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Journalists of wars prolonging U.S. and NATO nations media are providing cover for a monstrous genocidal crime against humanity by portraying the Israeli U.S. provisioned devastating bombing and air strikes on Israel’s military occupied Gaza Strip as ‘defensive war.’
“Israel can’t claim a right to defend itself from the people it oppresses and whose land it colonises,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, April 8, 2023.[1]
The successful Hamas guerrilla attack of October 7 was part of an ongoing many decades long Palestinian fight for freedom, and was so described by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressing the UN General Assembly on October 24 pointed out a second time that:
“The October 7 Hamas attack didn’t happen in a vacuum, The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”[2]
By international law, Israel is legally responsible for the well being of its captive, confined and illegally militarily occupied Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, illegally militarily occupied and entrapped since 1967 in what amounts to an outdoor prison. Western journalists, dutifully serving as accessories to genocide, never mention this as Israel’s American warplanes go on (‘like shooting ducks in a pond.’) destroying the homes and murdering tens of thousands of Gaza’s residents, of whom most are women and children.
Under International Humanitarian Law, the occupying power must ensure the humane treatment of the population and provide for their basic needs, including food and medical care. Oct 30, 2023 GENEVA CONVENTION RELATIVE TO THE PROTECTION OF CIVILIAN PERSONS IN TIME OF WAR OF 12 AUGUST 1949, Article 60 II. Responsibilities of the Occupying Power. page 189
Since October 7, Israel has blocked, food, water, electricity and fuel from entering Gaza, with the unholy desired effect of the present famine with children now dying of malnutrition.[3] This has been very rarely even mentioned in pro-Israel journalism.
Newscast time is almost entirely devoted to the hostages.
Hegemonic journalists are responsible for prolonging the genocide of their fellow human beings – almost half of them children — by delaying the world from putting an end to Israel’s American provisioned and supported slaughter of Palestinians through air strikes and famine.
How many more children will soon die because journalists working for the giant entertainment/news corporation conglomerates of the U.S.A.-led hegemonic colonialist West have for six months been underreporting this inhumane blockage of life sustaining aid, focusing its audiences attention instead on Israeli propaganda of mostly lies of horrendous atrocities*[4] during the Palestinian freedom fighters guerrilla attack on October 7, 2023, which Western journalists never fail to label a terrorist attack by Hamas repeating ‘which the U.S. and other nations have cited as a terrorist organisation.’
*U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on CSpan, YouTube, 12:19 PM · Oct 31, 2023, 3.4M Views
On family attacked by Hamas:
“The father’s eye gouged out, the mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed, and then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with.”
One Chris Christie tweeted in parody, “Is this before or after they beheaded 40 babies?”[Viewed in ‘Comments’ on Blinken’s…]
If the world had peace-seeking journalists working for honest media – they could remind Israelis that Hebrew terrorist organisations like the Irgun headed by Menachem Begin used terror to conquer Palestinian lands in 1948.
Excerpt of a Letter to the New York Times, December 4, 1948, from Albert Einstein and other prominent Jews.
“Attack on Arab Village [5]
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants ” 240 men, women, and children ” and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicised it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.”
Most importantly, todays robot-like journalists (many of who must be aware of their perfidious role in working for permanent war investor controlled Western media conglomerates), avoid all mention that Hamas and other Palestinian guerrilla groups are fighting against Israel’s generations long oppressive, often murderous, illegal military occupation of Palestinian land and illegal 600,000 settler colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Western ‘news’ media coverage audiences over these last six months have been subjected to listening, reading and watching Israeli government leaders and the families of hostages interviewed with the obvious intention of seeking to justify the horrific and massive genocide being perpetrated on the Palestinian population of Gaza by Israel and America, which has reportedly taken the lives of 33,360 (as of April 9) fellow human beings of these journalists, journalists, who in their work are cooperating with the perpetrators of genocide. It can be assumed that many of these corporate journalists realise this, but need to keep their job. And their ‘job’ is to keep the focus on hostages, and away from the annihilation ongoing in Gaza.
