Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Six Months of Lies and Pressure: How US and Israeli Interference Stalled Netanyahu’s ICC Arrest Warrant

 

at 11/22/24 7:06am

More than six months after the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, a ruling was finally issued Thursday. In the interim, both Israel and the United States took unprecedented steps to obstruct the court’s decision-making process. In May, ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan publicly announced his request for warrants targeting three Hamas officials and two Israeli leaders. Khan accused Israel of crimes against humanity, describing the actions as part of a “widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.” Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, dismissed the ICC’s actions with scorn. Netanyahu called the court anti-Semitic and remarked, “I’m not concerned at all about our status. I think the prosecutor should be concerned about his status.” His defense minister at the time, Yoav Gallant, denounced the charges as politically motivated. In the weeks following the ICC prosecutors announcement, backlash against the court reached a fever pitch. Both U.S. and Israeli officials issued a barrage of threats and condemnations, prompting UN experts to release a statement decrying the escalating rhetoric. According to sources cited by Axios, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly turned to President Joe Biden, urging him to intervene and block the arrest warrants. Simultaneously, bipartisan voices in Congress began threatening retaliatory legislation against the ICC. The pressure campaign soon escalated. Twelve Republican senators openly threatened the ICC with sanctions if its judges proceeded with warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Meanwhile, a wave of legal challenges poured in from Israel and allied nations, including the United Kingdom and Germany, seeking to undermine the prosecutor’s case. Despite appeals from human rights groups urging the Biden administration to disavow the threats, there has been no such distancing. Incoming Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune recently went further, suggesting the U.S. should introduce sanctions legislation against the ICC—a measure he expects to materialize under a second Trump administration. If the ICC bends to such pressure, might as well close the expensive shop, because no one has deserved an arrest warrant more than Netanyahu. In any event, the ongoing genocide will be condemned by the International Court of Justice, just near the ICC building in The Hague. — Alfred de Zayas (@Alfreddezayas) November 19, 2024 Such rhetoric advocating sanctions against the ICC is not new. During Donald Trump’s first term, similar threats were made, drawing sharp rebukes from prominent human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch. Allegations of sexual misconduct against ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan have sparked controversy, with many viewing the accusations as politically motivated attempts to derail the court’s high-profile cases. Khan, accused of groping a female aide, has denied the claims but now faces an external investigation by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. Critics argue that the timing of these allegations—coinciding with the ICC’s pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders—suggests a concerted effort to undermine the court’s work. The Guardian reported allegations from unnamed ICC staff questioning the impartiality of the United Nations’ Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) in its investigation of Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. These allegations, centered on Khans wife, Dato Shyamala Alagendra, who briefly worked with the OIOS four years ago, have been seized upon by critics of the ICC Romanian Magistrate Iulia Motoc, one of three judges assigned to the Netanyahu case, abruptly resigned citing health reasons. Her replacement, Slovenian Judge Beti Hohler, was immediately met with an Israeli challenge to her impartiality, further stalling the ICC’s deliberations. Observers have noted a pattern of disruption, alleging a deliberate strategy to obstruct justice. Reports from May 2024 revealed that former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was subjected to a targeted harassment campaign by Israel’s Mossad during her investigation into war crimes in Palestine. The reports claimed that Mossad’s former chief, Yossi Cohen, acted as an unofficial messenger for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, using covert threats to pressure Bensouda into dropping the case. It could not be more obvious whats happening here. Israel threatened Karim Khans predecessor as ICC chief prosecutor. Now hes on the receiving end of a smear campaign. It could hardly be less subtle. https://t.co/kmQrPd1Wcw pic.twitter.com/kqXElpFUd4 — Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) October 24, 2024 The timing of the allegations against ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan has drawn scrutiny, with media coverage increasingly dominated by calls for his resignation. The New York Times ran a headline reading, “ICC Prosecutor Seeking Arrest of Israeli Leaders Faces Own Inquiry,” reflecting the intensity of the moment. As debates unfold across social media, any definitive judgment on the allegations remains fraught amid the charged political climate. Six months after the International Criminal Court (ICC) submitted its request for arrest warrants against Hamas and Israeli officials, the landscape has shifted significantly. Israel has killed two of the Palestinians targeted by the investigation, and Yoav Gallant has been replaced as Defense Minister. The contrast with the court’s swift action in issuing an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin—completed within a month—is striking. The protracted delay in the case of Gallant, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Hamas military leader Mohammed al-Deif underscores the intense U.S. and Israeli efforts to undermine the ICC’s work and question its legitimacy. Feature photo | Demonstrators gather against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus address at the United Nations General Assembly, September 26, 2024. Aashish Kiphayet | AP Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post Six Months of Lies and Pressure: How US and Israeli Interference Stalled Netanyahu’s ICC Arrest Warrant appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Foreign Affairs, Hamas ICC investigation, ICC arrest warrants Israel, ICC Karim Khan investigation, ICC legitimacy crisis, ICC vs Israeli leaders, Israeli pressure on ICC, Mossad intimidation ICC, Netanyahu Gallant war crimes, Netanyahu war crimes charges, U.S. sanctions ICC]

— Why Did the FBI Show Up at Alison Weir’s Door? Critics of Israel Say They Know the Answer

 

at 11/21/24 7:40am

Journalist and author Alison Weir has raised concerns over what she describes as an unsettling visit from the FBI, alleging that agents showed up at her home unannounced to question her. In a public statement on November 18, Weir revealed that she was approached by agents who informed her the visit was connected to a matter involving Press TV, the Iranian state-owned news outlet. She said she asked agents to allow a family member to be present before continuing the discussion, during which she learned the agents had been directed by one of their offices to “check in with certain people.” The encounter has drawn attention amid growing fears among advocates for Palestinian rights, who say federal authorities are targeting individuals critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The FBI has declined to comment on the visit or clarify whether it is part of a larger investigation. FBI agents suddenly showed up at my home recently. They asked me about a person whose name I didnt recognize. I asked to have a family member present and ascertained from the agents that one of their offices had asked them to check in with certain people in regard to something… — Alison Weir (@alisonweir) November 18, 2024 The U.S. government’s targeting of Iran’s PressTV has been ongoing since June 2021, when its website domain was seized. Despite this, the channel has continued to interview guests from the United States and maintain correspondents there. Among its guests has been Weir, who says she has been interviewed by PressTV multiple times over the years without issue—until now. Weir, best known for her book “Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel.” also runs the website “If Americans Knew,” which offers critical perspectives on occupied Palestine. Following the FBI’s unexpected visit to her home, Weir expressed concern over what she perceives as a coordinated effort to suppress dissenting views on Israel. “It would appear someone is now trying to set the stage to silence dissent on Israel-Palestine in the United States by trumping up ‘connections with Iran,’” Weir said, noting that other pro-Palestine activists have reported similar visits from the FBI. On November 1, pro-Palestinian TikTok influencer Guy Christensen faced a harrowing ordeal when his familys home was encircled by police vehicles. Authorities informed him that an individual had impersonated him, making bomb threats against several synagogues. Christensen, en route to a speaking engagement with Green Party figures Jill Stein and Butch Ware, was detained at the airport for questioning and is now under FBI investigation. When he inquired about the impersonators identity, officials disclosed that the caller had used a VPN, obscuring the origin of the call. I’m finally speaking out. I was targeted by a Zionist who impersonated me to the FBI in an attempt to put me on a No Fly List. This is the story of what happened. This is what Zionists do to people who try to help Palestinians: pic.twitter.com/e1FSh33COo — YourFavoriteGuy (@guychristensen_) November 13, 2024 In June, U.S. human rights activist Osama Abuirshaid revealed he had been placed on an FBI watchlist without explanation. Speaking to Turkish media outlet Anadolu Agency, Abuirshaid described harassment that he believes was motivated by his advocacy for Palestinian rights. Months earlier, on March 19, an Egyptian-American woman faced a similar experience when FBI agents arrived at her home over screenshots of Facebook posts. A video of the encounter, in which she repeatedly asked the agents to leave and referred them to her attorney, went viral, garnering millions of views. Her comment, “This is America,” as she confronted the agents sparked widespread debate about federal overreach and the implications for freedom of expression. According to the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project at the City University of New York, government surveillance targeting Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs expressing support for Palestine has surged since the onset of the war in Gaza. However, the scrutiny has not been confined to minority groups. U.S. civil rights organization Palestine Legal reported that as early as February, it received multiple accounts of FBI agents visiting activists in response to social media posts criticizing what the activists described as Israels genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The FBI’s discriminatory targeting of people who speak up for Palestinian rights on social media is an attempt to silence popular criticism of Israel. You have a right to speak up against genocide. You have a right to refuse to speak to FBI agents without an attorney present. — Palestine Legal (@pal_legal) January 23, 2024 It was revealed earlier this year that, under pressure from U.S. members of Congress, the FBI began monitoring pro-Palestine student protesters who had set up encampments on college campuses. Pro-Israel groups in the United States reportedly lobbied for warrantless surveillance of these student-led demonstrations.. While the FBI focused on surveilling anti-war protesters and investigating its own citizens, reports emerged that an ex-Israeli special forces agent had infiltrated a student encampment at UCLA. The former operative suggested the operation may have been conducted in coordination with the Los Angeles Police Department. Requests for comment from Middle East Eye regarding the incident went unanswered. Feature photo | Alison Weir Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe.’ Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post Why Did the FBI Show Up at Alison Weir’s Door? Critics of Israel Say They Know the Answer appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: National, Alison Weir FBI visit, anti-war protest monitoring, civil rights Palestine Legal, FBI surveillance Palestine activism, freedom of expression Palestine, Israeli influence U.S. policies, pro-Palestine dissent suppression, pro-Palestine FBI watchlists, student activists under surveillance, U.S. PressTV investigation]

— Chris Hedges: Organized Oblivion

 

at 11/20/24 7:07am

Washington DC — (Scheerpost) — I am in the The Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center next to the St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in Manhattan. I am holding a bound, hand-written memoir, which includes poetry, drawings, and scrapbooked images, by Zaven Seraidarian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide. The front cover of the book, one of six volumes, reads “Bloody Journal.” The other volumes have titles such as “Drops of Springtime,” “Tears” and “The Wooden Spoon.” “My name will remain immortal on the earth,” the author writes. “I will speak about myself and tell more.” The center houses hundreds of documents, letters, hand-drawn maps of villages that have disappeared, sepia photographs, poems, drawings and histories — much of it untranslated — on the customs, traditions and notable families of lost Armenian communities. Jesse Arlen, the director of the center, looks forlornly at the volume in my hand. “No one has probably read it, looked at it or even knew it was here,” he says. He opens a box and hands me a hand drawn map by Hareton Saksoorian of Havav village in Palu, where Armenians in 1915 were massacred or expelled. Saksoorian drew the map from memory after he escaped. The drawings of Armenian homes have the tiny, inked in names of the long dead. This will be the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza. They too will soon battle to preserve memory, to defy an indifferent world that stood by as they were slaughtered. They too will doggedly seek to preserve scraps of their existence. They too will write memoirs, histories and poems, draw maps of villages, refugee camps and cities that have been obliterated, set down painful stories of butchery, carnage and loss. They too will name and condemn their killers, lament the extermination of families, including thousands of children, and struggle to preserve a vanished world. But time is a cruel master. Intellectual and emotional life for those who are cast out of their homeland is defined by the crucible of exile, what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said told me is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.” Said’s book “Out of Place” is a record of this lost world. The Armenian poet Armen Anush was raised in an orphanage in Aleppo, Syria. He captures the life sentence of those who survive genocide in his poem “Sacred Obsession.” He writes: Country of light, you visit me every night in my sleep. Every night, exalted, as a venerable goddess, You bring fresh sensations and hopes to my exiled soul. Every night you ease the waverings of my path. Every night you reveal the boundless deserts, The open eyes of the dead, the crying of children in the distance, The crackle and red flame of the countless burned bodies, And the unsheltered caravan, always unsure, always faltering. Every night the same hellish, deathly scene – The tired Euphrates washing the blood off the savaged corpses, The waves making merry with the rays of the sun, And relieving the burden of tis useless, weary weight. The same humid, black wells of charred bodies, The same thick smoke enveloping the whole of the Syrian desert. The same voices from the depths, the same moans, soft and sunless, And the same brutal, ruthless barbarity of the Turkish mob. The poem ends, however, with a plea not that these nighttime terrors end, but that they “come to me every night,” that “the flame of your heroes” always “accompany my days.” “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Milan Kundera reminds us. It is better to endure crippling trauma than to forget. Once we forget, once memories are purged — the goal of all genocidal killers — we are enslaved to lies and myths, severed from our individual, cultural and national identities. We no longer know who we are. “It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history,” Kundera writes in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” “Human life — and herein lies its secret — takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.” Those who have crossed that border return to us as prophets, prophets no one wants to hear. The ancient Greeks believed that as the souls of the departed were being ferried to Hades they were forced to drink the water from the River Lethe to erase memory. The destruction of memory is the final obliteration of being, the last act of mortality. Memory is the struggle to stay the boatman’s hand. The genocide in Gaza mirrors the physical annihilation of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks, who feared a nationalist revolt like the one that had convulsed the Balkans, drove nearly all of the two million Armenians out of Turkey. Men and women were usually separated. The men were often immediately murdered or sent to death camps, such as those at Ras-Ul-Ain — in 1916 over 80,000 Armenians were slaughtered there — and Deir-el-Zor in the Syrian desert. At least a million were forced on death marches — not unlike the Palestinians in Gaza who have been forcibly displaced by Israel, up to a dozen times — into the deserts of what are now Syria and Iraq. There, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered or died of starvation, exposure and disease. Corpses littered the desert expanse. By 1923, an estimated 1.2 million Armenians were dead. Orphanages throughout the Middle East were flooded with some 200,000 destitute Armenian children. The doomed resistance by several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria that chose not to obey the deportation order was captured in Franz Werfel’s novel “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a Polish-German literary critic who survived the Holocaust, said it was widely read in the Warsaw ghetto, which mounted a doomed uprising of its own in April 1943. In 2000, when he was 98 years old, I interviewed the writer and singer Hagop H. Asadourian, one of the last survivors of the Armenian genocide. He was born in the village of Chomaklou in eastern Turkey and deported, along with the rest of his village, in 1915. His mother and four of his sisters died of typhus in the Syrian desert. It would be 39 years before he reunited with his only surviving sister, who he was separated from one night near the Dead Sea as they fled with a ragged band of Armenian orphans from Syria to Jerusalem. He told me he wrote to give a voice to the 331 people with whom he trudged into Syria in September 1915, only 29 of whom survived. “You can never really write what happened anyway,” Asadourian said. “It is too ghoulish. I still fight with myself to remember it as it was. You write because you have to. It all wells up inside of you. It is like a hole that fills constantly with water and no amount of bailing will empty it. This is why I continue.” He stopped to collect himself before continuing. “When it came time to bury my mother, I had to get two other small boys to help me carry her body up to a well where they were dumping the corpses,” he said. We did this so the jackals would not eat them. The stench was terrible. There were swarms of black flies buzzing over the opening. We pushed her in feet first, and the other boys, to escape the smell, ran down the hill. I stayed. I had to watch. I saw her head, as she fell, bang on one side of the well and then the other before she disappeared. At the time, I did not feel anything at all.” He halted, visibly shaken. “What kind of a son is that?”’ he asked hoarsely. He eventually found his way to an orphanage in Jerusalem. “These things dig into you, not only once, but throughout life, throughout life, through these days,” he told an interviewer from the USC Shoah Foundation. I am 98-years-old. And today, to this day, I cannot forget any of this. I forget what I saw yesterday maybe, but I could not forget these things. And yet, we have to beg nations to recognize genocide. I lost 11 members of my family and I have to beg people to believe me. That’s what hurts you most. It’s a terrible world, a terrible experience.” His 14 books were a fight against erasure, but when I spoke with him, he admitted that the work of the Turkish army was now almost complete. His last book was “The Smoldering Generation,” which he said was “about the inevitable loss of our culture.” The present is something in which the dead hold no shares. “No one takes the place of those who are gone,” he said, seated in front of a picture window that looked out on his garden in Tenafly, New Jersey. “Your children do not understand you in this country. You cannot blame them.” The world of the Armenians in eastern Turkey, first mentioned by the Greeks and Persians in 6 B.C., has, like Gaza, whose history spans 4,000 years, all but disappeared. The contributions of Armenian culture are forgotten. It was Armenian monks, for example, who rescued works by ancient Greek writers such as Philo and Eusebius, from oblivion. I stumbled on the ruins of Armenian villages when I worked as a reporter in southeastern Turkey. Like Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel, these villages did not appear on maps. Those who carry out genocide seek total annihilation. Nothing is to remain. Especially memory. This will be our next battle. We must not forget. Feature photo | Forget Us Not by Mr. Fish Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report. The post Chris Hedges: Organized Oblivion appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: National, Opinion & Analysis, Top Story]

— Escalation Flashpoint: Biden Approves Ukrainian Strikes Inside Russian Heartland

