Police raided the Istanbul offices of LeMan Monday evening and detained the staff members after the publication of what officials claimed was a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, a depiction that is forbidden in the Muslim world. At the same time, a mob laid siege to the building and the surrounding area in Beyoğlu District, chanting pro-shariah law slogans. 

Istanbul prosecutors are investigating six people from the LeMan staff for “publicly demeaning religious values.” Four of the staffers are in custody and two others are wanted but are reportedly not in the country. 

The cartoon, published in the latest edition of the weekly, depicts two men with wings on their backs meeting over the skies of a city being bombed. They greet each other by saying “Assalamu alaikum, I’m Muhammad,” and “Aleichem shalom, I’m Moses,” as they shake hands. LeMan said on X that the man in the cartoon is not the prophet but instead a Muslim man named Muhammad. 

“Turkish authorities shouldn’t fan the flames of religious backlash over a cartoon that LeMan magazine said was not portraying the Islamic prophet,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “The authorities should release the four LeMan staff in custody, cancel the warrants for those abroad, and focus on ensuring their safety.”

Prior depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons have led to lethal violence and death threats against journalists.

The detained include Doğan Pehlivan, the cartoonist; Cebrail Okçu, graphic designer; Zafer Aknar, news editor; and Ali Yavuz, institutional manager. Tuncay Akgün, the chief editor and publisher, and news editor Aslan Özdemir were also wanted by the authorities. 

Turkish authorities banned the distribution of the latest edition of LeMan and ordered copies to be pulled from newsstands. A court ordered that LeMan’s website and X account be blocked within Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkey’s cabinet members welcomed the operation in public comments. Some opposition leaders also criticized the cartoon. 

CPJ’s emailed request for comment from the chief prosecutor’s office in Istanbul did not receive a reply.

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

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

The editorial boards of the nation’s major media organizations must have been frantic last week.

Used to reporting on US foreign policy, wars and arms exports so as to portray the United States as a benevolent, law-abiding and democracy-defending nation, they were confronted on March 25 with a real challenge dealing with Israel and Gaza. No sooner did the Biden administration, for the first time, abstain and thus allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that was not just critical of Israel, but demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, than US officials began declaring that the resolution that they allowed to pass was really meaningless.

It was “nonbinding,” they said.

The New York Times (3/25/24) reported that US’s UN Ambassdor “Thomas-Greenfield called the resolution ‘nonbinding’”—and let no one contradict her.

That was enough for the New York Times (3/25/24), which produced the most one-sided report on the decision. That article focused initially on how Resolution 2728 (which followed three resolutions that the US had vetoed, and a fourth that was so watered down that China and Russia vetoed it instead) had led to a diplomatic dust-up with the Israeli government: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a planned visit to Washington by a high-level Israeli delegation to discuss Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah and the future of Gaza and the West Bank.

The Times quoted Richard Gowan, a UN expert at the International Crisis Group: “The abstention is a not-too-coded hint to Netanyahu to rein in operations, above all over Rafah.”

Noting that “Security Council resolutions are considered to be international law,” Times reporters Farnaz Fassihi, Aaron Boxerman and Thomas Fuller wrote, “While the Council has no means of enforcing the resolution, it could impose punitive measures, such as sanctions, on Israel, so long as member states agreed.”

This was nevertheless followed by a quote from Washington’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who abstained from the otherwise unanimous 14–0 vote of the rest of the Security Council, characterizing the resolution as “nonbinding.”

The Times offered no comment from any international law scholars, foreign or US, to rebut or even discuss that claim. Such an expert might have pointed to the unequivocal language of Article 25 of the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

If the US offered its claim that this language only applies to resolutions explicitly referencing the UN Charter’s Chapter VII, dealing with “threats to the peace,” an international law expert (EJIL: Talk!, 1/9/17) might note that the International Court of Justice stated in 1971, “It is not possible to find in the Charter any support for this view.”

‘Creates obligations’

The Washington Post (3/26/24) quoted an international law expert to note that the resolution “creates obligations for Israel and Hamas.”

The Washington Post (3/26/24), though like the Times a firm defender of Washington’s foreign policy consensus, did marginally better. While the Times didn’t mention Britain or France, both major US NATO allies, in its piece on the Security Council vote, the Post noted that the four other veto powers—Britain and France, as well as China and Russia—had all voted in favor of the resolution, along with all 10 elected temporary members of the Council.

The Post also cited one international law legal expert, Donald Rothwell, of the Australian National University, who said the “even-handed” resolution “creates obligations for Israel and Hamas.”

While that quote sounds like the resolution is binding, the Post went on to cite Gowan as saying, “I think it’s pretty clear that if Israel does not comply with the resolution, the Biden administration is not going to allow the Security Council members to impose sanctions or other penalties on Israel.”

The Post (3/25/24) actually ran a stronger, more straightforward piece a day earlier, when it covered the initial vote using an AP story. AP did a fairer job discussing the fraught issue of whether or not the resolution was binding on the warring parties, Israel and Hamas (as well as the nations arming them).

That earlier AP piece, by journalist Edith M. Lederer, quoted US National Security spokesperson John Kirby as explaining that they decided not to veto the resolution because it “does fairly reflect our view that a ceasefire and the release of hostages come together.”

Because of the cutbacks to in-house reporting on national and international news  in most of the nation’s major news organizations, most Americans who get their news from television and their local papers end up getting dispatches—often edited for space—from the New York Times, Washington Post or AP wire stories. (The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran the same AP report as the Post.)

‘A demand is a decision’

CNN (3/27/24) quoted US officials claiming the resolution was nonbinding—and noted that “international legal scholars” disagree.

In TV news, CNN (3/27/24) had some of the strongest reporting on the debate over whether the resolution was binding. The news channel said straight out, “While the UN says the latest resolution is nonbinding, experts differ on whether that is the case.”

It went on to say:

After the resolution passed, US officials went to great lengths to say that the resolution isn’t binding. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller repeatedly said during a news conference that the resolution is nonbinding, before conceding that the technical details of are for international lawyers to determine. Similarly, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby and US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield separately insisted that the resolution is nonbinding.

Those US positions were challenged by China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun, who “countered that such resolutions are indeed binding,” and by UN spokesperson Farhan Haq, who said Security Council resolutions are international law, and “so to that extent they are as binding as international law is.”

CNN quoted Maya Ungar, another International Crisis Group analyst:

The US—ascribing to a legal tradition that takes a narrower interpretation—argues that without the use of the word “decides” or evocation of Chapter VII within the text, the resolution is nonbinding…. Other member states and international legal scholars are arguing that there is legal precedence to the idea that a demand is implicitly a decision of the Council.

‘A rhetorical feint’

According to the Guardian (3/26/24), the US’s “nonbinding” interpretation “put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself.”

To get a sense of how one-sided or at best cautious the US domestic coverage of this critically urgent story is, consider how it was covered in Britain or Spain, two US allies in NATO.

The British Guardian (3/26/24), which also publishes a US edition, ran with the headline: “Biden Administration’s Gaza Strategy Panned as ‘Mess’ Amid Clashing Goals.” The story began:

The Biden administration’s policy on Gaza has been widely criticized as being in disarray as the defense secretary described the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe” the day after the State Department declared Israel to be in compliance with international humanitarian law.

Washington was also on the defensive on Tuesday over its claim that a UN security Council ceasefire resolution on which it abstained was nonbinding, an interpretation that put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself.

But the real contrast is with the Spanish newspaper El País (3/29/24), which bluntly headlined its story “US Sparks Controversy at the UN With Claim That Gaza Ceasefire Resolution Is ‘Nonbinding.’” Not mincing words, the reporters wrote:

By abstaining in the vote on the UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the United States on Monday sparked not only the anger of Israel, which had asked it to veto the text, but also a sweeping legal and diplomatic controversy due to its claims that the resolution—the first to be passed since the start of the Gaza war—was “nonbinding.” For Washington, it was a rhetorical feint aimed at making the public blow to its great ally in the Middle East less obvious.

El País (3/29/24) quoted the relevant language from the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

After quoting Thompson-Greenfield saying it was a “nonbinding resolution,” and Kirby saying dismissively, “There is no impact at all on Israel,” they wrote,

These claims hit the UN Security Council—the highest executive body of the UN in charge of ensuring world peace and security—like a torpedo. Were the Council’s resolutions binding or not? Our was it that some resolutions were binding and others were not?

The reporters answered their own rhetorical question:

Diplomatic representatives and legal experts came out in force to refute Washington’s claim. UN Secretary-General António Guterres made his opinion clear: the resolutions are binding. Indeed, this is stated in Article 25 of the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.” Several representatives of the Security Council, led by Mozambique and Sierra Leone, pointed to case law to support this argument. The two African diplomats, both with legal training, said that the Gaza ceasefire resolution is binding, regardless of whether one of the five permanent members of the Council abstains from the vote, as was the case of the US. The diplomats highlighted that in 1971, the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) established that all resolutions of the UN Security Council are legally binding. The Algerian ambassador to the UN summed it up even more categorically: “Security Council resolutions are binding. Not almost, not partly, not maybe.”

Unlike most most US news organizations, El País went to an expert, in this instance seeking out Adil Haque, a professor of international law at Rutgers University, where he is a professor, and also executive editor of the law journal Just Security. Haque, they wrote, “has no doubts that the resolution is binding.” He explains in the article:

According to the UN Charter, all decisions of the Security Council are binding on all member states. The International Court of Justice has ruled that a resolution need not mention Chapter VII of the Charter [action in case of threats to the peace, breaches of the peace or acts of aggression], refer to international peace and security, or use the word “decides” to make it binding. Any resolution that uses “mandatory language” creates obligations, and that includes the term “demands” used in the resolution on Gaza.” He adds, “For now, it does not seem that the US has a coherent legal argument.”

It should be noted that the New York Times, when there is a dispute regarding a document, typically runs a copy of the document in question—or, if it is too long, the relevant portion of it. In the case of Resolution 2728, which even counting its headline only runs 263 words, that would have not been a hard call. Despite the disagreement between the US and most of the Council over the wording of the ceasefire resolution, the Times chose not to run or even excerpt it.

The post UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

Meta, the giant social media corporation, has “unpublished” Green Left’s longstanding Facebook page, which had tens of thousands of followers.

We had been regularly posting stories, videos and photographs on the page from our consistent reporting of the news and views that seldom get into the mainstream media.

But our recent interviews with veteran Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled have resulted in what appears to be a 10-year ban, imposed without warning, nor an avenue of appeal.

• READ MORE:  Meta’s broken promises — systemic censorship of Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook
• Leila Khaled on the Kurdish struggle
• Facebook censorship on West Papua – then deafening silence — David Robie

Khaled, 79, is a member of the Palestinian Council (Palestine’s parliament) and a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She lives in political exile in Jordan.

She is recognised as the Che Guevara of Palestine; she has enormous respect from Palestinians and millions of progressive people around the world.

The Facebook banning came shortly after Zionist organisations combined with right-wing media (SkyNews and the Murdoch media) to pressure Labor to say it would prevent Khaled from addressing Ecosocialism 2024 — a conference GL is co-hosting in Boorloo/Perth in June — by not only denying her a visa, but even banning her from speaking by video link.

Multiple visits
As GL reported, the excuse for such political censorship is, as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry alleged in its letter to Labor, that allowing Khaled to speak “would be likely to have the effect of inciting, promoting or advocating terrorism”.

This is nonsense.

Khaled has visited Britain on multiple occasions over the past few years. Israel issued her a visa to visit the West Bank in 1996.

She has visited Sweden and South Africa and, on one of her multiple visits, met Nelson Mandela (once also labelled a “terrorist” by the West), who warmly welcomed her.

A growing number of human rights activists, academics, journalists and community leaders have protested against this blatant political censorship. Their statements are here and we urge you to join in by sending us a short statement.

Khaled told GL the real reason for this censorship is to “make us shut up about what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank today”.

Meta has been exposed for carrying out “systematic online censorship”, particularly of Palestinian voices.

Suppression of content
In December 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented “over 1050 takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses”.

Meta did not apply the same censorship to pro-Zionist posts that incited hate and violence against Palestinians.

HRW noted that “of the 1050 cases reviewed for this report, 1049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel”.

Other studies have described the systematic “shadow banning” of pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram.

AccessNow, which defends the “digital rights of people and communities at risk” reports that Meta is “systematically silencing the voices of both Palestinians and those advocating for Palestinians’ rights” through arbitrary content removals, suspension of prominent Palestinian and Palestine-related accounts, restrictions on pro-Palestinian users and content, shadow-banning, discriminatory content moderation policies, inconsistent and discriminatory rule enforcement.

Social media corporations, such as Meta and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), exercise a lot of power to manipulate people’s social and political views. This power has grown exponentially as more people access their news, views and information online.