Worldwide reaching colonialist media journalism will not report the truth that Israel admits Apache helicopters fired on their own civilians running from the Supernova music festival – even when Tel Aviv Ynet reports it to Israelis.[6]
Western media features a readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place.
Each and every time Western media conglomerates consider it necessary to report the number of thousands killed in Gaza, its journalists repeat words to the effect that this is “a response to October 7 terror attack by Hamas — considered a terrorist group by the United States and European Union.”
However, during public hearings at the International Court of Justice on Palestinian representatives’ accusation that Israel is creating a permanent and illegal occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, China argued that Palestinians have the right to engage in “armed struggle” against Israel “in pursuit of the right to self-determination.” [The Times of Israel, Feb. 22, 2024]
A single publication of something ‘uncomfortable to U.S.’
NATO member Turkey’s President Erdogan backs Hamas, calls Netanyahu’s Israel government ‘today’s Nazis’ [New York Post, March 9, 2024]
Turkey’s Erdogan says Hamas is not terrorist organisation, … [Reuters, October 25, 2023]
January 1, tens of thousands of Turks poured on to the streets of Istanbul, chanting “Murderer Israel, get out of Palestine”. [BBC]
Simply not reporting reality is the most major crime in Western entertainment/news conglomerate journalism in hiding up to 90% of reality. Reporting, for example, as infrequently as possible, the reality of the immense and intense suffering of the Palestinians, which is the motive for the very existence of the Hamas militant group.
For more than half a century, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip has resulted in systematic human rights violations against Palestinians living there. Israel maintains an illegal air, sea and land blockade on Gaza and maintains a so-called “access-restricted area” or buffer zone within Gaza. These have cut off more than 2 million Palestinians from other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the outside world. [Amnesty International on its website reported back in 2017] [7]
Under Reporting Israeli Killing of Palestinians
This writer found noticeable that during much of December and January, many news hours began simply covering other world and local events to the exclusion of any or little mention of the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. Not reporting the bombing, the air strikes, the continuing day by day devastation, the dying and the dead, the agony, the constant burials, the amputations, pain and despair. Instead, diverting public attention to other places in the world, except for an occasional reference to the hostages, Has this type of non-reporting of what is obviously genocide not greatly lengthened the time it is taking for world outrage to reach a point of some kind of intervention to halt the American provisioned maniacal genocide reflecting years of Israeli hate?
Not Defending From Hamas – “Complete Siege” of Gaza’s Palestinians From the Beginning
Right away, on October 9, Israel’s defence minister announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, describing the Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel over the weekend as “human animals.” “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza,” Gallant said. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.” [Oct. 9, 2023 HuffPost]
Once Reported – Thereafter Made to be Forgotten
‘Erase Gaza’: War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel
WEBNov 15, 2023 · “Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Yair Golan an Israeli politician and senior military officer, said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15. New York Times Nov. 15, 2023
Shall one attribute the massive indifference and some good deal of enthusiasm of the Israeli citizenry shown toward the genocidally insane bombing of thousands of Palestinian children to death in their homes and the maiming even more thousands,
in part to word for word belief in their sacred Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. (which also forms the beginning of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible). Seems agood amount of enthusiasm must be based on genocidal commands in the Bible, which have gone uncommented upon or even covered by our Western obligated journalists even though mass killing has been called for by a number of rabbis.
Genesis 15:18
“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”
Deuteronomy 2:16
“However, you must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. You must completely destroy them – the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite”
Joshua 6:21
“And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”[8]
Once Reported – Thereafter Made to be Forgotten?
Netanyahu’s references to violent biblical passages raise alarm among critics [Published November 7, 2023, NPR]
The passage from 1 Samuel 1 15:3 referenced,“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
World Remains Ignorant of What Israelis Well Know of the Indescribable Horror It’s Military is Creating
APRIL 8, 2024, Times of Israel, “Radical Israeli rabbis come under fire amid settler violence” [9]
The King’s Torah, a 2009 book by firebrand rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, is perhaps one of the most provocative texts.
It quotes religious sages as permitting, under certain conditions, the killing of non-Jews, including babies, “if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents.” The book says “thou shalt not murder” does not necessarily apply to non-Jewish victims.