 

at 11/19/24 7:06am

President Joe Biden’s executive legacy will likely be marked by genocide, reckless great-power politics, massive and escalating deportation policies, and nuclear brinkmanship. With two months remaining in office, the president has authorized the Armed Forces of Ukraine to employ ATACMS, a U.S. supersonic ballistic missile system, against Russian and North Korean military forces inside Russian territory. The first strikes using ATACMS could occur within days. But why are these weapons significant for Ukraine? It is no secret that Kyiv has been lobbying Washington to use ATACMS against targets in Russia for some time. However, President Biden is now under more pressure to give Ukraine an upper hand now that President-Elect Trump has repeatedly stated that he will seek a speedy end to the War, presumably at the expense of Ukrainian interests. President Biden had previously prohibited the use of ATACMS within Russia, stating, Were trying to avoid World War III, in response to President Vladimir Putins warnings that such actions would escalate the conflict. However, this policy shift appears to be a reaction to the influx of North Korean troops into Russia, reportedly fighting alongside Russian forces to reclaim territory lost during Ukraines Kursk offensive. There are concerns that Pyongyang could deploy up to 100,000 soldiers to support Russias efforts in Ukraine, potentially leading to a disastrous confrontation with NATO. Despite alarmist narratives in corporate media, the deployment of North Korean troops would likely occur in rotations, similar to how other militaries cycle their forces. The purpose of employing ATACMS is to target command and control centers, supply depots, and logistical hubs within Russia. This strategy aims to deter Pyongyang from providing substantial military reinforcements to the Russian army. NATO continues to seek a short-term silver bullet fix to complex, enduring challenges. Ukraine is currently losing the war, losing ground in Kursk and the Donbas, and is facing a morale and recruitment crisis. Ballistic missiles do not hold ground, secure operational objectives, or sustain morale during a war of attrition. Like previous weapons packages, aid packages, and rules-of-engagement revisions, this new policy may serve as a minor obstacle to Russian advances or, at worst, prompt the Kremlin to escalate in unforeseen ways. The tragedy of great-power politics lies in the reality that neither side will likely back down. Russia, after enduring a prolonged campaign, is in a strong position, while the United States and its NATO allies are unwilling to let the fighting end. A cessation of hostilities would discredit them, embolden geopolitical adversaries such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, and strengthen the BRICS initiative, which directly challenges Western unipolarity. While the use of ATACMS within Russia is unlikely to trigger an immediate global conflict, the alignment of geopolitical alliances is hardening, and the prospect of broader confrontation is becoming increasingly plausible. One sliver of hope lies in the limitations of the U.S. industrial base, which lacks the surge capacity for a major war. The bombs fueling the genocide in Palestine and the attritional conflict in Ukraine have exposed the weaknesses in the U.S. defense manufacturing sector. How might a Trump presidency alter this equation? Join us on State of Play for an in-depth analysis of this escalating conflict and its potential flashpoints. Greg Stoker is a former US Army Ranger with a background in human intelligence collection and analysis. After serving four combat deployments in Afghanistan, he studied anthropology and International Relations at Columbia University. He is currently a military and geopolitical analyst and a social media “influencer,” though he hates the term. MintPress News is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Also, check out rapper Lowkey’s video interview and podcast series, The Watchdog. The post Escalation Flashpoint: Biden Approves Ukrainian Strikes Inside Russian Heartland appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, News, Top Story, ATACMS strikes analysis, Biden ATACMS policy, Biden Trump Ukraine policy, NATO escalation Russia, North Korea troops Ukraine, Russia Ukraine NATO conflict, U.S. military aid Ukraine, Ukraine ballistic missiles, Ukraine morale crisis, Ukraine war escalation]

— Trump Election Win Triggers Houthi War Drills as Yemen Braces for US Invasion

 

at 11/18/24 9:19am

The goal is not to repel or kill enemy soldiers but to capture them,” said Ali Mohammed Hassan, his voice steady as he adjusted the strap of his AK-47. Dressed in the traditional Tahami uniform, grenades hanging from his belt and ammunition at the ready, Hassan spoke with the confidence of someone deeply familiar with the terrain. “I know this land. That is our advantage.” Hassan recently joined a cadre of armed residents in a military drill along the coastal areas of eastern Hodeidah Governorate. The exercise, rooted in a mix of strategy and necessity, reflected growing local fears of an impending foreign incursion. Dozens of local military drills have been held across Yemen’s western regions in recent weeks, particularly in the coastal areas, as residents brace themselves for what they believe is an imminent invasion led by the United States. We prepare to face any bad scenarios, such as the army’s inability to confront the invading forces or an airdrop by enemy paratroopers that may attempt to exploit large areas inside the country,” said Hassan. Hassan’s words reflect the mounting fear gripping communities in the wake of recent threats directed at Yemen’s government by the United States. These grassroots maneuvers, marked by participation from local residents, align with broader and more complex drills conducted by Yemeni military forces. Over the past week, the Naval Forces and Coastal Defense units have executed tactical exercises under the name To Make Your Faces Disgraced. The operations simulated the defense against a hypothetical American attack, complete with four distinct waves of assaults. Yemeni naval forces have intensified their readiness with a series of five large-scale maneuvers that spanned regional waters, coastal areas, urban streets, and even residential neighborhoods. These exercises, which simulated violent clashes, underscore the escalating seriousness of perceived threats, particularly as reinforcements arrive in Mokha—a strategic area under the control of Saudi coalition allies. Compounding the tension is a surge in recruitment activity in southern Yemen by forces that have openly expressed a willingness to normalize relations with Israel. The maneuvers showcased an array of advanced weaponry, including drones, sea and air missiles, torpedoes, and naval mines, alongside tanks, anti-armor systems, and other cutting-edge equipment. Hypothetical scenarios included strikes on battleships, submarines, minesweepers, and amphibious assaults. Troops also engaged in simulated clashes along Hodeidah’s shores, using urban warfare tactics such as clearing occupied buildings, ambushing armored vehicles, and capturing hypothetical American soldiers. These exercises even included the evacuation of wounded personnel and the detonation of landmines under combat-like conditions. In a rare move, military media released only 45 minutes of footage from the drills, hinting at the secrecy surrounding the deployment of new weapons, including home-grown autonomous underwater vehicles. Key technologies like air defenses, ballistic missiles, anti-ship weaponry, and systems designed to counter advanced aircraft and destroyers remained classified. The training also prepared for unconventional scenarios, such as countering a scorched-earth strategy that might involve fire belts created by modern warships and aircraft. During a televised address on Thursday, Abdulmalik AlHouthi, leader of Ansar Allah, announced that over half a million fighters had been mobilized and trained, with many completing military courses. AlHouthi also revealed that Yemen had conducted 2,900 maneuvers, marches, and military displays in preparation for potential conflicts.   US Ultimatum Raises Stakes In a development that could spell disaster for millions of Yemenis, Sanaa has received an ultimatum: halt military operations targeting Israeli ships in the Red Sea or face an occupation of Hodeidah. As the primary entry point for humanitarian aid and economic goods into Yemen, Hodeidah is a lifeline for the country’s war-stricken population. Renewed conflict in the city threatens to unravel the fragile calm brought by a United Nations-brokered truce following more than eight years of devastating war. The U.S. threats against the Sanaa government come alongside heightened diplomatic activity. U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Steven Fagin has reportedly held intensive discussions with key opponents of Ansar Allah, including Rashad al-Alimi, Tariq Afash, and Aidaroos Al-Zubaidi. Sources familiar with the matter told MintPress News that these meetings are part of a broader U.S. plan to destabilize Yemens internal security and ultimately seize control of Hodeidah. The justification? Ensuring the security of international navigation and countering Ansar Allahs alleged threat to Israeli vessels. In response, the Sanaa government, Ansar Allah, and the Yemeni army have flatly rejected the U.S. demands. Reaffirming their stance, they declared that operations against Israeli or affiliated ships would persist until the aggression against Gaza and Lebanon came to an end. In a recent statement, Jamal Amer, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Sanaa government, asserted that the U.S. is actively seeking to undermine Sanaa. He claimed that, upon failing in its efforts, the U.S. began leaking information about a potential invasion of Hodeidah to support Israel and pressure Yemens leadership to cease its support for Gaza. Amer warned that any such action would result in a conflict surpassing the Vietnam War in severity for U.S. forces, emphasizing that free people do not kneel and that the American regime does not hold divine authority. Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the leader of Ansar Allah, responded to escalating threats by declaring, “We are on a practical path, in which we prepare for any level of escalation that America and Israel may resort to.” He also cautioned the Saudi coalition against further entanglement in Yemen. Echoing this sentiment, al-Houthi stated, “The Yemeni Armed Forces support our Arab brothers in Gaza and Lebanon, and any other movement the armed forces will face.” He warned that confrontations would not be confined to mercenary forces but could extend to Saudi Arabia and the UAE if further provocations occur. Newly recruited Houthi fighters gather in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 21, 2024. Osamah Abdulrahman | AP These warnings follow an unprecedented escalation by Washington and London against Yemen, including participation in Israeli attacks on power stations in Hodeidah. U.S. warplanes recently struck Sana’a, Sa’ada, and Hodeidah, deploying B-2 stealth bombers for the first time. A U.S. defense official confirmed that the bombers targeted five underground weapons storage sites, showcasing their capability to penetrate heavily defended airspace. Sources cited by MintPress News suggest that recent U.S. airstrikes in Yemen targeted remote mountain areas, a small communications network in Saada, and abandoned military camps—falling short of hitting weapon depots or making any significant dent in Yemens military arsenal. These strikes, conducted by the B-2 stealth bomber, are particularly striking, as they underscore the mounting difficulties faced by the U.S. in countering Yemens increasingly formidable air defense systems. Over the past year, Yemeni forces have downed at least 11 MQ-9 Reaper drones, each costing approximately $32 million. This alone amounts to more than $350 million in taxpayer-funded losses. Similarly, the cost of defending Israeli territory against Yemeni-launched projectiles has added to the mounting financial strain. Each missile from the U.S.-supplied THAAD and Patriot air defense systems, often priced between $2 million and $4 million apiece, has contributed billions of dollars in expenditures, with American taxpayers footing the bill. The U.S. naval presence near Yemen, including deployments such as the USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group and guided missile destroyers, further inflates this cost. Sustaining this naval operation to patrol the Red Sea and defend Israel runs into millions per day. Tensions have not been limited to aerial clashes either. Earlier this year, the Red Sea was the backdrop for a dramatic and violent confrontation between Yemeni Coastal Defense Forces and a commando squad believed to include American mercenaries and Israeli soldiers. The elite team attempted to liberate the Galaxy, an Israeli ship seized by Yemen’s navy near Hodeidah. Despite heavy fighting that left dozens of soldiers dead, the mission ultimately failed, leaving the Galaxy in Yemeni hands. The episode serves as a grim preview of the kind of direct confrontations that could unfold along Yemen’s coast should an American invasion move ahead.   Trump Policies Stoke Defiance As tensions in the Middle East continue to escalate, Yemen has emerged as an unexpected flashpoint, particularly following the election of Donald Trump, whose policies have already emboldened both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Trump’s previous administration, deeply aligned with Israeli interests and the Saudi-led coalition, intensified the militarization of the region under the guise of countering perceived threats from Yemens Ansar Allah. The consequences of these policies were stark. Yemeni forces, undeterred by U.S. and Israeli threats, continued their operations in the Red and Arabian Seas and even targeted Israel’s Nevatim Air Base with a hypersonic missile. The downing of yet another MQ-9 Reaper drone—valued at over $32 million and the 12th of its kind lost since the assault on Gaza—symbolized a humiliating blow to the U.S. military’s efforts to contain Yemen’s growing capabilities. Despite the Trump administrations claims of advancing peace in the region, Yemenis mobilized in defiance. In cities like Hodeidah, Hajjah, and Sanaa, massive demonstrations condemned U.S. and Saudi adventurism, asserting solidarity with Gaza and Lebanon. Protesters openly warned that any military escalation would backfire, framing Trump’s policies as exacerbating suffering rather than resolving conflicts. For many Yemenis, the prospect of an expanded war under a second Trumps presidency seems inevitable but not insurmountable. But their chants, speeches, and massive protests reflect a readiness for resistance, rejecting what they perceived as attempts to liquidate Palestine and halt Yemen’s role in supporting its struggle. Yet instead of deterring Yemen’s operations, these threats galvanized a population already hardened by years of war and resilient against foreign intervention. There is no doubt that a palpable tension has gripped Yemen since the election of President Donald Trump was announced, yet millions came out on Friday in Hodeidah, Hajjah and Sanaa, and other cities to warn against any adventure that Washington or Saudi Arabia might undertake. Demonstrators filling the streets of Yemen declared unwavering solidarity with Gaza and Lebanon, undeterred by mounting threats. They emphasized their intimate familiarity with war and suffering, framing any potential new conflict as not only inevitable but profoundly sacred and morally justified. Feature photo | A gathering aimed at mobilizing AnsarAllah fighters into battlefronts across Yemen. Hani Mohammed | AP Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist based in Sanaa. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media. The post Trump Election Win Triggers Houthi War Drills as Yemen Braces for US Invasion appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Foreign Affairs, Investigations, Top Story, Yemen Coverage, Ansar Allah military readiness, grassroots defense drills Yemen, Hodeidah invasion threat, Trump policies Middle East, U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, U.S. missile costs Yemen, Yemen Red Sea operations, Yemen U.S. conflict, Yemen-Israel tensions, Yemeni solidarity Gaza]

— The High Cost of Empire: US Weapons Depletion Fuels Concerns Over Military Readiness

 

at 11/15/24 2:14pm

As the United States channels tens of billions of dollars into wars in Palestine and Ukraine, data reveals a concerning depletion in its missile production capacity. Critics argue that the primary beneficiaries are weapons manufacturers, not American security. Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, U.S. defense companies have significantly outperformed major stock indexes. RTX, which produces the 2,000-pound bunker-busting bombs used by Israel in Gaza, outpaced the S&P 500 by roughly 46 percent. In 2023, U.S. weapons sales to foreign governments surged 16% to a record $238 billion, as defense contractors report unprecedented demand and growing backlogs. Although this may be cause for excitement among shareholders and CEOs in the Military-Industrial Complex, a recent report by Responsible Statecraft points out that these backlogs are not positive for Washington’s defense strategy. The data shows that the U.S. is shipping weapons at a pace its domestic industry cannot sustain, leaving it vulnerable in a potential conflict with China. American military aid to Israel since the beginning of the war has exceeded $17.9 billion. This figure does not account for weapons bridges set up to supply Israel. In August alone, President Joe Biden approved a $20 billion weapons package. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Washington has authorized $64.1 billion in military assistance, much of which remains undisclosed. Wow, watch StateSpox respond to @prem_thakker Q: US envoy told aid groups that US would not consider withholding weapons to Israel for blocking food, that essentially the rules don’t apply to Israel Miller: That’s not accurate Q: So you will enforce US law potentially blocking… pic.twitter.com/CPjM9uV0zX — Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 17, 2024 It is not just the United States grappling with looming weapons shortages—NATO allies face similar challenges. In February, Belgian ex-General Marc Thys starkly remarked, “It’s not a joke, we’re in deep sh*t,” referring to the severe deficits in European weapons production. The shortfall has been attributed to a “cultural problem” of overreliance on the United States. In 2022, top European generals estimated it would take “five to seven years” to scale up the continents defense industry to address these deficits. Focusing on U.S. weapons supplies to Israel, air defenses have emerged as a significant concern for security officials. Although the U.S. had an annual budget of $500 million for anti-air systems, this past year saw a dramatic surge, with air defense aid totaling $5.7 billion. In April, during Irans retaliatory strikes against Israel under Operation True Promise, reports indicate that Israel and the U.S. spent at least $1 billion to intercept around 300 projectiles. Following a second wave of Iranian strikes on October 1, which Israel failed to counter effectively, the U.S. deployed its THAAD missile system to bolster future defenses. However, the U.S. possesses only seven of these billion-dollar systems, each equipped with 48 interceptors costing $13 million per missile. If Tel Aviv received even a few reloads, this could account for up to a quarter of the U.S.’s total THAAD missile stockpile. On Times Radio explaining that the Iranian response to the Israeli attack on the embassy was a clear success. The West wasted over $1.3 billion to shoot down cheap drones/missiles. Iran gathered intelligence for future use. Israel gained nothing. Also, Iran hit the 2 targets. pic.twitter.com/Ijpnia1p3d — Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) April 15, 2024 The costs of the American-led multinational “Operation Prosperity Guardian” in the Red Sea remain undisclosed, raising questions about the missions financial strain. A January 2023 study highlighted a troubling vulnerability: the U.S. would likely deplete its stock of anti-ship missiles in a conflict with China. In the Red Sea operation, defending Israel has come at a steep price. The U.S. has deployed $2 million interceptor missiles to shoot down Yemeni drones reportedly constructed for just $2,000—an imbalance that illustrates the mounting economic burden of a naval mission that has yet to yield clear success. Germany’s faltering economy and strained weapons production capacity haven’t deterred its role as Israel’s second-largest arms supplier. Despite increasing pleas from Ukraine for more support, Berlin refuses to halt arms shipments to both Kyiv and Tel Aviv. The mounting pressures, however, have led Chancellor Olaf Scholz to engage directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Feature photo | A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile defense system is displayed during a Made in America showcase on the South Lawn of the White House, July 15, 2019, in Washington. Alex Brandon | AP Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post The High Cost of Empire: US Weapons Depletion Fuels Concerns Over Military Readiness appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: National, arms sales record 2023, Israeli air defense aid, military aid to Israel, military-industrial complex profits, NATO defense shortages, Red Sea operation costs, THAAD missile stockpile, U.S. missile production crisis, U.S.-China conflict risks, weapons backlog vulnerability]

— Are You Debating a Bot? Investigation Reveals Israel’s AI Bots Argue With Online Critics

