ of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile ‘radicals’ enlisted under the banner to stop him.” Woke cancel culture cooperated with the establishment media’s cancel culture to stop the Sanders juggernaut.

    Cancel culture and academic freedom

    “Cancel culture might be defined as the turning of a person into a non-person.” By that definition, it has been around for a very long time. Arguably, it is as old as civilization. The first and second Red Scares in the U.S. were instances of cancel culture; so is the corporate media’s treatment of virtually everyone on the left; so is the woke treatment of anyone who publicly strays from the party line. Even if such victims of woke defamation campaigns usually find their footing again or don’t always suffer career consequences in the first place, the mob’s impulse to censor and silence remains operative and ever-vigilant. Finkelstein knows cancel culture from the inside, and it is unsurprising that he resolutely opposes it.

    His defense of a regime of nearly untrammeled free speech is rooted, first and foremost, in his conviction that this is the surest way to Truth. He quotes DuBois: when free speech is stifled, “the nation…becomes morally emasculated and mentally hog-tied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions.” But John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is the text he primarily grounds his argument in, and he quotes from it liberally in his chapter on the right of even Holocaust deniers to make their case in public forums such as a college campus. “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion,” Mill writes, “is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth… The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.” As Finkelstein translates, “if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer.” Your opponents can even be useful for prodding you to rethink weak points in your reasoning or evidentiary basis, exposing little errors in your arguments, giving you something to think about that you had overlooked, in general giving you the opportunity to more rationally ground your beliefs.

    The mob’s desire to silence, attack, and destroy comes from feeling threatened, not from being rationally certain and confident. The latter attitudes are more likely to yield calm composure and willingness to give opponents a hearing because you know you’re able to refute them. When a mob tries to prevent someone from talking because it feels threatened by his speech, it’s quite possible, often, that his speech has some truth in it. Suppressing it—unless it’s merely emotive speech like “fuck you!”—possibly allows his opponents to persist in having false or partially false views.

    But someone might reply, “What if his speech is socially harmful? Isn’t that a legitimate reason to suppress it?” Well, the definition of “harmful” is, of course, contested, and it evolves over time. Eugenics and forced sterilization were once considered a very enlightened movement, being supported by progressives like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Now eugenics is considered downright evil. Who is to say your definition of “socially harmful” is, in all cases, the right one, or that your application of it is always right? “When it comes to curbing speech,” Finkelstein says, “experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance.”

    Moreover, if the “harmful” speech is socially marginal such that hardly anyone believes it, what’s the great danger in letting someone say it now and then? If, on the other hand, it’s not marginal but holds the assent of millions, letting someone express it presents an opportunity to argue against it and thus inoculate people. The strategy of pure suppression is apt to lead many to think there might be something “dangerously truthful” to it—“the establishment doesn’t want us to hear this because it’s threatened by its truth!”—and thus might contribute to its diffusion across the population. People might think they’re being “rebellious” or anti-establishmentarian by believing it, and furthermore that they’re upholding noble values of free speech against authoritarian censoring leftists (as the reactionary right thinks today). I might also note that giving authorities the right to suppress or punish certain kinds of speech, and even encouraging them to do so, will soon lead to their suppressing speech you like.

    The left has historically been in the vanguard of fights for free speech, from the abolitionists to the IWW (and most other unions, in fact) to the Socialists during World War I to the Civil Rights Movement. Its departure today from these honorable traditions is yet more evidence that it’s become a pseudo-left, a reactionary left—for the empowering of authorities to regulate speech is ultimately reactionary. It’s ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn’t.

    Admittedly, it might have strengthened Finkelstein’s discussion to consider in more depth possible counterarguments. It is, after all, very unfortunate that media operatives like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and the whole stable of Fox News social arsonists have brainwashed millions of people. It is likely they couldn’t have had such a destructive impact had the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987. Maybe it was right to repeal it, but a case can at least be made that it was wrong. Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn’t say much about these. The reason, it seems, is that he doesn’t think the internet has raised significantly new questions about free speech, and in any case there is already an extensive literature on web censorship.

    Among the many excellent points he makes is one that cuts to the heart of wokeness: the collective obsession with pinning a label—racist or not, sexist or not, transphobic or not—on every thought passing through one’s head and every utterance one makes, and then cancelling all the thoughts that (and all the people who) stray an inch past what’s deemed “acceptable,” is ridiculous and paranoid. It’s also reactionary, because it makes solidarity vastly more difficult. One of the more memorable passages in the book is when he imagines, in some alternate universe, a Robin DiAngelo who actually does care about fighting oppression of blacks and not only grifting off a culture’s pathologies. Were she to speak before a group of workers, she might say something like this (italics in the original):

    Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common. You’re all, Black and white, trapped in dead-end jobs. You all earn poverty wages… [You have to] organize together, as one because you are one, to overthrow this wretched, corrupt, god-forsaken system. You can’t eliminate every fleeting, non-p.c. thought passing through your head. The mind is a tricky business… You can’t wait until everyone’s thoughts are simon-pure. You don’t have the time, and they never will be. You cannot police your thoughts, and it’s probably better that way. Were it otherwise, you wouldn’t be human. You’re fallible, you’re imperfect vessels. You weren’t born, and your minds can’t be, immaculate… If you unite to change the system, then your psyches will fall into place. It’s common struggle, common sacrifice, that produces mutual respect, even mutual love. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. You don’t become better persons by each of you, singly, struggling with your racist demons. You become better persons by all of you, together, struggling against an antihuman system…

    Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the “left” adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.

    “The fight against racism must focus…not on the intangible, impalpable, unchangeable, invisible, or unprovable, but, instead, on what’s substantive, meaningful, and corrigible. In the first place, securing economic opportunity and legal equality.” The Sanders program was far more substantively “anti-racist” than the puny liberal programs of most of his woke critics. (As for Sanders’ being constantly hounded to support “reparations” for blacks, I’ve explained elsewhere why that demand is anti-solidaristic, politically impossible, and ultimately a diversion from radical social transformation.)

    The last chapter of I’ll Burn That Bridge delves into a specific dimension of cancel culture: when is it appropriate for a professor to be disciplined for his public behavior and statements, whether on social media or in some other context? This issue bears, of course, on Finkelstein’s own career, but he is hardly the only academic to have been disciplined in recent decades for alleged “incivility” or taking unpopular political stands. The chapter is tightly argued and has a more disciplined structure than others, consisting of analyses of four academic freedom cases (Bertrand Russell in 1940, Leo Koch in 1960, Angela Davis in 1969, and Steven Salaita in 2014) and then general reflections that conclude in a discussion of his own case. He endorses the American Association of University Professors’ standard that “a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness to serve [i.e., to teach]”—which was surely not the case in the four instances he examines. But he goes much further and questions whether it should even be seen as a professional obligation that one always use civil language in one’s scholarship (which Finkelstein didn’t when writing about the Holocaust industry and Alan Dershowitz’s lies). Given all the invective in Marx’s Capital, for example, the book would never have been published by a university press today and Marx wouldn’t get a position at a top university. “But if the likes of Marx wouldn’t qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn’t that a reductio ad absurdum? Doesn’t it conclusively demonstrate the inanity of a standard commanding restrained and temperate language?”

    One might connect Finkelstein’s lengthy discussion of academic civility with his book’s focus on woke politics by pointing to something his targets have in common: a preoccupation with policing language and thought at the expense of more substantive concerns. Academia insists on politeness, decorum, “neutral” language, which often serves to enforce conventions, emasculate dissent, and uphold power structures; wokeness insists on ceaselessly monitoring your own and others’ language, in fact making that a priority, allowing people to feel “radical” by doing nothing that remotely challenges real power structures. (No surprise that woke culture has largely emerged from the academy.) To do justice to Truth and Justice, though, requires more than this. In the case of scholarly writing and speaking,

    There are moments that might positively require breaking free of the constraints imposed by polite public discourse in order to sound the tocsin that, as we indifferently carry on in a privileged sanctuary of peace and prosperity, innocent people are being butchered by our own state. The uncivil reality, not uncivil words, should be cause for reproach and excoriation, while uncivil words might be called for to bring home the uncivil reality.

    It can at least be said for Finkelstein that he practices what he preaches: his book, to put it mildly, does not shrink from uncivil words.

    The anti-academic

    It should be clear from what has been said here that I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It is an unusual book. It requires a lot of patience to read, but I think the effort is worth it. It’s not a “polished” work, but in an academic and literary environment that sometimes seems to value polish above all else, including moral and intellectual substance, one appreciates something a little more raw. And someone with the courage to tear down—in order to build up.

    Finkelstein is in the tradition of the great incorruptible truth-tellers. He relates an anecdote from when he was a graduate student at Princeton in 1984: his work exposing a bestselling scholarly hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict had gotten the favorable attention of the editor of the New York Review of Books and his friend (Arthur Hertzberg) at Columbia University, and he sensed that career possibilities were opening up for him. But then, in a meeting with Hertzberg, he was bluntly asked, “Are you in Chomsky’s stable?” Despite knowing the probable consequences of giving the wrong answer, he unhesitatingly said he deeply admired Chomsky and was grateful for his support—which, of course, was the wrong answer. He never heard from the men again. Even so, “I was proud of myself,” he writes, “not to be tempted, at all, by the lure of fame and fortune, and I was grateful for this test of my fidelity to Truth (and Chomsky), so that I could prove in my own person dead wrong the cynics who imagine, or console themselves, that everyone has a price.”

    That unshakeable commitment, that willingness not to conform, combined with intellectual power, is chiefly what has set Finkelstein apart from most of his peers. One hopes that his book and his example will inspire young idealists to follow in his path.

    1. Incredibly, he called Obama a “post-modern Frederick Douglass.”
    2. He is hardly alone in this sort of thing. Finkelstein reports that, according to local activists in Kerala, India whom he met, Naomi Klein had demanded $25,000 plus a round-trip first-class airline ticket to give a talk there.
    The post The Righteous Outrage of Norman Finkelstein first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/28/the-righteous-outrage-of-norman-finkelstein/feed/ 0 368086     Considering the Invasions of Panama and Ukraine https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/considering-the-invasions-of-panama-and-ukraine/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/considering-the-invasions-of-panama-and-ukraine/#respond Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:02:25 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137278 The 26 January JTA Daily Briefing arrived in my mailbox with the subject: “Major Israeli Raid in Jenin Kills 9 Palestinians.” I was sadly dumbfounded by the imparted insensitivity and inhumanity. Would any humanity-loving organization blare such news about the killing of the Other? Supposedly, the Oslo accords were a movement toward peace, but Zionist […]

    The post Considering the Invasions of Panama and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     The 26 January JTA Daily Briefing arrived in my mailbox with the subject: “Major Israeli Raid in Jenin Kills 9 Palestinians.” I was sadly dumbfounded by the imparted insensitivity and inhumanity. Would any humanity-loving organization blare such news about the killing of the Other? Supposedly, the Oslo accords were a movement toward peace, but Zionist Israel has continued to wreak violence unabated, and Palestinians of every age and gender are the victims whether they be civilians or not. Yes, the violence is not only from one side, but the violence is overwhelmingly carried out by the Israeli side. And, when it comes to violence by Palestinians, one must realize that they have the right to resist oppression, occupation, siege, and violence.

    Imagine what would have been the reaction in the West if a headline had appeared — “Major Palestinian Raid in Tel Aviv Kills 9 Palestinians”?

    Such is the hypocrisy of the “West” that Israel can unleash lethal violence against Palestinians with scarcely a peep from the “West.” A Palestinian reprisal would undoubtedly be denounced in the strongest language as terrorism, and Palestinian officials would be called onto the carpet to unequivocally condemn the violence. Even the United Nations hardly comes across as a neutral party.

    The US can steal oil in open daylight from Syria, and there is not a peep from US-allied countries. Palestinians know this all too well, as Israel has been expropriating Palestinian oil and gas for years. The US occupies Cuban territory, and there is hardly a peep from the US-alliance. Britain can steal the gold reserves of the Venezuelan people, and there is little complaint from governments in the West.

    Western thievery has extended to Russia, as its bank assets were frozen by the US and by the European Union with the stated intention of using Russian assets to reconstruct Ukraine.

    The peoples of Palestine, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela people, among other nationalities, suffer from US thievery and violence. As an accomplice or silent actor, this also points to the inhumanity of US-allied governments. These are the same governments that criticize Russia for its “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.

    A Telling Comparison

    What happened when one out-of-uniform US marine officer, first lieutenant Robert Paz, was killed by Panamanian soldiers in December 1989? US president George HW Bush launched Operation Just Cause [sic]. A US invasion of Panama happened. About 600 Panamanians were killed (half civilians) and 23 US soldiers. Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, the drug-running CIA asset (and a person who should have been untouchable by having diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Article 29 reads, “The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable.”) was abducted and brought back to the US to face American justice.

    Since 2014, following the US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, a war has been carried out by the Ukrainian state, including its neo-Nazi fighters, against the predominantly ethnic Russian peoples of Donbass. Over 13,000 people had been killed, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.1

    Consider that the US invaded Panama after one US marine was killed, but the killing of thousands of ethnic Russians (who had been clamoring for secession to Russia) was muted by the US, the self-same country which created the circumstances that filliped Russia’s Special Military Operation to protect its security from further NATO encroachment.

    That the US invaded a country (many countries in its history) does not mitigate a Russian invasion of a country. But the invasions are not the same. There was no credible threat to US security from Syria, Palestine, Iran, Libya, Viet Nam, Venezuela, etc, but the US invaded or abetted the attack on these countries nonetheless. Russia has made irrefutably clear the security concerns posed by NATO missiles appearing on the Ukraine-Russia border just minutes away from Moscow. Russia was faced with an existential threat, a threat that the US would never allow (witness the US reaction to the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba).

    This essential background information will not appear in monopoly media.

    1. “According to calculations of the total number of human losses related to the conflict in Ukraine (from April 14, 2014 to January 31, 2021) amounts to 42,000-44,000: 13,100-13,300 killed (no less than 3,375 civilians, about 4,150 Ukrainian servicemen and approximately 5,700 members of armed groups)… Tass.
    The post Considering the Invasions of Panama and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/considering-the-invasions-of-panama-and-ukraine/feed/ 0 367753     Apple Brings Mainland Chinese Web Censorship to Hong Kong https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/26/apple-brings-mainland-chinese-web-censorship-to-hong-kong/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/26/apple-brings-mainland-chinese-web-censorship-to-hong-kong/#respond Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:00:22 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=420141

    When Safari users in Hong Kong recently tried to load the popular code-sharing website GitLab, they received a strange warning instead: Apple’s browser was blocking the site for their own safety. The access was temporarily cut off thanks to Apple’s use of a Chinese corporate website blacklist, which resulted in the innocuous site being flagged as a purveyor of misinformation. Neither Tencent, the massive Chinese firm behind the web filter, nor Apple will say how or why the site was censored.

    The outage was publicized just ahead of the new year. On December 30, 2022, Hong Kong-based software engineer and former Apple employee Chu Ka-cheong tweeted that his web browser had blocked access to GitLab, a popular repository for open-source code. Safari’s “safe browsing” feature greeted him with a full-page “deceptive website warning,” advising that because GitLab contained dangerous “unverified information,” it was inaccessible. Access to GitLab was restored several days later, after the situation was brought to the company’s attention.

    The warning screen itself came courtesy of Tencent, the mammoth Chinese internet conglomerate behind WeChat and League of Legends. The company operates the safe browsing filter for Safari users in China on Apple’s behalf — and now, as the Chinese government increasingly asserts control of the territory, in Hong Kong as well.

    Apple spokesperson Nadine Haija would not answer questions about the GitLab incident, suggesting they be directed at Tencent, which also declined to offer responses.

    The episode raises thorny questions about privatized censorship done in the name of “safety” — questions that neither company seems interested in answering: How does Tencent decide what’s blocked? Does Apple have any role? Does Apple condone Tencent’s blacklist practices?

    “They should be responsible to their customers in Hong Kong and need to describe how they will respond to demands from the Chinese authorities to limit access to information,” wrote Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous founder of GreatFire, a Chinese web censorship advocacy and watchdog group. “Presumably people purchase Apple devices because they believe the company when they say that ‘privacy is a fundamental human right’. What they fail to add is *except if you are Chinese.”

    Ka-cheong tweeted that other Hong Kong residents had reported GitLab similarly blocked on their devices thanks to Tencent. “We will look into it,” Apple engineer Maciej Stachowiak tweeted in response. “Thanks for the heads-up.” But Ka-cheong, who also serves as vice president of Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter, an online rights group, said he received no further information from Apple.

    “Presumably people purchase Apple devices because they believe the company when they say that ‘privacy is a fundamental human right’. What they fail to add is *except if you are Chinese.”

    The block came as a particular surprise to Ka-cheong and other Hong Kong residents because Apple originally said the Tencent blocklist would be used only for Safari users inside mainland China. According to a review of the Internet Archive, however, sometime after November 24, 2022, Apple quietly edited its Safari privacy policy to note that the Tencent blacklist would be used for devices in Hong Kong as well. (Haija, the Apple spokesperson, did not respond when asked when or why Apple expanded the use of Tencent’s filter to Hong Kong.)

    Though mainland China has heavily censored internet access for decades, Hong Kong typically enjoyed unfettered access to the web, a freedom only recently threatened by the passage of a sweeping, repressive national security law in 2020.

    Silently expanding the scope of the Tencent list not only allows Apple to remain in the good graces of China — whose industrial capacity remains existentially vital to the California-based company — but also provides plausible deniability about how or why such site blocks happen.

    “While unfortunately many tech companies proactively apply political and religious censorship to their mainland Chinese users, Apple may be unique among North American tech companies in proactively applying such speech restrictions to users in Hong Kong,” said Jeffrey Knockel, a researcher with Citizen Lab, a digital security watchdog group at the University of Toronto.

    Knockel pointed out that while a company like Tencent should expected to comply with Chinese law as a matter of course, Apple has gone out of its way to do so.

    “The aspect which we should be surprised by and concerned about is Apple’s decision to work with Tencent in the first place to filter URLs for Apple’s Hong Kong users,” he said, “when other North American tech companies have resisted Hong Kong’s demands to subject Hong Kong users to China-based filtering.”

    The block on GitLab would not be the first time Tencent deemed a foreign website “dangerous” for apparently ideological reasons. In 2020, attempts to visit the official website of Notepad++, a text editor app whose French developer had previously issued a statement of solidarity with Hong Kong dissidents, were blocked for users of Tencent web browsers, again citing safety.

    The GitLab block also wouldn’t be the first time Apple, which purports to hold deep commitments to human rights, has bent the company’s products to align with Chinese national pressure. In 2019, Apple was caught delisting an app Hong Kong political dissidents were using to organize; in November, users noticed the company had pushed a software update to Chinese iPhone users that significantly weakened the AirDrop feature, which protesters throughout the country had been using to spread messages on the ground.

    “All companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, including freedom of expression, no matter where in the world they operate,” Michael Kleinman, head of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley Initiative, wrote to The Intercept. “Any steps by Apple to limit freedom of expression for internet users in Hong Kong would contravene Apple’s responsibility to respect human rights under the UN Guiding Principles.”

    In 2019, Apple publicly acknowledged that it had begun using a “safe browsing” database maintained by Tencent to filter the web activity of its users in China, instead of an equivalent list operated by Google. Safe browsing filters ostensibly protect users from malicious pages containing malware or spear-phishing attacks by checking the website they’re trying to load against a master list of blacklisted domains.

    In order to make such a list work, however, at least some personal information needs to be transmitted to the company operating the filter, be it Google or Tencent. When news of Apple’s use of the Tencent safe browsing list first broke, Matthew Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, described it as “another example of Apple making significant modifications to its privacy infrastructure, largely without publicity or announcement.”

    “I suppose the nature of having a ‘misinformation’ category is that China is going to have its own views on what that means.”

    While important questions remain about exactly what information from Safari users in Hong Kong and China is ultimately transmitted to Tencent and beyond, the GitLab incident shows another troubling aspect of safe browsing: It gives a single company the ability to unilaterally censor the web under the aegis of public safety.

    “Our concern was that outsourcing this stuff to Chinese firms seemed problematic for Apple,” Green explained in an interview with The Intercept, “and I suppose the nature of having a ‘misinformation’ category is that China is going to have its own views on what that means.”

    Indeed, it’s impossible to know in what sense GitLab could have possibly been considered a source of dangerous “unverified information.” The site is essentially an empty vessel where software developers, including corporate clients like T-Mobile and Goldman Sachs, can safely store and edit code. The Chinese government has recently cracked down on some open-source code sites similar to GitLab, where engineers from around the world are able to freely interact, collaborate, and share information. (GitLab did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Notably, the censorship-evasion and anonymity web browser Tor has turned to GitLab to catalog instances of Chinese state internet censorship, though there’s no indication it was this activity that led to GitLab’s addition to the Tencent list.

    While Tencent provides some public explanation of its criteria for blocking a website, its decision-making process is completely opaque, and the published censorship standards are extremely vague, including offenses like “endangering national security” and “undermining national unity.”

    Tencent has long been scrutinized for its ties to the Chinese government, which frequently leverages state power to more closely influence or outright control nominally private firms.

    Related

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    Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the Chinese government was acquiring so-called golden shares of Tencent, a privileged form of equity that’s become “a common tool used by the state to exert influence over private news and content companies.” A 2021 New York Times report on Tencent noted the company’s eagerness to cooperate with Chinese government mandates, quoting the company’s president during an earnings call that year: “Now I think it’s important for us to understand even more about what the government is concerned about, what the society is concerned about, and be even more compliant.”

    While Tencent’s compliance with the Chinese national security agenda ought not to come as a surprise, Knockel of Citizen Lab says Apple’s should.

    “Ultimately I don’t think it really matters exactly how GitLab came to be blocked by Tencent’s Safe Browsing,” he said. “Tencent’s blocking of GitLab for Safari users underscores that Apple’s subjection of Hong Kong users to screening via a China-based company is problematic not only in principle but also in practice.”


    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/26/apple-brings-mainland-chinese-web-censorship-to-hong-kong/feed/ 0 367362 Speaking with Forked Tongues https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/26/speaking-with-forked-tongues/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/26/speaking-with-forked-tongues/#respond Thu, 26 Jan 2023 01:37:22 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137224 Orientation Can language limit thought? If a dogmatic belief system can narrow the kind of vocabulary used, can language itself limit the kind of thinking that is going on? How free are people to think their own thoughts independently of language? My answer in this article is that language can trap thought. In his book […]

    The post Speaking with Forked Tongues first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    Orientation

    Can language limit thought?

    If a dogmatic belief system can narrow the kind of vocabulary used, can language itself limit the kind of thinking that is going on? How free are people to think their own thoughts independently of language? My answer in this article is that language can trap thought. In his book The New Doublespeak, William Lutz points out that instead of being an instrument for expressing thought, language became a means for concealing or even preventing thought. We will examine how language doublespeak applies through propaganda in the fields of economy, politics and advertising.

    What is propaganda?

    In my article of almost two years ago “Socialist Rhetorical and Dialectical Communication: Overcoming Brainwashing, Propaganda and Entertainment,”

    I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control: a) perceptions; b) cognitions; c) emotions; and d) behavior while: a) censoring; b) hiding; c) restricting; d) distorting; or e) exaggerating the claims of their opposition. Propaganda can be found in economic textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies and sports.

    In this article we will be discussing how propaganda is used in print through verbal language. Propaganda is also used in other mediums like television, the internet and film. Furthermore, it is also used in how space is organized, in architecture, monuments and even street names. Propaganda through print is not nearly as dramatic or powerful as some of the other mediums and because of this it is more easily overlooked that are part of the motive for this article.

    The six functions of language

    At its most naïve and superficial, the purpose of language is to communicate information in everyday life. For example, it could be going to the grocery store and declaring to the cashier “it is pouring out there”. These are statements that to which the answers can be true or false. But this declarative statement is only one of many types.

    For example, there are interrogative questions such as “did you do the reading?”. In this case there may be some power going on depending if the question is coming from a teacher or another student. Another function of language is performative, that is when you promise or commit to doing something. If I say “I promise never to leave the front door unlocked again,” the response is not true or false or the answer to a question. It is performative – or what is called a commissive.

    The function of language can also be expressive such as criticism, praise, condolences or matters of taste. In power positions, we can tell someone what to do. “Either punch that time-card now or leave the building”. Lastly, as will be the topic of this article, language can be used to persuade. If during a debate on abortion, you define abortion in a loaded way as murder you will be persuading the audience to be on your side before the argumentations even begin.

