The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world, writes Rami Khouri.

Israel’s attacks on military, civilian, and infrastructural sites throughout Iran and the repeated Iranian retaliatory attacks against targets across Israel have rattled the existing power balance across the Middle East — but the grave consequences of this new war for the region and the world’s energy supplies and economies will only be clarified in the weeks ahead.

It is already clear that Israel’s surprise attack did not achieve a knock-out blow to Iran’s nuclear sector, its military assets, or its ruling regime, while Iran’s consecutive days of rocket and drone attacks suggest that this war could go on for weeks or longer.

The media and public political sphere are overloaded now with propaganda and wishful thinking from both sides, which makes it difficult to discern the war’s outcomes and impacts.

• READ MORE: Trump says US has bombed Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan, Natanz nuclear sites – and warns against retaliation
• Other Middle East reports

For now, we can only expect the fighting to persist for weeks or more, and for key installations in both countries to be attacked, like Israel’s Defence Ministry and Weitzman Institute were a few days ago, along with nuclear facilities, airports, military assets, and oil production facilities in Iran.

So, interested observers should remain humble and patient, as unfolding events factually clarify critical dimensions of this conflict that have long been dominated by propaganda, wishful thinking, muscle-flexing, strategic deception, and supra-nationalist ideological fantasies.

This is especially relevant because of the nature of the war that has already been revealed by the attacks of the past week, alongside military and political actions for and against the US-Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing aims in Palestine.

This round of US-Israel and Iran fighting has triggered global reactions that show this to be yet another battle between Western imperial/colonial powers and those in the Middle East and the Global South that resist this centuries-old onslaught of control, subjugation, and mayhem.

Identifying critical dimensions
We cannot know today what this war will lead to, but we can identify some critical dimensions that we should closely monitor as the battles unfold. Here are the ones that strike me as the most significant.

First off, the ongoing attacks by Iran and Israel will clarify their respective offensive and defensive capabilities, especially in terms of missiles, drones, and the available defences against them.

Iran has anticipated such an Israeli attack for at least a decade, so we should assume it has also planned many counterattacks, while fortifying its key military and nuclear research facilities and duplicating the most important ones that might be destroyed or damaged.

Second, we will quickly discover the real US role in this war, though it is fair already to see Israel’s attack as a joint US-Israeli effort.

This is because of Washington’s almost total responsibility to fund, equip, maintain, resupply, and protect the Israeli armed forces; how it protects Israel at the UN, ICC, and other fora; and both countries’ shared political goals to bring down the Islamic Republic and replace it with a puppet regime that is subservient to Israeli-US priorities.

Trump claims this is not his war, but Israel’s attacks against Iran, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon can only happen because of the US commitment by law to Israeli military superiority in the Middle East. The entire Middle East and much of the world see this as a war between the US, Israel, and Iran.

And then today the US strikes on the three Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Unconventional warfare attacks
We will also soon learn what non-military weapons each side can use to weaken the other. Missiles and drones are a start, but we should expect unconventional warfare attacks against civilian, infrastructural, digital, and financial sector targets that make life difficult for all.

An important factor that will only become clear with time is how this conflict impacts domestic politics in both countries; Iran and Israel each suffer deep internal fissures and some discontent with their regimes. How the war evolves could fragment and weaken either country, or unite their home citizenries.

Also important will be how Arab leaders react to events, especially those who chose to develop much closer financial, commercial, and defence ties with the US, as we saw during Trump’s Gulf visit last month. Some Arab leaders have also sought closer, good neighbourly relations with Iran in the last three years, while a few moved closer to Israel at the same time.

Arab leaders and governments that choose the US and Israel as their primary allies, especially in the security realm, while the attacks on Gaza and Iran go on, will generate anger and opposition by many of their people; this will require the governments to become more autocratic, which will only worsen the legacy of modern Arab autocrats who ignore their people’s rights and wellbeing.

Arab governments mostly rolled over and played dead during the US-Israeli Gaza genocide, but in this case, they might not have the same opportunity to remain fickle in the face of another aggressive moral depravity and emerge unscathed when it is over.

If Washington gets more directly involved in defending Israel, we are likely to see a response from voters in the US, especially among Trump supporters who don’t want the US to get into more forever wars.

Support for Israel is already steadily declining in the US, and might drop even faster with Washington now engaging directly in fighting Iran, because the Israeli-US attack is already based on a lie about Iran’s nuclear weapons, and American popular opinion is increasingly critical of Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Iran’s allies tested
The extent and capabilities of Iran’s allies across the Middle East will, too, be tested in the coming weeks, especially Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq. They have all been weakened recently by Israeli-American attacks, and both their will and ability to support Iran are unclear.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees this attack as the last step in his strategy to reorganise and re-engineer the Middle East, to make all states dependent on Israeli approval of their strategic policies. A few already are.

Netanyahu has been planning this regional project for over a decade, including removing Saddam Hussein, weakening Hezbollah and Hamas, hitting Yemen, and controlling trends inside Syria now that Bashar al-Assad is gone.

We will find out in due course if this strategy will rearrange Arab-Middle East dynamics, or internal Israeli-American ones.

The cost of this war to Israeli citizens is a big unknown, but a critical one. Israelis now know what it feels like in Southern Lebanon or Gaza. Millions of Israelis have been displaced, emigrated, or are sheltering in bunkers and safe rooms.

This is not why the State of Israel was created, according to Zionist views, which sought a place where Jews could escape the racism and pogroms they suffered in Europe and North America from the 19th Century onwards.

Most dangerous place
Instead, Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews in the world today.

This follows two decades in which all the Arabs, including Palestinians and Hamas, have expressed their willingness to coexist in peace with Israel, if Israel accepts the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination and pertinent UN resolutions that seek to guarantee the security and legitimacy of both Israeli and Palestinian states.

The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world. The US-Israel pursue this centuries-old Western colonial-imperial action to deny indigenous people their national rights at a time when they have already ignored the global anti-genocide convention by destroying life and systems that allow life to exist in Gaza.

Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut and a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. Dr Khouri can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri This article was first published by The New Arab before the US strikes on Iran.

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

The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world, writes Rami Khouri.

Israel’s attacks on military, civilian, and infrastructural sites throughout Iran and the repeated Iranian retaliatory attacks against targets across Israel have rattled the existing power balance across the Middle East — but the grave consequences of this new war for the region and the world’s energy supplies and economies will only be clarified in the weeks ahead.

It is already clear that Israel’s surprise attack did not achieve a knock-out blow to Iran’s nuclear sector, its military assets, or its ruling regime, while Iran’s consecutive days of rocket and drone attacks suggest that this war could go on for weeks or longer.

The media and public political sphere are overloaded now with propaganda and wishful thinking from both sides, which makes it difficult to discern the war’s outcomes and impacts.

• READ MORE: Trump says US has bombed Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan, Natanz nuclear sites – and warns against retaliation
• Other Middle East reports

For now, we can only expect the fighting to persist for weeks or more, and for key installations in both countries to be attacked, like Israel’s Defence Ministry and Weitzman Institute were a few days ago, along with nuclear facilities, airports, military assets, and oil production facilities in Iran.

So, interested observers should remain humble and patient, as unfolding events factually clarify critical dimensions of this conflict that have long been dominated by propaganda, wishful thinking, muscle-flexing, strategic deception, and supra-nationalist ideological fantasies.

This is especially relevant because of the nature of the war that has already been revealed by the attacks of the past week, alongside military and political actions for and against the US-Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing aims in Palestine.

This round of US-Israel and Iran fighting has triggered global reactions that show this to be yet another battle between Western imperial/colonial powers and those in the Middle East and the Global South that resist this centuries-old onslaught of control, subjugation, and mayhem.

Identifying critical dimensions
We cannot know today what this war will lead to, but we can identify some critical dimensions that we should closely monitor as the battles unfold. Here are the ones that strike me as the most significant.

First off, the ongoing attacks by Iran and Israel will clarify their respective offensive and defensive capabilities, especially in terms of missiles, drones, and the available defences against them.

Iran has anticipated such an Israeli attack for at least a decade, so we should assume it has also planned many counterattacks, while fortifying its key military and nuclear research facilities and duplicating the most important ones that might be destroyed or damaged.

Second, we will quickly discover the real US role in this war, though it is fair already to see Israel’s attack as a joint US-Israeli effort.

This is because of Washington’s almost total responsibility to fund, equip, maintain, resupply, and protect the Israeli armed forces; how it protects Israel at the UN, ICC, and other fora; and both countries’ shared political goals to bring down the Islamic Republic and replace it with a puppet regime that is subservient to Israeli-US priorities.

Trump claims this is not his war, but Israel’s attacks against Iran, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon can only happen because of the US commitment by law to Israeli military superiority in the Middle East. The entire Middle East and much of the world see this as a war between the US, Israel, and Iran.

And then today the US strikes on the three Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Unconventional warfare attacks
We will also soon learn what non-military weapons each side can use to weaken the other. Missiles and drones are a start, but we should expect unconventional warfare attacks against civilian, infrastructural, digital, and financial sector targets that make life difficult for all.

An important factor that will only become clear with time is how this conflict impacts domestic politics in both countries; Iran and Israel each suffer deep internal fissures and some discontent with their regimes. How the war evolves could fragment and weaken either country, or unite their home citizenries.

Also important will be how Arab leaders react to events, especially those who chose to develop much closer financial, commercial, and defence ties with the US, as we saw during Trump’s Gulf visit last month. Some Arab leaders have also sought closer, good neighbourly relations with Iran in the last three years, while a few moved closer to Israel at the same time.

Arab leaders and governments that choose the US and Israel as their primary allies, especially in the security realm, while the attacks on Gaza and Iran go on, will generate anger and opposition by many of their people; this will require the governments to become more autocratic, which will only worsen the legacy of modern Arab autocrats who ignore their people’s rights and wellbeing.

Arab governments mostly rolled over and played dead during the US-Israeli Gaza genocide, but in this case, they might not have the same opportunity to remain fickle in the face of another aggressive moral depravity and emerge unscathed when it is over.

If Washington gets more directly involved in defending Israel, we are likely to see a response from voters in the US, especially among Trump supporters who don’t want the US to get into more forever wars.

Support for Israel is already steadily declining in the US, and might drop even faster with Washington now engaging directly in fighting Iran, because the Israeli-US attack is already based on a lie about Iran’s nuclear weapons, and American popular opinion is increasingly critical of Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Iran’s allies tested
The extent and capabilities of Iran’s allies across the Middle East will, too, be tested in the coming weeks, especially Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq. They have all been weakened recently by Israeli-American attacks, and both their will and ability to support Iran are unclear.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees this attack as the last step in his strategy to reorganise and re-engineer the Middle East, to make all states dependent on Israeli approval of their strategic policies. A few already are.

Netanyahu has been planning this regional project for over a decade, including removing Saddam Hussein, weakening Hezbollah and Hamas, hitting Yemen, and controlling trends inside Syria now that Bashar al-Assad is gone.

We will find out in due course if this strategy will rearrange Arab-Middle East dynamics, or internal Israeli-American ones.

The cost of this war to Israeli citizens is a big unknown, but a critical one. Israelis now know what it feels like in Southern Lebanon or Gaza. Millions of Israelis have been displaced, emigrated, or are sheltering in bunkers and safe rooms.

This is not why the State of Israel was created, according to Zionist views, which sought a place where Jews could escape the racism and pogroms they suffered in Europe and North America from the 19th Century onwards.

Most dangerous place
Instead, Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews in the world today.

This follows two decades in which all the Arabs, including Palestinians and Hamas, have expressed their willingness to coexist in peace with Israel, if Israel accepts the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination and pertinent UN resolutions that seek to guarantee the security and legitimacy of both Israeli and Palestinian states.

The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world. The US-Israel pursue this centuries-old Western colonial-imperial action to deny indigenous people their national rights at a time when they have already ignored the global anti-genocide convention by destroying life and systems that allow life to exist in Gaza.

Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut and a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. Dr Khouri can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri This article was first published by The New Arab before the US strikes on Iran.

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

Western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their ‘criticisms’ of the genocide – just as they earlier coordinated on their support for the slaughter

After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different – but equally deceitful – narrative.

With the finishing line in sight for Israel’s programme of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West’s Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.

As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada – key US allies – erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel.

They called Israel’s plans to level the last fragments of Gaza still standing “disproportionate”, while Israel’s intensification of its months-long starvation of more than two million Palestinian civilians was “intolerable”.

The change of tone was preceded, as I noted in these pages last week, by new, harsher language against Israel from the western press corps.

The establishment media’s narrative had to shift first, so that the sudden outpouring of moral and political concern at Gaza’s suffering from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – after more than a year and a half of indifference – did not appear too abrupt, or too strange.

They are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel’s genocide. But genocides don’t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.

The media and politicians are carefully managing any cognitive dissonance for their publics.

But the deeper reality is that western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their “criticisms” of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – just as they earlier coordinated their support for it.

As much was conceded by a senior Israeli official to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Referring to the sudden change of tone, he said: “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.”

The handwringing is just another bit of stagecraft, little different from the earlier mix of silence and talk about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. And it is to the same purpose: to buy Israel time to “finish the job” – that is, to complete its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The West is still promoting phoney “debates”, entirely confected by Israel, about whether Hamas is stealing aid, what constitutes sufficient aid, and how that aid should be delivered.

It is all meant as noise, to distract us from the only pertinent issue: that Israel is committing genocide by slaughtering and starving Gaza’s population, as the West has aided and abetted that genocide.

PR exercise

With stocks of food completely exhausted by Israel’s blockade, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday that some 14,000 babies could die in Gaza within 48 hours without immediate aid reaching them.

The longer-term prognosis is bleaker still.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to let in a trickle of aid, releasing five trucks, some containing baby formula, from the thousands of vehicles Israel has held up at entry points for nearly three months. That was less than one percent of the number of trucks experts say must enter daily just to keep deadly starvation at bay.

On Tuesday, as the clamour grew, the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza reportedly climbed to nearly 100 – or less than a fifth of the bare minimum. None of the aid was reported to have reached the enclave’s population by the time of writing.

Netanyahu was clear to the Israeli public – most of whom appear enthusiastic for the engineered starvation to continue – that he was not doing this out of any humanitarian impulse.

This was purely a public relations exercise to hold western capitals in check, he said. The goal was to ease the demands on these leaders from their own publics to penalise Israel and stop the continuing slaughter of Gaza’s population.

Or as Netanyahu put it: “Our best friends worldwide, the most pro-Israel senators [in the US] … they tell us they’re providing all the aid, weapons, support and protection in the UN Security Council, but they can’t support images of mass hunger.”

Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was even clearer: “On our way to destroying Hamas, we are destroying everything that’s left of the [Gaza] Strip.” He also spoke of “cleansing” the enclave.

‘Back to the Stone Age’

Western publics have been watching this destruction unfold for the past 19 months – or at least they’ve seen partial snapshots, when the West’s establishment media has bothered to report on the slaughter.

Israel has systematically eradicated everything necessary for the survival of Gaza’s people: their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries, water systems and community kitchens.

Israel has finally implemented what it had been threatening for 20 years to do to the Palestinian people if they refused to be ethnically cleansed from their homeland. It has sent them “back to the Stone Age”.

A survey of the world’s leading genocide scholars published last week by the Dutch newspaper NRC found that all conclusively agreed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Most think the genocide has reached its final stages.

This week, Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s main centrist party and a former deputy head of the Israeli military, expressed the same sentiments in more graphic form. He accused the government of “killing babies as a hobby”. Predictably, Netanyahu accused Golan of “antisemitism”.

The joint statement from Starmer, Macron and Carney was far tamer, of course – and was greeted by Netanyahu with a relatively muted response that the three leaders were giving Hamas a “huge prize”.

Their statement noted: “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.” Presumably, until now, they have viewed the hellscape endured by Gaza’s Palestinians for a year and a half as “tolerable”.

David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary who in the midst of the genocide was happy to be photographed shaking hands with Netanyahu, opined in parliament this week that Gaza was facing a “dark new phase”.

That’s a convenient interpretation for him. In truth, it’s been midnight in Gaza for a very long time.

A senior European diplomatic source involved in the discussions between the three leaders told the BBC that their new tone reflected a “real sense of growing political anger at the humanitarian situation, of a line being crossed, and of this Israeli government appearing to act with impunity”.

This should serve as a reminder that until now, western capitals were fine with all the other lines crossed by Israel, including its destruction of most of Gaza’s homes; its eradication of Gaza’s hospitals and other essential humanitarian infrastructure; its herding of Palestinian civilians into “safe” zones, only to bomb them there; its slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of children; and its active starvation of a population of more than two million.

Played for fools

The three western leaders are now threatening to take “further concrete actions” against Israel, including what they term “targeted sanctions”.

If that sounds positive, think again. The European Union and Britain have dithered for decades about whether and how to label goods imported from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The existence of these ever-expanding settlements, built on stolen Palestinian territory and blocking the creation of a Palestinian state, is a war crime; no country should be aiding them.

In 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that it must be made clear to European consumers which products come from Israel and which from the settlements.

In all that time, European officials never considered a ban on products from the settlements, let alone “targeted sanctions” on Israel, even though the illegality of the settlements is unambiguous. In fact, officials have readily smeared those calling for boycotts and sanctions against Israel as “Jew haters” and “antisemites”.

The truth is that western leaders and establishment media are playing us for fools once again, just as they have been for the past 19 months.

“Further concrete actions” suggest that there are already concrete actions imposed on Israel. That’s the same Israel that recently finished second in the Eurovision Song Contest. Protesters who call for Israel to be excluded from the competition – as Russia has been for invading Ukraine – are smeared and denounced.

When western leaders can’t even impose a meaningful symbolic penalty on Israel, why should we believe they are capable of taking substantive action against it?

No will for action

On Tuesday, it became clearer what the UK meant by “concrete actions”. The Israeli ambassador was called in for what we were told was a dressing down. She must be quaking.

And Britain suspended – that is, delayed – negotiations on a new free trade agreement, a proposed expansion of Britain’s already extensive trading ties with Israel. Those talks can doubtless wait a few months.

Meanwhile, 17 European Union members out of 27 voted to review the legal basis of the EU–Israel Association Agreement – providing Israel with special trading status – though a very unlikely consensus would be needed to actually revoke it.

Such a review to see if Israel is showing “respect for human rights and democratic principles” is simple time-wasting. Investigations last year showed it was committing widespread atrocities and crimes against humanity.

Speaking to the British parliament, Lammy said: “The Netanyahu government’s actions have made this necessary.”

There are plenty of far more serious “concrete actions” that Britain and other western capitals could take, and could have taken many months ago.

A flavour was provided by Britain and the EU on Tuesday when they announced sweeping additional sanctions on Russia – not for committing a genocide, but for hesitating over a ceasefire with Ukraine.

Ultimately, the West wants to punish Moscow for refusing to return the territories in Ukraine that it occupies – something western powers have never meaningfully required of Israel, even though Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories for decades.

The new sanctions on Russia target entities supporting its military efforts and energy exports – on top of existing severe economic sanctions and an oil embargo. Nothing even vaguely comparable is being proposed for Israel.

The UK and Europe could have stopped providing Israel with the weapons to butcher Palestinian children in Gaza. Back in September, Starmer promised to cut arms sales to Israel by around eight percent – but his government actually sent more weapons to arm Israel’s genocide in the three months that followed than the Tories did in the entire period between 2020 and 2023.

Britain could also stop transporting other countries’ weapons and carrying out surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. Flight tracking information showed that on one night this week, the UK sent a military transport plane, which can carry weapons and soldiers, from a Royal Air Force base on Cyprus to Tel Aviv, and then dispatched a spy plane over Gaza to collect intelligence to assist Israel in its slaughter.

Britain could, of course, take the “concrete action” of recognising the state of Palestine, as Ireland and Spain have already done – and it could do so at a moment’s notice.

The UK could impose sanctions on Israeli government ministers. It could declare its readiness to enforce Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes, in line with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, if he visits Britain. And it could deny Israel access to sporting events, turning it into a pariah state, as was done to Russia.

It could announce that any Britons returning from military service in Gaza risk arrest and prosecution for war crimes.

And of course, the UK could impose sweeping economic sanctions on Israel, again as was done to Russia.

All of these “concrete actions”, and more, could be easily implemented. The truth is there is no political will to do it. There is simply a desire for better public relations, for putting a better gloss on Britain’s complicity in a genocide that can no longer be hidden.

Wolf exposed

The problem for the West is that Israel now stands stripped of the lamb’s clothing in which it has been adorned by western capitals for decades.

Israel is all too evidently a predatory wolf. Its brutal, colonial behaviours towards the Palestinian people are fully on show. There is no hiding place.

This is why Netanyahu and western leaders are now engaged in an increasingly difficult tango. The colonial, apartheid, genocidal project of Israel – the West’s militarised client-bully in the oil-rich Middle East – needs to be protected.

Until now, that had involved western leaders like Starmer deflecting criticism of Israel’s crimes, as well as British complicity. It involved endlessly and mindlessly reciting Israel’s “right to defend itself”, and the need to “eliminate Hamas”.

But the endgame of Israel’s genocide involves starving two million people to death – or forcing them out of Gaza, whichever comes first. Neither is compatible with the goals western politicians have been selling us.

So the new narrative must accentuate Netanyahu’s personal responsibility for the carnage – as though the genocide is not the logical endpoint of everything Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people for many decades.

Most Israelis are on board, too, with the genocide. The only meaningful voices of dissent are from the families of the Israeli hostages – and then chiefly because of the danger posed to their loved ones by Israel’s assault.

The aim of Starmer, Macron and Carney is to craft a new narrative, in which they claim to have only belatedly realised that Netanyahu has “gone too far” and that he needs to be reined in. They can then gradually up the noise against the Israeli prime minister, lobby Israel to change tack, and, when it resists or demurs, be seen to press Washington for “concrete action”.

The new narrative, unlike the worn-thin old one, can be spun out for yet more weeks or months – which may be just long enough to get the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza either over the finish line, or near enough as to make no difference.

That is the hope – yes, hope – in western capitals.

Blood on their hands

Starmer, Macron and Carney’s new make-believe narrative has several advantages. It washes Gaza’s blood from their hands. They were deceived. They were too charitable. Vital domestic struggles against antisemitism distracted them.

It lays the blame squarely at the feet of one man: Netanyahu.

Without him, a violent, highly militarised, apartheid state of Israel can continue as before, as though the genocide was an unfortunate misstep in Israel’s otherwise unblemished record.

New supposed “terror” threats – from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran – can be hyped to draw us back into cheerleading narratives about a plucky western outpost of civilisation defending us from barbarians in the East.

The new narrative does not even require that Netanyahu face justice.

As news emerges of the true extent of the atrocities and death toll, a faux-remorseful Netanyahu can placate the West with revived talk of a two-state solution – a solution whose realisation has been avoided for decades and can continue to be avoided for decades more.

We will be subjected to yet more years of the Israel-Palestine “conflict” finally being about to turn a corner.

Even were a chastened Netanyahu forced to step down, he would pass the baton to one of the other Jewish supremacist, genocidal monsters waiting in the wings.

After Gaza’s destruction, the crushing of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem will simply have to return to an earlier, slower pace – one that has allowed it to be kept off the western public’s radar for 58 years.

Will it really work out like this? Only in the imaginations of western elites. In truth, burying nearly two years of a genocide all too visible to large swaths of western publics will be a far trickier task.

Too many people in Europe and the US have had their eyes opened over the past 19 months. They cannot unsee what has been live-streamed to them, or ignore what it says about their own political and media classes.

Starmer and co will continue vigorously distancing themselves from the genocide in Gaza, but there will be no escape. Whatever they say or do, the trail of blood leads straight back to their door.

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

But we don’t have time for clout. We’re living through a coordinated, well-funded, global assault on democracy. In the U.S., basic freedoms are under attack, from reproductive rights to the ability to teach honest history in schools. While the edgelords are busy fighting each other for likes and retweets, authoritarians are organizing, legislating, and winning.

We need to focus.

Real change happens when people organize, not just online, but in communities, city councils, state legislatures, and the courts. Building political power means showing up to vote, yes, because not voting is voting, but also recruiting candidates, knocking on doors, demanding judicial accountability, and refusing to be distracted by culture war bait.