 

at 11/15/24 7:47am

In recent months, reports have surfaced that Israel is deploying artificial intelligence not only on the battlefield in Gaza but also online, where the goal is to influence public opinion through social media bots spreading disinformation. Israel has a long history of using social media for propaganda, whether by working with tech companies to flag pro-Palestine content or by mobilizing troll armies to support its narrative. With the advent of AI, Israel has found new methods to shape public opinion in its favor, employing AI-driven social media accounts to “debunk” allegations against the state. Nour Naim, a Palestinian AI researcher, has observed this shift firsthand. “From day one, I have encountered a troubling number of fake accounts disseminating Israeli propaganda,” Naim told MintPress News. “These accounts, functioning as digital trolls, systematically attempt to either discredit well-documented evidence of the genocide in Gaza—backed by audio and video proof—or distort the facts altogether.”   Israel’s AI Troll Army Israel has long used social media to manage its image with great effect. It collaborates with tech firms to flag pro-Palestinian content and employs coordinated online groups to quell online criticism. But now, AI offers new tools for influence. MintPress News has identified several accounts operating under names like Fact Finder (@FactFinder_AI), X Truth Bot (@XTruth_bot and @xTruth_zzz), Europe Invasion (@EuropeInvasionn), Robin (@Robiiin_Hoodx), Eli Afriat (@EliAfriatISR), AMIRAN (@Amiran_Zizovi), and Adel Mnasa (@AdelMnasa96892). Each account appears designed to “debunk” criticisms and circulate a streamlined pro-Israel perspective. These people arent real. Ai israel bots. I got banned for a week when I made this list btw and Ive been shadowbanned ever since pic.twitter.com/ahzHvQMcmk — PoliticallyApatheticBozo (@the1whosright) September 10, 2024 The first three accounts do not mention Israel in their bios, but most of their posts exhibit clear signs of pro-Israel propaganda. Fact Finders bio states: “Empowering #SmartConversations with AI-driven facts. Countering misinformation with knowledge, not censorship, one post at a time! #FactOverFiction.” The accounts posts aim to debunk information portraying Israel negatively. This is done by replying to news articles or pro-Palestinian voices or by creating posts purportedly refuting reports on Israel’s killings of Palestinian civilians and aid workers, as well as other acts of state violence. Yet these so-called clarifications read like theyre straight from a military spokespersons transcript—often justifying attacks as the elimination of terrorists. The X Truth Bot operates under two profiles: @XTruth_bot, established in August 2024, and @xTruth_zzz, created in January 2024. Both accounts are managed by the user Vodka & Seledka (@seledka_vodka), a British-Russian blogger. They promote a Telegram bot that claims to utilize Google search for verifying statements made on X, which Vodka & Seledka asserts to have developed. Notably, Vodka & Seledka follows several pro-Israel accounts and frequently shares Zionist content. Europe Invasion focuses mainly on xenophobic content targeting immigrants, particularly Muslims. The account frequently draws connections between pro-Palestine protesters and Hamas supporters, equating the two in its posts. Recent investigations have uncovered that the X account Europe Invasion, known for disseminating xenophobic content targeting Muslim immigrants and equating pro-Palestinian protesters with Hamas supporters, is likely operated by a Turkish entrepreneurial couple based in Dubai. Swedish news outlet SVT reported that this couple is also connected to the X account Algorithm Coach (@algorithmcoachX). When approached, the couple denied direct involvement, stating they had engaged an advertising agency to promote their business. Both accounts have undergone multiple rebrandings; notably, Europe Invasion was previously a cryptocurrency account under the username @makcanerkripto and has a bot score of 4 out of 5, according to Botometer. Following SVT’s investigation, Europe Invasion updated its profile, claiming to be managed by Stefan, a Montenegrin of Serbian origin. However, SVT reported that when they contacted the advertising agency linked to the Turkish couple allegedly behind the account, a person named Stefan responded — with an email account set to Turkish. The next three accounts on the list—Robin (@Robiiin_Hoodx), Eli Afriat (@EliAfriatISR), and AMIRAN (@Amiran_Zizovi)—do explicitly reference Israel or Zionism in their Bios. Robin, who joined X in May 2024, describes himself in his bio as: “• Think of nothing but fighting • PROUD JEWISH & PROUD ZIONIST.” Two of these accounts use AI-generated profile pictures of Israeli soldiers. They frequently interact with each other, replying to and reposting each other’s content, and follow various pro-Israel accounts. Other accounts, including Mara Weiner (@MaraWeiner123), Sonny (@SONNY13432EEDW), Jack Carbon (@JaCar97642), Allison Wolpoff (@AllisonW90557), and Emily Weinberg (@EmilyWeinb23001), display bot-like behavior. Their usernames include random numbers, and they either lack a profile picture or use vague images. Most of these accounts were created after October 2023, coinciding with the start of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. They predominantly respond to pro-Palestine posts by promoting Zionist talking points. Lebanese researchers Ralph Baydoun and Michel Semaan, from the communications consulting firm InflueAnswers, describe “superbots” as Israel’s new secret weapon in the digital information war over its operations in Gaza. Earlier versions of online bots were far more rudimentary, with limited language abilities, and were able only to respond to predetermined commands. “Online bots before, especially in the mid-2010s … were mostly regurgitating the same text over and over and over. The text … would very obviously be written by a bot,” Semaan told Al Jazeera. On the other hand, AI-powered super bots that utilize large language models (LLMs)—algorithms trained on vast amounts of text data—can produce smarter, faster, and, most critically, more human-like responses. Examples of these LLMs include ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. These AI bots have not only been covertly deployed on social media; pro-Israel activists have also assembled AI-powered troll armies to bolster their messaging. In October 2023, as Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza, Zachary Bamberger, a graduate student at Israel’s Technion University, created an LLM specifically designed to counter what he saw as “anti-Israel” content and amplify pro-Israel posts across online platforms. Bamberger’s company, Rhetoric AI, is designed to generate translations of Arabic and Hebrew social media content, assess whether posts violate platform terms of service, and swiftly report any infractions. For posts that don’t violate terms, the tool generates what it considers the most effective counter-argument. “When deployed on a larger scale, our platform will shift the balance of content and take away the numbers advantage of those who propagate hate, violence, and lies,” Bamberger told the American Technion Society. To develop Rhetoric AI, Bamberger enlisted the help of 40 doctoral students, and the company now collaborates with tech giants Google and Microsoft. Another platform, AI4Israel, also leverages AI to craft counter-arguments on social media. Founded by Israeli-American data scientist and pro-Israel activist Amir Give’on, the tool is part of a volunteer-based project. In November 2023, Give’on promoted AI4Israel in a LinkedIn article and has since posted about the platform on his X account. Give’on provided details on how the AI4Israel platform operates, explaining: It scans incoming claims and checks them against a pre-existing database. If a claim has been encountered before, the tool retrieves a stored response. If it’s a new claim, the tool generates a response using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model, which draws on a vast corpus of data.” He also emphasized the role of volunteers in enhancing AI4Israel’s effectiveness: Volunteers prioritize claims based on frequency and refine responses, ensuring relevance and accuracy. They also identify gaps in our knowledge base, constantly enriching it, especially in response to current events.”   The Israeli government’s role AI has played a central role in Israel’s online influence operations, aimed at swaying public opinion on the war. In May 2024, social media company Meta and ChatGPT’s owner, OpenAI, disclosed that they had banned a network of AI-powered accounts spreading pro-Israel and Islamophobic content. The campaign, orchestrated by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and executed by Israeli political consulting firm Stoic, was designed to influence online discourse. Naim, a Gaza resident, highlighted the damaging effects of these disinformation efforts. “Every day, I face comments on Twitter [now X] where I am either accused of lying or my news is questioned, despite providing verified sources,” Naim told MintPress News. Some individualshave denied the news of the death of seven of my cousins and family members, falsely claiming that their families are responsible for their sacrifices. This persistent disinformation campaign is a daily challenge as I strive to share accurate information about the atrocities occurring in Gaza.” In September, Israel joined the first global treaty on AI — an international agreement established to regulate the responsible use of the technology while safeguarding human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. The treaty is in cooperation with the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and other countries, and Israel’s participation was met with backlash, especially given Israel’s weaponization of AI to carry out its genocidal campaign in Gaza. Yet Israel’s dangerous AI advancements on the battlefield and online may only intensify. In addition to joining the international treaty, Israel announced the second phase of its Artificial Intelligence Program, which will run until 2027 with an allocated budget of NIS 500 million (approximately $133 million). For Naim, Israel’s misuse of AI to distort and fabricate information reveals a troubling side of the technology, particularly in its manipulation of public opinion, erosion of trust, and incitement of hate and violence. As AI’s darker applications make it harder to distinguish fact from fiction, Naim suggests approaching social media content with “a healthy dose of skepticism.” “Not everything you see online is true, especially if it seems overly sensational or emotional,” Naim cautioned. “Always verify information by searching for the original source, checking its credibility, and looking for confirmation from multiple sources.” She recommends watching for red flags, like spelling errors and doctored images, and utilizing verification tools, such as reverse image searches and fact-checking websites. Yet, Naim notes, AI isn’t inherently harmful. “While Israel exploits AI for harmful purposes, we have the opportunity to use AI constructively,” she said. “By leveraging AI, we can amplify and accurately convey the Palestinian narrative, ensuring that the true stories of those affected by the genocide in Gaza are heard across multiple languages and platforms.” Feature photo |Illustration by MintPress News Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist for MintPress News covering Palestine, Israel, and Syria. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye, The New Arab and Gulf News.  The post Are You Debating a Bot? Investigation Reveals Israels AI Bots Argue With Online Critics appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Foreign Affairs, Investigations, News, Top Story, AI bots Israel, AI misinformation Middle East, AI-powered propaganda tools, Gaza AI influence operations, Hezbollah AI counterarguments, Israeli AI propaganda, Israeli digital warfare, online disinformation campaigns, pro-Israel troll networks, social media manipulation AI]

— The Nasrallah Phenomenon: A Life and Legacy That Refuses to Die

 

at 11/13/24 10:08am

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the general secretary of the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, was assassinated by Israel in late September, an event that reverberated across the region and beyond. According to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), they decided to target Nasrallah after concluding that he would not accept a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon unless a ceasefire was also implemented in Gaza—a demand echoed by the vast majority of the international community and in UN resolutions for over a year. To carry out the assassination, the IDF dropped 85 American-made bunker-buster bombs, each weighing 2,000 pounds, on Beirut, leveling six residential towers and killing dozens of civilians in the process. President Biden described the action as a small measure of justice but omitted any acknowledgment of civilian casualties, despite the irony given the U.S. sensitivity to towers filled with civilians being destroyed. Nasrallah, who had openly condemned both Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks, was nonetheless portrayed as a type of terrorist akin to bin Laden due to his role as the leader of Hezbollah, which is designated as a terrorist organization by both the U.S. and the U.K. Following the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in late September, hostilities between southern Lebanon and Israel have intensified. Throughout October, Israel launched a ground invasion aimed at securing its northern border. This campaign has resulted in significant casualties, with hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed or wounded and numerous Merkava tanks destroyed. Despite these efforts, rocket fire into Israel has escalated. Hopes that Nasrallahs death might de-escalate tensions were further dashed when a drone attack recently targeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus residence. Nasrallah, the man, may be gone, but his assassination appears to have galvanized his followers, raising a pressing question: Who is more dangerous—Nasrallah the man or Nasrallah the idea?   From Humble Beginnings to Regional Icon At face value, it might seem surprising that Christians in the region have mourned Hassan Nasrallah as deeply as Muslims or that his image is appearing in murals across South America. Hassan Nasrallah was born in 1960 in a small village in southern Lebanon, coming from humble beginnings. He spent his formative years studying Islam in the holy cities of Najaf and Qom, where he was mentored by Sayed Abbas al-Musawi, the previous secretary general of Hezbollah. Al-Musawi played a pivotal role in establishing Hezbollah as a movement to resist the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, which began in 1982, following an earlier invasion in 1978. For a decade, Sayed Abbas led the fight against the occupation and eventually rose to lead Hezbollah. However, in 1992, the Israeli military targeted him, firing missiles from Apache helicopters at his family’s vehicle in southern Lebanon, killing him along with his wife and 5-year-old child. Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman later revealed that some Israeli military officials had opposed the assassination, cautioning that “Hezbollah is not a one-man show, and Musawi is not the most extreme man in its leadership… [al-Musawi] would be replaced, perhaps by someone more radical.” The death of his mentor, Sayed Abbas al-Musawi, prompted Hassan Nasrallah to return to Lebanon from his scholarly pursuits and assume the leadership of Hezbollah. Nasrallah successfully stepped into his predecessor’s role, using his leadership to galvanize an unprecedented number of fighters and implement new guerrilla tactics against the Israeli army. His legend grew further in 1997 when his 18-year-old son, Hadi, was killed in battle on the southern Lebanese front. Nasrallah appeared on live television shortly after receiving the news, expressing pride in his son for dying while confronting the enemy. He stated that he could now face the parents of fallen fighters with his head held high, as he, too, had become one of them. Over the years, Nasrallah built a reputation across the Arab world as the leader of the only movement to inflict a military defeat on the Israeli army. This first occurred in 2000, when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after an 18-year occupation. May 25, now celebrated as Liberation Day in Lebanon, became etched in national memory with scenes of Lebanese citizens returning to their villages, dancing in the streets, and reuniting with family members who had been held in Israeli prisons for years. Hezbollah’s second victory over Israel came during the 33-day July War in 2006. In a defining moment, Nasrallah broadcast the destruction of an Israeli battleship on live television, thanking his followers for their patience under relentless Israeli airstrikes.   “Fida al-Sayed” Nasrallah’s iconic status in Lebanon became one of his most powerful assets during conflicts. Despite the damage inflicted on Lebanese people and their homes, many would respond in interviews with the phrase “fida al-Sayed,” meaning “may it all be sacrificed for him.” This sentiment was echoed countless times by widows, orphans, and parents who had lost loved ones in airstrikes and wars. Nasrallah recognized the symbolic weight of this devotion. In a 2007 speech, he addressed his supporters, saying, “Because of our Arab culture, you sometimes express yourself by saying ‘fida al-Sayed,’ but what you are truly expressing is your support for the resistance because you know that it is myself and my soul and my children who are sacrificed for all of you.” The Nasrallah phenomenon continued to grow throughout his life, with many comparing him to a modern-day Che Guevara. Legendary journalist Robert Fisk observed that Nasrallah’s blend of religious and political rhetoric and “a fierce charisma” allowed him to project a powerful image of authority and resilience, saying, “he talks as if he’s the Lebanese president.” Edward Said, who once met Nasrallah, famously described him as a “remarkably impressive man.” This aura likely influenced Julian Assange’s determination to feature Nasrallah as the first guest on his show in 2012. Assange explained his interest, noting that he wanted to understand why “so many millions across the world call him a terrorist whilst many other millions call him a freedom fighter.”   Syria: A Divisive Stand, a Unifying Symbol Nasrallah’s involvement in Syria during the Arab Spring as an ally to Bashar al-Assad damaged his standing in much of the Arab world. In an interview, he explained his stance, acknowledging that Syria needed reforms and expressing support for the legitimate grievances of Syrian protesters. However, he said he could not support the toppling of an anti-imperial government, especially after the protests were, in his view, co-opted by the U.S. and its allies. He warned that Syria might suffer the same fate as Libya and beyond. Nasrallah framed his role in Syria as a fight against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other extremist groups allegedly armed by the U.S., which Hezbollah would battle for years. His support also extended to Syrian Christians whose churches were targeted by ISIS. Images of Hezbollah fighters lighting candles by statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus in Syrian churches went viral, highlighting the support he garnered from Syrian Christians and once again crossing religious divides and breaking stereotypes. The Syrian conflict was often portrayed as a sectarian struggle, a narrative Sayed Nasrallah firmly rejected. His unwavering support for Palestine and Gaza, along with his rhetoric of unity, frequently emphasized respect for symbols and revered figures within the Sunni world. For many, this stance underscored his efforts to promote Islamic unity beyond Sunni-Shia divisions.   The Nasrallah Legacy Perhaps the most unmistakable evidence of Nasrallah’s commitment to cross-sectarian unity is the cooperation between the Palestinian Sunni group Hamas and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah following October 7. On October 8, Hezbollah initiated operations against Israel to, as they described, lighten the load on Palestinian resistance by diverting a significant concentration of Israeli forces from Gaza to the Israeli-Lebanese border. Since his assassination in late September of 2024, the Muslim world has seen an increasingly unified stance, as the leader of millions of Shia Muslims is regarded to have given his life in defense of Sunni Muslims in Gaza, putting to bed the whispers of sectarianism through his very death. Rather than signaling weakness or defeat, Nasrallah’s absence has only intensified Hezbollah’s fight against Israel. The group has been introducing new weaponry into the battlefield near-weekly. Followers who once said, “May our homes be sacrificed for Sayed Nasrallah,” now say, “May our homes be sacrificed for the soul of Sayed Nasrallah,” underscoring how, in death, Nasrallah has evolved from a mere individual into an enduring symbol—an idea that Israel cannot seem to escape or eliminate. Hussain Makke, a London native, holds degrees in Journalism, Religion, and Global Politics. The post The Nasrallah Phenomenon: A Life and Legacy That Refuses to Die appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, Foreign Affairs, Top Story, Biden response Nasrallah, Gaza ceasefire demand, Hassan Nasrallah, Hassan Nasrallah biography, Hassan Nasrallah early years, Hezbollah Israel conflict, Hezbollah retaliation, Israeli airstrikes Lebanon, Lebanon sovereignty, Middle East sectarian unity, Nasrallah assassination, Palestinian resistance support, Syrian conflict Hezbollah]