    Manipulation through Mixing the Functions of Language

    Why bother naming the six functions of language? What does this have to do with powerplays and possibly propaganda? With the exception of a military order, most bosses or parents would prefer to get their employers or children to do something without giving them an order. Why? Because it is easier to control people by making it appear that there are no powerplays going on. In most communications, power struggles are muffled by mixing some functions with other functions. What is happening in these situations is inseparable from: a) the roles being played; b) the time; c) place; and d) circumstance.

    For example, when a teacher asks a student “did you do the reading,” they are not just asking a question. They are also implying a threat – what will happen if you don’t do the reading. The same process is at work when a parent asks a child if they have completed a chore. How about this: two brothers are going out to lunch. One said, “shit, I don’t have any cash and I don’t have any credit cards on me”. This is an expressive. Instead of just being explicit and saying “can you pay for me”? This brother said nothing intentionally, hoping his brother would offer to pay without having to ask. Lastly, a mother says to her son, “you have a lot of video games in your room. How do you find the time to play them?” This is an interrogative question. She wanted her son to have fewer games so he would spend more time on homework. She was leading up to giving him an order to play fewer video games. But she turned it into a question to manipulate him into buying fewer games by making it seem as if the son came to this of his own accord.

    The Power of Labels as Tools for Clarification

    Suppose I am feeling under the weather. My nose is running, I have a cough, I have a head-ache and have low energy. I am bothered by this because I don’t know what the trouble is. I make an appointment with my doctor and tell her my symptoms. She says to me that I have a “cold”. I am immediately relieved. Why is this? It’s because having a label for something means a) that other people have had it or it wouldn’t have a name; b) there is probably a diagnosis for it, and she will tell me why I have it and what are the developmental symptoms; and c) there is probably a prognosis as to what to do about it. Labels for physical problems don’t come out of thin air. First, there are a fragmented set of symptoms which are unconnected with many people having these symptoms. After the symptoms are studied, relationships between the symptoms are formed. If enough people have the same symptoms, a label is used to categorize the phenomenon as a whole.

    Labels are vitally important for identifying the basic features of something, where it came from and how it might progress. The same value comes about when it comes to mental illness. Suppose I find myself nervous when it is time to go to a birthday party. I have sweaty palms, dry mouth and my heart is racing. Then I notice similar symptoms before I go to work. I am nervous about being around the other workers. Then I notice the same symptoms when I am with my children. I go to a physician and she refers me to a psychiatrist. I tell the psychiatrist what my symptoms are she says I have general anxiety. Now I feel relieved for the same reasons I did when I was diagnosed with a cold. However, I am also uncomfortable because with the label comes somewhat of a stigma. But “anxiety” helps me to feel I do not have some rare problem I may die from and there is something I can do about it.

    The Power of Language as a Weapon: Reification

    On one hand, labels simplify processes and help us to live. Without labels we couldn’t get much done because we would be buried in events. Labels are short-cuts, generalizations which help us to rise above everyday life and predict what people are like and what people will do. However, real life is always more than any combination of labels. As individuals we are always more complicated than any group of labels. A problem with too closely identifying with a label is that you start acting like the label and lose track of the fact that you are more complex than the label. For example, a person diagnosed with anxiety might then explain all the behavior they don’t like as due to anxiety. They stop using skills to solve problems by simply falling back to the label – “I’m an anxious person”.

    When people use a tool of labeling against themselves they may reify the label. Reifying the label means you take a process and turn it into a thing which then oppresses you. The term “anxiety” becomes a prison from which there appears to be no escape. Here is an extreme case of this. Years ago, I worked as a relief counselor in a half-way house. When I first came on my shift after being away for a couple of months, the new patients would introduce themselves, not by their first name but by their diagnosis. I also remember how bitterly some of them fought when the house psychiatrist gave them a different diagnostic label. They were so attached to the label that the label meant more to them than getting a better diagnosis, with better treatment plans and better medications.

    Loading and Boiling the Language

    Virtue words

    When the Republicans and Democrats run for state offices, they hire consultants who suggest the language they use describe both their candidates as well as their opponents. Both of them are encouraged to use the following words: common sense courage; crusade dream; duty; family values; freedom; democracy; hard work; liberty, morality; pioneer, pride; prosperity; independency; patriotic; free enterprise and  ambitious.

    What do these words have in common? These are called “virtue” words. Virtue words are one-sidedly good words in which there are no conditions under which they can be opposed. For example, it is not possible to only be moderately for democracy. Neither could you be against freedom. How could anyone be against “free enterprise”? Surely  everyone wants to be enterprising. How can you not be ambitious. Only slackers wouldn’t want to move up in the class hierarchy.

    Vice words

    The same advertising firms had some suggestions for choice words that Republicans should call Democrats. They include communist, socialist, terrorists, anti-flag, corruption, traitors, treasonous, welfare; liberal, radical, taxes; bureaucratic and red tape. These are words the advertising agencies have identified that will trigger the citizens of Mordor to look unfavorably at those politicians.

    The larger picture: teaching people to think in mutually exclusive dualities

    What both Republicans and Democrats have in common is a hope that the population does not think critically. Among other things, thinking critically means that no person or institution can be seen as all good or all bad. All people and their institutions have their pro and cons. In addition, seemingly opposites actually have much in common. Therefore, the Republicans and Democrats have more in common than they have differences. They are both for capitalism, demonize Russia and China, are against communism and socialism and ignore class stratification in their own society. It is in the interests of both parties to portray their candidates as goodie-goodies and the opposition in bad-guy hats which infantilizes their populations.

    Slanting

    Very often slanting is held to be a bias against objectivity in the news. As an example, Fox news is presented as biased while CNN is looked at as more objective. But slanting is much deeper than giving a one-sided view. Two-sided views can be biased. Slanting is when the process of objectivity is limited to two views, as in virtue and vice words.  Or when it is limited to the positions of conservatives and liberals. What slanting ignores is what the two sides have in common and what points of view are objective but censored by both sides. For example, most citizens of Mordor agree that the minimum wage is too low. But this issue is never a regular part of any major news station in an ongoing group discussion.  At the same time, close to 70% of Mordor’s citizens say that third parties should be allowed in the debates. Though many feel this way, you will never see ongoing coverage of this. Lastly, over half the people between 25-34 in Mordor are sympathetic to a socialist system. Are real socialists (not Bernie Sanders) given any air time to present a transition program of how a socialist would address current social problem? There are many people who are respectable professionals who think that the events in Mordor on September 11th were an inside job. Yet for over 20 years these folks have been denounced as conspiracy nuts.

    Euphemisms Freezing the Language

    The opposite of loading the language is freezing the language. If loading the language is getting people riled up with inflammatory words, using euphemisms is masking the emotional nature of some institution or practice by stripping it of all emotions, meaning and sanitizing it. For example, instead of calling enemy troops prisoners of war they are called “detainees”. Death of civilians during war is sanitized and called “collateral damage”. It’s hard to get worked up about that. Instead of rousing and beating the homeless off the streets “police officers” conduct “street sweeps”. Sweeps implies cleaning up, implying no broken bones or crushed arteries. Sweeping also implies the homeless are dirt.

    How are workers likely to feel if they received a letter telling them there will be a mass firing of 2,000 of them? They might just get angry and want to do something collectively. They are much less likely to be angry if they received individual letters telling them they were “downsized”. What the hell does that mean? Workers don’t know but it buys capitalists time while they try to figure it out.

    If Democrats want to raise taxes, do they call it that? Chances are not likely given how the Mordor public feels about taxes.  Better to call it “revenue enhancements”. Instead of calling Democratic deficits due to support of a fascist Ukraine war, the deficits we have, lo and behold, are “shortfalls of revenue”. An insurance broker wants you to buy insurance. As you know, when you are being sold “life’ insurance, you are really betting against your own longevity. Why doesn’t the insurance agent call you up and say “Yo, wanna buy some death insurance”? Not very appealing, is it?

    The capitalist system is full of euphemisms to explain why a horrible system is really perfectly normal. In fact, Michael Hudson wrote an entire book exposing capitalist euphemisms in J is For Junk Economics. The following are a couple of examples. “Business cycles” is the term capitalist use to avoid coming to terms with crisis in the system that is irreversible and the downward spiraling – and “recoveries” never return to the level they once were. In the 19th century, economic crisis were called “panics”. That was a little too scary for capitalists, so in the 20th century economic crises were called ‘depressions”. Not so bad – right? Wrong! “Depressions” became too scary after the ten-year depression of the 1930s. Now any economic crisis no matter how bad will be called a “recession”.

    Do capitalists take responsibility for extreme weather and ecological pollution?  Not on your life! For capitalists, the biophysical world crises are called “externalities”. Translation? “This has nothing to do with us”. Lastly, capitalists never want to call their system “capitalist”. Why? Because calling capitalism a system means it has laws, a history and origin in time and a termination point, as so all systems. Instead, capitalists call their system “the market”. This sounds tame enough. It sounds nebulous. It makes it sound as if it has always existed and that there isn’t anything else. Capitalists also call their system “business” another meek term which hides processes like class struggle, exploitation or imperialism.

    Reification

    We met with this term earlier when we discussed the out-of-control use of labels. But reification is more than about labels. Reification is the transformation of processes into things. What we call entities are only processes that are temporarily frozen. We reify processes when we turn entities into things. Another part of reification is when we treat these things as if they have a life independent of processes and a life of their own. The third characteristic of reification is that these things oppress us. We pay homage to them as if they created us rather than that we created them.

    Good examples of reification are gods. We create gods to give our life meaning and purpose and yet we wind up being enslaved to our own creations. We do the same thing with capitalism. Marx talked about the reification of commodities in the first volume of Capital. People make commodities on the assembly line and their purpose is to use them. But under capitalism, commodities acquire a life of their own and people become enslaved to their own creations. When we say the economy is “growing” that is a reification. The economy is not a separate thing from people working. The people working is the real thing, the economy is not independent of that. If enough people went out on strike, there would be no economy. Neither is there such a thing as “smart money”. There are only individual people making smart or dumb choices about investing money. Money doesn’t do anything by itself. A vital part of all propaganda is the turning of people into things, processes into things, and abstractions into concrete entities.

    Jargon

    All professions have a specialized language which are shortcuts to describe processes that would otherwise take too long to describe if they were used in every-day terminology. There is nothing wrong with this and it’s inevitable. It occurs in mathematics and in the hard sciences. Specialized language turns into jargon when professionals use technical terms outside their profession to confuse or intimidate the public. For example, someone who is a lawyer may use technical terms to keep a neighbor from suing him for damage to his property. Another use of jargon is the fine print at the end of a document used on a kind of property class. The reader must hire a lawyer to translate what the document means. Lastly, free market fundamentalists use mathematics in their beginning economic textbooks in order to hide their questionable assumptions and their lack of scientific rigor predicting the direction of the economy.

    Muddying the Language

    Loading the language, reifying the language and using jargon are all dramatic or overly dramatic uses of language. Muddying the language makes words intentionally imprecise in order to get away with manipulating without being found out.

    Weasel words

    These words are most consistently used in advertising. They combine a lot of razzle-dazzle virtue words with key non-committal words that avoid taking a clear stand. For example, mouthwash that claims to “fight” bad breath but makes no attempt to cure it. Another ad claims to “control” dandruff but does not promise to eliminate it.  A car dealer claims that “no one sells for less” makes it seem as if the car is selling for the lowest prices. Sounds pretty good, right?  But it could very well be that the competition is selling for the same price. It is not such a good bargain after all! Why do weasel words exist? Advertisers are legally bound. If they promise a product would cure bad breath or eliminate dandruff and it doesn’t, the advertisers can be sued. If someone finds an ad in the paper promising the lowest prices in town and another car dealer undersells the first car dealer who put in the original ad, they also may run into legal problems.

    The political system in Mordor is so rotten that politicians can say anything they want and they cannot be sued by citizens for breaking their promises. This is one of many reasons why the political system in Mordor is held in such contempt by most citizens of its citizens.

    Ambiguity and Vagueness

    Words can be ambiguous when a word has a number of meanings and there isn’t enough context to allow you to figure out which of the meanings are appropriate.

    For example, the word bank can mean an institution for investing money or someone of something you can bank on. Bank can also mean a part of a river. Lastly, bank can mean the utilization of a strategy for making a pool shot (eight-ball banked and into the side pocket). There is usually no linguistic manipulation here, just a matter of confusion.

    Ambiguous words are many, but all the word definitions are clear. With words that are vague, the meaning of the word itself is foggy and this fogginess can be used for manipulative purposes whether political, economic or personal. I don’t know of a phase that has been used more manipulatively in Mordor than the words “I love you”. Especially in romantic encounters it can send one swooning or tightening up their defense mechanisms. Erich Fromm famously defined many kinds of love – parental love, sibling love, friendship love in addition to romantic love and they all mean different things. A famous use of love in a manipulative way by parents towards their children is to say “I am doing this because I love you” just before punishing them. Whether the punishment is just or unjust, the parent is attempting to escape the wrath of his child by trotting this out. When a female hears her date say “I love you,” she would be right to say, “What do you mean”? Is this a ploy to get her into bed? As the Shirelles sang, “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Or is it something that is said after sex by way of reassurance. The word love is thrown out for various types of manipulation far more than it is simply an expression of affection. We are told that radio stations love their listeners and football teams love their fans.

    Another emotional word  that people can be taken to the cleaners about is the term “support”. Many years ago, when I was teaching night school, I watched the sad devolution of many of my female students’ romantic relationships. By the time they were in the last quarter or two, their relationships were on the rocks or in trouble. Because the classes I was teaching were about adult psychological development, they spoke of their relationships in writing and in discussion. A common theme was their partner’s manipulative use of the term “support”. They said to their partner “I support you” going to school. But in retrospect my students said they should have responded with “What do you mean by support? Does support mean you will do the laundry on the weekends so I can do reading? Are you willing to make dinners on the weekend so I can write papers? Does support mean you can accept not going out on day trips on the weekend because I will be in class? That is what I mean by support”. Support is a practical down-to-earth series of active commitments a person does. It isn’t just an emotional word meaning you are sympathetic about my going to school. 

    Equivocation

    The last of our muddy words is equivocation. This means changing the meaning of the same word as we proceed from the beginning or end of a written piece or a lecture. A very simple and funny one is when I tell my students that when Marx and Engels defined the class structure as between capitalists and workers, he forgot to talk about the class struggle between students and teachers. In a serious vein, the word “class” in an institutional setting means a setting in which college courses take place. I was making a joke by suggesting that the battles between teachers and students over doing the reading, turning in papers and turning off their cell phones resembles a class struggle between workers and capitalists.

    How about this statement from the body of an international economic organization: “The developed countries have it all over the undeveloped countries. It’s just a matter of developmental maturation”. In the first place, the word “development” comes from either biology or psychology. In these fields the word development points to a predictable sequence from neonate, to adolescence, to adulthood, meaning maturity. Can nation-states be categorized as children, adolescents or mature adults? If they are, whose interest do they serve?

    Anthropologists claim that it is the essence of European racism to categorize political/economic nation-states as immature and mature. Given that the mature, developed countries are in the West and the immature countries are in the capitalist periphery we have the following:

    Western Core – like adults – US, Western Europe – capitalist

    Semi periphery – adolescence – China, India, Latin America – capitalist, socialist

    Southern periphery – children – Africa – socialist

    This political use of the term development helps justify the dispensing or refusing of loans from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to peripheral countries. If the World Bank wants to support “mature” development they will give peripherical countries money to develop a tourist industry. But if a country in the periphery asks for a loan to develop science and technology, which might compete with the oil industry present in a mature country, that loan will be refused and the name of the country will be classified as immature.

    Conclusion

    This article began with raising the question of the relationship between language and thought. If your vocabulary is intentionally shrunken, distorted or exaggerated how free are you to think your own thoughts? I am most interested in showing why you are not free when it comes to a propaganda setting. After defining what propaganda is, I described the six functions of language and how they can be manipulated. Then I described the use and misuse of labels as tools on the one hand and weapons on the other. With that as a foundation I described three ways language can be manipulated, by boiling the language, freezing the language and muddying the language. Boiling the language includes the use of virtue and vice words. Freezing the language is what happens when euphemisms are used. Lastly there are four kinds of ways language can be muddied. The first two are using language ambiguously or vaguely. Other sneaky ways to use language are by using weasel words or equivocation. Jargon and reification are two other forms of manipulation that are important that we covered but don’t fit into loading, freezing muddying language.

    The post Speaking with Forked Tongues first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/26/speaking-with-forked-tongues/feed/ 0 367252     How Adam Schiff directed Twitter censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/19/how-adam-schiff-directed-twitter-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/19/how-adam-schiff-directed-twitter-censorship/#respond Thu, 19 Jan 2023 21:40:07 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=4bd383bf61c1941546b278ecaa977f8f
    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/19/how-adam-schiff-directed-twitter-censorship/feed/ 0 365723     Armenian draft legislation would give government sweeping wartime censorship powers https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/19/armenian-draft-legislation-would-give-government-sweeping-wartime-censorship-powers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/19/armenian-draft-legislation-would-give-government-sweeping-wartime-censorship-powers/#respond Thu, 19 Jan 2023 17:03:11 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=254315 Stockholm, January 19, 2022 – Armenian authorities should not use military conflicts as an excuse to curtail press freedom and should rework clauses in a draft bill that would threaten press freedom, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

    On January 6, the public comment period closed for a bill drafted by the Ministry of Justice in late 2022; when the ministry has evaluated those comments, it can decide whether to send the bill to parliament, according to news reports and local press freedom advocates who spoke with CPJ.

    In the draft version circulated for public comment in December, the bill empowered authorities under conditions of martial law to temporarily block websites, apps, and social media networks and “partially or completely” restrict internet access in the country. That draft did not specify any restrictions on authorities’ ability to take such actions or any way for affected parties to appeal the decisions.

    The draft also authorized the government of Armenia—which is involved in a protracted conflict over disputed territory with neighboring Azerbaijan—to intervene in television and internet broadcasting to disseminate information and ensure that films and programs feature “exclusively military patriotic content.”

    “The blanket powers of censorship in a bill drafted by Armenia’s Ministry of Justice grant the state far too much discretion to block websites, cut off the country’s internet, and censor news outlets,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Armenian authorities should revise this bill and conduct thorough consultations with media representatives before putting it forward in a new form.”

    Artur Papyan, director of the Media Diversity Institute, and Ashot Melikyan, chair of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Speech, two local free speech groups, told CPJ by phone that Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party has a large enough parliamentary majority to pass the bill, but hoped that the Ministry of Justice will consult with media advocacy groups and amend the disputed clauses.

    Eleven local press freedom groups, including Papyan and Melikyan’s organizations, published a statement criticizing the draft bill on January 12. Media rights groups are concerned that once a mechanism for blocking websites and the internet is established, authorities will seek to gradually expand its use, Papyan told CPJ.

    Papyan and Melikyan said that the broad, unrestricted powers the draft would give the government, coupled with the lack of transparency over decisions, could lead to politically motivated decisions. They said the bill is particularly worrying given the government’s intolerance of criticism during the war in 2020.

    During the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan war, a temporary government decree prohibited the publication of reports “criticizing” or “questioning the effectiveness” of state actions concerning the conflict, leading to the forced takedown of hundreds of articles and fines issued to more than a dozen news outlets. Authorities also blocked many websites with Azerbaijani and Turkish domain names and the social media app TikTok.

    Papyan told CPJ that Armenian authorities struggled to legally justify these blocks at the time, and he believes the current draft law seeks to give them such a justification for the future.

    Armenia’s existing martial law allows authorities to confiscate media outlets’ equipment, establish special procedures for journalists’ accreditation, and “restrict freedom of opinion in accordance with the law.”

    In July 2022, Armenia’s prosecutor general proposed legislation that would empower the government to block websites, citing the need to censor harmful material such as instructions on committing suicide or selling drugs. The proposal was dropped following criticism by media organizations, Papyan said.

    CPJ’s email to the Ministry of Justice did not receive a reply.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/19/armenian-draft-legislation-would-give-government-sweeping-wartime-censorship-powers/feed/ 0 365631     Russian News-media are More Honest than U.S.-and-Allied Media https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/15/russian-news-media-are-more-honest-than-u-s-and-allied-media/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/15/russian-news-media-are-more-honest-than-u-s-and-allied-media/#respond Sun, 15 Jan 2023 02:38:53 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136946 How many times have the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries been lied-to about invasions their Governments had made on the basis of falsehoods that their ‘news’-media knew at the time were false but nonetheless reported to them as being true? How many times have those ‘news’-media reported as being ‘a democratic revolution’ the overthrow of a […]

    The post Russian News-media are More Honest than U.S.-and-Allied Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     How many times have the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries been lied-to about invasions their Governments had made on the basis of falsehoods that their ‘news’-media knew at the time were false but nonetheless reported to them as being true? How many times have those ‘news’-media reported as being ‘a democratic revolution’ the overthrow of a foreign Government when those ‘news’-media knew, either while it was going on or else less than a month afterward, that it had actually been just another U.S. coup — and yet those same ‘news’-media still, even to this day, refuse to refer to that coup as HAVING BEEN a “coup”?

    Russia’s news-media are far more honest, and this will be documented here, by recent examples:

    On Friday, January 13, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, told the members of the U.N. Security Council, which includes all of the “Big 5” Permanent Members, including (besides Russia), U.S., China, France, and UK, that a negotiated end of the war in Ukraine “will only present itself once Ukraine stops posing a threat to Russia and discriminating against Russian-speaking Ukrainians,” and that, “If this result can be achieved through negotiations, we stand ready for this scenario. If not, then our tasks will be achieved by military means,” meaning that Ukraine’s current government will be replaced by one that will be imposed upon that country by means of that government’s surrender to Russia’s Government.

    This was an extremely important statement. It indicates that Russia will not negotiate an end to its invasion of Ukraine unless and until Ukraine’s government will first have accepted Russia’s fundamental terms — which Russia had actually stated on 24 February 2022 when starting its invasion — and that there no longer remain any other demands by Ukraine’s government upon Russia’s Government that Russia’s Government will consider or discuss with anyone. First must come Ukraine’s acceptance of those demands by Russia.

    This reflects a historic turning-point in the war. It means that either Ukraine and its allies — especially the U.S. — will defeat Russia in this war, or else Russia will defeat the U.S. and its allies in this war. It lays down the gauntlet, to the United States Government, and to its allies on the Security Council — France and UK — that either Russia or else the U.S. and its allies (including all of NATO) will win this war; or else the U.S. and its allies (including Ukraine’s government) will peaceably accept Russia’s basic demand, that “Ukraine stops posing a threat to Russia and discriminating against Russian-speaking Ukrainians.” In order for Ukraine to “stop posing a threat to Russia,” Ukraine and its allies would need to guarantee that Ukraine will NEVER become a member of the U.S. Government’s anti-Russian NATO military alliance, nor ever become in any other way a military ally of the U.S. Government. Russia will accept Ukraine’s returning to its prior neutrality, which it had during the period 1991 up to 20 February 2014, or else to become an ally of Russia, but Russia will no longer accept (as it had during 20 February 2014 to 24 February 2022) Ukraine’s being allied with Russia’s enemies. Russia won’t ever accept that, he is saying.

    Nebenzia’s historic announcement on Friday still has not yet been reported by any U.S.-and-allied news-medium. As this article is being written, on the afternoon of Saturday, 14 January 2023, at 2PM Eastern Standard Time in NYC — late enough for any U.S.-and-allied news-medium to have reported this momentous news — none reported it. A Web-search at that time showed “5 results” and the only mainstream one was Russia’s RT News headlining “Russia speaks on endgame for Ukraine conflict.” The other 4 were only copying that report. The news-report by Russia’s Tass News Agency, “Russia’s special operation will be over when its goals are achieved – envoy to UN,” was — like all other news-reports, besides RT’s, that aren’t basically controlled by the U.S. Government, filtered out — NOT shown — by a Web-search by the CIA-created Google, which still has a monopoly in the English language because all other search-engines use Google’s as their own base, from which they might further-censor-out their finds. (And here is another way that truth is suppressed in the U.S.-and-allied world.)

    That’s an example of momentous, historic news, which is NOT reported by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Fox News, Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, The Nation, Deutsche Welle, and all other U.S.-Government-controlled ‘news’-media. They’re not controlled directly by the U.S. Government, but instead by means of the few super-wealthy individuals (billionaires and centi-millionaires) who (by means of their corporations, think tanks, universities, etc.) control that Government by vetting any prospective candidate by either of the nation’s two political Parties who seeks to win his Party’s nomination to become a federal official. These are the political mega-donors. Their media hide this news, instead of report it. That’s why it’s NOT reported.