Want to know who to trust in the influencer economy’s crowded marketplace of ideas? Prioritize the voices who are brave and smart by pointing out the obvious truth: the only way out is by building political power. The far-right knows that, which is why they work so hard to suppress the vote. Political power is what taxes the rich, enforces the good laws we have, repeals the bad ones, and forces accountability. You cannot do those things unless you are in power.

So ignore the noise. Turn down the doomscrolling and tune in to your community. Find the people doing the work: mutual aid organizers, voting rights advocates, school board watchdogs, and back them up.

Ignore the edgelords. Build political power. It’s the only way we win.

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

Show Notes:

 Opening Clip: Pat Bondi pretends to care about the rule of law: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lnnprevixu2y

Bella Ciao by Pink Martini https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ksj5lCh-JSo

Terrell Starr’s Black Diplomats Podcast and Substack: https://terrellstarr.com/

FBI arrests Milwaukee judge, alleging she interfered in immigration operation https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/fbi-arrests-milwaukee-judge-alleging-interfered-immigration-operation-rcna203006

Former New Mexico judge and wife arrested on charges of tampering with evidence linked to suspected Tren de Aragua member https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/us/new-mexico-judge-arrested-tren-de-aragua/index.html

EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:

• April 28 4pm ET – Book club discussion of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower  

• Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon. 

• Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon. 

• Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?

• Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”

A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, simple examination of the figures shows that Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated in the same way as every other country’s.

Before examining the opposition media’s error-strewn reports, this article first explains the background: how the tariff was set, whether it is legitimate and how US-Nicaragua trade is changing. Then it turns to the opposition’s mistakes and explains how they are using Trump’s actions to bolster their attacks on Nicaragua’s government and people.

How the tariffs were set

Trump’s chart of tariffs has two sets of figures for each country: the “tariffs charged to the USA” and the “reciprocal tariffs” to be imposed this month. Bizarrely, the “tariffs charged to the USA” do not relate to actual tariffs charged on US imports. Instead, they are the product of a calculation based on each country’s trade gap with the US. For most countries, the value of these “tariffs charged” has been set at 10 per cent, on the basis that the US has no trade deficit with them, or only a small one. All of these countries (including Nicaragua’s neighbors) are hit with a “reciprocal tariff” of 10 per cent on their exports to the US, from this month onwards, even if they buy more from the US than they sell to it.

However, a higher “tariff charged” is calculated for countries with which the US is judged to have a bigger trade deficit. For each country, the White House looked up the deficit for its trade with the US in goods for 2024, then divided that by the total value of the country’s exports to the US. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was distilled into a formula.

For example, these are the figures for China:

1) Goods trade deficit (exports from the US minus imports): – $291.9 billion

2) Total goods imported to the US from China: $438.9 billion

3) A ÷ B = – 0.67, or 67 per cent

4) Half of this is 34 per cent, the new tariff being applied to China.

Based on this formula, the small African country of Lesotho was saddled with the highest “reciprocal tariff” of 50 per cent, while several major SE Asian countries were also hit with very high tariffs.

How Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated

Nicaragua’s “reciprocal tariff” was calculated in the same way. According to US trade figures, in 2024 US goods exports to Nicaragua were $2.9 billion, while US goods imports from Nicaragua totaled $4.6 billion. The US goods trade deficit with Nicaragua was therefore – $1.7 billion in 2024.

The calculation was therefore: trade deficit (- $1.7 billion) ÷ imports ($4.6 billion) = – 0.37, or 37 per cent, halved to produce a “reciprocal tariff” of 18 per cent.

This means that from April 9, there will be a new tax of 18 per cent on Nicaraguan goods sent to the US, payable as a customs duty on their arrival by the company or agency importing the goods.

How Nicaragua might contest the tariff

It seems unlikely that Trump will bend to pressure on the tariffs. However, at least in theory, there are three ways in which Nicaragua might argue that the tariff is wrongly imposed:

1) Nicaragua’s Central Bank shows a smaller trade gap with the US. According to the Central Bank’s figures for 2024, Nicaragua’s exports to the US totaled $3.7 billion, not $4.6 billion, while its imports from the US totaled $2.7 billion, giving a trade gap of $1 billion, not $1.7 billion. On the basis of Trump’s tariff formula, the result should have been a 14 per cent tariff, not 18 per cent, if Nicaragua’s trade figures are correct. (A possible explanation for the difference may be the way that goods, originating in Nicaragua, are processed in other Central American countries before arrival in the US.)

2) Although most Central American countries import more from the US than they export to it, Costa Rica also has a trade surplus with the US, amounting to $2 billion, bigger than Nicaragua’s, yet it is only being penalized by the standard “reciprocal tariff” (10 per cent).

3) Most importantly, as the Guatemalan government pointed out, under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty new tariffs are illegal (under both US federal and international law). The treaty prohibits new tariffs or customs duties between the seven member countries. Therefore, all six of the other countries that are parties to CAFTA-DR are entitled to challenge the US for breaching it.

Action by CAFTA-DR members is complicated by the fact that Nicaragua is not only worst hit by the tariffs but is also a country that the US would like to exclude from the treaty completely, a point picked up below.

Changing significance of Nicaraguan exports to the US

Nicaragua’s Central Bank divides its trade figures between “merchandise” and products from free trade zones (principally, apparel). This, as we will see, confused the opposition media. This is the breakdown:

+ Exports of merchandise (e.g. gold, coffee, meat, etc.) totaled $4.2 billion in 2024, with the US accounting for 38.7 per cent of these, or $1.62 billion.

+ Exports from free trade zones were lower ($3.5 billion) but the proportion going to the US was much higher (59 per cent, or £2.08 billion).

+ Of Nicaragua’s total exports, at $7.7 billion, $3.7 billion went to the US (48 per cent).

+ Exports provide 39 per cent of Nicaragua’s annual income or GDP.

+ Exports to the US therefore account for a significant 18 per cent of GDP.

These figures exclude services, such as tourism and transport, where trade between Nicaragua and the US is roughly in balance (unlike Guatemala and Honduras, with whom the US has a strong trade surplus in services).

Exports to the US have fallen slowly from over 50 per cent of the total two years ago, as the government looks for other markets. Exports to the Republic of China, for example, were four times higher in 2024 than in 2022, but (at $68 million) are still a small proportion. There are other growing export markets, of which the most notable is Canada (now the second biggest buyer of Nicaraguan merchandise).

The Nicaraguan government’s response to the tariffs is likely to involve continued efforts to diversify trade and keeping a watchful eye on the effects on different sectors of the economy. Producers of products like coffee and gold may be less affected as they already have diverse markets. On the other hand the apparel sector, which until this month enjoyed zero tariffs on its $2 billion exports to the US, is geared to the US market and might find greater difficulty in mitigating the tariff’s effects.

Celebration and misinformation in opposition media

Nicaragua’s opposition media, long financed by the US government, admit that they have been hit by Elon Musk’s cuts. How they are now funded is unclear. However, prominent opposition activists enjoy salaried employment in US universities and think tanks, where they call for sanctions that would hit poor Nicaraguans. Naturally, they welcomed Trump’s announcement.

Errors in reporting on the tariffs showed opposition journalists’ unfamiliarity with Nicaragua’s economy. Confidencial, in a piece translated and reproduced in the Havana Times, claimed that the tariff imposed on Nicaragua ignored a trade surplus “of $484 million in favor of the US” which “has been growing in recent years.” This completely ignored exports to the US from the free trade zones. The same error was made a day later by Despacho 505.

According to Confidencial, the reason for the higher tariff on Nicaragua (and on Venezuela, hit with a 15 per cent tariff) was to punish their authoritarian governments. In reality, the higher tariffs on both countries resulted from the application of Trump’s formula, but this deliberate misrepresentation was to be repeated.

In an “analysis” for Confidencial on April 4, Manuel Orozco painted the 18 per cent tariff as specifically aimed at the Nicaraguan “dictatorship” (again, linking it with Venezuela). Orozco is a former Nicaraguan now living in Washington, working for the Inter-American Dialogue, an NGO funded by the US government and its arms industry. It is most unlikely that he was unaware of how the tariff was calculated; misleading his readers strengthened his argument that the higher tariff was a purely political move.

Further articles in Despacho 505 and Articulo 66 also blamed political factors without explaining the arithmetic behind the tariff. In La Prensa, activist Felix Maradiaga wrongly remarked that the US accounts for over 60 per cent of Nicaragua’s exports. According to him, the supposed weakness of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government means the country will struggle to cope (he disregards its remarkable resilience in dealing with the much heavier economic consequences of the 2018 coup attempt and the 2020 pandemic).

Then, also in Confidencial, opposition activist Juan Sebastián Chamorro made the claim that the new tariffs, which of course he welcomes, are entirely compatible with the CAFTA-DR trade treaty. He argued that Washington’s action is justified on grounds of “national security.” This echoes the absurd classification of Nicaragua (during the first Trump administration, continued by Biden) as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Opposition media are trying to present the new tariff as the first round of the stronger sanctions on Nicaragua that they have been urging Washington to adopt. They do this regardless of their illegality under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty or wider international law. The possibility of going further – excluding Nicaragua from the treaty – was trailed by Trump’s Latin America envoy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, in January, although he was careful to note the difficulties. But if this were to happen it would delight the opposition even further.

Obsessed with promoting regime change in Managua, these anti-Sandinista activists disregard the effects of tariffs and trade sanctions on ordinary Nicaraguans. On “Liberation Day” Trump showed his indifference to the millions of people in low-income countries whose livelihoods depend on producing food and other products for export to the US. The likes of Orozco, Maradiaga and Chamorro behave in just the same way.

The post Nicaragua’s Opposition Media Welcome Trump’s New Tariffs – and Ignore How They Were Calculated appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Perry.

On March 18 Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and recommenced its full scale assault, siege, and bombing of Gaza. Since then, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and the humanitarian situation is as desperate as ever. Watching mainstream media, however, one would hardly notice. 

While US media outlets continue to report below the fold on the daily airstrikes, they are no longer treated as major stories meriting emphasis and urgency. This is especially true for the New York Times and TV broadcast news, which have all but forgotten there’s an unprecedented humanitarian crisis ongoing in Gaza–still funded and armed by the US government. 

The paper of record, the New York Times, ran a front page story March 19, the day after Israel broke the ceasefire and killed hundreds in one day, but didn’t run a front page story on Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza in the 13 days since. (They ran a front page story on April 3 that centered Israel’s military “tactics” in Gaza but didn’t mention civilian death totals.) The Times did find room on March 27 for a front page image of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza which, of course, are a favorite media topic for the pro-genocide crowd as they see it as evidence their “war on Hamas” is both morally justified and, somehow, endorsed by Palestinians themselves. 

Like the New York Times, the nightly news shows–CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight–covered the initial bombing and breaking of the ceasefire the day after (ABC News’s lede after Israel killed 400+ in under 24 hours: “What does this mean for the hostages?”), but have subsequently ignored Gaza entirely, with one notable exception. CBS Evening News did a 4-minute segment on March 26 on “allegations” Israel was using Palestinians, and Palestinian children in particular, as human shields and even this was front loaded with bizarre denunciations of Hamas “using human shields”:

Most conspicuous of all was the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda-setting” Sunday news programs that are designed to tell elites in Washington what they should care about. Gaza wasn’t mentioned once on any of the Sunday news shows–ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union–for the weeks of March 23 and March 30. Despite Israel breaking the ceasefire on Tuesday March 18 and killing more than 400 Palestinians–including over 200 women and children–in less than 24 hours, none of the Sunday morning news programs that have aired since have covered Gaza at all. 

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday that at least 322 children had been killed and 609 injured since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18. 

Whereas the media approach during the Biden years was to spin, obfuscate, blame Hamas, and help distance the White House from the images of carnage emanating from Gaza by propping up fake “ceasefire talks,” the media approach now that Trump is doubling down on Biden’s strategy of unfettered support for genocide appears to be to largely ignore it. 

All indications are that Israeli officials were banking on US news outlets normalizing the ongoing genocide of Gaza, assuming–correctly, as it turns out–that the death and despair would become so routine it would take on a “dog bites man” element. Combined with the nonstop “flood the zone” strategy of the Trump White House as it attacks dozens of perceived enemies at once, the US-backed genocide in Gaza is now both cliche and low priority. 

By way of comparison, the Sunday shows, nightly news shows, and the front page of the New York Times ran wall-to-wall coverage of the Yemen-Signal group chat controversy. Obviously, administration officials using unsecured channels to discuss war plans is a news story (though not nearly as important as the war crimes casually being discussed) but the fact that Israel recommenced its bombing, siege, and starvation strategy on an already decimated population is, objectively, a more urgent story with much higher human stakes. 

Indeed, Palestinians reporting from Gaza say the situation is as dire as it’s ever been. Israel cut off all aid on March 2 and the bombings have been as relentless and brutal as any time period pre-ceasefire. Meanwhile, with Trump openly endorsing ethnic cleansing, “debates” around how best to facilitate this ethnic cleansing are presented as sober, practical foreign policy discussions–not the open planning of a crime against humanity. “You mentioned Gaza,” Margaret Brennan casually said to Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the last time Gaza was mentioned on CBS’s Face the Nation, March 16. “I want to ask you what specifics you are looking at when it comes to relocating the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In the past, you’ve mentioned Egypt. You’ve mentioned Jordan. Are you talking to other countries at this point about resettling?” 

Witkoff would go on to say Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza would “lead to a better life for Gazans,” to which Brennan politely nodded, thanked him and moved on. Watching this exchange one would hardly know that was being discussed–mass forceable population transfer–is a textbook war crime. Recent revelations by the UN that aid workers had been found in a mass grave have also been ignored by broadcast news. 15 Palestinian rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one,” according to the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS). This story has not been covered on-air by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, or CNN. 

The ongoing suffering in Gaza, still very much armed and funded by the White House, continues to fade into the background. It’s become routine, banal, and not something that can drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition. This dynamic, combined with US media’s general pro-Israel bias, means the daily starvation and death is not going to be making major headlines anytime soon. It’s now, after 18 months of genocide, just another boring “foreign policy” story. 

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

COMMENTARY: By Ahmed Najar

‘To the People of Gaza: A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD! Make a SMART decision. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW OR THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY LATER!’

These were not the words of some far-right provocateur lurking in a dark corner of the internet. They were not shouted by an unhinged warlord seeking vengeance.

No, these were the words of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world. A man who with a signature, a speech or a single phrase can shape the fate of entire nations.

And yet, with all this power, all this influence, his words to the people of Gaza were not of peace, not of diplomacy, not of relief — but of death.

• READ MORE: Houthis threaten Israel over aid blockage as Gaza hospitals run low on fuel
• RSF slams ‘horrific conditions’ for journalists in Gaza in wake of fragile ceasefire
• Other Gaza genocide reports

I read them and I feel sick.

Because I know exactly who he is speaking to. He is speaking to my family. To my parents, who lost relatives and their home.

To my siblings, who no longer have a place to return to. To the starving children in Gaza, who have done nothing but be born to a people the world has deemed unworthy of existence.

To the grieving mothers who have buried their children. To the fathers who can do nothing but watch their babies die in their arms.

To the people who have lost everything and yet are still expected to endure more.

No future left
Trump speaks of a “beautiful future” for the people of Gaza. But there is no future left where homes are gone, where whole families have been erased, where children have been massacred.

I read these words and I ask: What kind of a world do we live in?

A world where the leader of the so-called “free world” can issue a blanket death sentence to an entire population — two million people, most of whom are displaced, starving and barely clinging to life.

A world where a man who commands the most powerful military can sit in his office, insulated from the screams, the blood, the unbearable stench of death, and declare that if the people of Gaza do not comply with his demand — if they do not somehow magically find and free hostages they have no control over — then they are simply “dead”.

A world where genocide survivors are given an ultimatum of mass death by a man who claims to stand for peace.

This is not just absurd. It is evil.

Trump’s words are criminal. They are a direct endorsement of genocide. The people of Gaza are not responsible for what is happening. They are not holding hostages.

Trapped by an Israeli war machine
They are the hostages – trapped by an Israeli war machine that has stolen everything from them. Hostages to a brutal siege that has starved them, bombed them, displaced them, left them with nowhere to go.

And now, they have become hostages to the most powerful man on Earth, who threatens them with more suffering, more death, unless they meet a demand they are incapable of fulfilling.

Most cynically, Trump knows his words will not be met with any meaningful pushback. Who in the American political establishment will hold him accountable for threatening genocide?

The Democratic Party, which enabled Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza? Congress, which overwhelmingly supports sending US military aid to Israel with no conditions? The mainstream media, which have systematically erased Palestinian suffering?

There is no political cost for Trump to make such statements. If anything, they bolster his position.

This is the world we live in. A world where Palestinian lives are so disposable that the President of the United States can threaten mass death without fear of any consequences.

I write this because I refuse to let this be just another outrageous Trump statement that people laugh off, that the media turns into a spectacle, that the world forgets.

“‘Shalom Hamas’ means Hello and Goodbye – You can choose. Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you. Only sick and twisted people keep bodies, and you are sick and twisted! I am… pic.twitter.com/88EjVAyWAe

— President Donald J. Trump (@POTUS) March 5, 2025

My heart. My everything
I write this because Gaza is not a talking point. It is not a headline. It is my home. My family. My history. My heart. My everything.

And I refuse to accept that the President of the United States can issue death threats to my people with impunity.

The people of Gaza do not control their own fate. They have never had that luxury. Their fate has always been dictated by the bombs that fall on them, by the siege that starves them, by the governments that abandon them.

And now, their fate is being dictated by a man in Washington, DC, who sees no issue with threatening the annihilation of an entire population.

So I ask again: What kind of world do we live in?

And how long will we allow it to remain this way?

Ahmed Najar is a Palestinian political analyst and a playwright. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

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

A defiant Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair, John Minto, has appealed to Aotearoa New Zealand to stand with the “majority of humanity” in the world and condemn genocide in Gaza.

Minto has called on Foreign Minister Winston Peters to “ignore the bullying” from pro-Israel Texas Senator Ted Cruz and have the courage to stop welcoming Israeli solders to New Zealand.

Peters has claimed Israeli media stories that New Zealand has stopped Israeli military visiting New Zealand are “fake news”.

• READ MORE: ‘Fake news’: Peters hits back at US senator
• UN rapporteur welcomes ‘best news’ — Hague Group coalition pushing for Palestinian state
• Moral bankruptcy, Israel’s genocide and the betrayal of the Palestinians
• Australia denies Israel soldiers entry, asks about potential role in war crimes
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This @haaretzcom story is fake news, Senator @TedCruz. We are demanding it be corrected.

Israelis do not need visitor visas to travel to New Zealand, let alone have to declare their military service.

And both New Zealand’s Chief Human Rights Commissioner and I – as Foreign… https://t.co/mhrx9pwHyw

— Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) February 1, 2025

Senator Cruz had quoted Israeli daily Ha’aretz in a tweet which said “It’s difficult to treat New Zealand as a normal ally within the American alliance system, when they denigrate and punish Israeli citizens for defending themselves”.

The Times of Israel had also reported this week that Israelis entering New Zealand were required to detail their military service.

Minto responded in a statement saying that Peters “should not buckle” to a Trump-supporting senator who fully backed Israel’s genocide.

“Ted Cruz believes Israel should continue defending land it has stolen from Palestinians. He supports every Israeli war crime. New Zealand must be different,” he said.

Last September, New Zealand voted against the US at the United Nations General Assembly where the country sided with the majority of humanity — 124 votes in favour, 14 against and 43 abstentions — that ruled that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was illegal and it should leave within a year.

At the time, Peters declared: “New Zealand’s yes vote is fundamentally a signal of our strong support for international law and the need for a two-state solution.”

‘Different policy position’
“The New Zealand government has a completely different policy position to the US,” said Minto.

“That should be reflected in the actions of the New Zealand government.  We must have an immigration ban on Israeli soldiers who have served in the Israeli military since October 2023 as well as a ban on any Israeli who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement on occupied Palestinian land.”

Minto said it was not clear what the current immigration rules were for different entry categories, but it did seem that some longer stay Israeli applicants were required to declare they had not committed human rights violations before they were allowed in.

“That’s what the Australians are doing.  It appears ineffective at preventing Israeli troops having ‘genocide holidays’ in Australia – but it’s a start,” he said.

“We’d like to see a broader, effective, and watertight ban on Israeli troops coming here.

“Instead of bowing to US pressure New Zealand should be joining The Hague Group of countries, as proposed by the Palestine Forum of New Zealand, to take decisive action to prevent and punish Israeli war crimes.”

Immigration New Zealand reports that since 7 October 2023 it had approved 809 of 944 applications received from Israeli nationals across both temporary and residence visa applications.

Last December, Middle East Eye reported that at least two IDF soldiers had been denied entry to Australia and applicants were being required to fill out a document regarding their role in war crimes.

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

During America’s invasion of Vietnam, the U.S. Government argued that if Vietnam would be taken over by communists, then all non-communist nations would become “falling dominoes”; and, so, America had to prevent that. Denmark’s Prime Minister is presenting her own “falling dominoes” theory against not communism, but instead Russia.

She said that “My suggestion is, let us end the discussion about red lines [of Russia]. … It has been a mistake during this war to have a public discussion about red lines,” which are “simply giving the Russians too good a card in their hands.” In other words: Russia’s enemies must ignore the warnings that Russia has issued against any NATO country that will allow its long-range missiles to be fired from Ukraine into the Kremlin (Russia’s central command) or other sites that are crucial for Russia’s national security against NATO. She said simply “I think that the restrictions on the use of weapons should be lifted.” In other words: ignore Russia’s national-security concerns altogether. (What precisely she meant by saying “It has been a mistake during this war to have a public discussion about red lines,” was not clarified: Should that “discussion” be only private, and the public not be allowed to know anything about it; or should there simply not be any consideration given by U.S.-and-allied Governments to Russia’s national-security needs. When she said that for NATO to consider Russia’s red lines would be “simply giving the Russians too good a card in their hands,” she was indicating the latter, which would mean that even private discussions about that matter among NATO nations would be “a mistake.” In other words: she was saying that she is an absolutist against considering Russia’s national-security needs — even privately within NATO.)

She turned on its head Russia’s statements of what the U.S. and its allies call “Putin’s red lines”: The “most important red line has been crossed already. And that was when the Russians entered Ukraine [on 24 February 2022]. So I will not accept this premise, and I will never allow anyone from Russia to decide what is the right thing to do in NATO, in Europe or in Ukraine.” So: NATO must never negotiate with Russia. Russia must simply accept what NATO does. (Her statement that the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 instead of on 20 February 2014, has been contradicted both by Ukraine’s President Zelensky and by NATO’s Secretary General Stoltenberg.)

She also broadened her unconcern about the national-security needs of Russia, so as to encompass as being enemies also countries that do not stand with NATO against Russia: “What we see now is a Russia that is getting closer to North Korea and to Iran. And I don’t think that Russia would be able to have a full-scale war inside Europe without help from China, unfortunately. So this is not a European conflict, this is a global conflict.”

When the Bloomberg interviewer asked her about whether the U.S. Government shares the views that she was expressing about allowing Ukraine to fire deep into Russia the weapons that NATO countries are supplying to Ukraine, she refused to answer: “Frederiksen declined to comment on what the US position was on, for instance, the use of the 19 F-16 fighter jets given by Denmark.” (I have covered elsewhere what U.S. President Biden’s position on this is.)

Bloomberg News pointed out that, “Frederiksen, 46, is leader of the Social Democrats and has been prime minister since 2019.”

Shakespeare at around the year 1600 originated the phrase “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

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

In the wake of that incident, Chinese-language media outlets claimed that China ignores Taiwanese boundaries around the island, and that Chinese Coast Guard vessels entered Taiwan’s “prohibited” waters, closer to the island, during Feb. 25 drills.

However, a study of open-source intelligence that tracks ship movements showed that the coast guard vessels in fact mostly avoided crossing into “prohibited” waters, briefly doing so only twice between Feb. 25 and March 7. 

Two zones

Kinmen, which is just 10 kilometers (6 miles) from mainland China, is surrounded by two zones of ocean that Taiwan has barred mainland Chinese vessels from entering. 

The zones are identical on Kinmen’s west and north coast, closer to mainland China, but they are split into two zones on the south and east side: an outer zone called “restricted waters” and an inner zone closer to the island called “prohibited waters.”