— Revealed: The Israel Lobbyists Writing America’s News

 

at 11/12/24 6:09am

A MintPress News investigation has found hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA working in top newsrooms across the country, writing and producing America’s news – including on Israel-Palestine. These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News.  Some of these former lobbyists are responsible for producing content on Israel and Palestine – a gigantic and undisclosed conflict of interest. Many key U.S. newsroom staff were also formerly Israeli spies or intelligence agents, standing in stark contrast to journalists with pro-Palestine sentiments, who have been purged en masse since October 7, 2023. This investigation is part of a series detailing Israel’s influence on American media. A previous report exposed the former Israeli spies and military intelligence officials working in U.S. newsrooms.  The fight for control over the Israel-Palestine narrative has been as intense as the war on the ground itself. U.S. media have been widely criticized for displaying a distinct bias towards the Israeli perspective. However, a new investigation from MintPress News reveals that not only is the press skewed in favor of Israel, but it is also written and produced by Israeli lobbyists themselves. This investigation unearths a network of hundreds of former members of the Israel lobby working at some of America’s most influential news organizations, helping to shape the public’s understanding of events in the Middle East. In the process, it helps whitewash Israeli crimes and manufacture consent for continued U.S. participation in what a wide range of international organizations have described as a genocide.   Advocacy to Journalism: Israel’s Influence at NBCUniversal “Hi! My name is Kayla Steinberg…The summer before my first year of college, I attended the AIPAC New England Leadership Dinner and absolutely loved it. After going to Saban, I knew I had to get involved in [AIPAC] and go back to Israel…I dream of being a journalist someday, and I hope to write about Israel or Judaism. WIPAC and AIPAC have taught me so much about how important it is for the U.S. to be Israel’s greatest friend, and I know now why I am proudly pro-Israel.” So wrote Kayla Steinberg in 2018, while she was working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, widely considered the centerpiece of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. AIPAC has been one of the most generous political donors this election cycle, doling out $100 million to hundreds of political candidates. Steinberg did indeed become a journalist. Since 2022, she has been a producer at NBC News, pitching, scripting, producing and editing stories across NBCUniversal’s news channels, including MSNBC, CNBC and NBC News. Steinberg, who once stated publicly that “pro-Israel advocacy” was a key interest of hers, produced the NBC documentary, “Epidemic of Hate: Antisemitism in America,” which equated U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s criticism of AIPAC with the white supremacist marchers at the infamous Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, VA. Steinberg is one of many former Israel lobbyists hired by NBCUniversal, a conglomerate that owns over a dozen channels, including CNBC, NBC News and MSNBC. Emma Goss, for instance, began her career in media by traveling to Israel to make a documentary for Write on For Israel. This Zionist group aims to educate young Jewish students to “make a difference on college campuses” by learning about Jewish identity and anti-Semitism in American universities. While in college, she was a reporter for the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC). The ICC states its mission is to “inspire American college students to see Israel as a source of pride and empower them to stand up for Israel on campus” and to “unite the many pro-Israel organizations that operate on campuses across the United States” through coordination and sharing research and resources. Even before graduating, Goss had already begun to work for MSNBC, helping to produce “Morning Joe,” one of their flagship news shows. She went on to work for NBCUniversal for four years, helping produce, pitch, research, edit and book guests for The Today Show, MSNBC and NBC Nightly News. In 2018, she left to work in local media and, as of 2023, works as a reporter at NBC Bay Area. CNBC lead work reporter Gili Malinsky has an even closer relationship with Israel and its lobby. Until 2011, she was a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces, specifically in their public relations department. Malinsky (who has dual American and Israeli citizenship) led a unit dedicated to communicating the IDF’s story with the outside world, overseeing the military’s social media presence, as well as sending IDF officers abroad on public relations trips and organizing tours for foreign dignitaries to see the Israeli military in action. In 2011, she moved seamlessly into working for Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF), becoming their marketing coordinator. FIDF is an American group that raises money for supplies and support for Israeli soldiers, as well as encouraging Americans to enlist in the Israeli military. Its stated goal is to “champion the courageous men and women of the IDF and care for their needs through transformational opportunities and support as they protect the State of Israel and her people.” After working for the FIDF, Malinsky embarked upon a career in journalism, becoming a staff writer at CBS and contributing to The New York Times, Vice, The Daily Beast, NBC News and others. Since 2020, she has worked at CNBC. Although a business reporter, in the wake of the October 7 assault, Malinsky contributed to the network’s coverage of Israel-Palestine. For example, she co-wrote one article detailing the trauma suffered by the families of the Israeli festivalgoers killed by Hamas, a group she matter-of-factly identified as a terrorist organization. Noga Even, an NBCUniversal manager, is also a former Israel lobbyist. Between 2017 and 2018, she worked for StandWithUs, a conservative group that coordinates closely with the Israeli government to push a pro-Israel message on campuses globally. StandWithUs’ mission statement notes that its purpose is to “support Israel and fight antisemitism around the world.” In 2017, she organized an IDF soldier speaking tour in Texas with the intent of “putting a human face” on the Israeli military. The soldiers in question told hundreds of high schoolers in attendance about the supposed “strict IDF moral code while fighting an enemy that hides behind its civilians.” Even later went on to work for the Israeli Embassy in the United States before, in 2023, being hired by NBCUniversal. CNBC’s markets and investing reporter Samantha Subin began her career working for various Israel lobby groups. In 2016, she interned at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank created by the research director of AIPAC as a front group. One former AIPAC employee involved in its creation noted, “There was no question that WINEP was to be AIPACs cutout. It was funded by AIPAC donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and located one door away, down the hall, from AIPAC Headquarters.” In their book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt describe WINEP as a core part of the lobby, “funded and run by individuals who are deeply committed to advancing Israels agenda.” Subin went on to work for the TAMID group, which describes itself as “seek[ing] to forge a strong connection to Israel for the next generation of business leaders.” While still at TAMID, she managed to get her foot in the door at CNBC, and has worked as a reporter there since 2021. Another former TAMID employee working at CNBC is Benji Stawski. In 2016, Stawski co-founded a TAMID chapter at his local Bentley University. He later moved to CNN and, since 2022, has been an editor at CNBC. For Israel and its lobby, having these sorts of advocates in newsrooms across America is a dream. With dozens—if not hundreds—of individuals fact-checking pro-Palestine arguments, booking pro-Israel guests, pitching stories that cast Israel in a positive light and its adversaries negatively, and weaving Zionist narratives into reporting, it’s no surprise that U.S. corporate media shows a pronounced bias in favor of Israel and its perspectives. Older Americans who still rely on cable news and newspapers support the Israeli attack on its neighbors, while younger people who use social media as their primary source of information side with the Palestinians. The connections to pro-Israel organizations extend to the leadership of NBCUniversal as well. Danny Bittker, the company’s vice president of production and operations, worked for many years for BBYO, eventually becoming its regional director. BBYO (Bnai Brith Youth Organization) is a group that sends young Jewish teens to Israel. It is far from a politically neutral body, however. A measure of this can be seen on its homepage, where visitors are currently greeted with a gigantic banner reading, “We Support Israel and Stand By Its Right to Defend Itself.” Brandon Glantz, NBCUniversal’s senior director of global privacy operations, previously worked for Hillel International, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world. Some at Hillel might object to being called part of the Zionist Lobby in America. Helpfully, then, on his own LinkedIn page, Glantz described his role at Hillel as “conduct[ing] all Israel advocacy on the University of Florida campus.” Yelena Kutikova, a director and vice president of learning and development at NBCUniversal until May of this year, was previously a director for the United Jewish Appeal — Federation of New York. Kutikova worked for over three years at UJA-NY, a group that raises money to build illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine and coaches American politicians and pundits on how to best advocate for Israel. Earlier this year, leaked documents showed sessions convened by the UJA advised U.S. officials to spread highly questionable claims about mass rapes on October 7 as a way to deflect criticism away from Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Other former Israel lobbyists who have gone on to work for the network include longtime MSNBC producer Alana Heller, a former intern at AIPAC; Sara Bernstein, formerly of Hillel International, who went on to work for Paramount, the Discovery Channel and NBCUniversal; and Sarah Poss, a former intern at the Anti-Defamation League, who, since 2019, has worked in various roles at NBC News and MSNBC. NBCUniversal does not appear to view these individuals’ backgrounds as conflicts of interest or red flags. In fact, their history of lobbying for Israel may be seen as an asset, especially given that MSNBC’s executive producer, Moshe Arenstein, was an IDF intelligence commander for many years. Arenstein joined MSNBC in 2003 and has since produced news on a broad range of political topics, including coverage of Israel and Palestine. It seems likely that the enormous overlap between the Israel lobby and MSNBC at least played a part in the network’s decision to, in the wake of the October 7 attacks, suspend its only three Muslim anchors. MSNBC quietly and without explanation pulled Ayman Mohieddine, Ali Velshi and Mehdi Hasan from the air. Employees immediately understood this as a message to the rest of the staff. “The mood is very similar to what had happened post 9/11 with the whole you are either with us or against us argument,” one employee told Arab News. Hasan, a vocal critic of Israel, left the network and has never addressed speculation about his departure, only adding to the evidence that he was pushed out due to his political views.   Fox News and the Pro-Israel Pipeline At the other end of the American elite political spectrum lies Fox News. And yet, on the issue of Israel, the network’s coverage has been markedly similar to MSNBC’s. Like MSNBC, Fox News employs a wide range of former Israeli lobbyists in key positions within its company. Before becoming a journalist, Rachel Wolf worked for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), a right-wing pressure group that tries to minimize or silence criticism of Israel in the press. While still at CAMERA, Wolf interned at the Zionist Organization of America, compiling dossiers on pro-Palestine figures and authoring memos full of talking points against anti-Zionist speakers appearing on campuses. She left CAMERA to work at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. and soon became a speechwriter for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, where she worked aiding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Wolf then moved to Israel to join the IDF, where she served as a spokesperson for the military, producing press releases, running their social media campaigns, and developing, in her own words, “innovative” strategies to humanize the group. Only one year after leaving the IDF, she joined the “Hannity” program on Fox News and is now the company’s homepage and social media editor. A retweet by Fox News social media editor Rachel Wolf on her personal X account Wolf’s colleague at Fox News, Olivia Johnson, was formerly Director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), an organization that aims to build and strengthen the military bond between the United States and Israel. A recent JINSA report calls for the United States to support Israel in a war against Iran. After leaving JINSA, Johnson worked for CBS News and, since 2011, has been a broadcast associate at Fox. Nicole Cooper worked for AIPAC between 2019 and 2020, helping to organize conferences and other events. Soon after leaving the lobby group, she was offered the executive assistant position to the Fox News network President. Finally, Sarah Schornstein’s career has seen her run the gamut of pro-Israel groups, including seven months with AIPAC, an internship with Hillel and JINSA, and a position with CAMERA, where she, in her own words, was charged with “monitor[ing] any anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist activity on my campus” – a statement that suggests she sees the two as one and the same. In 2021, she also worked for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, where she policed NGOs being invited to the forum to ensure they do not “have a harmful impact on Israeli interests.” In 2022, she worked at the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a group dedicated to promoting the normalization of Israel in the Arab world. Since 2021, she has been at Fox News, producing some of its most influential shows, including “Cavuto Live!” Host Neil Cavuto regularly invites Israeli advocates and officials onto his show, throwing them softball questions and allowing them to present a pro-Israel narrative unchallenged. In October, for example, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon appeared on the show, claiming that his country was responding to Iranian aggression by launching “retaliatory” strikes against a rogue state.   CNN’s Israel Connections: Former IDF, Unit 8200, and Israel Lobbyists CNN is widely considered among the most prestigious networks in broadcast journalism. And yet, like NBCUniversal and Fox, this study found large numbers of CNN employees with backgrounds in Israeli advocacy. Jenny Friedland began her professional career at the American Jewish Committee, a strongly pro-Israel organization, which lists “defeating Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” as one of their primary goals and recently published an article headlined, “Five Reasons Why the Events in Gaza Are Not ‘Genocide.’” Friedland  has been a producer for CNN since 2019, primarily for Fareed Zakaria’s show. Another CNN producer, Hannah Rabinowitz, previously worked for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that purports to be an anti-racist organization but, in practice, often uses claims of anti-Semitism to shield Israel from criticism. A recent MintPress News investigation found that the ADL’s claims of a surge in Anti-Semitism across America were based upon labeling pro-Palestine marches as inherently anti-Semitic. ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt stated as much, going so far as to say that anti-Zionism was not just anti-Semitic but that it equates to “genocide.” Greenblatt explained that “Every Jewish person is a Zionist…it is fundamental to our existence.” This will undoubtedly be news to the large plurality of American Jews under 40, who, polls show, consider Israel to be a racist Apartheid state. The ADL has, for decades, spied on progressive American groups, including the AFL-CIO, Greenpeace, the United Farmworkers, and a host of left-wing Jewish groups. It also secretly passed much of this research onto the Israeli government, whom the FBI, internal memos show, believe funded their activities. CNN also employs an alarming number of former Israeli soldiers and spies. Among them is Ami Kaufman, a writer and producer of “Amanpour,” the network’s flagship news and global affairs show. Before working at CNN, Kaufman was a weapons specialist in the IDF, and between 2003 and 2004, worked for the CIA at their Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Another CNN producer, Tamar Michaelis, previously served as an official spokesperson for the IDF. Shachar Peled, meanwhile, spent three years as an officer in the Israeli military intelligence group Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Zakaria and Amanpour’s shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist. Unit 8200 is among the most notorious spying agencies in the world and is widely thought to be behind the recent Lebanon pager attack that injured thousands of civilians. It utilizes big data to create a digital dragnet on Palestinians and uses A.I. to determine the likelihood of individuals being members of Hamas or other proscribed organizations. The agency then uses this data to create gigantic kill lists of tens of thousands of people, which it used in its campaign against Gaza. Unit 8200 alumni also went on to work closely with Israeli authorities in developing the infamous Pegasus spying software, created to spy on politicians, journalists and civil rights leaders the world over. Tal Heinrich is another Unit 8200 agent turned journalist. In 2014, CNN hired her to be the field and desk producer for the network’s Jerusalem Bureau, where she oversaw its coverage of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A previous MintPress News investigation profiled Peled, Heinrich and other Israel ex-spies who work in America’s newsrooms. And while never having worked for a lobby organization, Israeli-American CNN news producer Gili Ramen seems to act as an unofficial lobbyist, beseeching anyone with the chance to go on birthright tours and penning long “love letters” to Israel, detailing how she “fell in love” with her “magical” “homeland.” Critics have claimed that CNN’s coverage of the attack on Gaza has been among the most biased and misleading anywhere to be seen, the network repeating Israeli talking points and ignoring Palestinian suffering. This has not gone unnoticed by ordinary Palestinians. Last year, a live CNN segment from Ramallah was broken up by angry demonstrators. Fuck CNN! You are genocide supporters! You are not welcome here, genocide supporters” Fuck CNN! one man told host Clarissa Ward before the live broadcast was cut.   From Birthright to Byline: Israel Ties Run Deep in America’s Newspaper of Record Pro-Israel lobbyists are not confined to broadcast media; they are also present in print newsrooms nationwide, including at the United States most prestigious and influential publication, The New York Times. Dalit Shalom, the Times’ director of product design, was formerly a guide for birthright trips – an Israeli government-funded program to gift free tours of Israel for young Jews in the hopes that they will settle there. He also worked for the Jewish Agency for Israel, an offshoot of the World Zionist Organization, whose mission statement is to “ensure that every Jewish person feels an unbreakable bond to one another and to Israel,” and encourages Jewish immigration to the country. Before his career in journalism, Adam Rasgon, the Times’ correspondent in Jerusalem, interned at the Shalem Center, a now-defunct group founded in 1994 to “enrich and strengthen the State of Israel.” From there, he went to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sofia Poznansky, a New York Times newsroom assistant, previously worked for Masa Israel Journey, an Israeli government-funded project to entice foreign Jewish people to the country. It works closely with lobby groups such as StandWithUs, the ADL and Hillel. Before joining the New York Times as an editorial assistant, Rania Raskin worked for the Tivkah Fund, an organization dedicated to promoting Zionism among young Jewish Americans. Raskin aids top Times columnists such as Pamela Paul, David French, and Bret Stephens. Since Raskin has been assisting Stephens, he has produced columns entitled “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran,” “The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity,” “Hezbollah is Everyone’s Problem,” “The Appalling Tactics of the ‘Free Palestine’ Movement,” “Abolish the U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency,” “The left is Dooming any Hope for a Palestinian State,” and “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in this War.” Of course, neither Stephens nor the Times needed Raskin’s assistance to promote an aggressively pro-Israel agenda. A study by MintPress News earlier this year analyzed coverage of the Yemeni Red Sea blockade by The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News. The study found that these outlets consistently maintained a pro-Israel perspective. This included frequently highlighting that Yemens Ansar Allah is Iranian-backed while not similarly noting U.S. support for Israel and portraying Yemen as the aggressor in the conflict.   From Lobbyist to Local News While this investigation has concentrated on four outlets, the phenomenon of former Israel lobbyists producing America’s news is widespread across the corporate press. For example, between 2010 and 2012, Beatrice Peterson was a delegate for AIPAC. She later became a producer for Politico and is currently a reporter and producer at ABC News. In 2018, Erica Scott left her job as the ADL’s media and communications specialist to work at CBS This Morning. She is currently CBS News’ editorial producer. Another current CBS News producer, Betsy Shuller, previously was a public relations associate for Hillel International. Shuller has also worked for CNN, ABC, and NBC. In 2021, Oren Oppenheim left UChicago Hillel to join ABC News, where he is currently a political unit journalist. Currently a technical project manager for The Washington Post, Lisa Jacobsen was previously the program director at the American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a group pushing for more robust pro-Israel policies in the United States. Eliyahu Kamisher was formerly an intern for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a research assistant at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies in Tel Aviv and is now a reporter at Bloomberg News. In addition, this investigation found dozens of former Israel lobbyists working in local news across the United States.   Switching Sides: The Newsroom to War Room Pipeline Not only do pro-Israel partisans go to work in America’s newsrooms, but journalists also leave their jobs to work for the Israel lobby, creating a highly problematic revolving door between the two professions. Benjamin Bell, for example, left a long and successful career in the media that included being deputy managing editor and politics coordinating producer for ABC News and the senior editor of features and planning at CNN+ to become the director of broadcast media at the Israeli Consulate General in New York. Jake Novak’s career arc followed a similar trajectory. A former producer at CNN and senior producer at Fox Business, in 2021, he left his job as a columnist and political analyst at CNBC to become the media director of the Israeli Consulate in New York. The previous year, Novak wrote an article about the assassination of Iranian leader Qassem Soleimani entitled “America just took out the world’s no.1 bad guy.” Originally an associate producer for CNN, where she wrote and produced content for leading shows such as “Amanpour,” Phoenix Berman left her job at CBS Philadelphia earlier this year to become an investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League. In 2008, Darren Mackoff ended a long career as a producer for Fox News and NBC News, taking up the position of senior communications manager and deputy press secretary for AIPAC. The ADL’s social media strategist and director of sports engagement, Alex Freeman, also has a background in broadcast journalism. Freeman left his position as a writer and producer for Fox News to join the pro-Israel group. Former CBS News, PBS and Fox News producer Anna Olson is currently serving as director of digital content for Hillel International. Naveed Jamali, meanwhile, has jumped between journalism, the lobby and back again. A former intelligence analyst at MSNBC and contributor to The Daily Beast, between 2020 and 2022, he was the ADL’s Belfer Fellow. His ADL profile describes him as an “FBI asset.” Today, he is the executive producer and editor-at-large of the influential magazine Newsweek. Jonathan Harounoff, currently a contributing writer to the New York Post, was, until recently, JINSA’s director of communications. He has just started a new job as an international spokesperson and senior communications advisor to the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations. Considering Israel’s actions and the U.N. response to them (the U.N. continues to vote to condemn Israel and demand a ceasefire), Harounoff is likely a busy man.   Censorship or Standards? The Cost of Pro-Palestine Advocacy The ease with which hundreds of individuals can jump between the pro-Israel lobby and the newsroom stands in stark contrast to how journalists publicly (or even privately) advocating for Palestinian rights have been treated. In 2021, the Associated Press fired news associate Emily Wilder after it was alleged that, while at college, she was a member of pro-Palestine groups, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine. The witch hunt against a young Jewish journalist was led and amplified by the likes of Fox News, who appeared to believe expressing support for Palestine robbed her of her credibility, even as the network, as this investigation has shown, employed multiple former members of Israel lobby groups. Three years previously, CNN sacked contributor Marc Lamont Hill after he called for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” during an address he made to the United Nations. Unsurprisingly, pro-Israel groups were among those lobbying CNN the hardest to take action against what they deemed unacceptable speech. The Hill, meanwhile, dismissed Katie Halper after she called Israel an Apartheid state on air. That so many of those fired for their positions on Israel have been Jewish is no coincidence. The Middle East has always been of particular concern to American Jews, and progressive, anti-Zionist Jewish groups are among the primary targets of the Israel lobby. Halper’s exit set the tone at The Hill. And so when its host, Briahna Joy Gray (another strong critic of Israel’s attack on Gaza), was also dismissed earlier this year, it came as no surprise to her. “It finally happened. The Hill has fired me. There should be no doubt that [The Hill] has a clear pattern of suppressing speech — particularly when it’s critical of the state of Israel,” she tweeted. Gray’s departure was part of a broader post-October 7 trend, with newsrooms across the West cracking down on pro-Palestine sentiment being shared. In the wake of the Hamas assault, the BBC pulled six reporters from its Arabic news service off the air. Around the same time, The Guardian announced it would not renew the contract of one of its longest-serving cartoonists, Steve Bell. The newspaper had recently refused to print a cartoon satirizing Netanyahu and the attack on Gaza. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times fired Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salam over comments he made supporting factions resisting Israel. Thus, while outlets across the board were rushing out editorials declaring their solidarity with Israel, even as it embarked on a rampage through Gaza, young, progressive journalists received the message loud and clear: this is no place for you. A case in point is Malak Silmi, a Palestinian-American reporter who left the profession in disgust, filled with disillusionment at what she experienced. “I do not believe I can be valued as a journalist by a media industry that delegitimizes and demonizes Palestinian journalists and allows for reporting that incites and justifies attacks against them,” she wrote in January, explaining her decision to walk away from the industry.   Words Matter: How Newsrooms Shape the Narrative Silmi’s comments are borne out by studies. More journalists were killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza than in any other conflict over a similar period. Yet outlets such as the New York Times have shown little interest in Israel’s war on journalists, and when they do cover it, they rarely identify Israel as the culprit in their headlines. A study of leading American outlets by media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that the word “brutal” was overwhelmingly used in reference to Palestinians and their actions and rarely used to describe Israel. These choices cue and prompt readers to feel one way about the conflict; they are brutes, and we are compassionate. These sorts of discrepancies do not happen by accident. A leaked New York Times memo from last November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience. Likewise, CNN employees face similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.” German media conglomerate Axel Springer, meanwhile, forces all of its employees to sign what amounts to a loyalty oath to support “the trans-Atlantic alliance and Israel.” Last year, the company fired a Lebanese employee who, through internal channels, questioned the requirement.   An outsized role in American politics The Israel lobby played an outsized role in this year’s elections, spending over $100 million to promote Zionist candidates and relentlessly attack progressive critics of Israel. All 362 AIPAC-endorsed candidates won their races. “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics,” AIPAC boasts. To be sure, AIPAC only endorses candidates it believes have a good chance of winning to promote its image as a kingmaker in U.S. politics. But it has also played a significant part in suppressing progressive change in the country by successfully primarying critics of Israel, such as Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush. AIPAC spent over $30 million ousting the pair in two of the most expensive House primaries in history. “I want to thank our partners at AIPAC,” Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell, said, adding that he was “not getting across the finish line without you.” AIPAC also helps push reactionary and racist political ideas into American life, supporting one candidate who proposed a bill to deport Palestinians from the U.S. It is clear that Israel and its supporters play an outsized role in American politics. But few are aware of the extent to which our news is written and produced by individuals with backgrounds in groups lobbying for Israel. This investigation was able to find hundreds of individuals from prestigious news outlets who previously worked for AIPAC, StandWithUs, CAMERA, or other organizations commonly identified as core pillars of the pro-Israel lobby. It is still far from an exhaustive list. For brevitys sake, it only highlighted a handful of the most prominent and influential U.S. media networks. Nor did it touch upon the army of former lobbyists working at smaller channels or in local media. This investigation does not accuse any of those noted above or claim they are unworthy of holding those positions and should be fired. But it does highlight the extent to which pro-Israel sentiment is considered so normal in elite circles, so much so that former Israel lobbyists, spies, and soldiers can be charged with producing supposedly objective and unbiased reporting, even on Middle Eastern issues. And even as former employees of Israel lobby groups are hired en masse, those speaking out against Israel’s attacks on its neighbors, or even suspected of harboring pro-Palestine sympathies, are jettisoned from corporate media’s ranks. When it comes to Israel-Palestine, there exists a glaring double standard in our media. In our supposedly free and open system, you can hold any opinions you like, so long as they are pro-Israel. The information presented here is likely common knowledge in newsrooms. And yet, it has been essentially ignored by the media, who seem to consider it unremarkable. This investigation is not claiming that people with pro-Israel views should be barred from working in the media. However, these backgrounds and blatant conflicts of interest should, at the very least, be disclosed, particularly when covering the ongoing violence in the Middle East. Despite the commitment to truth, transparency and journalistic integrity often touted by the likes of the New York Times and other newsrooms across America, U.S. media have failed in their ability to provide the public with truthful reporting of the facts when it comes to Israel-Palestine. Their approach throws to the wind guidelines from organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists, which dictate that journalists “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,” and “disclose unavoidable conflicts.” Similarly, the Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists outlines a newsrooms duty to disclose any affiliations that could affect coverage. Instead, former lobbyists and figures with ties to pro-Israel groups are given free rein to shape narratives around the Middle East. No wonder that Americans’ understanding of the conflict, its history, and the stakes involved is so poor. This lack of transparency is, in part, the reason for Americans’ fragile trust in the media—now at roughly 30%, according to recent polls. The revelation that much of our news is literally written and produced by former Israeli spies and lobbyists is not going to help that number improve. Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. The post Revealed: The Israel Lobbyists Writing America’s News appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Investigations, National, Top Story]