Break this power
The search for ways to break this power will go on.

In the meantime there is one way readers can break the social media bans and restrictions on GL’s voice-for-the-resistance journalism: become a supporter and get GL delivered to you.

It has always been a struggle to keep people-power media projects alive. But GL has been going since 1991 and, with your help, we will not let the giant social media corporations silence us.

Republished with permission from Green Left.

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

Council member Peggy Lindsey of Ouray County, Colorado, mailed a threatening note to the Ouray County Plaindealer mid-March 2024, several weeks after the paper published a story detailing her texts about a high-profile sexual assault case.

“What comes around goes around, and you haven’t seen yours yet, but it is coming,” Lindsey wrote in the note from a personalized notepad. “May your days be numbered.”

The story, written by Plaindealer co-Publisher Mike Wiggins, reported on city officials’ responses to the sexual assault, which allegedly occurred inside the home of the Ouray County police chief.

The note is the latest in an ongoing saga following the Plaindealer’s coverage of the case. On Jan. 18, 2024, a Colorado resident stole more than 200 copies of the paper after it published its first article on the allegations.

In an account of the most recent incident, the paper wrote that for his Feb. 21 story, Wiggins filed an open records request for communications by officials, including about the police chief before he was placed on paid administrative leave.

The records Wiggins obtained revealed that Lindsey first sent the chief a text message following the allegations, in which she wrote, “And this 2 shall pass. I’ve been in the hot seat many times for many reasons. You will be ok.”

She then texted a friend questioning the chief’s ability to keep his job, writing “I doubt you’ll ever see him in uniform again. … It’s too small of a town to overcome this, I think.”

Wiggins later wrote in a thread on X, formerly Twitter, that Lindsey had reached out to him before the records request was fulfilled, and asked him not to include the conversation with her friend, saying that it was a private conversation.

“The text concerned public business and therefore was a matter of public record,” Wiggins said in a tweet. “The city wouldn’t have provided it to us otherwise. Lindsey was angry and said she would pull her advertising, which she did.”

Plaindealer co-Publisher Erin McIntyre, in her explanation to readers, wrote, “Our job requires us to act independently. That means when someone threatens us to try to affect the outcome of our reporting and prevent a story from being published, we need to move forward and do the job, because the priority is the public’s right to know. No matter how uncomfortable that may be sometimes, especially in a small community, it’s what we’re charged to do.”

McIntyre and Wiggins were not able to comment at the time of publication.

Lindsey declined to answer questions about the note.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Since October, the Israeli press has uncovered damning evidence showing that an untold number of the Israeli victims during the October 7 Hamas attack were in fact killed by the IDF response.

While it is indisputable that the Hamas-led attackers were responsible for many Israeli civilian deaths that day, reports from Israel indicate that the IDF in multiple cases fired on and killed Israeli civilians. It’s an important issue that demands greater transparency—both in terms of the questions it raises about IDF policy, and in terms of the black-and-white narrative Israel has advanced about what happened on October 7, used to justify its ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.

Indeed, IDF responsibility for Israeli deaths has been a repeated topic of discussion in the Israeli press, accompanied by demands for investigations. But the most US readers have gotten from their own press about the issue is a dismissive piece from the Washington Post about October 7 “truthers.”

Implementing the Hannibal Directive?

Israel’s Haaretz (12/13/23) is willing to raise questions that seem to be taboo in the US press.

In the wake of October 7, after Israel began its genocidal campaign against Gaza, reports began to emerge from the Israeli press of incidents in which Israeli troops made decisions to fire on Hamas targets regardless of whether Israeli civilians were present.

That the IDF’s initial reaction was chaotic at best is well-documented. Much of the early military response came from the air, with little information for pilots and drone operators to distinguish targets but orders to shoot anyway (Grayzone, 10/27/23). Citing a police source, Haaretz (11/18/23) reported that at the Supernova music festival site, “an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants.” But there are also mainstream Israeli media reports that credibly suggest the IDF may have implemented a policy to sacrifice Israeli hostages.

Supernova music festival attendee Yasmin Porat had escaped the festival on foot to the nearby village of Be’eri, only to be held hostage in a home with 13 others. One of the captors surrendered and released Porat to IDF troops outside. She described how, after a prolonged standoff, Israeli tank fire demolished that home and killed all but one of the remaining Israeli hostages. Her account was verified by the other surviving hostage (Electronic Intifada, 10/16/23; Haaretz, 12/13/23). One of the Israeli victims was a child who had been held up as an example of Hamas’s brutality (Grayzone, 11/25/23).

Electronic Intifada (1/20/24) quoted the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth (1/12/24) as saying that Israel “instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly.”

Yedioth Ahronoth (1/12/24; translated into English by Electronic Intifada, 1/20/24)—one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers—published a bombshell piece that put these revelations in context. The paper reported that the IDF instructed its members

to stop “at any cost” any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to that of the original Hannibal Directive, despite repeated promises by the defense apparatus that the directive had been canceled.

The Hannibal Directive—named for the Carthaginian general who allegedly ingested poison rather than be captured by his enemies—is the once-secret doctrine meant to prevent at all costs the taking of IDF soldiers as hostages, even at the risk of harming the soldier (Haaretz, 11/1/11). It was supposedly revoked in 2016, and was ostensibly never meant to be applied to civilians (Haaretz, 1/17/24).

Yedioth Ahronoth reported:

It is not clear at this stage how many of the captives were killed due to the operation of this order on October 7. During the week after Black Sabbath [i.e., October 7] and at the initiative of Southern Command, soldiers from elite units examined some 70 vehicles that had remained in the area between the Gaza Envelope settlements and the Gaza Strip. These were vehicles that did not reach Gaza because on their way they had been hit by fire from a helicopter gunship, a UAV or a tank, and at least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed.

Reports that the IDF gave orders to disregard the lives of Israeli captives have caused great consternation in Israel (Haaretz, 12/13/23). An author of the IDF ethics code called it “unlawful, unethical, horrifying” (Haaretz, 1/17/23). Yet any mention of the reports, or the debates they have inspired in Israel, seems to be virtually taboo in the mainstream US media.

The only mention of “Hannibal directive” FAIR could find in a major US newspaper the since October 7 came in a New York Post article (12/18/23) paraphrasing a released hostage who

claimed that Hamas told them the Israel Defense Forces would employ the infamous “Hannibal Directive” on civilians, a revoked protocol that once allegedly called on troops to prioritize taking out terrorists even if it meant killing a kidnapped soldier.

‘A general’s dilemma’

Readers had to read 150 paragraphs into this New York Times piece (12/22/23) before they came to the stunning revelation that an Israeli general ordered an assault on a house full of hostages “even at the cost of civilian casualties.”

A version of Supernova attendee Porat’s account was related a few days later in the New York Times (12/22/23), which published a lengthy investigative report piecing together what happened across the village of Be’eri. That report included a section about the standoff at the house where Porat was held, under the subhead “A General’s Dilemma.” It did not mention Porat’s prior revelations in Israeli media and the controversy they had caused.

The piece described how

the captors had forced roughly half of the hostages, including the Dagans, into Ms. Cohen’s backyard. They positioned the hostages between the troops and the house, according to Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat.

After more than an hour of gunfire between the IDF and the gunmen, Ms. Dagan reported seeing at least two hostages in the backyard “killed in the gunfire. It wasn’t clear who killed them, she said.”

The article continued:

As the dusk approached, the SWAT commander and General [Barak] Hiram began to argue. The SWAT commander thought more kidnappers might surrender. The general wanted the situation resolved by nightfall.

Minutes later, the militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the general and other witnesses who spoke to the Times.

”The negotiations are over,” General Hiram recalled telling the tank commander. ”Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”

The tank fired two light shells at the house.

Shrapnel from the second shell hit Mr. Dagan in the neck, severing an artery and killing him, his wife said.

During the melee, the kidnappers were also killed.

Only two of the 14 hostages—Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat—survived.

It’s a shocking order; it’s also shocking that the Times offered no comment about the order. After the revelation caused a firestorm in Israel, including demands for an immediate investigation by family of those killed in the incident, the Times (12/27/23) published a followup about how General Hiram’s quote “stirred debate,” including multiple quotes from the general’s defenders.

Ignoring the context

The New York Times (1/5/24) neglected to mention its earlier report about the IDF being willing to sacrifice civilians.

There was another rare mention of Israeli friendly fire in New York Times (1/5/24), reporting on Palestinian Jerusalem resident Soheib Abu Amar, who was also held hostage and ultimately killed in the house Porat escaped from. Bizarrely, it did not mention the controversy over Hiram’s order.

Under the headline, “A Palestinian Man Vanished October 7. His Family Wants to Know Who Killed Him,” the Times traced Abu Amar’s disappearance that day, which began as a bus driver for partygoers at the music festival. Describing his final moments, the Times wrote that “Israeli security forces engaged in an intense battle with Hamas terrorists at the home” in which nearly “all of the hostages were killed.” It later mentioned that “families of the hostages…want an investigation to begin immediately,” but made no mention of Hiram’s order.

None of these Times articles put the Be’eri incident in the context of the Israeli press reports of other “friendly fire” incidents, and no other Times reporting has mentioned them, either, leaving the impression that the Hiram order was an isolated incident.

This is especially remarkable, given that one of the reporters on the Yedioth Ahronoth story, Ronen Bergenen, is also a New York Times contributor, and shared the byline on the Times‘ Be’eri investigation. His Yedioth Ahronoth revelations have yet to be mentioned in the Times, or elsewhere in US corporate media.

‘A small but growing group’

The Washington Post (1/21/24) conflates random cranks who claim that the October 7 attack was “staged by the Israeli military” with independent journalists who report on Israeli media exposés of friendly fire deaths—and associates both with Holocaust denial.

Meanwhile, the first time the Washington Post (1/21/24) made any mention of the controversies, it did so indirectly, and only to dismiss them by conflating them with conspiracy theories. Under the headline “Growing October 7 ‘Truther’ Groups Say Hamas Massacre Was a False Flag,” Post “Silicon Valley correspondent” Elizabeth Dwoskin attacked “truthers” who question the Israeli narrative of October 7, equating them with Holocaust deniers.

The Post’s first subject was a woman named Mirela Monte, who subscribed to a Telegram channel called Uncensored Truths. This convinced her that October 7 was a “’false flag’ staged by the Israelis—likely with help from the Americans—to justify genocide in Gaza.” The Post reported that the channel had nearly 3,000 subscribers, but despite this relatively miniscule reach, still used it as its lead example of dangerous misinformation.

Another target was an anonymous poster on the niche subreddit r/LateStageCapitalism, who claimed that “the Hamas attack was a false flag for Israel to occupy Gaza and kill Palestinians.” Though this is an internet forum largely consisting of memes, the Post described the subreddit as “a community of left-wing activists.”

These were held up as examples of a “small but growing group” that “denies the basic facts of the attacks,” pushes “falsehoods” and “misleading narratives” that “minimize the violence or dispute its origins.” The Post cited a seemingly random woman at a protest who claimed that “Israel murdered their own people on October 7”—linking her to “some in the crowd” who allegedly shouted “antisemitism isn’t real.”

But the Post avoided any attempt to address the empirical question of whether Israel killed any of its own on October 7. Dwoskin’s only reference to the reports from Israel come in a paragraph meant to downplay that question:

Israeli citizens have accused the country’s military of accidentally killing Israeli civilians while battling Hamas on October 7; the army has said it will investigate.

Dwoskin’s framing suggests these are minor concerns that are being appropriately dealt with. But those accusations are not of accidental killings, but of deliberate choices to treat Israeli civilians as expendable. And an internal army investigation is not the same as an independent investigation.

Moreover, the IDF only agreed to investigate the Be’eri incident, not the question of whether the Hannibal Directive was issued—and only after press scrutiny and public pressure, demonstrating the importance of having journalists willing to challenge those in power rather than covering up for them, as Dwoskin’s article did.

Attacking independent journalism

The Washington Post (1/21/24) falsely claimed that Grayzone “suggest[ed] that most Israeli deaths were caused by friendly fire, not Hamas,” because the outlet’s actual claim—that “the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen”—could not be refuted.

Electronic Intifada and the Grayzone are among the few outlets that have exposed English-language audiences to the reporting from Israel about the IDF’s attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7. To criticize Grayzone‘s reporting (10/27/23), the Post cited the director of “an Israeli watchdog organization dedicated to fighting disinformation,” who said that Grayzone “distorts” a helicopter pilot’s account of having trouble “distinguishing between civilians and Hamas.”

On the word “distorts,” Dwoskin hyperlinked to a Haaretz op-ed (11/27/23) attacking Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal’s reporting. That piece accused him misusing ellipses when he quoted the pilot from the Ynet piece who said there was “tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian.”