The latter line marking is considered a de facto sea border with China.

Riyue Tantian — a subsidiary social media account of China Central Television, or CCTV — posted a video on Weibo on Feb 26, claiming that its live footage shows China Coast Guard vessels entering Taiwan’s prohibited waters around Kinmen during drills conducted the day before.

Parts of both the video and accompanying text were taken from two separate coast guard press releases earlier that day. 

Several Taiwanese news outlets have also made similar claims about the purported intrusion from Chinese vessels, with one political talk show even claiming that China has deployed “paramilitary operations” against Kinmen. 

But the claims are misleading. Below is what AFCL found.

Methodology

To pinpoint Chinese ships’ exact location around Kinmen, AFCL sourced real-time location data for these ships from Marine Traffic – an open-source platform regularly cited by mainstream news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The platform only displays data for ships that broadcast their location using radio signals, which are typically relayed via satellites, also known as an open Automatic Identification System, or AIS.

While it’s common for most ships to emit these signals, there are instances where these signals are deliberately deactivated, often by military ships to maintain operational secrecy. AFCL’s analysis focuses on Chinese vessels whose AIS was recorded by Marine Traffic around Kinmen. 

After taking screenshots of vessel movements, AFCL then manually added lines over screenshots, illustrating the locations of the relevant Chinese ships as well as “restricted” and “prohibited” waters around Kinmen based on official public data from Taiwan. 

What happened on Feb. 25?

Seven Chinese Coast Guard, or CCG, vessels are recorded as patrolling around Kinmen on Feb. 25, according to the Marine Traffic data.

They include two large former military ships (CCG 2202 and CCG 2203) and five normal patrol ships (CCG 14608, CCG 14609, CCG 14513, CCG 14515 and CMS 8027). 

CMS, or China Marine Surveillance, was originally under China’s Ministry of Land and Resources, but later was integrated into the CCG.

Among them, CCG 2202 crossed into Kinmen’s restricted waters a little after 2:00 a.m. while sailing from the southeast towards the southwest.

Marine Traffic uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is 8 hours behind Taiwan time and 4 hours ahead of Washington time.

At around the same time, CCG 2203 briefly crossed into and made a single pass within the restricted waters alongside the south of Kinmen as the graphic below shows. 

Both ships approached but never crossed into Kinmen’s prohibited waters, coming within less than 4 nautical miles of Kinmen at one point before veering off into open water at around 4:00 a.m. and continuing their patrols throughout the rest of the day at a distance. 

Four of the five other Chinese vessels on patrol near Kinmen on Feb. 25 only entered the island’s restricted waters briefly.

CMS 8027, however, entered Kinmen’s prohibited waters a little before 1:00 a.m. on Feb. 25, the sole Chinese vessel that AFCL observed to have done so that day. 

Huang Chung-ting, an associate research fellow at the Taiwanese military think tank Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said while the intrusion of CMS patrol ships into Kinmen’s prohibited waters is certainly a provocation towards Taiwan, it is not as strong a challenge as sending former navy vessels such as CCG 2202 and CCG 2203 into these waters. 

Compared to regular law enforcement vessels such as CCG 2202 and 2203, the surveillance ships [such as a CMS] have the nature of general administrative purpose only, he explained. 

In contrast, the CCG is still now a branch of China’s armed forces directed by the country’s Central Military Commission, which has led U.S. officials to previously state that they may treat the CCG as a part of the Chinese Navy, Huang added.

Huang said activities of CCG ships are likely to be concentrated in Kinmen’s south because the separate borders of the restricted and prohibited waters in that area allow China to perform more calculated escalatory naval movements compared to the northwest and west of the island, where the overlapping restricted and prohibited water limit such provocations. 

After Feb. 25

While China did launch “regular” patrols in the waters near Kinmen following Feb. 25, six of the vessels checked in this article (2202, 2203, 14608, 14609, 14513, and 14515) only crossed slightly over into Kinmen’s restricted waters or sailed a short distance away from it.

Marine Traffic data show that CCG 2202 sailed into Kinmen’s restricted waters again on Feb. 27. In the following week, the ship repeated a similar daily patrol straddling Kinmen’s restricted waters while gradually shifting the main course of its daily routes farther and farther towards the open sea southeast of the island.

CCG 2203’s course mirrored CCG 2202 during the same timeframe, entering Kinmen’s restricted waters on Feb. 27 while gradually shifting the main course of its daily patrols further away from Kinmen to the southeast.

While CMS 8027 sailed through Kinmen’s prohibited waters again on both Feb. 26 and 27, there was overall very little change in the trajectory of CCG vessels on duty near Kinmen between Feb. 25 and March 7. 

‘Talk tough and tread carefully’

Huang from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research told AFCL that he does not believe that the situation represents a “reversal” of the long-term status quo surrounding Kinmen, pointing to China’s decision to avoid sending multiple CCG vessels deep into Kinmen’s prohibited waters as evidence. 

Huang pointed out that the specific language used in official CCG statements regarding maritime disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea and with Japan over the Diaoyu Islands highlights a nuanced difference in China’s strategy towards Kinmen. 

For instance, the CCG emphasizes that it is conducting patrols within “the range of China’s jurisdictional waters” in the South China Sea, but its statement concerning Kinmen only mentions the “waters around the island,” a sign of the Chinese government’s often used “talk tough and tread carefully” approach towards Taiwan, according to Huang. 

The variance in terminology and tone suggests that China adopts distinct diplomatic and tactical approaches in its maritime interactions with different neighbors, reflecting tailored strategies based on the unique geopolitical contexts of each dispute.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alan Lu for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Don’t believe that Canada does that? Here are a few examples of Canada contributing to leading international stories:

• There is a direct line between the downward spiral in Haiti’s security situation and Canadian interference. In 2004 the US, France and Canada invaded to overthrow Haiti’s elected government. René Préval’s election two years later partly reversed the coup, but the US and Canada reasserted their control after the 2010 earthquake by intervening to make Michel Martelly president. That set-in motion more than a decade of rule by the criminal PHTK party. After president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in mid 2021 the US- and Canada-led Core Group selected Ariel Henry to lead against the wishes of civil society. In a sign of Haiti’s political descent, 7,000 officials were in elected positions in 2004 while today there are none.
• Last Friday former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) was convicted of drug charges by a jury in New York. Pursued by the Southern District of New York against the wishes of US diplomats, the case documented JOH’s role in a murderous criminal enterprise that began under his predecessor. JOH became president after Ottawa tacitly supported the military’s removal of the social democratic president Manuel Zelaya. Before his 2009 ouster Canadian officials criticized Zelaya and afterwards condemned his attempts to return to the country. Failing to suspend its military training program with Honduras, Canada was also the only major donor to Honduras—the largest recipient of Canadian assistance in Central America—that failed to announce it would sever aid to the military government. Six months later Ottawa endorsed an electoral farce and JOH’s subsequent election marred by substantial human rights violations. JOH then defied the Honduran constitution to run for a second term, which Canada backed.
• There’s also a direct line between the 2014 Canadian-backed coup in Ukraine and Russia’s devastating invasion. As Owen Schalk and I detail in Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy, Ottawa played a significant role in destabilizing Victor Yanukovich and pushing the elected president out. Yanukovich’s ouster propelled Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and a civil war in the east, which Russia massively expanded two years ago.
• In an episode symbolic of Canadian influence and interference, Peru’s Prime Minister Alberto Otárola Peñaranda cut short his trip to the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada conference in Toronto last week to resign. Implicated in a love affair/corruption scandal, Peñaranda became prime minister after the December 2022 ouster of elected leftist president Pedro Castillo. Ottawa supported the ‘usurper’ government that suspended civil liberties and deployed troops to the streets. Global Affairs and Canada’s ambassador to Peru Louis Marcotte worked hard to shore up support for the replacement government through a series of diplomatic meetings and statements.
• Canada’s intervention to undermine Palestinian democracy has also enabled Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza. After Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, Canada was the first country to impose sanctions against the Palestinians. Ottawa’s aid cut-off and refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government was designed to sow division within Palestinian society. It helped spur fighting between Hamas and Fatah. When Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel used that to justify its siege of the 360 square kilometre coastal strip and series of deadly campaigns that left 6,000 Palestinians dead before October 7.

While the media reported the above-mentioned stories, they refuse to discuss Ottawa’s negative role. Instead of holding our governments to account and describing Canadian subversion the media sphere focuses on foreign interference by our designated ‘enemies’ that’s had little demonstratable negative impact. In war and politics this is called distraction.

Starting Thursday in Ottawa I’ll be speaking on Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy in Ottawa, Waterloo, Hamilton and Toronto.The information is here.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, the fact that the state, nation, and world are experiencing record-setting high temperatures is inescapable — as are the extreme and harmful impacts of global baking.  Montana is no exception.

Yet, as we suddenly transition from our non-winter to a scorching hot and very early Spring — our politicians not only deny this reality, they actively fight efforts to limit the pollutants responsible for increasingly disastrous climate change.

As a recent article from the Associated Press put it:  “Across much of America and especially in the normally chilly north, the country went through the winter months without, well, winter.

In parka strongholds Burlington, Vermont, and Portland, Maine, the thermometer never plunged below zero. The state of Minnesota called the last three months “the lost winter,” warmer than its infamous “year without a winter” in 1877-1878. Michigan, where mosquitos were biting in February, offered disaster loans to businesses hit by a lack of snow. The Great Lakes set records for low winter ice, with Erie and Ontario “essentially ice-free.”

As for Montana, the low snowpack is all too obvious.  Our ski resorts that traditionally open by Thanksgiving with full operations for the Christmas season — were unable to come even close to 100% skiable terrain.  Even those with snowmaking systems struggled due to lack of below freezing temperatures.  Some areas without snowmaking simply wrote off opening at all due to a lack of natural snowfall.

What this portends for the coming summer is anything but good news.  What little runoff our minimal snowpack will produce is likely to be gone almost before “floating season” even starts.  If the predictions hold true, Flathead Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, will be worse off this year than last.  Politicians and boaters lamented the low levels and, predictably for that part of the state, baselessly blamed the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal operation of the Séliš Ksanka QÍispé dam.

While the lack of water for recreation will create economic impacts to fishing and floating businesses, the effects upon Montana’s aquatic ecosystems will be worse.  It’s no secret our coldwater fisheries are already in serious trouble as the too hot, too long, too dry summers stack up.  The Big Hole is hanging on by a thread — and that thread is fraying.  The Lower Madison is routinely closed to fishing — a trend that now spreads to more and more streams every summer in the unrelenting heat.

Even the Yellowstone, the longest undammed river in the contiguous 48 states, is in trouble with fish die offs and the increasing upstream presence of warmwater species like bass, perch and northern pike.  And it may well be “game over” for endangered species like bull trout that require cold, clean and connected waters to even survive.

Although the Forest Service and Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation continue to come up with inventive names for deforestation under the guise of wildfire prevention, the science is clear that no amount of “thinning” and/or logging will prevent wildfires when temperatures soar and hot winds howl.  As one wag put it, “we’re in for a hellacious summer, with the emphasis on hell.”

Yet our politicians continue their horrendous dereliction of duty to deal with our burning planet.  Instead, Montana’s benighted attorney general, governor and his administration do just the opposite — and challenge our Supreme Court’s ruling that ignoring climate impacts violates Montanans’ constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.”

Despite the lamentable fact that Joe Biden leased more public land to produce more oil and gas than his predecessor, Donald Trump claims if he wins his first priority will be “drill, baby, drill.”

But in truth, for Montanans and the rest of the world, it will be “Burn, baby, burn.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

Photograph Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/danebrian/ – CC BY-SA 2.0

Over the years, particularly during the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, the Israelis have lied about their military campaigns, and have tried to deceive U.S. administrations about their actions.  In 1954, Israeli intelligence operatives bombed a U.S. Information Agency Library in Egypt, and tried to make it appear to have been an Egyptian act of violence.  The Israelis were trying to compromise U.S.-Egyptian relations, particularly the efforts of the Eisenhower administration to finance the Aswan Dam.  In the 1980s, the Israelis denied that Jonathan Pollard was spying on behalf of Israeli intelligence; they continued to do so throughout Pollard’s thirty-year prison sentence.  However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally welcomed Pollard to Israel upon his release from prison in 2020 with the greeting “You’re home.”

Israeli duplicity on key national security issues began in their War for Independence, 75 years ago, when they lied about the Nakba (the catastrophe) that involved the forced removal of 700,000 Palestinians from their villages. Israel claimed that the Palestinians made their own decision to leave, when in fact there was an Israeli plan (Plan Dalet) that prescribed the ethnic cleansing of Israeli territory.  The plan was developed in 1948 by Zionist political and military leaders, including Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.  It included operational military orders that specified which Palestinian population centers should be targeted and detailed a blueprint for their forcible removal and destruction. The plan is rarely cited, although it was Israeli historians who used archival documents to trace the official policy of displacement.

Israeli deceit has been present in all of their subsequent wars. The Israelis have never released sensitive documents that demonstrate their secret dealings with Britain and France to regain control of the Suez Canal and to remove Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956.  The secret plan called for an Israeli invasion of Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in order to justify a British and French invasion along the Suez Canal.  Political pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union led to withdrawal of British, French, and Israeli forces.  The episode strengthened Nasser; humiliated Britain and France; ended Britain’s role as a global power; and convinced Arab States that Israel was a part of European colonialism in the Middle East.

In 1967, Israelis officials at the highest level lied to the White House about the start of the six-day war.  The Israeli Ambassador to the United States assured the Johnson administration that the Israelis would not attack first under any circumstances, ruling out even a preemptive attack.  Israel then attacked and claimed it was preemptive.  I served on the CIA’s Task Force for the war, and there was no evidence of an Egyptian battle plan that would justify preemption.  In face, half of the Egyptian army was fighting in a civil war in Yemen.  The Israeli attack against the Egyptian air force was extremely successful because Egypt’s fighter jets were parked on airfields wingtip-to-wingtip, another indicator of Egypt’s lack of a plan to attack Israel.

Nevertheless, Israeli officials told President Lyndon Johnson that the Egyptians had initiated firing on Israel settlements, and that an Egyptian squadron had been observed heading toward Israel.  Neither statement was true.  Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had done his best to convince his government not to lie to the United States.

In addition to lying about the start of the Six-Day War, the Israelis were even more deceitful three days later when they attributed their malicious attack on the USS Liberty to a random accident.  In actual fact, the “accident” was well planned.  The ship was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters, both slow-moving and lightly armed.  It brandished a five-foot-by-eight-foot Stars and Stripes, and resembled no ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the arsenal of one of Israel’s enemies.  Yet, the Israelis claimed they believed they were attacking an Egyptian vessel.

The Israeli attack took place after six hours of intense, low-level reconnaissance, which was followed by an attack conducted over a two-hour period by unmarked Mirage jets using cannons and rockets.  Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, including a Soviet warship, then machine-gunned life rafts that survivors dropped in hopes of abandoning the ship.  The National Security Agency’s investigation of the disaster remains classified to this day, fifty-six years later.

Israeli duplicity played a significant role in the end game of the October War of 1973.  National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger used Israeli disinformation about a possible Soviet intervention in the war to justify the declaration of a DefCon-III nuclear alert, which could have worsened the Arab-Israeli war and provoked a Soviet-American confrontation.  Kissinger himself lied to our NATO allies in Europe as well as to China about a Soviet alert to their airborne divisions to prepare for intervention in the Middle East.  (The Soviets never introduced their airborne forces into areas that were not contiguous to the Soviet Union.)  The Israelis also violated the cease-fire that had been carefully arranged by Kissinger and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin; it took a Kissinger threat to Defense Minister Dayan to put a stop to the Israeli violations.

In 1982, the Israelis lied about their role in allowing Lebanese Christian Phalangists to enter the Sabra and Shitila refugee camps, where they committed horrific war crimes against defenseless Palestinians.  The Israelis have never conceded that the Phalangist militia were under the political and military control of the State of Israel.  Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon maintained that the Israeli Defense Forces “did not know exactly what was taking place” in the refugee camps, although it was Sharon himself who encouraged the Phalangists to attack.

This time it is the Israeli Defense Forces that are committing horrific war crimes in Gaza, where more women and children have been killed in one month than the Russians have killed in Ukraine in nearly two years of fighting.  Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in dense civilian areas is unprecedented.  Yet, the mainstream media continue to cite Israeli officials who maintain that the “smallest available ordnance” is used to cause the “minimal adverse effect on civilians.”  Israelis maintain that the “focus is on Hamas,” but the Israelis have slaughtered more civilians in one month than the the United States and its allies killed in Afghanistan over two decades.

There is no question that Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu is employing overwhelming military power to terrorize 2.3 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the name of defeating Hamas military forces.  This would be consistent with an Israeli policy that began in 1948 to use every military engagement with Arab states to displace as many Palestinians civilians as possible from their homes, and to never acknowledge a right of return for Palestinian refugees.  No U.S. administration has ever put pressure on Israel to allow the return of Palestinians to their homes in Israel.

Meanwhile, mainstream media support Israel’s contention that the Israel-Hamas War began on October 7th, which ignores Israel’s punishment of Palestinian civilians over the past 16 years.  Israeli policy has limited the usage of electricity in Gaza, which has created the need to dump sewage into the Mediterranean Sea, making the water undrinkable.  Israeli-imposed fuel shortages caused sanitation plants to be shut down.  Netanyahu, who once boasted that I “stopped the Oslo accords,” never indicated any interest in lessening these punishments, let alone pursuing a diplomatic or political solution to the Palestinian tragedy.

Sadly, U.S. administrations have paid lip service to the idea of a two-state solution, but have never pressed an Israeli government to move toward Palestinian statehood.  At the very least, the Biden administration should recognize Palestine as a member state in the United Nations, and press Israel to enter talks with Palestinians regarding borders, Jerusalem, and security from Israeli settlers on the West Bank.

The post Mainstream Media Largely Ignore Israel’s Duplicity and Deceit appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

Photo by Tim Mossholder

In the wake of a series of devastating polls showing Donald Trump defeating Joe Biden in the battle for the White House in 2024, Democrats have taken to consoling themselves that past party incumbents, including both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, also faced stiff challenges three years into their first term in office but still went on to win re-election.

There’s some truth to this claim:  Not just first-term Democrats but also Republican ones, most notably, Ronald Reagan in 1983-84 and Bill Clinton in 1995-96, have looked headed for defeat only to rebound and earn a second term – usually by decisive margins.

In fact, there may be something close to an iron law operating in American politics that seems to doom first-term presidents to a collapse of bipartisan support not long after taking office.

Many come to power with considerable fanfare, and even broad-based appeal,  only to see their popularity decline, usually under the weight of economic travails combined with disappointment among the party faithful that their standard-bearer doesn’t quite measure up or has outright failed to fulfill a major campaign promise or two.

Obama, who took office with a 69% approval rating, faced this double-whammy in the fall of 2011, as continuing economic travails and pushback from his Latino supporters, angry over his failure to promote immigration reform, pushed his approval rating to 40%, the lowest of his presidency.

Obama faced real doubts about his ability to win re-election, which only grew after his dismal performance against GOP nominee Mitt Romney in their first nationally televised debate.  Even Obama’s hard-core female supporters began defecting in droves; some even considered crossing over to support Romney. It was shocking, but the rebellion proved short-lived

Obama rebounded.  A combination of good statecraft – an executive order granting legal status to the DREAMers – and good fortune – an economic upturn combined with Operation Sandy, which thrust Obama into the spotlight, showcasing his executive abilities – turned the tide.

It also helped that former president Clinton launched a one-man crusade to convince the country to-reelect the president.  Clinton delivered a rousing and robust defense of Obama’s first term achievements at the Democratic party convention in September 2022 then barnstormed across the swing states over the next two months to win back the wavering and the uncommitted.   Obama ended up winning handily.

Some leading Democrats,  most recently Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012  campaign manager, believe that Biden’s growing chorus of critics are over-reacting to the latest polls showing the president losing to Trump in the 2024 election.  Yes, the polls are bad, but “we’ve been here before,” he insists.  Obama won, and so will Biden.  In fact, he’s in better shape than his predecessor, says Messina

This is complete nonsense.  The malaise facing Biden is far deeper than Obama’s and far less amenable to remedy.

First, Obama did not face concerns over his age and physical health.  Many of the president’s doubters do support him and his policies, but they still harbor grave doubts about his ability to serve another term.  If anything those doubts will continue to grow in the coming year as more signs of Biden’s obvious infirmity appear.

Second, questions about Biden’s ethics and integrity, while generally ridiculed by his Democratic supporters, are beginning to take their toll on the president, as evidenced in latest polling.  Even a majority of Democrats now say that clear-cut evidence of influence peddling, especially in the Biden family’s dealings with China, will be sufficient reason for considering another candidate.

Obama, it will be recalled, faced no major scandal – “Fast and Furious,” while notably quickly passed – let alone an impeachment push, while in office.   Here again, the next 12 months are unlikely to be kind to Biden.  If anything, the drip-drip of new revelations and the fanning of the impeachment flames by the conservative media will further  weaken the president’s standing.  And an actual impeachment vote will sting, just as it did with Trump

In 2016, with Hillary Clinton, Democrats learned the hard way what happens when their own standard-bearer’s negatives are on par with her Republican opponent’s.  It cancels out whatever positives she might otherwise enjoy. Clinton and the Democrats ignored their candidate’s deepening scandal – just as Democrats are doing now with Biden – and they paid for it.  Clinton completely lost the moral high ground.  In the end, voters saw no real reason to prefer her over Trump

Biden faces a third major threat that is also out of his hands: the challenge posed by third-party candidates.  Despite persistent efforts by Democrats to dismiss this threat, it is serious and growing. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Cornel West are capturing a share of the electorate not seen since H. Ross Perot ran virtually neck-and-neck with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush in 1992.  Recent polls suggest that Biden, on balance, is suffering slightly more than Trump at the hands of RFK, Jr. and West combined.  But if you add a No Labels candidate like Joe Manchin to the mix, even more Democrats are likely to defect, which in tight swing state races, could tilt the entire election to Trump.

The magnitude of the challenge Biden faces far exceeds anything Obama confronted in 2012.  For a while, there was talk that a dissident Democrat might challenge Obama in the primaries but it disappeared almost as quickly as it surfaced. By contrast, Biden has already faced an initial primary threat from RFK, Jr. (prior to his declaration of an independent candidacy) and more recently from Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN).  Phillips may pose a brief challenge to Biden in New Hampshire assuming Biden chooses not to run and Phillips ends up winning by default.  But Phillips may be damaging the president far more by hammering away at his age and questioning his fitness to govern through a second term.

But the challenge from RFK, Jr. – even as an independent – is actually far more threatening.  The latest New York Times/Siena poll has RFK, Jr beating both Biden and Trump among young voters and among independents.  Kennedy’s also within single digits of both men among all voters in a number of the critical swing states.   Not since H. Ross Perot ran neck and neck with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton back in 1992 – before dropping out and ending up with 19% of the vote –  have we witnessed a third-party candidacy on this scale and with this degree of resonance within the broad electorate.

Were RFK, Jr. Biden’s only challenger, he might well benefit from his presence in the race, just as Clinton probably did thanks to Perot’s presence in 1992. Polls seem to indicate that now that RFK, Jr. is no longer running as a democratic dissident, he is pulling far more from Trump than Biden.  For example, an NPR/PBS poll conducted in early October showed Biden’s lead of 3 points over Trump ballooning to 7 with RFK, Jr. in the mix.  However, that advantage largely disappears with the other third-party candidates considered.

But RFK could also conceivably win a state outright – something Perot never did –  and if so, it’s possible that neither of the two main candidates will get to the 270 electoral votes needed to claim victory.  If so, the election will be decided in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which means Trump would emerge the victor.

For Democrats these are not happy scenarios.  The problem for Biden is that all of these threats are likely to grow worse in the months ahead.  Even the economy, which may not be as bad off as the president’s critics suggest – and most voters feel – might deteriorate.  Some economists still hope that inflation, which has cooled somewhat from its 40-year high in 2022, will continue to subside, allowing Biden to claim a victory of sorts.  But many others say the long-predicted recession is coming, just in time to dash his chances in 2024.   In any event, lower-income Americans are bearing the brunt of home foreclosures, skyrocketing rents and evictions and high food and gas prices.   If it’s still  the “Economy, Stupid,” Biden and the Democrats may well be screwed on this front, too.