— Empire in Decline: How the Trump Presidency and Forever Wars Will Destroy US Imperium

 

at 11/11/24 3:01pm

If last weeks U.S. election results took you by surprise, then you may not have been closely following the converging social, economic, and political issues coalescing in America—an empire in decline. On Tuesday, the majority of voting Americans cast their ballots for President-elect Donald Trump, choosing to accelerate that decline. The Democratic Partys collapse is evident and undeniable. It validates left-wing critiques of its rightward drift, reliance on hollow identity politics and lack of an egalitarian economic agenda. While this may be validating for leftists who were criticized, lampooned, and defamed by Democratic Party elites for warning about this collapse, the partys decades-long failure to become a bastion of the working class has paved the way for a full-on fascist and ultimately self-destructive takeover of the United States. Predictably, self-identifying liberal elites are now raising their voices to cast blame on everyone but themselves voices that were previously silent about the genocide in Palestine, the betrayals of progressive climate and immigration policies by the Biden Administration, and the suppression of Stop Cop City activists in Atlanta. While they decry the downfall of democracy, it is unlikely that they will learn from their mistakes and will be sublimated into a junior partner in an overridingly fascist system rather than alter course and become a genuinely radical party. Here we are—locked into supporting two high-profile, ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—with a volatile and unpredictable president-elect showing signs of cognitive decline. Predicting his actions is challenging; his policy positions are often mutable and vague. However, he has publicly discussed seven potential action items. First, he has promised mass deportations of undocumented migrants, aiming for the most extensive deportation effort in U.S. history. Many experts warn that such an operation would face significant legal and logistical obstacles and could hinder economic growth. Second, Trump has proposed sweeping tax changes, including extending his 2017 tax overhaul, eliminating taxes on Social Security payments, and further cutting corporate taxes. He also plans to impose punitive tariffs on China, a move likely to raise consumer prices. Trump has also pledged to slash climate regulations to support the American auto industry and boost domestic fossil fuel production. He has suggested ending U.S. involvement in Ukraine, aligning with his stance against entanglement in foreign conflicts. Regarding the Gaza war, Trump, a vocal supporter of Israel, has urged the U.S. ally to end the conflict by his inauguration. On abortion, Trump stated in a debate with Kamala Harris that he would not sign a national abortion ban, leaving the issue to individual states. He has also suggested he would pardon January 6 rioters and has expressed intent to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading two investigations against him. Join us on State of Play to examine Trumps incoming cabinet, the promised policies mentioned above, and what they would mean for America and the world in general. Greg Stoker is a former U.S. Army Ranger with a human intelligence collection and analysis background. After serving four combat deployments in Afghanistan, he studied anthropology and International Relations at Columbia University. He is currently a military and geopolitical analyst and a social media influencer, though he hates the term. MintPress News is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Also, check out rapper Lowkeys video interview and podcast series, The Watchdog. The post Empire in Decline: How the Trump Presidency and Forever Wars Will Destroy US Imperium appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, Foreign Affairs, Top Story, climate deregulation Trump, corporate tax cuts Trump, Democratic Party collapse, January 6 pardons, mass deportations America, Trump Gaza stance, Trump policy agenda, U.S. decline empire, U.S. election 2024, U.S. foreign wars]

— How Did Israeli Forces Slip Through? Officials in Lebanon Question German Role in Kidnapping Raid

 

at 11/8/24 7:29am

On Nov. 1, an Israeli special forces unit conducted a naval landing operation in northern Lebanon, abducting a Lebanese sea captain whom they accused of being a senior Hezbollah operative. The failure to detect the Israeli boats has led to speculation that Germany may have facilitated the military operation. The high-profile Israeli mission to seize a man from Batroun, a coastal city 30 kilometers north of Beirut, quickly became a topic of heated debate over the weekend. Questions swirled around how Israeli forces managed to evade detection during the operation, fueling further controversy. On the first day of November, 25 Israeli Shayetet 13 naval commandos conducted a landing operation via speedboats approximately 400 meters from Batroun Marina, a popular tourist destination in Lebanon. Axios quickly cited Israeli military sources claiming that a “senior operative of Hezbollah” had been seized from a beachfront chalet. The abducted man was later identified as Imad Amhaz, a sea captain who had been studying with plans to join Lebanons navy. Lebanese officials described him as a civilian boat captain, prompting caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati to announce that Lebanon would file a complaint against Israel at the United Nations, citing a violation of sovereignty and UN Resolution 1701. LEBANESE MINISTER DEMANDS ANSWERS OVER NAVAL OFFICERS KIDNAPPING Lebanese Minister Ali Hamieh stated that Imad Amhaz, a civilian naval officer, was kidnapped just 100 meters from his home. Hamieh said that Lebanon is in contact with UNIFIL, which monitors the countrys… https://t.co/QO90AwBYWL pic.twitter.com/MeSU4gsZOG — Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 2, 2024 Israel has reported that Amhaz is being interrogated at a secret location, but a flurry of contradictory claims has surfaced about his alleged role within Hezbollah. Anonymous sources have floated a spectrum of accusations—from Amhaz assisting in the clandestine transfer of weapons by sea to holding a senior position within Hezbollah’s naval operations. Meanwhile, Amhazs father has publicly refuted any links between his son and the group, pushing back against the allegations surrounding his detention. Earlier this week, Lebanese media outlet Al-Diyar offered a closer look at the Lebanese Army’s account of the recent Israeli raid. In the report, Lebanese Army Commander Joseph Aoun described how the Israeli boats, moving at high speeds and deploying jamming devices, evaded detection by the country’s ten radar systems. Aoun noted that blind spots in Lebanon’s radar network added to the challenge. For now, these details mark the preliminary conclusions of Beirut’s investigation into the high-stakes operation. Speculation is swirling around potential German collusion in the Israeli raid, as Germany’s naval forces, part of the UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, regularly patrol and monitor Lebanese waters. UNIFIL moved quickly to deny any involvement, issuing a statement insisting its forces had no role in “facilitating any kidnapping operation or any violation of Lebanese sovereignty.” Yet doubts persist, with Germany’s actions in the region already raising eyebrows; just weeks prior, on Oct. 17, German forces shot down a Hezbollah drone, signaling a more assertive stance in the conflict. It starts with Germany but it will be an EU wide policy soon. https://t.co/vVFjZMfxUb — MENA Unleashed (@MENAUnleashed) November 7, 2024 Reports have since suggested that Israeli forces may have jammed UNIFIL’s radar systems during the raid, stirring fresh doubts about possible coordination behind the scenes. Germany, a key weapons supplier to Israel and one of Tel Aviv’s most loyal backers, has offered unflinching support to Israel throughout the Gaza conflict. Given these close and often controversial ties, some speculate that Israel might have quietly informed its German allies of the operation in advance, ensuring their cooperation—or at least silence—to prevent any unintended clashes. Shortly after the incident, The Telegraph published a report citing an anonymous senior Lebanese political figure “who opposes Hezbollah,” claiming that the abducted sea captain was a “double agent.” The source, suspected to be connected to the Lebanese Forces party—a faction known for its vehement opposition to Hezbollah and a history of dubious claims—used this narrative to cast suspicion on the captain’s loyalties. The Telegraph has a fraught history in Lebanon, having faced backlash in June after publishing an article based on anonymous sources, claiming—without clear evidence—that Hezbollah was stockpiling weapons at Beirut International Airport. The report leaned on statements from Lebanese Forces MP Ghassan Hasbani, who alleged that Hezbollah controlled the airport, along with vague accounts from unnamed “whistleblowers.” The claims, presented without substantial verification, sparked outrage in Lebanon, where officials saw the article as an attack on the country’s infrastructure. Lebanese Caretaker Minister of Public Works and Transport Ali Hamieh condemned the report as “ridiculous,” asserting that “Lebanon will file a lawsuit against The Telegraph because its article aims to damage the reputation of the airport.” In response, The Telegraph quietly revised the headline and heavily edited the article—a move that underscored concerns about the integrity of the original reporting. Now, following Israel’s recent covert operation, unanswered questions are adding to a growing unease in Lebanon over Western influence and media narratives. Frustrations have only intensified after the U.S. embassy in Beirut blocked Iraqi Airways from setting up a humanitarian airbridge to aid those affected by Israel’s ongoing airstrikes, leaving Lebanese citizens questioning the motives behind foreign interventions. Feature photo | The likenesses of German Chancellor Scholz, US President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu can be seen with black eye patches and bloody fangs at a protest in Steindamm in Hamburg, Germany, September 21, 2024. Georg Wendt | AP Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe.’ Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post How Did Israeli Forces Slip Through? Officials in Lebanon Question German Role in Kidnapping Raid appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: News, Beirut UN complaint, German involvement Lebanon incursion, Hezbollah sea captain abduction, Imad Amhaz, Imad Amhaz kidnapping, Israeli-German alliance, Israeli-Lebanon relations, Lebanese territorial waters, Lebanon sovereignty violation, Shayetet 13 operation, UNIFIL radar jamming]

— Biden’s Last Minute US-Saudi Deal Could Open Door Nuclear Arms Race

 

at 11/7/24 12:31pm

A recent report suggests that quiet negotiations are underway between Riyadh and Washington as the two nations work toward securing a U.S.-Saudi security agreement before President Biden’s term concludes. The initiative appears aimed at establishing what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dubbed “the new Middle East.” Before the conflict in Gaza erupted on Oct. 7, 2023, U.S. and Saudi officials were deep in discussions over a controversial security pact. The proposed agreement is part of a sweeping initiative designed to pave the way for normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The initial framework of the U.S.-Saudi deal was anticipated to include a provision akin to NATO’s Article 5, asserting that an attack on one would constitute an attack on all. By September 2023, it became clear that the security pact would hinge on Riyadh’s decision to normalize ties with Israel. Another key demand from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was the development of a nuclear program, a point expected to be a defining feature of the agreement. The US is offering Saudi Arabia a formal defense treaty in return for normalizing with Israel and vowing to distance itself from China and prohibit Chinese bases. A few months ago, Saudi Arabia revealed that it did NOT join BRICS, despite being invited and initially confirming. pic.twitter.com/sc90WSswMS — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 10, 2024 The U.S.-Saudi agreement, however, was far more ambitious than simply providing incentives for normalization; it was part of a sweeping strategy encompassing the entire West Asia region. In June 2022, Jordans King Abdullah II publicly voiced his support for a “Middle East-type NATO.” Speculation quickly followed that such an alliance could include Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other U.S.-aligned Arab nations—all working in tandem with Israel and the United States. The objective would be to establish a regional bloc capable of counterbalancing Iran’s Axis of Resistance and reinforcing U.S. influence across the region. Such an alliance would align closely with the push to establish the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor—a trade route designed to connect Asia and Europe through a land passage spanning the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. On Sept. 9, 2023, the White House issued a memorandum touting the “landmark” trade corridor, with President Biden calling it “a really big deal” during his visit to the G20 summit in New Delhi. Later that month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly, unveiling a map that underscored the emerging Israeli-Arab partnership and featured the trade route, which he hailed as “the new Middle East.” The only obstacle to the U.S.-backed Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran—and the ambitious trade corridor—was the lack of a formal normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. By late September, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly suggested that an agreement with Israel was “getting closer,” effectively sidelining the Palestinian cause. However, the entire project—predicated on the assumption that the Palestinian issue was no longer a significant factor—was upended by the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud: ‘Normalising relations with Israel is OFF THE TABLE until a Palestinian state is established.’ Butcher Blinken and Genocide Joe must face reality; Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world are disgusted not only by… pic.twitter.com/BIHi1qPX78 — Afshin Rattansi (@afshinrattansi) October 31, 2024 Saudi Arabia has recently emphasized that establishing a Palestinian state is a prerequisite for any normalization agreement with Israel. Throughout 2024, discussions between Riyadh and Washington regarding a controversial security pact have intermittently surfaced in the news. According to a report by Axios, there is a concerted effort to finalize this security agreement before President Joe Bidens term concludes in January. While the full details of the agreement remain undisclosed, two primary aspects have raised concerns: the establishment of a Saudi civilian nuclear program and a defense clause that could obligate the U.S. to engage militarily against Riyadhs adversaries in the event of an attack. In his 2024 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again turned to props, illustrating a vision of an Arab-Israeli alliance he described as the “dream” set against Iran’s “nightmare.” The presentation made clear that Netanyahu remains hopeful of reviving the region’s pre-Gaza war blueprint. A U.S.-Saudi defense agreement binding Washington to Saudi Arabia’s defense could have significant implications. Any breakdown in the truce between Riyadh and Sana’a could entangle U.S. forces in Yemen’s conflict. Additionally, the establishment of a Saudi nuclear program risks being perceived by Iran as a security threat, heightening regional tensions and adding a new layer of volatility to the Middle East. Feature photo | President Joe Biden speaks to reporters as he arrives at the White House in Washington after returning from a trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Andrew Harnik | AP Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post Bidens Last Minute US-Saudi Deal Could Open Door Nuclear Arms Race appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: News, Arab-Israeli alliance, Biden Middle East policy, Gaza conflict impact, India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, Iran regional influence, Israel Saudi normalization, Middle East security alliance, Riyadh Washington negotiations, Saudi Arabia nuclear program, U.S.-Saudi relations]

— Trump Wins: What Is Next for America and the World?