Haaretz complained that Blumenthal’s ellipses left out a statement from the pilot: “A decision was made that the first mission of the combat helicopters and the armed drones was to stop the flow of terrorists and the murderous mob that poured into Israeli territory through the gaps in the fence.” Blumenthal, the paper complained, ignored that “the pilots were assigned a different task: stopping the terrorists flowing in from Gaza,” and that there was “no ambiguity in this task.”

However, this is entirely consistent with Blumenthal’s claim that “the pilots let loose a fury of cannon and missile fire onto Israeli areas below.” Given that hundreds of hostages were concurrently being taken from Israel into Gaza, there was a great deal of “ambiguity” in the task of “stop[ping] the flow of terrorists…through the gaps in the fence.” It’s highly relevant that the pilot said it was very difficult to distinguish “who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian,” and that only later did the IDF “carefully select the targets.”

The Haaretz piece made several other dubious accusations, including charging Blumenthal with using “biased language” when he described Hamas as “militants” and “gunmen”—terms chosen by many establishment news outlets precisely to avoid bias (AP on Twitter, 1/7/21; BBC, 10/11/23).

The op-ed also accused Blumenthal of omitting “everything related to the war crimes committed by Hamas terrorists,” ignoring his clear statement in his article that “video filmed by uniformed Hamas gunmen makes it clear they intentionally shot many Israelis with Kalashnikov rifles on October 7.”

The Post offered no example of the Grayzone claiming “most” Israeli deaths were caused by friendly fire, and FAIR could find no such claims in the outlet’s October 7 coverage. It has, however, reported extensively on the friendly fire reports in Israeli media that the Post has so studiously avoided.

Hiding the accusations

The Washington Post (1/21/24) misquoted this Electronic Intifada article (11/23/23) as saying that “‘most’ Israeli casualties on October 7″—military and civilian—were killed by friendly fire. What the article actually said was that “Israel killed many, if not most, of the civilians that died during the Palestinian offensive.”

The independent Palestinian-run outlet Electronic Intifada has also based its reporting on articles and interviews from the Israeli press (e.g., Ynet, 10/15/23; Haaretz, 10/20/23, 11/9/23, 11/18/23; Times of Israel, 11/9/23). The Washington Post, however, only wrote that EI senior editor Asa Winstanley was “basing the story, in part, on a YouTube clip (10/15/23) of a man who describes himself as a former Israeli general.”

As Winstanley noted in his response to Dwoskin, “‘Graeme Ipp’ described himself—and actually was—an Israeli major, as I explain in detail in the piece itself.” The Post did not link to the article, video or give any citation to help readers find the article in question, which served to conceal the blatant misquotation.

The Post also misquoted Winstanley to claim he wrote that “most” of the Israeli civilians were killed by the Israeli military that day. In reality, Winstanely (Electronic Intifada, 11/23/23) wrote that Ipp’s testimony was confirmation that “Israel killed many, if not most, of the civilians that died during the Palestinian offensive.”

Had the Post actually pointed its readers to the reporting from the Grayzone and Electronic Intifada, readers may have been able to more easily understand Dwoskin’s distortions. But discrediting those outlets serves an important political purpose: Along with Mondoweiss, they are some of the only English-language outlets that have covered the bombshell revelations that appear frequently within the Israeli press. Attacking their reporting hides from US public view the numerous accusations of deliberate mishandling of intelligence and mass killing by the IDF of its own civilians.

Holocaust denial? 

Mondoweiss (2/1/24): “Stories of atrocity, sometimes cobbled together from unreliable eyewitnesses, sometimes fabricated entirely, have made their way to heads of state and been used to justify Israel’s military violence.”

A sizable chunk of the Washington Post‘s article centered on interviews with pro-Israel “experts” linking October 7 “truthers” to Holocaust denialism, or promoting “internet-driven conspiracy theories.” Dwoskin cited Emerson Brooking, a researcher from the NATO-affiliated Atlantic Council think tank, who warned that “the long tail of Holocaust denial is a lesson in what may happen to October 7.”

Dismissing any actual investigation into the facts, Brooking says, “It’s generally indisputable that Hamas did something—the pro-Hamas camp can’t erase that entirely.” He never specifies what that “something” was—the exact issue in question. Instead, he assumes that “something” is settled fact, and that anyone who investigates it is trying to “chip away at it” in an attempt at “rewriting…history.”

The Post equates people questioning the Holocaust—which has a factual record established over decades of international investigations, scholarship and research—with questioning the details of what Hamas called the Al Aqsa Flood, which has only ever been investigated by the Israeli government. That government, it should be recalled, has a documented record of blatantly lying and fabricating evidence.

Israel’s justification for its relentless assault upon Gaza has depended in large part upon its narrative. Since October 7, the Israeli government has blocked or rejected any serious international inquiry into the attacks or the IDF response. The US government has declined to call for or engage in any investigation.

On the other hand, in a recent statement, Hamas—which maintains that the Al Aqsa Flood was a military, not a terror, operation—has publicly agreed to cooperate with an international investigation into its own war crimes (Palestine Chronicle, 1/21/24).

Many of the most lurid claims that mobilized public opinion in support of Israel’s attack (e.g., 40 beheaded babies, babies cooked in ovens, etc.) have since been debunked and disproven (Mondoweiss, 2/1/24). In fact, Haaretz (11/18/23) revealed that Hamas had no prior knowledge of the festival they were accused of targeting.

Israeli and US officials repeatedly attribute all civilian deaths to Hamas, even though this is certainly false. Clearly, then, s0me Israeli civilian casualties have been “blame[d] on another party.”

How many Israeli civilians were actually killed by Hamas, and how many by Israel? Was the Al Aqsa Flood a terrorist attack designed to kill as many civilians as possible? These are important questions that have yet to be conclusively and independently answered, but the Washington Post seems to want to dissuade people from even asking them. In evoking the specter of Holocaust denial, Dwoskin and the Post are not defending the truth, but attempting to protect readers from it.

The post Shielding US Public From Israeli Reports of Friendly Fire on October 7 appeared first on FAIR.

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

"I am 100 percent -- 1,000 percent -- sure that we will continue to support you in this," Brink told journalists on February 20 in Kyiv.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

A critical $61 billion aid package has been stalled in Congress for months over political differences, despite warnings from President Joe Biden that failure by the Republican-led House of Representatives to authorize it would play into Russian President Vladimir Putin's hands.

"This is a very political issue that I cannot predict. But I can say that we all present the most compelling arguments why it is necessary, why this is not an open-ended request, why it is really important for you to succeed not only on the battlefield but also to have economic security and independence," Brink said.

She said she has spoken with House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican-Louisiana) and knows that he supports Ukraine and "understands the importance of Russia losing the war."

Brink said Biden and all the U.S. diplomats working on the matter are pushing hard to move it forward as quickly as possible.

"My message is this: You can't waste time, you can't waste a single day, not a single hour, not a single second. People die here every day," she said, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's comments over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference about the lack of weapons and the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka.

Zelenskiy said in his nightly video message on February 19 that delays in weapons deliveries had made the fight “very difficult” along parts of the front line and that Russian forces are taking advantage of the delays in weapons deliveries.

Putin on February 20 congratulated his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on capturing Avdiyivka and urged him to press Russia’s advantage.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said he and Oleksandr Syrskiy, commander in chief of Ukraine's armed forces, discussed the situation at the front and ammunition supplies in a phone call with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Syrskiy "gave updates on the current dynamics on the front line," Umerov said on Facebook. "The common understanding of the situation and the action plan were discussed. The ammunition supply was in focus as well."

WATCH: In NATO, the United States can boast of an alliance that neither Russia nor China enjoys, says NATO's secretary-general. In an interview with RFE/RL in Brussels on February 20, Jens Stoltenberg said it is in Washington's interest to keep it that way, regardless of the outcome of the coming U.S. presidential election. He spoke to Zoriana Stepanenko of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.

On February 20, Sweden announced its biggest aid package since Russia launched its full-scale invasion two years ago -- worth 7.1 billion Swedish kroner ($684 million). Sweden’s 15th aid package to date will provide Ukraine with combat boats, mines, artillery ammunition, and air-defense equipment among other supplies, Defense Minister Pal Jonson said at a press conference in Stockholm.

Canada said a day earlier that it would expedite the delivery of more than 800 drones.

The announcements came as Russian drones killed more Ukrainian citizens and damaged private property.

Two people were killed and one was injured in the Kharkiv region on February 20 when a Russian drone hit a civilian car, said Oleg Synyehubov, head of the regional military administration.

The attack by a "kamikaze" drone occurred around 4:50 p.m. local time in the village of Petropavlivka. There were three passengers in the car -- a 38-year-old civilian driver and a 50-year-old civilian man, who died on the spot, and a 48-year-old woman, who was taken to a hospital, Synyehubov said on Telegram. The woman is the wife of the 50-year-old man.

According to Synyehubov, all three were local farm workers returning home after work.

Earlier on February 20 in the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, a Russian drone struck a house, killing five members of the same family, the regional administration said.

A mother, her two sons, and two other relatives died as a result of the strike in Nova Sloboda, a village about 6 kilometers from the Russian border. The house was completely destroyed, Ukrainian officials said.

The Prosecutor-General’s Office in Kyiv announced a war crimes investigation.

WATCH: After withdrawing from Avdiyivka, Ukrainian units are scrambling to build new defensive positions west of the city.

The Ukrainian military dismissed a statement by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that Moscow's forces had secured full control over the village of Krynky on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson region.

A statement on Telegram by the Ukrainian military's southern district said Russian forces had made no headway on the eastern bank.

Russian troops abandoned the western bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region in late 2022 but remain in areas on the eastern bank. Ukrainian forces captured some districts on the eastern bank last November.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and dpa

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

More than 200 copies of a weekly Colorado newspaper, the Ouray County Plaindealer, were stolen, and then returned, on Jan. 18, 2024, after it published a story detailing an alleged rape that occurred inside the home of a local police chief.

“All of our newspaper racks in Ouray and all but one rack in Ridgway were hit by a thief who stole all the newspapers,” Erin McIntyre, co-publisher of the Plaindealer and author of the story, wrote in a statement displayed above the paper’s Jan. 18 e-edition. “It’s pretty clear that someone didn’t want the community to read the news this week.”

The story discussed details of the allegations, including about the three arrested suspects, one of whom is the stepson of the Ouray Police chief.

In the wake of the theft, residents raised over $1,000 to fund any loss in revenue the paper experienced, a portion of which has been donated to a local sexual assault support and advocacy organization.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The Age has revealed the dismissal of ABC broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson.

The official reason for Lattouf’s dismissal was ordinary: she shared a post by Human Rights Watch about Israel “using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza”, calling it “a war crime”.

It also noted the express intention of Israeli officials to pursue this strategy. Actions were also documented: the deliberate blocking of food, water and fuel “while wilfully obstructing the entry of aid”.

• READ MORE: Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?
• Journalists need to ‘take a stand’ over the Gaza carnage after latest killings – David Robie
• RSF condemns Israel over ‘silencing of media’ – 31 Palestinian journalists in jail, 80 plus killed

Lattouf shared it after management directed staff not to post on “matters of controversy”.

Prior to The Age revelations, much had been made of Lattouf’s fill-in role as a radio presenter — which was intended for five shows.

The Australian, owned by News Corp, had issues with Lattouf’s statements on various online platforms. It found it strange in December that she was appointed “despite her very public anti-Israel stance”.

She was accused of denying that some protesters had called for Jews to be gassed outside the Sydney Opera House on October 7. She also dared to accuse the Israeli Defence Forces of committing rape.

Leaked messages from a WhatsApp group called ‘Lawyers for Israel’ indicate that Australia’s public broadcaster – ABC – might have been lobbied into firing journalist Antoinette Lattouf.@meenakshirv reports. pic.twitter.com/1Nfl2kEDx6

— The Listening Post (@AJListeningPost) January 19, 2024

‘Lot of people really upset’
It was considered odd that she discussed food and water shortages in Gaza and “an advertising campaign showing corpses reminiscent of being wrapped in Muslim burial cloths”. That “left a lot of people really upset’,” The Australian said.

If war is hell, Lattouf was evidently not allowed to go into quite so much detail about it — at least concerning the fate of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli war machine.

What has also come to light is that the ABC’s managers were not targeting Lattouf on their own. Pressure had been exercised from outside the media organisation.

According to The Age, WhatsApp messages by a group called “Lawyers for Israel” had been sent to the ABC as part of a coordinated campaign.

Sydney property lawyer Nicky Stein told members of that group to contact the federal Minister for Communications asking “how Antoinette is hosting the morning ABC Sydney show” the day Lattouf was sacked.