Messina, like many Democrats, thinks Biden’s main problem isn’t his policies – which he deems a major success – but the public’s perception of them.  So, the solution is how to alter public perception – not to change course.  Biden does have a large campaign war chest – $71 million, by the latest estimates – to finance TV ad blitzes highlighting his message that the economy is working much better than voters – actually looking at their pocketbooks – know it to be.  Biden can also, as Obama did, make specific policy gestures and offer special incentives to aggrieved constituencies,  In 2012, Obama decided to issue an executive order providing temporary legal status to the DREAMers, and virtually overnight, his Latino supporters returned to the fold.  He also continued to draw sharp contrasts with Romney on racial issues, a strategy that has worked well for Democrats when their own candidates were White, but with Obama, barely needed reiterating to pay dividends at the polls.

That’s another huge difference between 2012 and 2024 that Messina seems to miss completely.  Biden is facing defections not just from Hispanics – on a massive scale, according to recent polling – but also from African Americans, especially Black men.  Amazingly, about half of each of these voter groups now supports Trump, which could spell disaster for Biden in Hispanic-rich swing states like Arizona and Nevada as well as swing states with large Black voting constituencies, like Georgia and North Carolina.  Biden carried Arizona, Nevada and Georgia in 2020    But recent swing state polls have Trump beating Biden in 6 of 7 critical swing states, in some cases by double digits. That’s enough to tilt the Electoral College – and the presidency – to the former president by a wide margin.

Could Biden rebound?  In theory, perhaps.  But Messina, like many Democrats, is vastly underestimating the scope of the challenge, especially in light of the mounting and compounding challenges that Biden now faces.  Even accepting some of the inherent advantages conferred by incumbency – and a certain inertia among the electorate when it comes to tossing out incumbents – Biden has no reason to assume that conditions still naturally favor his re-election. Even with a war chest that could well exceed Trump’s. he has no ground game or field operation to match his opponent’s to say nothing of the sheer grassroots fervor – and persistent media attention – that a plethora of vibrant third-party candidates will likely generate. Surrogates can help, but voters want to see their candidate in the flesh.  And it’s not clear that Biden – already challenged by foreign diplomatic travel – has the stamina to campaign for his re-election in any way that voters would find compelling.  Simply campaigning from the basement, which might have been justified, in part, during COVID, won’t pass muster with voters in 2024, especially those in need of the most reassurance.

The fact is, perceptions of Biden’s basic leadership abilities aren’t likely to improve that much, if at all, in the months ahead.

While Democrats like Messina are loath to admit it, Trump enjoys some important advantages over the president, including a track record in office that a majority of voters now seem to recall – however, nostalgically perhaps – as superior to Biden’s.  On the economy and on foreign policy, crime and immigration, most voters – including, critically, most independents – now trust Trump more than Biden.  If voters were so concerned about Trump’s role in the events of January 6, 2021, or other acts of possible criminal wrongdoing they would have registered that discontent by now.  In some ways they have – in Trump’s low favorability ratings –  but to the Democrats’ chagrin, it hasn’t changed voter assessment of the two men’s relative governing abilities.  Democrats may be hoping that an actual conviction will move the needle in Biden’s direction; it might, but probably not as much as they hope.

So why not replace Biden?  In one fell swoop Democrats would solve two of the biggest problems they currently face – the president’s age, and his deepening corruption scandal.  They might also eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the third party challenge. A fresh nominee – Gavin Newsom, of course, readily comes to mind– would reset the political landscape virtually overnight.  It would also galvanize the party base and give Democrats renewed vigor for battle.  Indeed, it might well electrify the entire country which at present, is deeply disgusted with the options that both parties are currently providing the voters.  It would be a clear and unmistakable sign yet that Democrats – unlike Republicans – have the courage to inspire a new generation of Americans to step up and lead.

Messina’s right:  Democrats shouldn’t panic.  Instead, they should soberly face the facts – and take pre-emptive action.   Biden never promised to serve more than one term.  In fact, he strongly hinted that he wouldn’t and was prepared to step aside.  For the good of the party and for the good of the nation, it’s time that he did.  The details can be worked out, and a soft landing assured.  Removing Kamala Harris from the equation can also be arranged.  She might even stay on as VP if a more promising Democratic nominee can be found.

Breaking tradition and replacing an incumbent mid-stream is risky, of course.  But it’s less risky than standing still and watching the current standard-bearer sink himself and his party into oblivion.  If Democrats really believe the country deserves better than Trump, then it’s time they really showed it and earned back the respect of voters across the spectrum who feel the country’s being poorly served and who have a right to demand better from their leaders.

The post Democrats Debate Their Options: Should Biden Ignore Pressure to Step Aside? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stewart Lawrence.

If the commentary that news media outlets offer up is supposed to equip audiences to understand the world, then major US outlets’ coverage of the unfolding horrors in the Middle East are failing spectacularly. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined ran seven editorials on Israel/Palestine between October 7–9: one from the Times, four from the Journal and two from the Post.

These three days of coverage begin the day that Hamas fighters broke out of the besieged Gaza Strip to kill and take captive hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians, after which Israel launched yet another massive bombing campaign against the Strip, killing hundreds of Palestinian militants and civilians. At no point do these analyses provide readers with the information necessary to comprehend what is happening and why, and they consistently mislead readers about key facts.

Root causes

Amnesty International (10/7/23): “The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”

Many credible observers have pointed to the relationship between this weekend’s escalation and Israel’s decades of mass violence against and dispossession of Palestinians. Amnesty International, for example, offered the following assessment:

The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians. The Israeli government must refrain from inciting violence and tensions in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, especially around religious sites.

Adalah, a Palestinian-run legal center based in Israel, called Hamas’ attacks “brutal and illegal,” and said that their “root causes” are

the illegal 56-year-old Israeli military occupation, the longest occupation in modern history; the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians; the blockade on Gaza; Israel’s settler-colonial policies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; and the denial of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination—as well as the total disregard by the international community of its obligations to fulfill UN resolutions.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem documents that since 2001, more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. More than 2,000 of these were minors, almost a thousand of whom were children aged 13 and younger. Over the same time period, some 1,300 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, including 145 minors, 58 of whom were 13 or under. Nearly 9 out of 10 deaths this century have been on the Palestinian side—a reality to consider when deciding whose killings are to be considered “retaliation.”

Mohammed El-Kurd (Democracy Now!, 10/10/23): Media outlets “are preemptively justifying the genocide of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians.”

Palestinian journalist and poet Mohammed El-Kurd said on Democracy Now! (10/10/23):

One wonders how much bloodshed, how much Palestinian death is necessary for people to realize that violence begets violence, and that the occupation and the colonization of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza Strip needs to end for all of this violence to end.

An editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (10/8/23) noted that the current administration of Israel has established “a government of annexation and dispossession,” with “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.” The paper criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “overt steps taken to annex the West Bank” and “to carry out ethnic cleansing in…the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.” Under the current government, the paper pointed out, there has been

a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in [Netanyahu’s] governing coalition.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, condemned all attacks on civilians, and also called Palestinian violence a result of “decades of oppression imposed on the Palestinians, brutalization, structural violence, of course punctuated also by eruptive violence.”

Lack of context

Washington Post (10/7/23): The attack “clarifies” in that “we now know just how audaciously Iran and its proxies might act to preempt negotiations among the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

As Ari Paul pointed out (FAIR.org, 10/11/23), the top US editorial boards downplayed or outright ignored the Netanyahu government’s expansionist policies.

They also declined to offer any of the broader historical context that’s urgently necessary to understand the causes—and therefore paths to resolution—of the current violence in Israel/Palestine.

The closest the Washington Post came was when its first editorial (10/7/23) alluded to “the legitimate Palestinian grievances that Hamas is exploiting.” Yet the paper gave no indication of what these are, omitting such foundational elements of Israel/Palestine as the 1947–48 Nakba, through which Israel created a Jewish majority by ethnically cleansing 750,000 Palestinians, and refusing to let them return to their homes despite their UN-stipulated right to do so. That history directly connects to contemporary events, in that approximately 2.1 million people live in Gaza—the territory that Hamas governs, and from which Palestinian fighters emerged on Saturday—and 1.7 million of these persons are Palestinian refugees.

Knowing these details would give readers a much more comprehensive picture of the recent killings in Israel/Palestine, but the Post editorial abstracts them into the vague, dismissable category of “legitimate Palestinian grievances.”

Without ‘immediate provocation’

The New York Times (10/9/23) endorses giving “America’s full support for Israel,” even as “the Israeli government is cutting off power and water to Gaza,” which “will be an act of collective punishment”—but only “if it continues.”

The New York Times editorial (10/9/23), on the other hand, didn’t mention that Israel has done any harm to Palestinians at all, asserting that Hamas fighters “burst through border fences without warning or any immediate provocation.” Setting aside that the barrier is a prison fence and not a “border” (+972 Magazine, 5/17/18), the word “immediate” is doing quite a lot of work here.

The UN noted in August that Gaza residents have

been living under collective punishment as a result of the [Israel-imposed] blockade that continues to have a devastating effect as people’s movement to and from the Gaza Strip, as well as access to markets, remains severely restricted. The UN secretary general has found that the blockade and related restrictions contravene international humanitarian law, as they target and impose hardship on the civilian population, effectively penalizing them for acts they have not committed.

Food security in Gaza has deteriorated, with 63% of people in the Gaza Strip being food insecure and dependent on international assistance…. Access to clean water and electricity remains at crisis level and impacts nearly every aspect of life. Clean water is unavailable for 95% of the population. Electricity is available up to an average of 11 hours per day as of July 2023. However, ongoing power shortage has severely impacted the availability of essential services, particularly health, water and sanitation services, and continues to undermine Gaza’s fragile economy.

NPR (9/24/23): “Israel has been carrying out stepped-up military raids, primarily in the northern West Bank, for the past year and a half.”

Furthermore, at the end of August, Human Rights Watch said that “the Israeli military and border police forces are killing Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability.” On September 23, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that Israeli government policies and government-condoned pogroms carried out by settler groups have displaced at least six West Bank communities. The group called this

an illegal policy that implicates Israel in the war crime of forcible transfer…. a choice the [Israeli] apartheid regime is making in order to realize its goal of maintaining Jewish supremacy in the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In late September, Israel bombed Gaza for several days in a row (NPR, 9/24/23). Israeli settlers stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque complex, one of Islam’s holiest sites, days before the Hamas attack (Al Jazeera, 10/4/23). The Guardian (10/4/23) also reported on evidence of Israel shooting Palestinian protesters at the Gaza fence just prior to the Hamas onslaught. From January 1, 2023, to October 4, the Israeli military killed 234 Palestinians and rendered 821 Palestinians homeless through housing demolitions.

Such actions would seem to meet the threshold of both “immediate” and “provoca[tive].”

‘No more condemnation’

Wall Street Journal (10/7/23): “Saturday’s assault from Gaza shows the reality of the global disorder that is expanding by the month.”

The Journal’s editorials went even further than those the Post and Times offered, not only neglecting to situate Palestinian violence but outright denying that Israel oppresses the Palestinians. Their first editorial of the weekend (10/7/23) admonished: “Please no more condemnation of Israel’s ‘blockade’ or ‘occupation.’ Israel has been allowing 17,000 Gazans to work in Israel each day.” The scare quotes suggest that Israel isn’t actually occupying Palestinian land or blockading Gaza.

The UN, however, considers Gaza and the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, to be occupied territories. On August 30, the United Nations General Assembly Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People issued a study that “lends its weight to the growing body of evidence that Israel’s belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territory is illegal.”

Moreover, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently noted:

Since the imposition of the blockade in 2007, the Israeli authorities have restricted the entry into Gaza of goods they consider having a dual (civilian and military) use, such as building materials, certain medical equipment, and some agricultural items.

Such measures, the OCHA pointed out, “continue to hinder access to livelihoods, essential services and housing, disrupting family life and undermining people’s hopes for a secure and prosperous future.”

Observers who are serious about wanting an end to violence against civilians would consider its causes. The Times, Journal and Post have shown that they are not up to the task.

The post Papers That Ignore Causes of Violence Can’t Help Prevent It appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

But the claim is false. Keyword searches found Han Duck-soo’s visit was widely covered by Chinese media, including the People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency. His meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping also garnered significant media attention in China. 

The claim was shared here on Facebook in a group with more than 70,000 members who mostly maintain anti-U.S, pro-China view.

“South Korean media outlets have been heavily promoting the S Korean PM’s visit to China as if it's a big deal. But there is zero coverage by the Chinese media. Nothing. If S Korea wants a proper summit with China, Yoon [referring to the South Korean President] must apologize to China first for upsetting it [with latest moves to cement ties with the U.S. and Japan],” reads the post.

It was shared by a user who claims to be a head of South Korea-based NGO “Green Transport Policy Institute.” Further searches found the user has often spread Chia-related misinformation online.

Similar claims have been shared in other Korean-language Facebook posts that claimed both Xinhua News Agency and People’s Daily did not cover South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo’s visit to China.

The claim began to circulate after Han arrived in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou on Sept. 23 to attend the opening ceremony of the Asian Games and meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the sporting event. 

During his two-day visit, Han attended a luncheon hosted by Xi for the leaders of countries competing in the Asian Games and held talks with Xi ahead of the opening ceremony later in that day.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that Xi, who has not visited South Korea since 2014, told Han that he will seriously consider visiting South Korea as part of efforts to support peace and security on the Korean Peninsula.

Han was the first high-level South Korean official to meet with Xi since President Yoon Suk Yeol met with him on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in Nov. 2022.

But the claim is false. 

Keyword searches of Han’s Chinese name in simplified Chinese, used in mainland China, show Chinese media outlets have been heavily covering Han’s visit to China and his meeting with Xi as seen on CCTV, China News Agency, Xinhua, etc. 

Both People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency also covered the news in their Korean language service.

Yoon, a conservative, has endeavored to align Seoul’s foreign policy with that of the United States in order to counter global challenges such as North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Yoon has prioritized strengthening its military and economic cooperation with Washington and Tokyo to this end.

South Koreans are largely divided on Yoon’s policy, with conservatives applauding the approach because they believe it could effectively promote North Korea’s denuclearization. Liberals, including the main opposition Democratic Party, contend that such an approach exacerbates tensions on the Korean Peninsula, citing the possibility of jeopardizing relations with China.

Han’s visit to China has become a source of disinformation among pro-China online users who support the DP. In addition to the false claim that Chinese media outlets ignored Han, users claimed that Xi was intentionally rude to Han to “teach him a lesson” and that Chinese authorities “mistreated” South Korean delegates in a protest against Yoon. 

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

Below is a statement Adam Markham, the deputy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

“As occurred with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in recent years, member nations of the World Heritage Committee punted on adding Venice to UNESCO’s list of endangered sites. Today’s decision by the World Heritage Committee signals an alarming trend of nations not being held accountable for protecting some of the most iconic and irreplaceable natural and historic sites around the globe. Venice is a city in crisis facing rising sea levels and flooding that threaten the structural integrity of homes, businesses, critical infrastructure, and world-renowned historical sites. Uncontrolled mass tourism has also made affordable housing scarce for locals as demand for vacation rentals increases and the growth of cruise ship traffic has caused significant damage to the Venice lagoon. If nations continue to ignore the existential threat climate change poses to places like Venice, they could be irrevocably damaged or lost forever. Sadly, climate change and tourism are killing Venice.”

If you have questions or would like to interview Markham, please contact UCS Climate and Energy Media Manager Ashley Siefert Nunes.

Additional Resources:

• A recent blogpost by Markham detailing some of the key issues being discussed at this year’s World Heritage Committee meeting.
• A joint report by UCS, UNESCO and U.N. Environment Program titled “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate,” which identifies the World Heritage sites most at risk from climate change.
• A case study on the threat climate change poses to the Great Barrier Reef, which was originally in the aforementioned report but ultimately removed at the request of the Australian government, as well as a statement by Markham about this government interference.
• A UCS report titled “National Landmarks at Risk: How Rising Seas, Floods, and Wildfires are Threatening the United States’ Most Cherished Historic Sites.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In December 2019, the New York Police Department released video of a fatal police shooting in the Edenwald Houses, a sprawling public housing complex in the Bronx. Similar videos — recorded by officers’ body-worn cameras — had been made public after other shootings. But this one differed in one key way: In addition to killing a suspect, police had killed one of their own, Officer Brian Mulkeen.

Mulkeen and his fellow officers had been patrolling the area as part of an initiative to get illegal guns off the street. Shortly after midnight, they came upon a man named Antonio Williams, who ran when they identified themselves as police. The video, shaky footage compiled from five body cameras, showed Mulkeen and other officers chasing Williams through the darkness and then tackling him. Williams, it turned out, had a revolver in his waistband.

“He’s reaching,” one officer yelled, as Mulkeen wrestled with the suspect. “Mulk! Mulk!”

Mulkeen fired five bullets into Williams, killing him. But just seconds later, as three other officers ran to the scene to provide backup, they fired their guns toward the two men and struck Mulkeen in the head.

Deputy Chief Kevin Maloney, the head of the NYPD’s Force Investigation Division, explained in the video that the release of the “relevant” footage would help the public “gain a better understanding of the events that led up to the incident.” The footage, he added, would also be a critical component of his team’s “thorough” investigation, which ultimately cleared the officers involved in the shooting that night.

The finding of no wrongdoing aligned with the view of then-Commissioner James O’Neill, who had rendered his own verdict months earlier in Mulkeen’s eulogy. “As every cop knows, one person is responsible for Brian’s death. And that’s the person carrying a loaded, illegal gun and decided to run from the police,” he said. “Every cop knows that, and every New Yorker should know that.”

New Yorkers, however, only saw a small portion of the video footage from that night — and only got a piece of the full story. The complete footage makes clearer just how far the shooters were when they fired and just how poor the visibility was that night as Mulkeen and Williams wrestled in the dark, according to a ProPublica review of the video, which was obtained by the news organization.

In fact, the NYPD’s crime scene measurements show the three officers who shot from the sidewalk were positioned 60 to 70 feet away, a fact that was not publicly disclosed by the department. At that distance, according to their training, the officers had just a coin-flip’s expectation of accuracy. The full video shows two of the officers with Mulkeen dodging the incoming bullets and yelling at their colleagues to “stop shooting.” The unpublished footage also reveals the immediate aftermath. Notably, one of the shooters runs from the sidewalk to the scene — which takes him a full five seconds, underscoring his distance from his target — and starts shouting expletives as he realizes Mulkeen has been hit.

Seven months later, when the FID interviewed the officers who shot their weapons, investigators did not ask about these key exchanges or challenge the officers when their accounts differed from what was captured on video, according to audio of the interviews, which was also obtained by ProPublica. In fact, two of the shooters misstated their distance, giving the impression they were much closer to the action when they fired their guns. Investigators allowed those misstatements — and others — to stand, despite having nearly a half-hour’s worth of body camera footage that disproved them. Detectives conducted relatively short interviews with the officers, ranging between 16 and 28 minutes each, and spent less than half their sessions discussing the actual shooting.

ProPublica requested an interview with Maloney for this story, but he did not respond. The news organization also sent a list of detailed questions to the NYPD and the union representing the officers involved in the case who are still on the force. None of the parties responded, despite multiple attempts to reach them. ProPublica also made several attempts to reach Daniel Beddows, a detective who is now retired but was also involved in the case, and sent questions via email to his former union, the Detectives’ Endowment Association, which said it “will bring it to the attention of the appropriate parties.” There was no further response. Mulkeen’s family, through its lawyer, declined to comment. The office of Mayor Eric Adams, who has championed the kind of anti-crime unit in which the officers served, also declined to comment, referring our questions to the NYPD.

The incident is the latest in a string of cases where the FID seemed to ignore evidence that was potentially damaging to officers who killed people in the line of duty. This year, ProPublica reported that in the FID’s investigation of the killing of Kawaski Trawick, the division never questioned officers about body-worn camera footage showing one of them trying to stop his partner from shooting Trawick, who was in the grips of a mental health crisis. Investigators also failed to challenge officers when their statements contradicted the available video.

Together, the shortcomings raise serious questions about how the NYPD is using body-worn camera video — especially when it implicates one of its own — both in its investigations of fatal shootings and in its messaging to the public, to which it releases edited and redacted cuts, if footage is released at all. In the Mulkeen case, time and again, investigators stopped short in their questioning of officers, even when the conduct at issue, which led to the death of a colleague, was on tape.

Former NYPD Detective John Baeza, who now serves as an expert witness on police misconduct and use of force in civil and criminal cases, said the FID failed in its mission to carefully examine every detail of what happened in this case.

“They don’t do a reconstruction,” said Baeza, who reviewed the FID report obtained by ProPublica. “You don’t see any police reports about anyone going out there, and having a couple guys on the ground, and then having somebody 60 feet away — photos of what it actually looks like when you’re 60 feet away from three guys on the ground.”

Such exercises could inform future training and potentially save lives, he said.

“Those are the things that first of all prevent police officers from being shot,” Baeza said, adding, “And the same thing goes for perpetrators.”

Indeed, Mulkeen’s father, who initially thanked the department for its response, is now suing the NYPD and the city. In his lawsuit, he accused the city of failing to properly train and supervise the officers in Mulkeen’s former unit. The shooters’ actions, Mulkeen’s father says in court filings, “were of such a wanton, willful, and reckless nature as to evince a callous disregard for human life.”

For the parents of the other man killed in the chaotic shootout, the FID’s clearing of the officers is part of what they call an NYPD “cover-up” of their son’s “murder.”

“This level of brutality and misconduct deserves far more than a twenty minute interview after waiting over half a year for the officers to get their stories straight so they can protect themselves,” Shawn and Gladys Williams said in a statement to ProPublica. The couple is also suing the NYPD and the city, alleging that officers illegally stopped their son that night in the Edenwald Houses.

The city denies the allegations in both cases, which are ongoing. The city’s Law Department, which is also representing the officers, declined to comment for this story.

When former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton created the FID in 2015, he told the public this new unit of “top investigators” would take advantage of the latest technology to produce detailed probes of police shootings. “I will get a better investigation, a speedy investigation, a more comprehensive investigation,” he said.

Three years later, Maloney, the head of the FID, told NBC New York that advancements like body-worn cameras were helping the division “to be transparent.” By using video, he said, the public will “know that when an incident happens, they’re going to get the truth of why it happened.”

In the Mulkeen case, the division had access to more than 28 minutes of body-worn camera footage from the five officers working with Mulkeen, each of whom belonged to the NYPD’s controversial “anti-crime” unit. Tasked with getting illegal guns off the streets and dressed in plainclothes, its members were responsible for a disproportionate number of police shootings at the time. (An investigation by The Intercept found that between 2000 and 2018, anti-crime officers committed about a third of NYPD killings, despite accounting for just 6% of the force.)

Several members of Mulkeen’s team also had disciplinary and legal histories. By the time they entered the Edenwald Houses in September 2019, four of the six members — Detective Daniel Beddows, Sgt. Jason Valentino, and Officers Brian Mahon and Keith Figueroa — had racked up a total of 17 departmental violations, including conducting illegal stop and frisks, restricting a person’s breathing and abusing their authority by drawing a gun. Each of the same officers, plus Mulkeen, were also named in at least one lawsuit alleging civil rights violations. (The officers denied the charges, and the cases were settled for a combined $280,000.)

That night at the Edenwald Houses, Mulkeen rode with two colleagues, Mahon and Officer Robert Wichers. As their unmarked police car approached, Williams grew “wide eyed” and “nervous,” Mahon later told investigators.

Williams took off running, and Mulkeen and Wichers went after him on foot. Mahon, who thought Williams was a potential decoy, stayed with another man on the scene. He radioed to officers in the area that his partners were in pursuit of a suspect, who he said he had seen reaching into his pants.

Mulkeen and Wichers soon caught up to Williams in a dark path and wrestled him to the pavement. Stuck at the bottom of the pile, Mulkeen managed to pull his gun and shot Williams five times just as Wichers jumped off the two men. Wichers and another officer, Beddows, then each fired one round at Williams.