 

at 11/6/24 3:05pm

Donald J. Trump is president yet again, and while the focus must shift toward the future, the only rational response to Trump’s victory is radical action. An autopsy of the Harris campaign’s failures can provide valuable insights into the course forward. The DNC and Harris campaign relied heavily on appeals to figures like former Vice President Dick Cheney, adopting positions that aligned with neoconservatives and promising a bipartisan cabinet, including Republicans. They commended strict border policies and spotlighted Harris’s prosecutorial record—a stance that alienated many voters. Her campaign, which younger critics dismissed as “mostly vibes,” counted on women rallying to protect abortion rights. Yet Harris offered little beyond a vague return to the flawed and unreliable framework of Roe v. Wade. Harris was inextricably attached to, and a vocal proponent of, the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, failing to distance herself ideologically from prominent Zionists like Biden and Trump. President Biden’s most recognizable achievements revolved around union support and organized labor, but surprisingly, these were not a focus of the Harris campaign. Instead, the Democrats promoted an economic plan friendly to corporate interests, offering little concrete support for the middle class beyond flowery language about “opportunity.” Many Democrats are blaming the Palestine Solidarity movement for Harris’ loss, but data does not support this accusation as the cause for such a decisive Trump victory. Harris, a deeply uninspiring and problematic candidate, failed to drive voter turnout in the way Biden did in 2020. We may never have reliable data on how many voters simply abstained, disillusioned by the choice between two unappealing candidates, but this perspective undoubtedly influenced the election. The Harris campaign, quite simply, moved too far to the right, alienating parts of its base that are committed to progressive, left-wing policies. Many others grew apathetic, watching the Democratic Party—a party often seen as centrist—adopt conservative positions to appeal to disaffected white conservative voters and independents. It appears that the DNCs logic was to draw in these conservative-leaning voters to hold back the far right. But this approach is likely to fail. “Republican Lite” will never beat “Republican actual,” especially since the electoral system itself structurally favors Republicans. This misstep has been a disaster in realpolitik. One could argue that the Democrats’ inability—or unwillingness—to embrace progressive platforms has had lasting consequences, harming America’s most vulnerable communities and intensifying struggles for those in the Global South who endure the impacts of U.S. imperialism. The salient question remains: Will Democrats learn from these mistakes and losses? History, in that regard, looks bleak. Establishment Democrats have already started to blame the left for their poor and alienating decisions, with surprising bile. “I hope you are happy; just look what Trump will do to Gaza now” is a common refrain. The Palestine solidarity movement is an easy scapegoat, but again, it’s not reflected in the data. On this episode of State of Play, we discuss how the Democratic Party cannot save us so how do we save ourselves? Greg Stoker is a former US Army Ranger with a background in human intelligence collection and analysis. After serving four combat deployments in Afghanistan, he studied anthropology and International Relations at Columbia University. He is currently a military and geopolitical analyst and a social media “influencer,” though he hates the term. MintPress News is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Also, check out rapper Lowkey’s video interview and podcast series, The Watchdog. The post Trump Wins: What Is Next for America and the World? appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, Foreign Affairs, Top Story]

— Jill Stein: Democrats Would Rather Lose the Election Than Stop A Genocide

 

at 11/5/24 1:10pm

There is an unstoppable uprising going on. And however far we get, people are not going to stop. This is not just for the election,” Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein told MintPress Director Mnar Adley: “The fight will not be over, no matter what. This is a long-term battle, and it is so uplifting to see how ready people are to be in it for the long haul.” Earlier this week, the 74-year-old doctor-turned-politician took time out of her campaigning schedule to meet with MintPress News’ Mnar Adley in Minneapolis, MN. Stein’s campaign has been drawing an unusual amount of attention – and support – in 2024, thanks to a Democratic administration that many in the U.S. feel is doing nothing to help them or to stop a genocide in Gaza. While other Western nations, such as France, Spain and Italy, mull over weapons boycotts to Israel, the Biden-Harris administration has green-lit $18 billion in arms aid since October 7, 2023, meaning that the carnage in the Middle East has been directly funded and enabled by the U.S. taxpayer. This has led to unprecedented levels of disillusionment and anger among younger people and the Arab and Muslim-American population. A recent poll found that 40% of Muslim-American voters in Michigan support Jill Stein’s candidacy, as opposed to just 12% who plan to vote for Kamala Harris. Michigan is a key swing state and is home to the country’s largest Arab-American population. Nationally, Stein and Harris are tied among Muslim-American voters. In response, Democratic leadership has diverted resources away from opposing Republicans and towards undermining Stein, funding a series of attack ads against the Green Party leader. Stein suggested that this tactic betrays deep insecurity among Democratic leadership, who fear the rise of a progressive third party, telling Adley: The Democrats are really worried because they have lost the Arab-American and Muslim-American vote, and that makes the margin of difference in many of the swing states. So, instead of changing their policy to earn those votes, they would rather distract and simply blame me for ‘spoiling the election’ by offering a solution to stop the genocide. They could earn those votes back in a heartbeat if they just implemented a weapons boycott right now. But they don’t want to do that. They would rather lose the election so that they can continue the genocide. Shame on them.” With the polls open, we could be in for a historic night for the Green Party—one that could determine the fate of the 2024 election. Watch the full interview exclusively here at MintPress News. Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh. The post Jill Stein: Democrats Would Rather Lose the Election Than Stop A Genocide appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, National, Top Story, 2024 election, Arab American voters, Biden administration, Gaza Genocide, Green Party, Jill Stein, Jill Stein interview, Muslim-American voters, progressive third party, swing states, U.S. politics, weapons boycott]

— From Promise to Peril: Israel’s Ground Invasion of Lebanon is Unraveling

 

at 11/1/24 8:07am

On Oct. 1, Israel announced a limited ground invasion in southern Lebanon. Now, a month and roughly 100 soldier casualties later, Israeli officials appear to be searching for an exit, insisting that their goals have been fulfilled. At the outset, Israeli officials described the ground invasion as “limited, localized, and targeted,” with the stated aim of neutralizing Hezbollah’s ability to fire on northern Israeli settlements. Yet, within days, Tel Aviv mobilized four additional divisions along the southern Lebanon border, signaling a clear escalation in its military engagement. By late December, Israel’s assassination operations had reportedly decimated much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership—alongside hundreds of civilians caught in the crossfire. Even so, Reuters and other media outlets reported that the Lebanese resistance group managed to re-establish its command just weeks later. By mid-October, the Israeli military was still struggling to break through the Lebanese border area, hampered by a series of persistent setbacks. Israeli forces faced relentless shelling along their supply routes, fell into ambushes, and encountered numerous booby traps. Andreas Krieg from the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London noted that Israel has not made the progress that I expected them to make in 16 days, which suggests that it is far more difficult. There is certainly more fierce resistance than Israelis initially expected. On Oct. 28, Hezbollah’s Operations Room issued a communiqué claiming its forces had confirmed the deaths of at least 90 Israeli soldiers and officers. The statement also reported that at least 750 had been wounded, and 38 of Israel’s renowned Merkava tanks had been destroyed. These figures, Hezbollah asserted, apply solely to the casualties and losses inflicted on Israeli forces operating within Lebanese territory. Hezbollah vs IDF at Ramya: Back-to-back Almas top-attack anti-tank guided missile strikes vs IDF troops at a border position opened in the wall west of Ayta ash-Shab in south Lebanon. [Hezbollah 21/10] pic.twitter.com/nYe6P1RDBK — Jon Elmer (@jonelmer) October 21, 2024 Israel has released footage showing its forces demolishing numerous civilian homes in Lebanese border villages such as Mhaibib. However, Hezbollah contends that Israel has yet to capture and hold a single village. The Israeli military justifies the widespread destruction by claiming it targets tunnel infrastructure, while Hezbollah argues that the demolitions aim to prevent ambushes on Israeli soldiers. These significant losses, which Israel has not fully acknowledged due to military censorship that obscures battlefield defeats, are beginning to affect its troops psychologically. Recently, the Israeli Hebrew outlet Yediot Aharonot reported growing distrust and tensions within the elite Egoz commando unit, highlighting concerns over poor decision-making in southern Lebanon and raising questions about the effectiveness of Israels military strategy. Earlier this week, former Israeli Brigadier General Yitzhak Brik criticized the Israeli militarys limited progress, revealing that forces have managed to advance only three kilometers into Lebanon, well short of the Litani River, which lies about 27 kilometers from the border. “Why? Because this army is tiny. In 78 it reached Litani and in 82 it arrived in Beirut. Now it is only three kilometers,” he stated, highlighting the difficulties faced by the military. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, known for making exaggerated claims about military achievements in Gaza, asserts that Israel has destroyed 80% of Hezbollah’s missile stockpile. However, Hezbollah continues to escalate its strikes on a near-daily basis, insisting that its stockpile remains largely intact, and the ongoing barrage of fire targeting Israeli settlements and troop gatherings suggests that the military has achieved little in the way of degrading Hezbollahs capabilities. Despite its assurances that the military campaign would drive Hezbollah back behind the Litani River and facilitate the return of 60,000 to 100,000 settlers to their homes in northern Israel, the number of displaced Israelis has continued to grow. Hezbollah’s new Secretary General, Sheikh Naem Qassem, has firmly vowed to persist in the fight for Gaza and Lebanon, signaling a steadfast refusal to bow to Israeli demands. Hezbollahs strategy has involved deploying ground forces to ambush Israeli troops, with anti-tank units effectively targeting enemy vehicles both within Lebanon and across the border. These operations are complemented by artillery units that shell Israeli supply lines and troop gatherings, which not only complicates rescue missions for the Israeli military but also prolongs the extraction of their dead and wounded, raising concerns about the safety of civilians caught in the crossfire. Additionally, air defense units are actively targeting Israeli aircraft, while missile and rocket units focus on settlements and military bases. Attack drones are being utilized against strategic targets. This well-coordinated effort suggests a deliberate plan that Israel has struggled to counter, potentially leading to reckless decisions that endanger not only soldiers but also civilians in the region. The US amb in Lebanon, Lisa Johnson, is doing what Robert Ford did in Syria: promoting a bloody civil war to advance US and Israeli objectives in the region She reportedly told local allies: Israel cannot accomplish everything through military means alone. The time has come for… https://t.co/TPqy6PCkQJ — Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 30, 2024 There are growing discussions about a potential ceasefire agreement, with Israeli officials claiming that the ground invasion has achieved its intended goals, though those objectives remain vague. Meanwhile, Israel appears to be trying to incite civil unrest within Lebanon, seeking to leverage proxy forces to carry out its agenda. Feature photo | A young girl carries a Hezbollah flag during the funeral procession of a Hezbollah commander killed while fighting ISIS in Syria. Photo | Shutterstock Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post From Promise to Peril: Israels Ground Invasion of Lebanon is Unraveling appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: News, Civilian casualties in Lebanon, Ground forces ambush strategies, Hezbollah missile stockpile, Hezbollah resistance tactics, Israel invasion of Lebanon, Israeli Defense Minister claims, Israeli Military Strategy, Military censorship in Israel, Potential ceasefire negotiations, Psychological impact on Israeli troops]

— How a Secluded 1984 Conference Forged Israel’s Unprecedented Influence Over US Media

 