They said employing Lattouff breached Clause 4 of the ABC code of practice on “impartiality”.

Stein went on to insist that: “It’s important ABC hears from not just individuals in the community but specifically from lawyers so they feel there is an actual legal threat.”

No ‘generic’ response
She goes on to say that a “proper” rather than “generic” response was expected “by COB [close of business] today or I would look to engage senior counsel”.

Did such threats have any basis? Even Stein admits: “There is probably no actionable offence against the ABC but I didn’t say I would be taking one — just investigating one. I have said that they should be terminating her employment immediately.”

It was designed to attract attention from ABC chairperson Ita Buttrose, and it did.

Robert Goot, deputy president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and part of the same group, boasted of information he had received that Lattouf would be “gone from morning radio from Friday” because of her “anti-Israeli” stance.

There has been something of a journalistic exodus from the ABC of late.

Nour Haydar, a political reporter in the ABC’s Parliament House bureau and another journalist of Lebanese descent, resigned on January 12 citing concern about the ABC’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.

There had been, for instance, the creation of a “Gaza advisory panel” at the behest of ABC news director Justin Stevens, ostensibly to improve coverage.

Journalists need to ‘take a stand’ over the Gaza carnage after latest killings

Must not ‘take sides’
“Accuracy and impartiality are core to the service we offer audiences,” Stevens told staff. “We must stay independent and not ‘take sides’.”

This pointless assertion can only ever be a threat because it acts as an injunction on staff and a judgment against sources that do not favour the line, however credible they might be.

What proves acceptable, a condition that seems to have paralysed the ABC, is to never say that Israel massacres, commits war crimes and brings about conditions approximating genocide.

Little wonder then that coverage of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice does not get top billing on the ABC.

Palestinians and Palestinian militias, however, can always be described as savages, rapists and baby slayers. Throw in fanaticism and Islam and you have the complete package ready for transmission.

Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the mainstream media of most Western countries, as the late Robert Fisk pointed out, repeatedly asserts these divisions.

After her resignation, Haydar told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Commitment to diversity in the media cannot be skin deep.  Culturally diverse staff should be respected and supported even when they challenge the status quo.”

#NoFearNoFavour https://t.co/JXq9TiI6Zu

— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) January 16, 2024

Sharing divisive topics
Haydar’s argument about cultural diversity should not obscure the broader problem facing the ABC: policing the way opinions and material on war, and any other divisive topic, is shared with the public.

The issue goes less to cultural diversity than permitted intellectual breadth.

Lattouf, for her part, is pursuing remedies through the Fair Work Commission and seeking funding through a GoFundMe page, steered by Lauren Dubois.

“We stand with Antoinette and support the rights of workers to be able to share news that expresses an opinion or reinforces a fact, without fear of retribution.”

Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, expressed his displeasure at Lattouf’s treatment, suggesting the ABC had erred.

ABC’s senior management, via a statement from Anderson, preferred the route of craven denial. He rejected “any claim that it has been influenced by any external pressure, whether it be an advocacy group or lobby group, a political party, or commercial entity”.

Dr Binoy Kampmark is a senior lecturer in global studies at RMIT University, Melbourne. This article was first published by Green Left Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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

Cambodian authorities detained and released 13 members of the Mother Nature environmental activist group on Sunday for holding a rally to raise awareness about the country’s largest island of Koh Kong Krau.

Described by environmental activists as “untouched,” the 103 square km (about 40 square miles) island is known for its beauty and abundant natural resources, including forests, white sandy beaches, clean sea water, waterfalls and plentiful wildlife.

In June 2023 Mongbay reported that Cambodia’s military facilitates logging on Koh Kong Krau and other nearby islands. 

In 2020, RFA reported that an ally of then-Prime Minister Hun Sen had secured permission to develop parts of the island. This was contrary to statements by the Ministry of Environment that it had been sending experts to study including Koh Kong Krau as a marine national park since 2016, and it expected it would have national park status by 2021.

Sunday’s detention and interrogations came after the group members dressed in T-shirts advocating the protection of Koh Kong Krau and exercised together on the banks of the Chaktomuk river and discussed the issue of Koh Kong Krau and held banners that read "Sunday for Koh Kong Krau.”

Once in custody, the police asked the activists to write their biographies including any instances of past crimes. Authorities then asked them to provide further answers on the purpose of the riverside rally and released them in the evening of the same day. 

Mean Lisa, who was among the detainees, told RFA Khmer that the members had gathered on Sunday to exercise together and discuss the island. She said the authorities persecute young people who strive to protect the environment and natural resources.

"We take Sundays to discuss Koh Kong Krau every week,” she said. “Secondly, we want to encourage young people from all walks of life and the public to get involved in protecting the environment and natural resources. Third, we want the ministry to honor its promise to make Koh Kong Krau a marine national park."

Am Sam Ath, the director of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, told RFA that the activities of the Mother Nature group, are important to raise awareness about protecting natural resources and they benefit the nation as a whole. 

He added that these activities should be encouraged because they are fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens and not crimes.

“If the authorities take them for questioning, it is a threat to intimidate young people to participate in activities to protect natural resources, the environment, as well as to participate in public to develop a good society,” he said.

Among the detainees was German national Jannik Gaul, who was a friend of one of Mother Nature members. 

At the police office, Gaul was questioned in an isolated room alone. After his release, Gaul texted to the Mother Nature group that the police made him speak in front of a video camera saying that members of Mother Nature lied to him to join an illegal demonstration.

His phone was taken for a couple of hours . He also said the immigration police officer wants him to leave Cambodia. 

The police also released a statement Sunday night saying that Gaul admitted his mistake. Police accused Mother Nature of acting illegally, endangering security and public order.

Translated by Sokry Sum. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
Update fixes spelling of Koh Kong Krau and removes sensitive information.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

Sydney-born investigative journalist, author and filmmaker John Pilger died on December 31, 2023.

He should be remembered and honoured not just for his impressive body of work, but for being a brave — and at times near-lone — voice for truth against power.

In early 2002, the “war on terror”, launched by then United States President George W Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attack, was in full swing.

• READ MORE: Daily Mirror legend John Pilger awoke world to great injustices as tributes pour in

After two decades, more than 4 million would be killed in Iraq, Libya, Philippines, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere under this bloody banner, and 10 times more displaced.

The propaganda campaign to justify this ferocious, US-led, global punitive expedition cowed many voices, not least in the settler colonial state of Australia.

But there was one prominent Australian voice that was not silenced — and it was John Pilger’s.

‘Breaking the silence’
On March 10 that year, Sydney Town Hall was packed out with people to hear John speak in a Green Left public meeting titled “Breaking the silence: war, propaganda and the new empire”.

Outside the Town Hall, about 100 more people, who could not squeeze in, stayed to show their solidarity.

Pilger described the war on terror as “a war on world-wide popular resistance to an economic system that determines who will live well and who will be expendable”.

He called for “opposition to a so-called war on terrorism, that is really a war of terrorism”.

The meeting played an important role in helping build resistance in this country to the many US-led imperial wars that followed the US’ bloody retribution exacted on millions of Afghans who had never even heard of the 9/11 attacks, let alone bore any responsibility for them.

That 2002 Sydney Town Hall meeting cemented a strong bond between GL and John.

GL is proud to have been the Australian newspaper and media platform that has published the most articles by John Pilger over the years.

Shared values
For much of the last two decades, the so-called mainstream media were always reluctant to run his pieces because he refused to obediently follow the unspoken war-on-terror line.

He refused to go along with the argument that every military expedition that the US launched (and which Australia and other loyal allies promptly followed) to protect privilege and empire were in defence of “shared democratic values”.

The collaboration between GL and John was based on real shared values, which he summed up succinctly in his introduction to his 1992 book Distant Voices:

“I have tried to rescue from media oblivion uncomfortable facts which may serve as antidotes to the official truth; and in doing so, I hope to have given support to those ‘distant voices’ who understand how vital, yet fragile, is the link between the right of people to know and to be heard, and the exercise of liberty and political democracy …”

GL editors have had many exchanges with John over the years. At times, there were political differences. But each such exchange only built up a mutual respect, based on a shared commitment to truth and justice.

The last two decades of John’s moral leadership against Empire were inadvertently confirmed a few weeks before his passing when US President Joe Biden warned Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu not to repeat the US’ mistakes after 9/11.

“There’s no reason we did so many of the things we did,” Biden told Netanyahu.

Focus on Palestine struggle
John had long focused on Palestine’s struggle for self-determination from the Israeli colonial settler state. He condemned Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign of Gaza and, on X, praised those marching for “peaceful decency”.

He urged people to (re)watch his 2002 documentary film Palestine is Still The Issue, in which he returned to film in Gaza and the West Bank, after having first done so in 1977.

John was outspoken about Australia’s treatment of its First Peoples; he didn’t agree with Labor’s Voice to Parliament plan, saying it offered “no real democracy, no sovereignty, no treaty between equals”.

He criticised Labor’s embrace of AUKUS, saying it was about a new war with China, a campaign he took up in his documentary The Coming War on China. While recognising China’s abuse of human and democratic rights, he said the US views China’s embrace of capitalist growth as the key threat.

John campaigned hard for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange’s release; he visited him several times in Belmarsh Prison and condemned a gutless Labor Prime Minister for refusing to meet with Stella Assange when she was in Australia.

He spoke out for other whistleblowers, including David McBride who exposed Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.

Did not mince words
John did not mince words which is why, especially during the war on terror, most mainstream media refused to publish him — unless a counterposed article was run side-by-side. He never agreed to this pretence of “balance”.

John wrote about his own, early, conscientisation.

“I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal,” he said on the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century — Vietnam.

“I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.”

John Pilger will be remembered by all those who know that facts and history matter, and that only through struggle will people’s movements ever have a chance of winning justice.

Republished with permission from Green Left Magazine.

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

On October 23, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, editor of the Weekly Blitz, published a separate article in the right-wing digital media outlet HinduPost, reviewed by CPJ, alleging Saer Khan had been deported from Hungary to the United Kingdom, where he was “funding and promoting pro-Hamas and anti-Israel rallies.”

Saer Khan, an independent investigative journalist, told CPJ by phone that he denied all allegations, which also extended to accusations of involvement in drug trafficking and fraud. He said he has been targeted in a campaign that seeks to discredit his work and could potentially endanger his safety.

Saer Khan said he believed he was being targeted in retaliation for his upcoming report on alleged high-level government corruption in Bangladesh to be published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). On September 25, two days before the latest round of Weekly Blitz articles against him, the journalist sent a series of emails requesting comment from the subjects of his investigative article.

In recent years, the Weekly Blitz has repeatedly published articles, reviewed by CPJ, accusing Saer Khan, along with other journalists critical of the Bangladesh government, of criminal activities.

On March 17, four unidentified men beat Mahinur Khan, Saer Khan’s brother, with iron rods in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, accusing the latter of “writing about the PM [prime minister]” and “against the government.” As of November 22, no suspects had been held accountable, Saer Khan said.

Choudhury told CPJ via email that the Weekly Blitz stood by its reporting and was unaware of Saer Khan’s upcoming report for the OCCRP.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On September 13, officers with the detective branch of the Bangladesh police, in the Noakhali town of the southeast Chittagong division, arrested Nur Alam Chowdhury Pervez, brother of Shamsul Alam Liton, editor of the privately owned United Kingdom-based Weekly Surma newspaper, according to news reports, a report by The Weekly Surma, a Twitter thread by Bangladeshi editor Tasneem Khalil, and a person familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ by phone on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

The September 13 police first information report, a document that opens an investigation, accuses the U.K.-based Liton of spreading anti-government propaganda on social media platforms and alleges that Pervez conspires with Liton to create “confusion and agitation” among the public.

Separately, on September 9, police in Moulvibazar town in the northeast Sylhet division arrested Abdul Muktadir Manu, brother of Abdur Rab Bhuttow, a special correspondent for The Weekly Surma and head of the privately owned digital news platform London Bangla Channel, according to news reports and a person familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ by phone on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

“The Bangladesh government’s targeting of family members of critical journalists is an egregious form of retaliation that must not go unnoticed by its diplomatic partners and the international community,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Frankfurt, Germany. “Authorities must swiftly and unconditionally release Nur Alam Chowdhury Pervez and Abdul Muktadir Manu and cease subjecting family members of foreign-based journalists to detention, harassment, and other forms of reprisal.”

The September 10 police first information report alleges that Manu is conspiring with the U.K.-based Bhuttow to remove Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from power and “destroy the image of the state.”

Both police reports cited a section of the Bangladesh Code of Criminal Procedure that allows authorities to conduct warrantless arrests if there is “reasonable suspicion” that an individual may commit an offense.

The arrests came days before the prime minister left on official visits to the U.K. and the United States.