    They also hide supporting details, such as the reality that after Obama’s coup in Ukraine grabbed Ukraine for America’s billionaire masters, his junta called the residents in the far-eastern Donbass region where the coup was rejected the most vociferously, ‘terrorists’, and launched against them an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’, which has been slaughtering uncounted thousands of them ever since. The German independent journalist Alina Lipp has been filming there and trying to get the reality — such as this on January 12 — reported back to her homeland, but (as-of January 11) “German prosecutors claim that Ms Lipp’s Telegram channel is intended to destabilise the country’s [Germany’s] democracy and undermine public faith in established media,” so, her ‘“endorsing serious crime’ [in that way] is an offence that can be punished with up to three years in jail.”

    Another recent mega-news event they all hide was the news-report from Tass on January 10, “Corporate trail apparent in all four assassinations of US presidents — security official: Nikolay Patrushev believes that an increasingly large number of Americans say that the Republicans and the Democrats are merely “two actors in one staging that has nothing to do with democracy.” Patrushev is one of the top officials in Russia’s Government; and, according to the the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, he is a very important man. Wikipedia’s article about Patrushev says: “Belonging to the siloviki faction of president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, [3] Patrushev is believed to be one of the closest advisors to Putin and a leading figure behind Russia’s national security affairs.[4] He is considered as very hawkish towards the West and the US and has promoted various conspiracy theories. Patrushev is seen by observers as one of the likeliest candidates for succeeding Putin.[5]” So, America’s Deep State (America’s billionaires and their employees and many thousands of other hired agents) takes seriously what he says. On January 14, I Googled a key assertion by Patrushev in that article, saying that the U.S. Government is “cover for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world.” It found “6 results” and those were this Tass article and 5 others, all of which were based upon this tass article — none of which were by any U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, all of which instead hide his statement, which was made in a Russian national TV interview of him. So: here is that complete Tass article:

    MOSCOW, January 10. /TASS/. A corporate trail can be traced in all assassinations of US presidents, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said in an interview for aif.ru.

    “All four assassinations of American leaders are tied to a corporate trail,” he said in an interview published Tuesday.

    He explained that the American state is only a “cover for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world.” According to the official, transnational corporations treat even US presidents as “mere figureheads that can be silenced, as it happened with [Donald] Trump.”

    He believes that an increasingly large number of Americans say that the Republicans and the Democrats are merely “two actors in one staging that has nothing to do with democracy.”

    “The US authorities, allied to big business, serve the interests of trans-national corporations, including the military-industrial complex. The assertive policy of the White House, the unbridled aggressiveness of NATO, the emergence of the AUKUS military bloc and others – are also a consequence of corporate influence,” he concluded.

    Colonies and corporations

    Patrushev also noted that, in the past, the West achieved prosperity and global dominance through colonial conquests. He drew a parallel with transnational corporations that behave in a similar fashion, preferring to increase their capital by pumping resources from other countries and “using their system of dumbing down the masses to impose the idea about some rules that they have themselves invented and that do not correspond to international law.”

    The official stated that transnational corporations seriously influence local political and social and economic processes.

    “On the one hand , they introduce new technologies through direct investments, they increase labor productivity. But the population is unable to use these results, because the companies permanently supplant the local producer, becoming monopolies. By moving the main volume of income abroad, they devoid countries of an opportunity to increase their national welfare,” he elaborated.

    Meanwhile, according to Patrushev, national legal regulation is not enough to solve this problem, and the existing international legal regulation of economic activities of transnational corporations has been shaped in their interests and with their direct involvement.

    “Its amendment in favor of national interests of countries is being sabotaged,” he noted.

    “Amid the fundamental changes in the world, the corporations have one goal – to preserve the system of global exploitation. It is headed by an elite of businessmen that do not tie themselves to any states. Beneath it are the so-called developed countries and the ‘golden billion.’ And further below is the rest of humanity, contemptuously referred to as the ‘third world’,” the Secretary concluded.

    The assertions that Patrushev made there are documented true in my latest book, America’s Empire of Evil , except that his allegation regarding those assassinations concerns matters that the book doesn’t discuss, because — though I believe those allegations to be probably true — I’ve not yet researched those assassinations sufficiently to be writing about them. All the rest of his statement there is documented in my book, and the history of how it came to be this way is likewise fully described and documented there, so that the reader can understand how this came about. But, anyway, even if what Patrushev said there weren’t true, his having said it is of historic importance, because it indicates the extent to which Russia now, finally, recognizes the implacability of America’s Government regarding Russia — an implacability that started on 25 July 1945.

    The post Russian News-media are More Honest than U.S.-and-Allied Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/15/russian-news-media-are-more-honest-than-u-s-and-allied-media/feed/ 0 364621     The U.S. Regime Made me a Non-Person https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/09/the-u-s-regime-made-me-a-non-person/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/09/the-u-s-regime-made-me-a-non-person/#respond Mon, 09 Jan 2023 16:11:48 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136795 This is what happens to anyone who happens to report the types of things that America’s billionaires want to be hidden from the public. To understand how it happened to me (and has happened to lots of others), an introduction is needed, first, about the American Government: America’s First Amendment to its Constitution is this […]

    The post The U.S. Regime Made me a Non-Person first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     This is what happens to anyone who happens to report the types of things that America’s billionaires want to be hidden from the public.

    To understand how it happened to me (and has happened to lots of others), an introduction is needed, first, about the American Government:

    America’s First Amendment to its Constitution is this sentence: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

    The best summary-description of what that means (as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court) is by the American Library Association, and includes the following crucial statement:

    “The First Amendment only prevents government restrictions on speech. It does not prevent restrictions on speech imposed by private individuals or businesses. Facebook and other social media can regulate or restrict speech hosted on their platforms because they are private entities.”

    So long as a “private” entity censors public debate, the nation’s laws cannot get involved in that — that censorship cannot be outlawed. If public debate can be squelched by private entities, that’s okay, in America’s system of Government.

    The false assumption of this system is that allowing private entities to squelch “the press” or “the news media,” is okay because different private entities will squelch different truths from being presented to the public; and, so, each citizen will select which types of truths not to know, and which types of lies to believe instead — and that’s ‘democracy’ in America. Having different private entities black-out different truths and filter-in different lies instead, will give each citizen whatever he or she wants to believe. The individual will select on the basis of one’s own prejudices. That’s the individual’s ‘freedom’. The consumer will choose which type of fool to be (such as a fool of Democratic Party billionaires, or a fool of Republican Party billionaires), and will buy (believe) whatever lies he or she wants. But is that — belief in the political falsehoods that the individual prefers — really democracy? Won’t the result be instead to cement-in whatever myths that are setting different groups in the society against each other — instead of going against whatever is actually wrong with the Government? How will whatever is wrong with the Government get fixed, that way? Is it even possible?

    Scientific empirical studies that compare what the American public want to become laws in America and of what they don’t want to become laws, versus what actually does become law and what does not, have shown that only the preferences of the very wealthiest Americans affect and shape the nation’s laws. This is a one-dollar-one-vote country, not a one-person-one-vote country. (This is an empirical fact, not a theory.) America’s Government is an aristocracy, not a democracy. It’s controlled by counting the wealth, not really by counting the persons. Furthermore, 57.16% of the money that is donated to political campaigns in the U.S. comes from the richest one-ten-thousandth (top 0.01% wealthiest) of the American people (the “original donors” — the actual individuals who donated it); so, the individuals who own the controlling interests in the corporations, think tanks, foundations, and media that shape public opinion in America and who thus determine who becomes elected and who does not, are only the very richest few, America’s actual aristocrats, the people who control the public. The public thus vote the way that the super-rich of both Parties want them to vote. There is a technology of “manufactured ‘public’ consent,” and it’s controlled by the billionaires — NOT by the public. And whereas Democratic Party billionaires determine who get nominated by their Party, and Republican billionaires determine who get nominated by their Party, virtually no one gets elected who wasn’t first selected and backed by that Party’s billionaires.

    Since those few individuals control the media, they ALSO are the ULTIMATE employers of the various censors — both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side.

    All of the media that are NOT controlled by the super-rich are small (none of them are large, or even medium-sized), and one of those is “Ms. Cat’s Chronicles”. On January 3rd, they headlined linking through to one of the 5 (out of the 200+ that I submitted it to) sites that had published my December 30th article, “Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths, And Demands Spreading Lies”, and they gave an excerpt from the full article, and they noted “Related: Eric Zuesse’s Now-Deleted Profile at Modern Diplomacy” but here is what became of that profile. It’s gone. All of my hundreds of articles which had been published at Modern Diplomacy are gone. I am now a non-person there (which had been one of the few remaining sites that the billionaires hadn’t yet gotten under their control). And here is the full article that was linked-through to, by “Ms. Cat”: it was published at Oriental Review, “Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths, And Demands Spreading Lies”, and it explains, and fully documents, how the owner of Modern Diplomacy was forced, by ‘NewsGuard’ in Washington DC, to remove me — the author there that had drawn more page-views than any other author there. And yet, all of those articles now are gone. And you can see described there how it was done, and you can also see that truthfulness had nothing whatsoever to do with my being removed, but that my reporting the ‘wrong’ truths had everything to do with it. A censoring organization that had been funded by some billionaires’ agents, and called itself a “news guard” for the general public, did it. I report truths that all American billionaires (the people who actually control the U.S. Government) want Americans NOT to know. And now, the billionaires are going after EVEN the few (all of them very small) remaining sites, that publish SOME articles that the billionaires want the public NOT to see.

    There is no way to solve this, other than by outlawing ALL censorship, and allowing the public to see everything — regardless of whether or not some ‘news’-media owner, or billionaire-funded ‘NewsGuard’ service, doesn’t like it.

    Censorship that’s done by the agents of the billionaires who control a Government is just as vile as is censorship that’s done DIRECTLY BY that Government. ALL censorship should be outlawed, regardless of who does that censorship. Otherwise, how is an authentic democracy even possible?

    This problem can exist ONLY in a country that has enormous wealth-inequality (such as the U.S. does) and that allows by law (such as the U.S. does) agents of its very wealthiest few to coerce all but a few of the smallest news media to eliminate — not to publish — whatever those super-wealthy individuals want to be blacklisted (not published). The reality in the U.S. today is a ‘democracy’ of, by, and for, only its super-rich, none of whom want the public to know this fact. One way or another, a country that has enormous wealth-inequality will be a dictatorship; and no dictatorship can exist and be perpetuated without censorship. Censorship is the cardinal mark of any dictatorship. Only without censorship can democracy exist, at all. To censor is to mentally control another person — not to inform that person. It is mentally to enslave, not to free, that person. It is not to educate but to miseducate and manipulate that person. Any authentic democracy will do everything possible to prevent censorship.

    Julian Assange has been imprisoned by the UK on the demand by the U.S. for over a decade now, though never convicted of anything, but ONLY because he was the world’s most effective champion against censorship and for international democracy and personal accountability. To call either of these countries a democracy is to lie, and to insult the very term “democracy.” What Governments deserve to be overthrown and replaced more than those two do? However, any such revolution must be against censorship, and must itself be overthrown and replaced if it entails any censorship. To replace one dictatorship by another is no path toward freedom.

    The post The U.S. Regime Made me a Non-Person first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/09/the-u-s-regime-made-me-a-non-person/feed/ 0 363170     What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/06/what-to-expect-from-the-government-in-2023-more-of-the-same/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/06/what-to-expect-from-the-government-in-2023-more-of-the-same/#respond Fri, 06 Jan 2023 01:01:12 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136716 For those wondering what to expect from the government in 2023, it looks like we’re going to be in for more of the same in terms of the government’s brand of madness, mayhem, corruption and brutality. Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police […]

    The post What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     For those wondering what to expect from the government in 2023, it looks like we’re going to be in for more of the same in terms of the government’s brand of madness, mayhem, corruption and brutality.

    Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police agencies have already been given access to facial recognition software and databases containing 20 billion images, the precursor to a digital ID. Eventually, a digital ID will be required to gain access to all aspects of life: government, work, travel, healthcare, financial services, shopping, etc. Before long, biometrics (iris scans, face print, voice, DNA, etc.), will become the de facto digital ID.

    Precrime. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies are being used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating is being done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. AI predictive tools are being deployed in almost every area of life.

    Mandatory quarantines. Building on precedents established during the COVID-19 pandemic, government agents may be empowered to indefinitely detain anyone they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.

    Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel. As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.

    Tracking chips for citizens. Momentum is building for corporations and the government alike to be able to track the populace, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card, microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin, or tags in retail products.

    Military involvement domestically. The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, all signs point to the battlefield of the future being the American home front. Anticipating this, the government plans to have the military work in conjunction with local police to quell civil unrest domestically.

    Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation. In the government’s ongoing assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Threat assessments. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    War on cash. The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal.

    Expansive surveillance. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

    Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

    Police shootings of unarmed citizens. Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Police brutality and the use of excessive force continues unabated.

    False flags and terrorist attacks. Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party is in power: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

    Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed. The military and security industrial complexes that have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire abroad and here at home.

    Erosions of private property. Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

    Overcriminalization. The government has increasingly adopted the authoritarian notion that it knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives. Overregulation and overcriminalization have been pushed to such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair.

    Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Individuals—men and women alike—continue to be subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

    Censorship. First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

    Taxation Without Any Real Representation. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.

    Year after year, the government remains the greatest threat to our freedoms, and yet year after year, “we the people” allow ourselves to be suckered into believing that politics will fix what’s wrong with the country.

    Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the very definition of insanity.

    The post What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/06/what-to-expect-from-the-government-in-2023-more-of-the-same/feed/ 0 362322     Banning Books Is Perverse and Vulgar https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/04/banning-books-is-perverse-and-vulgar/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/04/banning-books-is-perverse-and-vulgar/#respond Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:05:22 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/republican-book-banning

    Excuse me for using explicit language here, but it seems to me that today's most vulgar expression of right-wing extremist dogma is its unhealthy obsession with banning books. It's a political perversion that, ironically, its participants usually rationalize by claiming they are "battling vulgarity."

    And, boy, are they hot to trot! Of course, pious book-banners have been around ever since books were first published, but there's a surge of them these days. That's because stripping books out of schools and public libraries has become a favorite way for right-wing politicos to stimulate their supporters' political passion for engaging in culture wars against their neighbors... and common sense.

    Until recently, there were only a couple of hundred isolated book challenges a year in our entire country, and local school boards and city councils generally handled them properly — without starting an uncivil war. But now, attempted book bans are erupting everywhere, orchestrated by a few extremist political groups and a flock of opportunistic Republican politicians. PEN, a nonprofit watchdog that monitors these attacks on our freedom of expression, has documented 2,532 copycat campaigns across America in the past year to ban more than 1,600 works from our schools.

    These self-appointed autocratic censors uniformly assert that they are defending "parental rights" and protecting their little ones from "sensitive materials" that dare discuss controversial topics like slavery and sexual identities. Bovine excrement. First, their naked censorship is just a power play to impose their hang-ups on you and your children; they're really only defending their own little group's nonexistent right to tell all other parents how to raise their kids. Indeed, in a nationwide poll this year, 71% of Americans oppose these partisan efforts to ban library books in the name of "protecting" young people. Second, have these political nannies not heard of the internet? I can assure them that most of their own children and grandchildren have, and most of them already know about the truths these so-called adults are trying to censor.

    Nothing is so foolish — or wrong — as trying to put blinders on young people's natural curiosity.

    Sometimes, stupid political ideas beget even stupider political tactics.

    For example, a faction of right-wing Republicans wants to stop public discussion and actions involving two ideas they hate. No. 1: Racism always has been and still is a systemic problem in American society; and No. 2: LGBTQ people are a normal and welcome part of... well, of us : America's richly diverse society.

    Aside from the raw ignorance behind the GOP's denial of these realities, consider the boneheadedness of their current campaign to impose their bigotry on America. At least 50 extremist groups are roaming from city to city, funded by deep-pocket right-wingers like the Koch brothers' political network, to demand that books they don't like be removed from schools and libraries. Worse, their open assault on knowledge and our freedom to read includes the nasty tactic of demonizing and threatening librarians who resist their dictates. Librarians! As a group, these truly helpful people are a national treasure, serving the common good — yet they're getting physical threats and being fired by these little right-wing mobs.

    The good news is that their surreptitious attacks are being exposed, and local folks are rising up against the book-banners and partisan thugs spreading their ignorance and usurping people's freedom to learn. For example, when two high-school girls in Leander, Texas, asked to check out a few books from their library, they were stunned to learn that the school district had banned all the titles they requested. Students had not been informed of this censorship, much less consulted. Rather than whine, the two feisty girls organized the Banned Book Club in their school, reading "prohibited" titles as a group, then meeting twice a month to discuss the books, including the ban.

    To get more information and to fight this right-wing repression, contact American Library Association: ala.org.

    Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes "The Hightower Lowdown," a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jim Hightower.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/04/banning-books-is-perverse-and-vulgar/feed/ 0 361915 Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/30/censorship-prohibits-spreading-truths-and-demands-spreading-lies/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/30/censorship-prohibits-spreading-truths-and-demands-spreading-lies/#respond Fri, 30 Dec 2022 21:59:31 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136551 When U.S. President George W. Bush, on 7 September 2002, said that the IAEA had just come out with a “new report” concluding that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA three times denied it, the President’s allegation grew into, and became the basis for, America’s ‘justification’ […]

    The post Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     When U.S. President George W. Bush, on 7 September 2002, said that the IAEA had just come out with a “new report” concluding that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA three times denied it, the President’s allegation grew into, and became the basis for, America’s ‘justification’ to invade Iraq on 20 March 2003, while the IAEA’s denial was hidden by the ‘news’-media — censored-out by them all (except for only one tiny and unclear news-story that only one small news-medium published three weeks later and few people even noticed — and which news-report didn’t even so much as just mention that it had related to the U.S. President’s allegation, much less that it disproved that allegation: that America’s President had lied his country into — deceived his own public into supporting — that invasion).

    This is an example of censorship to require lies, and to prohibit truths. And that is what censorship is generally intended to do. An author can write or say truths, but if no one will publish it, what good is it? What good is such ‘freedom of the press’? What good was it? (The IAEA knew.) None, at all (except for the international corporations that profited from America’s takeover of Iraq, and that served them by publishing those clients’ propaganda as ‘news’, such as in “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”).

    I specialize in documenting such censorship to enforce lies and prohibit truths, but I find that the public isn’t much concerned about this problem; most people simply assume it doesn’t even exist, and that if any censorship does exist, it is to prohibit lies instead of truths (the exact opposite of what it really is). They are thus doubly deceived. On December 27th, Russia’s RT headlined “Every social media firm censors for US government”, documenting that claim with links to the sources, and noting that it pertains to at least Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, and Pinterest, and that it’s controlled by collusion between those corporations and the Government in order to hide truths — including partisan political truths — so as to pump up the public’s support for current Governmental policies, to continue those policies by continuing those leaders in office. It’s essential to retaining the regime.

    This censorship is so normal in America so that on 24 November 2016, the Washington Post headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”, and it reported that a

    group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns. (Update: The report came out on Saturday).

    The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

    PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

    It wasn’t “nonpartisan,” and it was, instead, censorship to enforce lies — not to prohibit them — and that ‘news’paper was praising it by spreading its lies about itself (i.e., that the WP wasn’t itself one of the top spreaders of “fake ‘news’” — which, like all mainstream (and many non-mainstream) ‘news’-peddlers, it was and is). In fact: many of the “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” were publishing more truths and less lies than such mainstream ‘news’-media as the WP itself was and does. But that’s an unpublishable truth, because it’s a truth that exposes themselves to be precisely what they condemn.

    If you want to be censored-out from America’s mainstream — and from most of America’s non-mainstream — ‘news’ media, just prove that they are fraudulent; that’ll do it, every time.

    There was no accountability for either Bush’s, or his ‘news’-media’s, lying America into invading and occupying Iraq — providing knowingly false ‘justifications’ for that (in order to do it ‘democratically’ — with support by the majority of voters). However, to expose, such lying, gets a journalist censored-out 100% (in this anything-but-democratic country).

    On 5 February 2003, U.S. SecState Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council urging its authorization to invade (which didn’t come). He said that Saddam’s Government was hiding crucial information, and “Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq’s nuclear program. Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?” The next day, all major U.S. newspapers editorialized that, as the Washington Post headlined “Irrefutable”, saying that, “Whether Iraq is disarmed through the authority of the United Nations or whether the United States effectively assumes responsibility depends on how the Security Council responds.” In other words: this issue was to stand as a test not of the U.S., but of the U.N. And definitely not of the ‘news’-media, at all. On 22 March 2019, the WP’s “Fact Checker” columnist issued a 2,000+word retrospective, “The Iraq War and WMDs: An intelligence failure or White House spin?” which concluded “It’s too fuzzy for the Pinocchio Test [“True” vs. “False”], as it also falls in the realm of opinion [supposedly meaning statements that are neither true nor false but ONLY about what the person wants others to believe — and that statement about “opinion” is itself FALSE]”; and, so, he was alleging, both the “Bush administration” and its intelligence agencies had failed (even though both actually succeeded because they — with the assistance of the Washington Post and others — had deceived the public). His lengthy column 100% avoided any reference to the IAEA — whose Bush-alleged but non-existent “new report” had gotten the regime’s PR campaign to invade Iraq started. Nobody (certainly no U.S. ‘news’-medium) even noticed that the IAEA as the alleged source of the nuclear allegation had somehow mysteriously disappeared (much less wondered why it disappeared in the press, and from the Government). Colin Powell’s speech made no mention of the IAEA. There was constant hiding of the fact that America’s President had lied in order to start the allegation as having originated from the IAEA (the U.N.-authorized investigation-agency on nuclear matters — and Powell was addressing the U.N.). The media hid his lies, and their own lies, to back up the U.S. president’s lies. And (unlike on issues that are politically partisan in the U.S.) this was unanimous lying, by the U.S.-and-allied press.

    I shall here cite my own personal experience to explain why I think that the public (which is so deceived as to be largely supportive of censorship) should be very much concerned about this (censorship), if they care at all about democracy. The incident in which the invasion of Iraq resulted from censorship is what had caused me, in 2002, to focus upon this problem, because it made clear to me that I was living under a dictatorship. I hadn’t previously been certain of this subsequently proven fact about America. So: that incident was a turning-point for me. A second such turning-point for me was the start in 2014 of the war in Ukraine:

    Back in or around 2014, 43 international-news media were publishing my articles, and some of them were mainstream liberal media, some were mainstream conservative, and others were libertarian, but the vast majority were non-mainstream. When Barack Obama in February 2014 perpetrated a coup in Ukraine that installed a rabidly anti-Russian government there on Russia’s border and that was instead ‘reported’ as-if it had been a ‘democratic revolution’, which coup-imposed regime perpetrated a massacre against its pro-Russian protestors inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa on 2 May 2014 (see especially the charred bodies of its victims at 1:50:00- in that video), I started writing about Ukraine; and, then, those 43 international-news sites gradually whittled themselves down to only 7; and, yet, none of them ever alleged that anything in any of my articles was false and asked me to prove it true, but they were instead getting pressure from Google, and from the FBI, and from other Establishment U.S. entities, and were afraid of being forced out of business (which many of them ultimately were) by them. The personal narrative that will now be provided here is about the latest of these cases, which threatens the site Modern Diplomacy, which had been an excellent international-affairs news site and included writers from all across the international-affairs news spectrum, for and against every Government’s policies, and from practically every angle. I had long been expecting MD (because of its impartiality) to receive a warning from the U.S. regime, and this finally happened late in December 2022, when the site’s founder, D., sent me this notice:

    Dear Eric, do you know who are these guys? https://www.newsguardtech.com/ratings/rating-process-criteria/

    They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.

    Do they have any influence on Search engines and social media? Will we have any problems at all?

    Thanks

    D.

    I replied with an email

    Subject: Since you are a co-founder,

    Date: Dec 24, 2022 at 9:20 AM

    To: moc.hcetdraugswennull@llirb.nevets

    Cc: [D.]

    I ask you please to explain to me, and to the webmaster at moderndiplomacy.eu, why your organization — well, here is what he sent me about what your organization did:

    [I pasted in D.’s message to me.]

    As you can see there, he is afraid (that’s a weak version of terrorized) that your organization will downgrade his site because of his site’s posting some of my articles.