As the shots rang out, Valentino and Figueroa, who had responded to the radio call, got out of their cruiser. The two officers, along with Mahon, ran toward the gunfire. When the three officers got to the sidewalk, about 60 to 70 feet away, they fired into the scene. Mulkeen’s body instantly tensed as one of the bullets entered his skull. Beddows jumped back. “Stop shooting!” he yelled to his colleagues. Wichers echoed Beddows: “Stop shooting! Stop shooting!” Video shows Mahon then ran toward the men, taking five seconds to close the distance between the sidewalk and the scene. As he gets closer, he shouts expletives.

Multiple former NYPD officers who reviewed the footage told ProPublica they took issue with the officers’ decision to fire toward the struggle from that far away.

Daniel Modell, a former NYPD lieutenant who ran the department’s Tactical Training Unit, said if the officers believed they needed to shoot to protect Mulkeen, “I would think that calculus might be made by someone close to the struggle — not at a distance of 20 yards.”

Baeza, the former NYPD detective, agreed. “At 60 feet, these guys didn’t have time to set up and aim,” he said. “Plus, what are you aiming at? The first thing is: Know your target. Well, you’ve got three men involved in a scuffle, and how do you know what your target is? They’re moving around.”

Former NYPD Sgt. Joe Giacalone, who worked in the Edenwald Houses, said the emotional rush of such situations introduces more potential for error. “If you are in a situation where people are thinking your life’s in danger, your accuracy gets even worse,” he said. “Was it a good decision? Maybe not. But, that still doesn’t make it justified or unjustified.”

Seven months passed before the FID interviewed the five officers who fired their guns that night. But investigators raised few questions about the “friendly fire” part of the incident, according to the division’s full report, which included audio interviews with the officers — even when two of the shooters misrepresented how far away they were from the scuffle.

Mahon, for example, estimated that he observed Williams and the muzzle flash from 25 to 30 feet away, though he added that he was “not exactly sure” of his position. Body-camera evidence and crime scene measurements showed he was much farther than that. In fact, Mahon was more than twice that distance — about 70 feet away — when he fired, according to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, which also looked into the incident. The office cited measurements taken by the NYPD Crime Scene Unit, in coordination with the FID. Figueroa, who was standing next to Mahon, also told investigators he was about 20 feet away, though he was “not sure.” Despite having the correct information, the FID detectives did not follow up.

That kind of deference is notable, given that making false, misleading or inaccurate statements is punishable under the NYPD’s disciplinary system, depending on the circumstances.

Investigators did ask the three officers who fired from the sidewalk whether they could tell who was shooting in the scuffle, Mulkeen or Williams. But when each said they could not make that distinction, detectives did not press any further.

Investigators also failed to question officers about other key details captured on their body-worn cameras. Most notably, the FID did not ask Wichers and Beddows — the two officers closest to Mulkeen and the struggle — about the “stop shooting” commands they shouted just after their colleagues fired from the sidewalk. For their part, neither officer mentioned the exchange, which would have underscored just how much the shooters had endangered everyone on the scene, including police.

Beddows told investigators that after he fired at Williams he “gave all his attention to Police Officer Mulkeen.” Maloney asked Beddows if he made any statements after he heard the gunshots from the officers on the sidewalk. He said no. Investigators did not press him any further.

Wichers also left out the exchange in his telling of the shooting. “After all the gunshots have stopped,” he told investigators, “I immediately go and try to render aid to Mulkeen.” Investigators did not challenge him. Instead, they asked Wichers if Mulkeen or Wiliams were still in possession of their firearms, who recovered the guns from the scene and if Wichers had any prior dealings with Williams.

Omissions of material facts are also punishable under the NYPD’s disciplinary system, but they must be found to be intentional.

A review of the audio interviews shows that the FID spent between seven and nine minutes questioning each of the officers about why they decided to fire their guns. In each interview, investigators spent almost as much time asking about logistical details, such as whether they were carrying a taser, if they were wearing a windbreaker or not and where their badge was positioned on their clothes.

By contrast, the FID spent considerably more time investigating Williams, the other victim in the shooting. Records show the division searched the Bronx apartment of Williams’ godmother, whom he was visiting the night he was killed. Investigators also spoke to his parole officer, the manager of a restaurant he worked at in Binghamton, New York, and his girlfriend, who also lived upstate. Additionally, the investigators probed the alleged gang ties of Williams and the other man standing with him on the sidewalk when they were stopped by the NYPD. The FID’s report included both men’s complete criminal records and a review of Williams’ and his girlfriend’s social media profiles.

Two years after the shooting, the FID presented its report to the NYPD’s Use of Force review board, which makes recommendations on discipline to the police commissioner. The FID said it found no violations of department policy by the officers, and the board agreed. According to the FID file, in January 2022, the commissioner signed off on this recommendation and the officers were cleared of all wrongdoing. Like prior FID reports, it was not released publicly.

The FID, however, was not the only law enforcement entity to review the shooting. The Bronx District Attorney’s Office did its own investigation, drawing heavily from the body-worn camera footage. In all, its report makes 17 references to the videos, compared with just nine mentions in the FID probe. And although the DA’s office said it did not have enough evidence to support criminal charges against the officers who shot Mulkeen, it did find that they had misstated key details in their recollections of the shooting and made some critical mistakes that night.

Notably, the DA’s office said that Mahon “mistook” Mulkeen for the suspect, Williams, when he claimed he saw a person on the ground holding a gun. The DA said “it is doubtful that Officer Mahon actually observed the weapon at that point” because it was underneath Williams, who was lying face down after being shot by Mulkeen.

The DA also challenged the account of Figueroa, who said he believed Williams was attempting to stand up and shoot at Beddows.

“Officer Figueroa was mistaken,” the DA wrote. “At the time of Officer Figueroa’s discharge, Mr. Williams had already been separated from Officer Mulkeen and was on the ground facing away from Officer Figueroa.”

Likewise, the DA concluded Valentino’s recollection that he could “clearly” see Williams at the time he fired was “controverted by the body worn camera evidence.”

“In fact, by the time that Sergeant Valentino began firing, Mr. Williams had already rolled off of Officer Mulkeen, was motionless on the ground, and Officer Mulkeen was no longer in danger,” the report said.

While no charges were filed by the DA and no discipline administered by the NYPD, the matter is not completely closed. Today, the city’s NYPD watchdog, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, is investigating a misconduct claim over the officers’ actions that night inside the Edenwald Houses. The CCRB confirmed the probe is ongoing but declined to make further comment for this story.

Meanwhile, Mulkeen’s father’s lawsuit against the NYPD and the city is on hold, pending the outcome of the CCRB investigation. So is the separate lawsuit by Williams’ family.

In the years since the Mulkeen shooting, the city disbanded the anti-crime unit, which department officials at the time said was a “seismic shift” away from the “brute force” tactics of the past. The officers involved in the case have gone in various directions. In October 2020, Beddows retired after he reached the 20-year mark with the NYPD, according to New York City employment records. Valentino and Wichers were each promoted and reassigned to nonpatrol units.

Mahon and Figueroa are still in the field, reassigned to another specialized NYPD unit. Its task: recovering illegal guns.

Last year, Adams announced that he would reinstate the anti-crime unit his predecessor had disbanded. “In doing this, we will avoid mistakes of the past,” he said. To assure New Yorkers, he noted officers would be identifiable as NYPD, receive enhanced training and be equipped with body cameras.

Video editing by Chris Morran and Kassie Navarro.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Mike Hayes for ProPublica.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In December 2019, the New York Police Department released video of a fatal police shooting in the Edenwald Houses, a sprawling public housing complex in the Bronx. Similar videos — recorded by officers’ body-worn cameras — had been made public after other shootings. But this one differed in one key way: In addition to killing a suspect, police had killed one of their own, Officer Brian Mulkeen.

Mulkeen and his fellow officers had been patrolling the area as part of an initiative to get illegal guns off the street. Shortly after midnight, they came upon a man named Antonio Williams, who ran when they identified themselves as police. The video, shaky footage compiled from five body cameras, showed Mulkeen and other officers chasing Williams through the darkness and then tackling him. Williams, it turned out, had a revolver in his waistband.

“He’s reaching,” one officer yelled, as Mulkeen wrestled with the suspect. “Mulk! Mulk!”

Mulkeen fired five bullets into Williams, killing him. But just seconds later, as three other officers ran to the scene to provide backup, they fired their guns toward the two men and struck Mulkeen in the head.

Deputy Chief Kevin Maloney, the head of the NYPD’s Force Investigation Division, explained in the video that the release of the “relevant” footage would help the public “gain a better understanding of the events that led up to the incident.” The footage, he added, would also be a critical component of his team’s “thorough” investigation, which ultimately cleared the officers involved in the shooting that night.

The finding of no wrongdoing aligned with the view of then-Commissioner James O’Neill, who had rendered his own verdict months earlier in Mulkeen’s eulogy. “As every cop knows, one person is responsible for Brian’s death. And that’s the person carrying a loaded, illegal gun and decided to run from the police,” he said. “Every cop knows that, and every New Yorker should know that.”

New Yorkers, however, only saw a small portion of the video footage from that night — and only got a piece of the full story. The complete footage makes clearer just how far the shooters were when they fired and just how poor the visibility was that night as Mulkeen and Williams wrestled in the dark, according to a ProPublica review of the video, which was obtained by the news organization.

In fact, the NYPD’s crime scene measurements show the three officers who shot from the sidewalk were positioned 60 to 70 feet away, a fact that was not publicly disclosed by the department. At that distance, according to their training, the officers had just a coin-flip’s expectation of accuracy. The full video shows two of the officers with Mulkeen dodging the incoming bullets and yelling at their colleagues to “stop shooting.” The unpublished footage also reveals the immediate aftermath. Notably, one of the shooters runs from the sidewalk to the scene — which takes him a full five seconds, underscoring his distance from his target — and starts shouting expletives as he realizes Mulkeen has been hit.

Seven months later, when the FID interviewed the officers who shot their weapons, investigators did not ask about these key exchanges or challenge the officers when their accounts differed from what was captured on video, according to audio of the interviews, which was also obtained by ProPublica. In fact, two of the shooters misstated their distance, giving the impression they were much closer to the action when they fired their guns. Investigators allowed those misstatements — and others — to stand, despite having nearly a half-hour’s worth of body camera footage that disproved them. Detectives conducted relatively short interviews with the officers, ranging between 16 and 28 minutes each, and spent less than half their sessions discussing the actual shooting.

ProPublica requested an interview with Maloney for this story, but he did not respond. The news organization also sent a list of detailed questions to the NYPD and the union representing the officers involved in the case who are still on the force. None of the parties responded, despite multiple attempts to reach them. ProPublica also made several attempts to reach Daniel Beddows, a detective who is now retired but was also involved in the case, and sent questions via email to his former union, the Detectives’ Endowment Association, which said it “will bring it to the attention of the appropriate parties.” There was no further response. Mulkeen’s family, through its lawyer, declined to comment. The office of Mayor Eric Adams, who has championed the kind of anti-crime unit in which the officers served, also declined to comment, referring our questions to the NYPD.

The incident is the latest in a string of cases where the FID seemed to ignore evidence that was potentially damaging to officers who killed people in the line of duty. This year, ProPublica reported that in the FID’s investigation of the killing of Kawaski Trawick, the division never questioned officers about body-worn camera footage showing one of them trying to stop his partner from shooting Trawick, who was in the grips of a mental health crisis. Investigators also failed to challenge officers when their statements contradicted the available video.

Together, the shortcomings raise serious questions about how the NYPD is using body-worn camera video — especially when it implicates one of its own — both in its investigations of fatal shootings and in its messaging to the public, to which it releases edited and redacted cuts, if footage is released at all. In the Mulkeen case, time and again, investigators stopped short in their questioning of officers, even when the conduct at issue, which led to the death of a colleague, was on tape.

Former NYPD Detective John Baeza, who now serves as an expert witness on police misconduct and use of force in civil and criminal cases, said the FID failed in its mission to carefully examine every detail of what happened in this case.

“They don’t do a reconstruction,” said Baeza, who reviewed the FID report obtained by ProPublica. “You don’t see any police reports about anyone going out there, and having a couple guys on the ground, and then having somebody 60 feet away — photos of what it actually looks like when you’re 60 feet away from three guys on the ground.”

Such exercises could inform future training and potentially save lives, he said.

“Those are the things that first of all prevent police officers from being shot,” Baeza said, adding, “And the same thing goes for perpetrators.”

Indeed, Mulkeen’s father, who initially thanked the department for its response, is now suing the NYPD and the city. In his lawsuit, he accused the city of failing to properly train and supervise the officers in Mulkeen’s former unit. The shooters’ actions, Mulkeen’s father says in court filings, “were of such a wanton, willful, and reckless nature as to evince a callous disregard for human life.”

For the parents of the other man killed in the chaotic shootout, the FID’s clearing of the officers is part of what they call an NYPD “cover-up” of their son’s “murder.”

“This level of brutality and misconduct deserves far more than a twenty minute interview after waiting over half a year for the officers to get their stories straight so they can protect themselves,” Shawn and Gladys Williams said in a statement to ProPublica. The couple is also suing the NYPD and the city, alleging that officers illegally stopped their son that night in the Edenwald Houses.

The city denies the allegations in both cases, which are ongoing. The city’s Law Department, which is also representing the officers, declined to comment for this story.

When former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton created the FID in 2015, he told the public this new unit of “top investigators” would take advantage of the latest technology to produce detailed probes of police shootings. “I will get a better investigation, a speedy investigation, a more comprehensive investigation,” he said.

Three years later, Maloney, the head of the FID, told NBC New York that advancements like body-worn cameras were helping the division “to be transparent.” By using video, he said, the public will “know that when an incident happens, they’re going to get the truth of why it happened.”

In the Mulkeen case, the division had access to more than 28 minutes of body-worn camera footage from the five officers working with Mulkeen, each of whom belonged to the NYPD’s controversial “anti-crime” unit. Tasked with getting illegal guns off the streets and dressed in plainclothes, its members were responsible for a disproportionate number of police shootings at the time. (An investigation by The Intercept found that between 2000 and 2018, anti-crime officers committed about a third of NYPD killings, despite accounting for just 6% of the force.)

Several members of Mulkeen’s team also had disciplinary and legal histories. By the time they entered the Edenwald Houses in September 2019, four of the six members — Detective Daniel Beddows, Sgt. Jason Valentino, and Officers Brian Mahon and Keith Figueroa — had racked up a total of 17 departmental violations, including conducting illegal stop and frisks, restricting a person’s breathing and abusing their authority by drawing a gun. Each of the same officers, plus Mulkeen, were also named in at least one lawsuit alleging civil rights violations. (The officers denied the charges, and the cases were settled for a combined $280,000.)

That night at the Edenwald Houses, Mulkeen rode with two colleagues, Mahon and Officer Robert Wichers. As their unmarked police car approached, Williams grew “wide eyed” and “nervous,” Mahon later told investigators.

Williams took off running, and Mulkeen and Wichers went after him on foot. Mahon, who thought Williams was a potential decoy, stayed with another man on the scene. He radioed to officers in the area that his partners were in pursuit of a suspect, who he said he had seen reaching into his pants.

Mulkeen and Wichers soon caught up to Williams in a dark path and wrestled him to the pavement. Stuck at the bottom of the pile, Mulkeen managed to pull his gun and shot Williams five times just as Wichers jumped off the two men. Wichers and another officer, Beddows, then each fired one round at Williams.

As the shots rang out, Valentino and Figueroa, who had responded to the radio call, got out of their cruiser. The two officers, along with Mahon, ran toward the gunfire. When the three officers got to the sidewalk, about 60 to 70 feet away, they fired into the scene. Mulkeen’s body instantly tensed as one of the bullets entered his skull. Beddows jumped back. “Stop shooting!” he yelled to his colleagues. Wichers echoed Beddows: “Stop shooting! Stop shooting!” Video shows Mahon then ran toward the men, taking five seconds to close the distance between the sidewalk and the scene. As he gets closer, he shouts expletives.

Multiple former NYPD officers who reviewed the footage told ProPublica they took issue with the officers’ decision to fire toward the struggle from that far away.

Daniel Modell, a former NYPD lieutenant who ran the department’s Tactical Training Unit, said if the officers believed they needed to shoot to protect Mulkeen, “I would think that calculus might be made by someone close to the struggle — not at a distance of 20 yards.”

Baeza, the former NYPD detective, agreed. “At 60 feet, these guys didn’t have time to set up and aim,” he said. “Plus, what are you aiming at? The first thing is: Know your target. Well, you’ve got three men involved in a scuffle, and how do you know what your target is? They’re moving around.”

Former NYPD Sgt. Joe Giacalone, who worked in the Edenwald Houses, said the emotional rush of such situations introduces more potential for error. “If you are in a situation where people are thinking your life’s in danger, your accuracy gets even worse,” he said. “Was it a good decision? Maybe not. But, that still doesn’t make it justified or unjustified.”

Seven months passed before the FID interviewed the five officers who fired their guns that night. But investigators raised few questions about the “friendly fire” part of the incident, according to the division’s full report, which included audio interviews with the officers — even when two of the shooters misrepresented how far away they were from the scuffle.

Mahon, for example, estimated that he observed Williams and the muzzle flash from 25 to 30 feet away, though he added that he was “not exactly sure” of his position. Body-camera evidence and crime scene measurements showed he was much farther than that. In fact, Mahon was more than twice that distance — about 70 feet away — when he fired, according to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, which also looked into the incident. The office cited measurements taken by the NYPD Crime Scene Unit, in coordination with the FID. Figueroa, who was standing next to Mahon, also told investigators he was about 20 feet away, though he was “not sure.” Despite having the correct information, the FID detectives did not follow up.

That kind of deference is notable, given that making false, misleading or inaccurate statements is punishable under the NYPD’s disciplinary system, depending on the circumstances.

Investigators did ask the three officers who fired from the sidewalk whether they could tell who was shooting in the scuffle, Mulkeen or Williams. But when each said they could not make that distinction, detectives did not press any further.

Investigators also failed to question officers about other key details captured on their body-worn cameras. Most notably, the FID did not ask Wichers and Beddows — the two officers closest to Mulkeen and the struggle — about the “stop shooting” commands they shouted just after their colleagues fired from the sidewalk. For their part, neither officer mentioned the exchange, which would have underscored just how much the shooters had endangered everyone on the scene, including police.

Beddows told investigators that after he fired at Williams he “gave all his attention to Police Officer Mulkeen.” Maloney asked Beddows if he made any statements after he heard the gunshots from the officers on the sidewalk. He said no. Investigators did not press him any further.

Wichers also left out the exchange in his telling of the shooting. “After all the gunshots have stopped,” he told investigators, “I immediately go and try to render aid to Mulkeen.” Investigators did not challenge him. Instead, they asked Wichers if Mulkeen or Wiliams were still in possession of their firearms, who recovered the guns from the scene and if Wichers had any prior dealings with Williams.

Omissions of material facts are also punishable under the NYPD’s disciplinary system, but they must be found to be intentional.

A review of the audio interviews shows that the FID spent between seven and nine minutes questioning each of the officers about why they decided to fire their guns. In each interview, investigators spent almost as much time asking about logistical details, such as whether they were carrying a taser, if they were wearing a windbreaker or not and where their badge was positioned on their clothes.

By contrast, the FID spent considerably more time investigating Williams, the other victim in the shooting. Records show the division searched the Bronx apartment of Williams’ godmother, whom he was visiting the night he was killed. Investigators also spoke to his parole officer, the manager of a restaurant he worked at in Binghamton, New York, and his girlfriend, who also lived upstate. Additionally, the investigators probed the alleged gang ties of Williams and the other man standing with him on the sidewalk when they were stopped by the NYPD. The FID’s report included both men’s complete criminal records and a review of Williams’ and his girlfriend’s social media profiles.

Two years after the shooting, the FID presented its report to the NYPD’s Use of Force review board, which makes recommendations on discipline to the police commissioner. The FID said it found no violations of department policy by the officers, and the board agreed. According to the FID file, in January 2022, the commissioner signed off on this recommendation and the officers were cleared of all wrongdoing. Like prior FID reports, it was not released publicly.

The FID, however, was not the only law enforcement entity to review the shooting. The Bronx District Attorney’s Office did its own investigation, drawing heavily from the body-worn camera footage. In all, its report makes 17 references to the videos, compared with just nine mentions in the FID probe. And although the DA’s office said it did not have enough evidence to support criminal charges against the officers who shot Mulkeen, it did find that they had misstated key details in their recollections of the shooting and made some critical mistakes that night.

Notably, the DA’s office said that Mahon “mistook” Mulkeen for the suspect, Williams, when he claimed he saw a person on the ground holding a gun. The DA said “it is doubtful that Officer Mahon actually observed the weapon at that point” because it was underneath Williams, who was lying face down after being shot by Mulkeen.

The DA also challenged the account of Figueroa, who said he believed Williams was attempting to stand up and shoot at Beddows.

“Officer Figueroa was mistaken,” the DA wrote. “At the time of Officer Figueroa’s discharge, Mr. Williams had already been separated from Officer Mulkeen and was on the ground facing away from Officer Figueroa.”

Likewise, the DA concluded Valentino’s recollection that he could “clearly” see Williams at the time he fired was “controverted by the body worn camera evidence.”

“In fact, by the time that Sergeant Valentino began firing, Mr. Williams had already rolled off of Officer Mulkeen, was motionless on the ground, and Officer Mulkeen was no longer in danger,” the report said.

While no charges were filed by the DA and no discipline administered by the NYPD, the matter is not completely closed. Today, the city’s NYPD watchdog, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, is investigating a misconduct claim over the officers’ actions that night inside the Edenwald Houses. The CCRB confirmed the probe is ongoing but declined to make further comment for this story.

Meanwhile, Mulkeen’s father’s lawsuit against the NYPD and the city is on hold, pending the outcome of the CCRB investigation. So is the separate lawsuit by Williams’ family.

In the years since the Mulkeen shooting, the city disbanded the anti-crime unit, which department officials at the time said was a “seismic shift” away from the “brute force” tactics of the past. The officers involved in the case have gone in various directions. In October 2020, Beddows retired after he reached the 20-year mark with the NYPD, according to New York City employment records. Valentino and Wichers were each promoted and reassigned to nonpatrol units.

Mahon and Figueroa are still in the field, reassigned to another specialized NYPD unit. Its task: recovering illegal guns.

Last year, Adams announced that he would reinstate the anti-crime unit his predecessor had disbanded. “In doing this, we will avoid mistakes of the past,” he said. To assure New Yorkers, he noted officers would be identifiable as NYPD, receive enhanced training and be equipped with body cameras.

Video editing by Chris Morran and Kassie Navarro.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Mike Hayes for ProPublica.

(New Press, 2023)

Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million people displaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.

When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapers that brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.

No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.

How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.

Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.

Useful victims

Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.

FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”

One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”

At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.

The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”

During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).

Media boundaries

Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.

Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.

Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”

Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:

What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.

Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”

NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:

I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.

The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own.  If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.

Accepting forever wars

Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).

As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.

US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”

Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Times op-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy  “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.

Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”

The risk of truth-telling

Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”

As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”

One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012,  90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”

Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery.  In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.

These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”

It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.

The post How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

(New Press, 2023)

Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million people displaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.

When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapers that brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.

No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.

How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.

Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.

Useful victims

Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.

FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”

One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”

At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.

The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”

During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).

Media boundaries

Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.

Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.

Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”

Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:

What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.

Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”

NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:

I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.

The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own.  If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.

Accepting forever wars

Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).

As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.

US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”

Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Times op-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy  “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.

Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”

The risk of truth-telling

Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”

As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”

One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012,  90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”

Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery.  In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.

These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”

It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.

The post How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

After the closing of a major NATO summit in Lithuania, President Biden vowed to support Ukraine and warned the war may continue for a long time, before flying to Finland, the newest member of NATO, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia. The goal of this summit may have been to make Ukraine seem more aligned with NATO, but “they actually revealed that the alliance was split” when they did not offer a timeline for Ukraine’s membership, says Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Wertheim says the real result of this summit was Ukraine moving to an “armed neutrality” or “Israel model,” where international allies supply long-term economic and security assistance to the country. The NATO summit also resulted in a communiqué criticizing China’s growing military power, saying Beijing’s actions are threatening the security of NATO nations.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

That’s the view of the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the world’s youngest nation, Nicholas Haysom, who told UN News that if a fresh crisis erupts there in combination with the military power struggle in neighbouring Sudan, it would be “catastrophic” for the whole Horn of Africa.