The person familiar with Pervez’ case told CPJ that he is also the brother of Hasina Akhter, host of the U.K.-based political affairs talk show Table Talk with Hasina Akhter, and Shah Alam Faruq, editor of the U.K.-based, privately owned digital news platform Shoja Kotha. On August 14, Liton published an editorial for The Weekly Surma calling on Hasina to hold government officials accountable for alleged money laundering.

CPJ’s source said they believed Pervez’ arrest was either retaliation for his sibling’s critical journalism or because of Liton’s organization of a protest in front of the British parliament in support of Bangladeshi victims of enforced disappearances on August 30. Pervez is the Noakhali district president of the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal, a socialist party associated with Hasina’s ruling Awami League party.

Separately, the person familiar with Manu’s case told CPJ that they believed his arrest was in retaliation for Bhuttow’s critical journalistic work, most notably two interviews he published on the London Bangla Channel in August 2022 with retired lieutenant colonel Hasinur Rahman, who received international attention for his allegation that Bangladesh’s military intelligence secretly detained him on two separate occasions in 2011 and 2018.

That person told CPJ that Bhuttow received several anonymous threatening calls and messages following the publication of these interviews, warning him to stop his critical journalistic work.

Manu is a government servant with a local administrative unit associated with the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, according to news reports and the person familiar with the case, who added that Moulvibazar jail authorities have denied Manu access to his family since his arrest.

The Bangladesh police, the Awami League, and the prime minister’s office did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.

Previously, Bangladesh authorities detained Nusrat Shahrin Raka, sister of the U.S.-based Bangladeshi journalist Kanak Sarwar, from October 2021 to March 2022, and have repeatedly harassed the mother of Khalil, who is based in Sweden as the editor-in-chief of the Netra News website.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II brings to an end a long, complex and remarkable chapter in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s evolution from colony to independent, bicultural and multicultural nation.

Throughout that period, however, New Zealanders have generally admired and even loved the monarch herself, even if the institution she represented lay at the centre of a vexed, often traumatic, reckoning with the colonial past.

If there was a highpoint in New Zealand royalism, it was witnessed during the first visit by the young Queen and Duke of Edinburgh between December 23 1953 and January 30 1954. 

• READ MORE: Queen Elizabeth II live news: King Charles mourns death of mother
• RNZ live updates: Queen Elizabeth II dies – world reacts
• Pacific Royal Tour 1953 – Pacific Journalism Review
• Queen Elizabeth II: the end of the ‘new Elizabethan age’
• What would King Charles mean for the monarchy, Australia and the republican movement?
• Prince Charles: the conventions that will stop him from meddling as King

An estimated three in every four people turned out to see the royal couple in what historian Jock Phillips has called “the most elaborate and most whole-hearted public occasion in New Zealand history”.

After decades of economic depression and war, Elizabeth’s June 1953 coronation heralded an optimistic postwar atmosphere. Following the conquest of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay — claimed as a jewel in the new Queen’s crown — the royal tour was the perfect moment for New Zealand to celebrate.

The Queen’s presence also fulfilled the long anticipated wish that a reigning British monarch would visit. War, then bad health, had previously dashed hopes for a tour by George VI.

Elizabeth II made a huge impression. She appeared as a youthful, radiant, even magical queen, one dedicated to serving her people.

She charmed an older generation and embedded herself in the memories of the children who lined up to see her. They would all grow up to be, one way or another, “royal watchers”, aware of her reign and its milestones, keeping up with the lives of her children, their spouses and her grandchildren.

And then, less than 40 hours after her arrival, the young Queen’s leadership was put to the test when 151 people died in the Tangiwai rail disaster on Christmas Eve. She visited survivors and included words of comfort in her speeches, cementing her connection to the grieving, and to the country.

The female crown
Remarkably, it was not until 2011 that females became equal to males in the rules of British royal succession. Queens only came to power in the absence of a male heir. And yet, this historical sexism also endowed queens with an exceptional quality — strong mother figures presiding over their subjects.

Indeed, in the past two centuries of the British monarchy, it is Queen Victoria (who reigned for almost 64 years) and Queen Elizabeth II (reigning for 70 years) who stand out as not just the longest-serving, but also most significant monarchs.

Both played a crucial part in New Zealand’s history.

In my work as a historian I have argued that the politically conservative “female imperialism”, emblemised in the reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth, encouraged women to support the British Empire and Commonwealth. In turn, it helped raise women’s status in society.

For example, both queens inspired women to “take up their mantle” and work for empire and nation: often in maternal roles with children as teachers and nurses.

The female crown encouraged citizenship based on British values, offering school prizes and support for migrants.

The young Elizabeth’s volunteer work during the Second World War set an example for youth, as did her longtime role as patron of the Girl Guides. The gender-power of the Queen was already on display during the 1952-53 tour when she visited servicewomen, nurses and mothers with new babies, and was given presents for her own children.

Celebrity status
Over the past 70 years, the Queen also became something of a modern celebrity, a fixture in women’s magazines, on radio, television and now social media. As well as turning out to see her in person during her 10 visits, New Zealanders “took her into their homes” with press clippings, souvenir pictures and keepsakes.

During that first tour, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly pronounced upon the Queen’s role in the enduring relationship with Britain:

An even stronger link will be consolidated and spiritual stimulus given to life by the influence of one who is an inspiration to all.

She was described as “enchanting”, with her “exquisite complexion, her eyes like sapphires […] and her beautiful mobile mouth as she talked and smiled”. In 1963, she was “lovely” with “the breathtaking brilliance of [her] peacock silk outfit against the broad canvas of sea and sky”.

In 1970, she was “a fairytale Queen — a glittering image such as children visualise when they think of the word Queen”. In 1977, “The Queen is perfection”.

On a 1986 visit she was reportedly closer and more familiar than ever, but at nearly 60 her “movements are inclined to be slower, her smile reflects more understanding than youthful sparkle […] and there were times when she looked as if she would rather kick off her shoes and have a cup of tea”.

By the 1980s, the glamour baton had passed to the next generation, notably the hugely popular Diana, Princess of Wales. Proving that royalty was not immune from modern life, three of the Queen’s four children divorced, most publicly and scandalously.

Ironically (perhaps absurdly), there were accusations the Queen was out of touch with the times.

Relationship with a colony
As power devolved around the Commonwealth during the Queen’s reign, the relationship with New Zealand inevitably changed too. Notions of a settler colony of Anglo-Celtic descendants emulating a “superior” British imperial economy, politics and culture — with a distant monarch as head of state — became outmoded.

Most importantly, the colonisation and assimilation of Indigenous peoples were challenged.

As historian Michael Dawson has shown, Māori involvement was minimal at the 1950 Commonwealth Games in Auckland. There was no Māori welcome or presence in the opening or closing ceremonies, with only a musical performance as athletes and officials arrived in the country.

It was left to King Korokī and Te Puea Herangi to hold their own welcome for athletes at Ngāruawāhia. The Prime Minister of the day, Sidney Holland, attended and considered the event an excellent example of good race relations.

But rather than Māori being partners in the planning of the first royal tour, they were largely expected to fit in, mostly providing entertainment.

In the original tour plans, Arawa were expected to represent all Māori during a lunch stop. Only when they asked for more time were plans changed. Meanwhile, the Kīngitanga had to lobby hard for the Queen to visit Ngāruawāhia. This eventually happened, with the Queen and Duke spontaneously deciding to spend more time there than had been allocated.

Importantly, through the Queen’s reign, the Crown’s role in redressing the past became an essential part of New Zealand’s post-colonial development. After much agitation, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975 to investigate Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi.

In 1987, Māori became an official language. Rather than assimilating into a devolved settler state, decolonisation came to mean mana motuhake for Māori.

By the 1974 Commonwealth Games — the “friendly games” — in Christchurch, Māori “were centrally incorporated” into the festivities, including a leading role in the opening ceremony.

By the 1990 games in Auckland, also the 150th anniversary of signing of the Treaty, emerging biculturalism was evident in the medals incorporating Māori design.

Abandoning Britain?
In late 20th century New Zealand there were simmering republican sentiments. At the same time, because of the regenerating Iwi-Crown relationship under the Treaty, there was a reluctance to move away from Britain constitutionally.

Ironically, it was Britain going its own way – most notably by joining the EEC in 1973 — that moved the issue along. Symbolically, the number and length of temporary working visas for New Zealanders were cut back, despite an “OE” in the “mother country” being still viewed as a rite of passage.

There were other reasons republicanism was not a priority for the state. The shift towards a laissez-faire, free-market economic ideology shifted the ground; the move to a new electoral system in the 1990s underscored New Zealand’s growing independence.

But through those decades of change, the popularity of the Queen provided a constant. If there was a moment when the republican break might have happened, it was missed. New Zealand has been more reticent than Australia, where a referendum on becoming a republic was only narrowly defeated in 1999.

New Zealand has also retired and then later reinstated the royal honours system. Attempts to change the flag and remove the Union Jack from its corner came to nothing in a 2016 referendum.

And New Zealand still doesn’t have its own constitution outlining its fundamental laws of government. Rather, we rely on a conglomerate constitution, messily located in 45 Acts of Parliament. And of course, the Head of State remains a hereditary monarch who lives half a world away.

Aotearoa after Elizabeth
The Queen’s death presents another opportunity for New Zealand to reassess its nationhood — and perhaps be creative.

King Charles and the Queen Consort Camilla simply don’t have the appeal of Elizabeth II. But postcolonial Britain and the modern, diverse Commonwealth still have much to offer an increasingly multicultural New Zealand.

Most importantly, it is time for a broad conversation about how the various dymamics of contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand — liberal and egalitarian traditions, Pākeha settler notions of governance, Te Ao Māori, and the special Iwi-Crown connection — might work together in the future.

After all, Māori signed the Treaty with Queen Victoria at least in part as protection from the behaviour of unruly settlers. Does 21st-century New Zealand still need a monarch to protect against settler colonialism?

Whatever the answer, any move away from the Crown needs to honour the history of which Elizabeth II has been such a significant part.

Dr Katie Pickles is professor of history, 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.

Janine Jackson interviewed Dave Zirin about the Supreme Court’s football prayer ruling for the July 1, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Coach Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent)

Janine Jackson: While we still reel from the theft of bodily autonomy from half the population, the right wing–dominated Supreme Court has delivered other blows to principles that many believed were assured.

In Kennedy v. Bremerton, a 6–3 ruling determined that Washington state high school assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy had a right to pray in the locker room and on the field. And why should a person be denied their right to what the Court described as a “short,” “personal,” “private” exercise of their religious beliefs?

As our guest and others want us to understand, the court’s ruling relies on a storyline that just doesn’t match the reality, and is much less about freedom than about coercion.

Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation and host of the Edge of Sports podcast. He’s also author of numerous books about sports and their intersection with history, politics and social justice, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, which is out now from New Press.

He joins us now by phone from Takoma Park. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dave Zirin.

Dave Zirin: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

The Nation (6/27/22)

JJ: I can feel the heat coming off your piece on this. And I think it’s because of the boldly false premise of this ruling, about the role of coach prayer generally, but in particular about Kennedy. You say that this ruling is wrong from the opening statement. So maybe let’s start there.

DZ: Here’s the issue; it’s a cliche, but it’s true: You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. And in the decision that was written by Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch, he relied on his own facts. Let’s put it more simply: He lied in describing what took place in the case.

And here’s the thing: Coach Kennedy was not off, as Gorsuch writes, praying on his own. He was not off quietly doing this, and he was not fired for doing it. So they painted a narrative of this coach looking for a quiet corner to pray and then this school board, with pitchforks and torches in hand, forcing Kennedy out of his job.

None of this happened. What Kennedy did in praying in the locker room, and then particularly his prayers after the game on the field, was draw in players to surround him in prayer, asking players to do testimonials about God. All of this thing creates this kind of maelstrom of pressure on the players, that if you are down with your coach, you will pray with your coach. And if you’re not down with that, then, hey, you’re free not to pray with the coach, but anybody who’s ever played high school sports knows that if you don’t do what the coach says, particularly in an autocratic sport like football, you’re going to pay a price for that.

You’re going to pay a price for it, whether it’s in terms of playing time or, maybe even worse for the high school level, you’re going to pay a price for it in terms of being outcast, in terms of being seen as a locker room distraction, or even worse in the parlance of sports, a locker room cancer.

And that is what the Supreme Court basically said could now take place, is a process of bullying in high school sports to make players feel coerced into praying with their coach, and that’s unconscionable. It’s absolutely unconscionable. And I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from folks, including tons of stories about what it was like to play high school sports at private or religious institutions, and the degree of religious peer pressure that would take place, and how it would alienate, ostracize and all the rest of it.