Its authors have said it is meant to be seen as religious theory and not a guidebook. The book has been endorsed by other rabbis, among them Rabbi Dov Lior, a longtime symbol of religious and nationalist extremism, and US-born Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, who heads a yeshiva in the hard-line West Bank settlement of Yitzhar.
Critics blame Ginsburgh’s writings — including a pamphlet that praises Baruch Goldstein, a settler who killed 29 Muslim worshippers at a West Bank shrine in 1994 — for fuelling the attacks by extremist Jews against Palestinian property, mosques and churches.
Rabbi Dov Lior, a national- religious leader and the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, published a letter saying that Jewish law permits destroying the entire Gaza Strip[Jerusalem Post, July 23, 2014]
Media Falsified ‘Search for Peace in the Holy Land
For seventy-five years, the powerful media of the ‘Colonial Powers renamed ‘Free World’ and finally ‘the International Community of Nations’ have kept up a murderously deceitful pretence of trying to bring peace to Palestine and the oil rich Middle East. A quick glance at the provisions of the 1946 proposed UN partition that were fully expected and obviously intended to incite violence and create deadly conflict, permanent hostilities, destabilisation and facilitate Western imperialist penetration, exposes this pretending to search for a peace which that financial element that rules the United States and Wall St. has never wanted.
75 years of pro-Israel journalism for the same U.S. war investing business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible.
Colonialist Media Silence on Horrible Injustice Perpetrated in 1948 with Anglo-American Backing
Palestinians were forced off their lands or fled en masse from deadly Jewish attacks during the civil war ignited intentionally by the announcement of a never meant to be implemented Partition Plan forced through a yet tiny United Nations by the United States that would eventually result in a Jewish population of 630,000 militarily occupying 77% of what had been British misgoverned Palestine, containing an Arab population of 1,970,000. This injustice of making refugees of so many Arab Palestinians whose homes and orchards were seized by Jews, is the basis for 75 years of massive bloodshed.
Genocide Enablers’: Gaza And The Corporate Media MediaLens, 5th April 2024
‘We have had genocides captured by video feed day by day.
‘We have IDF forces standing with their thumbs up as they blow up universities, mosques, hospitals, and apartment buildings—it’s unbelievable. We have members of the Israeli cabinet preaching hate.
‘We’ve seen these religious nationalist extremist rabbis talk about killing all the people in Gaza. “And do you mean the children?” the Rabbi is asked. “Yes, the children. They can grow up to be terrorists.”’
Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone wrote this week:
‘Israel has ended its assault on the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, because there is nothing left to assault. The facility — the largest medical complex in Gaza where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering — is now an empty, unusable, burnt-out husk. Witnesses report hundreds of corpses in and around the complex, with video footage showing human body parts protruding from the earth and bodies with zip ties on their wrists.’
British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent over a month treating patients at Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals in Gaza,
‘I blame the Western journalists, who perpetuated the narrative that militarised the [Al-Shifa] hospital as a justifiable and an acceptable target to the Israelis. These genocide enablers, these Western journalists, from the very beginning, peddled these stories that the Israelis were feeding them about Shifa being on top of this massive complex of a command-and-control center. And their job was to enable the genocide to take place.
Western Media Journalists Avoid Mention of IDF Videos Showing Israeli soldiers Laughing as Universities, Mosques, Hospitals, and Apartment Buildings Are Blown Up
As hegemonic news media makes sure this macabre inhuman slaughter goes on and on, we can recall what hero publisher of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, cried out during the barbaric U.S.UK led war on Iraq. Assange suggested we ask ourselves:
– “of the complicit media, (which is the majority of the mainstream press), what is the average death child count that could be attributed to each journalist?”
When we understand that wars come about and are continued as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries then who are the war criminals?
“Journalists Are War Criminals!”
“It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals. …the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars, …if wars can be started by lies, truth can be started, peace can be started by truth. So go and get the truth, and we’ll spread it all over the world.” [War By Media: “Journalists Are War Criminals,” Julian Assange “The Reality That Is Constructed Around Us Is Constructed By Liars.” Celia Farber, The Truth Barrier, Oct. 10, 2023]
Julian Assange spoke succinctly about those media journalists who read us selected, bent and twisted one-sided news to disinform, blind or subtly trick the public to support, accept or ignore ongoing atrocity wars even when massive amount of lives are being taken.