at 10/31/24 8:56am

As Israels October 1 invasion of Lebanon unfolds, the medias complicity in shaping public perception raises urgent questions, particularly when viewed through the lens of a controversial 1984 conference where influential advertising and media figures gathered to refine Israels narrative strategies. This conference laid the groundwork for a sophisticated propaganda campaign—Hasbara—that sought to sanitize Israels actions and cast its military operations in a favorable light. Today, as Western journalists whitewash, distort, and conceal Israel’s the realities of Israels deadly campaign of violence, the enduring legacy of this meeting becomes alarmingly clear, revealing how narratives crafted decades ago continue to shape the coverage of a conflict that claims countless lives. In the first week of October, Israeli forces fired 355 bullets at a car containing a five-year-old, then shot at rescue workers who rushed to save her life. A horrific crime yet, per many Western media headlines, she was simply a “girl killed in Gaza.” The circumstances and perpetrators of her death, if mentioned at all, were invariably buried at the bottom of reports, well hidden from the 80% of the news-consuming public who only read headlines, not accompanying articles. By contrast, on October 15, Sky News was very keen that its viewers know the names and faces of four “teenage” IDF soldiers “killed” in a “Hezbollah drone attack,” humanizing and infantilizing individuals who, by mere token of their service in Israel’s military, are by definition, guilty of genocide. In passing, the same report briskly noted: “‘23 die’ in Gaza school strike.” Their identities, ages, and photos, let alone clarity on who or what murdered them, weren’t provided. Moreover, the inverted commas incongruously hovering around the number of Palestinians killed subtly undermined that claim’s credibility while reducing the child victims to an afterthought compared to the considerably more important quartet of deceased IDF genocidaires. MintPress News senior staff writer Alan MacLeod put it succinctly when he Tweeted, “In years to come, students in university departments around the world will be studying the propaganda embedded in this headline. Its truly incredible how much propaganda has been packed into 16 words.” The mainstream media’s systematic use of distancing and evasive language, omission and other duplicitous chicanery to downplay or outright justify Israel’s murder of innocent civilians while simultaneously dehumanizing their victims and delegitimizing Palestinian resistance against brutal, illegal IDF occupation is as unconscionable as it is well-documented. Amazingly though, ‘twasn’t ever thus. Once upon a time, mainstream news networks exposed Israel’s war crimes without qualification, and anchors and pundits openly condemned these actions on live TV to audiences of millions. The story of how Western media was transformed into Israel’s doting, servile propaganda appendage is not only a fascinating and sordid hidden chronicle. It is a deeply educational lesson in how imperial power can easily subordinate supposed arbiters of truth to its will. Comprehending how we got to this point equips us with the tools to assess, identify, and deconstruct lies large and small and effectively challenge and counter not only Israel’s falsehoods but the entire settler colonial endeavor.   ‘Neighborhood Bully’ On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. The effort was ostensibly intended to drive Palestinian Liberation Organization freedom fighters away from their positions on Israel’s northern border. But, as the IDF savagely pushed ever-deeper into the country, including Beirut, it became clear that ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft were as in Palestine the true goal. Throughout the Lebanese capital, news crews from major networks and reporters from the West’s biggest newspapers were waiting. Israel’s rapacious bloodlust and casual contempt for Arab lives had hitherto been, by and large, successfully concealed from the outside world. Suddenly, though, scenes of deliberate IDF airstrikes on residential housing blocks, Tel Aviv’s trigger-happy soldiers running amok in Beirut’s streets, and hospitals overflowing with civilians suffering from grave injuries, including chemical burns due to Israel’s use of phosphorus shells, were broadcast the world over, to nigh-universal outcry. As veteran NBC news anchor John Chancellor contemporarily explained to Western viewers: What in the world is going on? Israel’s security problem, on its border, is 50 miles to the south. What’s an Israeli army doing here in Beirut? The answer is we are now dealing with an imperial Israel, which is solving its problems in someone else’s country, world opinion be damned.” From: Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies Global shock and repulsion at Israel’s conduct would only ratchet during the IDF’s resultant illegal military occupation of swaths of Lebanon. In September 1982, an Israel-backed armed Christian militia, Phalange, entered Sabra, a Beirut neighborhood home to many Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Nakba. Over a two-day span, they slaughtered up to 3,500 people while mutilating and raping countless others. Again, unfortunately for Tel Aviv, mainstream journalists were on hand to document these heinous crimes first-hand. To say the least, Israel had an international PR disaster of historic proportions on its blood-soaked hands. The risk that further exposure of its genocidal nature might decisively and permanently shift global opinion in favor of the Palestinians and the Arab world more generally was significant. The attack on Lebanon had already spurred Western news outlets to critically reassess other illegal annexations and occupations in which Israel was and remains engaged. As ABC News reporter Richard Threlkeld commented at the time: Israel was always that gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds. Now, the Israelis have annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, settled down more or less permanently on the West Bank, and occupied close to half of Lebanon. In the interests of self-defense, that gallant little underdog, Israel, has suddenly started behaving like the neighborhood bully.” So it was that in the summer of 1984, the American Jewish Congress a major Zionist lobby organization convened a conference in Jerusalem, Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies. It was chaired by U.S. advertising supremo Carl Spielgovel, who a decade earlier provided pro bono advice to the Israeli government on strategies for publicly communicating why Tel Aviv refused to adhere to the terms of the Henry Kissinger-brokered 1973 Sinai Accords. Spielgovel later recalled: It occurred to me then that the Israelis were doing a good job at training their military people, and they were doing a relatively good job at training their diplomatic corps. But they weren’t spending any time training information officers, people who could present Israel’s case to embassies and TV anchormen around the world. Over the years, I made this a personal cause celebre.” The 1984 Jerusalem conference offered Spielgovel and a welter of Western advertising and public relations executives, media specialists, editors, journalists, and leaders of major Zionist advocacy groups an opportunity to achieve that malign objective. Together, they hammered out a dedicated strategy for ensuring the “crisis” caused by news reporting on the invasion of Lebanon two years earlier would never be repeated. Their antidote? Ceaseless, methodical, and wide-ranging “Hasbara” Hebrew for propaganda for “changing people’s minds [and] making them think differently.”   ‘Big Scoop’ The AJC subsequently published records of the conference. They offer extraordinarily candid insight into how multiple Hasbara strategies, which have been in perpetual operation ever since were birthed. For example, basic propaganda messages were agreed upon. This included messages that are echoed by Israel’s supporters to this day, emphasizing Israel’s regional importance to the U.S. and Europe, Western cultural and political values, geographic vulnerability, and supposed striving for peace in the face of implacable Palestinian belligerence and intransigence. As Judith Elizur, an expert in “communications” from Tel Aviv’s Hebrew University, explained: Because the ‘power dimension’ of Israel’s image is so problematic, it seems to me that Hasbara must concentrate on reinforcing other aspects of Israel that have a positive appeal medicine, agriculture, science, archaeology…We have been too preoccupied with extinguishing political brush fires. We need to devote more of our resources to long-range image-making. We must recreate a multi-dimensional image of Israel which will assure us the basic support we require in times of crisis.” There was extensive discussion of how to present “unpalatable policies” to Western populations, and counter the perception of Israel as “Goliath steamrolling” across West Asia, against adversaries “outgunned, outclassed and outmanned” with “no capacity to resist.” The necessity of training the Jewish diaspora in countering criticism of Israel was considered paramount. AJC’s president lamented that “many American Jews” had condemned the invasion of Lebanon and “did us a terrible disservice.” Any such future “disagreement” would make it “very difficult for us to conduct Hasbara effectively.” From: Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies Joseph Block, Pepsi’s former vice president of public relations, stressed the need for a dedicated, 24/7 Israel press operation “equipped to offer foreign journalists an occasional exclusive or scoop” and engage in other media outreach to balance critical coverage and get reporters and newsrooms ‘on side.’ Block lamented that had Israeli officials not “briefed NBC and other networks appropriately” and given them “a big scoop” during Lebanon’s invasion, “a different story would have reached America’s 90 million TV households”: News doesn’t just jump into a camera. It’s directed. It’s managed. It’s made accessible. Public relations is a process that makes news available in a particular form. In the US, PR is as important as accounting, the law and the military…As a corporate spokesman for two of America’s top 50 corporations, I wish I had a shekel for every time I said, ‘no comment’ to a reporter. I was always careful, however, not to antagonize or intimidate the reporter. I knew I had to live with him or her.” Yoram Ettinger, media analysis chief at the Israel Information Center, concurred, declaring that media framing on Israel’s actions needed to be determined in advance. “Actions” such as “blowing up houses,” which were “difficult to explain,” could be preemptively justified or at least relativized by placing them “in context” while “[drawing] analogies that others will understand.” This would “help others to interpret their meaning,” per Tel Aviv’s perspectives. The Conference hoped such efforts would mean “our American friends will be able to take a more activist posture as amplifiers of our policy” and assist them in “tucking away the house problems in a back room.” It was also suggested that on an individual and organizational level, Zionist activists serve as a rapid reaction force, deluging news outlets with complaints en masse should their coverage of Israel be at all critical. One attendee boasted of their personal success in this regard: One day CBS News Radio reported that an American soldier had been hurt by stepping on an Israeli cluster bomb at the Beirut airport. I called CBS to point out that no one had established the bomb was an Israeli one. One hour later CBS reported that an American soldier had stepped on a bomb; this time the report omitted any reference to Israel.”   ‘Frequent Violations’ Another significant recommendation came from Carl Spielgovel: creating a “training program” to bring carefully selected Israeli information specialists into U.S. advertising, PR agencies, and major news outlets. The initiative aimed to equip them with industry insights, ensure Hasbara efforts were maximized, and establish close relationships between Israeli officials and the organizations to which they were assigned. These “specialists” would operate under the guidance of a U.S.-Israeli council described as “wise persons who can project different scenarios and how to cope with them” on complex issues like “annexation and Jerusalem.” Spielgovel was careful to clarify that he was “not suggesting that we make policy” but rather that “we should make the best minds available to help elucidate the consequences of certain policies.” The goal, he suggested, was to reinforce to the American public that Tel Aviv remains Washington’s “staunch political and military ally.” Spielgovel further proposed that future AJC conferences should incorporate input from “young people” and people of color to better promote Tel Aviv’s image among diverse “constituencies.” He argued that “Hasbara needs to implant in the consciousness of the world the day-to-day existence” of Israeli citizens, requiring a steady stream of “stories in the arts, business, and cooking sections of U.S. newspapers.” Since then, a dedicated Hasbara program aimed at cultivating skilled Zionist advocates in the U.S. has operated continuously. Buoyed by its success, the operation soon expanded to include school and university students worldwide, training them to act as vigorous advocates for Israel in classrooms and on campuses. Graduates of these Israeli-funded programs frequently enter influential fields, including journalism, where they continue to promote Hasbara narratives and defend Israel’s actions. The impact on Western media coverage of Palestine has been profound. To a significant degree, the portrayal of Tel Aviv as “the gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds” has been firmly reestablished. Despite the ongoing crisis in Gaza, mainstream outlets seldom provide context for Palestinian resistance to Israel’s policies of annexation, occupation, and military actions. Coverage nearly always frames Israel’s actions as “self-defense” against “terrorist” threats, with Western journalists keenly aware of potential repercussions for diverging from this narrative. From: Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies The rapid reaction force proposed at the 1984 AJC conference remains highly active. An extensive network of Hasbara-trained individuals and Israel lobby organizations is always on standby, ready to pressure and intimidate news outlets if coverage diverges from favorable framing or casts Israel in a critical light. As a senior BBC producer once confided to veteran media critic Greg Philo: We wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis. The only issue we face then is how high up it’s come from them. Has it come from a monitoring group? Has it come from the Israeli embassy? And how high has it gone up our organization? Has it reached the editor or director general? I have had journalists on the phone to me before a major news report, asking which words can I use ‘is it alright I say this’?” An October exposé by Al Jazeera, citing testimony from BBC and CNN whistleblowers, detailed “pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards, and frequent violations of journalistic principles” at both networks. According to insiders, much of this was driven by concerns over how Israeli officials might perceive and react to certain coverage. Independent activists and journalists, however, are not bound by such institutional pressures—and since October 7, 2023, they have mounted a formidable challenge to Hasbara narratives. Were it not for the persistent investigations by outlets like MintPress News, The Grayzone, and Electronic Intifada, unfounded allegations promoted by Israel since the outset of the Gaza conflict—such as claims of Hamas committing mass rape or beheading infants—might never have been thoroughly debunked and might still shape the “context” for Israel’s actions against Palestinians. Meanwhile, countless concerned citizens have actively challenged Western narratives on the conflict in real-time across social media, a groundswell of critique that may be fueling pushback within some mainstream newsrooms. It is a poetic irony that the same information warfare techniques once honed under Hasbara are now being directed at Israel and its defenders. For decades, these methods allowed Israel to proceed with its gradual displacement of the Palestinian people, often with tacit approval from Western audiences. But those times seem to be fading. Today, critics and former targets of Israeli policy are effectively using these strategies, wielding what they see as their most potent tools—truth and justice. Feature image | Sol Goldstein, spokesman for a group of Jewish organizations, holds up a German language newspaper with headlines questioning the validity of the Holocaust, at a news conference in Chicago, June 14, 1978. Photo | AP Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg. The post How a Secluded 1984 Conference Forged Israels Unprecedented Influence Over US Media appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Investigations, National, Top Story, 1984 Israel media conference, Hasbara propaganda strategies, Historical media manipulation, Israel's influence in journalism, Israeli military operations coverage, Israeli propaganda in the West, Media complicity in conflict narratives, Palestinian casualties in media, U.S. media and Israel relations, Western media bias]

— Israel’s War Claims More Journalists Than WWII and Vietnam Combined

 

at 10/31/24 7:17am

Despite Israel’s actions resulting in over two-and-a-half times the number of journalists killed in Gaza this past year compared to those lost during the entirety of World War II, its justifications for targeting media—actions that violate journalists civilian protections under Article 79 of the Geneva Conventions, Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and customary international humanitarian law (IHL) as defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross—continue to find validation within Western media circles. In recent weeks, Israel has intensified its crackdown on press freedom. On October 23, the Israeli military accused six Al-Jazeera journalists stationed in northern Gaza of being “terrorists” with ties to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Israel subsequently released a document identifying the journalists as combatants, though it offered no corroborating evidence to support these claims, and the dossier appears to contain conflicting details. Al-Jazeera swiftly rejected the allegations, joined by journalist advocacy groups that denounced Israel’s documents as fabrications. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) weighed in as well, noting that the document released by the Israeli military closely resembles one circulated earlier this year following a targeted strike that killed Al-Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul while he was traveling in a clearly marked press vehicle. The CPJ pointed out inconsistencies in the document linking al-Ghoul to Hamas, noting it included “contradictory information showing that [al-Ghoul], born in 1997, received a Hamas military ranking in 2007 – when he would have been 10 years old.” The organization added that Israel has “repeatedly made similar unproven claims without producing credible evidence.” Scenes from the funeral procession of the journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul, who was assassinated by Israeli occupation in west of Gaza. pic.twitter.com/zHeQ2uQRAu — PALESTINE ONLINE (@OnlinePalEng) July 31, 2024 Since May, Israel has barred Al-Jazeera from reporting within its borders, a move followed by a raid on the network’s office in the West Bank city of Ramallah. During the operation, soldiers reportedly ransacked the offices and confiscated equipment, despite the area being under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Israel’s history of using disinformation to justify strikes on Al-Jazeera dates back years. In May 2021, Israeli forces demolished Gaza City’s al-Jalaa Tower, home to the offices of Al-Jazeera, the Associated Press, and Middle East Eye, asserting that Hamas militants were using the building as cover and journalists as human shields. After facing international backlash, Israel offered shifting explanations. Initially, officials claimed the building housed electronic warfare equipment meant to jam Israeli smart bombs. Later, they Associated Press that Hamas operatives were using the site to target Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. Israeli intelligence sources later told Haaretz they were unaware the al-Jalaa Tower housed media organizations until after the strike—a claim widely dismissed as implausible, given AP’s decade-long presence there. The Haaretz report also revealed that the strike was part of Israel’s calculated strategy to project an image of victory. Despite calls for a war crimes probe from Reporters Without Borders, Israel has not provided evidence to support its claims. The 2022 killing of veteran Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh drew further international scrutiny. Though multiple witnesses described the Palestinian-American’s assassination in Jenin Refugee Camp, then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett maintained that “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.” “We have seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists, which is likely to have hit the journalist,” former Defense Minister Benny Gantz stated, adding that Israel’s preliminary investigation suggested no Israeli fire was directed toward Abu Akleh at the time. Yet within 24 hours, the footage Gantz referenced was debunked by Israeli rights group B’Tselem, while a CNN investigation later indicated that Israeli forces had, in fact, fired directly at the journalists. two years ago today the Israeli regime targeted, shot and killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, then released doctored videos claiming she was killed by "Palestinian terrorists", then months later admitted they intentionally killed her pic.twitter.com/MLBTdELnLb — (@zei_squirrel) May 11, 2024 Shireen Abu Akleh is just one of at least 20 journalists killed by Israeli forces over the past two decades, a “deadly pattern” marked by the absence of any charges or accountability. This persistent lack of justice is part of why the Committee to Protect Journalists now ranks Israel highest after only Haiti, as the worst offenders on its 2024 Impunity Index, where journalist killings are most likely to go unpunished. Israel was only added to the index last year. Israel is at the top of the impunity index for countries with the worst records for prosecuting the murderers of journalists. “The only democracy in the Middle East” according to the U.S. pic.twitter.com/KrPO9YIwvK — Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 30, 2024 While Al-Jazeera has been at the heart of Israel’s crackdown on journalism, it is far from the only outlet targeted. Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen News was the first network banned during the Gaza war in November 2023. Last week, Israeli forces launched airstrikes on an Al-Mayadeen office in Beirut, followed by a strike on a media complex in the southern Lebanese town of Hasbaya that killed three Lebanese journalists. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 180 Palestinian journalists in Gaza and at least seven in Lebanon. Among the victims was Reuters visual journalist Issam Abdullah, who was killed on October 13 at age 37. Initially, Israel attributed his death to Hezbollah, asserting that the group was firing in the area at the time. Reuters initially released a report on Issam Abdullah’s death without directly accusing Israel, though it noted he had been “killed in Lebanon in missile fire from the direction of Israel.” It wasn’t until December that Reuters’ internal investigation confirmed that the Israeli military was indeed responsible for their colleague’s death. A subsequent UN report echoed this conclusion, stating that Abdullah, who was “clearly identifiable” as a journalist, had been killed by Israeli fire. In response, an Israeli military spokesperson revised their initial account, claiming that Israeli forces had returned fire after a Hezbollah attack and later received reports of journalist casualties. To date, no one has been held accountable for the killing. During World War II, 69 journalists lost their lives covering the deadliest conflict in history, while 63 were killed over two decades of the Vietnam War. By contrast, Israel has killed more journalists in just over a year than both wars combined, making this conflict the deadliest for journalists in recorded history. Feature photo | Journalists, relatives and friends pray over the body Journalists Sari Mansour and Hassouna Esleem after they were killed in an Israeli bombardment of Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza on November 19, 2023. Majdi Fathi | AP Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe.’ Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post Israel’s War Claims More Journalists Than WWII and Vietnam Combined appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Foreign Affairs, Al-Jazeera journalist accusations, CPJ impunity index, Gaza conflict media targeting, Geneva Conventions protections, Israel Al-Mayadeen airstrikes, Israel press crackdown, journalist deaths Gaza, press freedom in Israel, Shireen Abu Akleh investigation, targeting of journalists]

— Hamas, Oslo, and the Peace Process: Did Israel Use Hamas to Sabotage Peace Efforts?

 