And I should probably add that we would be completely, completely naive if we didn’t just see this as an issue of prayer, but this is about Christian prayer. Like if the coach was Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever you want, Shinto, or wanted to do a prayer of atheism beforehand, there would be a very different response from this Court than Christianity, because this Court has shown itself to be proudly in a relationship with a kind of Christofascism which is quickly overcoming the ruling structures of the United States, if not the people themselves.

Seattle Times (6/29/22)

JJ: And just to underscore the idea of the false narrative, Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, very close to the issue, wrote a story in which he was saying, as you have said, that Kennedy explained himself. He said he was inspired to start these midfield prayers after he saw an evangelical Christian movie called Facing the Giants, in which a losing team finds God, Christian God, and then goes on to win the state championship.

So the very idea that he was trying to find a personal private space to pray in private, and that he was being denied that, it’s just wholly not true.

DZ: And can I say something else? The school district—and I say this as somebody who made phone calls, spoke to people, I’m not just saying this for the purposes of my own narrative—they made every effort to try to accommodate Coach Kennedy. They made every effort to create spaces for him to pray.

And they did not fire him when he repeatedly and repeatedly ignored what they had to say, thumbed his nose at what they had to say. Look, my wife is a teacher, and if she thumbed her nose at the rules of the district to the degree that Coach Kennedy was doing, she would’ve found herself out of work.

Now, Coach Kennedy, again and again thumbing his nose at what they’re saying to him, and in the end, you know what they did, they didn’t fire him. They suspended him with pay, with the opportunity to reapply back for his job, and partly because I think they realized how hot button this was.

Dave Zirin: “There is a political movement in this country that’s playing for keeps. They don’t care how nice you’re going to be about it.”

They made every effort to try to look like partners in trying to figure this out. And they wanted to look like we want to collaborate with you to find a solution that actually helps and makes everybody feel validated.

And I think what they learned, which I think a lot of us need to learn, is that there is a political movement in this country that’s playing for keeps. They don’t care how nice you’re going to be about it. They don’t care if you’re willing to meet them halfway. They’re not trying for a bigger piece of the pie. They’re trying to take over the bakery right now.

And I think the sooner we realize that the better, because a lot of people in the ruling corridors of the Democratic Party really seem to have not gotten the memo.

JJ: It’s important that it integrates with sports and with athletics here, which I think makes it slot into a different place in some people’s brains. This ruling, it galls, of course, for many reasons, but part of it is the ability for people who have a public platform to express political or social concerns, whether they’re athletes or musicians or artists, it’s framed so differently depending on who they are and what they’re saying.

DZ: Exactly.

JJ: It’s related, but if I can just transition you, you’ve written about Muhammad Ali, about Colin Kaepernick. It’s always been true that there’s been a kind of policing of what people can say, if it’s decided that they’re outside of their purview.

DZ: Yeah. If I could say something about that, I wrote this book The Kaepernick Effect. I interviewed dozens of young people, a lot of them in high school, who took a knee, and they were invariably subject to all kinds of ostracization, pushed off the team, made to feel outcast from the team, oftentimes at the behest of the coach.

And I think one of the things that we need to come to grips with is that this kind of aggressive Supreme Court–led Christian posturing is political. Because people say, well, that’s just religious, what the coach is doing. Taking a knee during the anthem, that’s a political act, and politics have no place in sports.

Do you honestly think it’s not political that this coach is defying the school district time and again, is drawing in students into the prayer circle time and again, is thumbing his nose at the concerns of parents time and again, and now, and I wish I could bet money on this, is going to be on the right-wing gravy train probably for the next decade, doing speeches time and again, and maybe there’ll even be one of those Hollywood movies that only a small segment of the population sees, starring, I don’t know, Gina Carano and Kevin Sorbo, whatever, the actors who occupy that space.

And I think we need to realize that these onward Christian soldiers, like, that’s not just a song to them. This is a movement that they’re trying to build, and trying to collaborate and figure out common solutions I think is going to be a very, very difficult task, because their eye is not on reconciliation.

New York Times (6/30/22)

JJ: Right, right. Thank you for that. And I’m going to let you go, but while I have you, I can’t resist. Today’s New York Times:

More than four months after she was first detained, the WNBA star Brittney Griner is expected to appear in a Russian courtroom on Friday for the start of a trial on drug charges that legal experts said was all but certain to end in a conviction, despite the clamor in the United States for her release.

I know I’m asking a lot in a short amount of time, but I know that for a lot of listeners who follow media closely, they’re going to say, “Wait, there was a clamor in the United States for Brittney Griner’s release? Wait, who’s Brittney Griner?” Thoughts on that?

DZ: We need a much bigger clamor, is my first thought. Brittney Griner is a WNBA superstar. If her name was Tom Brady or Steph Curry, there would be a national day of action to try to get them freed from a Russian prison.

I mean, Brittney Griner is a political prisoner, make no mistake about it.

JJ: In Russia, in Russia—we care about Russia, right?

DZ: Yeah. Facing 10 years behind bars, five years at labor behind bars. I mean, this has nothing to do with drugs. I have serious doubts in the charges in the first place. This is about Ukraine. This is about political posturing. This is about this new cold war that we’re dealing with with Putin.

And this is about them trying to extract political prisoners out of the United States, who are Russian, in an exchange, and I think we need to apply pressure to our own State Department that bringing Brittney Griner home should be an immediate priority.

What’s disturbing is the concern that Brittney Griner, because she’s a woman athlete, because she’s from the LGBTQ community, because she presents in a certain way, that she’s just not getting the coverage or the attention that she otherwise would get.

And I think that’s one of the things also we need to fight against. It’s not just about injustice in Russia; it’s about standing up to injustice and prejudice here at home.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dave Zirin. He’s sports editor at The Nation, and you can follow his work at EdgeOfSports.com. Dave Zirin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DZ: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

The post ‘They Painted a Narrative of This Coach Looking for a Quiet Corner to Pray’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

“Philippine authorities must reverse their order to close Rappler and to block access to independent news websites Bulatalat and Pinoy Weekly, and cease fabricating spurious reasons to suppress the free press,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “We strongly urge President-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to reverse the outgoing Duterte government’s abysmal press freedom record.”   

Rappler founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa released a statement on Tuesday while attending a conference in Hawaii saying that the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission had upheld an earlier ruling revoking the news outlet’s operating license for violating foreign ownership rules, according to news reports.

Ressa was quoted in the reports saying Rappler would appeal the ruling, that the news outlet is “not shutting down,” and that legal proceedings in the case to date have been “highly irregular.” Ressa, the 2018 recipient of CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for comment on the closure order.

Separately, the Philippine National Telecommunications Commission on June 8 ordered access to the independent news websites Bulatlat and Pinoy Weekly blocked on accusations they publish “misinformation” and support local terrorist organizations, according to news reports. The NTC ordered internet service providers to impose the blocks on June 18, according to a statement by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, a local press freedom advocacy group.

National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. was quoted in a state media report as saying he ordered the blocks because the news websites’ reporting had violated the Anti-Terrorism Act, including by inciting and recruiting to commit terrorism.

Rhea Padilla, national coordinator of the Altermidya network of independent media groups–of which both Bulatlat and Pinoy Weekly are members–told CPJ by email that the accusations are false and that authorities have failed to provide “any evidence at all” to justify the blockages.  

The Philippine Securities Exchange Commission, National Security Council, and National Telecommunications Commission did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comments on the closure and blockage orders.  

Rappler has consistently denied that its use of Philippine Depositary Receipts, an investment instrument that may be issued with corresponding company shares and held by both Filipinos and foreigners, violates a constitutional ban on foreign investment in media and that their use was accepted by the SEC in 2015, according to a CNN report.

The news reports noted that the SEC’s ruling against Rappler comes just days before Duterte will step down after six years in power and President-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is inaugurated.

In a public letter, CPJ recently called on Marcos to reverse his predecessor’s various press freedom-eroding actions and policies, including against Rappler and Altermidya network members.

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

“Philippine authorities must reverse their order to close Rappler and to block access to independent news websites Bulatalat and Pinoy Weekly, and cease fabricating spurious reasons to suppress the free press,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “We strongly urge President-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to reverse the outgoing Duterte government’s abysmal press freedom record.”   

Rappler founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa released a statement on Tuesday while attending a conference in Hawaii saying that the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission had upheld an earlier ruling revoking the news outlet’s operating license for violating foreign ownership rules, according to news reports.

Ressa was quoted in the reports saying Rappler would appeal the ruling, that the news outlet is “not shutting down,” and that legal proceedings in the case to date have been “highly irregular.” Ressa, the 2018 recipient of CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for comment on the closure order.

Separately, the Philippine National Telecommunications Commission on June 8 ordered access to the independent news websites Bulatlat and Pinoy Weekly blocked on accusations they publish “misinformation” and support local terrorist organizations, according to news reports. The NTC ordered internet service providers to impose the blocks on June 18, according to a statement by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, a local press freedom advocacy group.

National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. was quoted in a state media report as saying he ordered the blocks because the news websites’ reporting had violated the Anti-Terrorism Act, including by inciting and recruiting to commit terrorism.

Rhea Padilla, national coordinator of the Altermidya network of independent media groups–of which both Bulatlat and Pinoy Weekly are members–told CPJ by email that the accusations are false and that authorities have failed to provide “any evidence at all” to justify the blockages.  

The Philippine Securities Exchange Commission, National Security Council, and National Telecommunications Commission did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comments on the closure and blockage orders.  

Rappler has consistently denied that its use of Philippine Depositary Receipts, an investment instrument that may be issued with corresponding company shares and held by both Filipinos and foreigners, violates a constitutional ban on foreign investment in media and that their use was accepted by the SEC in 2015, according to a CNN report.

The news reports noted that the SEC’s ruling against Rappler comes just days before Duterte will step down after six years in power and President-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is inaugurated.

In a public letter, CPJ recently called on Marcos to reverse his predecessor’s various press freedom-eroding actions and policies, including against Rappler and Altermidya network members.

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

The Washington Post‘s headline (4/29/22) seems to play down the importance of vaccination—relegating the crucial message that people are dying for lack of boosters to the subhead.

On April 29, the Washington Post (4/29/22) reported that Covid deaths among the vaccinated have been up sharply in 2022—42% of deaths in January and February were among vaccinated people according to the Post’s analysis of state and federal data—and that “a key explanation for the rise in deaths among the vaccinated is that Covid-19 fatalities are again concentrated among the elderly.” The paper went on to report that “the bulk of vaccinated deaths are among people who did not get a booster shot,” noting that data showed that in California and Mississippi 75% of the vaccinated seniors who died of Covid in the first two months of 2022 were not boosted.

The New York Times ran a story on May 31 with similar content. The Post’s piece was framed around deaths among the vaccinated, while the Times’s focus was deaths during the winter omicron surge, but the narrative pointed to the same data: that in 2022 the vast bulk of deaths were once again among the elderly, as they had been in 2020 before the availability of vaccines. Covid is “preying on long delays since their last shots,” the Times piece said, and accompanying graphs and charts show that vaccines without boosters have left many vulnerable to serious illness and death. 

Both pieces demonstrate that  for the elderly, getting booster shots is literally a matter of life and death.  Multiple studies in both Israel and the US point to the same conclusion (here and here, for instance). 

Yet neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times directly address the lagging booster rate among older USians. Fewer than half of all those eligible have received a first booster shot; among those over 65, only 69% have gotten at least one booster shot—a significant difference from the 90%+ who have received the initial one- or two-shot vaccination series (KHN, 5/12/22).

Given that seniors are clearly not vaccine-averse, and that without boosters they are at significant risk of death, the question of why more people 65 and older are not getting boosted is a pressing public health problem, one that ought to be getting significant media attention, given how many lives are at stake.

Covid cases in the US have risen sharply over the last two months, but in that time there’s been hardly any mention in corporate media of the lagging booster rate among older USians, and even less analysis.

‘Faulty messaging’

“The booster program has been botched from day one,”  Kaiser Health News (5/12/22) reports—citing as an example the fact that the CDC uses the phrase “fully vaccinated” to refer to people it maintains are insufficiently vaccinated. 

As far as I can tell, there has been exactly one article whose subject is the low booster rate among US seniors: “Why Won’t More Older Americans Get Their Covid Boosters?” by Liz Szabo from Kaiser Health News (5/12/22). That piece was reposted by NBC (5/11/22) and CNN (5/13/22). It cited “a chorus of leading researchers” blaming “faulty messaging on booster shots”; quoted one institute director saying, “the booster program has been botched from day one”; and explained changes in the federal government’s distribution of vaccines that contribute to the lower booster rate:

Although the Biden administration coordinated vaccine delivery to nursing homes, football stadiums, and other targeted venues early last year, the federal government has played a far less central role in delivering boosters…. Today, nursing homes are largely responsible for boosting their residents…. And outside of nursing homes, people generally must find their own boosters, either through clinics, local pharmacies, or primary care providers.