    It seems to me that there are two reasonable types of responses that you can give him and me:

    Either you will cite falsehoods in one or more of my articles at his site 

    https://moderndiplomacy.eu/author/ericzuesse/ 

    (but, of course, you could also do that regarding any edition of the New York Times or Washington Post; so, why would that be a reason?), or else:

    You could search to find such falsehoods, find none, ask your employee why he or she is terrorizing that webmaster and (essentially) indirectly threatening me; and, if that employee fails to provide a reasonable and entirely true answer, which justifies what he or she has done, fire that person and inform the rest of your staff that you have done so and explain to all of them WHY you fired the employee, so that they all can then know to STOP DOING THIS!!!

    Sincerely,

    Eric Zuesse

    Brill didn’t respond. So, I sent to D.:

    I take my not having received a reply from either Steven Brill or you to be an ominous sign, because, suddenly, none of my recent articles has been posted by your site. Would you please explain? (If you are cancelling me as an author, I shall remove your site from my submissions-list.) After all, you said “They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.” Did they state what those “false claims” were? Did you ask them? I very much doubt that they were able to find anything in any of my articles that is false. No one has ever before, to my knowledge, alleged any assertion in any of my articles to be false. I don’t ever make a claim that is false. I am EXCEEDINGLY careful. And any assertion in any of my articles that I think some readers MIGHT find questionable I provide a link to its documentation. So, I would distrust that allegation from Brill’s organization and consider it to be likely a lie from them in order to censor out from the news-media information that the U.S. regime wishes the public not to know. Would you not want to know whether that allegation from them was merely an excuse to censor out from your site information that they don’t want the public to know?

    D. responded:

    Dear Eric,

    Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your efforts in contacting newsguard, although I was surprised to see that you used my message I sent you in your contact email without my consent. Now they know I took it seriously. Anyway, I decided to stop publishing your articles — at least for a while and see how it goes. Part of my decision was of course the threats (not only from them) but also the fact that you are spreading them to a lot of websites and that google considers it as “scraped content”. I will try to stay in exclusive content although I appreciate your work and your courage.

    I worked really hard these 10 years for MD and still can’t monetize it to support the expenses and me of course. Also I am tired and I am thinking about the possibility to find a buyer and stand back. Just keep it in mind, in case you find someone interested in it.

    Of course we can stay in touch and keep sending me your articles — at least to have the opportunity to read them.

    Below, you will find newsguard allegations concerning your articles. Please don’t use it to reply to them — we both know that there is no use. Instead, maybe you can write a new piece debunking them.

    Kind Regards

    D.

    Here is what he had received from News Guard, and which I shall here debunk [between brackets]:

    We found that Modern Diplomacy articles often link to sites rated as unreliable by NewsGuard for promoting false information, such as OrientalReview.org, pro-Kremlin site TheDuran.com, and en.interaffairs.ru <http://en.interaffairs.ru> , owned by the Russian Foreign Ministry. The site has also republished articles from sites such as The Gray Zone, rated unfavorably by NewsGuard for repeatedly publishing false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war and Syrian chemical attacks. Could you comment on why Modern Diplomacy republishes or links to sites which consistently promote false claims?

    [Rating allegations as “true” or as “false” ON THE BASIS OF the identity of the SITE instead of on the basis of the specific allegation in the specific article (or video) is a standard method of deception of the public, which censors employ to distract and manipulate individuals (readers, etc.) by appealing to their existing prejudices such as (for an American conservative or Republican) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Times” or (for an American liberal or Democrat) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Post” (or, for both, “Russia is bad and wrong, and America is good and right”). It is appealing to prejudices and emotions, instead of to facts and evidence — it is NOT appealing to actual truth and falsity. It is a method of deception.]

                   We also found that ModernDiplomacy.eu has repeatedly published false and misleading claims about the Russia-Ukraine war.

                   For example, a June 2022 article titled “Have Europeans been profoundly deceived?,” claims to provide evidence that “A coup occurred in Ukraine during February 2014 under the cover of pro-EU demonstrations that the U.S. Government had been organizing ever since at least June 2011.”

    [The word “coup” in that article was linked to this video, every detail of which I have carefully checked and verified to include ONLY evidence that is authentic — and no one has contested any of the evidence in it. The first item of evidence that is referred-to in this video is at 0:35, which item is the audio of a private phone-conversation between two top EU officials in which one, who was in Kiev while the coup was occurring, reported to his boss, who wanted to know whether it was a revolution or instead a coup, and he reported to her that it was a coup, and described to her the evidence, which convinced her. My article later says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of what he was telling her, and of what her response to it indicated — that though it was a disappointment to her, she wouldn’t let the fact that it had been a coup affect EU policies).” This news-reporting is of real evidence, not distractions, not any appeal to the reader’s (and listener’s) prejudices, either. But Mr. Brill’s employee apparently didn’t check my article’s sources (gave no indication of having clicked onto any of my links), because he or she was judging on the basis purely of that person’s own prejudices — NOT upon the basis of any evidence. Then, at 3:35 in that video, is audio of another private phone-conversation, which was of Obama’s planner of the coup, Victoria Nuland, telling his Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get appointed to run the stooge-regime after the coup will be over, “Yats” Yatsenyuk, which then was done. My article also says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of whom she was referring to in it, and why).” The reference to “June 2011” had appeared in this passage from a prior article of mine, where that two-word phrase linked to Julian Assange’s personal account of the matter — the Obama Administration’s early planning-stage for the coup in Ukraine — that explains how those “pro-EU demonstrations” had been engineered by Obama’s agents. So: everything in that paragraph by Brill’s employee was fully documented in my links — which that person didn’t care to check.]

                   However, there is no evidence that the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that led to the ouster of then-president Viktor Yanukovych was a coup orchestrated by the United States. … Angry protesters demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and hundreds of police officers guarding government buildings abandoned their posts. Yanukovych fled the same day the agreement was signed, and protesters took control of several government buildings the next day. The Ukrainian parliament then voted 328-0 to remove Yanukovych from office and scheduled early presidential elections the following May, the BBC reported. These events, often collectively referred to as the “Maidan revolution,” were extensively covered by international media organizations with correspondents in Ukraine, including the BBC, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?

                   A March 2022 article titled “Who actually CAUSED this war in Ukraine?” states that “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.”

                   In fact, Nazis are not running Ukraine. … Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote. Svoboda currently holds one parliamentary seat.

                   In February 2022, U.S. news site the Jewish Journal published a statement signed by 300 scholars of the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II, which said that “the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime” is “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it.” Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, addressed the Russian public in a Feb. 24, 2022, speech, saying that these claims do not reflect the “real” Ukraine. “You are told we are Nazis. But could people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?”

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim [that “the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there”], despite evidence to the contrary?

    [Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee simply ignores my evidence — fails even to click onto my links whenever he disagrees with an allegation that has a link. Here was my published assertion, as it was published: “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.” The evidence is right there, just a click away, but Mr. Brill’s employee again wasn’t interested in seeing the evidence. (Nor is Brill himself.)]

                   An April 2022 article titled “Authentic War-Reporting From Ukraine,” promotes a video report by pro-Kremlin journalist, Patrick Lancaster, filmed in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The article asserts that Ukraine was “constantly shelling into that region in order to kill and/or compell to flee anybody who lived in that region […] It was an ethnic cleansing in order to get rid of enough of those residents so that, if ever that area would again become integrated into Ukraine and its remaining residents would therefore be voting again in Ukrainian national elections, the U.S.-installed nazi Ukrainian regime will ‘democratically’ be able to continue to rule in Ukraine.” (The article also repeats the claim that the 2014 revolution was a US-backed coup, and makes the unverified claim that “The CIA has instructed all of Ukraine’s nazis (or racist-fascists) to suppress their anti-Semitism and White Supremacy until after Ukraine has become admitted into NATO.”)

                   The claim that Ukraine conducted an “ethnic cleansing” in the Donbas echoes a falsehood propagated by the Russian government for years. There is no evidence supporting the claim that genocide occurred in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas. The International Criminal Court, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have all said they have found no evidence of genocide in Donbas. The U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called the genocide claim a “reprehensible falsehood” in a Feb. 16, 2022 post on its official Twitter account. It said that the mission “has complete access to the government-controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims.”

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?

    [Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee relies upon people’s opinions — but ONLY ones who agree with his — instead of any evidence at all. Here, on behalf of myself, and of Modern Diplomacy, and of Patrick Lancaster (INSTEAD OF on behalf of Lockheed Martin and the other U.S.-and-allied international-corporate entities that are profiting from this war), are nine news-reports linking to actual evidence which disproves those opinions:

    “Mortar shelling in Kramatorsk. Nazis attacking city district.” 18 May 2014

    “Ukraine crisis: ‘Those fascists killed this girl and they will be in hell’” 5 May 2014

    “Ukraine Crisis: Kiev’s Slovyansk ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ Kills 300 Pro-Russian Separatists” 4 June 2014

    “Luhansk. After Air Strike. Part 4 (of 6)” 2 June 2014

    “AP’s Matt Lee challenges White House’s lies on Ukraine” 7 July 2014

    “Obama Definitely Caused the Malaysian Airliner to Be Downed” 18 July 2014

    “How Our People Do Their Extermination-Jobs In Ukraine” 23 October 2014

    “What Obama’s Ukrainian Stooges Did” 10 October 2014

    “Brookings Wants More Villages Firebombed in Ukraine’s ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’” 3 February 2015]

    My final reply to D.’s final rejection of my position was:

    As regards myself, I am with Chris Hedges (who quit the N.Y. Times over this) and with Consortium News (which is standing up against the same pressure that you are caving to), in order to have any hope that the future might possibly be better than the present.

    At the same time when News Guard was threatening Modern Diplomacy and perhaps forcing that site to reject all future submissions from me, the news-site, Consortium News, was likewise being threatened by Brill’s shills. On December 29th, Consortium News headlined “On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine: A short history of neo-Nazism in Ukraine in response to NewsGuard’s charge that Consortium News published false content about its extent”. That, too, is an excellent example of censors killing truths and leaving only lies. However, mega-corporate America has a number of such ‘fact-checking’ truth-destroying organizations: New Guard is only one of them.

    These self-styled truth-policemen of the Web represent the regime, and came into being after the Web itself did. The Web enabled — for the first time in history — articles to be published and read that link to their sources, and this opened up a new possibility and reality, in which the online readers could actually evaluate ON THEIR OWN (by clicking onto such links) the evidence. That upset the billionaires’ applecarts of ‘authoritative opinion’ (which they have hired) so that authoritarianism (which they control) could become replaced by facts (which they can’t).

    The least reliable means of forming or even of changing one’s opinions are means such as ink-on-paper allegations (newspapers, magazines, etc.) that cannot even POSSIBLY provide immediate direct online links to the items of evidence; and the MOST reliable means are online articles and books (such as my new one, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL, whose ebook versions do document allegations by means of such online links — it’s the first-ever book to do so) which constantly bring directly to one’s computer or other Web-online device the items of evidence whenever the reader has any doubt about a given allegation’s veracity or not. That way the individual can form one’s opinion on the basis only of the evidence.

    Anyone whose opinions are based upon the opinions of other people who believe as that person does, instead of on the basis of purely the facts of the matter and of ONE’S OWN investigations seeking out evidence both for and evidence against any alleged fact, will simply believe the myths that one already believes, and will only become more and more convinced of those falsehoods, as one grows older.

    The function of censorship is to prohibit spreading truths. It poisons democracy, to death. Censors kill democracies. That’s what they are being paid to do. And they do it.

    The post Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/30/censorship-prohibits-spreading-truths-and-demands-spreading-lies/feed/ 0 361179     Mute Protest: Chinese crowds hold up blank sheets to hit out at lockdowns, censorship https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/white-sheets-11302022143251.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/white-sheets-11302022143251.html#respond Wed, 30 Nov 2022 19:33:00 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/white-sheets-11302022143251.html They have become a symbol of China’s recent wave of protests: Blank, white sheets of paper held aloft by demonstrators to signify their opposition to anti-virus lockdowns, censorship and freedom of speech.

    As videos of crowds holding up paper sheets and chanting slogans flooded the internet last weekend, Chinese-language social media posts have come to call the demonstrations in more than a dozen cities the “white paper revolution.” 

    Authorities have since moved quickly to squelch the protests, arresting some demonstrators and sending university students home, in a bid to quickly snuff out the most overt challenge to Chinese leadership in decades.

    Using blank sheets of paper as a symbol of protest is not new. 

    They were used during protests in the Soviet Union during the 1990s and in recent years in Russia and Belarus as well, Taiwan-based Chinese blogger Zuola told Radio Free Asia.

    "In the current climate in China, you can be told off by the government for saying anything at all," Zuola said. "It's the ultimate kind of performance art protest -- by holding up a blank sheet of paper, you are saying that you have something to say, but that you haven't said it yet."

    "It's very contagious, so everything started holding up these blank sheets of paper to show dissatisfaction with the social controls imposed by the Chinese government, with their political environment and with [controls on] speech," he said.

    Pent-up anger

    The protests were sparked by public anger at the delayed response to a deadly fire on Nov. 24 in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, that has been widely blamed on COVID-19 restrictions.

    The incident, which left at least 10 people dead, tapped into pent-up frustrations of millions of Chinese who have endured nearly three years of repeated lockdowns, travel bans, quarantines and various other restrictions to their lives.

    Videos swirled around the internet showing people in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities holding the white pieces of paper above their heads, demanding an end to the strict “zero-COVID” limits. Protesters also began to call for greater freedom of expression, democratic reforms, and even the removal of President Xi Jinping, who has been closely identified with the rigid policies.

    ENG_CHN_WhitePaperMeaning_11302022.2.JPG
    Women hand out sheets of paper in protest over COVID restrictions in mainland China, during a commemoration of the victims of a fire in Urumqi, at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in Hong Kong, China, Nov. 29, 2022. Credit: Reuters

    According to an unverified document circulating on social media, officials in major cities were being told to take steps to control the supply of ubiquitous white printer paper, with a major stationery firm suspending online and offline sales.

    Compared with the Post-it notes that formed the "Lennon Walls" of Hong Kong's 2019 protest movement, which showcased huge mosaics of diverse messages and creative personal expression, the blank sheets of paper are a more ironic reference to government controls and censorship, analysts said.

    Striking a chord

    Veteran Taiwan social activist Ho Tsung-hsun said the white paper revolution had quickly spread across the country, indicating it struck a chord with a wide variety of protesters in China.

    "Some people pasted blank sheets of paper next to a statue of [late revolutionary Chinese writer] Lu Xu, and under Xi Jinping slogans," Ho told RFA. 

    "Some students sang the Internationale in their dorms at night, while others took their guitars to sing it on the streets, with blank sheets of paper pasted next to their guitars," he added, referring to the communist anthem.

    "In Wuzhen, Zhejiang, some young women sealed their mouths shut, handcuffed themselves and held up blank sheets of paper," he said.

    Ho added that people quickly started using other white items following reports that the sale of A4 paper – the typical size of printer paper in China and other countries – was being restricted by the authorities.

    "I'm more inclined to call it the white revolution, because people have been very creative about expressing themselves through white objects, since reports emerged online that it was now impossible to buy paper, that sales had been restricted in a lot of places," he said.

    "If they restrict sales of white paper, then other white materials and objects can be used, such as white cloth or white paint," Ho said.

    Some online accounts have started replacing their avatars or profile photos with white backgrounds, while social media users have used the hashtags #whitepaperrevolution and #A4revolution to show support for the protests, alongside selfies holding blank sheets of paper in the streets or posting them anonymously on bulletin boards and in corridors, cafes and parks.

    ‘We want dignity and freedom’

    A news and commentary account that uses the handle @citizensdailycn across several social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter said the white paper movement was "the revolution of our generation."

    "We want to say what they don't want us to say: We want dignity and freedom," it said in an apparent rallying call opposing controls on speech and information, as well as the restrictions of the zero-COVID policy.

    The Urumqi fire has coincided with a growing realization that the circumstances in China as it relates to COVID restrictions are unusual compared with other countries, according to Zuola.

    "Since the start of the World Cup, the Chinese people have been discovering that no other country is taking [the] Omicron [variant of COVID-19] seriously," Zuola said.

    "People are also angry that Sinovac and other [Chinese] vaccine companies won their licenses through bribery, and over the government collusion with business that has made it impossible to roll back pandemic restrictions over the past three years," he said.

    Feeling their pain

    "Then there was the lone protest by Peng Lifa," he said, in a reference to the Oct. 13 “Bridge Man” protest banners hung from a Beijing traffic flyover. "All of this has been fermenting for some time; it hasn't happened overnight. There has been a sense of long-running grievance over internet censorship in China, too."

    When the Uyghur residents of the apartment block died in a fire after screaming to be allowed to leave the locked-down building, everyone in China felt their pain, he said.

    "They were shouting that they were all from Urumqi, that everyone was a victim of the disease control measures, and that they couldn't allow those people to be left to die in silence," he said.

    Ho believes there is also a mute reference to ballot papers -- meaningless in China, where all "election" candidates must be pre-approved by the government -- in the use of sheets of printer paper.

    The blankness of the sheets also echoes the lack of clear aim or unified leadership during the weekend's protests.

    "A movement without a leader is what those in power fear the most," Ho said.

    Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/white-sheets-11302022143251.html/feed/ 0 354400     Citing Orwell, Judge Blocks ‘Positively Dystopian’ Censorship Law Backed by DeSantis https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/17/citing-orwell-judge-blocks-positively-dystopian-censorship-law-backed-by-desantis/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/17/citing-orwell-judge-blocks-positively-dystopian-censorship-law-backed-by-desantis/#respond Thu, 17 Nov 2022 15:58:05 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/341114

    In an order that begins by quoting the famous opening line of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, a federal judge on Thursday blocked key provisions of a Florida censorship law that aimed to restrict how state university professors teach race, gender, and U.S. history.

    "'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,' and the powers in charge of Florida's public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of 'freedom,'" Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, an Obama appointee, wrote in his scathing decision, which temporarily halts enforcement of parts of the law championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis—a possible 2024 presidential candidate.

    "To confront certain viewpoints that offend the powers that be, the state of Florida passed the so-called 'Stop WOKE Act in 2022—redubbed (in line with the state's doublespeak) the 'Individual Freedom Act,'" Walker continued. "The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this act, professors enjoy 'academic freedom' so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian."

    The Thursday decision, which concludes that the GOP law violates the First Amendment rights of public university faculty and students, marks the second time Walker has ruled against the "Stop WOKE Act" in recent months. In August, the judge blocked the part of the law pertaining to private businesses.

    Adriana Novoa, a University of South Florida history professor and a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement that Walker's Thursday ruling is a win "for the institutions of this country."

    "I hope that the courts will defend the existence of a public education that cannot be manipulated by politicians to push any ideology, now and in the future," Novoa added.

    Part of a recent wave of censorship laws advanced by Republicans in Florida and across the U.S., the "Stop WOKE Act" was billed as an attempt to "give businesses, employees, children, and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination."

    But civil liberties groups and other critics of the law have argued it is both unjustifiable and exceedingly vague in its mandates, creating a chilling effect on educators as they attempt to teach their classes under the threat of state retaliation. 

    Emily Anderson, an assistant professor of International Relations and Intercultural Education at Florida International University, told the Miami Herald in August that "these policies have really led to increased efforts to silence and surveil academic speech."

    "Academic speech matters, because it's a fundamental freedom that is really how our university system is grounded," said Anderson. "When we have policies that threaten speech, in my view, it shadows threats to all other protected rights."

    In his ruling, Walker points to the eight specific concepts outlawed that are under the measure, including the notion that "such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, national origin, or sex to oppress members of another race, color, national origin, or sex."

    "Despite [Florida officials'] insistence that the professor plaintiffs' proposed viewpoints must serve as a mirror image for each prohibited viewpoint, the proposed speech needs only to arguably run afoul of the prohibition," Walker wrote.

    Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—which sued Florida officials over the censorship law—said that "faculty members are hired to offer opinions from their academic expertise—not toe the party line."

    "Florida's argument that faculty members have no First Amendment rights would have imperiled faculty members across the political spectrum," said Steinbaugh.

    Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement that Walker's ruling "is a huge victory for everyone who values academic freedom and recognizes the value of inclusive education."

    "The First Amendment broadly protects our right to share information and ideas, and this includes educators' and students' right to learn, discuss, and debate systemic racism and sexism," Sykes added.


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/17/citing-orwell-judge-blocks-positively-dystopian-censorship-law-backed-by-desantis/feed/ 0 351650 CPJ: Kyrgyzstan’s block of RFE/RL website ‘a flagrant act of censorship’ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/27/cpj-kyrgyzstans-block-of-rfe-rl-website-a-flagrant-act-of-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/27/cpj-kyrgyzstans-block-of-rfe-rl-website-a-flagrant-act-of-censorship/#respond Thu, 27 Oct 2022 16:21:40 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=239962 Stockholm, October 27, 2022 – Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Culture, Information, Sports, and Youth Policy on Wednesday announced a two-month block of the website of Radio Azattyk, the local service of U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, under the country’s false information law after the outlet refused to remove a video report on recent border clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

    “The blocking of RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz service is a flagrant act of censorship of a crucial and critical media outlet, and all too clearly shows the immense dangers of Kyrgyzstan’s false information law,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Kyrgyz authorities must immediately lift the block on Radio Azattyk and repeal the law on false information, which gives state officials carte blanche to quash inconvenient reporting through wholly opaque decisions on alleged ‘inaccuracy.’”

    The Ministry of Culture said the report, aired by Current Time TV, a joint Russian-language project of RFE/RL and Voice of America, on September 16 and published on Radio Azattyk’s website, was “unreliable” and “contrary to the national interests of the Kyrgyz Republic.”

    In a press release issued the same day, RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said the broadcaster had reviewed the content in question and found “no violation of our standards.” Fly added, “We will not succumb to pressure to remove balanced reporting from our sites, be it from the Kremlin or the Kyrgyz government.”

    The decision to block Radio Azattyk is the third use of the 2021 false information law, previously criticized by CPJ, against a media outlet, reports stated. In July, authorities blocked the independent news website Res Publica over a disputed anti-corruption investigation. In August, the Ministry of Culture ordered major news outlet 24.kg to be blocked but reversed its decision the same day.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/27/cpj-kyrgyzstans-block-of-rfe-rl-website-a-flagrant-act-of-censorship/feed/ 0 345608     Proposed amendments to Georgia’s broadcasting law raise censorship fears https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/21/proposed-amendments-to-georgias-broadcasting-law-raise-censorship-fears/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/21/proposed-amendments-to-georgias-broadcasting-law-raise-censorship-fears/#respond Fri, 21 Oct 2022 17:59:18 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=238535 Stockholm, October 21, 2022—Georgian authorities should withdraw contested amendments to the country’s broadcasting law and work with stakeholders to devise a regulatory framework that enjoys broad industry support, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

    In a first reading on September 20, Georgia’s parliament passed a package of amendments to the country’s broadcasting law that includes stipulations local press freedom advocates fear could be weaponized against pro-opposition TV channels. Dates for further parliamentary readings of the amendments are yet to be announced, local media advocates told CPJ.

    If approved, the amendments would transfer the authority to rule on alleged broadcasting of hate speech and providing a right of reply from media self-regulation to the state regulatory body, Georgian National Communications Commission (GNCC). GNCC sanctions—fines of up to 3% of a broadcaster’s annual income and suspending broadcast operations—also would be enforceable immediately rather than after exhausting legal appeals per existing legislation.

    The bill’s authors argue that the amendments package is necessary to align Georgian legislation with European Union (EU) law. But Georgia’s Media Advocacy Coalition, an alliance of independent media and legal nongovernmental organizations, objects to the current form of the amendments that would give GNCC authority to rule on hate speech and enforce immediate sanctions, arguing that these specific amendments are not required by EU law and “significantly increase” the risk of politically biased decisions against critical media.

    “Given Georgia’s widely recognized problems with political polarization and evident lack of stakeholder confidence in its communications commission, moves to bolster the commission’s powers of sanction are deeply inappropriate and should be discarded,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Georgian authorities should work with media experts and broadcast stakeholders to devise a regulatory system that does not pose the threat of partisan use.”

    Currently, complaints concerning alleged hate speech and right of reply are decided by broadcasters’ own internal, self-regulatory groups, which each broadcaster is statutorily required to establish, or by independent trade group Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics (GCJE), whose decisions are merely recommendations, Mariam Gogosashvili, executive director of GCJE (a Media Advocacy Coalition member organization), told CPJ by phone.

    While Gogosashvili agrees with GNCC criticism that self-regulation has not proven effective, granting the GNCC the power to rule on hate speech—which lacks a precise definition in Georgian law—presents a “real risk” that arbitrary rulings will be used to inflict devastating fines that will lead to the closure of critical media, she said.