Maoqi Li asked the head of UNMISS and UN Special Representative why he thought South Sudan was not getting the attention it deserved.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Maoqi Li.

That’s the view of the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the world’s youngest nation, Nicholas Haysom, who told UN News that if a fresh crisis erupts there in combination with the military power struggle in neighbouring Sudan, it would be “catastrophic” for the whole Horn of Africa.

Maoqi Li asked the head of UNMISS and UN Special Representative why he thought South Sudan was not getting the attention it deserved.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Maoqi Li.

That’s the view of the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the world’s youngest nation, Nicholas Haysom, who told UN News that if a fresh crisis erupts there in combination with the military power struggle in neighbouring Sudan, it would be “catastrophic” for the whole Horn of Africa.

Maoqi Li asked the head of UNMISS and UN Special Representative why he thought South Sudan was not getting the attention it deserved.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Maoqi Li.

That’s the view of the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the world’s youngest nation, Nicholas Haysom, who told UN News that if a fresh crisis erupts there in combination with the military power struggle in neighbouring Sudan, it would be “catastrophic” for the whole Horn of Africa.

Maoqi Li asked the head of UNMISS and UN Special Representative why he thought South Sudan was not getting the attention it deserved.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Maoqi Li.

Janine Jackson interviewed Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones about the Mifepristone ruling for the April 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson:  As we record on Thursday, April 20, the US Supreme Court has extended, until tomorrow, its decision on whether reproductive rights will be severely curtailed, including in so-called “blue states,” by restricting access to Mifepristone, approved for more than 20 years as part of a medical method of terminating pregnancies.

Washington Post (11/19/23)

The Washington Post tells readers:

The Biden administration, abortion providers and anti-abortion activists, drug makers and the Food and Drug Administration have engaged in a rapid and at times confusing legal battle over Mifepristone.

Well, that suggests a sort of informational free-for-all, in the face of an actual disinformation campaign on the part of a minority of Americans opposed to the right to choose when and whether to have a child.

To the extent that there is any cloudiness around the science or the human rights involved here, one would hope that journalists would sort it, and not throw up their hands.

Rachel K. Jones is principal research scientist at Guttmacher Institute, the research and policy group focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rachel Jones.

Rachel K. Jones: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

JJ: Very narrowly, this Supreme Court case is about the authority of the FDA to approve drugs. But anybody paying attention can see that it’s actually about much more.

I wonder if you could just tell us a bit, first, about the impact of the introduction of medication abortion; it’s been 20 years now. What has that meant in terms of the ability of people to access abortion, and how widely is it used?

RJ: Right. So we know from decades of medical research that Mifepristone is safe, effective and widely accepted by both patients and providers, and Guttmacher’s own research has established that the majority of abortions are done with medication abortions, 53% in 2020.

JJ: So what would we expect, I mean immediately, and then maybe longer term, if this effort to make Mifepristone unavailable, if that were to actually go through, what sort of impacts would you be expecting?

RJ: OK, so there’s actually a lot that we don’t know about what’s going to happen or what would happen if the Supreme Court were to impose restrictions on Mifepristone. But, again, it’s important to recognize that any restrictions that are put in place are not based on medical science.

We do know that any restrictions that were put in place would have a devastating impact on abortion access. Again, 53% of abortions are medication abortions. Currently, only 55% of women in the US live in a county that has an abortion provider. And if Mifepristone were taken away, that number would drop to 51.

But there are 10 states that would have a substantially larger, notable impact. So about 40% of clinics in the US only offer medication abortion. And so, again, there’s 10 states where if these clinics were taken away, if these providers were taken away, substantially large proportions of people would no longer have access to abortion.

And some of these are states that are actually supportive of abortion rights, states like Colorado, Washington, New Mexico and, again, just one example: In Colorado, it’s currently the case that 82% of women live in a county that has an abortion provider. If Mifepristone were no longer available, this number would drop to 56%.

JJ: I think it’s important, the way that Guttmacher links health and rights, and the way that your work shows that access—sometimes media present it as though we’re talking about “the United States,” and rights to access abortion in the United States, but it varies very much, as you’re just indicating, by region, by state, and then also by socioeconomic status. So there are a number of things to consider here in terms of this potential impact, yeah?

RJ: Definitely. Again, we know, from decades of Guttmacher research on people who have abortions, that it’s people in disadvantaged populations—low-income populations, people of color—who access abortion at higher rates than other groups.

And so, by default, any restriction on abortion, whether it’s a complete ban, a gestational ban, a ban on a certain type of method, on a medication abortion, it’s going to disproportionately impact these groups that are already, again, at a disadvantage.

JJ: And I think particularly when we’re talking about medication abortion, if you know, you know. If you never thought about it, then maybe you never thought about it. But there’s a difference between having to go to a clinic, where maybe you’re going to go through a phalanx of red-faced people screaming at you, and the ability to access that care in other ways. It’s an important distinction, yeah?

RJ: Definitely. You know, one of the benefits of medication abortion, of Mifepristone, is that it can be offered via telemedicine. If there’s a consultation, it can be done online or over the phone, and then the drugs can be mailed to somebody. There are online pharmacies that can provide medication abortion.

This means that people, right, don’t have to, in some cases, travel hundreds of miles to get to a clinic, that they don’t have to worry about childcare, and taking off time from work.

So medication abortion has the ability to—and has, for a number of people—made abortion more accessible.

JJ: If you talk to staunch anti-abortion people, the conversation is very rarely about science or about medicine. But then, some of them, and their media folks, will throw around terms that sort of suggest that they’re being science-y. You know, they’ll talk about “viability” or “heartbeat,” or they’ll say it’s about concern about the safety of drugs.

And I just wonder, as a scientist who actually is immersed in this stuff, what do you make of the reporting on the medical reality of abortion, and would more knowledge help inform the broader conversation? Or is it just two different conversations? What do you think?

Rachel K. Jones: “We have decades of scientific medical research establishing that medication abortion is safe, effective and widely accepted.”

RJ: I definitely think it’s two different conversations. Like I said, we have decades of scientific medical research establishing that medication abortion is safe, effective and widely accepted. People who don’t support abortion choose to ignore the science and the safety, and dig for their own factoids and supposed scientific facts to support their arguments.

JJ: It’s so strange how the media debate always seems to start again and again at point zero, as though there were no facts in the matter, or no experience, and as though women aren’t experts on their own experience, you know?

Well, finally, we see things like the Women’s Health Protection Act federalizing the right to abortion. I know the law is not necessarily your purview, but in terms of responding to these court moves, and these state level moves, do you think that federal action is the way to go?

RJ: Certainly that is one solution, right? The Women’s Health Protection Act would enshrine the right to abortion federally.

But we also need, and especially in the current environment…. I don’t want to say the Women’s Health Protection Act is pie in the sky, but given everything that’s going on right now, we also need federal and state policy makers to step up to restore, protect and expand access to abortion.

Quite frankly, the right to abortion was removed because of Roe, and that allows states to impose pretty much any restriction that they want to, we’re seeing from all these different laws that are being implemented.

And so it really is, a lot of times, at the state level, and then certainly in the current environment, the state level is what we might need to focus on.

JJ: And then anything you would like to see more of, or less of, from journalism in this regard?

RJ: On medication abortion, it seems like the media are actually doing a decent job of covering the issue, of acknowledging, again, the decades of research showing that medication abortion is safe, effective and commonly used.

I guess the only issue we might have is one that you see any time that abortion is the subject of media stories, and that is, a lot of times, reporters think, well, if they have to take a fair and balanced approach, that means that they have to talk to the people who oppose abortion.

And again, when this is about science and facts and research, then you don’t need to talk to people who don’t believe in sound science, or who are going to ignore, again, decades of solid medical research.

JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Rachel K. Jones, principal research scientist at Guttmacher Institute. You can find their myriad resources online at Guttmacher.org. Thank you so much, Rachel Jones, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RJ: Sure. Thank you for having me.

The post ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

In response to U.S. President Joe Biden's Tuesday announcement that he is seeking reelection in 2024, four youth-led advocacy groups urged the incumbent to push for progressive priorities during the remainder of his first term and campaign on policies that motivate young voters to cast ballots for him.

In a letter addressed to Biden, March for Our Lives, Gen Z for Change, Sunrise Movement, and United We Dream Action wrote: "If we're going to excite one of the leading voting blocs for Democrats, we need you to deliver the bold ideas that our generation cannot live without—stop the climate crisis, fight for the rights and dignity of immigrants, impose real gun control—and run on a bold platform that will get our generation out to vote."

"As the organizers of millions of young people across the country, we know that in order to secure wins against fascism in the 2024 presidential election, Millennials and Gen Z will have to turn out to vote in full force," the groups argued, sounding the alarm about the dire consequences likely to ensue if the increasingly authoritarian Republican Party takes control of the White House.

"Young people are not just a necessary part of a winning Democratic coalition, but the keystone precondition for Democratic victory... When Democrats energize and mobilize our generations, they win elections. When they don't, they lose."

"Following the results of 2018, 2020, 2022, and most recently the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in 2023, it is clear that young people are not just a necessary part of a winning Democratic coalition, but the keystone precondition for Democratic victory," says the letter. "The equation is simple. When Democrats energize and mobilize our generations, they win elections. When they don't, they lose."

"Going into 2024, our youth coalition is deeply committed to defeating fascist, right-wing extremism and the eventual Republican presidential nominee," the letter continues. "Young people are clear that the runaway extremism of abortion bans, threats to trans students, criminalization of immigrants, and the all-out assault on our climate are existential threats to our generation and generations to come."

However, when the Biden administration makes "bad decisions"—such as approving the Willow oil drilling venture and other fossil fuel projects, entertaining the revival of migrant family detentions, or otherwise "settling for the status quo"—it becomes "harder for us to get young people to the polls," the groups lamented. "That's why we need you to listen and co-govern with us if we're going to be able to mobilize the young voters we need to win."

The organizations implored Biden "to lead with our generation's values and policies at the forefront of your campaign and your next year in office," contending that his 2020 platform was essential to defeating former President Donald Trump—who is seeking the Republican nomination for 2024 despite facing various legal issues—and that progressive policymaking, particularly last summer, inspired the young voters who ultimately minimized the Democratic Party's losses in the 2022 midterms.

In the spring of 2022, "young voters were largely disillusioned with politics and were not excited to vote," states the letter. "That changed once you passed a historic climate bill, passed overdue gun safety legislation, and sought to cancel student loan debt—resulting in the second-highest youth midterm turnout in the past 30 years. Now, more than ever, we cannot abandon this two-part strategy—run on bold ideas young people can rally behind and have significant legislative victories to back them up."

"We urge you to not leave our generation behind as you build your new campaign. Do not take our generation for granted."

"Going into the 2024 presidential election, it is clear that our opponents are getting even more ruthless and extreme," the groups warned. "Across the country we've seen abortion bans, transgender bathroom bans, [and] book bans in schools imposed by Republican extremists. We've seen Republican electeds say they will do nothing to stop gun violence, expel those who disagree with them from office, and attempt to ban educational opportunities and threaten the livelihood of immigrants in our communities. They must be stopped."

"We urge you to not leave our generation behind as you build your new campaign," says the letter. "Do not take our generation for granted."

"We are a generation that grew up through crisis—from watching storms decimate our communities to practicing school shooter drills to living through a global pandemic," the letter adds. "Throughout all of these crises, young people have shown up to demand the transformational change the country needs. We are fighters for a better world. That will not change in 2024."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

The Biden White House on Monday said it would not simply ignore a Trump-appointed judge's ruling that could imperil access to a safe abortion medication, dismissing a demand from progressive lawmakers who characterized the decision as a flagrant abuse of judicial power with far-reaching implications.

"No," an unnamed White House spokesperson toldTalking Points Memo when asked whether it would instruct the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ignore the right-wing judge's ruling invalidating the agency's decades-old approval of mifepristone, which is typically used as part of a two-pill regimen to end a pregnancy.

"We stand by FDA's approval of mifepristone, and we are prepared for a long legal fight, if needed," the spokesperson continued. "The focus of the administration is on ensuring that we prevail in the courts. There is a process in place for appealing this decision and we will pursue that process vigorously and do everything we can to prevail in the courts."

During a briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that "we are going to always follow the law" after a reporter asked whether the administration intends to comply with Kacsmaryk's order.

"Doesn't mean that we're not going to fight," she added.

The White House's adherence to business-as-usual legal procedure comes even as top Biden administration officials acknowledged that, should U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk's ruling be upheld, the entire FDA approval process could be thrown into chaos and placed at the mercy of far-right judges.

"You're not talking about just mifepristone," Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra toldCNN on Sunday. "You're talking about every kind of drug. You're talking about our vaccines. You're talking about insulin. You're talking about the new Alzheimer's drugs that may come on."

"The courts are now going rogue with rulings that no longer even pretend to respect precedent, jurisprudence, or limits to overreach."

The U.S. Justice Department formally appealed the Texas judge's unilateral ruling on Monday as legal analysts and rights groups grappled with the decision's glaring flaws and potentially profound impacts on abortion rights and other freedoms.

"His order, which applies nationwide, marks the first time in history that a court has claimed the authority to single-handedly pull a drug from the market, a power that courts do not, in fact, have," Slate court writer Mark Joseph Stern noted shortly after the ruling was made public Friday evening.

"Kacsmaryk's ruling is indefensible from top to bottom and will go down in history as one of the judiciary's most shocking and lawless moments," Stern argued. "Within an hour of its release, the decision also spurred the start of a constitutional crisis: A federal judge in Washington swiftly issued a dueling injunction compelling the FDA to continue allowing mifepristone in 17 states and the District of Columbia, which brought a separate suit in Washington."

In a late Friday statement, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) characterized Kacsmaryk's ruling as a product of the far right's "dangerous and undemocratic takeover of our country's institutions" and said the FDA would be well within its legal authority to ignore it.

"The FDA, doctors, and pharmacies can and must go about their jobs like nothing has changed and keep mifepristone accessible to women across America," said Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. "If they don't, the consequences of banning the most common method of abortion in every single state will be devastating."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) issued a similar call and warned that the failure to resist out-of-control judges "paves a dangerous road of worsening abuse of power."

"The courts are now going rogue with rulings that no longer even pretend to respect precedent, jurisprudence, or limits to overreach," the New York Democrat wrote. "They are long overdue for a check and balance."

Even one Republican—Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina—said the FDA should ignore the Texas judge's ruling after one of her GOP colleagues suggested cutting funding for the agency if it does so.

"This is an FDA-approved drug," Mace said in a CNN appearance on Monday. "Whether you agree with its usage or not, that's not your decision. That is the FDA's decision."

Kacsmaryk's order is set to take effect this coming Friday barring an intervention from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is hearing the Biden administration's legal challenge. The Justice Department, which called the ruling "extraordinary and unprecedented," has requested that the order be put on hold as the legal process plays out.

Given the right-wing bent of the fifth circuit, which includes six Trump-appointed judges, the chances that Kacsmaryk's order will be upheld appear strong—meaning the case could be on a path to the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court.

"Only the Supreme Court can resolve this looming crisis, and it has a very limited window of time in which to do so," Stern last week. "It has been less than a year since the court claimed to rid itself of the abortion issue. Now it must decide whether American patients will lose access to an abortion drug that has been on the market for 23 years and proven safer than Tylenol—on the order of a single, rogue judge."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

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Norfolk Southern allows a monitoring team to instruct crews to ignore alerts from train track sensors designed to flag potential mechanical problems.

ProPublica learned of the policy after reviewing the rules of the company, which is engulfed in controversy after one of its trains derailed this month, releasing toxic flammable gas over East Palestine, Ohio.

The policy applies specifically to the company’s Wayside Detector Help Desk, which monitors data from the track-side sensors. Workers on the desk can tell crews to disregard an alert when “information is available confirming it is safe to proceed” and to continue no faster than 30 miles per hour to the next track-side sensor, which is often miles away. The company’s rulebook did not specify what such information might be, and company officials did not respond to questions about the policy.

The National Transportation Safety Board will be looking into the company’s rules, including whether that specific policy played a role in the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine. Thirty-eight cars, some filled with chemicals, left the tracks and caught fire, triggering an evacuation and agonized questions from residents about the implications for their health. The NTSB believes a wheel bearing in a car overheated and failed immediately before the train derailed. It plans to release a preliminary report on the accident Thursday morning.

ProPublica has learned that Norfolk Southern disregarded a similar mechanical problem on another train that months earlier jumped the tracks in Ohio.

In October, that train was en route to Cleveland when dispatchers told the crew to stop it, said Clyde Whitaker, Ohio state legislative director for the Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, or SMART. He said the help desk had learned that a wheel was heating up on an engine the train was towing. The company sent a mechanic to the train to diagnose the problem.

Whitaker said that it could not be determined what was causing the wheel to overheat, and that the safest course of action would have been to set the engine aside to be repaired. That would have added about an hour to the journey, Whitaker said.

But Whitaker said the dispatcher told the crew that a supervisor determined that the train should continue on without removing the engine.

Four miles later, the train derailed while traveling about 30 miles per hour and dumped thousands of gallons of molten paraffin wax in the city of Sandusky.

Records from the Federal Railroad Administration, the agency responsible for regulating safety in the railroad industry, show that Norfolk Southern identified the cause of the October derailment as a hot wheel bearing. Whitaker said this bearing was on the same engine that originally drew concerns.

A spokesperson for the FRA said the agency’s investigation into the derailment is ongoing. The agency did not say whether it was examining the role of any Norfolk Southern officials in deciding to keep the damaged engine on the train. It’s still unknown what role, if any, the help desk played in the final decision.

This month, 20 miles before Norfolk Southern’s train spectacularly derailed in East Palestine, the help desk should have also gotten an alert. As the train rolled through Salem, it crossed a track-side sensor. Video footage from a nearby Salem company shows the train traveling with a fiery glow underneath its carriage.

If, like the Sandusky train, this one was dangerously heating up, a key question for investigators will be whether the help desk became aware and alerted the crew, and if it did, why the crew was not instructed to stop. The NTSB told ProPublica it is reviewing data from the Salem detector and those before it on the train’s route.

Norfolk Southern declined to say whether members of the train’s crew received an alert before the derailment and, if they did, whether the help desk told them to disregard it. The company did not address questions about its policy giving its help desk leeway to ignore such alerts. A spokesperson said that the company’s detector network is a massive safety investment, and that its trains rarely require troubleshooting.

ProPublica asked officials at the six other large freight railroad companies whether they have similar policies allowing employees to disregard such alerts. CSX and Burlington Northern Santa Fe said they don’t, and Canadian National said that no one can instruct a crew to continue traveling when they receive an alert “requiring them to stop the train.” Union Pacific, Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern did not respond.

While some employees and outside experts say there are times in which such policies safely benefit business operations, union officials believe they are emblematic of Precision Scheduled Railroading, the most controversial — and profitable — innovation that’s come out of the country’s seven biggest railroads, the so-called Class 1s, in the last decade. It prioritizes keeping rail cars and locomotives in constant motion.

Gabriel Sandoval and Danelle Morton contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Topher Sanders and Dan Schwartz.

The post NYT: When the Data Doesn’t Fit the Narrative, Ignore it appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Photo by Elyse Chia

Some conflicts we can see — and understand — rather easily. Their raw rhetoric will typically help us identify the opposing players and what they’re fighting over.

But sometimes the rhetoric never gets raw. The dominant players smother real differences with appeals to vague values. They paper over real conflicts and choices and leave the general public unaware and uninvolved.

Exhibit A in this sort of smothering? The international dialogue over “sustainable development.”

Over the past decade, nations worldwide have been gathering at a series of global confabs to hammer out what we all ought to be doing to save our planet and bring all peoples living on it up to a decent standard of living. These huddles, back in 2015, appeared to have scored an unprecedented breakthrough.

That September, our global heads of state gathered at the UN in New York and announced they had “adopted a historic decision on a comprehensive, far-reaching, and people-centered set” of goals and targets that would, among other noble outcomes, “build peaceful, just, and inclusive societies” and ensure our Earth’s “lasting protection.”

“We envisage a world in which every country enjoys sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth and decent work for all,” the assembled dignitaries declared. “A world in which consumption and production patterns and use of all natural resources — from air to land, from rivers, lakes and aquifers to oceans and seas — are sustainable.”

“We commit ourselves,” the dignitaries added, “to working tirelessly for the full implementation of this Agenda by 2030.”

We’ve now come about halfway through the years those leaders figured that “full implementation” would take. But that glorious global end state they originally promised, researchers at the Geneva-based UN Research Institute for Social Development noted earlier this fall, now seems frighteningly distant.

“With only eight years remaining to make this ambition a reality,” the UNISD observes in a powerful new report that has so far received far too little global attention, “the context for achieving the vision of Agenda 2030 has never been more daunting.”

Direct and difficult challenges to the goals world leaders so triumphantly announced in 2015 now seem everywhere. The rise of austerity. The backlash against egalitarian and human rights discourses and movements. The worsening climate crisis “threatening our very existence.”

We have, the UN researchers conclude, “a world in a state of fracture, and at its heart is inequality.”

The spirited new report from these researchers, Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-Social Contract, frames our globe’s continuing maldistribution of income and wealth as the most formidable obstacle the world now faces to a safe and decent future.

“Our current system perpetuates a trickle-up of wealth to the top, leaving no possibilities for shared prosperity,” advises UN Research Institute director Paul Ladd. “It destroys our environment and climate through over-consumption and pollution and offloads the steep costs onto those who consume little and pollute the least.”

UN Secretary General António Guterres has of late been sounding similar themes.

“Divides are growing deeper. Inequalities are growing wider. Challenges are spreading farther,” Guterres told the UN General Assembly this past September. “We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

Last month the left-wing website, for whom I’ve written for two decades, published “Understanding the dynamics of the protests in Iran”. Everything about the article should have raised red flags.

Described as “a lawyer and human rights activist”, Shahrooz is a Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad. A hub of pro-corporate and imperialist thought, MLI is a “right-wing charity” reported the Broadbent Institute. Alongside funding from the wealthy and corporations, MLI’s pro-NATO and anti-China politics are financed by the US, Latvian and Taiwanese governments.

Rabble would never publish an article about labour or indigenous rights based on softball questions to an MLI fellow. It contradicts its raison d’être. As Eric Wickham recently detailed in “Meet Postmedia’s favourite right-wing think tank” MLI already has unique access to the National Post and the rest of Postmedia.

To be clear Shahrooz isn’t the odd progressive at MLI. He’s publicly attacked prominent eco-socialist Dimitri Lascaris and less hawkish voices in the Iranian Canadian Congress and US-based National Iranian American Council.

Without push back Shahrooz explicitly criticized the left and Iranian support for Palestinians. “A chant that you often hear on the streets is ‘not for Gaza, not for Lebanon, I give my life for Iran’,” Shahrooz told Rabble’s Maya Bhullar. He also suggests protesters in Iran have no problem with US policy. “The international left has been very, very wrong” about criticizing Washington and Ottawa’s belligerence towards Iran, claimed Shahrooz. “Viewing Iran purely through an anti-imperialist lens, they have ended up perhaps unwittingly parroting the talking points of the Islamic regime where they have put all the blame on the United States, on Israel, on Canada and other countries in the West.”

Few place “all the blame” for Iranian government policies on foreign interference, but almost all media reports on recent protests have ignored the impact of US and Canadian sanctions/isolation/interference.

Rabble’s interview highlights the dearth of critical consciousness on Canadian foreign policy. Canada passively supported the 1953 US/UK coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, backed the Shah for many years, severed diplomatic relations after the 1979 revolution and has worked to isolate Iran more recently. Before their 2015 election the Liberals promised to restart diplomatic relations with Iran, which many prominent politicians advocated until early 2020.

Rabble publishing a right wing think tank’s position on Iran is a stark example of the media climate on the subject. Unfortunately, other left-wing publications have echoed this outlook. Three weeks ago Midnight Sun Magazine posted “Iran: A History of Violence and a Revolution in the Making”, which ignored Canada’s diplomatic isolation and listing of Iran as a state-sponsor of terror, enabling the seizure of that country’s assets in Canada. The Midnight Sun story criticized “Western leftists including Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders” for criticizing US sanctions designed to stoke public unrest by squeezing the country’s economy. Socialist Project and The Tyee both recently published articles on Iran that erase Canadian belligerence.