at 10/29/24 7:15am

Over a year into the Gaza conflict, Hamas remains widely misunderstood. Due to persistent media mischaracterizations, the group is often compared to ISIS, used to justify Israel’s heavy-handed military tactics, and even portrayed as a group allegedly created and controlled by Israel. A few weeks ago, we published the first part of this video series. In it, we explained the origins of Hamas, distinguishing fact from fiction about the group’s funding, its historical context, and how it emerged as the most popular Islamic party in Palestine. In this video, we examine the argument that Hamas, along with a fringe Israeli right-wing faction, was responsible for derailing the so-called peace talks aimed at securing a two-state solution. As is often necessary with such questions, the discussion requires a careful look at history. When the Declaration of Principles was signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel in September 1993, it marked the end of the First Intifada. This mass Palestinian uprising brought Hamas to prominence as a political force. Many viewed the Oslo Accords as a beacon of hope, a chance for peace in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, the path to failure had been set long before Hamas became a significant factor. To understand why Oslo ultimately failed, we must rewind to 1974, when PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations, famously offering peace while upholding the right to armed struggle. This followed the PLO’s issuance of a ten-point plan, which many saw as paving the way for dialogue with Israel. Israel’s response was to reject what it described as a terrorist group’s “peace offensive.” Interestingly, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had once labeled the PLO a terrorist organization, would later go on to sign the Oslo Accords with Arafat. So, what changed? By 1981, the Arab League had ratified the Fez Initiative, advocating a two-state solution—a proposal the PLO was prepared to consider. However, Israel’s response was not peace but war. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, forcing the PLO to flee to Tunisia and resulting in the deaths of around 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese. This conflict severely weakened the PLO, diminishing its capacity for both armed resistance and political leadership. When the Palestinian Intifada erupted in the late 1980s, the PLO struggled to take control of the uprising, which was led locally within the occupied territories. During the Intifada, the PLO also lost the support of one of its primary financial backers, Kuwait, after aligning with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War. Meanwhile, Israel faced a public relations crisis, as images of Palestinian youths throwing stones at tanks created a David-versus-Goliath narrative that Israel found difficult to counter. Recognizing the unsustainable economic and security burden of the occupation, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—infamously dubbed the “bone-breaker” for his harsh crackdown on non-violent protesters—ultimately agreed to a deal with the severely weakened PLO. This led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority, transferring administrative and security responsibilities for the West Bank and Gaza’s Areas A and B away from Israel. Israel retained full control over most of the territory, designated as Area C. The arrangement was further beneficial to Israel, as the Palestinian Authority was funded by the U.S. and EU, making Israel’s occupation cost-free and allowing it to allocate military resources elsewhere. Hamas, which had emerged during the Intifada, rejected the Oslo Accords, along with other Palestinian factions. In 1995, after Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein massacred Palestinians worshipping at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank, Hamas launched a series of suicide bombings. Later that year, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli, and by 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu had risen to power, escalating the situation toward further violence and unrest. This ultimately led to the Second Intifada in 2000, following the collapse of hopes for a two-state solution. Hamas has often been blamed for the failure of peace talks and the Israeli government’s refusal to compromise. However, the group was far from the first to use suicide bombings—Palestinian Islamic Jihad introduced this tactic in 1989, with several groups contributing to similar attacks throughout the 1990s. The peak of these attacks occurred during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, with Hamas responsible for 39.9%. Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and especially the Marxist–Leninist socialist organization, the PFLP, accounted for the remainder. Hamas’s violence came in direct response to Israel’s own wantonly violent policies, including continued settlement expansion, apartheid and, of course, an ongoing military occupation, all of which played significant roles in derailing the peace process. Even as armed Palestinian groups were crushed in the West Bank, especially during Israels Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, Hamas’s resilience in Gaza compelled Israel to rethink its approach. By 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza but not before securing control over the West Bank, restructuring and repurposing the Palestinian Authority’s security forces to ensure their coordination with Israeli occupation forces. Successive Israeli governments, including those led by Netanyahu’s Likud Party, continued expanding settlements in direct contravention of international law, all while placing the blame on Hamas for stalled progress. The narrative of a so-called Hamas-Netanyahu radical alliance, promoted by some liberal Zionists, centers less on Hamas’s actions and more on deflecting responsibility from Israel’s policies. In the post-9/11 era, Islamic extremism became a convenient boogeyman for Israel. In 2008, Netanyahu himself stated the September 11 attacks were beneficial for Israel because it had found a new equivalent to the Soviet Union in Iran and to the PLO in Hamas, arming itself with two new public relations tools. The first was to assert that the Palestinian Authority was not a rational negotiator for peace, and the second was to frame Israel’s own “Al-Qaeda-type problem,” using the specter of Islamic terrorism as a distraction. Borrowing from the battle-tested strategy of the post 9-11 Bush administration, today Netanyahu claims that October 7 was “Israel’s September 11.” It’s the same playbook he used to advocate—twice—for U.S. military action in Iraq. However, Al-Qaeda was a transnational terrorist organization whose founders were armed and trained with CIA assistance to counter a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. The only real commonality between Al-Qaeda and Hamas is that they share a common faith, Sunni Islam. However, each organization has distinct goals and origins: Al-Qaeda emerged as a transnational answer to U.S. wars in the Middle East, whereas Hamas was founded with a focus on Palestinian national liberation. While Hamas and other Palestinian armed movements may have been used as Israel’s rationale for its hardline stance, it was not a primary factor in the failure of the Oslo Peace Process. The roots of that failure lie in multiple variables: Israels strategic decisions, its ongoing occupation, unconditional U.S. support for Israel, and the broader dynamics of Palestinian resistance. Suppose Hamas were truly the core issue in the failure of Oslo. Why would Israel continue to expand settlements, target civilians, and tighten its control over the West Bank—a region where, unlike in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority promotes non-violence and actively suppresses those who resist occupation by force? The issue is less about ideology and more about the fact that Palestinians are engaging in armed struggle for their existence against the expansion of a settler-colonial project on their land—an approach that dates back to the Arab Revolt of 1936 and earlier. Nearly every major Palestinian political faction, whether secular-nationalist, Marxist, or Islamist, has been labeled a terrorist organization by Israel, with the mainstream branch of Fatah, which governs the Palestinian Authority, as a notable exception. Yet, before the Oslo Accords, even Fatah was cited by Israel as a barrier to peace. Join us for Part 3 of this series examining the origins of Hamas. We’ll examine Netanyahu’s strategy in the post-Second Intifada period and analyze how Qatari financial support has influenced the dynamics of the conflict. Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47 The post Hamas, Oslo, and the Peace Process: Did Israel Use Hamas to Sabotage Peace Efforts? appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, Foreign Affairs, News, Top Story, accusations Israel derailing Oslo, Gaza conflict, Hamas, Israel Hamas peace process, Israel-Palestine conflict, Netanyahu and Hamas, Oslo Accords, Qatari aid]

— “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” Drops Amid Censorship Attempts: Lowkey Talks to MintCast

 

at 10/28/24 2:27pm

It is the album the Israel lobby tried – and failed – to kill. “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” by MintPress News’ Lowkey is released today. It is the rapper’s first album in five years and is already receiving critical acclaim. Today on “The MintCast,” Mnar Adley sits down with Lowkey to discuss his new offering, the attempts to shut him down, and why good music is often political. A tireless fighter for justice, Lowkey’s tracks have become anthems in the anti-war movement, particularly in the struggle for Palestine liberation. Soundtrack to the Struggle 3 is no different and provides a political snapshot in time, taking on issues such as the genocide in Gaza, the persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, and the pervasive surveillance power of our smartphones. If the Israel lobby had its way, this album would never have seen the light of day. Last year, the pressure group We Believe in Israel petitioned music giant Spotify to remove his songs from their platform, citing non-existent anti-Semitism concerns. We Believe in Israel works hand-in-hand with the Israeli government, which has been monitoring Lowkey closely for over a decade. The Jewish Chronicle newspaper once noted that the rapper’s skill and worldwide fan base constituted a “nightmare” for the government in Tel Aviv. “Pro-Israel groups had me no-platformed at different shows; I’ve been canceled in at least four countries so far, thanks to their maneuvers,” Lowkey told MintPress, adding: “They have recorded meetings I have been at, taken pictures of me in public, and I am sure there is a lot more we do not know about…I’m sure this album will make them very angry and unhappy… They certainly won’t want people to listen to this album.” Lowkey began his music career in the mid-2000s as a member of the group Poisonous Poets. Although he is now a solo artist, he has collaborated with many of the most well-known names in the music industry, including Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, the Racial Justice Network, and The Peace and Justice Project. This kind of pedigree earned him respect and admiration in the music scene but made major labels extremely wary of working with him because of his radicalism. As he told MintPress: I was never really embraced by any major label, despite selling hundreds of thousands of records, getting millions of views online, and selling thousands of tickets. I was never approached by a major label. And actually, major labels are signing artists that have done far less, and have demonstrated far less marketability. And I am of the view that it is simply down to the subject matter.” “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” is available to stream for free on major music platforms such as Spotify. You can also watch official music videos on YouTube. Lowkey is currently on tour in the United Kingdom and will play live shows in London, Birmingham and Manchester this November. The album is also available in hard copy for purchase at his shows. Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh. MintPress News is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Also, check out rapper Lowkey’s video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog. The post “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” Drops Amid Censorship Attempts: Lowkey Talks to MintCast appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, News, Top Story, anti-war music, Israel lobby censorship, Julian Assange support, Lowkey Gaza, Lowkey new album, Lowkey tour dates, MintPress News MintCast interview, Palestine liberation music, political rap album, Soundtrack to the Struggle 3]

— The Album Israel Tried to Kill: Lowkey’s Soundtrack to the Struggle Out Now

 

at 10/27/24 3:00am

This is for political prisoners, feeling trapped and sad, not for the rapper pulling up in a flashy Jag. It’s for the person in the same street, wrapped in rags, It is for the dad, carrying his son in plastic bags, for the resistance, wrapping cash in their elastic bands.” So begins “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3,” the new album from Lowkey. It is the hip-hop legend’s first offering in five years and is already blowing away the critics – and making his enemies very nervous. The album will be available on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms starting October 28. It will be available in hard copy at his upcoming shows in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Today, MintPress sat down with the rapper (and host of “The Watchdog” podcast on MintPress News) to discuss the album, being independent, attempts to silence him, and why art should be political. One of the voices of the Palestine liberation movement, Lowkey is widely considered one of the most talented and respected rappers in the world, widely acclaimed for his flow and lyricism. But his popularity and influence have also made him powerful foes along the way. The staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Chronicle newspaper once lamented that his very existence is a “nightmare” for the State of Israel. The pro-Israel lobby has been relentless in their attempts to shut him down, pressuring universities into canceling his speaking appointments. The powers that be have also taken a dim view of him; BBC executives even blocked his appearance on a top radio station. In the wake of the October 7 assault, YouTube Music deleted his song “Terrorist?” after almost 14 years and 5.5 million views. And last year, a shadowy, Israel-linked pressure group tried to pressure music streaming giant Spotify to remove his content from its platform. That attempt elicited a massive worldwide backlash, with artists and entertainers coming to the rapper’s defense. “Pro-Israel groups had me no-platformed at different shows; I’ve been canceled in at least four countries so far, thanks to their maneuvers,” Lowkey told MintPress. They have recorded meetings I have been at, taken pictures of me in public, and I am sure there is a lot more we do not know about…I’m sure this album will make them very angry and unhappy… They certainly won’t want people to listen to this album.” Lowkey began his music career in the mid-2000s as a member of the group Poisonous Poets. Although he is now a solo artist, he has collaborated with many of the most well-known names in the music industry, including Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, the Racial Justice Network, and The Peace and Justice Project. “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” is a deeply political album, weaving together activism and music to provide a snapshot in time. In the already-released single, “Genocide Joe,” the rapper takes aim at President Biden, asking him: Genocide Joe, your terrorize souls,  When your eyes close at night, how do you sleep? The track describes Biden as “America’s woke president speaking like he’s on sedatives.” It references the killing of Palestinian child, Hind Rajab, and the self-immolation of former American serviceman Aaron Bushnell in a protest against the U.S.-Israeli attack on Gaza, which Lowkey says is “not a strip,” but “the world’s biggest crime scene.” Palestine is and always has been a key issue for Lowkey. “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” features the track “Palestine Will Be Free,” whose chorus includes the lines, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a phrase that has been banned and censured across much of the West. “My fingers pointed at this government; you all killed them. Tell me you wouldn’t take up arms if it were your children,” Lowkey says. Major media labels, themselves part of gigantic, multinational corporations, have never liked Lowkey precisely because of what they perceive as his radicalism. As he told MintPress: I was never really embraced by any major label, despite selling hundreds of thousands of records, getting millions of views online, and selling thousands of tickets. I was never approached by a major label. And actually, major labels are signing artists that have done far less, and have demonstrated far less marketability. And I am of the view that it is simply down to the subject matter.” Nevertheless, his music is as popular as ever and has even found a new life as an anthem of the global Palestine liberation movement. Today, there is barely a march, meeting, or demonstration not accompanied by his work. Lowkey acknowledged this, saying, “Many of those songs become more relevant than ever before. ‘Long Live Palestine’ has been heard more in the past year than any other time.” Gaza is far from the only subject on the rapper’s mind, however. In “Free Assange,” he takes on the case of the (now recently released) WikiLeaks co-founder, confined in London for over a decade. “Hang him in his cell, they tied the rope; it’s not a war against a person; it’s [against] your right to know,” he says, concluding that, “Every time you see the face of Assange on the news, remember it is not him. The real target is you.” Last year, Lowkey sat down for a face-to-face interview with Assange’s wife, Stella, recorded for MintPress’ “The Watchdog,” describing the Australian publisher as “the political prisoner of our time.” Purposefully stepping on these political red lines has made Lowkey a deeply unpopular figure among record executives and the establishment class more generally. However, he insists he is far better off as an independent artist than he would be signed to a major label. With the rise of the internet and social media, he told MintPress, it is easier than ever to be an independent artist. You have the ability to be self-sufficient now, with music, you can independently make a living off it. But also, I wouldn’t want any interference in my subject matter or in my creativity. And when you are on a major label, they decide when your album will drop, so you can actually be left in a hinterland for several years. I know of amazing artists who have not been able to release their albums because the major label hasn’t been willing to push the button on it for years.” Furthermore, he explained, major labels find any excuse to siphon more money away from musicians. From administration fees to entourages and video-making expenses, most of the money comes from the artist’s share of the pot. And labels insert sneaky clauses into contracts to ensure they – not the artist – reap the benefits. “There are people I know who have sold millions of records and been ripped off by the major labels. They do it all the time. They rip off people on a daily basis,” he said. I know so many people who have sold huge amounts of records and have never received a royalty check. These records are top five in the charts, but they have never seen a penny.” Today, Lowkey works in independent media. “The album definitely could not have happened without MintPress,” he said. Another key topic “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” addresses is British politics and the pursuit of a better world. In “The Killing of Corbynism,” Lowkey describes how the various factions of the British state came together to crush the grassroots political movement around socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn. As he states, Corbynism was more than a living organism Centered on one man; a vehicle of a broader mission.  The main focus was how they could reform the system, Millions of people up and down the country saw the vision,  As a chance for you to improve your conditions, What we learned was the establishment is more malignant: Constant attacks to drag supporters from their core positions. A story of betrayal, backstabbing and sore decisions Millions with dreams, the establishment killed them. Other tracks are less overtly political, however. “Two Kites” tells the story of a tragic romance destroyed by the death of a woman. “Friend or Foe,” meanwhile, is ostensibly about a comrade who double-crosses Lowkey. As the song develops, however, it becomes clear that his “friend” is actually a cellphone, and the whole track is a commentary about the pernicious, double-edged nature of having such a powerful surveillance device in our pockets at all times. Lowkey describes his friend as being “born in Congo, raised in China, but he says he’s American,” a reference to the globalized nature of electronics production. “We both loved fruits, but apples were his thing,” he notes, adding, “At the beginning, he taught me how to deal with snakes. Later he helped with my career and how to build a base.” However, as time goes by, he realizes how pernicious the technology is: He listens when I sleep, watches when I’m not watching him, Knows how to eat up my time, I didn’t clock a thing,  Turns out befriending him was the worst thing I’ve ever done, It seems he’s selling everything about me to everyone. Much of the best art has an important message behind it. Yet most of what big media outlets, be it music, TV or film, have been thoroughly sanitized, Lowkey told MintPress, stating: There has been a steady push to depoliticize art because it was seen as such a subversive medium. With music, you can reach people, you can popularize slogans, you can create mantras in people’s heads, you can distill the hopes and dreams of people in a digestible form with a memorable melody. So, it was, of course, seen as a threat.” As such, big labels push bland, vapid music on us or even artists who extol extravagant and decadent lifestyles. Throughout the War on Terror, Lowkey says, there was virtually no English-language music engaging with the U.S.’ actions. This is in stark contrast to the protest music of the 1960s, which excoriated America’s role in Vietnam, for example. Lowkey dedicates one track to the fighters of Vietnam who resisted the American occupation. “I don’t know about you, but all my heroes fought colonizers,” goes the chorus. What passes for political music today is uninspiring at best and cringe-inducing at its worst. From talentless pro-Trump country musicians to the stars of Hamilton rapping about voting Blue, no matter who, it can often feel like political music is inherently inferior. “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” is the perfect antidote to this. But even if the politics weren’t as sharp and timely as it is, the lyricism displayed would still qualify this album as a masterpiece. Lowkey has little time for Team Red or Team Blue. As he says in “Genocide Joe,” “Biden is a murderer, Trump is a murderer. Whichever way you look, the political system’s circular.” With this album, Lowkey certainly won’t be making any friends in high places. But he doesn’t need them; he’s already got millions of fans around the world, and “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” will only further cement his place as a legend of hip hop. “Soundtrack to the Struggle 3” is out on October 28 and can be listened to on all major streaming platforms. Feature image | A poster featuring Lowkeys upcoming tour schedule. Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. The post The Album Israel Tried to Kill: Lowkeys Soundtrack to the Struggle Out Now appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: News, Top Story, anti-Israel hip hop, Gaza hip hop anthem, Israel lobby pressure on Lowkey, Lowkey activist rapper, Lowkey Palestine liberation, Lowkey Soundtrack to the Struggle 3, MintPress News podcast, political hip hop album, pro-Palestine music, UK rapper Lowkey]

— How the UK Powers Israel’s War on Gaza: Matt Kennard Reveals Hidden Connections

 

at 10/25/24 11:01am

The MintPress podcast The Watchdog, hosted by British-Iraqi hip-hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know—including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media. Israel’s attack on its neighbors could not be sustained without support from the West. And much of that support comes from the United Kingdom. Only a few hundred kilometers from Gaza, the British military base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, serves as the “heartbeat” of the Israeli assault. Israeli warplanes fly there to be serviced and repaired, while Western supply planes fly into the base before making the final trip to Israel. “Almost no one in this country [the United Kingdom] had heard about it before Gaza and before our work on it,” investigative journalist and returning guest Matt Kennard told Lowkey today, adding: This is a colony that Britain retained after awarding independence to Cyprus in 1960. But it wasn’t really independent because Cyprus gave 3% of its land mass to the British, on which they built a massive air base on Akrotiri and a massive intelligence base at Dhekelia. And now, they are being used to facilitate a genocide in Gaza, through [supplying] arms, personnel and intelligence.” Kennard is a writer and journalist for Declassified UK. He has broken several stories about secret British collaboration and support for Israeli actions. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Financial Times and was a fellow and a director of the Center For Investigative Journalism in London. His latest book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.” For Kennard, Britain’s active support of Israeli actions makes them participants in the ongoing genocide. Last October, the British government issued a “D Notice” instructing media outlets not to report on any elite U.K. SAS commando operations in Gaza. This action immediately raises the question, “What are British special forces doing in Gaza?” In addition to weapons sales, logistical aid and political support, Britain also secretly trains Israeli troops. Despite this, the Israeli government has continued to attempt to infiltrate and surveil top-level British politicians. Boris Johnson, for instance, revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu personally attempted to place a listening device in his quarters. Kennard’s investigation revealed that one-third of Johnson’s cabinet had their political careers funded either directly by Israel or by the pro-Israel lobby. New prime minister Keir Starmer has shown himself to be just as loyal to the Israeli project as his Conservative predecessors were. Starmer has actively purged pro-Palestine politicians from his party, including, most notably, former leader Jeremy Corbyn. And so, while millions in the U.K. have marched against Israel’s genocide, the government has remained in full support of Netanyahu and his administration, even going so far as to arrest or harass notable pro-Palestine journalists, such as Richard Medhurst and Asa Winstanley. Watch the full interview here at MintPress News, and do not forget to subscribe to us on whichever platform you use. Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times. The post How the UK Powers Israels War on Gaza: Matt Kennard Reveals Hidden Connections appeared first on MintPress News.

[Category: Behind The Headlines, Foreign Affairs, Podcasts, Top Story, British special forces in Gaza, British support for Israel, Gaza conflict coverage, Israel UK military collaboration, lowkey rapper, Matt Kennard journalist, pro-Israel lobby UK, pro-Palestine activism UK, The Watchdog podcast, UK media censorship Israel]

As of 11/22/24 7:26pm. Last new 11/21/24 10:39am.