    GNCC members are nominated by the country’s president and prime minister and are elected by parliament, and many stakeholders question its independence from the ruling Georgian Dream party, Gogosashvili and Mamuka Andguladze, media program manager at anticorruption NGO Transparency International Georgia, told CPJ. Gogosashvili cited a series of maximum fines the GNCC issued to pro-opposition broadcaster Mtavari Arkhi, whose director Nika Gvaramia is currently serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence thought to be retaliation for Mtavari’s critical coverage.

    Asked to comment on the claim that giving GNCC the authority to rule on hate speech and enforcing immediate sanctions would increase the risk of politically biased decisions, GNCC told CPJ by email that accusations of bias are “categorically unacceptable,” since all of its decisions are transparent and stem from current legislation, adding that it acted “in full compliance with the law” by penalizing Mtavari.

    Gogosashvili said that making GNCC sanctions effective immediately is particularly dangerous. While GNCC decisions can be appealed in court, such cases can take years to try, with rulings coming far too late to save outlets forced into closure, she said.

    Rather than GNCC regulation or broadcasters’ self-regulation, Gogosashvili recommends some form of co-regulation, which would involve rulings by an independent trade body with GNCC support, though she said the precise form for this is yet to be determined. Gogosashvili’s recommendation is in line with Council of Europe expert advice for Georgia reviewed by CPJ.

    GNCC told CPJ that it “supports the idea of self-regulation and co-regulation” in general but has questions about the effectiveness of co-regulation of hate speech and its compatibility with EU audiovisual media legislation.

    Authorities drafted the bill without consulting independent stakeholders, but a consultation process has begun following the initial parliamentary reading, Gogosashvili and Andguladze said.

    CPJ emailed the Parliament of Georgia for comment but did not receive a reply.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/21/proposed-amendments-to-georgias-broadcasting-law-raise-censorship-fears/feed/ 0 343748     Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/07/katie-halper-violated-media-taboo-against-israel-criticism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/07/katie-halper-violated-media-taboo-against-israel-criticism/#respond Fri, 07 Oct 2022 22:40:55 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9030589 Halper laid out the case that has been made by major human rights organizations: that Israel is in fact an apartheid state.

    The post Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism appeared first on FAIR.

    ]]>      

    After turning in the draft of an op-ed monologue critical of Israel, journalist Katie Halper was fired from her new post at the Hill TV’s political commentary show Rising (Daily Beast, 10/4/22).  The monologue, known as a “Radar” on Rising, was called “Israel IS an Apartheid State.”

    Katie Halper on Israel: Separate and Unequal

    In documenting Israel’s status as an apartheid state, Kate Halper crossed one of corporate media’s most policed red lines.

    Halper (who has written for FAIR) used CNN’s Jake Tapper (9/21/22) and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s condemnation of applying the term “apartheid” to Israel, and their suggestion that Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib was antisemitic for saying support for Israel was incompatible with progressivism, as a jumping point to examine Israel’s ethnonationalist violence.

    In her commentary, Halper laid out the case that has been made by major human rights organizations like Amnesty International (2/1/22) and Human Rights Watch (4/27/21), and the Israeli human rights group B’tselem (1/12/22), that Israel is in fact an apartheid state. Along with substantial documentation, Halper contributed a personal perspective as well:

    I was born in New York City. My great-grandparents…were from Eastern Europe. I could move to Israel today, buy a house, get a job, travel around with no problem. So could Jake Tapper and Jonathan Greenblatt. But a Palestinian like Rashida Tlaib can’t even visit her family home in what is now Israel.

    The monologue was going to be Halper’s first as a permanent co-host, after having been a contributor for three years. Rising frames itself as a forum where “anti-establishment” or “populist” views from both the left and the right can be freely exchanged and debated. Former co-host Ryan Grim, who personally delivered more than 150 monologues for Rising, noted there is “no approval process” for hosts’ commentaries (Intercept, 9/29/22). Despite this, executives at Hill TV and/or its new parent company Nexstar Media saw Halper’s criticism of Israel as a bridge too far.

    First Halper’s superiors put the commentary under review. Then they told her that it would be nixed altogether, because of a brand-new policy barring opinion pieces on Israel, which even the producer was unaware of. Finally, they fired her (Daily Beast, 10/4/22).

    ‘A systematic effort’

    Halper wasn’t the first journalist silenced for criticizing Israel, and she won’t be the last. In her response to the firing and in subsequent tweets, Halper pointed to several other recent examples:

    • CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill for calling for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” (FAIR.org, 12/11/18).
    • The Guardian’s firing of Nathan J. Robinson for satirically claiming on Twitter that Congress cannot authorize new spending without a portion of it going to Israel (FAIR.org, 2/22/21).
    • AP’s firing of Emily Wilder after she was targeted by a right-wing smear campaign for her pro-Palestinian activism as a college student (Democracy Now!, 5/25/21; FAIR.org, 5/22/21).
    • Journalist Abby Martin being banned from the University of Georgia for refusing to sign a pledge that she would not participate in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel (Mint Press, 2/10/20). (Numerous academics, like Angela Davis and Norman Finkelstein, have also faced retaliation for their critical views of Israel.)
    Twitter: After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for the New York Times...

    Photojournalist Hosam Salem (Twitter, 10/5/22) disclosed being banned by the New York Times for his pro-Palestinian views.

    Just this week, New York Times freelance photojournalist Hosam Salem reported that the Times fired him after the “Israel lobby organization Honest Reporting, which exists to attack the Palestinian narrative in the West” (Mondoweiss, 10/5/22), accused him of antisemitism for voicing support for Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation forces. Salem discussed his firing on Twitter:

    What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity, simply because we cover the human rights violations that the Palestinian people undergo on a daily basis at hands of the Israeli army.

    ‘The best defense is a good offense’

    The firing of journalists like Salem, Wilder and Hill wasn’t in response to their violating any clear policy of their respective outlets. Instead, well-funded pressure groups are able to get pro-Palestinian journalists fired, especially when they can appeal to pro-Israel sympathies in media management.

    In Halper’s case, her firing may be connected to Nexstar Media‘s August 2021 purchase of The Hill, including its TV outlet. Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic (10/1/22) wrote of “signs of a possible tilt in The Hill’s editorial line on Israel”:

    In late August, Nexstar filled the position of deputy managing editor of NewsNation, its cable channel, with Jake Novak, a journalist who spent the preceding year and a half as the media director of the Israeli consulate general in New York….

    Six days before the announcement of his hiring, Novak led a presentation at Bar-Ilan University titled, “Defending Israel Against Media Bias—How to Fight News Media and Social Media Bias Against Israel: The Best Defense Is a Good Offense.” It was an update of a talk he had given in 2016 about defending Israel’s reputation, which the host described as “an absolute master class in public relations and diplomacy.”

    As Marcetic noted, a pro-Israel bias in Nexstar should be of grave concern: Following its purchase of Tribune Media, it is now the largest local broadcast TV owner in the US.

    Lethal censorship

    Graphic depicting the fact that Israeli occupation forces committed 479 violations and crimes against journalists in the first half of 2022.

    For journalists operating in Palestine, censorship takes on violent and deadly forms.

    Getting fired is hardly the worst form of retribution experienced by journalists who expose Israeli crimes. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reports 479 violations and crimes against Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces and settlers in just the first half of 2022. These include two killings, 35 shootings, and numerous assaults and arrests. On Wednesday, two Palestinian journalists were shot by Israeli occupying forces while covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank (Al Jazeera, 10/5/22). Over 50 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since 2001, including Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was an American citizen (Vox, 5/13/22; FAIR.org, 5/20/22, 7/2/22).

    Washington’s supply of weapons and aid to Israel is critical to Israel’s capacity to uphold apartheid (Al Jazeera, 6/4/21; Belfer Center, 2/7/17), so maintaining a positive opinion of Israel in the US public is of extreme importance to Israel. By censoring critical journalists like Katie Halper, US corporate media are thus playing a key role in supporting a system that has seen journalists killed, assaulted and detained in Israel/Palestine.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the The Hill at https://thehill.com/contact/ or on Twitter: @HillTVLive. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/07/katie-halper-violated-media-taboo-against-israel-criticism/feed/ 0 339997     China steps up social media censorship, ‘upgrades’ Great Firewall ahead of congress https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/ccp-censorship-10072022135730.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/ccp-censorship-10072022135730.html#respond Fri, 07 Oct 2022 18:16:55 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/ccp-censorship-10072022135730.html The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stepped up its censorship of social media ahead of its five-yearly congress, with users complaining that it was no longer possible to "speak normally" using Douyin, Weibo and WeChat.

    "I'm unable to have a normal conversation in any of my group chats with friends, relatives or classmates," the Twitter account @observerincn tweeted on Oct. 4.

    "I started to climb the Great Firewall [use circumvention software to use sites outside China], to find a place where we could talk normally, but none of my friends or relatives were there," the account said.

    "Inside the Great Firewall, the thing that prevents people from communicating normally, causing division and confrontation, isn't just the fact that the internet has been hijacked by the devil," it said. "It's also the endless intimidation and abuse."

    A resident of the eastern province of Jiangsu surnamed Feng said several of her chat groups on WeChat have been blocked in recent days.

    "A lot of groups are getting blocked," Feng told RFA. "People are setting up up new groups."

    "My WeChat group was blocked and my friends stopped sending me messages," she said. "It's gotten much worse now; they are stopping people chatting in groups and among followers."

    "You can chat privately one-to-one," Feng said.

    One Twitter account replied to @observerincn, saying most blogs, podcasts and livestreams had now disappeared.

    "There have been a lot of public security announcements that are now blatantly intimidating to ordinary people, telling them not to spread rumors or believe rumors," the account said. "If you're investigated, you will be clearly told that your children and even future generations will be seriously affected."

    "This is by no means an isolated case, but based on my own experience and that of several friends of mine."

    VPN crackdown

    Feng said it is also getting harder for her to use a virtual private network (VPN) to scale the Great Firewall and read content that is blocked by government censors in China.

    "I can't [get over the wall]; it's blocked and I can't open FreeVPN," she said. "This time, [the controls] are very strict."

    "The 20th National Congress is on Oct. 16, but police were contacting me and coming to my home as early as Aug. 15 to tell me they were starting stability maintenance measures."

    Internet technician Li Ming said China's internet censorship had likely had a technological upgrade.

    "VPNs and virtual private servers don't seem to be blocked, but the use of ... other types [of blocking] are more powerful now," Li said. "They are blocking at the level of protocols, not servers, which probably mean they are capturing data packets."

    "Now, if you ... enter an address, they block the data packets, which is different from before, so it's probably an upgrade," he said.

    According to information security site Thousand Eyes, China has always used deep packet inspection as part of its intrusion detection system (IDS).

    "If the IDS technology detects undesirable content and determines that a connection from a client to a web server is to be blocked, the router injects forged [reset code] into the data streams so that the endpoints abandon the connection," it said.

    "After blocking the connection, the system [blocks] further communication between the same pair of machines, even for harmless requests that would not previously have been blocked," according to an analysis on the site.

    "These timeouts can last for up to hours at a time and escalate if more attempts are made to access the censored content."

    If Li Ming's observation were correct, the system would now be blocking data packets rather than just forcing connections to drop when they are detected.

    Blocking outside users

    Users outside China said they are also having difficulty using WeChat.

    Former 1989 Tiananmen protest leader Wang Dan, said via Twitter that WeChat appeared to be preventing blocked users from outside China from chatting privately with users back home, a move which he termed "a new firewall."

    Wang said the move showed that the CCP continues to fear any free flow of information.

    "Whatever they say about self-confidence this, self-confidence that is fake," he said. "They are living in a turbulent world where they have to fear every shadow, all day, every day."

    A resident of Sichuan surnamed Zhao said he had noticed his posts on WeChat disappearing more often than before.

    "Sometimes I post something with a slightly more sensitive title, but I can't get it to send," Zhao said. "Sometimes I will post something, but then, a short while later it's gone, or only visible to me, not to others."

    WeChat, which is heavily relied upon by millions in China for anything from social contact and news updates to online shopping and fan sites, with 1.26 billion active users by the end of the third quarter of 2022.

    WeChat's parent company Tencent hadn't responded to a request for comment by the time of writing.

    Social media users are beginning to give up trying to use the platforms at all.

    One user in the eastern province of Jiangxi said he had deleted his Weibo account, quit his WeChat groups, and doesn't bother using any China-based chat apps at all any more.

    Another user told RFA that he had quit all of his WeChat groups, but was re-added to a family group chat so he could stay in touch.

    The powerful Cyberspace Administration of China said on Sept. 29 that is continuing to run operations labeling unconfirmed posts and comments as rumors, to "rectify the chaos of the rumor mill."

    It said internet workers at 12 platforms including Weibo, Douyin, Baidu, Tencent, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Zhihu and Douban had so far labeled 80,000 items as "rumors."

    Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

    ]]>     https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/ccp-censorship-10072022135730.html/feed/ 0 339944     No, Elon Musk’s Starlink Probably Won’t Fix Iranian Internet Censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/27/no-elon-musks-starlink-probably-wont-fix-iranian-internet-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/27/no-elon-musks-starlink-probably-wont-fix-iranian-internet-censorship/#respond Tue, 27 Sep 2022 18:50:49 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=409092

    Elon Musk is once again suggesting his business interests can solve a high-profile crisis: This time, the SpaceX CEO says Starlink satellite internet can alleviate Iran’s digital crackdown against ongoing anti-government protests. Iranian dissidents and their supporters around the world cheered Musk’s announcement that Starlink is now theoretically available in Iran, but experts say the plan is far from a censorship panacea.

    Musk’s latest headline-riding gambit came after Iran responded to the recent rash of nationwide protests with large-scale disruption of the country’s internet access. On September 23, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced the U.S. was easing restrictions on technology exports to help counter Iranian state censorship efforts.

    Musk, ready to pounce, quickly replied: “Activating Starlink …”

    Predictably, Musk’s dramatic tweet set off a frenzy. Within a day, venture capitalist and longtime Musk-booster Shervin Pishevar was already suggesting Musk had earned the Nobel Peace Prize. Just the thought of Starlink “activating” an uncensored internet for millions during a period of Middle Eastern political turmoil was an instant public relations coup for Musk.

    In Iran, though, the notion of a benevolent American billionaire beaming freedom to Iran by satellite is derailed by the demands of reality, specifically physics. Anyone who wants to use Starlink, the satellite internet service provider operated by Musk’s rocketry concern, SpaceX, needs a special dish to send and receive internet data.

    “I don’t think it’s much of a practical solution because of the problem of smuggling in the ground terminals.”

    While it may be possible to smuggle Starlink hardware into Iran, getting a meaningful quantity of satellite dishes into Iran would be an incredible undertaking, especially now that the Iranian government has been tipped off to the plan on Twitter.

    Todd Humphreys, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on satellite communication, said, “I don’t think it’s much of a practical solution because of the problem of smuggling in the ground terminals.”

    The idea is not without precedent. In Ukraine, after the Russian invasion disrupted internet access, the deployment of Musk’s satellite dishes earned him international press adulation and a bevy of lucrative government contracts. In Ukraine, though, Starlink was welcomed by a profoundly pro-American government desperate for technological aid from the West. U.S. government agencies were able to ship the requisite hardware with the full logistical cooperation of the Ukrainian government.

    This is not, to say the very least, the case in Iran, where the government is unlikely to condone the import of a technology explicitly meant to undermine its own power. While Musk’s claim that Starlink’s orbiting satellites are activated over Iran may be true, the notion that censorship-free internet connectivity is something that can be flipped on like a light switch is certainly not. Without dishes on the ground to communicate with the satellites, it’s a meaningless step: technologically tantamount to giving a speech to an empty room.

    Humphreys, who has previously done consulting work for Starlink, explained that because of the specialized nature of Starlink hardware, it’s doubtful Iranians could craft a DIY alterative. “It’s not like you can build a homebrew receiver,” he said. “It’s a very complicated signal structure with a very wideband signal. Even a research organization would have a hard time.”

    Musk is famously uninterested in the constraints imposed by reality, but he seems to acknowledge the problem to some degree. In a September 25 tweet, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow Karim Sadjadpour wrote, “I spoke w/ @elonmusk about Starlink in Iran, he gave me permission to share this: ‘Starlink is now activated in Iran. It requires the use of terminals in-country, which I suspect the [Iranian] government will not support, but if anyone can get terminals into Iran, they will work.’”

    Implausibility hasn’t stopped Musk’s fans, either. One tweet from a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council purporting to document a Starlink dish already successfully secreted into Iran turned out to be a photo from 2020, belonging to an Idaho man who happened to have a Persian rug.

    The fandom — and the starpower it’s attached to — might be the point here. Given the obstacles, Musk’s Starlink aspirations may be best understood in the context of his past spectacular, spectacularly unfulfilled claims, rather than something akin to Starlink’s rapid adoption in Ukraine. Musk’s penchant for internet virality has become a key component of his business operations. He has repeatedly made bold pronouncements, typically on Twitter, that a technology he happens to manufacture is the key to cracking some global crisis. Whether it’s Thai children stuck in a waterlogged cave, the Covid-19 pandemic, or faltering American transit infrastructure, Musk has repeatedly offered technological solutions that are either plainly implausible, botched in execution, or a mixture of both.

    It’s not just the lack of dishes in Iranian homes. Musk’s plan is further complicated by Starlink’s reliance on ground stations: communications facilities that allow the SpaceX satellites to plug into earthbound internet infrastructure from orbit. While upgraded Starlink satellites may no longer need these ground stations in the near future, the network of today still largely requires them to service a country as vast as Iran, said Humphreys, the University of Texas professor. Again, Iran is unlikely to approve the construction within its borders of satellite installations owned by an American defense contractor.

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    Humphreys suggested that ground stations built in a neighboring country could provide some level of connection, albeit at reduced speed, but that still doesn’t get over the hump of every Iranian who wants to get online needing a $550 kit with “Starlink” emblazoned on the box. While Humphreys added that he was hopeful that a slow trickle of Starlinks terminals could aid Iranian dissidents over time, he said, “I don’t think in the short term this will have an impact on the unrest in Iran.”

    Alp Toker, director of the internet monitoring and censorship watchdog group NetBlocks, noted that many Iranians already watch banned satellite television channels through contraband dishes, meaning the smuggling of Starlink dishes is doable in theory. While he praised the idea of bringing Starlink to Iran as “credible and worthwhile” in the long term, the difficulty in sourcing Starlink’s specialized equipment means that accessing Musk’s satellites remains “a solution for the few,” not a counter to population-scale censorship.

    While future versions of the Starlink system might be able to communicate with more accessible devices like handheld phones, Toker said, “As far as we know this isn’t possible with the current generation of kit, and it won’t be until then that Starlink or similar platforms could simply ‘switch on’ internet in a country in the sense that most people understand.”

    Even with Iran’s culture of bootleg satellite TV, these experts warned that a Starlink connection could endanger Iranians. Rose Croshier, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, noted the risks: “A word of caution: TV dishes are passive — they don’t transmit — so a Starlink terminal (that both receives and transmits data) in a crowd of illegal satellite dishes would still be very findable by Iranian authorities.”

    “I don’t think in the short term this will have an impact on the unrest in Iran.”

    The plan faces further terrestrial hurdles. The complex two-way nature of satellite connections is part of why they’re subject to international regulation, most notably through the International Telecommunication Union, of which both the United States and Iran are members. Croshier pointed to a 2021 paper on satellite internet usage by the Asia Development Bank that explained how “US-based entities such as Starlink … require regulatory approval from the FCC as well the ITU” and that “service provision to customers will require regulatory approval in every country of operation.” Mahsa Alimardani, a senior Middle East researcher at Article19, a free expression advocacy group, tweeted that even if Starlink could beam internet to Iranians in a meaningful way, the company would face consequences from the International Telecommunications Union if it did so without Iranian approval — approval it is unlikely to ever get.

    Then there are sanctions against Iran. Blinken, the secretary of state, announced a relaxation of tech exports, but the restrictions on trade with Iran remain a serious obstacle. “There are a host of human rights related sanctions on Iranian actors in the IT space under a sanctions authority called GHRAVITY that complicate any of this beyond the questions raised of whether Iran would allow Starlink terminals in country,” explained Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and expert on global sanctions. The relaxed rules would still require a special license for Starlink use in Iran, O’Toole said, which he doubts would be granted: “Much of this Starlink stuff doesn’t appear terribly likely to do much, from my point of view.”

    Starlink — or a competitor — may one day bring unfettered net uplinks to Iran and other countries where online dissent is choked out, but for today’s Iranian protesters, the realities far exceed the PR punch of a two-word tweet.


    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/27/no-elon-musks-starlink-probably-wont-fix-iranian-internet-censorship/feed/ 0 336742 A very British censorship: How UK law helps oligarchs silence journalists https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/22/a-very-british-censorship-how-uk-law-helps-oligarchs-silence-journalists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/22/a-very-british-censorship-how-uk-law-helps-oligarchs-silence-journalists/#respond Thu, 22 Sep 2022 14:11:53 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oliver-bullough-oligarchs-libel-journalism-slapp/ OPINION: So-called ‘SLAPP’ cases – like the one now facing openDemocracy – have a chilling effect on scrutiny


    This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Oliver Bullough.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/22/a-very-british-censorship-how-uk-law-helps-oligarchs-silence-journalists/feed/ 0 335404     Facebook Report Concludes Company Censorship Violated Palestinian Human Rights https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/21/facebook-report-concludes-company-censorship-violated-palestinian-human-rights/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/21/facebook-report-concludes-company-censorship-violated-palestinian-human-rights/#respond Wed, 21 Sep 2022 22:45:05 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=408444

    Facebook and Instagram’s speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites’ parent company Meta.

    “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication.

    Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report focuses on the company’s censorship practices and allegations of bias during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces last spring.

    “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact.”

    Following protests over the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and launched military air strikes against Gaza that injured thousands of Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, according to the United Nations. Many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the violence using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain.

    Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter protesting Meta’s delay in releasing the report, which the company had originally pledged to release in the “first quarter” of the year.

    While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it further blames “a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy errors with significant consequences to occur.”

    Though BSR is clear in stating that Meta harms Palestinian rights with the censorship apparatus it alone has constructed, the report absolves Meta of “intentional bias.” Rather, BSR points to what it calls “unintentional bias,” instances “where Meta policy and practice, combined with broader external dynamics, does lead to different human rights impacts on Palestinian and Arabic speaking users” — a nod to the fact that these systemic flaws are by no means limited to the events of May 2021.

    Meta responded to the BSR report in a document to be circulated along with the findings. (Meta did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about the report by publication time.) In a footnote in the response, which was also obtained by The Intercept, the company wrote, “Meta’s publication of this response should not be construed as an admission, agreement with, or acceptance of any of the findings, conclusions, opinions or viewpoints identified by BSR, nor should the implementation of any suggested reforms be taken as admission of wrongdoing.”

    According to the findings of BSR’s report, Meta deleted Arabic content relating to the violence at a far greater rate than Hebrew-language posts, confirming long-running complaints of disparate speech enforcement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The disparity, the report found, was perpetuated among posts reviewed both by human employees and automated software.

    “The data reviewed indicated that Arabic content had greater over-enforcement (e.g., erroneously removing Palestinian voice) on a per user basis,” the report says. “Data reviewed by BSR also showed that proactive detection rates of potentially violating Arabic content were significantly higher than proactive detection rates of potentially violating Hebrew content.”

    BSR attributed the vastly differing treatment of Palestinian and Israeli posts to the same systemic problems rights groups, whistleblowers, and researchers have all blamed for the company’s past humanitarian failures: a dismal lack of expertise. Meta, a company with over $24 billion in cash reserves, lacks staff who understand other cultures, languages, and histories, and is using faulty algorithmic technology to govern speech around the world, the BSR report concluded.

    Not only do Palestinian users face an algorithmic screening that Israeli users do not — an “Arabic hostile speech classifier” that uses machine learning to flag potential policy violations and has no Hebrew equivalent — the report notes that the Arabic system also doesn’t work well: “Arabic classifiers are likely less accurate for Palestinian Arabic than other dialects, both because the dialect is less common, and because the training data — which is based on the assessments of human reviewers — likely reproduces the errors of human reviewers due to lack of linguistic and cultural competence.”

    Human employees appear to have exacerbated the lopsided effects of Meta’s speech-policing algorithms. “Potentially violating Arabic content may not have been routed to content reviewers who speak or understand the specific dialect of the content,” the report says. It also notes that Meta didn’t have enough Arabic and Hebrew-speaking staff on hand to manage the spike in posts.