Spring Magazine’s “Iran’s uprising: A revolution from below” mentions Canadian belligerence but concludes that it must be intensified. According to the authors, the Canadian left must pressure Ottawa “to impose diplomatic and media sanctions on the Iranian state and remove the ability of Iranian state actors and their affiliates to engage in business and financial transactions” in Canada.

Leaving aside the international law implications of unilateral sanctions, Iran’s more repressive neighbour Saudi Arabia is the second biggest recipient of Canadian arm sales. As long as billions of dollars in Canadian weapons flow to Iran’s regional rival, the left definitely shouldn’t be seeking to “impose diplomatic and media sanctions on the Iranian state”.

US-based left outlets Jacobin and Counterpunch have also published long stories that ignore or deny the objective of US “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran. Similar to Shahrooz in Rabble, the exiled Iranian “anarchist” interviewed for Counterpunch says, “I also appreciate the work of Masih Alinejad, who is a journalist.” In 2019 Alinejad met US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and she works for Voice of America Persia. Since 2015 Alinejad has been paid over US$600,000 from the US Agency for Global Media.

Unfortunately, leftists aligning with Western imperialism in Iran or elsewhere is not new, as I detail in Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada. During Stephen Harper’s reign Canadian naval vessels ran provocative manoeuvres off Iran’s coast, Canadian troops occupied a bordering state, Ottawa targeted Iran at the UN, listed that country as a state sponsor of terrorism and cut off diplomatic relations with Iran. But the NDP largely failed to oppose Canada’s low-level war against Iran. In fact, the social democratic party sometimes joined the attacks.

In the early 1950s Iranians pushed to gain greater benefit from their huge oil reserves. But British Labour and Conservative governments had different plans. As one of the earliest sources of Middle Eastern oil, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP’s predecessor) had generated immense wealth for British investors since 1915. With Anglo-Iranian refusing to concede any of their immense profits, Iran moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry.

Despite calling for the nationalization of numerous sectors of the Canadian economy, the leader of the CCF criticized Iran’s move. In October 1951 M. J. Coldwell told the House of Commons: “What happened recently in Iran [the nationalization of oil] and is now taking place in Egypt [abrogation of a treaty that allowed British forces to occupy the Suez Canal region] is an attempt on the part of these reactionary interests to use the understandable desire of the great masses of the people for improvements in their condition as an excuse to obtain control of the resources of these countries and to continue to exploit the common people in these regions.” The CCF leader then called on the federal government to “give every possible aid to the United Kingdom in the present crisis.”

Mohammad Mossadegh’s move to nationalize Iran’s oil would lead the US and UK to orchestrate his overthrow in 1953. The CCF failed (or at least it’s not recorded in Hansard) to criticize Ottawa for backing the overthrow of Iran’s first popularly elected prime minister.

On international affairs the left’s primary responsibility is to curb Ottawa’s violations of international law. This is not an endorsement of a theocracy that imposes the veil. Nor is it support for state violence. It’s a recognition that Canada has long had a belligerent policy towards Iran. That’s what left wing media should focus on. Our primary responsibility is to end the wrongs of the governments that we have some chance of influencing.

• Beginning November 22 Yves Engler will be touring in southern Ontario, Vancouver Island and the lower mainland.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

The post Herman Daly: A Economist Who Future Economists — and Societies — Will Dare Not Ignore appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

I really don't want to write about him any more. I'd rather not even think about him. Honestly, I'd rather forget he existed.

Rather than ignore him, we must demand that Trump be prosecuted. Instead of pretending the poison he released into the American system is behind us, we must acknowledge that it is spreading.

But he looms over the 2022 elections like a sword of Damocles. Trump continues to dominate all political coverage. In many respects, he is still the center of American politics—if anything, bigger and more dangerous than he was when he left the White House.

First, consider all the action in federal and state courts.

Just within the last two weeks, Trump has been subpoenaed to appear before the January 6 committee, his appeal to the Supreme Court challenging the FBI's seizure at Mar-a-Lago of secret documents he stole from the White House was rejected, his former aide Steve Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, a federal appeals court denied a request by Sen. Lindsey Graham to be shielded from testifying in an investigation into Trump's interference in the 2020 election in Georgia, other aides were observed after testifying before a grand jury in the criminal investigation of Jan. 6, his name was featured in text messages read aloud at the Oath Keepers trial, and his decision to form a new company (Trump Organization II) was criticized by the New York attorney general, who is suing him.

Never before in history has a former president, his aides, and supporters in Congress been as entangled in legal proceedings stretching years beyond his administration. Never have the legal maneuvers attracted more media attention.

Second is the continuing speculation about whether Merrick Garland will indict him.

The Jan 6 committee has done an outstanding job, but it has also helped Trump become a more historically significant. As Politico's John Harris noted,  

"The usual journalistic crutch when assessing political legacies is 'for better or worse,' but in this case it is only for worse. Trump's historic significance flows from how effectively he has made people doubt what was previously beyond doubt—that American democracy is on the level—and how brilliantly he has illuminated just how much this generation of Americans looks at one another with mutual contempt and mutual incomprehension."

While the Jan. 6 committee has dismantled Trump's deceptions and denialism surrounding the 2020 election, it has also helped build Trump into something larger than he appeared two years ago—a political force too serious to forget. That's not a bad thing; we must not allow ourselves to forget what he has done to America. But it does cast his shadow over our future in ways few former presidents have ever managed.

Third is the groundwork for an undemocratic coup that Trump and his henchmen continue to lay.

That groundwork is being prepared step by step. A majority of Republican candidates for office in the 2020 midterms are election deniers, including several candidates for the crucial election jobs of secretaries of state and governors.  

The tactics they and their supporters used in primary elections force us to brace for a range of new challenges in the upcoming midterms and in 2024, including disruptive poll watchers and workers, aggressive litigation strategies, voter and ballot challenges and vigilante searches for fraud.

He will almost certainly declare his candidacy for president in 2024 within the next few months.

Just as menacingly for 2024 and beyond, the Supreme Court has taken up the "independent state legislature" doctrine. If upheld, this doctrine would allow state legislatures to do exactly what Trump tried to do in December 2020—appoint their own slates of electors, regardless of the popular vote.

Finally, Twitter and Facebook are poised to allow Trump back on—to continue to spread his lies on the largest megaphones in the world.

Trump is not only a sociopath. He is also a masterful conman. Social media will soon allow him to continue to spread his lies and hate. (Elon Musk has virtually guaranteed it for Twitter if, as expected, Musk takes over that platform. Facebook has signaled it will do the same.)

A sociopathic conman on social media is terrifying.

It is our terrible misfortune that Trump came to power and continues to infect America and the world just as the tangled weave of other crises—near-record inequality, bigotry (racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia), the climate, the pandemic—have made many Americans vulnerable to his demagoguery.

I didn't want to write about him today or even think about him. But none of us dare turn our eyes away in revulsion.

Rather than ignore him, we must demand that Trump be prosecuted. Instead of pretending the poison he released into the American system is behind us, we must acknowledge that it is spreading.

As opposed to dismissing him, we must deal with him and the lawmakers who are enabling him head-on—and stop him, and them, through every non-violent means possible.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Robert Reich.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paul Rogers.

The country’s centrist corporate media have decided what this year’s primaries are mainly about: Donald Trump.

In the wake of an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and continued efforts by the Republican Party to undermine democratic processes, corporate media remain fixated on Trump’s role in the party, seeing the 2022 primaries as a series of referenda on Trump and his role as kingmaker. But the focus on Trump obscures the even more important story that Trump represents: the GOP assault on democracy, which is being carried out only marginally less aggressively by many of those “defeating” him.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is the perfect example of this. After this week’s state primaries, most corporate media made their lead story the losses of Trump-backed candidates, in particular to Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who both played very public roles in refusing to bow to Trump’s demands to “find” votes for him in Georgia in 2020.

The Washington Post (5/24/22) declared, “Kemp, Raffensperger Win in Blow to Trump and His False Election Claims.” A New York Times (5/24/22) subhead read, “The victories in Georgia by Gov. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, handed the former president his biggest primary season setback so far.” At Reuters (5/24/22), the top “takeaway” subhead read: “Trump Takes Lumps.”

These are stories centrist media like to tell: The voters are sensibly rejecting extremists from their party, so the “moderate” candidates are taking the right path. Journalists tell this story over and over in coverage of Democratic primaries, with “move to the center” stories encouraging the party to reject its progressive candidates. The problem is, candidates like Kemp and Raffensperger are not moderate, except in comparison to Trump—and painting the story as one centrally about Trump obscures the anti-democratic nature of those who defeated his hand-picked candidates.

The Boston Globe demonstrated that this contradiction could be addressed, with an article (5/24/22) headlined, “Kemp Cruises to Victory in Georgia, Dealing Blow to Trump but Not His Voter Fraud Lies.”

The Globe‘s Jess Bidgood reported:

Kemp’s easy win over Perdue on Tuesday may seem to suggest that the former president and his baseless insistence that fraud and irregularities cost him the election have lost their iron grip on the Republican Party….

Even though he stood up to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Kemp found other ways to assuage the GOP base’s unfounded doubts about the issue. He signed a voting bill that added new hurdles to absentee voting and handed some election oversight power over to the Republican-controlled legislature. He spoke of “election integrity” everywhere he went, while Raffensperger leaned into the issue as well.

But even this didn’t go nearly far enough in describing Kemp and Raffensperger’s histories of attacking voting rights. As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp for years vigorously promoted false election fraud stories and made Georgia a hotspot for undermining voting rights. He aggressively investigated groups that helped register voters of color; in 2014, he launched a criminal investigation into Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project—which was helping to register tens of thousands of Black Georgians who previously hadn’t voted—calling their activities “voter fraud.” His investigation ultimately uncovered no wrongdoing (New Republic, 5/5/15).

Kemp oversaw the rejection of tens of thousands of voter registrations on technicalities like missing accents or typos (Atlantic, 11/7/18) and improperly purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls prior to the 2018 election (Rolling Stone, 10/27/18), disproportionately impacting voters of color (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 3/12/20). He refused to recuse himself from overseeing his own race for governor against Abrams, drawing rebukes from former president, Georgia native and fair elections advocate Jimmy Carter (The Nation, 10/29/18), among others. Kemp ran that governor’s race as a “Trump conservative.”

None of Kemp’s history as anti–voting rights secretary of state was mentioned in any of the next-day election coverage FAIR surveyed. (There was an opinion piece on CNN.com on May 26 that detailed “Kemp’s appalling anti-democracy conduct.”)

As governor, Kemp has further eroded voting rights in Georgia, as mentioned by the Globe (a story that the media managed to both-sides at the time—FAIR.org, 4/8/21). He has also taken a hard-right stance on many other rights issues, signing into law a bill to prohibit “divisive concepts” from being taught in schools, a bill to ban abortions as early as six weeks and a bill discriminating against transgender kids in sports.

Like Kemp, Raffensperger was an early supporter of Trump who pushed election fraud stories and voter suppression tactics. As FAIR (3/5/21) pointed out at the time, centrist media fawned over Raffensperger for standing up to Trump in the 2020 election, ignoring his “support of the little lies that made the Big Lie possible.”

For instance, just weeks before an uncritical editorial (1/4/21) praising him, the local Journal-Constitution published a front-page investigation (12/17/20) that found Raffensperger was touting “inflated figures about the number of investigations his office was conducting related to the election, giving those seeking to sow doubt in the outcome a new storyline.” Those claims helped propel the state’s 2020 bill restricting voting rights.

Like Kemp, he launched vote fraud investigations into progressive voter registration groups (AJC, 11/30/20), and oversaw the purge of nearly 200,000 voters, mostly people of color, from the rolls before the 2020 election (Democracy Now!, 1/5/21).

During his re-election campaign, Raffensperger had gone on national television (CBS, 1/9/22) to push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting noncitizens from voting in any elections, as well as to praise photo ID requirements for voting and oppose same-day voter registration. He has also called for an expansion of law enforcement presence at polling sites.

In their obsession with Trump’s win/loss record and their desperate search for “moderate” Republicans, journalists whitewash GOP candidates who paved the way for Trumpism and, ultimately, seek the same end—minority rule—by only slightly different means.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Testifying in front of a House committee, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently announced DHS’s formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The board’s stated mission would be to address “disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” as well as “transnational criminal organizations and human-smuggling organizations.”

Little is known about the board, and Mayorkas has claimed it will have “no operational authority or capability.” Still, leading media instantly heralded its creation. The Associated Press (4/28/22) accepted the premise that a DHS-helmed body would “counter disinformation” coming from Russia and “human smugglers” targeting people seeking to immigrate to the US. MSNBC (4/29/22) maintained that the initiative “makes sense.” Notably, not a single reference to the DHS’s history of incessant violence against immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers and other activists was deemed relevant to either story.

A ‘Soviet’ plot?

Despite their decidedly uncritical framing, media have acknowledged broadsides against the board—but almost exclusively those from the far right. In the wake of Mayorkas’ announcement, right-wing policymakers like Sen. Josh Hawley (R.–Mo.) and Fox News personalities including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity groused about the Disinformation Governance Board, condemning it as an Orwellian, “Soviet,” Democrat-masterminded ploy to spy on and muzzle conservatives. News outlets subsequently alarmed readers of a brewing “tempest” (Washington Post, 4/29/22), “uproar” (CNN, 5/1/22) and “partisan fight” (New York Times, 5/2/22) over the board.

Taking these right-wing cries of persecution at face value, CNN’s Dana Bash (5/1/22) asked Mayorkas to address them, handing him an opportunity to paraphrase a DHS press release. Other than a fleeting question about a disinformation board under a hypothetically re-elected President Trump, Bash inquired no further regarding any harms the board may pose, nor did she so much as flinch when Mayorkas—deputized to manage “disinformation” about immigration—reiterated his enduringly callous message to would-be US immigrants: “Do not come.”

The same day, CNN’s Brian Stelter (5/1/22) invited Moira Whelan of the federally funded National Democratic Institute (NDI) on his show to tout the board as a civil liberties–honoring public good. The think tank’s funding comes in part from the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development—both of which function as facilitators of US covert operations—as well as the State Department, rendering Whelan a dubious source. Stelter welcomed the development of the board as “common sense,” while raising only the concerns of the right, and characterizing the discourse as “mostly a Fox world story.” Any further interrogation of the board, apparently, was unnecessary.

‘Cruel, unlawful and ineffective’

While it’s entirely justifiable to impugn right-wingers’ tantrums, it’s inaccurate to suggest those objections are the only ones that exist.

As noted, outlets have been conspicuously incurious about a decision to place the stewardship of “disinformation” directly under the authority of the DHS. Conceived in the thick of post-9/11 anti-Muslim “counterterrorism” hysteria, the department oversees ICE and Customs and Border Patrol, two gravely abusive agencies that have been responsible for the death and disappearance of at least tens of thousands of undocumented asylum seekers. The DHS’s cruelty is notorious, prompting activists, journalists and organizations like the ACLU to call for its dissolution. More recently, DHS continued its pattern of violently disrupting civil rights protests in the US when it descended on Los Angeles demonstrators defending the right to an abortion amid a pending overturn of Roe v. Wade.

Mayorkas, a Biden appointee and former US attorney for the Central District of California, offers little hope that any of this will change. Though he’s voiced mild disagreement with DHS’s rhetoric and tactics, activist groups have described Mayorkas’ DHS as implementing “cruel, unlawful and ineffective deterrence-based policies that extend rather than dismantle the previous administration’s approach to migration.” A glossy Washington Post profile (11/1/21), largely heedless of these concerns, informed readers that Mayorkas “leans into his days leading a team of prosecutors when wooing politicians skeptical that he will aggressively enforce America’s immigration laws.”

Overseeing Mayorkas’ new board is Nina Jankowicz, a self-described “expert on disinformation” and alum of the National Democratic Institute. At NDI, Jankowicz “managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus”—a phrase that can’t be divorced from the think tank’s soft- and hard-power funding sources.

‘A certain amount of gumption’

When considered in concert with Mayorkas’ and the DHS’s virulent jingoism, one might start to view Jankowicz with suspicion. Mainline media, however, have instead embraced Jankowicz as a credentialed, principled and neutral authority (New York Times, 5/2/22), and defended her from the right’s vitriol. “Spare a thought for Nina Jankowicz, who has stepped up to lead this effort at the Department of Homeland Security,” Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce (4/29/22) implored. “Volunteering to be a piñata takes a certain amount of gumption.”

News media have issued some reservations about the board, but these amount to little more than process critiques, comments on semantics and light McCarthyism. Esquire’s Pierce opined:

I am concerned what this operation would look like under, say, President DeSantis, and there had to be a more deft way to roll it out than having DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just drop it into his testimony before a House committee.

The Washington Post (4/29/22) also chimed in, calling the name Disinformation Governance Board “a bit ominous; it sounds less like an effort to combat disinformation rather than to, well, govern it.” In a later piece, the Post’s editorial board (5/3/22) cautioned that the initials of the Disinformation Governance Board were the “Soviet-sounding DGB,” presumably meant to evoke the KGB.

The Post went on to assure readers that the board “could do a great deal of good” with just a bit of transparency and a few language tweaks, adding that “the reality isn’t nearly so scary” as the right suggests. But therein lies the problem: If only the right gets to weigh in on what’s “scary,” the voices of those who truly suffer will continue to go unheard.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julianne Tveten.

AP (4/28/22): “The new board also will monitor and prepare for Russian disinformation threats as this year’s midterm elections near and the Kremlin continues an aggressive disinformation campaign around the war in Ukraine.”

Testifying in front of a House committee, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently announced DHS’s formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The board’s stated mission would be to address “disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” as well as “transnational criminal organizations and human-smuggling organizations.”

Little is known about the board, and Mayorkas has claimed it will have “no operational authority or capability.” Still, leading media instantly heralded its creation. The Associated Press (4/28/22) accepted the premise that a DHS-helmed body would “counter disinformation” coming from Russia and “human smugglers” targeting people seeking to immigrate to the US. MSNBC (4/29/22) maintained that the initiative “makes sense.” Notably, not a single reference to the DHS’s history of incessant violence against immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers and other activists was deemed relevant to either story.

A ‘Soviet’ plot?

Despite their decidedly uncritical framing, media have acknowledged broadsides against the board—but almost exclusively those from the far right. In the wake of Mayorkas’ announcement, right-wing policymakers like Sen. Josh Hawley (R.–Mo.) and Fox News personalities including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity groused about the Disinformation Governance Board, condemning it as an Orwellian, “Soviet,” Democrat-masterminded ploy to spy on and muzzle conservatives. News outlets subsequently alarmed readers of a brewing “tempest” (Washington Post, 4/29/22), “uproar” (CNN, 5/1/22) and “partisan fight” (New York Times, 5/2/22) over the board.

To CNN‘s Brian Seltzer (5/1/22), government “counter-disinformation efforts…to give us accurate information” “sounds like common sense.”

Taking these right-wing cries of persecution at face value, CNN’s Dana Bash (5/1/22) asked Mayorkas to address them, handing him an opportunity to paraphrase a DHS press release. Other than a fleeting question about a disinformation board under a hypothetically re-elected President Trump, Bash inquired no further regarding any harms the board may pose, nor did she so much as flinch when Mayorkas—deputized to manage “disinformation” about immigration—reiterated his enduringly callous message to would-be US immigrants: “Do not come.”

The same day, CNN’s Brian Stelter (5/1/22) invited Moira Whelan of the federally funded National Democratic Institute (NDI) on his show to tout the board as a civil liberties–honoring public good. The think tank’s funding comes in part from the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development—both of which function as facilitators of US covert operations—as well as the State Department, rendering Whelan a dubious source. Stelter welcomed the development of the board as “common sense,” while raising only the concerns of the right, and characterizing the discourse as “mostly a Fox world story.” Any further interrogation of the board, apparently, was unnecessary.

‘Cruel, unlawful and ineffective’

The Guardian (10/21/21) reported on declassified DHS documents that documented abuses ranging “from child sexual assault to enforced hunger, threats of rape and brutal detention conditions.”

While it’s entirely justifiable to impugn right-wingers’ tantrums, it’s inaccurate to suggest those objections are the only ones that exist.

As noted, outlets have been conspicuously incurious about a decision to place the stewardship of “disinformation” directly under the authority of the DHS. Conceived in the thick of post-9/11 anti-Muslim “counterterrorism” hysteria, the department oversees ICE and Customs and Border Patrol, two gravely abusive agencies that have been responsible for the death and disappearance of at least tens of thousands of undocumented asylum seekers. The DHS’s cruelty is notorious, prompting activists, journalists and organizations like the ACLU to call for its dissolution. More recently, DHS continued its pattern of violently disrupting civil rights protests in the US when it descended on Los Angeles demonstrators defending the right to an abortion amid a pending overturn of Roe v. Wade.

Mayorkas, a Biden appointee and former US attorney for the Central District of California, offers little hope that any of this will change. Though he’s voiced mild disagreement with DHS’s rhetoric and tactics, activist groups have described Mayorkas’ DHS as implementing “cruel, unlawful and ineffective deterrence-based policies that extend rather than dismantle the previous administration’s approach to migration.” A glossy Washington Post profile (11/1/21), largely heedless of these concerns, informed readers that Mayorkas “leans into his days leading a team of prosecutors when wooing politicians skeptical that he will aggressively enforce America’s immigration laws.”

Overseeing Mayorkas’ new board is Nina Jankowicz, a self-described “expert on disinformation” and alum of the National Democratic Institute. At NDI, Jankowicz “managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus”—a phrase that can’t be divorced from the think tank’s soft- and hard-power funding sources.

‘A certain amount of gumption’

The New York Times (5/2/22) allowed Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to absurdly claim, “We in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens.”

When considered in concert with Mayorkas’ and the DHS’s virulent jingoism, one might start to view Jankowicz with suspicion. Mainline media, however, have instead embraced Jankowicz as a credentialed, principled and neutral authority (New York Times, 5/2/22), and defended her from the right’s vitriol. “Spare a thought for Nina Jankowicz, who has stepped up to lead this effort at the Department of Homeland Security,” Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce (4/29/22) implored. “Volunteering to be a piñata takes a certain amount of gumption.”

News media have issued some reservations about the board, but these amount to little more than process critiques, comments on semantics and light McCarthyism. Esquire’s Pierce opined:

I am concerned what this operation would look like under, say, President DeSantis, and there had to be a more deft way to roll it out than having DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just drop it into his testimony before a House committee.

The Washington Post (4/29/22) also chimed in, calling the name Disinformation Governance Board “a bit ominous; it sounds less like an effort to combat disinformation rather than to, well, govern it.” In a later piece, the Post’s editorial board (5/3/22) cautioned that the initials of the Disinformation Governance Board were the “Soviet-sounding DGB,” presumably meant to evoke the KGB.

The Post went on to assure readers that the board “could do a great deal of good” with just a bit of transparency and a few language tweaks, adding that “the reality isn’t nearly so scary” as the right suggests. But therein lies the problem: If only the right gets to weigh in on what’s “scary,” the voices of those who truly suffer will continue to go unheard.

The post Media Ignore Criticism of DHS’s New ‘Disinformation’ Board—Unless it’s from the Right appeared first on FAIR.

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

On Thursday, I appeared on Al Jazeera English to talk about the killing of the network's iconic correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh.

Despite its quickly debunked attempts to cast blame elsewhere, the evidence overwhelmingly points to Israel being responsible.

Yet Israel does not bear responsibility alone. As I told Al Jazeera, the governments now shedding crocodile tears for Abu Akleh—especially the United States, European Union countries, the United Kingdom and Canada—also have her blood on their hands.

Watch:

While they are calling for an investigation, this is a ruse aimed ultimately at guaranteeing continued Israeli impunity. They know very well that Israeli attacks on the media are nothing new.

A year ago, Israel directly attacked journalists and media organizations in Gaza. Those crimes are now barely even remembered.

And in April, the International Criminal Court received a complaint alleging war crimes against journalists by Israeli occupation forces.

It cites the "systematic targeting" of four Palestinian media workers who were "killed or maimed by Israeli snipers while covering demonstrations in Gaza," according to the International Federation of Journalists.

On Wednesday, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price claimed that "the Israelis have the wherewithal and the capabilities to conduct a thorough, comprehensive investigation."