Evidence suggests that this lack of support from the federal government is responsible for the lagging senior booster rate. In Minnesota, which at 83% has the highest senior booster rate of any state, officials used federal CARES money to bring mobile vaccine clinics to neighborhoods and mobile home parks and to provide booster shots to residents and staffers in long-term care facilities (KHN, 5/12/22).

The May 31 New York Times piece, without mentioning the lagging booster rate per se, did make several mentions of the obstacles older people face in getting boosted. It also said, “Scientists said that the wintertime spike in Covid death rates among older Americans demanded a more urgent policy response.” The need for a better government response, though, is ongoing.  

Most reporting on the overall low booster rate tends toward blaming individuals for their failure to get boosted. Structural causes are nowhere in sight. There’s a fair amount of talk about the “confusion” and “debate” about the second booster recommendation, but explanations for the low rate amount to comments like “a majority of the vaccinated public has not been convinced” (Washington Post, 3/25/22) and “risk analysis is not the strong suit of most people” (Washington Post, 4/20/22).

‘For whatever reason’

The Washington Post (4/18/22) waits until the next-to-last paragraph to convey the key facts: “The weekly death rate over the final three months of 2021 was a little more than 1 per million for boosted people, and about 6 per million for vaccinated-but-unboosted people. Those compare to the 78 per million weekly rate we see from unvaccinated people.”

Besides the Kaiser Health News story, I could find only one other article specifically on the low booster rate in the US, the Washington Post‘s “The Troublesome US Booster Gap” (4/18/22), though it made no mention of the special vulnerability of older USians or their part in this trend. The piece, labeled an “analysis,” began by noting:

Booster shots are a significant shortcoming in the federal government’s coronavirus response—with no easy answers for why it has happened or what to do about it.

Reporter Aaron Blake then went on to list various factors contributing to the booster gap. The first was “how partisan vaccines have become in the United States.” Acknowledging that this doesn’t explain everything, he mentioned “people who were willing to get two shots and, for whatever reason, haven’t been persuaded to get a third.” The article continued, “Another potential reason is the confusing rollout,” and added “there are signs that opposition to boosters is increasing and hardening among the vaccinated.” It then cited a bunch of opinion polls. That’s the “analysis,” and it never really went  any deeper than the observation that “for whatever reason” some people don’t want to get a third shot.

All of this boils down once again to blaming individuals for not getting boosted. This is bad journalism in general, and does nothing to explain why people in institutional settings like nursing homes—those most at risk—aren’t getting boosted. At the end, the Post tosses off the observation that “our lagging booster rate creates all kinds of potential consequences down the road.” Those unnamed consequences, of course, include the unnecessary deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of older people—people whose low booster rate didn’t rate a mention in the article.

Capitol Hill ‘gambit’

The New York Times (5/11/22) presents the failure to pass life-saving Covid aid as a bipartisan puzzle rather than as a Republican refusal.

A May 20 New York Times piece about the CDC recommendation that everyone over 50 get a second booster quoted the agency’s concern about “a steep and substantial increase in hospitalizations for older Americans” as a part of the reason for the recommendation. The article notes that “only one-fourth of those 65 and older who have gotten one booster dose…have gotten a second,” but doesn’t say anything at all about the low first booster rate, though clearly it is responsible for the alarming rise in hospitalizations as well as deaths.

Meanwhile, corporate coverage of the fight over additional Covid funding has largely followed predictable patterns. In an April 28 piece, the Washington Post mixed metaphors of various “games” the Democrats and Republicans are playing: “Covid Funding Has Become a Gambit on Capitol Hill,” the headline reported, while the article said “Democratic leaders haven’t yet shown their cards.” 

The New York Times (5/11/22) described the funding as stuck in “an election-year dispute over immigration.” (There’s a whole world of problems with that last phrase in terms of corporate coverage of immigration, which is even worse than when I wrote about it recently—FAIR.org, 4/22/22.)

Left unsaid in these pieces is that if Republicans continue to succeed in blocking additional Covid funding, many more people will die. Most of them will be over 65.

There was one article that acknowledged the direct link between funding and deaths. On May 6, in “The White House, Warning of a Fall Surge, Plans for How to Provide Vaccines if There’s No More Covid Aid,” the New York Times reported that the Biden administration is planning to divert funds for therapeutics and testing for a “bare bones” vaccination effort if additional funding is not approved. That effort would be aimed at older and immune-compromised people. It adds, “But if access to vaccines is limited, the United States could see hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

Human rights atrocity

In mustering evidence for what the Biden administration sees as “the country’s success” in dealing with the coronavirus, the New York Times (5/18/22) notes that “Many people are vaccinated, [and] a fair number are boosted.” By “a fair number,” the Times means 32% of the total population.

It’s also outrageous that Democrats are unwilling to either go to the mat for Covid funding or to call out Republicans for their callous disregard for human life, the party’s “pro-life” platform notwithstanding. But as the Times noted in an article (5/18/22) on the CDC’s alarm about rising cases:

The warnings from…federal health officials seemed somewhat at odds with President Biden’s own stance…. He no longer treats the pandemic as his chief concern among many…. The new approach is… a recognition of the political reality. Many Americans have decided to accept the risk of infection to resume their normal routines.

There’s a lot that could be said about the public health failures that have led “many” USians to return to “normal,” but for older people, “normal” means no additional government efforts to make boosters available, increasing risk of infection as restrictions continue to be lifted, and additional unnecessary deaths. 

The utter failure to protect older people from death has been a singular catastrophe within the overall disaster that is the United States’ response to the Covid pandemic. Those 65 and older account for 75% of all covid deaths, and the elderly living in long-term care facilities have suffered even greater death rates. A staggering 8% of all such people have died of Covid; for nursing home residents, that figure is 10%.  Scholar and blogger Dave Kingsley reported that it is “the largest mass fatality of an institutionalized population in the history of the United States.”

The willingness of corporate media to normalize so much preventable death makes them complicit in what Kingsley rightly called a “human rights atrocity.”

The post Media Fail to Raise Alarm Over Deadly Lack of Booster Shots in Elderly appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Dorothee Benz.

Mondoweiss report (5/11/22) on Shireen Abu Akleh’s killling.

Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known and much-loved Al Jazeera reporter who covered Palestine for two decades, was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper May 11 while documenting an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank.

Footage of the moments after her death show Abu Akleh, still wearing her press vest and helmet, lying face down on the ground below a tree, as Shatha Hanaysha, another Palestinian journalist and writer for Mondoweiss, sits by her side and attempts to reach out to her. Writing for Mondoweiss (5/11/22), Yumna Patel described the video:

A young Palestinian man is then seen jumping over a wall behind Abu Akleh and Hanaysha. When he attempts to retrieve Abu Akleh’s body, another round of sniper fire can be heard, and he quickly takes cover behind the tree.

No armed combatants are there. Journalists are shouting for an ambulance. The young man tries a second time to remove Abu Akleh, but fails. He manages to help a shaken Hanaysha hide behind the tree. The footage is harrowing.

Shatha Hanaysha crouches near her slain colleague Shireen Abu Akleh—both wearing jackets that clearly identify them as press.

The Qatar-based news network interrupted its broadcast (5/10/22) with breaking news reporting that “an Al Jazeera correspondent has been shot by Israeli forces” and killed in Jenin. The network called it “deliberate,” adding that the killing of Abu Akleh was a “heinous crime which intends to only prevent the media from conducting their duty.”

Reporter Nida Ibrahim, on the phone from Ramallah, recounted the announcement of Abu Akleh’s death by the Palestinian Health Ministry, saying she was shot in the head. Her voice broke up as she talked about Abu Akleh’s dedication, her long experience covering Palestine, and the grief Ibrahim and her fellow journalists were experiencing. She carried on, saying, “This is the reality of Palestinian journalists covering the news”; unfortunately, they find “themselves part of the story.”

Outpourings of grief

Twitter (5/12/22)

News of Abu Akleh’s death spread across the world at the speed of the internet, with outpourings of grief, tributes, and international condemnation for her killing. Journalists who have covered the Israeli occupation of Palestine provided context, hitting Twitter with art, videos, eyewitness testimony and images from Palestinian activists, advocacy groups and press critics, among many others. Clips of Al Jazeera footage were prominent.

Late Wednesday, the Israeli military posted an online video and an implausible scenario to deflect blame for the murder, a denial that, with a few notable exceptions, corporate media would assiduously repeat. Yet the documentation and eyewitness accounts continued to mount.

Mondoweiss‘s Hanaysha told Al Jazeera (5/11/22):

The [Israeli] occupation army did not stop firing even after she collapsed. I couldn’t even extend my arm to pull her, because of the shots. The army was adamant on shooting to kill.

Electronic Intifada (5/11/22) included the Twitter post of another Palestinian-American journalist—Dena Takruri, host of Al Jazeera‘s Direct From—who said, “Shireen was shot near her ear, where the helmet didn’t cover. This was a shot of extreme precision.”

Abu Akleh was taken in a private vehicle to a hospital in Jenin, where she was declared dead. The shot to the head killed her instantly. An Al Jazeera producer, Ali Samoudi, was also shot in the back by an Israeli gunman, but will recover.

At the hospital, Samoudi told reporters, “We were covering the raid of the Israeli occupation forces when they suddenly opened fire at us; the first bullet hit me and the other killed Shireen.” He went on to say, “They killed her in cold blood.”

WSWS (5/11/22) also reported that Samoudi confirmed that “there was no Palestinian military resistance at all at the scene.”

“We pledge to prosecute the perpetrators legally, no matter how hard they try to cover up their crime, and bring them to justice,” the Qatar-based network said in a statement (NBC, 5/11/22).

The Israeli response

The Israeli prime minister offered video of a Palestinian fighter firing a weapon as evidence that Israel’s military did not kill Abu Akleh.

The video the Israeli military posted online depicted a lone Palestinian resistance fighter shooting down an alleyway, purportedly evidence that the Al Jazeera team were victims of Palestinian gunfire. In a series of statements on Twitter (Mondoweiss, 5/11/22), the office of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said:

According to the information we have gathered, it appears likely that armed Palestinians—who were firing indiscriminately at the time — were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist.

Israel’s claim was refuted by a number of sources, in addition to other eyewitness testimony. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s field researcher in Jenin documented the location of the Palestinian gunman depicted in the Israeli government video. “According to B’Tselem, the location of the video is in a completely separate location than where Abu Akleh was killed,” Mondoweiss (5/11/22) reported, and “cannot be the gunfire that killed the journalist.”

NBC’s Raf Sanchez’s reporting from Jenin corroborated B’Tselem’s. He posted on Twitter (5/11/22) that NBC researcher Matthew Mulligan “has geolocated the Al Jazeera video” and found that the “area doesn’t match the alleyways shown in the video being put out by the Israeli government.”

A thorough debunking by human rights groups, witnesses and journalists aired on Al Jazeera (5/12/22) also exposed the online video as Israeli military fabrication. Using a map of the occupied West Bank, the network illustrated how occupation forces had a direct line of fire to where Abu Akleh was shot, while the Palestinian resistance fighter shown was too far away to have shot her, blocked as he was by alleyways and buildings.

Hagai El Ad, executive director of B’Tselem, told viewers that the Israeli version of events is based “on a false narrative designed to protect the perpetrators.” He explained the “impossible logistics” of the Israeli scenario, adding that he recognized this as a “trick” often used for the “blanket impunity that Israel provides for itself.” He went on to say that

Israel has a track record of not punishing its soldiers who have committed crimes against Palestinians, and it has never jailed one of its soldiers for the killing of a journalist.

Though it provides another point of evidence, the geolocation data is hardly necessary, as simply looking at the videotapes and listening to corroborating journalistic and eyewitness testimony renders Abu Akleh’s death at the hands of the occupation forces beyond dispute.

Attacks on journalists

Intercept (4/5/22): “The journalist will be told that the reports he posts on Facebook are considered incitement—and although he is only reporting news, the fact that that news is made public is tantamount to incitement.”

Many independent news outlets provided context by including numbers and details of journalists killed and wounded by Israeli forces. Though well-documented, the numbers may be different due to different criteria and the difficulty of recording.

Cross Currents (5/12/22) reported that since 1972, the Amman-based Center for Defending Freedom of Journalists, “has documented 103 deaths of Palestinian journalists and nearly 7,000 injuries, plus many detentions and imprisonments.”

According to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (Mondoweiss, 5/11/22):

Abu Akleh is the 86th Palestinian journalist to be killed by Israel since the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967. And since 2000, more than 50 Palestinian journalists have been killed, including six in the past two years.