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    These faults had cascading speech-stifling effects, the report continues. “Based on BSR’s review of tickets and input from internal stakeholders, a key over-enforcement issue in May 2021 occurred when users accumulated ‘false’ strikes that impacted visibility and engagement after posts were erroneously removed for violating content policies.” In other words, wrongful censorship begat further wrongful censorship, leaving the affected wondering why no one could see their posts. “The human rights impacts … of these errors were more severe given a context where rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and safety were of heightened significance, especially for activists and journalists,” the report says.

    Beyond Meta’s failures in triaging posts about Sheikh Jarrah, BSR also points to the company’s “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy — referred to as “DOI” in the report — a roster of thousands of people and groups that Meta’s billions of users cannot “praise,” “support,” or “represent.” The full list, obtained and published by The Intercept last year, showed that the policy focuses mostly on Muslim and Middle Eastern entities, which critics described as a recipe for glaring ethnic and religious bias.

    Meta claims that it’s legally compelled to censor mention of groups designated by the U.S. government, but legal scholars have disputed the company’s interpretation of federal anti-terrorism laws. Following The Intercept’s report on the list, the Brennan Center for Justice called the company’s claims of legal obligation a “fiction.”

    “Meta’s DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.”

    BSR agrees the policy is systemically biased: “Legal designations of terrorist organizations around the world have a disproportionate focus on individuals and organizations that have identified as Muslim, and thus Meta’s DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.”

    Palestinians are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the blacklist, according to the report: “Palestinians are more likely to violate Meta’s DOI policy because of the presence of Hamas as a governing entity in Gaza and political candidates affiliated with designated organizations. DOI violations also come with particularly steep penalties, which means Palestinians are more likely to face steeper consequences for both correct and incorrect enforcement of policy.”

    The document concludes with a list of 21 nonbinding policy recommendations, including increased staffing capacity to properly understand and process Arabic posts, implementing a Hebrew-compatible algorithm, increased company oversight of outsourced moderators, and both reforms to and increased transparency around the “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy.

    In its response to the report, Meta vaguely commits to implement or consider implementing aspects of 20 out of 21 the recommendations. The exception is a call to “Fund public research into the optimal relationship between legally required counterterrorism obligations and the policies and practices of social media platforms,” which the company says it will not pursue because it does not wish to provide legal guidance for other companies. Rather, Meta suggests concerned experts reach out directly to the federal government.


    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Sam Biddle.

    ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/21/facebook-report-concludes-company-censorship-violated-palestinian-human-rights/feed/ 0 335209 The Rise of the New Normal Reich, Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III, banned in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-normal-reich-consent-factory-essays-vol-iii-banned-in-germany-austria-and-the-netherlands/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-normal-reich-consent-factory-essays-vol-iii-banned-in-germany-austria-and-the-netherlands/#respond Mon, 12 Sep 2022 13:55:03 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=133223 So, the censorship of my latest book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), continues. Amazon.com has now banned the book in three countries … Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands. The pretext the Amazon Content Review Team has cited as grounds for banning the book is the semi-visible swastika […]

    The post The Rise of the New Normal Reich, Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III, banned in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

    So, the censorship of my latest book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), continues. Amazon.com has now banned the book in three countries … Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands.

    The pretext the Amazon Content Review Team has cited as grounds for banning the book is the semi-visible swastika on the cover. This pretext is clearly a pretext; i.e., a lie, as Amazon sells a number of other products displaying semi-visible swastikas in these markets.

    For example, William Shirer’s books, or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, as depicted in the images above. Some of the swastika-displaying products Amazon offers in these markets display not merely semi-visible swastikas, but totally-visible swastikas on their packaging.

    For example …

    The Amazon Content Review Team’s pretext for banning the book is clearly a lie, and not even a convincing lie. But then Amazon doesn’t have to lie convincingly.

    When you are an unaccountable supranational corporation founded and executive-chaired by Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in the world, and a component of the US Intelligence Community, the “rule of law” does not apply to you. You do not have to justify your actions to any court of law or regulatory body, much less to some mid-list author whose income and reputation you are maliciously damaging.

    Sure, there are constitutional protections against censorship and discrimination, and other laws that ostensibly forbid you from maliciously damaging the reputations and incomes of mid-list authors like me. For example:

    Article 5 of the Grundgesetz (i.e., Germany’s constitution):

    “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.”

    Article 3 of the Grundgesetz:

    “No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions.”

    But these laws do not apply to you, not when you’re Amazon.com, because you know that: (a) the governments in question, i.e., the governments of Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands, condone your violations of their constitutions (which they have abrogated in any event under the pretext of a “public health emergency”) and might have even had something to do with them, i.e., your constitutional violations; and (b) lawyers will be too afraid of your wealth and power to challenge you in court.

    Moreover, mainstream journalists will completely ignore your censorship of political literature that does not conform to the new official global-capitalist ideology, or they will “like” or retweet one of my tweets, and then rush back to covering whatever one of their colleagues tweeted about some other colleague’s tweet, and their colleagues’ responses to that tweet, i.e., the tweet about the original tweet, because they, i.e., the mainstream journalists, are also scared shitless of incurring your ire, and potentially getting their books banned by Amazon, and their incomes and reputations damaged, and getting fired by their literary agents, and so on.

    Which means you can pretty much do whatever you want to anyone you want, which is a pretty sweet deal if you’re an immensely powerful supranational corporation that dominates book sales and distribution globally and is also an essential component of the global-capitalist Intelligence Community.

    Which that is kind of the point of this piece. Yes, Amazon’s banning of my book will damage my book sales and reputation as an author, but I’ll survive. The point is, as I put it in a post I published yesterday, before Amazon advised me that they had banned the book in Austria and The Netherlands, in addition to Germany:

    “What is important is that corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. (which control our communication networks) do not have the slightest qualms about censoring information, banning books, suppressing facts, spreading disinformation, and generally behaving like Orwellian Thoughtpolice … and we are gradually becoming accustomed to it. It is becoming “normal,” boring even. I don’t know about you, but I am not OK with living in a world where Amazon and other unaccountable global corporations decide which books we are allowed to read, which films we are allowed to watch, which facts we are allowed to know about. And that is where we are headed, currently. We’re not going to arrive there suddenly, one day. We’re going to arrive there just like this … little step by little step, one little act of corporate censorship at a time.”

    I don’t know how to fight this, exactly … not my book ban, the larger phenomenon. It probably has to start with mainstream journalists and lawyers taking on these global corporations. Relatively obscure little literary outlaws (like me) do not have the juice to do it.

    So, if you happen to know any people like that …

    Oh, and, for those of you who enjoy seeing how the ideological-sausage gets made, here, for the purpose of criticism and review, is my recent correspondence with the Amazon Content Review Team.

    August 29, 2022 (4:35 PM)

    Hello,

    During our review process, we found that your book’s cover image contains content (i.e. Swastika, Reichsadler, Sowilō) that is in violation of our content guidelines for Germany and may infringe German law. As a result, we will not be offering the following book for sale in Germany:

    The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)
    ASIN: B0B1VCK39P, 3982146429

    You may reply to this message if you believe this decision has been made in error.

    Our content guidelines are published on the Kindle Direct Publishing website: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2TOZW0SV7IR1U.

    Best regards,

    Amazon KDP

    Content Review Team
    Amazon Content Review Team

    August 29, 2022 (5:18 PM)

    Dear Amazon KDP Content Review Team,

    German law is clear on the banned/permitted use of images of swastikas. See, e.g., this Deutsche Welle article …

    • Swastikas and other banned symbols can displayed in Germany if they are used for “civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art and science, research and education, the coverage of historic and current events, or similar purposes,” according to the Criminal Code.

    There are numerous examples of books, films, artworks, etc. containing swastikas for the above-cited purposes in Germany.

    The cover artwork of my book (which has been on sale throughout the world since May 2022, and was an Amazon bestseller in several countries upon its release) clearly falls under such exceptional use under German law, therefore, there is no legal ground for Amazon to ban its sale or otherwise censor it.

    Additionally, Amazon.de offers for sale other products bearing images of swastikas, e.g., William Shirer’s books, a Quentin Tarantino film, etc. Thus, your decision to ban my book can only be seen as arbitrary, rather than as the result of a consistent in-house policy.

    Moreover, Amazon’s banning of my book violates Germany’s constitutional protection of freedom of expression as set forth in Article 5 of the Grundgesetz:

    • Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.

    I trust you have taken this decision based on your misunderstanding of German law and lack of awareness of the other books and products Amazon offers in Germany that also contain images of swastikas for the above-cited purposes, and not based on any political or ideological bias and/or intention to damage my income and reputation as an author. Thus, I assume you will immediately reverse this ban.

    I look forward to your prompt reply.

    Yours sincerely,
    CJ Hopkins

    August 30, 2022 (3:07 PM)

    Hello,

    Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

    We need a little time to look into the problem.

    We’ll reply and send you more information within 2-3 business days.

    Thanks for your patience.

    Content Review Team
    Amazon Content Review Team

    August 30, 2022 (6:24 PM)

    Hello,

    Thanks for your email.

    We’ve reviewed your book “The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)” (ASIN:B0B1VCK39P, 3982146429 ), and found that it is in violation of our content guidelines and we will not be offering this title for sale on Amazon.

    We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience and remove that content from sale.

    You can find our KDP content guidelines, here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672390

    Thanks for your understanding.

    Best regards,
    Amazon KDP

    Content Review Team
    Amazon Content Review Team

    August 30, 2022 (6:39 PM)

    Hi Amazon Content Review Team,

    Could you please clarify:

    (1) in which countries Amazon KDP has banned and/or is planning to ban the book;

    (2) the nature of the “poor customer experience” you have cited, or which specific “content guidelines” the book violates?

    I would note that the book has overwhelmingly positive reader reviews from readers all around the world, so I am unclear as to which customers are having a “poor experience.”

    With kind regards,
    CJ Hopkins

    August 31, 2022 (9:38 AM)

    Hello,

    During our review process, we found that your book’s cover image contains content (i.e. Swastika) that is in violation of our content guidelines for Germany and may infringe German law.

    As a result, we will not be offering the following book for sale in Germany, Netherlands and Austria:

    “The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent > Factory
    Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)” (ASIN:B0B1VCK39P, 3982146429 )

    Regarding the Paperback version “The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent > Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)” (ASIN: 3982146429) KDP Print availability may not always align with digital availability.

    For European countries sales, in order for a KDP paperback title to be available in one European country, you must make the book(s) available in all European countries.

    If your book(s) is not in the public domain, or you don’t have publishing rights in any one of those countries, then none of the European countries should be selected as territories.

    For a list of European countries, visit Help: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G201834280

    If you have additional questions, please reply to this email.

    You may reply to this message if you believe this decision has been made in error.

    Our content guidelines are published on the Kindle Direct Publishing website: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2TOZW0SV7IR1U.

    Best regards,

    Thanks for using Amazon KDP

    Content Review Team
    Amazon Content Review Team

    August 31, 2022 (1:31 PM)

    Dear Amazon Content Review Team,

    Thank you very much for clarifying in which countries you have arbitrarily decided to ban my book, clearly for political/ideological reasons, as you offer several other products containing “content (i.e. Swastika)” that you falsely claim is “in violation of [y]our content guidelines for Germany and may infringe German law” (referenced in my previous email).

    I especially appreciated your failure to address my explication of German law regarding the permitted use of swastikas for certain purposes, and your robotic repetition of the phrase “may infringe German law,” as if I had not explained it (i.e., German law) to you. That was a lovely touch. It radiates Faceless Unaccountable Power, which I assume was what you were going for, so kudos!

    Your refusal to explain the nature of the “poor customer experience” that you claimed customers have experienced or might experience, after I demonstrated that your “German law” pretext was nonsense, and a lie, and which specific Amazon “content guidelines” the book violates, is also much appreciated. Again, it evokes that “You-Are-Dealing-With-A-Faceless-Orwellian-Machine” feeling, so … good job!

    Thank you also for the gibberish about “publishing rights” in European countries, which has absolutely nothing to do with this matter.

    I will be sure to update you regarding the results of your efforts to damage my income and reputation as an author in due course. Until then …

    All best wishes and kindest personal regards,
    CJ Hopkins

    *****

    The post The Rise of the New Normal Reich, Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III, banned in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by C.J. Hopkins.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-normal-reich-consent-factory-essays-vol-iii-banned-in-germany-austria-and-the-netherlands/feed/ 0 332090     Civicus raps Solomon Islands over rights curbs, tighter media controls https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/07/civicus-raps-solomon-islands-over-rights-curbs-tighter-media-controls/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/07/civicus-raps-solomon-islands-over-rights-curbs-tighter-media-controls/#respond Wed, 07 Sep 2022 05:16:25 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=78875 Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    The Civicus Monitor has documented an uptick in restrictions on civic space by the Solomon Islands government, which led to the downgrading of the coiuntry’s rating to “narrowed” in December 2021.

    As previously documented, there have been threats to ban Facebook in the country and attempts to vilify civil society.

    The authorities have also restricted access to information, including requests from the media. During violent anti-government protests in November 2021, journalists on location were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets from the police.

    Elections are held on the Solomon Islands every four years and Parliament was due to be dissolved in May 2023.

    However, the Solomon Islands is set to host the Pacific Games in November 2023, and Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has sought to delay the dissolution of Parliament until December 2023, with an election to be held within four months of that date. The opposition leader has criticised this delay as a “power grab”.

    There have also been growing concerns over press freedom and the influence of China, which signed a security deal with the Pacific island nation in April 2022.

    Journalists face restrictions during Chinese visit
    In May 2022, journalists in the Solomons faced numerous restrictions while trying to report on the visit of China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi to the region.

    According to reports, China’s foreign ministry refused to answer questions about the visit.

    Journalists seeking to cover the Solomon Islands for international outlets said they were blocked from attending press events, while those journalists that were allowed access were restricted in asking questions.

    Georgina Kekea, president of the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI), said getting information about Wang’s visit to the country, including an itinerary, had been very difficult.

    She said there was only one press event scheduled in Honiara but only journalists from two Solomon Islands’ newspapers, the national broadcaster, and Chinese media were permitted to attend.

    Covid-19 concerns were cited as the official reason for the limited number of journalists attending.

    “MASI thrives on professional journalism and sees no reason for journalists to be discriminated against based on who they represent,” Kekea said.

    “Giving credentials to selected journalists is a sign of favouritism. Journalists should be allowed to do their job without fear or favour.”

    The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said that “restriction of journalists and media organisations … sets a worrying precedent for press freedom in the Pacific” and urged the government of the Solomon Islands to ensure press freedom is protected.

    Government tightens state broadcaster control
    The government of the Solomon Islands is seeking tighter control over the nation’s state-owned broadcaster, a move that opponents say is aimed at controlling and censoring the news.

    On 2 August 2022, the government ordered the country’s national broadcaster — the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, known as SIBC – to self-censor its news and other paid programmes and only allow content that portrays the nation’s government in a positive light.

    The government also said it would vet all stories before broadcasting.

    The broadcaster, which broadcasts radio programmes, TV bulletins and online news, is the only way to receive immediate news for people in many remote areas of the country and plays a vital role in natural disaster management.

    The move comes a month after the independence of the broadcaster was significantly undermined, namely when it lost its designation as a “state-owned enterprise” and instead became fully funded by government.

    This has caused concerns that the government has been seeking to exert greater control over the broadcaster.

    The IFJ said: “The censoring of the Solomon Island’s national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process.

    “The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands”.

    However, in an interview on August 8, the government seemed to back track on the decision and said that SIBC would retain editorial control.

    It said that it only seeks to protect “our people from lies and misinformation […] propagated by the national broadcaster”.

    Authorities threaten to ban foreign journalists
    The authorities have threatened to ban or deport foreign journalists deemed disrespectful of the country’s relationship with China.

    According to IFJ, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement on August 24 which criticised foreign media for failing to follow standards expected of journalists writing and reporting on the situation in the Solomons Islands.

    The government warned it would implement swift measures to prevent journalists who were not “respectful” or “courteous” from entering the country.

    The statement specifically targeted a an August 1 episode of Four Corners, titled “Pacific Capture: How Chinese money is buying the Solomons”. The investigative documentary series by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was accused of “misinformation and distribution of pre-conceived prejudicial information”.

    ABC has denied this accusation.

    IFJ condemned “this grave infringement on press freedom” and called on Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to “ensure all journalists remain free to report on all affairs concerning the Solomon Islands”.

    Republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/07/civicus-raps-solomon-islands-over-rights-curbs-tighter-media-controls/feed/ 0 330539     The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine and the crisis of media censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/02/the-chris-hedges-report-ukraine-and-the-crisis-of-media-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/02/the-chris-hedges-report-ukraine-and-the-crisis-of-media-censorship/#respond Fri, 02 Sep 2022 16:00:10 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=77cc3b59f7294900cc45ebe2d7c82322
    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/02/the-chris-hedges-report-ukraine-and-the-crisis-of-media-censorship/feed/ 0 329058     Factchecking the Factchecker on Chomsky, Russia and Media Access https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/29/factchecking-the-factchecker-on-chomsky-russia-and-media-access/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/29/factchecking-the-factchecker-on-chomsky-russia-and-media-access/#respond Mon, 29 Aug 2022 15:34:16 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9030070 Millions of people in the Soviet Union, including virtually all intellectuals, had access to and tuned into Western media in the 1970s.

    The post Factchecking the Factchecker on Chomsky, Russia and Media Access appeared first on FAIR.

    ]]>      

    Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US-based media platforms have made an extraordinary effort to cut Western audiences off from news from a Russian perspective. When social critic Noam Chomsky pointed out how unprecedented this was, Newsweek‘s “factchecker” (7/26/22) declared his criticism “clearly untrue”–a determination that did more to confirm the ideological strictures of US media than to debunk them.

    Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russia Today, funded by the Russian government, was removed from DirecTV and Dish Network (New York Times, 3/12/22), YouTube (France24, 12/3/22), TikTok, Meta (CNN, 3/1/22) Google News (Reuters, 3/1/22) and Spotify (Reuters, 3/2/22) in the United States and/or Europe. RT and Sputnik (another Russian state–funded network) were removed from the Apple app store (TechCrunch, 3/1/22).

    CNN: RT sees its influence diminish as TV providers and tech companies take action against the Russia-backed outlet

    CNN (3/1/22): “The actions taken by television providers and technology companies against RT have…reduc[ed] the Kremlin’s ability to peddle its narrative at a pivotal time.”

    Microsoft banned RT from the Windows app store, and deranked RT and Sputnik in Bing search results (TechCrunch, 3/1/22). Google (Reuters, 3/1/22), Meta (Reuters 2/26/22) and Microsoft (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22) barred RT from receiving any ad revenue through their platforms. RT was also banned by Roku, a streaming hardware company (CNN, 3/1/22).

    Motivations for banning RT and Sputnik were due to “extraordinary circumstances,” in Google’s words (Reuters, 2/26/22), and to protect “against state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22). RT’s offices in the US had to close down their production completely (Washington Post, 3/3/22).

    PayPal has recently frozen the accounts of independent news outlets such as Consortium News (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22) and MintPress (Democracy Now!, 5/4/22; FAIR.org, 5/18/22). The circumstances around PayPal’s actions are less clear than with the actions against RT. The editor-in-chief of Consortium News, Joe Lauria, said he didn’t know why PayPal froze its account, but he suspects a clause in the user agreement against “purveying misinformation” may have been invoked (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22).

    One of the many chilling effects of the media blackout was that YouTube deleted its entire archive of commentary by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges (who formerly worked for the New York Times and NPR) because it was hosted by RT (Democracy Now!, 4/1/22).

    In May, the US announced new sanctions against Russian television networks Channel One Russia, Television Station Russia-1 and NTV Broadcasting Company (CNN, 5/8/22), cutting them off from US advertisers.

    ‘A kind of totalitarian culture’

    Newsweek: Fact Check: Noam Chomsky Claims American Access To News Worse Than In USSR

    Newsweek (7/26/22): “There are no justified parallels to be drawn between the Soviet Russia media landscape and that of the US today.”

    Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and a renowned media critic, responded to this consolidated effort to “counter the threat” posed by the “information war” (Newsweek, 7/26/22) in an interview with actor Russell Brand (YouTube, 7/22/22):

    Take the United States today; it is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime, and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.

    Chomsky’s comments were “factchecked” recently by Tom Norton of Newsweek (7/26/22). He wrote:

    While the BBC and Radio Free America did broadcast in Russia post-WWII and during the Cold War, their frequencies were jammed by the Soviet government for decades. Any access that the Russian public did have was gained in spite of, not thanks to, their government’s efforts.

    The article briefly covers the history of signal jamming in the Soviet Union and other comments made by Chomsky, concluding:

    To suggest that Americans have less access to information than citizens in Soviet Russia is therefore, not only clearly untrue, but an argument that neglects the sacrifices and perils that journalists have endured to deliver accurate news about the country, and continue to endure to this day.

    The official ruling of Newsweek declared Chomsky’s comments false:

    By all accounts, Americans are able to access news from Russia despite many Western journalists having fled the country, and Russia having blocked its public’s access to most Western social media and news platforms.

    ‘A ubiquitous phenomenon’

    BBC: BBC Russian radio hits the off switch after 65 years

    BBC (3/23/11): “Listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.”

    One of the articles used to support the certification of falsehood was a New York Times article (5/26/87) from 1987 that reported “Russia had begun broadcasting Voice of America after blocking its signal for seven years.” A BBC article (3/23/11) from 2011 was also used to explain that between 1949 and 1987 the Soviets spent significant funds developing jammers to block Western transmissions.

    Interestingly, the same New York Times article reported that “a Harvard University study in the mid-1970’s estimated that 28 million people in the Soviet Union tuned in [to US-funded VoA] at least once a week.’” And similarly, from the same BBC article cited by Newsweek:

    However, jamming was never totally effective, and listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.

    Using just two articles from Western sources selected by the factchecker, it seems that millions of people, including virtually all intellectuals in the Soviet Union, had access to and tuned into Western media in the 1970s, which is fairly consistent with Chomsky’s comments: “Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.”

    Newsweek reached out to Chomsky for comment, who responded:

    I was explicit. I referred to the banning of RT and other channels, comparing it with pre-Perestroika Russia when Russians were getting their news from BBC and VoA, according to US studies.

    A mass Soviet audience

    Cold War Broadcasting

    Cold War Broadcasting (CEU Press, 2010): “Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s.”

    A collection of studies were published in 2010 in the book, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by A. Ross Johnson, a former research fellow at the Hoover Institute (a conservative think tank) and director of Radio Free Europe (US-funded media), and R. Eugene Parta, also a former director of RFE and a contributor to the Hoover Institution. The studies corroborate the claim that people in the Soviet Union were frequently listening to Western media.

    In the 1970s, simulations estimated by MIT put VoA weekly listenership reaching highs of 19% of the adult Soviet population, with the BBC topping out at 11%. “Study results showed that by the end of the 1970s, more than half of the USSR urban population listened to foreign broadcasting more or less regularly,” according to Cold War Broadcasting.

    Out of curiosity, what do the US studies have to say about the 1980s?

    Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s. That was approximately half of VoA’s global audience at the time.

    The Soviet war in Afghanistan apparently did not stop people from listening to Western broadcasts. In 1984, 40% of the urban population received information on the war in Afghanistan from Western radio, and in 1987 it was 45%.

    In the contemporary United States, however, this is not permitted. We cannot have people listening to the enemy in times of war.

    Cold War Broadcasting noted that

    the size of Western radio stations’ audience grew gradually from the beginning of broadcasting in the early post-war period to reach more than 50% of the Soviet urban population in the early 1980s.

    In other words, Western radio stations had a mass audience in the former USSR. The number of regular listeners was as high as 20–25%.

    Soviet listeners appeared to use their access to news from multiple perspectives to get a more comprehensive picture of events:

    Despite a relatively high level of trust in Western radio stations, most listeners did not totally accept all the information they heard. The Soviet audience took a more deliberate approach to understanding information that was based on a comparison of information obtained from Soviet mass media with that from foreign radio programs.

    So Western outlets and US studies seem to agree with Chomsky: Despite jamming, people had access and often listened to Western sources in the Soviet Union and were critically engaged with the news at the time, especially during the ’70s.

    ACTION ALERT: You can contact Newsweek here or via Twitter: @Newsweek. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

    FEATURED IMAGE: Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! (12/7/21).