One only has to imagine the State Department asserting that Russia is capable of a "comprehensive investigation" of alleged war crimes in Ukraine to understand how thoroughly uninterested the US is in any real accountability for Abu Akleh's killing.

The goal is to assuage public anger with empty calls for an investigation, until this latest atrocity fades from the news cycle.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Ali Abunimah.

Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s David Arkush about fossil fuels’ Federal Reserve veto for the March 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The disjuncture between what really day-to-day matters in the lives of people around the country—food, shelter, work you can live on—and what elected officials do is the stuff of political science.

We all know that the connection isn’t direct. People want healthcare, for instance. When they have to choose between their medicine and keeping the lights on, nobody is saying, “Yay, this is a choice I made that redounds overall to my benefit.”

But when it comes to media coverage, people and their needs and their problems often get subsumed into an abstract story about economic interests and industry and government and blah, blah, blah.

Journalism could provide a different connection between human needs and policy decisions, that might spur action rather than frustration. And it seems as though a failure to connect those dots is part of why a candidate for a position at the Federal Reserve, Sarah Bloom Raskin, had her nomination derailed because her record indicated that she recognized that climate disruption is real, and will have economic impacts.

So what happened here is the sausage is being made, and there’s a reason that the joke is that you don’t want to see it. But we have to see it if we want to be the democracy of, by and for the people we claim we want to be.

David Arkush is the managing director of Public Citizen’s climate program, and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, David Arkush.

David Arkush: Thanks, Janine. Thanks for having me on.

Sarah Bloom Raskin (cc photo: New America)

JJ: Let’s start at the center here. Sarah Bloom Raskin was up for Federal Reserve vice chair for supervision. She was confirmed by the White House, obviously, but by others as well. So what happened?

DA: That’s a great question. And you know, your introduction had me thinking, there’s one thing worse than seeing how the sausage gets made, and that is seeing it fail to be made up close.

This is a job—I’ll start with maybe a little background on what this role is. So the position of vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve was created after the financial crisis of 2008. When Congress passed the big bill, the Dodd/Frank Wall Street Reform Act, one of the pieces in it was creating this position at the Fed, so that there would be a high-up official at the Fed monitoring the safety of banks and monitoring the stability of the financial system, and looking out, looking at the horizon for emerging risks, and figuring out what to do about it.

Sarah Bloom Raskin—it is hard to think of a person who is better suited to that job. She’s the most qualified person in the country that I know of by far. She is a former state bank regulator. She was the supervisor of banks in Maryland and the top financial regulator in Maryland. She has already been on the board of the Federal Reserve, which, this vice chair for supervision is one of the governors on the board; she’s already been one. And she was the No. 2 person at the Treasury. So she has high-level experience.

At Treasury, she led work on cybersecurity risks to finance, so she’s actually also the nation’s leading expert on cybersecurity threats to financial institutions and to financial stability, something that would squarely be within her jurisdiction at the Federal Reserve, and something that is a really heightened concern right now, given the war between Russia and Ukraine. We are actually facing heightened cyber threats on critical infrastructure in this country, including banks and the financial system. So it’s really hard to imagine somebody who’s more qualified.

Now, one of the things that somebody who is that qualified and that expert thinks about, in the context of making sure that we have a sound economy and a sound financial system right now, is climate. It is impossible to ignore that climate harms are imposing really severe costs on a lot of sectors, and a lot of whole states, and a lot of geographies. There are insurers who are pulling out of insuring homes in large regions of California. These things have major economic impacts, and it’s also hard to ignore that there are a lot of climate-related risks to financial institutions and to financial stability.

And that is basically a consensus view among most financial regulators these days. And Sarah Bloom Raskin also agrees with that view, and was very clear that she intended not to ignore things that were related to climate, as there is often pressure to do in the United States, because of our bizarre politics and the power of the fossil fuel industry, but that she would look at those risks the same way she would look at any others, and take them on if need be, in regard to how they affect banks and how they affect finance.

David Arkush: “Oil and gas has, for a long time, pressured financial regulators, pressured bank regulators, to adopt essentially biased rules.”

JJ: Which businesses and banks should want, right? I mean, they’re reality-based organizations, as we understand them to be. So what was it about what she said, matter-of-factly, about climate disruption and its impact that was the problem?

DA: This is what’s surprising and unusual about this situation. Sarah Bloom Raskin, in addition to all the other things I have said, has already been confirmed twice by the US Senate—she wouldn’t have been on the Fed board and she wouldn’t have been the No. 2 at Treasury if she hadn’t been—twice confirmed unanimously. And this time around, she also had broad bipartisan support. She’s supported by consumer groups, by civil rights groups, by unions, by many businesses, and by banks—by big banks and small banks. It’s a really uncommon thing to find somebody who virtually everybody agrees is actually extremely expert, competent and reasonable.

There was one major group that does not agree, and that is the oil and gas industry. And not even the whole oil and gas industry. It’s interesting, having seen this fight up close: The large oil companies didn’t bother. It was small oil and gas companies who were opposed.

And it’s not hard to figure out why. If you pay attention to these issues, a lot of the smaller oil and gas companies are in pretty shaky financial condition. Some of them have never been profitable, over the 10- or 15-year history of the company. And oil and gas markets are really volatile, everybody knows this; prices go up, prices go down; and it’s really hard for them to get loans, in part because a combination of how, basically, the companies are just really risky, and all the financial institutions know it, and they have trouble getting bank loans.

And so, oil and gas has, for a long time, pressured financial regulators, pressured bank regulators, to adopt essentially biased rules that either give them, directly, special bailouts or favors, or pressure banks to lend to companies that the banks think are too risky.

And one thing that was clear about Sarah Bloom Raskin was she was not going to do that. She was going to take a measured, serious, expert approach. And she’s well within the mainstream of what any honest and competent regulator should and would do, and frankly, most do, particularly on the one side of the aisle here.

But she had said some things about recognizing the threats from climate risks to financing to banks, and her opponents just seized on that, and I think we all know what often happens in US politics if you start painting somebody as a climate radical. She very quickly lost, in the US Senate, the support of basically every Republican and Sen. Joe Manchin from West Virginia. Ultimately, that was the end of her nomination, basically on the basis of her having viewpoints that are completely mainstream and reasonable. The chair of the Fed, who is a Republican, Chair Powell, agrees with and is about to sail through his confirmation. But in her case, they were used basically to smear her and treat her like she was some kind of radical.

Joe Manchin, arguably the single biggest obstacle to Congressional action on climate, whose deep conflicts of interest rarely interest corporate journalists (FAIR.org, 7/27/21)

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, for your thoughts about media coverage, because when I looked at the coverage, I saw a reference to Bloom Raskin as “embattled.” And when you hear that word, or that kind of language, it makes it sound as though, you know, the jury was out, it was kind of 50/50, and she was on the losing side. What you’re telling me is, there was a whole lot of support and understanding, and then there was a faction that was able to whipsaw the rest. So if people are reading journalism, media coverage about this, and they want to really understand what happened, maybe “embattled” isn’t going to really tell them the story in the way that they should understand it.

So I would just ask you, finally, what would you like to see journalists doing more of or less of in terms of, not just this nomination, but in terms of the relationship between climate disruption and financial regulation?

DA: Well, that’s interesting. It is a big topic. I think that people do need to hear more about it and understand more about it. It couldn’t be more obvious; again, it’s very quickly becoming totally uniform among financial regulators to be taking it seriously, and lots of them are acting on the issue. And, frankly, a lot of the private sector is, a lot of the big banks are, a lot of the big asset managers are.

I think the coverage has been improving. Frankly, it’s a new area; a lot of people haven’t heard about the idea that there’s a connection between climate change and finance, although the moment you start talking to people about it, it’s obvious that it’s right, and there is, and that we ought to be thinking about it. And so it’s catching on very quickly.

But I think, yeah, increased awareness of that, increased awareness of the seriousness of the risks and what needs to be done. And that’s around the issue in general.

And then I think, in terms of this type of political fight, I started thinking toward the end of it that the US Senate is such a strange institution. And it’s so undemocratic. In a society that has such a long and proud tradition of democracy in so many ways, that is not one of them. And almost everything that happens there needs to be painstakingly contextualized as happening in this sort of bizarro alternate reality.

There’s a real world in which someone like Sarah Bloom Raskin is supported by basically everybody, including the banks that she’s going to regulate, and including consumer advocates and civil rights groups and unions; and then there’s the bizarro world of the US Senate, where the representation does not match the population of the United States, what they do does not match public opinion in the United States, and they operate under bizarre rules.

And, yeah, what happens there, it’s like a parallel universe. I think sometimes things that happen there get treated as if they’re real world things, or that they reflect real opinions, or that they reflect where the American people are. And I think that does some real harm, because it’s actually important for us to understand how that institution actually works, and frankly, in my view, how broken it is, and how much we need to be taking on that issue as well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Arkush; he’s managing director of Public Citizen’s climate program. They’re online at Citizen.org. David Arkush, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DA: Thank you, Janine.

The post ‘She Intended Not to Ignore Things Related to Climate, as There Is Pressure to Do’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

A Fox News story (1/27/22) that used anti-Asian hate crimes to swipe at a favorite Fox target—a progressive DA—was accompanied by a video that put Fox‘s typical anti-China spin on a space story.

In crafting a landscape rife with danger and lawlessness, Rupert Murdoch–owned outlets drew upon a spike in hate crimes—specifically anti-Asian and antisemitic hate crimes—without taking responsibility for the xenophobia they’ve consistently peddled when it benefited their political agendas.

Fox News (1/27/22) in January reported that the Asian-American victim of a 2019 attack was suing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin for mishandling his case, just one day before the San Francisco police department announced that hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were up 567% in the city in 2021 compared to the previous year. The story also mentioned a 60% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2020.

Early last month, Fox (2/2/22) reported on the arrest of a man suspected of spray painting swastikas on several Jewish schools and synagogues throughout Chicago. “The incidents came days after Holocaust Remembrance Day and as antisemitism is on the rise across the country,” the piece says. Another Fox headline (2/7/22) declared, “NYC Antisemitic Crimes Up Nearly 300% in January”; the story noted that “there were 15 hate crimes committed against Jewish people in January—a 275% increase compared to the four hate crimes recorded in January 2021.”

Meanwhile, Murdoch’s New York Post (1/21/22) published “NYC Hate-Crime Complaints Skyrocket, With Anti-Asian Attacks Up 343%.” Citing NYPD data, the article also noted that the largest portion of hate-crime complaints in the city in 2021 was for anti-Jewish incidents.

The Wall Street Journal (1/26/22), another Murdoch property, reported on an incident at a virtual meeting of National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum when a “Zoom bomber” hacked the group and projected anti-Asian images and audio onto the screen. “Major cities have reported an increase in hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans,” the article said, also citing the San Francisco and New York police department numbers.

Murdoch’s own outlets, however, often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place.

Scapegoating China

The O’Reilly Factor‘s Jesse Watters (10/3/16) pretends to perform martial arts as part of a race-baiting report from New York’s Chinatown.

The rise in anti-AAPI violence is connected to both the rise of a new cold war with Beijing and the scapegoating of China for the Covid-19 pandemic (FAIR.org, 4/8/21, 7/29/21, 8/25/21), playing upon xenophobic stereotypes of Asians as disease-carriers (Salon, 2/6/20) and as robots brainwashed by their government.

Even in the years prior to the Covid outbreak, Fox News was spreading anti-Asian—particularly anti-Chinese—sentiment. In 2016, the Fox News segment Watters’ World (10/3/16) featured Fox personality Jesse Watters conducting on-the-street “interviews” with New York City Chinatown residents, ostensibly to mock them for their lack of knowledge regarding US/China relations as discussed in the 2016 presidential debates. From the “Kung Fu Fighting” background music, to Watters asking his sources if they knew karate (a Japanese martial art) and questioning whether their watches were stolen, the piece was five straight minutes of blatant racist stereotyping thinly veiled as cheap humor.

Like bullies in the lunchroom deriding another child’s food, Murdoch’s outlets employed the stereotype of Asian cuisine being unclean as  a common—and juvenile—trope to scapegoat the Chinese for Covid. Watters’ anti-Chinese racism predictably ramped up at the start of the outbreak in 2020, when on Fox’s The Five (3/2/20), Watters asked for a “formal apology” from “the Chinese,” insisting Covid originated in China “because they have these markets where they are eating raw bats and snakes.” He linked the disgust such stories evoke to a red-baiting agenda:

They are a very hungry people. The Chinese Communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked. It’s unsafe, and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated.

The New York Post (1/23/20) misidentifies a gross-out video as being taken “amid [the] coronavirus outbreak.”

The Wall Street Journal that condemned the rise in anti-AAPI hate crimes is the same paper that on multiple occasions has itself conflated Covid with China. In 2020, the Journal called China “the real sick man of Asia” (2/3/20), used what it called “the Communist coronavirus” to criticize China’s government (1/29/20), referred to the virus as the “Wuhan Coronavirus” (1/29/20) and falsely accused the Chinese government of stalling investigations into the evidence-free Wuhan lab leak theory (2/12/21, 5/23/21).

Normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric

Murdoch’s outlets have also played a significant role in normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric, despite their eager conflation of any criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. In 2012, Murdoch himself tweeted about purported irony of the “Jewish-owned press” being (in his mind) anti-Israel, evoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that an elite Jewish cabal controls media (Extra!, 9–10/96).

Fox News blames the left and Palestinian solidarity for a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes. “US Seeing Wave of ‘Textbook Antisemitism’ Amid Israel/Gaza Tensions,” warned one Fox headline (5/21/21). “The incidents fly in the face of those trying to distinguish between anti-Israel and antisemitic bromides,” the piece said.

Right-wing talkshow host Dennis Prager told Fox News (5/21/21) that the “Middle East dispute” is because “a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state.”

Conservative radio host Dennis Prager joined Fox News Primetime  (5/21/21) to discuss the rise in attacks:

This is not what the left wants you to believe. They want you to believe it’s over land. No, it’s not. There is a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state beginning with, of course, Iran. That is why if you look at the rhetoric, it’s always “F the Jews,” “F the Jews” in all of these attacks. It’s never “F the Israelis.” It’s always “F the Jews.”

But attributing a rise in antisemitic hate crimes mainly to left-wing anti-Zionism is more politically useful than substantiated. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggests the majority of antisemitic attacks come from white supremacist groups.

ADL’s most recent numbers are from 2019, during which there were 2,107 recorded attacks. There were 171 incidents in which attackers mentioned Israel or Zionism, and 68 of those were propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups (ADL, 2019). Out of 270 incidents carried out by known extremist groups, two-thirds of those groups were white supremacist.

Certainly, antisemitism does appear on the left as well as the right, and there are activists who shout “Free Palestine” and “Death to Jews” in the same breath, and use the word “Zionism” not as the name of an ideology but as a codeword for Jewishness. But Murdoch outlets consistently blur the line between criticizing Israel, or supporting Palestinian rights, and antisemitism. When Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid wore a necklace with the word “Palestine” on it, Fox (1/16/22) reported the model was accused of “perpetuating antisemitic tropes”—referring to a tweet Hadid had posted condemning “Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid over the Palestinian people.”

‘A complicated web’

Fox News (12/14/21) took down a cartoon depicting George Soros as “the puppet master” behind progressive DAs and attorneys general after complaints that such imagery “contributes to the normalization of antisemitism.”

Murdoch outlets stop short of condemning antisemitism when it benefits their anti–police reform agendas. Blaming Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for the election of progressive “soft on crime” district attorneys throughout the country, they evoked images of a wealthy Jewish cabal pulling strings behind the scenes (FAIR.org, 1/14/22). “Soros Funnels Cash Through a Complicated Web,” explained a New York Post piece (12/16/21).

In late 2021, Fox removed a Soros “puppet master” cartoon from its social media after being called out for evoking antisemitic imagery (Ha’aretz, 12/16/21; FAIR.org 1/14/22).

Fox star Tucker Carlson has also accused Soros of “waging a kind of war—political, social and demographic war—on the West,” in his recent documentary, Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization (Fox News, 1/26/22).

In an interview with Watters about the documentary, Carlson said Soros is seeking to create a society that is “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive” (Fox News, 1/25/22).

This anti-Soros rhetoric sounds eerily similar to that of Robert Bower, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting suspect who allegedly killed 11 people during Shabbat services in 2018. Bower (Washington Post, 10/28/18) once tweeted:

Jews are waging a propaganda war against Western civilization and it is so effective that we are headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.

Also a target of the “puppet master” trope: Michael Bloomberg. In 2020, Fox News anchor Raymond Arroyo described the billionaire and former New York City mayor, who is Jewish, as a “Biden puppet master” (Fox News, 3/5/20).  The comments sparked backlash from the ADL, which contended that the use of the trope, even unintentionally, played a role in mainstreaming antisemitism.

‘Jews will not replace us’

Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/21/21)  said Democrats want “to change the racial mix of the country”: “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries” (Media Matters, 9/23/21).

In October, Jewish groups condemned Carlson’s defense of  “Replacement Theory” (Daily Beast, 4/9/21)—the idea that immigrants and people of color are entering the US to reduce the political power of white Americans (Media Matters for America, 4/8/21; FAIR.org, 10/20/21). The theory is linked to antisemitism because it’s often claimed an elite Jewish cabal is leading the replacement. A popular conspiracy theory in 2018 claimed Soros himself was organizing the caravan of Central American migrants to the US border (Washington Post, 10/28/18).

Among Carlson’s fan-base are a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where “Jews will not replace us” was a prominent chant. Facing a lawsuit for taking part in the deadly demonstration while serving time in prison for an unrelated crime, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell reportedly watched Carlson with other white supremacists to prepare for the trial, according to a former inmate (BuzzFeed News, 10/28/21). Cantwell also mentioned Carlson in court documents, saying his trial was intended to silence white supremacists and those who agree with them, “even on peripheral issues.” He went on:

This is evidenced by the president of the United States, and the second most popular show in cable news (Tucker Carlson) being branded as “white nationalists” on account of sharing a small number of our views on the pressing issues of our time.

Neither Carlson nor Fox  has commented on the neo-Nazi endorsement of the show.

Carlson has also downplayed the January 6 insurrection, whose participants included Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, asserting that it was not an act of terrorism (Fox News, 1/7/22). On hand for what Carlson (7/7/21) described as a “fake” insurrection “where elderly people showed up with signs on the Capitol” were Tim Gionet, a livestreamer known as Baked Alaska who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories online; the Nationalist Social Club neo-Nazi group; a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt; and another wearing a shirt reading “6MWE,” which stands for “6 million wasn’t enough.”

In 2021, Fox News commentator Lara Logan faced condemnation from Jewish advocacy groups for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly pseudoscientific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners (Fox News, 11/30/21). “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline,” tweeted the Auschwitz Museum in response. Neither Fox nor Logan apologized; in fact, Logan retweeted a defense of her comments.

The answer? More police

As FAIR (FAIR.org, 6/24/21; CounterSpin, 10/7/21) has reported in the past, using an uptick in certain crime categories to stoke fear  of street crime allows corporate outlets to push a pro-police agenda, while blaming social justice, anti-police violence movements for crime.

In early February, Fox News (2/3/22) reported on President Joe Biden’s visit to New York City and rejection of calls to defund the police, citing the city’s rise in crimes, including hate crimes:

Hate crimes also surged 72% in New York City last month, driven mostly by a 275% increase in crimes against Jewish people.

It’s a trend that started last year, as hate crimes rose 96% in 2021 .

Framing the primary problem as crime and not hate allows hiring more police to be presented as the solution. And hate-mongering outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal don’t have to address their own antisemitism and anti-Asian racism.

The post Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

Like the many similar movements against vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions around the world, New Zealand’s protests have expressed a unifying concern with personal freedoms.

One of the highest-profile groups at the occupation of Parliament grounds in Wellington was “Voices for Freedom”. The occupation itself began with a “freedom convoy”, and many of the signs and placards around the makeshift camp made “freedom” their focus.

And while that particular protest ended in chaos, it seems likely the various movements behind it will continue to make “freedom” their rallying cry.

• READ MORE: What are the rights of children at the parliament protest – and who protects them?
• What the ‘freedom convoy’ reveals about the ties among politics, police and the law
• Vaccine mandates for NZ’s health and education workers are now in force – but has the law got the balance right?

The extent to which personal freedoms are limited as part of living in a functioning society is ultimately a moral concern about the role of government. But this also requires a clear understanding of the nature of freedom in the first place, and what it means to be a free person in a free society.

At the heart of this lies the distinction between a narrow conception of freedom known as “negative liberty” and the wider concept of “positive liberty”.

The former, seemingly preferred by the protesters, implies a freedom from imposed restrictions on people’s behaviour — such as lockdowns and vaccine passes or mandates.

The counter-argument is that reasonable restrictions, if justified to prevent significant harm from covid-19, actually increase overall freedom. In that sense, the freedom to behave in certain ways becomes a “positive liberty”.

Understanding liberty
Drawing on a long intellectual tradition, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin defined the two forms of liberty in an influential 1958 lecture at Oxford University.

Negative liberty, he said, means the absence of external obstacles or constraints, such as coercive interference by governments.

By contrast, positive liberty means the ability to do the things you want to do. It is associated with self-realisation or self-determination — being in control of one’s own destiny. The protest slogan “my body, my choice”, for instance, is an appeal to individual negative liberty — freedom from mandates and restrictions.

But it’s not possible to simultaneously maximise both negative and positive liberty. There are inevitably trade-offs. If the protesters had their way, New Zealanders would have more negative liberty but less positive liberty.

Overall, we argue, people would be less free.

Nearly all laws restrict negative liberty, but their effect on positive liberty varies dramatically. For example, laws prohibiting theft restrict negative liberty — they restrict people’s freedom to steal with impunity.

But do such restrictions make you feel un-free? Quite the contrary, laws against theft increase positive liberty. They allow us to feel more secure, and because we don’t have to keep a constant eye on our property, we can do other things.

Justified limits on liberty
Thinking of freedom only through a lens of negative liberty involves a critical problem — it ignores the fact that our actions affect other people: the freedom to drink and drive restricts other people’s ability to use the streets safely; the freedom to smoke in public places exposes others to the potential harms of secondhand fumes.

In general, the choices we make — even concerning our own bodies and what we choose to consume — have moral implications for how and where we can participate in society. Giving people freedom to visit certain places while unvaccinated against covid-19 restricts other people’s ability to visit those places safely.

Vaccinated New Zealanders currently enjoy high levels of positive liberty. Life is nearly normal. Crucially, though, this freedom depends on policies designed to reduce the threat of the disease — high rates of vaccination, vaccine certificates and mandates for certain key roles, masks and temporary restrictions on large gatherings to reduce the spread.

Such policies constitute a slight loss of negative liberty. Without these policies, however, positive liberty would be much reduced. New Zealanders could not visit places like gyms, pools, restaurants and shops without fear of catching a potentially deadly disease.

New Zealand has enjoyed more freedom over the past two years than nearly anywhere else, but it has only been possible through restrictions on negative liberty to reduce the risk of covid-19.

Restriction and risk
Isaiah Berlin was rightly concerned about the potential slippery slope towards totalitarian control inherent in appeals to positive freedom, as witnessed in the Soviet Union where severe restrictions on speech, movement, assembly, literary expression and much else were imposed in the name of “freedom” (namely the freedom to be a good Soviet).

But slippery slopes can be resisted and the risk here seems slight. For covid policies that restrict negative liberty to enhance overall freedom, they must be necessary to promote positive liberty, responsive to the evidence, and proportional to the threat.

One sign we are not on a slippery slope to totalitarianism: covid restrictions change with, and are proportional to, the risk.

Last year, when New Zealand had zero covid-19 cases, lockdowns ended and restrictions were few; when the threat increased, restrictions did, proportionally.

Restrictions on negative liberty should be adopted with care and subject to continual review. All citizens, protesters included, are right to value freedom and to be wary of heavy-handed, top-down control.

But that is not the same as calling for an end to covid-19 rules because such rules limit freedom. A clearer understanding of positive liberty allows us to see that restrictions designed to protect us from covid-19 actually enhance our overall freedom.

Dr Andrew Vonasch is a senior lecturer in psychology, University of Canterbury and Dr Michael-John Turp is a senior lecturer in philosophy, University of Canterbury. 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 APR editor.