Julian Assange has brought to our attention the pleasant-looking evening news anchor who captivates TV audiences with alternating joviality and gravitas, asking whether they should be seen as insidiously evil as they generate support for horrific suffering, death, maiming and destruction.
Assange seems to have tasked us to awaken a critical number of decent but unwary citizens to the realisation that a trusted prime time personality of theirs is in fact a war criminal?
Countering the CIA-overseen giant entertainment /news/ information conglomerates wars enabling deceptive journalism [11] with truth is more effective than attacking the wars ordering government officials, both those elected and those appointed, who in reality must take orders form the ‘deep state’ Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex ‘deep pocket’ war investors – just, for example, as President Eisenhower did when he ordered Laos bombed, and the Guatemalan and Congo governments overthrown.
The seemingly ubiquitous accessory to wars CIA overseen international media must and will eventually be taken down by a growing alternate media and new media from powerful greatly populated countries like China, India and other emerging nations of the awakening South. Today’s realities and their history will soon be apparent even to Americans.
Truth will out.
*
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This article was originally published on Countercurrents.
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Greanville Post, Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations from 1945 thru 2012.
Notes
1. “Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses [or] whose land it colonizes,” [UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, tweeted on X, April 8, 2023]
2. [UN] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-10-24/secretary-generals-remarks-the-security-council-the-middle-east%C2%A0
3. In recent days, at least 15 children have died from malnutrition and dehydration at Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital. Additionally, almost 350,000 children under the age of 5 are at risk of starvation. This man-made crisis demands urgent attention and action to prevent further loss of innocent lives.
The international community must come together to address this humanitarian catastrophe and ensure the safety and well-being of the vulnerable population in Gaza.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/gaza-food-famine-malnutrition-children-aid/
4. Outrageous allegations, such as the story of Hamas “beheading 40 babies’ made headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies,” and that Israeli women were “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies” The New York Jewish newspaper Forward’s article on 11 October reported that the Israeli military acknowledged they had no evidence of such allegations. (The White House spokesperson’s retraction received minimal media coverage.)
5. AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948 https://archive.org/details/
6. Survivor Speaks: Israeli forces shot their own civilians, You Tube
Israeli Apache helicopters killed own soldiers, civilians on …New footage corroborates previous reports that say the Israeli military is responsible for many of the Israeli casualties
The Cradlecradle.com/articles-id/11993
IDF combat helicopter targeting Hamas fighters at Nova festival massacre shot some partygoers by mistake, says Haaretz.
A Hebrew-language Haaretz newspaper article published on 20 October quotes a kibbutz resident survivor trembling as he spoke of Israeli Defence Force shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists. Photos show that only the heavy munitions of the Israeli army could have destroyed residential homes in this manner. Yasmin Porat, another survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, said in an interview for an Israeli radio-show, hosted by state-broadcaster Kan, that Israeli forces “eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” going on to state that “there was very, very heavy crossfire” and even noted tank shelling.
Chris Hedges Max Blumenthal – What Really Happened on Oct 8
7. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/
8. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/yehoshua-joshua-full-text
9. https://www.timesofisrael.com/radical-israeli-rabbis-come-under-fire-amid-settler-violence/
10. ‘Genocide Enablers’: Gaza And The Corporate Media, MediaLens
https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AA4fDqpIU6vbZg_mZAEVWNGncnk?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9tYWlsLnlhaG9vLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANSKf2EOF95iT6GbFvbINwFLT3X8Jp-qsqLraVUuUEJCXTwwnCWZRA1cmk3TzTm52eB_vOCwDB2a9GZGrP-kRdeC6yQc09ENhlgcfG9ym2g7HPVx_NHtf9h6SHVcLQPzj39cJQJvJx882aE5iAGAGwH1VKQmDWCmxcuIlEzZqB4s
11. “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times
Featured image is from Countercurrents