     

    The post Factchecking the Factchecker on Chomsky, Russia and Media Access appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by John Kempthorne.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/29/factchecking-the-factchecker-on-chomsky-russia-and-media-access/feed/ 0 327392     CPJ joins calls for Turkish regulator to reverse ad ban on Evrensel daily https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/26/cpj-joins-calls-for-turkish-regulator-to-reverse-ad-ban-on-evrensel-daily/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/26/cpj-joins-calls-for-turkish-regulator-to-reverse-ad-ban-on-evrensel-daily/#respond Fri, 26 Aug 2022 14:32:23 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=225939 On August 26, 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists joined the International Press Institute and 17 Turkish and international groups in a joint statement calling for Turkey’s Press Ad Agency, the state regulator of government advertisements in print media, to reverse its cancellation of advertisements carried by the leftist daily Evrensel.

    In the statement, the groups urged the agency reinstate the advertising, noting that the ads were a “vital source” of the paper’s income. The groups stated that the Press Ad Agency has “a regulatory duty to act as an independent and fair distributor of public ads, and not to facilitate censorship through suppressing critical news outlets.”

    The statement also noted that the Constitutional Court of Turkey decided on August 10 that the agency has been arbitrarily banning advertisements in critical print outlets including Evrensel.

    The full statement is available here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/26/cpj-joins-calls-for-turkish-regulator-to-reverse-ad-ban-on-evrensel-daily/feed/ 0 326783     The Confluence of Surveillance and Censorship and Violence Against Journalists https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/22/the-confluence-of-surveillance-and-censorship-and-violence-against-journalists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/22/the-confluence-of-surveillance-and-censorship-and-violence-against-journalists/#respond Mon, 22 Aug 2022 17:02:11 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=26365 In the first half of the show, Mickey talks with attorney and author Heidi Boghosian and Project Censored associate director Andy Lee Roth about the confluence of surveillance and censorship,…

    The post The Confluence of Surveillance and Censorship and Violence Against Journalists appeared first on Project Censored.

    ]]>     In the first half of the show, Mickey talks with attorney and author Heidi Boghosian and Project Censored associate director Andy Lee Roth about the confluence of surveillance and censorship, and how that impacts journalism. Many people believe they have nothing to hide online, but that myth is dispelled by today’s guests as they address everyday precautions citizens can take to defend their privacy online. Later, Clayton Weimers of Reporters Without Boarders joins the discussion with Mickey and Andy to address the rising incidences of violence (or threats of violence) against journalists, how they should be confronted, and the impacts they have on a free press and society at large.

    Notes:

    • Heidi Boghosian is executive director of the AJ Muste Institute, and former executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Her most recent book is I Have Nothing to Hide, And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy.
    • Andy Lee Roth is Associate Director of Project Censored, co-editor of the Project’s annual volume of censored stories, and co-coordinator of the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program. He has published widely on media issues, including most recently, The Deadly Business of Reporting Truth.
    • Clayton Weimers directs the Washington DC bureau office of Reporters Without Borders, an international institution which works to protect journalists around the world; it also publishes the annual “Press Freedom Index” ranking of countries around the world on press freedom issues.

    Hosts: Mickey Huff and Eleanor Goldfield

    Producers: Anthony Fest and Eleanor Goldfield

    The post The Confluence of Surveillance and Censorship and Violence Against Journalists appeared first on Project Censored.


    This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/22/the-confluence-of-surveillance-and-censorship-and-violence-against-journalists/feed/ 0 348547     Rights Groups Tell Zuckerberg to Stop ‘Dangerous Censorship’ of Abortion Content https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/rights-groups-tell-zuckerberg-to-stop-dangerous-censorship-of-abortion-content/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/rights-groups-tell-zuckerberg-to-stop-dangerous-censorship-of-abortion-content/#respond Wed, 17 Aug 2022 16:08:23 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/339111

    A coalition of civil society organizations on Wednesday demanded that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg put a halt to censorship of abortion rights content on his company's platforms following reports that Facebook and Instagram have been removing posts aimed at helping pregnant people access reproductive care in U.S. states where it is heavily restricted.

    "Meta has demonstrated that it has no policy in place to defend peoples' right to abortion on its platforms."

    In a letter to Zuckerberg, the groups argue that Meta may be violating its "responsibility to respect human rights" by censoring information on reproductive health and rights, the treatment of which contrasts with Facebook's lax regulation of climate and election lies.

    "Actions that unduly restrict the right to freedom of expression on this topic, including the right to seek, receive, and impart information related to sexual and reproductive health and rights, would contravene Meta's responsibility to respect human rights," reads the letter, which was signed by Access Now, Amnesty International USA, Fight for the Future, Human Rights Watch, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

    "Numerous media organizations have reported that Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram have taken down posts explaining how to access abortion pills," the groups write. "Media reports also indicate that Instagram is censoring searches for hashtags referencing terms such as 'abortion pills' and 'mifepristone,' stating that such posts are 'hidden because some posts may not follow Instagram's Community Guidelines.'"

    In late June, days after the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority overturned Roe v. Wade and imperiled abortion access across the country, the Associated Press reported that Facebook and Instagram started "promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them" as people turned to the internet for information on how to access care in the face of fresh bans.

    As the outlet noted:

    Memes and status updates explaining how women could legally obtain abortion pills in the mail exploded across social platforms. Some even offered to mail the prescriptions to women living in states that now ban the procedure.

    Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the U.S. were searching for clarity around abortion access.

    The platform's handling of such posts has drawn scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers.

    Last month, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Zuckerberg raising alarm about the AP reporting and arguing that "it is more important than ever that social media platforms not censor truthful posts about abortion, particularly as people across the country turn to online communities to discuss and find information about reproductive rights."

    Jennifer Brody, U.S. policy and advocacy manager at Access Now, echoed that message in a statement on Wednesday.

    "Meta's censorship of information on abortion and reproductive health is jeopardizing the safety and human rights of millions across the U.S.," said Brody. "People need the power and knowledge to make informed decisions about their bodies and their lives—Meta must decide now if it will be on the right side of history."

    Related Content

    Facebook has said its content guidelines prohibit "content that attempts to buy, sell, trade, gift, request, or donate pharmaceuticals," but posts related to "the affordability and accessibility of prescription medication" are allowed.

    "We've discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these," Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on Twitter in late June.

    But the civil society coalition argued in its letter Wednesday that Facebook and Instagram's responses to censorship reports in the post-Roe U.S. have been woefully inadequate thus far. The groups called on Meta to release data on how many posts related to reproductive rights that it has censored.

    "Meta has demonstrated that it has no policy in place to defend peoples' right to abortion on its platforms," said Caitlin Seeley George, director of campaigns at Fight for the Future. "Time and again, the company has deflected the question, but users of Facebook and Instagram have the right to know whether or not the company is going to defend their human rights or if it plans to roll over under the current, anti-abortion regime."


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/rights-groups-tell-zuckerberg-to-stop-dangerous-censorship-of-abortion-content/feed/ 0 324387     GOP Censorship Crusade Leads to 250% Spike in ‘Educational Gag Order’ Proposals https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/gop-censorship-crusade-leads-to-250-spike-in-educational-gag-order-proposals/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/gop-censorship-crusade-leads-to-250-spike-in-educational-gag-order-proposals/#respond Wed, 17 Aug 2022 13:27:51 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/339101
    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/gop-censorship-crusade-leads-to-250-spike-in-educational-gag-order-proposals/feed/ 0 324288     Zimbabwe’s censorship board bans Danish documentary about opposition leader https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/16/zimbabwes-censorship-board-bans-danish-documentary-about-opposition-leader/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/16/zimbabwes-censorship-board-bans-danish-documentary-about-opposition-leader/#respond Tue, 16 Aug 2022 19:28:10 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=222271 Lusaka, August 16, 2022–Zimbabwean authorities must lift the ban on the documentary film “President” by Danish journalist Camilla Nielsson and not abuse censorship laws for political ends ahead of next year’s general election, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.

    The film, which follows opposition leader Nelson Chamisa on the 2018 presidential election campaign trail, was banned by Zimbabwe’s Censorship and Entertainment Control Unit, the country’s censorship board housed under the Ministry of Home Affairs, because it violated the country’s censorship laws, according to a June 16 letter from the unit’s deputy director Oscar Mugomeri to Nielsson’s lawyer, Chris Mhike. Under the ban, the film, which news reports said premiered in the United States August 8, cannot be shown anywhere in Zimbabwe. 

    The letter, which CPJ reviewed, said the film violated of Section 10 (2)(b) of the Censorship and Entertainments Control Act, because it was “likely to be contrary to public order” and “to incite violence” ahead of the 2023 national elections, according to news reports.

    The documentary details alleged rigging, intimidation, fraud, and political violence on the part of the ruling ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front) party in the 2018 elections, according to news reports. A date for Zimbabwe’s 2023 elections has yet to be set.

    “Zimbabwe’s censorship board’s decision to ban the documentary film ‘President’ seems to be less about stopping incitement to violence and more about ensuring that an opposition political leader does not get free publicity ahead of a crucial election,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities must immediately reverse this apparent knee-jerk decision and uphold the right to freedom of expression and the public’s right to know at a crucial time in the country’s history.”

    Mhike told CPJ via messaging app that on July 26, he appealed the ban to the Ministry of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage and said he would bring his appeal to the Constitutional Court if all other avenues were exhausted. 

    Nielsson initially sought the censorship board’s approval on April 1 for the documentary to be aired in Zimbabwe and on April 25, in a letter to Mhike, reviewed by CPJ, Mugomeri stated that the film was not approved because some of the scenes violated Section 10 (2) of the censorship act.  

    In a June 2 letter, also reviewed by CPJ, Mhike asked the censorship board to cite specific portions of the film that allegedly violated the law, adding that not doing so would “be deemed unreasonable, unfair and therefore defective.”

    In his reply on June 16, Mugomeri said the board had rejected the whole documentary in line with the same law. “The film has the potential to incite violence as the country is now preparing to go for elections in 2023,” Mugomeri’s letter stated.

    CPJ called and texted Mugomeri for comment but he did not pick up or respond. 


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/16/zimbabwes-censorship-board-bans-danish-documentary-about-opposition-leader/feed/ 0 324066     A Distant Mirror: Official Torture in the Roman Empire https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/13/a-distant-mirror-official-torture-in-the-roman-empire/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/13/a-distant-mirror-official-torture-in-the-roman-empire/#respond Sat, 13 Aug 2022 18:55:04 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=132486 Much is to be learned from the political correspondence of such Roman luminaries as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, among many others.  Here I am restricting myself to a Gestapo-like bureaucrat, Pliny the Younger (61-113 C.E.), imperial governor of Bithynia province (now part of Turkey) under the divinely mandated autocracy of the Emperor Trajan (53-117 C.E.). […]

    The post A Distant Mirror: Official Torture in the Roman Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Much is to be learned from the political correspondence of such Roman luminaries as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, among many others.  Here I am restricting myself to a Gestapo-like bureaucrat, Pliny the Younger (61-113 C.E.), imperial governor of Bithynia province (now part of Turkey) under the divinely mandated autocracy of the Emperor Trajan (53-117 C.E.).

    In his numerous letters seeking orders from the emperor, Pliny repeatedly pledges his obeisant loyalty.  But his tone, which seems curiously modern to me, is that of a pragmatic administrator merely seeking clarification of official policy regarding treatment of a small but possibly disloyal, subversive cult.  Here is a high-level governor, entirely indifferent to any considerations of morality, writing in the matter-of-fact, legalistic style we have come to expect from present-day war planners and intelligence agency heads.  New religious cults posed a possible threat of disloyalty to the emperor, whose rule itself is sanctified by the official State religion.

    An eccentric, secretive cult known as Christians had become a concern, and Pliny simply requests orders as to how to deal with them:

    I do not know…whether it is the mere name of Christian which is punishable, even if innocent of crime, or rather the crimes associated with the name…. I have asked them in person if they are Christians, and if they admit it, I repeat the question a second or third time, with a warning of the punishment awaiting them.  If they persist, I order them to be led away to execution.

    On the other hand, after “enhanced interrogation,” many suspects said they had long ceased to be Christians, and, as proof, made offerings to Trajan’s statue and invocations to the official gods.  Christians had been in the habit of gathering to study the Gospels and share a meal afterwards.  But Pliny reports to the emperor that “they had in fact given up this practice since my edict, issued on your instructions, which banned all political societies.  This made me decide it was all the more necessary to extract the truth by torture from two slave-women, whom they call deaconesses… I have postponed any further examination and hastened to consult you.”

    Although the “wretched cult” has “infected” both citizens and non-citizens in innumerable towns and villages, Pliny assures the emperor that it is being gradually suppressed, one indication being that:

    People have begun to throng the temples which had been almost entirely deserted for a long time; the sacred rites which had been allowed to lapse are being performed again, and flesh of sacrificial victims is on sale everywhere, though up till recently scarcely anyone could be found to buy it [italics mine].

    Entirely pragmatic and focused solely on policy which would strengthen the empire, Pliny the Younger strikingly prefigures the modern “fascist” official.  Devoid of independent principles or even ordinary compassion, he furthers his governmental status through carefully consulting with, and carrying out, the edicts of his superior, the absolute ruler.

    We can easily discern the lineaments of the very modern-day tactics of intimidating, torturing and even executing without trial supposed “subversives” and suspected “terrorists” (Guantanamo, CIA renditions and black-sites, executions by drone without trial–ad nauseam).

    • Note: all direct quotations are from: Pliny the Younger, Complete Letters, trans. P. G. Walsh, Oxford World Classics, 2009.

    The post A Distant Mirror: Official Torture in the Roman Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/13/a-distant-mirror-official-torture-in-the-roman-empire/feed/ 0 323478     Philippine court orders telco agency to ‘unblock’ Bulatlat media website https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/12/philippine-court-orders-telco-agency-to-unblock-bulatlat-media-website/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/12/philippine-court-orders-telco-agency-to-unblock-bulatlat-media-website/#respond Fri, 12 Aug 2022 20:31:33 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=77816 By Jairo Bolledo in Manila

    A Philippine court has granted alternative news site Bulatlat’s plea to temporarily unblock its website citing constitutional press freedom rights.

    In a decision on Thursday, the Quezon City Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 306 granted Bulatlat’s plea for the issuance of a writ of preliminary injunction to temporarily suspend the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC)’s memorandum, which blocked the website.

    A writ of preliminary injunction is an order granted at any stage of the legal action or prior to the final order, which requires a party, court, agency, or a person to refrain from performing a particular act or acts.

    “The issuance of the writ is conditioned upon plaintiff’s posting of a bond in the amount of One Hundred Thousand Pesos (NZ$2,800), either in cash or by surety, which shall answer for the damages the defendants would suffer by reason of the injunction in case the plaintiff is found to be not entitled thereto,” the resolution issued by Judge Dolly Rose Bolante-Prado said.

    After issuance, the writ will remain effective until “final adjudication of the merits of the main case has been made”.

    Since Bulatlat’s plea for writ of preliminary injunction has been granted by the court, its motion for reconsideration of the order denying its application for a temporary restraining order is now moot and academic, the resolution added.

    Before the end of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s term, his National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. asked the NTC to block Bulatlat and Pinoy Weekly websites.

    The former security official used the draconian anti-terror law and justified the blocking by citing excerpts from Pinoy Weekly that mentioned armed struggle and the communist insurgency.

    Right to free press, speech
    In explaining the decision, Judge Prado highlighted at least two reasons why Bulatlat was granted the writ.

    The decision explained that Bulatlat was able to prove that it has a “clear and unmistakable” right to be protected by the Constitution under the freedom of speech and of the press.

    Judge Prado noted that these freedoms included the right to publish opinion and commentaries and disseminate them.


    Online censorship in the Philippines.               Video: Rappler

    The same principle was used by Bulatlat in the filing of case to justify that the NTC order indeed violated their constitutional rights. The alternative news organisation cited Article 3, Section 4 of the 1987 Constitution.

    Judge Prado also noted that Bulatlat was able to prove that there was “a material and substantial invasion of its right.”

    The judge said the news organisation was able to establish that after the NTC memorandum took effect, Bulatlat’s website was no longer accessible.

    According to the resolution, the editorial staff could not access and upload stories on their website without using a virtual private network, and their subscribers also could not access the same.

    This was a violation of the right to free speech and press freedom, the resolution said, since the publishers’ and readers’ access to the website was limited.

    Weeks after the enforcement of the NTC memorandum, Bulatlat said it had lost half of its readership.

    “To the Court, any limitation or restriction in the exercise of one’s right, no matter the extent, and for even minimal periods of time, is a form of deprivation, and, clearly, a violation of such right,” the resolution said.

    Jairo Bolledo is a Rappler journalist. Republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/12/philippine-court-orders-telco-agency-to-unblock-bulatlat-media-website/feed/ 0 323424     SIBC chief defends ‘free’ state media broadcaster in face of tighter controls https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/11/sibc-chief-defends-free-state-media-broadcaster-in-face-of-tighter-controls/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/11/sibc-chief-defends-free-state-media-broadcaster-in-face-of-tighter-controls/#respond Thu, 11 Aug 2022 08:21:06 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=77715 Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    The head of the Solomon Islands state-owned broadcaster has defended its role in the face of the government tightening control — a move that critics say is squarely aimed at controlling and censoring the news.

    The government said last Friday that the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) would retain editorial control and that government officials would not censor or restrain the outlet.

    Earlier in the week, the government had lashed out at the broadcaster, accusing it of a “lack of ethics and professionalism” and saying the government had a duty to “protect our people from lies and misinformation” it claimed was propagated by the SIBC.

    In an interview published by the VOA News, Johnson Honimae, the SIBC chief executive, said he was proud of the broadcaster’s award-winning journalism.

    He said it was business as usual for the broadcaster and there were no government censors vetting stories before they were broadcast, contrary to what was reported by some news outlets.

    The government’s move came at a politically tumultuous time in the Solomon Islands.

    There were riots in the capital of Honiara last November, followed by a no-confidence vote in Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare in December, which he survived.

    Security pact with China
    Then in April, Sogavare signed a security pact with China that has caused deep alarm in the Pacific and around the world.

    The SIBC has reported those developments and has included the views of Sogavare’s opponents.

    The broadcaster, which began as the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service, has been a fixture for 70 years in the Solomon Islands.

    Employing about 50 people and operating under the slogan “Voice of the nation,” the broadcaster is the main source of radio and television news for the nation’s 700,000 people and is listened to and watched from the capital to the smallest village.

    In late June, the government moved to delist the SIBC as a state-owned enterprise and take more direct control, saying the broadcaster had failed to make a profit, something that had been expected of such state-owned businesses.

    Opposition Leader Matthew Wale said the delisting was a scheme orchestrated by Sogavare as “a clear attempt to directly control and censor the news content of SIBC”.

    “This will hijack well-entrenched principles of law on defamation and freedom-of-speech, thus depriving the public using SIBC to freely express their views, or accessing information on government activities,” Wale said.

    Critical government calls
    Honimae said the broadcaster took critical calls from Sogavare’s office in recent months.

    “They believe we’ve been running too many stories from the opposition side, causing too much disunity,” Honimae said.

    Honimae said the broadcaster and its staff won several journalism awards this year from the Media Association of Solomon Islands, including newsroom of the year and journalist of the year.

    He also said the broadcaster plays the national anthem when broadcasts begin each morning at 6 am and again when they finish at 11 pm.

    “We believe we are a great force for unity and peace in this country,” Honimae said.

    Honimae added that the broadcaster needed to “balance our stories more” and leave no opportunity for criticism.

    He said Sogavare — who is also the government’s Broadcasting Minister– had said in Parliament that the government would not tamper with the broadcaster’s editorial independence.

    “There is no censorship at the moment,” Honimae said. “We operate as professional journalists.”


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/11/sibc-chief-defends-free-state-media-broadcaster-in-face-of-tighter-controls/feed/ 0 322489     Kim Iversen on leaving The Hill, defying corporate media censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/kim-iversen-on-leaving-the-hill-defying-corporate-media-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/kim-iversen-on-leaving-the-hill-defying-corporate-media-censorship/#respond Mon, 08 Aug 2022 16:39:59 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=8cf271f67df2fac48ea349f3825e6f61
    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/kim-iversen-on-leaving-the-hill-defying-corporate-media-censorship/feed/ 0 321689     Kim Iversen on leaving The Hill, defying corporate censorship https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/kim-iversen-on-leaving-the-hill-defying-corporate-censorship/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/kim-iversen-on-leaving-the-hill-defying-corporate-censorship/#respond Mon, 08 Aug 2022 16:18:14 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=9632ad887bd4b7d38159eb31b929e14f
    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/kim-iversen-on-leaving-the-hill-defying-corporate-censorship/feed/ 0 321693     Backlash after Solomons government reins in public broadcaster https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/06/backlash-after-solomons-government-reins-in-public-broadcaster/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/06/backlash-after-solomons-government-reins-in-public-broadcaster/#respond Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:56:36 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=77413 RNZ Pacific

    The Solomon Islands government has prompted anger by ordering the censorship of the national broadcaster.

    The government of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has forbidden it from publishing material critical of the government, which will vet all stories before broadcast.

    The Guardian reports that on Monday the government announced that the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC), a public service broadcaster established in 1976 by an Act of Parliament, would be brought under government control.

    The broadcaster, which airs radio programmes, TV bulletins and online news, is the only way to receive immediate news for people in many remote areas of the country and plays a vital role in natural disaster management.

    Staff at SIBC confirmed to media that as of Monday, all news and programmes would be vetted by a government representative before broadcast.

    The development has prompted outrage and raised concerns about freedom of the press.

    “It’s very sad that media has been curtailed, this means we are moving away from democratic principles,” said Julian Maka, the Premier for Makira/Ulawa province, and formerly the programmes manager and current affairs head at SIBC.

    “It is not healthy for the country, especially for people in the rural areas who need to have balanced views available to them.”

    The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has also condemned the move.

    “The censoring of the Solomon Islands’ national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process. The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands.”

    Claims of bias
    The restrictions follow what Sogavare has called biased reporting and news causing “disunity”.

    The opposition leader, Matthew Wale, has requested a meeting with the executive of the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI) to discuss the situation.

    The Guardian reports there have been growing concerns about press freedom in Solomon Islands, particularly in the wake of the signing of the controversial security deal with China in May.

    During the marathon tour of the Pacific conducted by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, Pacific journalists were not permitted to ask him questions and in some cases reported being blocked from events, having Chinese officials block their camera shots, and having media accreditation revoked for no reason.

    At Wang’s first stop in Solomon Islands, MASI boycotted coverage of the visit because many journalists were blocked from attending his press conference. Covid-19 restrictions were cited as the reason.

    Sogavare’s office was contacted by the newspaper for comment.

    Mounting pressure on SIBC ‘disturbing’
    In Auckland, Professor David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and convenor of Pacific Media Watch, described the mounting pressure on the public broadcaster Solomon islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) as “disturbing” and an “unprecedented attack” on the independence of public radio in the country.

    “It is extremely disappointing to see the Prime Minister’s Office effectively gagging the most important news service in reaching remote rural areas,” he said.

    It was also a damaging example to neighbouring Pacific countries trying to defend their media freedom traditions.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/06/backlash-after-solomons-government-reins-in-public-broadcaster/feed/ 0 321245     Censoring SIBC an ‘assault on media freedom’ in Solomons, says IFJ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/censoring-sibc-an-assault-on-media-freedom-in-solomons-says-ifj/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/censoring-sibc-an-assault-on-media-freedom-in-solomons-says-ifj/#respond Thu, 04 Aug 2022 06:00:44 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=77349 Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the censoring of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) as an “assault on press freedom” and an “unacceptable development” amid mounting concern over China’s influence on the media and security.

    “The censoring of the Solomon Island’s national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process,” the IFJ said in a statement.

    “The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands.”

    The government of the Solomon Islands on August 1 ordered the national radio and television broadcaster SIBC to censor its programmes of anti-government voices.

    The Prime Minister and Cabinet Office of the Solomon Islands mandated the SIBC to censor its programmes of perspectives critical of the incumbent government.

    According to SIBC staff, the acting chairman of the board, William Parairato, outlined the new guidelines on July 29.

    Both news and paid programmes are to be vetted in line with government regulations, as the government attempts to crack down on “disunity”.

    SIBC now beholden
    Special Secretary to the Prime Minister Albert Kabui indicated that the SIBC would now be beholden to a government-appointed board of directors, who would be appointed solely from the Prime Ministerial office.

    The SIBC, which has moved from a state-owned enterprise to receiving all funding from the ruling government, had previously allowed paid programmes to broadcast criticism of the government.

    The broadcaster also provided full live coverage of Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s visit to Honiara in June, with coverage funded by the Australian High Commission.

    Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavere has been unavailable for comment, as reported by several news organisations.

    In recent months the Solomon Islands has further developed existing links to China, which the Australian Broadcaster Corporation argues is indicative of “authoritarian and anti-journalist” developments in Solomon Islands’ leadership.

    The IFJ raised concerns surrounding press freedoms in the Solomon Islands during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to the Pacific in May.

    Wang Yi’s press tour of the Solomon Islands featured heavily restricted press conferences, with local journalists collectively confined to one question for the nation’s Foreign Minister.

    Sourced from an IFJ dispatch.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/censoring-sibc-an-assault-on-media-freedom-in-solomons-says-ifj/feed/ 0 320607     “Net Neutrality” is Back. It’s Still a Corporate Welfare Scam and Internet Censorship Enabling Act https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/01/net-neutrality-is-back-its-still-a-corporate-welfare-scam-and-internet-censorship-enabling-act/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/01/net-neutrality-is-back-its-still-a-corporate-welfare-scam-and-internet-censorship-enabling-act/#respond Mon, 01 Aug 2022 05:45:28 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=250860

    On July 28, US Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), along with US Representative Doris Matsui (D-HI) introduced a bill to reclassify Internet Service Providers from Title I “information services” to Title II  “common carrier services.”

    Why this bill? Because the term “Net Neutrality” polls well among those who don’t bother to look into the details.

    Why now? Because Democrats are playing every card in the deck as they cast about for ways to stem their likely bleeding in this November’s midterm elections.

    In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission published an “Open Internet Order” magically turning ISPs into “common carriers” and requiring them to treat some, but not all, network traffic “neutrally.”

    But since the rule was imposed unilaterally by one FCC, it could be withdrawn by the next. One of the few fortunate outcomes of Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 was the appointment of a new FCC chair and withdrawal of the rule.

    The new law, if passed, would require, rather than merely allow, the FCC to impose “Net Neutrality” on America.

    What is “Net Neutrality?” It’s really three different things, none of them good.

    First, it’s corporate welfare for companies whose business models involve pushing lots of bits (like streaming high-definition video) through the Internet and into your home, and who’d rather not foot the bill for the infrastructure to carry their product.

    Second, it’s the Internet censorship camel’s nose pushing its way into the administrative state’s regulatory tent.

    Third, it’s a sexy-sounding solution desperately in search of a problem that does not and never has existed. The Internet has become incrementally better and more accessible for 30 years now without it.

    “Net Neutrality” requires ISPs to treat some data “neutrally”: An email from your mom can’t receive higher priority than your neighbor’s weekend Stranger Things binge in all its 4k glory.

    Instead of Netflix, or your neighbor, getting the bill for the bandwidth and  infrastructure required to accommodate your neighbor’s insane bandwidth consumption — or, heaven forbid, his screen freezing during the chorus of “Running Up That Hill” — both your ISP bills will go up to pay for fatter pipes. You get to subsidize your neighbor, and Netflix, whether you like it or not.

    Notice that I said “some” data must be treated “neutrally.” Not all of it. The FCC’s previous order mandated such “neutrality” only for “legal” content.

    Who gets to rule content “legal” or “illegal?” For the most part the FCC, although occasional pro-censorship input from Congress is a given (hint: Content from sanctioned US Enemies of the Week will be “illegal”).

    The FCC will  also receive sage advice from the aforementioned corporate welfare queens, who wouldn’t want you getting your movies and music from unapproved sources (i.e. sites that don’t make them money).

    The purpose of the TERM “Net Neutrality” is to fool you into voting for people who sound like they’re promising you something cool and even necessary.

    The purpose of  “Net Neutrality” POLICY is to leave you with less money and less choice.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/01/net-neutrality-is-back-its-still-a-corporate-welfare-scam-and-internet-censorship-enabling-act/feed/ 0 319737     Dems Accuse Hulu of ‘Outrageous’ Censorship of Abortion Rights, Gun Control Ads https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/25/dems-accuse-hulu-of-outrageous-censorship-of-abortion-rights-gun-control-ads/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/25/dems-accuse-hulu-of-outrageous-censorship-of-abortion-rights-gun-control-ads/#respond Mon, 25 Jul 2022 14:11:27 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/338537

    Three Democratic Party committees on Monday protested the refusal of the streaming service Hulu to run several campaign ads denouncing Republican policies ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, with the Disney-owned company saying the content of the ads was too "sensitive" and "controversial."

    As The Washington Post reported, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) made attempted ad buys with the streaming service on July 15 for ads regarding gun control policy and abortion rights.

    "By blocking ads on issues like climate change and abortion, Hulu is effectively censoring Democrats from engaging a massive swath of voters on the most critical issues facing our country."

    One ad said the overturning of Roe v. Wade is part of a "coordinated Republican attack on abortion" and warned that Republicans "will not stop at overturning Roe" and will continue working to impose a nationwide ban on abortion care—which GOP lawmakers and pro-forced birth activists have stated.

    The ad focusing on gun control included statistics on gun violence and said, "Republicans are more devoted to the gun lobby than taking common-sense action to make our kids safe."

    The DSCC accused Hulu of imposing "shady" ad policies, which vaguely bar ads including "controversial" content.

    Hulu told the committees after delaying the airing of the ads that there were "content related" issues, but did not explain the ultimate decision not to run them.

    "Americans deserve to know the truth about these issues, and Hulu has no right to block it," tweeted the DSCC Monday as it shared the ads on social media.

    Democratic candidate Suraj Patel, who is running for the U.S. House in New York's 12th District, was also told by Hulu officials that a campaign ad he submitted to the platform violated an "unwritten Hulu policy" and that its subject matter was too "sensitive" to show Hulu viewers.

    The ad showed footage of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and discussed Republican climate, abortion, and gun policies.

    "To not discuss these topics in my campaign ad is to not address the most important issues facing the United States," Patel told Hulu officials in a letter earlier this month. "We are at an absolutely critical time in our nation's history. How are voters supposed to make informed choices if their candidates cannot talk about the most important issues of the day?"

    "The issues of abortion, guns, climate change, and our democracy are not topics to be discussed in quite hushed speech outside of the reach of the electorate," he added. "These are topics the American people expect to hear from their leaders, and they are issues that are going to define the next several decades. Americans deserve to know their leaders stand on them."

    The Democratic committees and their supporters are expressing anger both over Hulu's refusal to air the ads and its failure to make its ad policies clear.

    "It's one thing to have a bad policy. It's another to have a policy so bad you won't even put it in writing," said Isaac Rappoport, digital campaign services director for the DGA. "Hulu's censorship is dangerous and anti-democratic, and they need to answer for it."

    Democratic strategist Matt McDermott called Hulu's decision "an absolute scandal" and pointed out that the streaming platform is "one of the most impactful platforms for advertising to young voters."

    "By blocking ads on issues like climate change and abortion," said McDermott, "Hulu is effectively censoring Democrats from engaging a massive swath of voters on the most critical issues facing our country."


    This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News &amp; Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/25/dems-accuse-hulu-of-outrageous-censorship-of-abortion-rights-gun-control-ads/feed/ 0 318036     Government Censorship Rebrands with “Disinformation” Campaign https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/21/government-censorship-rebrands-with-disinformation-campaign/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/21/government-censorship-rebrands-with-disinformation-campaign/#respond Thu, 21 Jul 2022 02:45:41 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=131651 Last week the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Management released a report titled “The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada”. According to lead author Anatoliy Gruzd, “the research provides evidence that the Kremlin’s disinformation is reaching more Canadians than one would expect. Left unchallenged, state-sponsored information operations can stoke […]

    The post Government Censorship Rebrands with “Disinformation” Campaign first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     Last week the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Management released a report titled “The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada”. According to lead author Anatoliy Gruzd, “the research provides evidence that the Kremlin’s disinformation is reaching more Canadians than one would expect. Left unchallenged, state-sponsored information operations can stoke societal tensions and could even undermine democracy itself.”

    But the report calls statements of fact “pro-Kremlin claims”. One flagrant example cited prominently is the idea that “since the end of the Cold War, NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases and broken their promise to not offer NATO membership to former USSR republics, like Ukraine.”

    “The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada” follows on the heels of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy releasing “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media”. The June report listed prominent Twitter accounts engaged in what it called “disinformation”, which includes “portraying NATO as an aggressive alliance using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia” and “promoting a specific mistrust of Canada’s Liberal government, and especially of Prime Minister Trudeau.” The widely mediatized report’s lead author, JC Boucher, has received millions of dollars in research funding from the military and is a product of the Canadian military’s vast ideological apparatus.

    Recently the Canadian Forces tweeted, “we’re working with international partners to detect, correct, and call out the Kremlin’s state-sponsored disinformation about Ukraine.” They linked to a webpage titled “Canada’s efforts to counter disinformation — Russian invasion of Ukraine”.

    Overseen by the Department of National Defense, the 2,700 employee Communications Security Establishment (CSE) also claims to combat “disinformation”. Its Twitter account regularly posts updates on Russian “disinformation” and the top item in its recently released annual report is “exposing Russian-backed disinformation campaigns and malicious cyber activity.”

    Ten days ago, the Trudeau government announced sanctions on 15 Russian entities engaged in “disinformation”. In March, Ottawa put up $3 million to counter Russian “disinformation.”

    At the legislative level Bill C11 is expected to require companies to remove content flagged as “disinformation.” A panel of experts appointed by the heritage minister to help shape the “online harms” legislation called for it to address “harmful content online, which includes disinformation, by conducting risk assessments of content that can cause significant physical or psychological harm to individuals.” The legislation is expected to further empower CSIS and establish a “digital safety commissioner”.

    One member of the expert panel advising the minister, Bernie Farber, has repeatedly sought to suppress challenges to Israeli apartheid. As head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Farber pressured the York University administration against holding an academic conference entitled Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace, applauded the Stephen Harper government’s 2009 move to block former British MP George Galloway from speaking in Canada, spurred Shoppers Drug Mart to withdraw Adbuster from its stores, campaigned to suppress A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth and called on Toronto Pride to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Today Farber is an advocate of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which has repeatedly been used to suppress Palestine solidarity activism.

    After I interrupted justice minister David Lametti’s press conference to question him about Israel murdering al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh and illegal recruitment for the Israeli military, Honest Reporting Canada released an action alert titled “CBC and CPAC Broadcast Anti-Israel Radical Crashing Press Conference and Spewing Hatred”. The May 27 statement noted, “instead of cutting away from this radical interrupting the press conference, CBC News gave the anti-Israel activist a national platform to spew disinformation, falsehoods, and anti-Israel hatred for over 2 minutes.” They called on the two TV channels to suppress my “disinformation.”

    The Daily Dot, a US-based technology publication, published a similar response when I interrupted a speech by foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly to challenge Canada’s escalation of violence in Ukraine. In “Tech giants built digital dragnets to stop Russian propaganda—here’s how it still seeps through” Claire Goforth suggested Twitter and other social media outlets should have suppressed my 45 second video challenging Canada’s promotion of NATO and weapons deliveries. Bemoaning how “Russian propaganda and disinformation commingle across the web”, Goforth effectively argued that if Russian media promoted a video of a Canadian challenging their country’s foreign minister about Canada’s role in an important international issue it should be suppressed.

    Proponents of “disinformation” are overwhelmingly focused on information that displeases Western power. “Disinformation” campaigners don’t cry foul when articles suggest Canada seeks to help Haiti or uphold the international rules-based order. Even obviously false numbers are okay so long as they align with power. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended a memorial to the Rwandan genocide at last month’s Commonwealth Summit in Kigali CBC reported, “more than 800,000 Tutsis lost their lives across the country in the organized campaign that stretched over 100 days.” But it’s improbable there were 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 and no one believes every single Tutsi was killed, as I detailed in the 2017 article “Statistics, damn lies and the truth about Rwanda genocide”. (Rwanda’s 1991 census calculated 596,387 Tutsi and a Tutsi survivors’ group concluded close to 400,000 survived.)

    In challenging his disinformation, I tagged the author of the CBC story, Murray Brewster, but he didn’t bother correcting the story. Canadian commentators claim more Tutsi were killed in the genocide than lived in Rwanda since it aligns with Washington, London and Kigali’s interests, as well as liberal nationalist Canadian ideology.

    As someone who spends hours daily countering “disinformation” about Canadian foreign policy, I find it odd objecting to efforts to combat the scourge. But current official talk about “disinformation” has largely become a euphemism for protecting empire and a rebranding of age-old government-run censorship.

    The post Government Censorship Rebrands with “Disinformation” Campaign first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

    ]]>     https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/21/government-censorship-rebrands-with-disinformation-campaign/feed/ 0 316869     Imagination: Finding the End of the World as Capitalists Know It! https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/18/imagination-finding-the-end-of-the-world-as-capitalists-know-it/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/18/imagination-finding-the-end-of-the-world-as-capitalists-know-it/#respond Mon, 18 Jul 2022 03:10:07 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=131519 It’s truly amazing that the capitalists see the end of the world — human species, I suppose — way before they can imagine the end of capitalism. You know, that perfect system of slavery then, slavery now, and even more draconian slavery for the future. That sort is not based on whips, 15 hours a […]

    The post Imagination: Finding the End of the World as Capitalists Know It! first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>     It’s truly amazing that the capitalists see the end of the world — human species, I suppose — way before they can imagine the end of capitalism. You know, that perfect system of slavery then, slavery now, and even more draconian slavery for the future. That sort is not based on whips, 15 hours a day toiling, not run by the masters of the Anglo Saxon variety raping and starving. The new-new slavery is capitalism on a digital bender. Food, water, activities, housing (not a house, but housing in the very generic term such as tents or mini-sheds), where one can live, jobs, the like. All will be dictated, and you and I will own nothing!

    If the mRNA vax dance has its way, more and more dead bodies, warped minds, sterilized wombs, dropping sperm counts, and zygotes from hell might end humanity, and, well, capitalism will live on in the metaverse, in the global computer. That old eugenics drama — corona bioweapons — but masked up with the Fauci’s and the Gates and those presidents and dictators following the jab jab lies will do it by death through 2 billion jabs.

    It’s amazing the lies fed us, and amazing how incredibly stupid we are as a collective. As if this SARS-CoV2 wasn’t/isn’t a fix, isn’t a messed with and serialized and gain of function facilitated “virus.” As if all those true ways to stop viral loads building up in the mucous cavities, in the lungs, in the cells are suddenly treated like snake oil. Imagine that, all the naturopathy and preventative potients, all thrown out the window. How can you get your pudding if you don’t eat your media meat (propaganda)?

    Daily, it is me meeting people who have zero idea about world history or about the USA, and I am not just talking about Ukraine and that part of the neighborhood. We are talking about our own neck of the woods, lands stolen by the white man, man. So much mind bleaching occurs in k12. And in higher education!

    Native Land.

    I hear people talking to me about the visitors here, the vacationers, who just have that entitled disease of myopia. “Yeah, I talk to my customers that not all is rosy here on the coast, that there are homeless people big time. They say, ‘What homeless people? I don’t see any.’ They say that while looking out the window at the bay where several men are hanging out smoking and just chilling. Homeless men. These tourists are looking right through them.”

    That’s the issue, no, seeing right through or just not noticing what’s around us. Out of sight, well, this time, In Plain Sight, Out of Mind. What did the original people of Mexico see when those ships entered the tidal shore? Nothing? Because ships were not of their culture, their natural order of things.

    (Why did Herman Cortez burn his ships when he invaded Mexico?)

    Then, another friend in Vancouver, WA, with his Handy Man service, and business is booming, as in mold and mildew mitigation and tear outs, he’s struggling to pay the taxman, to get all his bills and receipts in order. He’ll never have good credit score (sic) to buy a home. You know, AmeriKa, giving missiles and bombs and guns to Ukraine with, well, you get it, no real accounting, receipts, etc. All those things on the dark web, black market, gone. So, my friend will have taxes to pay, and fines, double taxes, penalties, late fees to pay, and weathering admonishments, threats. He finds it difficult to get young men and women to sign on for $20 an hour for all the work he undertakes. So he resorts to hiring, well, some of those very same people mentioned above: the homeless.

    Many are carless because of the fact they have had their driver’s licenses revoked for unpaid bills — child support, court fines, etc. There are almost 10 million in the USA with driver’s license revocation because of unpaid fines, or unpaid child support. Not because of driving under the influence of whatever.

    Debt-related driving restrictions make everyday life impossible. Currently, more than half of U.S. states still suspend, revoke or refuse to renew driver’s licenses for unpaid traffic, toll, misdemeanor and felony fines and fees. The result: millions of people are struggling to survive with debt-related driving restrictions.

    License suspensions are the primary way debt-related driving restrictions occur in the United States. However, many states restrict registrations, or other administrative automobile requirements, as a counterproductive means of coercing debt payments for unpaid parking, tolls and other court fines and fees. (Source)

    Check out the site,

    As I repeat incessantly — this is just one of a million things about capitalism that demonstrates the system is not for or about The People, We the People. This is just one of a million absurdities in our system. And there is always a gravy train for endless systems of oppression and bureaucracies and middle men and women. The entire systems of pain and double-pain in the USA is about debt, managing people’s pain, laying on shame and setting forth endless struggle to make it (pay for) in capitalism. So it makes sense in a sadistic way to take away the only viable thing — a car — for these people to get to work to pay these fines or child support.

    We know the fines are highway robbery, from the point of origin, to the add-ons and the endless late fees and penalties and handling fees.

    Best to listen to Michael Parenti to understand this ugly ugly system, that for many, will never die. Imagine, capitalism will never die! Over the human species dead body.

    Here: “If value is to be extracted from the labour of the many, to go into the pockets of the few, this system has to be maintained. The conditions of hegemony must constantly be refortified. And that’s something that no one IBM or General Motors could do for itself… to put it simply the function of the capitalist state is to sustain the capitalist order. And it must consciously be doing that.” Michael John Parenti is a political scientist who was raised by an Italian-American working class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He received an M.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

    Here, just the essence of it all, capitalism:

    And then, my real profession, in the old days, was journalism. I’ve heard all of my life that journalists are not real, that all of it is yellow journalism, that even the earnest work of a young reporter in a small town is smeared with the Yellow in Yellow Journalism. Bullshit!

    This is, of course, a lie, a broad brush stroke lie. Not that journalists are somehow immune from the reality of American Exceptionalism and the Lie after Lie of what this country is and was about. Yes, Mom, Flag and Apple Pie.

    Yet, that is not so true, that regular ethical journalists want to lie or damage or invent fake news. When I was learning the craft of journalism, we had a code of ethics. We worked hard as college newspaper reporters and editors to get the news of the campus, publicizing some amazing students and programs and departments, and to get the bead on the city, in this case, Tucson. The neighborhood, the people, the police beat, all the unique things that newspapers can do to publicize the goings on. Yes, school boards and city councils and all the college, in this case, University of Arizona, things that make a university like this one a mini-town, we tried to cover fairly.

    We were not after smear campaigns. We were not attempting to do hit pieces on people. We had a code of ethics. Really:

    Preamble

    Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.

    The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.

    Seek Truth and
    Report It

    Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

    Journalists should:

    Minimize Harm

    Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.

    Journalists should:

    Act Independently

    The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.

    Journalists should:

    Be Accountable and Transparent

    Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public.

    Journalists should:

    “The SPJ Code of Ethics is a statement of abiding principles supported by explanations and position papers that address changing journalistic practices. It is not a set of rules, rather a guide that encourages all who engage in journalism to take responsibility for the information they provide, regardless of medium. The code should be read as a whole; individual principles should not be taken out of context. It is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.”

    For an expanded explanation, please follow this link.

    Now, I know of so many other professions with codes of ethics, but so many have few ethics, or the profession is based on unethical foundations. Even as new reporters, we understood power, that is, the powers that are, and that powers that shouldn’t be. The headlines and stories about malfeasance or wrong doing, those could literally kill people. We knew the value of sources, and in our small town journalism work — we worked on a lab paper in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places — we had a duty to the people in that town. Did we want to break stories? Of course. Did we want to uncover wrong doing, or some sensational story? Yep. But our goal was simple news reporting and news writing. We had so many beats, and each beat had it’s own culture — arts, music, sports, entertainment, city, state, police, business, etc. But as students who were paid through student association money and who did not have direct oversight from the journalism department; we took our jobs seriously. We went to conferences, we did internships, we met with all sorts of people to understand the needs and wants of the small town, the big town, etc. We had advertising, and we were a big part of the community’s lifeblood: where communities get their news and information.

    We could break a story about the football coach’s unethical practice of pocketing unused travel (airline) vouchers, and we could see how much cost overruns the new engineering building was entailing. Each one of those controversial pieces we spent hours and weeks attempting to get right and not do unnecessary harm. We would report on interesting members of the community, on people who had unusual stories. The newspaper was a source of cultural connection. We strived for accuracy.

    We highlighted authors, authors, orators, movers and shakers, community enterprises, members of the community who were unique.

    We covered crime and punishment, codes and planning, and took many beads on the life of people, organizations and the community.

    Yet, even back in 1977, we knew how some newspapers were bending too close to the leanings and yearnings of big business, or at the owners’s whims. We were concerned about newpapers dying, concerned about editorial decisions that hurt our code of ethics listed above. We believed in newspaper ombudsmen, and we always wanted to learn what other newspapers and what other parts of the country were doing to enhance the community.

    Indeed, that was the goal of newspapers, and while everything is bastardized in capitalism and media, and while we knew the CIA infilitrated newspapers decades earlier, and we know that now, newspapers are in most cases, skeletons, and many cities and towns have no newspapers, we still took our roles seriously. We knew that on-line / WWW publications would eat at the soul of newsprint dailies and weeklies. We knew that once lively newspapers or magazines would get bought up by large and mid-sized media groups. Then decimated and sold.

    In the end, we still wanted to know. We wanted fairness and accuracy in journalism. We did want to do the stories that few were doing.

    Just listen to these three folk. It shows you the robust work of thinkers. In my other professions –education, planning and social work — we do have that level of scrutiny, and self-examination. But here, the journalists look really hard at themselves. I do not find this hard look into my other professions as robust and penetrating.

    Virtually nobody trusts what they read any more. The United States ranks dead last among 46 nations surveyed in confidence in the press. Only 29% of Americans say they broadly believe what they read, see or hear in mainstream media. And more than three quarters of the public think that big outlets knowingly publish fake news.

    The term “fake news” first came into common usage around the contentious 2016 election, where both the Trump and Clinton campaigns attempted to weaponize the term against their opponents. Clinton claimed that Trump was being buoyed by false information put out by Eastern European bloggers and shared on sites like Facebook, while Trump shot back at her, claiming the likes of Clinton-supporting networks CNN and MSNBC were themselves fake news.

    But joining MintPress Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod today are two guests who know that fake news and false information have a long history in America. Dr. Nolan Higdon is an author and university lecturer of history and media studies at California State University East Bay. Meanwhile, Mickey Huff is professor of social science, history and journalism at Diablo Valley College in California and the director of the critical media literacy organization Project Censored.

    But, now, with the Brave New World of up being down, Nazi being Jewish President, Lies as Truth, I am both disgusted and not surprised at how terrible the propaganda is and how lock step those who follow the lies of society and government have infected so-called traditional journalism. Yes, still, in the local rags, we get news, we get entertainment, but when it comes to the stories of a lifetime — Weapons of No Mass Destruction, World Trade Center 9/11, War for Oil, Cocaine for Contras, all of it — newspapers fail. Local newspapers do not have the guts to question everything.

    That failure in journalism is tied to consumerism, capitalism, collective delusion, Stockholm Syndrome Writ Large, Collective Trauma, Agnotology, and the Comic Book Ideology of the common people and the leaders in the USA/UK/Klanda/EU.

    The first casualty of capitalism is truth. Capitalism of course relies on deception, thieving, extirpation, extinction, survival of the fittest, divide and conquor, racism, classism, poisoning mind/body/soul/soil. So we lead back to the above, to Michael Parenti. Listen to him.

    The young people of the world are not all going to hell in a hand-basket. Really. Amazing journalists blazing trails. This is just one most recent example of attacking truth, the messenger:

    “Independent Donetsk-based journalist Alina Lipp of Germany speaks to Max Blumenthal about being prosecuted by the German state for violating new speech codes through her reporting in the breakaway Donetsk Republic. As the only German reporter on the ground in Donetsk, Lipp has exposed Ukrainian forces shelling civilians, attacking a maternity ward, mining harbors, and bombing a granary filled with corn for export. She faces three years in prison if she returns to her home country.”

    Newspapers being printed in printing press.
      
    To finish this off, an HBO special, Endangered, just out, to put more arrows in our quiver,