In April, the Intercept (4/5/22) revealed the ongoing harassment, jailing, repeated interrogations and threats against Palestinian journalists, so severe that many abandoned the work of journalism. The primary charge against them was ‘incitement.’” Vice reporter Hind Hassan posted a string of horrific videos on Twitter (5/12/22) documenting Israeli attacks on journalists. One dated April 15, 2022, shows an Israeli police officer run across the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in a surprise attack, breaking the arm of journalist Alaa Sous with a baton smash (Mondoweiss, 4/22/22).

‘Armed with cameras’

The Middle East Eye (5/11/22) reported Israeli military spokesperson Ran Kochav telling Army Radio that even if soldiers shot at someone, “this happened in battle, during a firefight,” so “this thing can happen.” Kochav went on to say Abu Akleh was “filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians. They’re armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so.”

Numerous press advocates responded to this statement. Reporting on a tribute for Abu Akleh held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, Cross Currents (5/12/22) called the accusation “an outrageous and egregious claim by any standard.” Reporters Without Borders has condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force against journalists, saying under no circumstances should they “be treated as parties to the armed conflict.”

Vox (5/11/22) noted that if Abu Akleh’s was killed by the IDF, her death “will fit into a larger pattern of attacks on the press in Palestine and in the systemic violence against Palestinians more broadly.” It called the “armed with cameras” assertion “a not-subtle comparison between the work of journalism and that of violence.”

Viewing cameras as weapons, together with the history of escalating attacks on reporters and charges of “incitement” for bearing witness to Israeli attacks, makes clear that the Israeli government considers journalists to be the enemy, and by extension suitable targets for snipers. Because journalists document the actions of Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinians, they jeopardize the military’s continued ability to act with impunity. Repressing press freedom in the Occupied West Bank seems to now be part of the state’s increasingly militarized strategy.

Calling for investigation

Anadolu Agency (5/11/22) reported on Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s moment of silence for Shireen Abu Akleh.

The Turkish international news outlet Anadolu Agency (5/11/22) covered Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s moment of silence for the slain journalist on the floor of the House of Representatives, including Tlaib’s opening that quoted President Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

We honor journalists killed, missing, imprisoned, detained and tortured covering war, exposing corruption and holding leaders accountable. The free press is not the enemy of people, far from it; at your best, you are the guardians of the truth.

Though she is a Palestinian American like Abu Akleh, no US corporate news outlet used Rashida Tlaib as a source for covering the slain journalist.

Tlaib also called on the US government to investigate the killing, saying that Washington should not allow “the same people committing those war crimes to do the investigation.” (Al Jazeera, 5/11/22). The International Criminal Court launched an investigation last year into possible Israeli war crimes (AP, 3/3/21).

In an interview between MSNBC news host Ayman Mohyeldin and on-the-ground reporter Raf Sanchez (5/13/22), Sanchez explained why the Palestinians don’t trust the Israelis to investigate Abu Akleh’s death. In 2018, he said:

I was in Gaza; an Israeli sniper killed a young Palestinian journalist called Yaser Murtaja. He, like Shireen Abu Akleh, was wearing a vest that clearly showed he was a member of the press. That was four years ago. The Israeli military said they were investigating then, and I asked them today to give me the report…. They sent me a very short statement saying that they had looked into the incident, they had determined that there was no criminal activity by any Israeli soldiers, and they had closed the case. That gives you a sense of why Palestinians feel that they are unlikely to get the full story out of the Israeli military.

Murtaja’s story also appears in the Intercept (4/9/18).

Palestinian rights advocates in the United States have called on the Biden administration to demand an independent probe into the killing of Abu Akleh, saying that Israel should not be allowed to investigate itself. Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, said investigations are “empty gestures” if the probe is to be left for Israel (Al Jazeera, 5/11/22).

Addressing reporters at UN headquarters in New York, Palestine’s UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour (Al Jazeera, 5/11/22) said:

The story of the Israeli side does not hold water, it is fictitious, and it is not in line with reality, and we do not accept to have an investigation on this issue with those who are the criminals in conducting this event itself.

He said what is needed is an investigation that is “internationally credible.”

House Democrats demanded an independent investigation. Though US Department of State spokesperson Ned Price (Reuters, 5/11/22) called for a “thorough investigation and full accountability,” when asked whether the US would support an international investigation, Price repeated: “Israel has the wherewithal to conduct a thorough investigation.”

Al Jazeera reported the calls by US sources for an independent investigation, while most US corporate news repeated Israel’s demand to control any investigation.

US corporate coverage

The context of escalating Israeli attacks on freedom of the press and on journalists in the Occupied Territories did not enter the frame of most US news coverage. Instead, many used a back-and-forth blame frame for reporting the murder of a veteran war correspondent who knew well how to negotiate crossfire in the field of battle. This was acknowledged by Ali Samoudi, who said from his hospital bed, if there had been crossfire, they wouldn’t have been there.

Amidst the debunking of the Israeli messaging, by late Wednesday some news outlets, including NBC (5/11/22), noted that Israel “appeared to step back from that claim” that Abu Akleh may have been killed by Palestinian gunmen.

Yet most big media would continue to include Israeli messaging in their reporting, while failing to disclose any of the factchecking done on the Israeli video. They “balanced” on-the-ground testimony with Israeli statements, keeping the propaganda story alive.

CBS News (5/11/22) carefully avoided attributing responsibility to Israeli forces.

The second sentence of the CBS report (5/11/22) from Jerusalem said, “The broadcaster and a reporter who was wounded in the incident blamed Israeli forces, while Israel said there was evidence the two were hit by Palestinian gunfire.” The opening set the tone for a long series of opposing claims, in which every fragmented aspect about Israel and Palestine becomes a tedious set of contentions, rendering the truth incomprehensible.

The story included the “camera as weapon” comment, followed with the unrelated, “CBS News correspondent Imtiaz Tyab knew Abu Akleh personally,” adding more laudable details about the slain journalist. It continued, “Israelis have long been critical of Al Jazeera‘s coverage, but authorities generally allow its journalists to operate freely”—presented not as a requirement for democracy, but as a generous act of tolerance.

CBS said that the relationship between Israeli forces and Palestinian journalists “is strained,” and ended with a series of toned-down examples of Israeli attacks on journalists, without one unifying critical comment. It even included the killing of three Palestinian journalists, including AP (12/21/18) reporter Rashed Rashid in 2018, followed by: “The military has never acknowledged the shooting.” It failed to connect that history to Palestinian demands for an independent, international investigation into Abu Akleh’s murder.

The most disingenuous comments, which revolved around the investigation, were included early on. CBS offered fragments of truth—saying, for example, that US Ambassador Tom Nides called for “a thorough investigation into the circumstances of her death,” without saying by whom. It stated uncritically, “Israel said it had proposed a joint investigation and autopsy with the Palestinian Authority, which refused the offer,” with no explanation as to why.

The reporting illustrated how “balance” and fragments of disjointed “facts” have become a stylistic method to confuse and obliterate meaningful connections that drain compassion, outrage and demands for justice for the victims of state violence.

The New York Times (5/11/21) ran a home-page headline that could have run if Abu Akleh had died of natural causes.

In a similar manner, the New York Times (5/11/22) attributed Abu Akleh’s death to “gunfire” in the second paragraph. A second article posted later that day was more definitively structured by false balance: “The network and Palestinian authorities blamed Israeli troops for the killing. Israel said the blame could lie with Palestinian gunmen.”

ABC News (5/12/22) presented the same style of decontextualized back-and-forth, referring to a proposed Israeli investigation in the lead paragraph: “The head of the Palestinian Authority blamed Israel for her death and rejected Israeli calls for a joint investigation.” It evoked the “angry Arab” lexicon, saying, “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas angrily rejected that proposal,” while “Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett accused the Palestinians of denying Israel “access to the basic findings required to get to the truth.” No mention was made of past Israeli failures to investigate the killing of journalists.

ABC dismissed the investigation into Israeli war crimes with one phrase: “Israel has rejected that probe as being biased against it.”

An end in sight?

 When the Al Jazeera news anchor (5/10/22) asked Nida Ibrahim what could be done now, the reporter answered that a “powerful military occupation has been targeting journalists for years,” and if no one is brought to justice, “there will be no end to this.” She explained that Palestinian journalists are targeted by the IDF because “part of what we do is uncover the crimes,” or what the Israeli army doesn’t want to be shown. “Palestinian journalists will show you injuries where they’ve been shot by the Army or settlers,” she noted.

Responding to Representative Tlaib’s statement on the House floor, the New York Post (5/12/22) called it an “anti-Israel tirade,” charging that Tlaib was only interested in “slamming the Middle East’s only true democracy as it defends itself against terrorists.”

Chris Hedges (Consortium News, 5/17/22): “The execution of Abu Akleh was not an accident. She was singled out for elimination.”

Writing for Consortium News (5/17/22), former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges called Abu Akleh’s death an execution. “Assassination” may be a better word for her killing, but she did not simply “die,” as the New York Times reported. As the Chicago Sun Times (5/14/22) pointed out, “Palestinian Journalist Dies” is an “especially egregious” New York Times headline, “blatantly ignoring” that Abu Akleh “was struck by a bullet.”

That the state of Israel can continue to be labeled a “true democracy” after years of human rights violations, the repression of press freedoms and the extreme of killing journalists outright—not to mention that approximately 30% of the population under its control not allowed to participate in national elections—attests to the strength of the dominant narratives that have long guided US news coverage of Israel, recently identified by writer Greg Shupak in The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel & the Media. The misleading and distorted frames of “both sides,” and “Israel’s right to defend itself” even as they are aggressors, are presented in a manner that benefits Israel.

Yet with the targeted killing of the globally prominent Al Jazeera reporter, as global calls for accountability mount (The Nation, 5/18/22), a crack seems to have appeared in the media armor of the Israeli military. Some US corporate media, most notably NBC, have shown a willingness to follow on-the-ground truth instead of Israeli fabrications. Other outlets, however, seem resigned to repeat increasingly implausible, transparently incoherent reporting that fails the basic test of decent journalism practices.

The post Israel Killed Reporter Abu Akleh—but US Media Disguised the Facts appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Robin Andersen.

This week on CounterSpin: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently: “Whenever I go to community meetings, it always comes up. Young and middle-aged and even some elderly. It tortures them.” What was he talking about? Student loan debt. So is what we call “higher” education an individual investment or a public good? The way news media talk about it could be decisive. We’ll hear from Braxton Brewington, press secretary and organizer at the group Debt Collective.

(cc photo: Ted Eytan)

Also on the show: When media say there’s a debate about transgender peoples’ “right to exist,” remind yourself that trans people are going to exist; what’s on the table is whether they get to live free from persecution, oppression, exclusion and erasure. Texas state leadership is staking a position on that, but humans everywhere are pushing back, and we talk about that with Andy Marra, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund.

The post Braxton Brewington on Student Loan Debt, Andy Marra on Trans Youth Rights appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

On June 10, 2021, the Dhaka Cyber Tribunal referred the case to the cybercrime unit of the Dhaka police’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for investigation, Choudhury told CPJ. On August 16, 2021, CID officers interrogated Choudhury for around two hours, during which they repeatedly asked him why he published the articles and demanded he reveal his sources, he said.

Section 40 of the Digital Security Act allows authorities 60 days to complete an investigation, which can be extended with judicial approval. The CID submitted applications to extend the investigation period on June 22, 2021, September 30, 2021, and November 17, 2021, according to Choudhury.

On January 23, 2022, Sub-inspector Mehdi Hassan filed an investigative report at the Dhaka Cyber Tribunal which accused Choudhury of violating three sections of the Digital Security Act pertaining to the publication of offensive, false, or threatening information; defamation; and abetment.

The first two offenses can each carry a prison sentence of up to three years and a fine between 300,000 taka (US$3,500) and 500,000 taka (US$5,815), according to the law, which states that abetment carries the same punishment as committing an offense itself.

On February 17, 2022, the Dhaka Cyber Tribunal issued a summons for Choudhury to appear on April 6, 2022, at which time the journalist’s lawyer will file an application for anticipatory bail, Choudhury said, adding that if anticipatory bail is denied, the tribunal will frame, or determine the nature of, the charges against him.

Sub-inspector Hassan, the investigating officer in the case, did not respond to CPJ’s text message requesting comment. Sanu did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

Choudhury was previously arrested in November 2003 when he tried to travel to Israel to participate in a conference with the Hebrew Writers Association, according to CPJ documentation. He was released on bail in May 2005 before he was convicted of sedition and treason in January 2015 and sentenced to seven years in prison, according to CPJ research and Choudhury. Choudhury was also detained from November 2012 to July 2018, when he served concurrent sentences for fraud, sedition, and treason, he said.

In July 2006, two small devices detonated outside the Weekly Blitz office, as CPJ documented.

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