The Jerusalem Post reports that the Observer newspaper has been forced into a retraction by the Israeli embassy in the UK after it ran an oped highlighting the west’s hypocrisy in its current threats towards Syria. The author compared Israel’s known use of white phosphorus in Gaza to the alleged use of sarin by Bashar [...]
There’s been a noticeable trend in the past few days among mainstream US media for offering reasonably prominent reports questioning the credibility of the White House’s accounts of what is taking place in Syria. Notable was a long report in the NYT, based on an old video of rebels executing Syrian soldiers, suggesting that the [...]
Two appalling propagandistic commentaries on Syria in the Guardian in one day. The first is by art critic Jonathan Jones on Bashar Assad’s Instagram account. Assad is assailed for the banality of his and his regime’s evil. Pictures of his wife as do-gooder, as death and destruction rage all around, are “shameless and grotesque”. It’s [...]
Few of us – even the participants – believe that there is any hope these latest “peace” talks will lead anywhere. All the Palestinians will get from the negotiations are a handful of political prisoners, while Israel gets a quick expansion of the very settlements it is supposed to be about to dismantle as part [...]
There’s invariably a refreshing honesty to the views of the Israeli right, precisely because they have such little insight into the implications of what they say. There’s none of that clever dissembling and dishonesty you get with a Shimon Peres, for example. The mayor of Upper Nazareth, Shimon Gapso, is a good example of the [...]
That corporations are pathological really should not be hard to understand. Their rationale is the maximisation of profit, and everything – bar their public image – is subordinate to that goal. What is deeply troubling is that these pathological entities now have such a hold on our societies that institutions like the courts, which are [...]
This video tells you everything you need to know about the power relations between Israelis and Palestinians – and more about the peace process than you will get from any commentary you read…
Jonathan Freedland writing at his hasbara best. This is becoming a discernible trend in liberal commentary about the renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks. The fact is that there is not an ice-cube’s hope in hell of these talks leading to anything but a serious deterioration in the Palestinians’ position. But Freedland would tell you otherwise. According to [...]
This out-Bushes the Bush Administration. The White House is warning all Americans that al-Qaeda is planning a major unspecified terror operation in some unknown place in the world at some unknown time in August. Well, we can say with certainty that no American on the planet is going to be helped by that kind of [...]
Following the 1948 war and the massive numbers of Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from the former state of Palestine, Israel was keen to conceal not only the recent war crimes it had committed but, even more importantly, the continuing one it commits to this day in not allowing the refugees to return to their [...]
This interview on Fox News of a leading Biblical scholar (who happens to be Muslim) isn’t simply embarrassing, it’s downright sinister. One has to watch it to believe it. I fear this tells us something about the state of the US more than it does about Fox News. We learn very little about Dr Reza [...]
The extent to which the US has become a security and surveillance state was illustrated to me that last time I travelled there, a few years back on a book tour. I had 10 internal flights to make over the course of 2 weeks. When I was pulled out of line and taken for “extra [...]
I have in the past written a number of articles (for example, here) discussing the preponderance of what I call “partisan reporters” covering the Israel-Palestine beat for the corporate media. These are journalists who have a strong emotional attachment and personal investment in Israel. Often it takes the form of the reporters serving in the [...]
Strange what things suddenly reveal to Israelis the ugliness of their political and legal systems, but this story seems to have pricked some consciences. Zaki Sabah, a Palestinian street vendor in the Old City of Jerusalem sells one of the local staples, kaki simsim or sesame cakes (not bagels, as Israelis keep referring to them). [...]
Remember when in 2009 the BBC reneged on its commitment to the Disasters Emergency Committee by refusing to run ads to raise money for the homeless and destitute in Gaza, arguing that such broadcasts were not charitable but political (presumably because that was the way Israel saw them). The BBC’s intransigence infuriated the British public [...]
The birth of the “Royal Baby” seems a good moment to consider the function of the supposedly “liberal-left” media. How well does a paper like the Guardian do in expressing the worldview of much of its readership when confronted with this kind of news event? The answer: it offers almost wall-to-wall sycophancy. Headlines include: All [...]
A little while back, I advised that we should beware feting the Guardian for its role in the Edward Snowden revelations. This is what I wrote: But please be careful about investing too much faith in the Guardian’s position. Whatever the view of the individual journalists at the paper (especially Greenwald), the Guardian as a [...]
